The Biden administration worked hand in glove with the National School Boards Association to treat parent-led protests against school board policies on COVID-19 and woke curricula as "domestic terrorism," enabling or justifying federal law enforcement investigations that identified "radical traditionalist" Catholics and even priests as a threat, among others.

The second Trump administration has swung hard in the other direction regarding anti-deportation protests against the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, chilling verbal criticism of the agency and its leaders in addition to physically responding to activist violence.

A federal judge approved a preliminary injunction late Tuesday against DHS and ICE senior officials and special agents, preventing them from following up on a "warning notice" to a New York man for writing a disparaging email to then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons after Customs and Border Protection fatally shot ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

The civil rights investigation into Pretti's death, ordered by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in January, was still going as of last week. Lawyers for a witness told CBS Minnesota on Sept. 9 that the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Civil Division had interviewed their client that day in lieu of subpoenaing her to testify before a grand jury.

Attributed to ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility, the warning notice broadly warned David Streever he could be federally prosecuted for threatening to "assault, kidnap, and/or murder a federal official" in response to Lyons' duties, or for knowingly making available "restricted personal information about a covered person" or family member.

The notice asked Streever to "promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior," without any specificity. The notice "will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above."

Titled "What's next," Streever's email to Lyons said history will remember the acting ICE director as "America’s Reinhard Heydrich," referring to the chief of the Reich Security Main Office in Nazi Germany who helped plan the Holocaust.

Streever predicted the "downfall" of Lyons and abandonment by President Trump because Lyons is "protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota" as video evidence undermines agents' claims about Pretti. Lyons will end up "a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness" and "will torment yourself until your last day on Earth."

The plaintiff "has a right to express his political views through non-threatening speech, however degrading the speech might be," and officials "likely infringed on that right," U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras wrote.

The warning notice is a "continuing injury" that gives Streever legal standing to sue because the government hasn't disavowed it or denied "it remains in effect," he wrote.

"The notice practically shouts that Mr. Streever may be prosecuted if he continues to engage in his political speech," the President Obama nominee wrote. "OPR did not ask kindly if Mr. Streever would tone down his rhetoric" but rather sent agents "to his home for an unannounced visit where they delivered a 'WARNING NOTICE'" in bold.

Though Contreras denied Streever legal standing on the basis of the investigation, which the government represents ended in June, he ordered the Department of Justice to provide him in chambers "the report and any documentation evidencing supervisory approval or official documentation closing the investigation."

The judge allowed officials to "conduct investigations into future conduct to ensure the safety of law enforcement and public officials so long as they do not issue threats to Mr. Streever deterring protected speech," and stayed his ruling for two weeks for the government to appeal.

Denied change of venue out of injunction-heavy D.C.

It took five months after Streever's email for special agents David Brodie and Abbi Henry to actually deliver the notice to his Rochester home, when he was in Europe with his 7-year-old daughter, instead giving it to his wife. 

Henry and special agent Trevor Pitts then showed up at the New York City hotel where Streever and his daughter were staying on their return trip and called him twice, but never met with or spoke to him, the ruling says. 

His wife hadn't told the agents where they were, according to Streever's lawyers at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The agents also didn't name themselves in the voicemails, "identifying themselves only as 'Homeland Security Investigations.'"

Streever's New York City layover makes an unusual appearance in Contreras's ruling, which denied DOJ's bid to transfer the case out of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a frequent source of injunctions against the administration.

The government claimed Streever tried to "manufacture" D.C. as the venue rather than his home court, the Western District of New York, and that even the Southern District of New York in Manhattan was more appropriate to hear the case than D.C.'s court.

Contreras refused because three government defendants reside in D.C., including Lyons, who received a "personalized message" from Streever, "not a generalized petition or request made to an agency, which might have been processed anywhere." The federal response to Streever's email also took place mostly outside his home district.

"It is not lost on the Court that both parties seek to litigate in fora that appear to be less convenient for them. Nonetheless, because two play at that game, the Court is left to weigh where on balance would be convenient for most parties," which is not western New York — further from New York City than the Big Apple is from D.C.

Simply investigating a 'potential' threat with a 'prophylactic warning'

The government's actions were astounding, considering the DOJ didn't even try to argue Streever made a "true threat" unprotected by the First Amendment, FIRE said, pointing to the government's opposition to his motion for preliminary injunction.

The only line from Streever's three-paragraph email it quoted was "You will never know peace," omitting the context of Streever's argument. DOJ portrayed this as a "potential" threat justifying a home visit to determine if he posed an "actual" threat. 

"In-person investigatory visits from law enforcement – accompanied by prophylactic warnings about federal law – are a critical tool in the investigative and preventative process, and they do not violate the First Amendment" and cannot justify a "preliminary injunction against unspecified, speculative future harm," DOJ's opposition said.

"They did not state that Streever had in fact violated any law" and closed the investigation without talking to him, showing ICE has "no plans" to contact, visit or warn Streever again, the opposition says. 

"But no one told Mr. Streever that the investigation was closed," Judge Contreras's ruling countered.

DOJ's opposition doesn't try to reconcile its portrayal of Streever's email with a 1969 Supreme Court precedent that rejected the prosecution of a man for saying he'd aim a rifle at President Johnson if he were drafted, agreeing with the defense that it was "a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President."

Taking five months to investigate a potential threat sitting in Lyons' inbox – the acting director left ICE about a month before the home visit – shows how "preposterous" the government's argument was, FIRE said late Tuesday.

"Telling the director of ICE that he would carry a guilty conscience around with him for the rest of his life, at the pinnacle of public debate over ICE actions, is no crime," FIRE said. "It’s at the core of the First Amendment freedoms to free speech and to petition government officials."

The civil liberties group also represented retired police officer Larry Bushart in his lawsuit against Tennessee's Perry County, which jailed him for a month on $2 million bail for sharing a common anti-Trump meme that the county said could be interpreted as a threat to shoot up a local high school. The county paid him $835,000 to settle this spring.

A DHS spokesperson gave Just the News a statement that plagiarizes its social media response to FIRE's lawsuit in July, also referenced in Contreras's ruling.

"Any allegation DHS and its components are attempting to ‘squash’ free speech is categorically FALSE," both say, without specifying the source of the "squash" quote. "ICE investigates all credible threats," and DHS law enforcement officers have experienced massive increases in assaults, vehicular attacks and death threats.

“Anyone who assaults or threatens our law enforcement officers will face the consequences," it concludes. 

The spokesperson didn't answer when asked to identify a credible threat in the Jan. 26 email to Lyons or distinguish ICE's response to Streever from then-AG Merrick Garland's federal investigation of "domestic terrorism" at heated school board meetings.

Garland's Oct. 4, 2021 memo was equally vague about the "disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence" against school officials, but the NSBA letter to Garland seeking federal intervention — developed in coordination with the Biden White House – cited many examples of inflammatory rhetoric comparable to Streever's.

Internal communications, revealed just this summer, show opposition to Garland's memo within DOJ before its release. "If they do this, they might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force," an official wrote.