# Direct Action Minnesota Indictment On **June 16, 2026**, federal prosecutors in Minnesota unsealed a 94-page indictment charging **15 anti-ICE activists** with conspiring to impede or injure federal officers during [[Operation Metro Surge]]. Prosecutors say the defendants belonged to a group called Direct Action Minnesota ("DAMN"). The case was built by [[Homeland Security Investigations]]: US Attorney Daniel Rosen announced it alongside HSI's special agent in charge, Michael McCarthy. Inside HSI the case is filed as **"Project Whipple,"** after the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, ICE's Minnesota headquarters, under the office's [[Operation North Star]] caseload. All 14 defendants who appeared pleaded not guilty on July 1. The fifteenth was in custody in Michigan on separate federal charges. ## The charges | Element | What prosecutors allege | |---|---| | Core count | All 15: conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers | | Blockades | Attempts to block ICE traffic in and out of the Whipple Building on January 23 and March 1, 2026, including flipping a trailer into the road, forming human chains and handing out homemade shields | | Coordination | A Signal group chat that scheduled meetings, "shield" and "de-arrest" trainings, and deliveries of blockade materials. Much of the indictment quotes it. | | Following agents | Defendants followed federal vehicles after being told to stop. Two (William Morgan and a co-defendant) are charged with interstate stalking for following an officer to his home in Hudson, Wisconsin. | | Individual counts | Morgan: assault on a federal officer and destruction of property (knocking papers from an agent's hand, kicking a vehicle). Natasha Rakotz: assault, for allegedly brake-checking and side-swiping an ICE vehicle. Kyle Wagner, already in custody on earlier charges, posted a video urging protesters to "get your f*cking guns and stop these f*cking people." | **What the indictment doesn't show:** Sahan Journal reported that it documents no injuries to federal agents, and Rosen declined to say whether any agent was hurt. ## Arrest day Twelve defendants were arrested by ICE agents on the morning of June 16; two were at large. One defendant, Cameron Kennedy, said twelve armed agents came to his home at 6 a.m. Rosen: "These defendants are not being charged for what they said, but what they did." He warned others that they should assume "we're watching you and that we will get you." That afternoon about 80 people gathered at the federal courthouse in St. Paul where the defendants made first appearances. Sahan Journal reported that US Marshals used pepper spray and federal agents deployed chemical agents on the crowd. HSI's own report calls it "the riot on June 16, 2026, outside the U.S. Courthouse" and says the agency is seeking an assault complaint against one person from that day. ## The court so far - **July 1:** Judge David Schultz denied the prosecution's broad motion to redact names and personal details from discovery. "I'm inferring that not every bit of evidence was necessarily gathered pursuant to a warrant," he said. - Prosecutors told the court they hold about 20 terabytes of data, roughly 16 of it Signal chats, not all about these defendants, and that more people may be charged. - **July 23 (HSI report):** "The USAO is considering superseding the conspiracy indictment" to add a woman whose name is redacted, "pending evidence from the residential search warrants." ## Context The conspiracy case came after a string of weaker ones. During and after the surge, 36 Minnesotans were charged individually with assaulting or impeding agents. Many of those charges were downgraded, and Sahan Journal counted at least 15 dismissed; the Minnesota Reformer, citing the *Star Tribune*, put the dismissal rate at more than a third. A conspiracy indictment built on a group chat doesn't need any single act of assault to hold up. The ACLU of Minnesota said the prosecutions "should be carefully scrutinized for retaliatory motives." Defense lawyer Anna Hall of the National Lawyers Guild: "They charge without sufficient evidence, they have brought cases on false testimony." ## Why it matters **From individual acts to the network.** When individual assault cases kept falling apart, prosecutors moved to a conspiracy charge, which turns ordinary organizing tools — a chat group, trainings, shared supplies, cars following ICE vehicles on public streets — into evidence of an agreement. The same shift runs through the rest of HSI's Minnesota file: undercover agents inside rapid-response networks, bank subpoenas against a fund's fiscal sponsor, and grand jury subpoenas for people who only attended a planning meeting (see [[Operation North Star]] and [[Cities Church Protest]]). It matches the network-and-funders approach of [[NSPM-7]], though nothing public ties this case to the memo directly. **An immigration agency as the lead investigator.** HSI, an immigration and customs agency, investigated, arrested and co-announced a domestic protest conspiracy case. The Cities Church defendants are challenging exactly that authority. ## See also - [[Operation Metro Surge]] · [[Operation North Star]] · [[Cities Church Protest]] - [[Homeland Security Investigations]] · [[ICE]] - [[NSPM-7]] · [[Domestic Terrorism]] · [[Surveillance State]]