America Is Failing Its Own Free Speech Standards

Criticizing ICE now means risking the censor’s wrath.

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Sarah McLaughlin is senior scholar, global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). She is the author of Authoritarians in the Academy, out now from Johns Hopkins University Press.

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You’re relaxing with a cup of tea, winding down from your day, and thinking about tomorrow’s errands. And then you hear a ring at the doorbell. Followed quickly by another. And another.

When you finally open the door, you’re shocked to see not a neighbor or a delivery driver, but a federal agent. He knows what you said about the government on Instagram, and he’s here giving you notice to shut up.

A chilling encounter like this might dissuade even the most dogged critic from speaking their mind. In the United States, home of the First Amendment—a uniquely robust protection against censorship compared with other democracies’ rules—this kind of incursion should be unimaginable. These days, it isn’t, as a new lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials makes painfully clear.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where I work, filed a lawsuit last week to vindicate the rights of a Rochester man targeted by federal officers for nothing more than an angry email castigating ICE’s actions.

That man, David Streever, wrote to the head of ICE and likened him to a Nazi after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January.

“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” Streever wrote to then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, adding that Lyons “would never know peace” because of his guilty conscience.

Streever’s words were certainly strong, but that’s all they were: words. No threats, nothing outside the bounds of protected speech. After two more fatal ICE shootings in recent days—one in Biddeford, Maine and another in Houston, Texas—there will surely be more people who share strong words.

Streever’s three-paragraph email expressed a moral objection to the federal government’s conduct: the same kind of objection millions of Americans raise each and every year. But that didn’t stop federal agents from appearing at Streever’s door five months later and handing his wife a “WARNING NOTICE” alleging he may have violated federal law and insisting he “promptly” stop his “behavior”—and by that, they meant his constitutionally protected speech.

Streever was traveling with his young daughter at the time, so agents even tried to hunt him down at his hotel. When Streever warned his daughter that they may encounter federal agents, she cried, “I don’t want them to kill you!”

You could easily imagine such chilling acts from officials in Hong Kong or Russia—or even democratic Germany, with its strict speech regulations. But such anti-free speech behavior is certainly not the norm in the United States.

Americans should be alarmed to learn that the knock at the door might be happening next door. While neighbors host a family barbecue, ICE agents may be dropping off a threatening letter just down the street.

Unfortunately, not-so-friendly visits like these are a usual occurrence in much of the world. Across the globe, people who use the internet to speak their minds and engage in political life online pay a price anywhere from a warning visit by police to decades behind bars in horrid conditions.

Under Hong Kong’s campaign to protect what it deems “national security,” the city’s residents know that even a stray Facebook comment or Telegram post can result in arrest and a lengthy jail sentence. Simply celebrating the use of a protest anthem (rather than China’s national anthem) at a sporting event was enough to invite the police to one man’s home.

In Thailand, online insults to the monarchy are severely punished under the country’s draconian lèse-majesté laws—no mocking the king—while online forums and social media sites are a hunting ground for police to track down government critics. In one particularly disturbing example, a man was sentenced to over 50 years in prison for numerous Facebook posts critical of the king.

And from Uganda to Zimbabwe to Nigeria, social media users know that posting just a few words can bring officers, and danger, straight to their door.

These abuses aren’t limited to dictatorships. Even other democracies have deep free speech issues.

In the United Kingdom, police calls over online posts, including political commentary, have become routine. A 2025 investigation found that UK police detain thousands of people annually over online speech that merely annoys or upsets others, averaging 30 arrests a day under laws governing online and other communications. Even more bafflingly, the UK has long monitored what it deems “non-crime hate incidents,” which often resulted in people who tweeted perfectly legal speech receiving a visit from police or a black mark in a government database.

Germany, where politicians receive heightened protection against insults under the criminal code, often punishes online speech about political figures with a knock at the door—sometimes in a pre-dawn raid. In one especially absurd case, police raided a man’s home at six in the morning over a tweet calling a local politician a “pimmel” (Google it).

The United States should be different. It has the First Amendment—an especially strong free speech safeguard, even judged by the relatively high standards of the democratic world—and a proud legacy of shirking off the yoke of unaccountable power.

And yet, even America is drifting down the same oppressive path. Streever isn’t the only American to face unconstitutional consequences for expressing himself online in recent months. In January, Miami police questioned resident Raquel Pacheco after she criticized Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner on Facebook. A different Florida agency questioned a grandfather over a postcard he sent a senior state official telling him: “you lack values.” Last year, a Philadelphia-area retiree received a visit from DHS agents demanding he explain himself after he emailed a federal prosecutor criticizing the deportation case against an Afghan man who feared the Taliban would kill him. And this past May, FIRE secured an $835,000 settlement for retired Tennessee law enforcement officer Larry Bushart after he spent an outrageous 37 days in jail for posting a meme critical of President Trump after Charlie Kirk’s killing.

Indeed, the US is starting to look a little more like the very nations Vice President JD Vance rightly criticized for putting “free speech” into “retreat.”

“There is freedom of speech but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” The quote, attributed to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, perfectly captures the risks one takes by speaking out. Sure, you can say what you want, but you might suffer the consequences after. That isn’t freedom at all.

We cannot guarantee freedom of speech, in the US or elsewhere, if the government response is a knock at the door and an official “notice.” If the guarantee means anything, it means no warning letters, no surprise visits, no threats. Even children sitting in their first American civics class could tell you that freedom is most adequately defined by what we are free from.

It’s time our leaders relearned that lesson.

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