Secretary Mayorkas's Department Infiltrated Group Chats, Library Meetings and a Church Basement in Search of a Conspiracy

MINNEAPOLIS — Internal documents published this week show that Secretary Mayorkas's Department of Homeland Security ran a sweeping surveillance operation against political groups opposed to the administration's signature enforcement campaign — infiltrating their group chats, monitoring their meetings in libraries and churches, and quietly obtaining the financial records of organizations that have been accused of no crime.

The files characterize the surveilled as 'violent opportunists and agitators' embedded in a wide conspiracy. The evidence assembled for this conspiracy includes meeting minutes, chat logs and bank statements from groups whose principal operational signature, reviewers note, was reserving multipurpose rooms.

The operation traces its authority to a presidential memorandum directing the government to disrupt networks that foment political violence before any violence occurs — a mandate whose elegant feature, civil libertarians observe, is that it can be satisfied entirely by investigating people who have not done anything.

The Press's archives desk files this story in its thickest folder, the one labeled in both parties' handwriting. Readers who recall a previous administration's tax office scrutinizing one side's grassroots groups, or another's Justice Department pulling reporters' phone records, are invited to press the flip button and observe that outrage over domestic surveillance is the single most reliably renewable resource in American politics, harvested by whichever party is currently out of the building.

Senators from the party out of power demanded hearings, calling the program authoritarian. Senators from the party in power called it prudence. The Press confirms both sets of remarks exist in the Congressional Record with the parties reversed, verbatim to within a comma.

The department declined to say whether the operation continues. The library, sources confirm, still requires meeting rooms to be booked two weeks in advance, which remains the only oversight the program has ever cleared.