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Paigelynne Gonyea has more than 100,000 followers on TikTok, where she posts a mix of comedy and skincare product reviews. On Instagram, where she has more than 33,000 followers, she occasionally posts about politics — including about violence committed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis last winter.
This past Tuesday, Gonyea wasn’t on her phone. It was Election Day in New York, and she was working the polls at the Central Library in Syracuse.
While she was there, she got a voicemail from someone identifying himself as a Homeland Security special agent calling from a New Jersey number.
“We were just by your apartment,” the caller said, adding he had gotten her phone number from her significant other. “We were just calling you in reference to a post that we believe you made on Instagram where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January.”
Gonyea denied to NPR she had ever doxxed an ICE agent. Doxxing usually refers to releasing sensitive personal information such as addresses and phone numbers. However, the Trump administration has tried in recent months to broaden the definition.
In a statement to NPR that came after this story first published, a DHS spokesperson said Gonyea had committed a federal crime by publishing an ICE officer’s address online. But DHS has so far not offered evidence to back up that claim.
“Where is the address?” Gonyea wrote to NPR after she was made aware of DHS’s statement. “I literally have looked through my social media carefully and I do not see an address.”
Gonyea’s encounter with federal agents was first reported by Syracuse.com.
Gonyea says on Election Day she called the agent back and told him she was working at a polling site. The agent wanted Gonyea to come outside, but she didn’t feel comfortable.
“I don’t trust going outside or dealing with ICE agents at all in any capacity,” Gonyea said in an interview with NPR. Her fellow poll worker, 70-year-old Sheilia Milledge, didn’t want her to go outside either.
“There’s too many people being kidnapped by ICE and I can’t run behind her,” Milledge told NPR. “I use a cane.”
There was a lull in voters and Gonyea says she told the agent to come inside to talk to her. Milledge and another poll worker recorded video as a man and a woman with ICE badges entered the library. Milledge can be heard on the video trying to call city officials.
“We’re working down at the polls today and ICE came here to bring a warning to one of our workers,” Milledge is heard saying on the video.
It’s illegal under federal law for armed federal law enforcement to come inside a polling place. It is unclear whether these agents were armed. A recently enacted New York state law also bars immigration agents from entering voting sites.
Kevin Ryan, the local Republican county election commissioner, told NPR he confirmed through a DHS contact that the people with badges were real agents.
He said the entire incident was “a comedy of errors from beginning to end.” As a poll inspector, Ryan said, Gonyea should have known not to invite the agents in. Meanwhile, it was “a mistake” for the agents to enter the polling place, he said. Ryan also questioned why the agents needed to confront Gonyea about her social media post on that day.
Gonyea said the agents had a file about her with details including her name, address, date of birth, height, weight and eye color.
Gonyea said the agents asked her to sign a document that claimed her Instagram account might have violated a federal law that says it is unlawful to threaten or intimidate a federal officer. The notice, which is from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility, warns “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW” at the top. The notice reads, “OPR is requesting that you promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior.”
Gonyea did not sign the document or delete any of her posts. While she says the agents never told her exactly which post triggered their visit, she says they did confirm it was a post about Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who fatally shot Renée Macklin Good in Minnesota.
She saw a printout of a screenshot in the agents’ file of a post from her Instagram account featuring a photo of Ross. She had posted that photo back in January days after the shooting with a comment saying the Minnesota Star Tribune had identified him as Jonathan Ross. “I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted,” Gonyea wrote in her caption. (Ross has not been indicted for his role in Macklin Good’s death.)
“I didn’t say anything that would incite violence or cause anyone to want to go out of their way to go harm an ICE agent, or their family, or anything like that,” Gonyea said. “What I said was within the confines of free speech.”
DHS has not responded to questions asking what post triggered the incident.
Gonyea posted the document the ICE agents had asked her to sign to her Instagram, along with the voicemail she received and a video of the incident. In it her caption reads, “Just had a run-in with ICE at work for when I doxxed Jonathan Ross in January,” though she told NPR she had intended for “doxxed” to appear in quotes.
Civil liberties experts are concerned by the DHS agents’ actions, which come as the agency is also under scrutiny for surveilling peaceful protesters and activists.
Demanding government accountability for the killing of an American citizen is a highly protected form of political speech, said Perry Grossman of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
“If this is the kind of speech that the administration, that DHS wants to go after, then they are trying to fundamentally redefine the First Amendment and the scope of permissible public debate,” Grossman said. “And that is wrong. That is ridiculous.”
For Gonyea, she keeps thinking about George Orwell’s book, 1984, which describes a dystopian mass surveillance state.
“That was one of my favorite books growing up,” Gonyea said. “I just did not think that I would be living in a time where it’s starting to parallel.”
Holliday Moore of member station WAER contributed reporting to this story.
