The government said it was hunting a conspiracy. The paperwork shows it was running a casting call.

"You are requested not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time."

— Department of Homeland Security, in an administrative subpoena to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, ordering up years of wire-transfer records for unions and climate groups

For a year, the people of Minneapolis had a hunch that someone in the room was listening. Not a reporter. Not a rival organizer. The federal government. They had watched the hotels where ICE agents slept get besieged at midnight, had seen their own meetings turn into the front page, had felt the weight of about 3,000 federal officers bearing down on the Twin Cities for what Homeland Security called its "largest immigration enforcement operation ever." Now, in a batch of investigative reports turned over by a defense attorney, the hunch came back wearing a name tag.

The documents, released in federal court on Thursday, describe a months-long undercover operation inside Department of Homeland Security, "Operation Puppet Master," opened four days after federal officers killed Alex Pretti while he filmed them during an immigration raid. Its stated purpose was to find a "network of conspirators" supplying "violent opportunists and agitators." Its actual product, according to the nearly 30 internal reports, was a sprawling watch on churches, libraries, gymnasiums, and public parks. On one slide, a hand-drawn diagram titled "The Conspiracy" mapped eighteen organizations into a single web. The list ran from a small Minneapolis bicycle-repair collective all the way up to the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor in the country. None of those groups have been charged with a single crime.

The operation got its name from its method. Undercover agents did not sit quietly in the back row. They worked the room. One attended a "how to stop ICE" training inside a church on December 13, 2025, before the crackdown had even peaked. By December 22, an agent had been added to the Signal group that was planning a hotel protest. On January 9, two agents stood in the crowd outside a Hilton as someone set off fireworks, and wrote it down. A week after Pretti was killed, another agent walked into a public library for a "resistance skills" session that, by the agent's own report, "was made clear" was devoted to "peaceful" protests.

The library is the scene the records have made infamous. The report notes the meeting covered de-escalation, recruiting, and keeping "a police liaison and safety marshal present during events." It then records the moment an agent leaned toward an organizer, said he "works in construction and could build items that might assist other groups with more 'direct-action' protests," added that "going to jail did not bother him," and handed out his phone number. The organizer took the number. The agent filed the report.

Translation: a government investigator told a climate-activist organizer he would build weapons for the very crowds he was embedded in, and the agency kept the transcript as evidence of a plot.

The surveillance did not stop at listening. It reached for money. On March 9, 2026, ICE sent subpoenas to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and to the private clearing house for years of wire transactions, going back to January 2023, before Trump was even reelected. The targets included Sunrise Movement, the Service Employees International Union, and the Communications Workers of America, the union that represents many Associated Press employees. The requests were administrative subpoenas, tools that require no judge and no warrant. One carried the quiet instruction, quoted above, not to tell anyone it existed.

That the agency leading this was Homeland Security, not the FBI, is a detail the lawyers keep circling. Mike German, a former FBI agent and civil liberties advocate, said it was "striking" that the surveillance division answering to the White House's immigration agenda was running what is usually a federal-bureau job. He said the whole thing read like "guilt by association" doing the work of an investigation, with no narrower theory of crime beneath it.

"You're talking about meetings that are open to the public, where they are recruiting among the public, saying: 'Please come to this protest,'" German said. "It's hardly a challenge to 'infiltrate' this kind of meeting, and that should be a clue this isn't a criminal group. It's very rare for criminals to publicize discussion of their criminal activities."

The legal theory underpinning it all traces to an executive order designating "antifa" a domestic terrorist organization. Kevin Riach, the defense attorney who dragged the records into the light, called the effort a "mass spying campaign" and accused his opponents of "wild conspiracy allegations born from the fantasies of political retribution that animate the Trump Administration."

None of the 15 people charged in the June indictment are members of the Sunrise Movement, the group's executive director, Aru Shiney-Ajay, said. None of the eighteen groups on the conspiracy slide are charged. And yet the investigation is the whole point. The question the documents answer is not "what did these groups do wrong?" It is "how far will the government look, and how loudly will it say nothing?"

A UCLA law professor, Ahilan Arulanantham, put the stakes plainly: "It's that fear of that creeping police state." A coalition of dozens of Minnesota groups issued a single line in reply to the revelation. "We know the truth, and we will not be intimidated."

Sunrise, which has always trained its people to hold a line and walk away, said the documents confirmed something it had only been able to suspect in the dark. "What this is meant to do," Shiney-Ajay said, "is scare protesters and scare people away from joining protest groups."

The government's position is a single, unvarying sentence, the kind of line that does not defend itself but simply stands in front of the paperwork like a wall. Homeland Security Investigations, a spokesperson said, "does not comment on the existence or status of on-going investigations, or investigative methods." The U.S. attorney's office in Minnesota did not respond to a request.

So the record speaks for itself. A bicycle shop and the AFL-CIO on one slide. A construction worker offering to build weapons. A subpoena asking you to forget it happened. A church, a library, a gym, a park. The government said it was hunting a conspiracy. The paperwork shows it was running a casting call, and then it asked you to pretend the call never went out.

The question is not whether a government can investigate a crowd it disagrees with. Every government in the history of the republic has tried. The question is what it does when the only thing the crowd did wrong was stay, and show up, and ask to be heard.