A grand jury is trying to force Reddit to unmask a user who criticised ICE

On the evening of 7 January 2026, ICE officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman, in Minneapolis. Within days, Ross was named publicly: The Intercept identified him and published biographical details, and other news organisations followed. Across Reddit, users discussed the shooting, the officer, and the agency. One of them is now the target of a federal grand jury investigation.

According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, federal prosecutors in Washington, DC have ordered Reddit to appear before a grand jury and hand over the name, address, phone number, and other personal data of a user who posted criticisms of Ross and shared biographical information about him, details that had already appeared in published news articles. Reddit has until 14 April to comply.

This is the second attempt by the government to unmask the same user. In early March, ICE issued an administrative summons to Reddit citing a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, a near-century-old statute governing customs duties, wild animal imports, forfeited wines and spirits, and cross-border trade in goods. The user filed a sworn declaration stating they had nothing to do with the imports and exports the statute was designed to regulate. A Northern California federal court agreed, and the government withdrew the summons around 27 March.

Four days later, it came back. The new demand arrived not from an ICE field agent but from a Special Assistant US Attorney in Washington, DC, where the US Attorney’s office is led by Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host and judge who was confirmed to the role by the Senate in a 50-to-45 vote in August 2025. The new subpoena moved the proceedings to a different jurisdiction, expanded the scope of the data requested, and carried an instruction telling Reddit not to disclose that the subpoena existed.

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Grand jury proceedings are, by design, secret and not adversarial. Unlike a civil court challenge, where the target of an information demand can argue the merits before a neutral judge, a grand jury offers no equivalent forum. Matthew Kellegrew, an attorney at the Civil Liberties Defense Center representing the user, described the escalation as “a disturbing” one, arguing that the First Amendment raised the bar considerably for any government investigation that “intrudes into the area of constitutionally protected rights of speech, press, association.” Will Creeley, the legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, was blunter: “So far, the government hasn’t been able to point to a single Reddit post that’s not protected by the First Amendment.”

Reddit reportedly notified the affected user after the subpoena was obtained by the user’s lawyers. The company has a documented history of contesting government data demands, but its own transparency report tells a more complicated story. The first half of 2025, which Reddit described as the highest volume of requests it had received in any single reporting period, included 1,179 requests from law enforcement agencies worldwide. Sixty-six per cent came from US agencies. Reddit disclosed user data in 82 per cent of cases.

The grand jury subpoena is the sharpest expression yet of a much broader campaign. The Department of Homeland Security has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord in recent months, seeking the identities of users who have documented ICE activity, criticised government immigration policy, or attended protests. Gizmodo reported that Reddit, Meta, and Google voluntarily complied with some of those requests. The Electronic Frontier Foundation published an open letter to major technology companies in February 2026 urging them to resist what it characterised as lawless DHS subpoenas, warning that the tool, which requires no judicial approval, had been repurposed from its original use in cases such as child abductions and was now being deployed against political speech.

What the Reddit user posted was not private intelligence. It was a summary of publicly available information about an ICE officer whose actions had generated national news coverage, a job title, a hometown, and biographical details already in print. The government has not explained publicly what crime it believes was committed. In the context of a secret grand jury, that silence is, in a sense, the whole mechanism.