Feds Identify “Leader of Antifa”
The list they're creating says so, anyway
Twenty-nine year old Chandler Patey has been regularly protesting outside his local ICE facility in South Portland for months, offering up his apartment to fellow protesters to use the bathroom or wash off pepper spray, according to local news.
To the Department of Homeland Security, “he is the leader of Antifa in Portland, OR.”
That phrase appears in an internal report produced by DHS, the largest law enforcement agency in the country. As they see it, Patey—a young man accused of no crime and who looks like a random protester plucked off the streets of Minneapolis—is a domestic terrorist.
In Patey’s apartment, Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Jesse Waters saw something sinister: an “Antifa safe house,” as they called it in multiple segments. This kind of idiocy is hardly unprecedented by the standards of cable news, of course; but the federal government is buying into the hysteria, too. Documents leaked to me show Patey and countless other American protesters have been branded as domestic terrorists. As a result, their private information is now being collected and stored in a DHS intelligence system shown below.
Asked about Patey’s inclusion in the system and how this squares with spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin’s response to my reporting on DHS’s watchlists that “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS,” the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
The government’s elevation of an ordinary citizen like Patey to terrorist mastermind is the result of a subtle bureaucratic process revealed in this and other DHS documents I’ve obtained. They show that since almost the beginning of the Trump administration, DHS has been desperate to pull together evidence—no matter how thin—of an epidemic of left-wing domestic terrorism.
This bureaucratic imperative to find terrorists among protesters is what got Renee Good and Alex Pretti killed.
Customs and Border Protection as well as other DHS sub-agencies are hard at work producing “evidence” to feed the domestic terrorism frenzy through the “Intelligence Reporting System - Next Generation” (IRS-NG), a portal created to track foreign terrorists trying to sneak into America. As I’ve reported, there are so many databases, both to feed into and extract data from, that analysts need a separate reporting system to sort out what is known and who the potential targets should be.
According to Department of Homeland Security records, through the IRS-NG, federal agents can access at least 28 different databases the government maintains, including:
Terrorist Screening Dataset (TSDS)
Watchlist Service (WLS)
Secure Flight Passenger Data (SFPD)
Automated Targeting System (ATS)
Importer Security Filing and consignment manifests
Automated Commercial Environment (ACE)
Arrival and Departure Information System (ADIS);
Automated Export System (AES)
Advance Passenger Information System (APIS)
Border Crossing Information (BCI)
Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA)
Electronic Visa Update System (EVUS)
Global Enrollment System (GES)
I-94 data
Non-Immigrant Information System (NIIS)
Seized Asset and Case Tracking System (SEACATS)
National Crime Information Center (NCIC)
Interstate Identification Index (III)
Central Index System (CIS)
Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP)
Enforcement Integrated Database (EID)
Criminal Arrest Records and Immigration Enforcement Records (CARIER)
Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing (e-QIP)
National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS)
Social Security Administration (SSA) Death Master File
Consular Consolidated Database (CCD)
Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT)
And if that’s not enough, IRS-NG has access to DMV licenses, license plate data, information from electronic devices that have been confiscated or cloned, and “certain law enforcement and/or intelligence data,” according to a DHS privacy impact assessment issued in the first week of the Trump administration.
As homeland security agents and intelligence analysts gather information about the Chandler Pateys of the country, they use IRS-NG to track each individual, accessing all kinds of identifying information. Legal name, aliases, birthdate, social security number, passport number, home address and biographical information about their targets are all swept up.
“Chandler Patey was identified through open-source research as an active participant in the protests,” an IRS-NG entry about him says. “Online platforms indicate he is the leader of Antifa in Portland, OR,” the reports continues, adding: “Patey is seen in many videos advocating the principles of Antifa.”
“Online platforms”—or in other words, random shit they saw on X/Twitter, TikTok or whatever. The same hysterics, it turns out, peddled by Fox News, whose host Laura Ingraham in October declared in a segment: “ANTIFA SAFE HOUSE EXPOSED—and Portland police look the other way.”
Portland police looked the other way because there wasn’t much to see. Asked about his supposed safe house, a soft-spoken Patey let the local news see it for themselves.
“This is my very normal apartment, and it has been referred to by right wing social media grifters as the ‘Antifa safe house,’” Patey told The Oregonian. “But I just let people use my sink and use my bathroom.”
Ridiculous as all of this might seem, homeland security officials tell me that many if not most federal agents have taken all of the rhetoric about shadowy Antifa networks to heart.
“Intel frequently has Alex Jones-level paranoia and wild leaps” about Antifa, one homeland security official told me. “‘So-and-so has made threats and may be Antifa’; ‘such and such motorcycle club has Antifa loyalty.’”
All of this follows President Trump’s designation of Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization” (and his related NSPM-7 directive). Senior DHS officials have described to me the bureaucratic nightmare of having to find a legal way to implement the patently outrageous directives of an elected president whom they feel they can’t just ignore.
The assumption that Antifa is an organized network is evident in many other DHS IRS-NG documents besides just the ones about Patey.
Here’s another report about a so-called “Antifa protester” named Dustin Ragsdale, shown holding a pride flag while wearing sweatpants with a Batman logo on them. But don’t let the seemingly innocuous demeanor fool you: he is “aggressive to counterprotesters” and “further research” into him is being done, the DHS document says.
Per the report:
“Dustin Ragsdale is an Antifa protester who, through open-source research, lives across the street from the ICE Detention Center. He is often seen with a megaphone and is aggressive to counter protesters. Further research is currently being conducted on this individual. Open-source reporting has indicated he lives across the street from the ICE Detention Facility.
Then there’s “Mossy Matriarch,” the pseudonym of a 30-year-old American woman and Washington state resident who works as a photographer. But where others might see an artist and small business owner, DHS sees a conspirator who “has been advocating for people to drop supplies for the Portland protesters,” to quote from its report.
Again, no crime is alleged.
Per the report:
“Mossy Matriarch is a social media influencer who is on numerous social media platforms. In recent posts, she has been advocating for people to drop supplies for the Portland protesters. She lists the address to mail supplies: PO BOX 1603, Vancouver, WA 98661, or drop off supplies in person at the Cottonwood School. In a later post, she recorded all the supplies she had received and posted a video claiming to be driving these supplies to Portland and was to interview one of the organizers on her podcast. See below some of her recent posts.”
Patey, Ragsdale, Matriarch. To the record keepers, they are the enemy. And applications like the IRS-NG contain the repository of “confirming” information. Homeland security even insists on crediting right-wing commentators with being “open source intelligence” (OSINT) that confirms their worst nightmares. But there’s no there there; that is, except for the manufacturing of a further fractured American landscape and a battlefield that homeland security believes it is operating on.
With “LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE” stamped all over the documents, none of this would ever come out under the Freedom of Information Act or any formal channel. And forget about Congress, which seems more interested in scoring political points against administration figures like Kristi Noem than any systemic changes to the Department of Homeland Security.
There is me, of course; but I don’t have corporate money - I just have readers like you. Please become a paid subscriber (or if you’d prefer a one-off donation, contributing to our GoFundMe here) so I can keep doing this work!
— Edited by William M. Arkin
The headline combined with the photo could easily be confused with something from The Onion. Truly absurd that this is reality.
They’re going after your average samaritan. If that’s the case then i wonder if I’m on the list 🤦♀️