On the evening of April 8, an undercover Homeland Security Investigations agent walked into the sanctuary of Zion Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and took notes on the people who came.
I know the church. I had thought about going that night; family obligations came up instead.
I found out four months later — not from anyone in Ann Arbor, but from a federal court filing in Minneapolis, in a criminal case about something else entirely.
April 8, Zion Lutheran, Ann Arbor
The event was a public talk by people who’d lived through Operation Metro Surge, the federal enforcement surge that put two thousand agents into Minneapolis in January. Two days earlier, Homeland Security Investigations in St. Paul had asked HSI at Detroit Metro Airport in Romulus for a collateral investigation.
The report tells us the request was for an undercover agent “attend the event equipped with recording devices to collect evidence.”
The reason documented in the unsealed filing does not include any allegation of a specific crime. Instead, it lists the tour’s public advertisement.
The agent arrived at 5:45, fifteen minutes early, when about twenty people were seated. By six, when it started, there were seventy-five to a hundred. The agent left at 8:10.
The report describes the agent’s conversation with a married couple who belong to the church.
The agent writes that the husband explained that the touring group had asked Zion Lutheran to host, and the wife described a mission team that traveled to Uganda, where they helped build a hospital.
She handed over her business card.
It is in a federal criminal investigative file now.
When the donation basket came around to cover the tour’s travel costs, the agent describes receiving it, noting the cash donations inside, and copying the URL off a QR code sitting in the basket.
The companion investigation’s case-opening report says HSI St. Paul would “prioritize the identification of funding sources, organizational structures, and predicate actions.”
During questions, a young woman stood up to announce a weekly anti-ICE protest in Romulus. That went into the file too, even though it was already a widely reported event.
And Romulus is where ICE moved $34.7 million toward a warehouse without telling the city.
I have been tracking that fight since February.
Michigan’s attorney general and the City of Romulus went to court to stop on March 24, two weeks before the agent sat down in that pew. The case is still pending in the Eastern District of Michigan (No. 2:26-cv-10968).
It is also where, 17 days later, about two hundred people marched a mile and a half from Romulus Middle School to that warehouse.
Recognition is prior knowledge
The report says the agent recognized one of the four presenters on sight, named him, and gave an alias he is “also known as.” So far, he has not been charged with anything.
An agent tasked from Detroit two days earlier walked into a church in another city already able to put a name and an alias to a face.
An alias comes from a file. What that file is, and who else is in it, the report does not say.
And then there is the shovel.
In the report’s own words:
“The presenters took turns describing the events that transpired in Minneapolis, Minnesota, leading up to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. One of the female presenters recalled an incident where ICE agents were ‘allegedly’ attacked by a man with a shovel. The presenter stated something to the effect of how she wished someone would attack ICE agents with a shovel.”
That is the only line in three pages that resembles advocacy of violence, and it is worth reading twice. Nobody is quoted. “Something to the effect of” is the agent’s hedge, and it is the only plece in the report that hedges what a person said — everywhere else it is flat and specific.
Even if you ignore the hedge, a woman at a public meeting, describing a shooting the government had lied about, said she wished someone would do to ICE agents what agents had falsely accused two men of doing.
That is a wish, not a plan, not a call, not a direction to anyone. It came from the stage. Not from the pew.
And yet, it is the closest thing to a crime that a federal agent, sitting in that sanctuary for two and a half hours, was able to write down.
On the way out, the agent took one of each pamphlet and sticker from a table by the entrance and handed them to agents outside.
The shovel is almost certainly a reference to January 14 shooting in north Minneapolis.
Federal agents said two men, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, attacked them with a shovel and a broomstick. An agent shot Sosa-Celis in the thigh. Then the video came out, showingF a man dropping a shovel in the yard before the officers arrived.
I wrote about this pattern in January: agents fire, DHS announces a “weaponized vehicle” or a weapon or an assault, the statement lands before any investigation, and then the evidence contradicts it.
Renee Good’s car was called a weapon but the video shows otherwise.
Alex Pretti was said to have brandished a gun but again video shows otherwise.
Marimar Martinez was called a domestic terrorist who used her car as a weapon, but the video showed otherwise, and prosecutors dropped every charge.
The shovel is a fourth instance, and it is the one where the record collapsed hardest. On February 13 the Justice Department moved to dismiss the charges with prejudice, citing evidence “materially inconsistent” with the FBI affidavit and sworn testimony.
A judge granted it. Two agents were placed on administrative leave for what a review found were untruthful statements under oath. In May, an ICE officer was charged with assault for the shooting.
How I found out
Michigan Advance reported the Ann Arbor operation on August 18, and published the report itself. They embedded the PDF. Local coverage of a local church, which I missed. My lane, my town, but it still took Minnesota to get me here.
The document is an exhibit in an unrelated federal criminal case in Minnesota — United States v. Sant, No. 0:26-cr-00115-KMM-DTS (D. Minn.). Defense counsel Kevin Riach moved to compel discovery on August 13 and attached thirty-one exhibits: reports of investigation, administrative summonses, Federal Reserve correspondence, a grand jury transcript, a spreadsheet, an HSI slide, NSPM-7 itself. One of them is the Ann Arbor church.
The case is Operation Puppet Master, and it has been covered ( CNN, ABC, the AP wire, Labor Notes, Democracy Now!, Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel) but every one of those stories was about Minnesota.
It reached me sideways. BlackBeltBabe, who writes as The People’s Reporter, read from the exhibits and offered analysis; Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent, restacked it: “I warned you all about this. Long history of this. Border Patrol, ICE and CBP infiltrate anyone who questions them.”
That sent me to the docket, where I found my home town under investigation.
No agency notified the church, or the couple, or the woman who stood up during questions. They found out the way I did, if they found out at all — from a court filing in another state, four months later, published by a newspaper.
All of it is part of Puppet Master. The case-opening report doesn’t cite a statute for its authority; it says the case was “accepted under CUC Op Keyhole,” a certified undercover operation.
I have a been digging into the wider project that runs investigations like Puppet Master which is almost ready to publish.
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People die on video, and that is naturally what gets covered.
But this does not end with them. It ends in my neighborhood church.
It ends up with my neighbor — a woman who helped build a hospital in Uganda. No crime alleged against her, no warrant, no probable cause.
It is hard not to see this as a system working as designed: a collateral request from one field office to another, a case number, a case accepted under a certified undercover operation, a supervisor’s approval five days later, and an agent in a pew fifteen minutes early. Nothing in that sequence provides friction or accountability for survailence.
An overreach is a thing that went beyond what is allowed. But this seems to me a story about how there seem to be almost no limits on was allowed.
The last line of the report reads:
This investigation continues.
So does mine.
This filing has thirty-one exhibits in it. And one of them names Keyhole as the larger operation of which Puppet Master is one investigation.
And, HSI St. Paul had an undercover agent inside a public ICEWatch training on December 3, 2025. So this is not new either.
I’ll publish that research very soon. So, subscribe for free now, and get it in your inbox.