First, it was Paigelynne Gonyea. She's a Syracuse, NY, digital content creator. She's also a poll worker. In June, she was working the state primary election when she got a call from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Gonyea invited them into the polling place - there were no voters there at the time - where they were not supposed to go. Only voters and election workers are allowed in. But Gonyea felt that the Syracuse Central Library polling location was a safer place to have her close encounter with ICE than being on the outside. Quite reasonably, she had a bit of fear about being roughed up, dragged off, or worse.
The agents handed Gonyea a form letter that says they were investigating threats made against ICE personnel. The form says the agents had identified an Instagram account they believe breaks federal law. They asked her to remove and discontinue the behavior, according to the unsigned document she shared on Instagram.
“This notice officially informs you that it is unlawful to threaten to assault, kidnap, and/or murder a federal official or that federal official’s immediate family member with the intent to impede, intimidate, and/or interfere with the federal official’s duties or retaliate against a federal official due to the performance of their duties,” the document said.
The document said she could be subject to both federal and state prosecution. (Source: Syracuse.com)
The agents were armed with copies of some of her social media posts - and her driver's license.
Trouble was, Paigelynne Gonyea hadn't exactly been threatening much of anything. She had named the individual who shot and killed Renee Good - his name was by then public knowledge - and suggested that he should be indicted. Seems to me to be a pretty common opinion among folks who oppose the violent tactics ICE has been known to employ.
The agents accused her of doxxing, but Gonyea didn't recall giving out anyone's address or phone number: just his name, which was all over the news. ICE counterclaims that she had, indeed, posted the guy's address. Mostly, I'm thinking that it tends to be pretty easy to find someone's address on the 'net. Still, it might be ill-advised to publicize it, given how many loosely wired people there are out there who might take a listing of someone's address as license to go after them. Best not play that game. And god knows I wouldn't want someone putting my particulars out on social media. Let someone google for themselves if they feel the need to know.
But I do have this question: if information is in the public domain, how is putting it out there - however nasty and ill-intentioned - a crime?
The entire episode was so far-fetched that a Republican election official thought it was a hoax, and called a contact at DHS to see whether it was legit. It was.
Things got even worse for another Upstate NY resident.
David Streever is a journalist/tech marketing guy. His wife is an Episcopalian priest. They live with their two kids in Rochester, NY.
When the ICE agents showed up on his doorstep - the same day as their encounter with Gonyea - Streever wasn't home. He was in Finland with his older child, visiting an amusement park. But he saw the agents on his phone via his doorbell camera app - Yay, technology! There's no escape! - and the agents did speak with his wife, home with their little one.
The two federal agents told Streever’s wife they had come Tuesday afternoon to deliver a warning letter about an email Streever had sent in January to Todd Lyons, then the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (Source: Syracuse.com)
In the email, Streever - undestandably upset about the killing of Renee Good, of Alex Pretti - had compared Lyons to Reinhard Heydrich, a notorious Nazi who was monstrous even by monstrous Nazi standards. He wrote to Lyons that:
“You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”
Are we no longer allowed to tell those in high places what we think of them?
If anything, it strikes me that Streever is assuming the best of Lyons: that he has a conscience, and that what ICE is doing is going to live with him forever.
Anyway, a couple of days later, Streever and his little girl headed home. After landing at JFK, they headed off to a hotel to crash before heading back to Rochester.
At 9:55 p.m., the front desk rang his hotel room. A special agent named Trevor Pitts had come looking for him, the staff said. The hotel staff did not tell the agent that Streever and his daughter were upstairs, Streever said. The agent left his card.
Now Streever was really creeped out: How did the U.S. Department of Homeland Security know he was in a hotel in New York City? And why was his email from January suddenly so urgent?
With a bit of googling, Streever discovered Paigelynne Gonyea, and, inspired by her speaking out about her meet up with ICE, decided to go public as well.
“A threat is when someone tells someone else that they’re going to do a thing to them, and there’s nothing in the email of what I will do to him,” he said. “It’s really about how he will feel and what his boss will do [i.e., 'even Trump will turn on you'], which I think was right on both counts.”
Bad enough showing up on his doorstep, but tracking him from his vaction in Finland to his airport hotel at JFK? Absolutely chilling.
Streever and Gonyea aren't mad bombers. They're not threatening death and destruction. They're exercising their rights - and courageously opposing what they view as terrible behavior on the part of a terrible regime.
Like pretty much everyone else in this country, I'm all in favor of ICE going after the bad guys: immigrants (here legally or not) who are committing heinous crimes. By all means, get rid of the gang bangers, the drug runners, the bad actors. (Note: but still don't deprive them of their rights and use violence where not needed.] But that's not what they're doing. In their eagerness to meet their deportation goals, the government's catching all sorts of folks in their dragnets. The vast majority have no criminal record. Many are trying to pursue legal avenues to stay here. Many have been here since they were kids and know no other life. A few weeks back, they even rounded up a Catholic nun on her way to Mass.
Pro tip: if you don't want someone to compare you to a Nazi, don't act like a Nazi.
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