When Government Spies on Churches and Labor Unions, Democracy Loses

In February, an undercover federal agent walked into Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville, Minnesota, and did what agents do: watched, listened, took notes. But what came next, license plate captures, dossiers with names, addresses, family information, and job details, reveals something more troubling than standard law enforcement.

Pastor Steve Sylvester stood at his altar not long after and told his elderly congregation the truth: the Department of Homeland Security had surveilled their church. "It feels like I'm living in 1950s Eastern Europe," he told NPR.

He wasn't alone. According to court filings in an ongoing conspiracy case against ICE protesters, federal agents spent months secretly recording meetings at churches, libraries, restaurants, and schools across the Twin Cities. They infiltrated private group chats. They demanded financial records from national labor unions. They built files on community members, people who'd committed no crimes and weren't suspected of any.

The Scope Is the Problem

At University Baptist Church in Minneapolis, an undercover agent wore a wire to a self-defense class. At La Doña Cerveceria brewery, agents attended a meeting in January. The surveillance wasn't narrow or targeted. It was vast, indiscriminate, and designed to map out entire communities of people exercising their First Amendment rights.

Rachel Levinson-Waldman, who directs the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, described it plainly: "Just the scope of what was being revealed in terms of how deeply it had gone, how many government resources were being devoted to this."

This matters because it exposes a fundamental imbalance in how government power is being used. The stated goal was immigration enforcement. The actual result was a dragnet that caught people engaged in lawful protest, worship, organizing, and political speech.

Why This Violates What We Stand For

The Common Good Party exists to fix the machinery of democracy itself. That machinery breaks when government agencies treat citizens as suspects for speaking out, organizing workers, or gathering in churches.

Three principles collide here:

Privacy is a right, not a gift. Americans have no federal privacy law while a $323 billion data broker industry extracts our lives for profit. When government adds its own surveillance to that equation, collecting data on people who've done nothing wrong, it crosses into a different kind of abuse. Your data belongs to you. Government shouldn't harvest it from the pews.

Religious freedom means government stays out. We're not against religion. We're against government officials using their power to monitor, profile, or chill the exercise of faith. Churches are supposed to be sanctuaries, places where people gather without fear of state surveillance. When an agent wearing a wire shows up at a self-defense class or a protest meeting held in a church basement, the government isn't protecting security. It's threatening freedom.

Labor organizing is legally protected work. The federal government went after labor unions' financial records. Labor unions exist because workers need a collective voice to negotiate fairly with employers. When government surveils unions to suppress organizing, it tilts an already imbalanced economy even further toward the companies that already have all the power.

And none of this made anyone safer. It made communities less trusting of institutions. It made people wonder if a stranger in the room is a federal informant. It made pastors have to stand at altars and explain to their congregations that they were being watched.

Immigration Can Be Secure Without Being Invasive

We support a functioning immigration system that is secure, humane, and honest about what America needs. Secure doesn't mean indiscriminate. It means targeting actual threats, not casting nets wide enough to catch everyone in a church basement.

The DHS surge in Minnesota was described as ICE enforcement. But the surveillance apparatus it created went far beyond immigration law. It criminalized protest. It chilled free speech. It targeted communities exercising their constitutional rights.

That's not security policy. That's a violation of the rights that make America worth securing.