It was a typical Tuesday for Paigelynne Gonyea. On a primary election day, she was working the polls at the Central Library in Syracuse, New York. This is a civic duty that is by its very nature unglamorous. Voters enter, you verify their names, and you maintain order. Standing at a folding table in a public library is not very dramatic. Her phone rang after that.
A man calling from a New Jersey number and claiming to be a Homeland Security special agent left a voicemail. “We were just by your apartment,” the caller stated. He informed her that her significant other had given him her phone number. Her January Instagram post, which he characterized as “doxxing an ICE agent,” was the cause of the call.
Gonyea posted a picture of Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis during anti-ICE protests earlier in the year. Gonyea has amassed a following of over 100,000 on TikTok through a combination of comedy and skincare content. The image had already surfaced in the media. “I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted,” she captioned the photo. no address at home. No personal phone number. Nothing more than what reporters had previously reported.
She said she had never doxxed anyone. Given that the post is still accessible to the public and lacks an address, it’s difficult not to find that denial at least somewhat credible. When DHS later released a statement alleging that she had “committed a federal crime by posting the address of an ICE law enforcement officer online,” Gonyea and NPR were unable to find any such address in her posts. When asked specifically why they thought her actions were doxxing in the first place, DHS did not provide a response. That gap is important.
Gonyea called the agent back on election day to let him know that she was at a polling place. He wanted her to step outside. No, she replied. “I don’t trust going outside or dealing with ICE agents at all in any capacity,” she said afterwards to NPR. Sheilia Milledge, a 70-year-old poll worker, supported her. Milledge stated bluntly, “There’s too many people being kidnapped by ICE and I can’t run behind her.” “I use a cane.”
Gonyea invited the agent to come inside if he wanted to speak during a pause in the voting. Even though it seemed sensible at the time, that choice proved to be problematic. Armed law enforcement cannot enter a polling place, according to federal law. Immigration officers are expressly prohibited from voting locations by a recently enacted state law in New York. It’s unclear if the agents had weapons. It is evident that Milledge began recording as soon as two individuals wearing ICE badges entered the library.
Gonyea was in the agents’ file. Name, address, birthdate, weight, height, and eye color. She refused to sign a document from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility that warned her that she “MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” The notice was written in capital letters at the top.
Through a DHS contact, local Republican county election commissioner Kevin Ryan verified the validity of the badges. He described the entire situation as “a comedy of errors from beginning to end” because the agents shouldn’t have gone inside, Gonyea probably shouldn’t have invited them in, and the timing—on the day of the primary election—raised a number of awkward issues. Why on that particular day? Whether the timing was intentional or coincidental is still unknown.
Observing this situation from the outside gives the impression that it reflects a broader issue regarding the extent to which the current administration is willing to define threats to federal officers. Journalists had already identified the person mentioned in Gonyea’s post. Her caption expressed a strong political viewpoint. According to practically every conventional interpretation of the First Amendment, that area ought to be unremarkable.
The office of the New York Attorney General stated that it was looking into the matter. “I plan on using this experience to defend and support our First Amendment right,” Gonyea stated, adding that she has no intention of removing the post. It remains to be seen if that spirit will be sufficient to protect her from additional scrutiny. The warning letter is not signed. The post remains up. And in a Syracuse library, a 70-year-old woman with a cane held her ground while recording everything on her phone.
