When President Donald Trump’s acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Todd Lyons, received an angry email from a man named David Streever, they personally confronted him to give a warning.
Read more Revealed: Why Trump’s newest vanity obsession has him counting trees
“A picture showed up on his phone from the door camera,” wrote Syracuse.com’s Michelle Breidenbach on Sunday. “Two people stood among the childrens’ toys on his porch. A woman, wearing an ordinary windbreaker and slip-on sneakers, held a bunch of papers.”
Breidenbach added, “Streever was not there. He was with his seven-year-old daughter at Moominworld in Finland – an amusement park in the happiest country in the world.”
Syracuse.com went on to report that Streever’s wife was told by the pair of federal agents that they were delivering a warning letter to Streever. The New York resident had emailed Lyons in January about the federal government shooting to death two protesters, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, during anti-ICE protests in Minnesota. When he and his daughter returned from a trip to Finland and settled in a New York City hotel room, he was contacted by ICE.
“At 9:55 p.m., the front desk rang his hotel room,” Syracuse.com reported. “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.”
Breidenbach continued, “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? And what would he tell his daughter?”
In the email, Streever wrote to Lyons that “you are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher.”
It continued, “The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.
Streever closed, “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.”
Read more Trump’s ‘lost cause’ is a threat to democracy
He is not the only Syracuse resident to receive a warning letter. Upon doing further research, Streever discovered a story on Syracuse.com about Paigelynne Gonyea, who was similarly warned by ICE after she criticized them. In her case, the ICE agents delivered their warning while she was working at a polling station for the recent primary election. They claimed she had threatened Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Good to death, by posting his address online. Gonyea claims she criticized Ross online but never doxxed him.
Streever believes the agents who warned Gonyea were the same ones who targeted him.
“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,” Streever said. “It’s really about how he will feel and what his boss will do, which I think was right on both counts.”
He later explained that he does not view himself as a particularly political person, at least in terms of his public profile, but is proud that his letter to Lyons clearly upset the government.
“I feel like that front desk person, just some random person, stood up to this agent and that impressed the hell out of me,” Streever said. “That little act of bravery. If he had come and banged on my door at 10 p.m. I don’t know. That’s a scary thing to think about.”
Streever’s story is part of a larger pattern of Trump targeting people who speak critically of his administration. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the Department of Justice had sued social media companies to obtain names, addresses and banking information of X and Reddit users who have criticized Trump’s mass deportation program.
“The anonymous users, who learned of the subpoenas from the platforms and hired lawyers to challenge the government’s demands for information, haven’t been told what possible offenses are being probed,” Bloomberg wrote. “Their lawyers believe the investigations could relate to allegations of revealing a federal officer’s location data or other types of perceived threats, but dispute that their clients committed crimes. Even if no charges ultimately are filed, the attorneys contended in interviews that rooting out identities of dissenters is at the very least an intimidation tactic.”
Read more Inside Trump’s most pernicious legacy
