A Minneapolis father of two says federal agents queried his information 55 times since March after he started showing up to watch immigration enforcement in the Twin Cities. Now Michael Khalili and the nonpartisan group Common Cause are suing the federal government, arguing that pattern of surveillance was retaliation for exercising his First Amendment rights.
The 94-page lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, names the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the FBI, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations and ICE as defendants, according to the Campaign Legal Center. As LAist reports, the suit asks a Washington, D.C. judge to bar federal agencies from intimidating or retaliating against people like Khalili who observe and record immigration operations in public, and it seeks relief on a national scale.
Khalili, 47, began watching federal immigration officers operate in the Twin Cities area after 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis in January, an incident Hoodline covered extensively at the time in its report on the shooting and its aftermath. Bystander video recorded by local observers directly challenged the initial claims federal officials made about that shooting, per the same account, helping fuel the volunteer observer networks that formed across the metro afterward.
Escalating Scrutiny After a March Encounter
According to the lawsuit as described by LAist, federal officers photographed Khalili and his vehicle, told him to stop following them, and were tracked as having subjected him and other observers to following, police reports, pepper-spraying and threats of home visits. A state trooper threatened Khalili with a harassment charge for following ICE, the lawsuit states. Records show law enforcement had queried Khalili's information twice before he ever began observing, but that number jumped to 55 queries since March.
The consequences reportedly extended well beyond the street. Customs and Border Protection notified Khalili that his Global Entry membership had been revoked following a March exchange with federal officers, and he was referred for additional questioning by U.S. immigration officials after returning from a trip to Ireland. His Global Entry status was only reinstated after a HuffPost journalist inquired about the case, the lawsuit says. Khalili now suspects he is on a federal list or carries some kind of federal flag, though that suspicion remains unconfirmed.
A Family Decision to Step Back
Mounting risk and pressure from his family eventually led Khalili to stop observing ICE altogether. He agreed to stop, the lawsuit notes, because his wife feared federal agents could arrest him at their home. The lawsuit also describes an ICE-related incident involving a Common Cause member at a Maryland public parking lot, and says officers used a facial recognition database to identify another Common Cause member, while federal officers also visited one Minnesota member's home directly.
Danielle Lang, the Campaign Legal Center's vice president of voting rights and rule of law, said the alleged retaliation reflects a top-down policy rather than a string of isolated incidents. Maryam Jazini Dorcheh, Common Cause's vice president for litigation, said citizens' right to criticize and hold government accountable is under attack. The lawsuit draws on declarations from observers not just in Maryland, Minnesota and New Jersey but also in Illinois, Maine and Tennessee, and it includes incidents involving seven Common Cause members total.
The Federal Policy Behind the Retaliation Claims
The lawsuit points to National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which President Trump issued on September 25, 2025, describing a comprehensive strategy against political violence and intimidation, according to the Federal Register. NSPM-7 refers to extremism on migration and other ideologies. The lawsuit also discusses domestic counterterrorism authorities.
NSPM-7 has already been used to investigate activists in Minnesota. In August, defendants in a Minnesota federal criminal case filed a motion for discovery seeking internal government records to determine whether their indictment for conspiracy to impede ICE was driven by viewpoint-based discrimination under the memo, according to Protect Democracy. Federal prosecutors had charged 15 people in June with conspiracy to impede or injure an officer, part of what the lawsuit describes as statements and memoranda equating observers recording federal officers with violent rioters and domestic terrorists.
Federal officials have separately justified the crackdown by citing a surge in violence against agents. The federal government reported in September 2025 that attacks on ICE officers had increased by more than 1,000 percent following the expansion of immigration operations earlier that year, with administration officials citing doxing and physical interference as active threats to agent safety. DHS also dismantled its office for civil rights and civil liberties and repealed guardrails governing facial recognition and license plate readers used against peaceful observers, the lawsuit alleges.
Courts Elsewhere Are Weighing In
The Minneapolis case lands amid a broader wave of litigation challenging federal surveillance of immigration observers nationwide. In Ohio, a temporary restraining order prohibited seven federal ICE officers from taking threatening, intimidating or retaliatory action against a volunteer observer in Springfield, after the ACLU of Ohio filed suit alleging agents repeatedly followed and confronted the observer.
In July, EPIC and individuals filed a federal complaint in San Diego mentioning facial recognition and license-plate readers. Legal advocates argue such practices, including logging license plates and facial scans of observers into domestic terrorism watchlists, violate the Privacy Act of 1974, which bars federal agencies from maintaining records on how people exercise First Amendment rights unless a statute expressly authorizes it.
Federal appellate courts have consistently held that citizens have a clearly established right to record law enforcement performing official duties in public, a standard affirmed most recently by the Second Circuit in Massimino v. Benoit in September, according to Police1. That consensus sits at the center of the tension driving these lawsuits: courts have long protected the right to film officers, even as federal agencies now treat that same activity as a potential counterterrorism concern.
The FBI declined to comment on the Common Cause lawsuit, and DHS and DOJ did not immediately respond to its allegations, per LAist's reporting. NPR has documented numerous instances of people legally observing ICE reporting intimidation and threats, underscoring that Khalili's experience is not isolated. Hoodline has previously reported on Minnesota's immigration enforcement operations.
