Media Must Cover ICE Provocateurs as Inciting Violence

Court documents have revealed that ICE ran undercover operations against the Sunrise Movement — a strictly nonviolent youth organization — infiltrating its meetings at churches, libraries, and schools, subpoenaing years of its financial records without notice, and deploying at least one agent who approached an organizer to offer to "build items" for more confrontational protests and volunteered that "going to jail did not bother him." The investigation, codenamed "Operation Puppet Master," targeted not just Sunrise but dozens of labor unions and protest groups — none of whose members were ultimately charged. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which receives conservative funding, said it plainly: this kind of surveillance "will likely make many Americans think twice before joining a protest, attending a meeting, donating to an advocacy organization, or speaking out at all."

An undercover agent trying to entice peaceful activists into confrontational tactics is not law enforcement. It is provocation — the same tactic used by COINTELPRO to destabilize and discredit civil rights organizations in the 1960s. When the government infiltrates nonviolent groups, offers to build protest weapons, and then charges activists with conspiracy, it is manufacturing the threat it claims to be investigating.

We call on the media to cover ICE's undercover operations against the Sunrise Movement not as a law enforcement story, but as a civil liberties crisis — one that asks who authorized these tactics, what legal authority ICE had to surveil peaceful protesters, and whether a federal agency is deliberately trying to incite the violence it needs to justify its crackdown. The public deserves reporting that names what "Operation Puppet Master" actually was: a government program designed to silence dissent.