Chicago-area law enforcement officers took part in an undercover probe by Immigration and Customs Enforcement into Minneapolis mutual aid networks last spring as part of the feds’ conspiracy investigation into 15 Twin Cities activists facing federal felony charges for resisting Operation Metro Surge, according to newly released documents reviewed by WIRED.
An April report by ICE’s investigations wing, Homeland Security Investigations, titled “Antifa Roadshow,” details in-person and electronic surveillance by a joint task force of an April 2 talk. The task force was made up of 14 law enforcement officers—six local cops and eight HSI Chicago agents. The talk included self-described anarchists in Minnesota who spoke about their organizing experiences during the three-month immigration surge, which resulted in the killings of two US citizens.
The document, released by the 15 Minnesota activists’ defense team as part of the ongoing federal case against them, exposes close cooperation between local police, sheriffs, and HSI agents on a prosecution that critics say crosses the line into political repression. The Chicago HSI task force, which included officers from Chicago, Aurora, Downer’s Grove, Cook County, and Kane County, used two undercover agents, unspecified electronic surveillance, audio recordings, license-plate-reader data, and surveillance cameras from Chicago’s sprawling CCTV network to identify the April 2 event’s attendees and build connections to other anti-ICE protests in Illinois and other states.
Records produced by the Kane County Sheriff’s office show the unit in question is the Chicago-area Homeland Security Investigations Task Force. Local cops who join the unit are accepted on either a full- or part-time basis for two years, with the sign-off of their superiors.
Since Operation Midway Blitz in Illinois last autumn, residents in Chicago and surrounding communities have pressed elected officials for answers about cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE. While Illinois state law prevents local law enforcement from participating in immigration enforcement operations, criminal investigations by HSI appear to fall outside those restrictions because they pertain to ICE’s other law enforcement functions.
Chicago police have substantial approval requirements for surveilling and infiltrating protests or public gatherings, per a 2017 departmental order. It is unclear how these regulations apply to Chicago Police Department agents participating in joint task forces with federal agencies.
In response to questions from WIRED, the CPD claims that no First Amendment notifications to CPD’s chain of command or the department’s general counsel were made for the April 2 investigation, and says its work with HSI is permitted under Illinois law because it pertained to criminal enforcement, not immigration. A source with knowledge of the matter stated that CPD believed the early April surveillance operation was in service of a federal racketeering investigation. The only financial element mentioned in the report is a GoFundMe account to support the Crimethinc speaking tour. There is no mention of funds solicited or received at the April 2 event.
The Chicago Mayor’s Office did not provide comment ahead of publication. In response to queries from WIRED, ICE would neither confirm nor deny details of past or present investigations and said individual agents are not authorized to speak to the media.
HSI is also emerging as the point agency for Trump’s war on internal dissent and opposition politicians: Its agents, not the FBI, conducted the Minnesota 15 investigation and served a search warrant earlier this month on congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
The targeted April 2 event was held at Co-Prosperity, a Leftist gallery in the Southside Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport. Several speakers from the Twin Cities area attended the event to share information about resisting federal immigration surges. This was part of a national tour last spring that was organized by the longtime anarchist collective Crimethinc, whose meetings have been infiltrated by federal informants repeatedly over the decades and contributed to the convictions of Eric McDavid, as well as 2008 Republican National Convention protester Matthew DePalma.
Per the four-page HSI report, a plainclothes cop from suburban Aurora was dropped off at the Co-Prosperity event by Officer Mike Xu from the wealthy village of Downers Grove; HSI undercover agent #9147 walked in five minutes later, once the undercover cop from Aurora confirmed no security checks were done at the door.
The undercover HSI agent transmitted a live recording of the event to the rest of the surveillance team for an hour, until transmission was lost. The recordings of the incident were uploaded and shared with HSI agent Kenneth Popovits, a financial crimes investigations supervisor who was working on a temporary assignment in Minneapolis.
Remarks by defendant Callum Robinet from the April 2 talk in Bridgeport about building rapid-response networks are included in the federal conspiracy indictment brought against the Minnesota 15, implicating the Chicagoland law enforcement that participated in surveillance in the controversial prosecution.
The Aurora Police Department, Downer’s Grove Police Department, and Kane County Sheriff did not respond to requests for comment.
The HSI Chicago surveillance team logged 219 vehicles parked in the vicinity of Co-Prosperity. Several subjects already under investigation, including some of the speakers on the tour, were identified by ICE. Ryan Wasson, a Kane County Sheriff’s deputy, spotted a hooded, masked man outside the venue removing an object from his trunk. Running the license plate, Wasson identified the man as the subject of an October 4 arrest during Operation Midway Blitz whose prosecution had been declined by assistant US attorney Christopher Veatch.
Outside the venue, agents Joel Sullivan and Michael Finerty spotted an unnamed subject already under investigation for running “an anti-ICE Signal chat and group called ‘ICE Cream Patrol’” and noted an orange Hyundai had been documented near two March 2026 protests outside the ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois. The surveillance lasted for roughly two hours until 8:30 pm local time on April 2.
Nick Nunez, a veteran Chicago Police detective detailed to the joint task force, filed a request to obtain surveillance footage from a CPD camera outside the venue; the request would take a week to complete, and it is unclear whether he received footage. All information obtained during the April investigation in Chicago was shared with HSI St. Paul/Minnesota, according to the agency’s report.
Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, calls the surveillance of the Bridgeport gathering “very troubling,” adding that local law enforcement should make a full accounting of their role in the incident and participation in joint task forces with federal agencies.
“No one should be subjected to surveillance and infiltration by law enforcement simply for engaging in constitutionally protected activity, including the ability to gather together and express dissatisfaction with public policy,” Yohnka says. “It is also a moment for local law enforcement to reexamine their participation in task forces with the Trump administration, especially any group focused on combatting ‘terrorism.’”
The April 2 meeting in Bridgeport is not the only out-of-state gathering spied upon by HSI during the Minnesota 15 investigation. Reports obtained by defense attorneys through discovery show that events on the same Crimethinc tour in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Seattle, Washington, were monitored in person by local HSI agents, who reported the speech’s contents back to their colleagues in Minneapolis.