Did you buy a beanie from REI recently? The Department of Homeland Security might be looking for you.
New court filings allege that Homeland Security Investigations agents subpoenaed the outdoor retailer in March, requesting the transaction information for “all persons” in the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area who had purchased a specific type of dark green beanie from the company since 2024. REI did not respond to questions about whether it had complied with the request and, if so, how many people are affected.
The filings are part of a broader lawsuit by the federal government against 39 people who attended an ICE protest at a church whose pastor also worked as an acting ICE field office director. Both protesters and journalists who were attempting to cover the event, including former CNN host Don Lemon, are now defendants.
The subpoena to REI was one of 92 sent as part of HSI’s investigation into the defendants, according to the court filings. Other recipients included social media companies, airlines, telecom providers, a car rental company, and a state employment agency. At least one subpoena sent to an unnamed airline, the filings allege, asked not only for information about a defendant’s past flights, but also requested that the airline give HSI a “lookout notification” about the defendant’s travel in the future. DHS declined to comment. The US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, which is litigating the case on behalf of the government, did not respond questions about why it was necessary to identify everyone in Minnesota who purchased the beanie from REI, or why it specifically targeted REI customers, since the beanie is sold on other platforms as well.
The subpoenas sent by HSI agents are also known as 1509 customs summons, and are meant to be used to request information related to imports and exports. However, since the start of the Trump administration, WIRED and other news outlets have reported on DHS’s attempts to unmask online critics using the legal tool, which can be sent without the oversight of a judge or a jury.
“It’s flat-out absurd for DHS to demand REI search two years of customer data as part of Trump’s campaign against the people of Minneapolis,” US senator Ron Wyden of Oregon tells WIRED. “Customs summonses only allow DHS to request information directly related to compliance with customs laws, not to conduct unending fishing expeditions into the lives of people critical of Donald Trump.”
The total number of 1509 summonses that have been sent since the start of the Trump administration—and how many people have had their personal information guzzled up by DHS as a result—is unknown. Companies that receive these types of subpoenas are typically asked to keep their existence a secret. When the public has gotten a glimpse of them, it’s usually because the target has contested it in court, either because the recipient company ignored the request for silence and notified the target, or because the target discovered it after the fact.
According to a recent letter written by Wyden and Representative Pramila Jayapal, big tech companies will sometimes ignore the government’s request for silence when not legally required, but other companies in more heavily regulated sectors have told Congress that they’ve complied because of fear of regulatory retaliation.
Court filings, internal DHS documents, and companies’ own public statements show that companies have responded to recent customs summons in different ways.
Attorneys for Georgia Fort, a journalist and one of the defendants in the Minnesota case, wrote in a court filing that they were “stunned” when they realized that the government had obtained logs detailing six months’ of Fort’s calls and text messages from T-Mobile after the government sent a customs summons to the telecom provider. The attorneys allege that Fort was never notified by either T-Mobile nor the government.
