Nested within ICE is an American Stasi with the power to target U.S. citizens. Called Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, it is the country’s second-largest criminal investigative agency behind only the FBI — though with broader authorities.
But the most dangerous feds in America may also be the most incompetent. The Justice Department’s ongoing attempt to turn 15 Minnesota anti-ICE activists into a sprawling “Antifa” conspiracy opened a rare window into HSI, with disclosures that are equal parts creepy and hilariously inept, including:
**The Dropped Wire:**An undercover agent spying on a church gym when her concealed surveillance wire fell out — which she only realized later.**The Terrorist Dental Plan:**Hunting for a "terrorist financing" ring, HSI secretly subpoenaed years of labor union SEIU’s bank records only to uncover a paper trail consisting entirely of strike supplies, retiree dues, and member dental benefits.**The Antifa Bike Shop:**Prosecutors showed a grand jury an Alex Jones-style HSI briefing titled “The Conspiracy” that framed a bicycle repair shop as a key node in a criminal syndicate.
Federal court records describe Operation Puppet Master — yes, that's the official name — HSI’s clandestine effort to infiltrate anti-ICE groups that the agency believe are fronts for “Antifa” domestic terrorists.
The reality of HSI’s work, as depicted in the court filings, contrasts starkly with the ICE’s official propaganda. Press releases highlight HSI’s work busting child predators and little more. It is an unimpeachable public relations shield: who isn’t against pedophiles? But HSI has quietly evolved into a lightly regulated domestic intelligence apparatus that under the name of “counterterrorism” now investigates unions, non-profits, environmental groups, and protesters.
In a document detailing Operation Puppet Master entered in the court record, HSI says: “Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) St. Paul has opened an investigation … [which] will prioritize the identification of funding sources, organizational structures, and predicate actions behind these campaigns.”
Here’s what that looked like in practice.
Two undercover agents sat through a skills workshop at the Minneapolis Public Library. Their report is a memo of pure nothing. The marquee finding: an attendee had red curly hair.
Another HSI undercover snuck into a “Stop the War on Iran!” meeting; but they forgot to record audio or video. Suspect number one emerged anyway: a “heavy-set young white woman,” flagged because she’d attended a previous meeting.
Funny as this all is, it’s also alarming how much HSI has wormed its way into Americans’ civic life.
When HSI seeks information, the court papers show that it uses both its own undercover officers or it enlists a network of informants to report. They showed up at organizing meetings in person and on Zoom, joined private Signal groups, made recordings, scrolled social media accounts, and logged license plates to build link diagrams — the sort of network chart you'd draw to map an insurgency.
It’s clear too that HSI’s efforts crept right up to entrapment. An undercover told an organizer he worked in “construction” and could build items that might assist other groups with more “direct-action" protests, adding that “going to jail did not bother him.” Another undercover offered to set up a donation platform for activists — a tidy way to trace a money trail that didn't exist.
Operation Puppet Master was officially launched on January 28 of this year, exactly four days after federal agents shot and killed activist Alex Pretti. Its purpose is to undertake the digital and physical penetration of activist groups in Minneapolis, according to the court documents. Puppet Master has involved local and national investigations, including secretly obtaining financial records for several national labor unions, including SEIU and the Communications Workers of America, and for social justice non-profits including the Sunrise Movement and Voices for Racial Justice.
All of which raises the question of why a customs agency is running the operation at all, instead of the FBI. The answer is that HSI can do things the FBI can't.
HSI’s authority is a legal Frankenstein: Title 19 (customs) stitched to Title 8 (immigration) and Title 18 (general federal crimes), with a little Title 50 (war and national defense) sprinkled on top. The seams are where the Fourth Amendment goes to die. An HSI official told Congress in 2024 that the agency's powers are “unique,” then rattled off a mandate running from “terrorism, national security threats” all the way down to “organized retail crime.”
HSI’s domestic footprint is massive: 235 domestic field offices organized under 30 regional headquarters across all 50 states, backed by more than 10,000 employees and contractors, including over 7,000 special agents and 1,000 criminal analysts. HSI is aided by a network of some 2,800 state, local, and federal task force “partners” who have been dragooned into federal service. HSI supplies the second-largest contingent of agents to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) — once the country's al Qaeda hunters, now a domestic plaything of director Kash Patel.
None of this is really about terrorism, though. Real terrorism cases are rare. As former HSI Deputy Assistant Director Louis A. Rodi III ▶told the Washington Institute:
“Only a few counterterrorism cases culminate with the filing of actual ‘terrorism’ charges by the JTTF. When terrorism charges are unattainable, HSI has shown to be extremely effective in offering non-traditional disruption options.”
Translation: when the task force can’t find terrorism, HSI swoops in and combs through the remaining trash looking for its own enemies so it can pursue “non-traditional disruption options.” That’s a euphemism for using secondary statutes — immigration status checks, customs summonses, regulatory audits, administrative subpoenas, secret surveillance, informant pressure — to neutralize, harass, or dismantle targets when prosecutors don’t have the goods to charge a serious crime.
In other words, HSI is doing the dirty work for the Trump administration, aided by its obscurity and sweeping mandate.
A page added to HSI's website earlier this year helpfully explains that terrorism can be “Domestic, meaning social or political objectives influence the attacks in the terrorist's home country.”
HSI’s brazenness seems to only be increasing. On August 6, a Richfield police officer noticed a woman parked outside the community center hosting Rep. Ilhan Omar’s town hall. He ran the plates. They came back to a different vehicle. She said she was event security. Omar’s detail said she wasn’t. Only then did she identify herself as an HSI agent — running, she claimed, an undercover drug operation.
Omar wrote to Michael McCarthy, HSI’s interim special agent in charge in St. Paul, the next day. The fake plates violate state law, she noted, and break commitments HSI had already made to her office — meaning this was not the first time her staff had to have this conversation.
HSI looks for a conspiracy and when it doesn’t find it, it redoubles its efforts on the assumption that the conspiracy is so deep, the operation security so strong, that it can’t be found. It is a bureaucratic gift that keeps on giving.
When the Justice Department declined to investigate the ICE agent who killed Renee Good — and pressed the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minneapolis to scrutinize Good and the people around her instead — six career prosecutors resigned. So did at least four senior leaders of the Civil Rights Division unit that investigates police killings. Roughly a dozen officials walked rather than participate.
None of HSI has resigned as far as I know.
While HSI is busy chasing its tail, Americans are paying for it — in tax dollars and freedoms.
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— Edited by William M. Arkin
