Federal agents track down woman, demand she remove Instagram post about ICE
syracuse.comThe content of the post deemed by ICE to warrant ~~federal prosecution~~ crime-boss-style intimidation:
> BREAKING: The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in broad daylight has been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune. I think today is a great day for Johnathan to be indicted!
If anyone is wondering, it would still be a good day : )
I don’t read the Minnesota Star and hadn’t seen any of this, so, if anything the Feds doxxed their own by bringing it to my attention.
Streisand!
_in a polling place_ no less
I see they were invited in by the person they wanted to intimidate, so that she wouldn't be alone, and there were no voters present. "Better judgement" would have been to not invite them and to not accept the invitation, but after the fact I could say it's preferable to the alternative. The person who decided to take action against this lady should be fired though.
Maybe you should ask them for an ID to make sure they belong there.
This kind of intimidation sucks and I'd like to see individual officers who indulge in it lose their qualified immunity and be prosecuted for it.
But I'm at least grateful to live under a regime that needs to break its own laws to do this, and so such charges can be dismissed by courts that follow the law, even if they don't apply consequences to the offending officials. Compare that to the UK where more than 12k people were arrested for social media posts in 2023 alone and where it is fully permitted under the law with great discretion and supported by the courts.
It's a bit like "my husband is better than yours because he doesn't beat me as hard", but it's something.
The 12k number is an estimate, and only 1k were convicted. And the law they're being charged with breaking covers things like threats to assault someone, false bomb threats, harassment of ex-partners, threats sent to MPs, serious domestic abuse-related crimes, etc. There's no breakdown of what each charge was for.
If you make a bomb threat or threaten to kill someone else over social media, you really should get arrested and prosecuted because that isn't an exercise of "first amendment rights".
Given the costs of defending a federal case start at the five figs and the typical naughty tweets style offense nets community service at worst, I’m not so sure.
"Typical" doesn't fit with "at worst".
The former may well be as you say, though when I tried to find real stats I was unable to tell what the breakdown of offence was let alone punishments (if someone has an official link, not opinion piece, I'd be interested).
All I do know is that one of the more famous cases is that kind of scale, total penalty being £985 including costs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
> But I'm at least grateful to live under a regime that needs to break its own laws to do this
Actions speak louder than words.
He's a (translated) quote from a constitution; the country it is from has no qualms about breaking it. I am confident you, as a lover of freedom, would not wish to live there:
- https://archive.org/details/constitution_202002/page/n21/mod...Article 67. Citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration and association. The State shall guarantee the conditions for the free activities of democratic political parties and social organizations.in what world do you think they would actually be prosecuted?
Which of the 12K arrests do you not agree with? Or are you saying people should be free to write whatever they want on social media with no repercussions?
Saying what you want about the government without fear of reprecussion or intimidation or consequence from the government is literally in the constitution. Very specifically for this situation.
This isn't a "freespeach" argument, this is the actual text of the actual constitution. This is the actual literal reason that line is included in the bill of rights. It is explicit constitutional law that the government cannot punish you for criticizing the government.
There are a ton of exceptions to our right to free speech, but this is not one.
Most of those aren't about the government, those are people using social media to threaten their ex and so on.
Who's talking about criticising the government? If someone put my name and address on the internet and then falsely claimed I'd committed some henious crime against children (and maybe added a fake AI image) I'd certainly want the police to do something.
>Or are you saying people should be free to write whatever they want on social media with no repercussions?
no repercussions from the government, yes, people should be free to write whatever they want
If someone put my name and address on the internet and then falsely claimed I'd committed some henious crime against children (and maybe added a fake AI image) I'd certainly want the police to do something.
I don't think this is actually your view, though. I can't imagine that you think harassment or violent threats are things that should have no repercussions.
Most countries in the West have higher threshold to arrest someone over social media posts. Some actually much, much higher.
12K is just a ridiculous number and indicates that the UK indeed has a free speech problem. I don't think that in my country there were more like ~ 20 actual arrests over the same problem during the same period.
Even if you agree with prosecuting people for speech, why exactly would you arrest them and drag them to prison/jail? Even here in Europe, this is a sort of offense that usually results in a suspended sentence or a fine, and a physical arrest is absolutely unnecessary, unless there is a good suspicion that that person is going to harm some concrete people at a concrete time.
In a more liberal country, even if prosecution over an utterance takes place, it usually happens without arrests, simply by asking the culprit to come to a police station and explain themselves, later the same in front of a court. There just isn't any need for physical restraining of that person, it is just intimidation.
The 12K figure is the total figure for arrests for Malicious Communications offenses. It's not a figure for social media posts specifically. The vast majority of these arrests have nothing to do with people making edgy social media posts. They're arrests for personal threats, harassment, stalking, etc. etc.
I think a lot of people assume by default that other European countries have fewer (or less egregious) arrests for social media posts just because the American right isn't boosting the relevant stories. But if you Google, you'll find some pretty wild instances of arrests for social media posts in lots of other European countries. Here are some examples.
In Spain you can be arrested for insulting the King: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Has%C3%A9l [No, he didn't just insult the King, but that is one of the crimes he was charged with.]
