Undercover agents infiltrated union hall meeting to ‘Defeat ICE’

Reconnaissance reports from the investigative case file, titled “Project Whipple Shield,” show that a team of HSI agents snuck into a Feb. 15 recruitment drive against ICE that was held at the United Labor Center in Minneapolis, which serves as a common meeting space for the city’s labor movement.

Alongside several local labor solidarity groups, the Democratic Socialists of America’s Twin Cities chapter co-organized the February meeting as a “Workers Assembly to Defeat ICE and Plan the Next Mass Strike” after anti-ICE activists waged a months-long campaign continuously attacking ICE’s base of operations in Minneapolis, the Federal Whipple Building, during Operation Metro Surge.

“Twin Cities workers, unions, community and rapid response groups are invited to collectively decide the next mass action against ICE,” read a digital flyer advertising the event on social media.

The undercover HSI team’s debrief to department supervisors reported that, upon checking in at the registration tables, the federal agents witnessed multiple demands during the meeting to free illegal immigrants from detention and abolish ICE as an institution, as well as all of Homeland Security.

“After discussion, a decision was made to concentrate on the abolition of ICE and not DHS,” the report back read.

Audio recordings of the gathering, attended by approximately 200 participants, were attached to the report. The undercover agents recounted meeting organizers also addressing other resolutions important to the labor movement, including joining the Healthcare Workers for Palestine’s National Day of Action against Israel and a proposal from the Revolutionary Communists of America to create a labor-oriented political party called the “Workers Party.”

Per the meeting debrief, other left-wing organizations that sponsored the labor conference included Socialist Alternatives, the Ray Rainbolt Memorial Shooting Club, and the Communications Workers of America’s Minneapolis branch.

Investigators searched for funding sources and organizations involved

The stated purpose of Project Whipple Shield, according to the HSI special agent reports, was to uncover the funding sources behind the anti-ICE antifa ring targeting the Federal Whipple Building and the cell’s organizational structure.

Operational documents show that HSI also opened a separate investigation, “Operation Puppet Master,” four days after the fatal Border Patrol shooting of anti-ICE activist Alex Pretti, a nurse and union member of the American Federation of Government Employees. Operation Puppet Master sought to unmask the agitators conspiring to exploit the civil unrest to riot, destroy federal property, and assault personnel protecting these facilities.

HSI’s field office in St. Paul allegedly discovered a network of “violent opportunists,” later identified as Direct Action Minnesota or DAMN, operating both online and in person by either directly participating in the assaults on ICE officers around Whipple or providing support through crowdfunding, planning, and mass mobilization efforts.

In its investigation into “protest domestic terrorist financing,” HSI obtained the financial records of the Service Employees International Union, the country’s second-largest labor union of public service workers.

Through the execution of an administrative subpoena, HSI acquired years’ worth of wire transfers from various financial institutions to and from the SEIU’s bank account in Minneapolis.

A preliminary analysis of the retrieved records only yielded transactions typically involved in union organizing, such as strike-related payments, strike supplies, member dues, and medical expenses, between the SEIU’s national committee and local SEIU unions.

HSI also issued an administrative summons seeking financial statements from the CWA pertaining to its donations and PAC spending. CWA, a left-of-center labor union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, represents communication workers across the United States, Puerto Rico, and Canada, including journalists at print and broadcast news companies. The investigation into CWA’s finances additionally targeted the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, another AFL-CIO affiliate.

Defense counsel for the lead defendant in the conspiracy case, United States v. Sant, filed a discovery motion on Thursday with the HSI exhibits attached, alleging that the federal government has “dreamed up a conspiracy” that extends far beyond the indicted co-conspirators to include, “with no evidence,” major Minneapolis-area labor unions.

The defense’s filing cited a diagram the government presented to the grand jury that handed down the 94-page indictment against 15 alleged cell operatives of DAMN.

Prepared by HSI, the graphic visualized the purported conspiracy, in part plotting the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, the Minnesota Association of Public Employees, the AFL-CIO, and SEIU 26 of Minnesota as “council members” within the DAMN network.

According to a transcript of the grand jury proceedings, an HSI agent testified before the charging body that the slide shown was “a snapshot of some of the other organizations that members are affiliated with that kind of comprise and make up DAMN.”

Allegations of ‘political animus’ driving the conspiracy case

The lawyer for the lead defendant, self-described healthcare worker Isaac Sant, argued in Thursday’s filing that the prosecution’s grand jury presentation reflected a “broad and irrational investigation.”

“These wild conspiracy allegations are born from the fantasies of political retribution that animate the Trump Administration,” said Sant’s criminal defense attorney, Kevin Riach. “President Trump and senior administration officials routinely speak of the political left in de-humanizing terms – as ‘deformed,’ ‘scarred,’ and ‘filled with ugliness,’ for example. The administration has crystallized these sentiments into policies that encourage and authorize political prosecutions like this one.”

In the discovery motion for additional records from HSI’s covert surveillance activities allegedly withheld from the defense, Riach claimed Homeland Security conducted an unconstitutional “mass spying campaign” that gathered intelligence on “ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to protest ICE’s lawless rampage in our state.”

According to the federal indictment, Sant was a top recruiter enlisting revolutionary-left radicals to join DAMN’s rapid-response system, which deployed activists to counter the ICE raids around Minneapolis in real time.

“I think the Twin Cities’ real contributions to the field of revolutionary organization, of insurrectionary organization, is these rapid response networks,” Sant allegedly said while on an anarchist speaking tour. “I am in an anarchist, revolutionary organization. It’s called Black Cat [Worker’s Collective].”

Black Cat Worker’s Collective, which investigators identified as one of the antifa affinity groups belonging to DAMN’s coalition, describes itself as a cohort of “dedicated anarchists who root ourselves in the labor and direct action movements.”

In Minneapolis, the city’s labor movement has declared its support for Sant and his jointly indicted codefendants, dubbing them the “Minnesota 15.” Supporters of the accused have set up a legal defense fund on Chuffed.org, a crowdfunding site popular among left-wing activists. So far, the fund has collected more than $380,000, mostly from anonymous donors.

The defendants face varying federal charges for their alleged involvement in the anti-ICE conspiracy, including conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers, interstate stalking, destruction of government property, assault of a federal officer, and solicitation to commit a crime of violence.