On the night of January 7, 2026, ICE Officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman, in Minneapolis. Within days, Ross was publicly named: The Intercept identified him and published biographical details, and other news organizations followed suit. Across Reddit, users talked about the shooting, the officer, and the agency. One of them is now the subject of a federal grand jury investigation.
According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., ordered Reddit to appear before a grand jury and hand over the name, address, phone number and other personal information of a user who posted criticism of Ross and shared biographical information about him, details that had already appeared in published news articles. Reddit has until April 14 to comply.
This is the second attempt of the government to unmask the same user. In early March, ICE issued an administrative subpoena to Reddit citing a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, a nearly century-old statute that regulates customs duties, wild animal imports, seized wines and spirits, and cross-border trade in goods. The user submitted an affidavit stating that he had nothing to do with the imports and exports that the statute was designed to regulate. A federal court in Northern California agreed, and the government withdrew the subpoena around March 27.
Four days later, he returned. The new lawsuit came not from an ICE field agent but from a special assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. attorney’s office is led by Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News host and judge who was confirmed to the position by the Senate in a 50-45 vote in August 2025. The new subpoena moved the proceedings to a different jurisdiction, expanded the scope of the data requested, and contained an instruction telling Reddit not to disclose that the subpoena existed.
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Grand jury proceedings are, by design, secret and non-adversarial. Unlike a challenge in civil court, where the recipient of a demand for information can argue the merits before a neutral judge, a grand jury does not provide an equivalent forum. Matthew Kellegrew, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center representing the user, described the escalation as “a disturbing“one, arguing that the First Amendment considerably raised the bar for any government investigation that “it intrudes into the realm of constitutionally protected rights of expression, press and association.Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, was more forceful: “So far, the government has not been able to point to a single Reddit post that is not protected by the First Amendment..”
Reddit reportedly notified the affected user after the user’s lawyers obtained the subpoena. The company has a documented history of challenging 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 reporting period, included 1,179 requests for law enforcement agencies world. Sixty-six percent came from US agencies. Reddit revealed user data in 82 percent of cases.
The grand jury subpoena is the clearest 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, criticized the government’s 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 characterized as illegal DHS subpoenas, warning that the tool, which does not require court approval, had been repurposed from its original use in cases such as child abductions and was now being used 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 publicly explained what crime it believes was committed. In the context of a secret grand jury, that silence is, in a sense, the entire mechanism.
