Minnesotan who lost Global Entry after Border Patrol encounter sues federal government

A Minnesota woman who's a trained legal observer is suing the federal government after she says she faced retaliation for monitoring agents during Operation Metro Surge earlier this year.

One of the four plaintiffs in the suit, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, is Richfield resident Nicole Cleland, who told WCCO in February her Global Entry was revoked just three days after an encounter with a Border Patrol agent on Jan. 10, whom she says she was legally following in a vehicle. Cleland, 56, said the agent already knew her name and warned her not to follow him.

"It isn't about losing that privilege, it is about how I lost the privilege," Cleland told WCCO earlier this year. "Of those methods in which [the government is] tracking people, which of them are actually legal and how many of them are actually interfering with our privacy and our personal security?"

The defendants in this case are three federal agencies and the men who currently run them: Markwayne Mullin with the Department of Homeland Security, David Venturella with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Rodney Scott with Customs and Border Protection.

Lawyers allege in the filing that the agent's actions amount to "intimidation and retaliation" regarding Cleland's First Amendment-protected right to legally observe federal law enforcement.

"Nicole Cleland has self-censored some of her personal communications over electronic media for fear of government surveillance; experiences fear and anxiety each time she travels; and, until she successfully used it as identification at an airport, reasonably feared that in addition to terminating her Trusted Traveler status, the government may have invalidated her passport as well," the court filing reads.

Cleland says she's used Global Entry since 2014 and was reapproved in 2024. That status typically lasts for five years.