A former Department of Homeland Security official who served in the Trump administration, Miles Taylor, is sounding the alarm over what he views as an egregious use of federal power against protesters, after newly uncovered documents showed that federal agents investigated Minnesota demonstrators as terrorists for using tools such as "wooden spoons and cookware."

Taylor laid out his concerns in a post on his Defiance Substack.

"DHS opened the secret investigation out of its St. Paul office in late January, four days after a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was filming officers during the immigration crackdown," Taylor wrote.

According to Taylor, the agency buried any investigation into the agents involved in that shooting. Instead, it "set out to probe the protest movement itself, including labor unions, community organizers, and a climate group called the Sunrise Movement."

Citing reporting by The New York Times, Taylor noted that agents "infiltrated activists' internal meetings at libraries, public parks, and in churches, recording not just what people said but who they were." The operation ultimately produced the June arrests of a handful of activists who had thrown chunks of ice at ICE vehicles, after the full weight of the counterterrorism apparatus was brought to bear in a search for anything that could stick.

It is not the first time DHS has faced questions over monitoring of political activity. In 2020, the department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis compiled open-source reports on journalists covering protests in Portland, Oregon, prompting the reassignment of that office's acting head and calls from Congress for tighter limits on its intelligence work.

Taylor described the episode as extraordinary and alarming because the surveillance swept in entire political groups rather than individuals suspected of committing crimes. That concern has deep roots in federal policy: after congressional investigations in the 1970s exposed FBI surveillance of civil-rights and anti-war groups, the Justice Department adopted guidelines requiring a criminal predicate before domestic security investigations could be opened.

Taylor, who served as DHS chief of staff during Trump's first term and later revealed himself as the anonymous author of a 2018 New York Times op-ed describing internal resistance to the president, wrote: "I spent years at DHS and have worked with almost every head of the department, under Democratic and Republican administrations. Until Trump's first term, few of them would've been caught dead overseeing an investigation like this," adding that in earlier years the official responsible would have been fired and the incident reported to Congress.

"No longer. In story after story, we are witnessing the slide of DHS down a slippery slope into becoming the warden of a burgeoning police state," he wrote.

The bottom line, Taylor argued, is that Trump "wants Americans to think twice before joining a group chat, attending a training at a church, or banging a pot outside a hotel in protest of his administration" — and that, precisely for that reason, the American people need to "keep on banging."

Source: Raw Story