In Germany you can be arrested for being rude about civil servants: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/german-police-raid-home-of-s...
In France, you can be convicted (not just arrested) for posting a non-doctored photo that makes some policemen look bad: https://www.amnesty.ie/france-criminal-conviction-for-a-twee...
In the Czech Republic, you can be convicted for making rude posts about Ukranians: https://www.newsendip.com/in-czech-republic-two-men-guilty-o... And if you're a communist, that's too bad, because it's illegal to express support for communist ideology (on social media or anywhere else).
In Italy, you can be fined for mocking the President's height: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italian-journalist-orde...
All of these (with the exception of some of the non-King-related charges in the Spanish case) are pretty clearly instances where someone would not be arrested – and would certainly not be convicted – in the UK. But you won't find out about these cases from Elon Musk's X feed. And of course, people do get arrested and jailed for social media posts even in the land of the free, from time to time:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jail...
See also this article for some more context on the '12K' claim: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...
I know in CA it is a violation of election law for an armed law enforcement officer to enter a vote center unless they are responding to an incident or there to vote.
And what are the consequences if they do it anyway?
That, in my opinion, is the question of the era for the USA. We were taught that the rule of law prevailed and there are "checks and balances" but it seems like there is no prescibed way to enforce the rules inside the system.
USA is trending towards right is might.
> what are the consequences if they do it anyway?
State AGs seem to have collectively shrugged. But theoretically, a state charging a federal officer with unlawful conduct is precedented.
Whose gonna call the cops on the cops?
Different cops. We had sheriff’s deputies out for some other issue, my impression was they took the law pretty seriously. They may not arrest them on the spot, but I think they would get ID and tell them to leave, and later file a report.
Unfortunately due to chain of command, your good sheriffs deputies will be prevented from carrying out justice.
How so? If some ICE agents show up the sheriff and state police can certainly deal with them.
Like they did in Minneapolis? No, federal officers will always “out law” your local law enforcement.
This situation there was very different
aka "who watches the watchmen?"
Exactly
are the cops gonna do anything? just start a mini civil war in someone’s garage?
These days, I would guess a "tsk-tsk" is said to them.
The States need to grow a pair and start arresting these agents who break the law.
“Grow a pair” presumes the state isn’t actively achieving its goals through these actions.
It’s a big club, and we ain’t in it.
I wonder how far we are away from people being arrested for holding up blank pieces of paper.
Happened in 2023 in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_paper_protest
The UK case involved him being "lead away" by police and "detained" when he returned and spoke so not really an arrest for holding up a blank piece of paper. Not good by any means, but not quite "for holding up a blank piece of paper". The other UK case was about a threat of arrest if he wrote on the paper - that is under the law that bans protests in Parliament Square. Again, not good, but not for holding up a blank piece of paper.
I thought detainment was a lighter kind of arrest. Seems that I’m wrong and they are distinct concepts (I’m not too familiar with the English terminology here, my bad)
When someone is detained, they're just a person of interest wanted for questioning. When they're arrested, it's because they've actually been charged for something.
In the U.S. you can be “detained” for days or weeks for having brown skin.
It’s called a Kavanaugh Stop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop
Its more complex than that. Arrest is fairly straightforward, but you can be arrested and released without charge (e.g. Peter Mandelson was).
Detaining is not something I really understanding, but from what I have read it is using restraint of some sort without arrest and not really something police seem to have any special powers to do (whereas their powers of arrest are greater than those of other people).
The facts in your link contradict your post
I mean, if we are going to go after people for their tweets and posts, there’s a social network that needs crawling…
Or praying silently to yourself in a No Praying Zone!
The US regime's effort to avoid any culpability for killing American citizens is very concerning.
I remember the good ole days when the White House would coordinate with former employees that got jobs with SV companies in their "online safety" orgs and would just ban or shadowban people. Less legally suspect because it was action by private companies.
How is this anything other than a flagrant violation of her constitutional right to free speech? This is the government suppressing her speaking the name of the executioner, which was already publicly published.
If I was her, I would be launching a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the government for a violation of constitutional rights.
Was it against the law for them to ASK that she remove her post? In essence, it was a request, coupled with an unrelated statement about the illegality of interfering with federal officers. Yes, it was an attempt to intimidate her, but she recognized it for what it was and did not cave in.
Doxxing has many forms, and I agree that she did nothing wrong by citing the news source with the officers name, and offering her opinion. They did not detain or arrest her, and she agreed, and even invited them to speak with her.
This whole thing is a non-story.
> Was it against the law for them to ASK
> Yes, it was an attempt to intimidate her
You've answered your own question
What happened to freedom of speech? Before you know it we won't have any freedom at all. They had no right to track her down. We can't let this continue, something has to be done.
More broadly, across various instances, the administration and feds have been coming out strongly against basic freedom of speech which is a core constitutional pillar that defines America. It is highly unAmerican.
Meanwhile, the crook in charge keeps doing everything he can to keep his cronies rich, at the expense of the planet's climate. Those who voted for him continue to remain utterly uninformed of the tornadoes and floods they sow.
She claims that the post with his name is the one that triggered the visit.
When is the tipping point?
7 hours old and not flagged? Amazing.