Last month, two ICE agents showed up to David Streever’s front porch in Rochester, New York, over one strongly worded email he sent to former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons. Now he’s suing the Department of Homeland Security for First Amendment violations.Two agents with Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, rang Streever’s doorbell on June 23 and left a “WARNING NOTICE” with his wife, which said he was possibly in violation of federal law and that Lyons was “requesting that you promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior.”Streever was in Finland with his daughter at the time. When they returned, federal agents even came to the JFK Airport hotel he stayed at that night and left a note for him at the front desk.The visit came five months after Streever initially sent the email. The lawsuit, filed Monday by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, highlights that.“If someone is really threatening a government official, you don’t wait five months to act on it,” Adam Steinbaugh, senior attorney at FIRE, said. “The fact that authorities didn’t respond immediately shows that David presented no threat. This pursuit is designed to intimidate lawful speech, pure and simple.”Streever’s January email to Lyons followed ICE’s killing of Americans Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.The subject line was “What’s next,” and Streever warned Lyons would be haunted by the shootings.“You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself,” he wrote. “But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.” He also equated Lyons with a Nazi.Streever sent the email on January 26, two days after Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents in Minnesota, and 19 days after Good suffered the same fate.The lawsuit argues that Streever’s email was speech protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution.“Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is actively threatening that freedom, tracking down and retaliating against speakers like Plaintiff David Streever because he exercised his fundamental right to criticize one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in the United States,” the suit reads. “ICE’s issuance of formal ‘WARNING NOTICE’ documents to critics who engage in protected speech—and its decision to have federal agents deliver those warnings in person—can have only one purpose: to systemically chill ICE’s critics and coerce them into silence.” Streever said his email came from frustrations with ICE’s violent tactics.“Like many Americans, I was deeply upset after the shootings in Minnesota and I felt compelled to do something,” Streever said in a statement. “Writing an email to the head of ICE seemed like the least I could do to express my sense of outrage. I never dreamed it would lead to a knock on my door by federal officers or descending on my hotel in the dark of night.”It certainly shouldn’t have. Yet this pattern of speech repression has become all too common under the Trump administration, as it has attacked or threatened to attack people for anything that threatens its ideology, whether writing op-ed columns in support of Palestine or criticizing Charlie Kirk.