Two ICE agents harassed a poll worker on Election Day, demanding she remove social media posts they claimed threatened federal agents, according to Syracuse.com.
Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, said she received a phone call Tuesday from two ICE agents asking to meet with her. Not wanting to meet with them alone, she invited them into her workplace. “I’ve seen the news, especially in Minnesota,” she said. “And I didn’t want anything to happen to me at all.”
The ICE agents arrived with copies of her social media posts and driver’s license, and handed her a warning notice alerting her that they were investigating her for allegedly threatening ICE personnel. “They tried to scare me into signing it while I was working,” she said. The agents told her to “remove and/or discontinue” the behavior, according to the notice, which Gonyea shared on Instagram.
Gonyea frequently posts about immigration on social media. She believes the investigation was prompted after she shared a news article in January identifying Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good. “I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted,” she wrote in the caption.
Gonyea did not believe that her post or caption qualified as doxing. “I didn’t dox his personal information, such as address, phone number,” she told Syracuse.com.
Ross, who was only placed on three days of administrative leave for shooting Good in the head, chest, and arm, faced virtually no consequences for killing an innocent woman in broad daylight. It appears that federal law enforcement now view pleas for actual justice as some kind of threat.
“For ICE to come to me over a social media post just feels very 1984 to me,” Gonyea said. “They definitely should have known better to not go into a polling place, even if I said it was OK.”
Kevin Ryan, the Republican Elections Commissioner, spoke with polling employees about whether it was a hoax, and confirmed with the Department of Homeland Security that a visit had been made.
Dustin Czarny, the Democratic Elections Commissioner, said that election law prohibits anyone but poll workers, elections inspectors, and voters from entering a polling place. “There’s no role for law enforcement officials to be inside a polling place unless they are responding to an emergency of some kind,” he told Syracuse.com. “There is no indication of that here.”
Gonyea’s experience is just the latest example of how far federal law enforcement is willing to go to silence critics of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts. Earlier this week in Texas, a man received a 30-year prison sentence for transporting left-wing zines linked to a protest at ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility. Others involved in the protest received sentences of up to 50 years.
Additionally, the intrusion of ICE agents into a polling place on Election Day should raise serious red flags amid concerns that Trump could use federal law enforcement to intimidate voters in future elections.