Court filings describe a Homeland Security operation that infiltrated Minnesota unions and churches

Defense attorneys in a federal criminal case in Minnesota filed court documents on August 13 describing an undercover Department of Homeland Security surveillance campaign, called Operation Puppet Master in the government’s own records, that placed agents inside union meetings, church basements and climate group trainings across the Twin Cities. The filings were made in a case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota against 15 people charged in June with conspiring to impede law enforcement during Operation Metro Surge, the immigration enforcement push that federal agents ran in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area.

A government slide labeled “Conspiracy” named 18 organizations, according to CBS News Minnesota, which reviewed the documents. Among them were the climate group Sunrise Movement, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the Communications Workers of America, the immigrant rights group Unidos, and a bicycle repair collective in Minneapolis. HuffPost reported that the surveillance also covered the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, the Minnesota Federation of Educators, the Direct Action Minnesota Network, the protest group 50501 and Voices for Racial Justice, and that a second effort was recorded under the name Project Whipple Shield.

Homeland Security Investigations agents used administrative subpoenas to collect financial records from several of the groups, including bank statements and PayPal and Venmo transaction histories. The New Republic, citing the New York Times report that first disclosed the operation, said agents obtained three years of records and described the inquiry as an investigation into domestic terrorist financing. None of the organizations whose finances were examined has been charged with a crime.

The filings describe agents posing as protesters at meetings in churches, schools, parks, libraries and union halls, monitoring encrypted Signal group chats, wearing audio recorders into know your rights trainings, and recording license plate numbers outside gatherings to compile lists of who attended. Agents entered Zion Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, more than 600 miles from Minneapolis, and recorded license plates outside St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in St. Paul. Audio was collected at a boxing session at University Baptist Church more than 100 days after Operation Metro Surge ended, and agents followed defendants to the No Kings march on March 28. One defendant, Isaac Sant, was misidentified through Clearview AI facial recognition software.

“These agents surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to protest,” the defense attorneys wrote in the filing.

Claude Cummings Jr., president of the Communications Workers of America, said “our union has become the latest target of a corrupt administration that weaponizes the legal process.” Emilia González Avalos, executive director of Unidos, said that at one of the trainings agents recorded she had told the room that “if there were any ICE officers in the room, they were welcome to stay,” because the session was constitutional and grounded in the First Amendment. Ahilan Arulanantham, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, called the operation “very disturbing” and said it raised the prospect of “that creeping police state.”

The Department of Homeland Security said it does not comment on the existence or status of ongoing investigations. Government documents quoted in the filings characterize the people under surveillance as “violent opportunists and agitators” who were part of a network of conspirators. HuffPost reported that the released documents contain no evidence of illegal activity by the organizations that were monitored.

Operation Metro Surge ran from December 4, 2025 to February 16, 2026, deployed roughly 3,000 federal officers to the Minneapolis and St. Paul area, and produced thousands of arrests in what the department called its largest immigration enforcement operation. During that period federal officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37 year old intensive care nurse, in Minneapolis in January. Homeland Security said officers fired defensive shots after Pretti approached them and violently resisted an attempt to disarm him. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Pretti was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry, and bystander video did not appear to show him holding a weapon, PBS NewsHour reported.

The surveillance followed a presidential memorandum signed September 25, 2025, which directs federal agencies to counter what it calls organized political violence and lists “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” among the common threads of the movements it targets, alongside “extremism on migration, race, and gender” and hostility toward people who hold traditional views on family, religion and morality. The memorandum instructs the Treasury Secretary to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence, and to trace illicit funding streams.

Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union said the memorandum is “a deliberate attempt to sow fear and intimidate and silence opposition,” and the organization notes that federal law contains no domestic terrorism designation regime under which groups can be labeled. The criminal case against the 15 defendants is pending in federal court in Minnesota. None of the 18 organizations named on the government’s slide has been charged.