The Department of Homeland Security tried to obtain a Canadian man’s location information, activity logs, and other identifying information from Google after he criticized the Trump administration online following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis early this year.
Lawyers for the man, who has not been named, are alarmed in part because they say that the man has not entered the United States in more than a decade. “I don’t know what the government knows about our client’s residence, but it’s clear that the government isn’t stopping to find out,” says Michael Perloff, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia who is representing the man in a lawsuit against Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of DHS, over the summons. The lawsuit alleges that DHS violated the customs law that gives the agency the power to request records from businesses and other parties.
Perloff argues that the government is using the fact that big tech companies are based in the US to request information it would not otherwise be able to get. “It’s using that geographic fact to get information that otherwise would be totally outside of its jurisdiction,” he says. “I mean, we’re talking about the physical movements of a person who lives in Canada.”
DHS and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The demand for the man’s location data was included in a request DHS issued to Google called a customs summons, which is supposed to be used to investigate issues related to importing goods and collecting customs duties.
“It says right in the statute, it’s for records and testimony about the correctness of an entry, the liability of a person for duties, taxes, and fees, you know, compliance with basic customs laws,” says Chris Duncan, a former assistant chief counsel for US Customs and Border Protection who now works as a private practice attorney representing importers and exporters. “And that’s all it was ever envisioned to be used for.”
A customs summons is a type of administrative subpoena, and is not reviewed by a judge or grand jury before being sent out. According to the complaint, Google alerted the man about the request on February 9, despite an ask included in the summons “not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time.”
Through his attorneys, the man told WIRED he initially mistook the notification for a joke or scam before realizing it was real.
The summons, which is included in the complaint, does not give a specific reason for why the man was under investigation beyond citing the Tariff Act of 1930. The man’s lawyers contend that he did not export or import anything from the United States between September 1, 2025 to February 4, 2026, the timeframe the government requested information about.
Instead, the man’s lawyers allege, the summons was filed in response to the man’s online activities, including posts that he made condemning immigration enforcement agents after the killings of Good and Pretti in January.
The man tells WIRED that watching members of the Trump administration “smear these two souls as terrorists was absolutely disgusting and enraging. People were being asked to disbelieve our own eyes so that the men responsible for killing two good Americans would go free.”
The man says of his online activity, “I felt I needed to do something that would stand out and be seen by despairing Americans to show them they had support and that they were not alone.”
