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Department of Homeland Security attempted to obtain Canadian personal information, activity logs, and other information from Google after criticizing the Trump administration online following the assassination of Renee Good and Alex Pretty and federal immigration agents in Minneapolis earlier this year.
The man’s lawyers, who have not been named, are alarmed in part because they say the man has not entered the United States for more than a decade. “I don’t know what the government knows about where our clients live, but it’s clear that the government is not stopping to find out,” said Michael Perloff, a senior attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia who is representing the man in the case against Markwayne Mullin, DHS secretary, on the subpoena. The lawsuit alleges that DHS violated the Customs Act that gives the agency the authority to request records from businesses and other parties.
Perloff says the government is using the fact that big tech companies are in the US to ask for information they couldn’t get. He said: “It’s using this information to find things that other countries wouldn’t control. I mean, we’re talking about the behavior of a person who lives in Canada.”
DHS and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The need for the person’s location data was included in a DHS request issued to Google called a customs subpoena, which is supposed to be used to investigate matters related to importing goods and collecting customs duties.
“It says in the law, it’s documentation and evidence of the validity of the entry, the person’s responsibility for the job, the taxes, and the fees, you know, following the basic rules of technology,” says Chris Duncan, a former assistant director of US Customs and Border Protection who now works as a private attorney representing importers and exporters. “And that’s all it’s supposed to be used for.”
A subpoena is a type of administrative subpoena, and is not reviewed by a judge or grand jury before it is issued. According to the complaint, Google warned the man about the request on February 9, even after he was asked not to disclose the “undisclosed time limit.”
Through his representatives, the man told WIRED that he mistook the information for a joke or hoax before realizing it was real.
The subpoenas, which are included in the complaint, do not provide a specific reason why the man was investigated beyond citing the Tariff Act of 1930. The man’s lawyers argue that he did not export or import anything from the United States between September 1, 2025 and February 4, 2026, the time the government requested the information.
Instead, the man’s lawyers say, the decisions were made in response to the man’s online activities, including posts criticizing immigration officials after the killings of Good and Pretti in January.
The man tells WIRED that seeing members of the Trump administration “deface these two lives like criminals was disgusting and infuriating. People were being asked not to believe our eyes that the men who killed two good Americans have been released.”
This brother said: “I felt that I needed to do something so that the American people who were losing hope would see me as useful and that they are not alone.”
