Federal Spies Hunt Minnesota Unions in Search of Conspiracy, But Find Solidarity

Yesterday news broke of a sweeping undercover investigation by the Department of Homeland Security in Minnesota early this year to infiltrate and surveil meetings and obtain the financial records of nonprofit groups and two of the country’s largest unions, the Communications Workers (CWA) and the Service Employees (SEIU). This investigation was behind the indictments of 15 people in June.

The news should unite the labor movement in defense of constitutional rights and democracy as its members face what one defendant’s attorney calls “political prosecution.”

“CWA 7250 has learned that we have been subject to an illegal and aggressive federal investigation that used undercover agents to enter our office, infiltrate meetings we co-sponsored, subpoena our finances, and surveil one of our officers,” said CWA Local 7250 President Kieran Knutson.

“We know that this is because our members, from across the workplaces we represent,
were active in the fight against the federal occupation and racist campaign of terror by ICE. CWA 7250 members joined neighborhood rapid-response groups, distributed warning whistles, protested at the Whipple Federal Building, marched in the streets and the snow, and helped build the January 23rd Day of Truth and Freedom.

“We are proud of our work and will never apologize or back down because of these dirty tricks and intimidation.”

“The most notable revelation to me was their infiltration of the February 15th Workers Assembly to Defeat ICE, a great event that brought over 300 unionists and community members together to democratically debate on next steps for the movement,” said UFCW Local 663 executive board member Paul Kirk-Davidoff, a meat cutter at Cub Foods supermarket.

“I helped put this together, and multiple unions sponsored the event. Four undercovers attended, and made sure to take detailed notes of all the speakers and political positions. This, along with the surveillance of unions, leads me to believe that the feds were frightened by the January 23rd mass strike and the possibility of more labor action.”

BOGUS CONSPIRACY

Federal Deputy Attorney General Brian Lynch participated in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Now he is leading a taskforce dedicated to prosecuting left-wing activism, which the administration calls political violence. The taskforce is using Trump’s National Security Policy Memorandum (NSPM-7) to investigate the funding sources of the president’s opponents.

Lynch is casting a wide net to go after Trump’s perceived enemies. The investigation targets, among others, the AFL-CIO, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, and the Minneapolis Federation of Educators. A slide that prosecutors showed to a grand jury portrays the unions, along with some nonprofits, left groups, and a bike shop, as part of an antifa conspiracy.

Minnesotans are responding with solidarity.

“This winter, Minnesotans stood together in rejecting the Trump regime’s occupation of Minnesota,” said a statement from a broad coalition of unions and nonprofit organizations, including many who had not been targeted in the investigation so far.

“Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol agents broke countless laws while kidnapping Minnesotans based on racial profiling, violating our constitutional rights, and murdering our neighbors… Across the state, Minnesotans joined with community, faith, labor, and neighborhood organizations to build networks that protected our neighbors and defended our constitutional rights.”

“Minneapolis educators worked in union to exercise our constitutional rights to peacefully protest Operation Metro Surge and other discriminatory policies of the president—and we will continue to do so,” said Minneapolis Federation of Educators Teacher Chapter President Marcia Howard in a statement. “For now, we have no further comment about this so-called investigation into whatever they’re calling ‘Antifa’ today.”

FOLLOWED TO CHURCHES, PARKS, AND UNION HALLS

In January, after federal agents killed Renee Good and union nurse Alex Pretti, investigators with the Department of Homeland Security launched the undercover mass surveillance and infiltration campaign, called “Operation Puppet Master,” targeting the widespread community and labor organizing against ICE and Border Patrol agents.

“These agents surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment rights to protest ICE’s lawless rampage in our state,” wrote attorney Kevin Riach in a brief as part of a discovery filing on behalf of Isaac Sant, one of the “Minnesota 15” who were charged in June with conspiracy to impede federal officers.

“These wild conspiracy allegations are born from the fantasies of political retribution that animate the Trump Administration,” wrote Riach. Undercover agents followed protestors to public meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools, and union halls.

At one meeting organized by Sunrise Movement at Minneapolis Public Library, where participants learned about the history of peaceful sit-ins and de-escalation tactics, an undercover agent posing as construction worker tried to entrap a speaker, saying he “could build items that might assist with more ‘direct action,’” according to newly disclosed documents. The agent told the person “going to jail did not bother him.”

Federal agents also used facial recognition software called Clearview AI to compile photo dossiers of activists and protestors. In one diagram shared with Labor Notes, the federal government mapped faces of union leaders, members, and staff to their affiliations into an organizational chart as evidence of a conspiracy.

Homeland Security agents used administrative subpoenas to obtain the financial records of SEIU, CWA, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, as well as the climate group the Sunrise Movement and the nonprofit Voices for Racial Justice.

When they pored over SEIU’s wire transfers looking for alleged “domestic terrorist financing,” a release of information filing showed, all that Homeland Security investigators could find were “various types of debits and credits to include annuity payments, strike payments, strike supplies, investigations, union member dues, retiree dues, medical expenses, and pension fund expenses.”

A PROUD TRADITION

Minnesota AFL-CIO President Bernie Burnham called the targeting of the labor movement an “unhinged conspiracy theory.”

“Instead of holding federal agents accountable for shooting and killing Renée Good and our union brother Alex Pretti, or addressing the dangerous and deadly conditions within immigration detention facilities,” Burnham said in a statement, “the Trump administration continues to weaponize our federal government to intimidate our unions, our communities, and anyone who peacefully opposes their radical authoritarian agenda…

“They are now bringing back McCarthyism to paint unions and organizations that advocate for workers and families as threats to the nation. “It didn’t work in the 1950s when Joseph McCarthy accused anyone he didn’t like of being unamerican and it won’t work for Donald Trump.”

“We are part of the proud tradition of ordinary Americans who join together in union halls and church basements to make this country better,” CWA President Claude Cummings, Jr. said in a statement. “But our values of unity, of community, are under attack by a president and his Department of Homeland Security that sends government spies to surveil community meetings in church basements...

“CWA is a union with a long history of standing up to bullies and billionaire bosses. We will not be intimidated, and we will not be silenced in our solidarity with our members, with our communities, and with our neighbors.”