War on dissent comes to Western Slope
by Jacob Richards
On Friday, May 1, a known ranking agent with the Department of Homeland Security attended the Grand Junction May Day event in plain clothes while presenting himself as a father of a son with special needs. He said his name was both “Mike” and “Tony” to different people in attendance. He told some people in the crowd he had been in Grand Junction for fourteen years and others that he had just relocated here.
Video taken on April 10 and viewed by The Revolutionist shows Tony/Mike coming out of the ICE substation taking the lead role in interacting with the Grand Junction Police Department after ICE called the GJPD on volunteer observers attempting to document ICE arrests in our community. In the video, it is clear that Tony/Mike was the person in charge.
During the April 10 incident, ICE lied to the GJPD, saying that observers were climbing the trees and reaching over the fence taking photos. They weren’t. An ICE agent told one observer that they would now be investigating them.
In the video, Tony/Mike can be seen showing video or photo evidence to the GJPD on a phone in an attempt to get the observers ticketed with trespass. After viewing Tony/Mike’s “evidence,” GJPD found that no trespass had occurred and allowed the observers to leave without ID’ing themselves.
Since April 10, observers at the ICE substation have had the GJPD called on them numerous times, sometimes multiple times a day. Each time, the GJPD confirms that the volunteer observers are not breaking any law.
Indivisible Grand Junction said in a statement about the incident: “We unequivocally condemn any surveillance, infiltration, or intimidation of community members engaged in protected First Amendment activity. ICE agents have no legitimate role at a union event. Misrepresenting identity to gain access and gather information is a deliberate attempt to monitor and undermine lawful civic participation.
“The presence of ICE in spaces like this erodes trust and places a particular burden on immigrant and marginalized community members, who are already disproportionately targeted and for whom the risks are not theoretical.”
“We are addressing this openly because ignoring it would put our community at greater risk . . . Indivisible Grand Junction is committed to protecting the safety, privacy, and rights of those who engage with our work. We encourage community members to stay informed, look out for one another, and remain grounded in the understanding that transparency protects a healthy democracy,” the statement from IGJ continues.
Tony/Mike’s appearance at the May Day event is a continuing trend of DHS agencies spying on Western Slope protests and organizations. In March, The Revolutionist reported on emails obtained through CORA requests that showed Mountain Action Indivisible’s facebook account was being monitored by Homeland Security Investigations, and intel was being shared by HSI to the Glenwood Springs Police Department.
Additionally, recently CORA’d Flock camera data shows that outside agencies, including departments and states known to be actively aiding ICE, accessed Glenwood’s camera data regularly. Outside agencies made 516,892 queries in January of 2025, alone. Many of those searches give “HSI” (Homeland Security Investigations or “Immigration” as the reason for the search.
Flock Safety specializes in automatic license plate reading (ALRP) cameras, which log the license plates of every vehicle that passes the camera and then holds those images in a database for at least 30 days and potentially longer.
Flock audit logs from October of 2025 show that numerous outside agencies were actively searching Glenwood Springs’ Flock data in the days after the October No Kings event, with the given reason for the search being “protest,” “protest rally” and most concerningly three searches for “AIBF2025 Protest Intel workup.”
These local examples of the surveillance state zeroing in on peaceful protests and activists in sleepy Western Colorado should concern anyone who believes in freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, or in the openness a robust democracy requires.
This unprecedented level of federal surveillance is part of the administration’s continued efforts to criminalize those who disagree with the regime.
In September of 2025, the regime issued National Security Presidential Memo 7 (NSPM-7), which directed the nationwide network of Joint Terrorism Taskforces (JTTFs) to investigate Americans who hold anti-America, anti-capitalist, and/or anti-Christian views and those who hold extreme views on gender, race, or immigration as potential domestic terrorists.
More than just talk, NSPM-7 has become a central task of the FBI and other federal agencies. Ken Klipperstein has reported (if you haven’t yet, subscribe to his Substack) on a new FBI “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center,” which includes personnel from 10 federal law enforcement, national security, and spy agencies, and is included in the regimes proposed 2027 budget.
Klipperstein has also reported from leaked documents showing that ICE has been creating numerous watch lists of American citizens. Most are so secret, investigators only know their name. Some of the known ICE/DHS databases of Americans include Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta.
Just days after May Day, the regime updated the “United States Counterterrorism Strategy,” which states, in part, “our national CT [counterterrorism] activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before,” any violence has actually taken place. Essentially creating a thought crime.
The regime attempted and failed to label Renée Good and Alex Pretti as domestic terrorists, but they are far from giving up on classifying all dissent as domestic terrorism.
Of course, the criminalization of dissent is a long-standing tradition in the land of the free. From union busting, Palmer raids, and McCarthyism, through COINTELPRO, the war on terror, and now NPSM-7.
Even the idea of targeting activists as domestic terrorists was tested in the 2000s as environmental activists were lumped in with the arson and sabotage tactics being used by the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, and special enhancements criminalized all but the most milquetoast forms of dissent and environmental protest.
The Grand Junction May Day event was sponsored by a broad coalition of local organizations and unions and held on the greens of the historic Lowell School and resembled a fair “focused on connection, local resources, and the issues impacting working people across the region,” and highlighted “how issues like wages, workplace safety, and economic opportunity impact not just individuals, but the broader health of the community,” according to a press release sent out by Grand Junction Indivisible.
Fact is, under this regime, there is no “right way to protest,” no “proper way to dissent;” anyone and everyone speaking out against this regime is a target. From the most hardened antifa street brawler to your grandma pestering Jeff Hurd with daily emails. Dissenters are being criminalized, surveilled, placed on watch lists, and targeted as potential domestic terrorists based merely on ideology.
The answer is obviously not to disengage or self-censor but to find real solidarity with other groups and individuals speaking out and putting into practice good security culture within our organizations and community so we can continue to organize and resist.
We Keep Us Safe!
Security Culture for Activists
Ruckus Society’s Security Culture for Activists
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