Further investigation shows that the following added to functions.php will run if the “activate” button is clicked from the wp-admin by an existing admin. It will not run from the activate link in the user activation-email.
I must be looking for a different action.
The goal is to login the user and redirect them after they have clicked the activate link from the activation-email.
No errors, no print_r. The user is activated and sent to the sites home_url().
It’s as if my function is being over looked. I thought maybe it needed to be called at a specific point in time so I dropped it in the functions.php to try and circumvent any timing issues.