Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta remains embroiled in litigation over whether its products are designed to hook kids. But Zuckerberg’s got nothing on another centibillionaire pushing to expand his influence over the next generation: Larry Ellison, the octogenarian oligarch of Oracle. Ellison not only brags about having even more data about us than Meta but runs a global surveillance machine and is a major military contractor. 

A toothless consent decree intended to resolve an antitrust case brought by a group of state attorneys general may clear the way for his and son David’s President Trump-facilitated takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, HBO, and a major film studio, Warner Bros. Pictures. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin still needs to approve the decree, and she noted in an order on Tuesday that she has some questions about its “factual and legal underpinnings.”

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If it goes through, the merger will give the Ellisons unprecedented control over what the next generation watches and reads on social media, news, TV, and in movies. Trump steered co-ownership of TikTok to Oracle earlier this year, a move enabled by the Biden administration’s misguided TikTok ban. And last year, David’s Skydance Media became Paramount Skydance, gaining control of CBS, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, and more in a massive consolidation bankrolled by Ellison senior.

We’ve seen the Ellisons’ willingness to censor content in exchange for Trump rolling out the regulatory red carpet for their media acquisitions. Larry Ellison reportedly promised Trump to overhaul CNN if the deal went through, and David Ellison echoed promises of “sweeping changes.” A Paramount spokesperson said “no [such] commitments” were made regarding CNN, but there’s no dispute that David made editorial concessions to the Federal Communications Commission in exchange for approval of the Paramount–Skydance merger, and the Bari Weiss-helmed network is already following through.

Just how far they will go to push narratives that bolster their far more lucrative interests in war and surveillance tech (and suppress ones that don’t) isn’t yet clear, but it’s not looking good. For a preview, take a look at this Flock Safety commercial masquerading as a short-form news segment, recently published by The Free Press, the blog Paramount bought from opinion columnist Weiss to pave the way to put Weiss in charge of CBS News.

Proponents of the lawsuits against Meta worry about algorithms warping kids’ minds, while critics are concerned with surveillance and user privacy, as well as the First Amendment implications of liability for sorting content. Now both sides can find common cause: The future $111 billion “Warner-Mount” deal threatens to brainwash kids and bolster surveillance all at once. 

Like Meta, Warner-Mount will have a profit incentive to design algorithms that keep kids glued to their screens, even if it leads them to dark corners of the internet. But the Ellisons’ agenda reaches far beyond likes and follows. Their “really profoundly scary technology” empire (that’s a quote from Oracle Vice Chair and former CEO Safra Catz about the tech it provided Israel after October 7) relies on government spending which requires a public primed to accept its tax dollars being diverted to those scary technologies under the guise of keeping us safe.

There’s no better way for the Ellisons to accomplish that end than buying up as many media holdings as possible while their buddy is president. It’s the perfect feedback loop: Stoke America’s fears about crime, terrorism, and anything else they choose to inspire further public investment in Oracle’s products.

Before handing the Ellisons control of even more of our media, we should remember their track record, which dates back long before they took control of CBS News.

A decade ago, Larry boasted about Oracle’s invasive surveillance products tracking how long a person lingers in a particular aisle of a specific store, which led to a privacy lawsuit that settled for $115 million. He bragged that 5 billion people were in Oracle’s “ID Graph” back then. “How many people are on Earth, 7 billion? Two billion to go,” he added at the time. In fact, Ellison and his companies have settled all manner of consumer and investor fraud lawsuits. But those dings are just the cost of doing invasive business for a behemoth now valued at somewhere around $440 billion. 

For a glimpse into how Ellison sees Oracle’s role in shaping the future, he told investors in 2024: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” 

At the World Governments Summit in Dubai in February 2025, he said countries worldwide should “unify” all of their national data into a single database an AI model could study, as he argued this is the only way to unlock AI’s full value for governments.

Oracle already has a nearly $7 billion contract to run its software across the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and the Coast Guard. It’s a founding partner of Stargate, the $500 billion data center buildout Trump announced during his first week back in office, with Ellison by his side.

So the same person who wants to surveil us to keep us on our best behavior, sell “profoundly scary weapons” to foreign armies, and unify the world’s data into one AI brain will now control a huge slice of the news and entertainment industries? It goes far beyond foxes guarding henhouses.

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Of course, there’s never been a firewall between elite interests and the media. Hollywood framed U.S. regime-change wars and foreign interventions as heroic underdog stories. TV shows and news outlets have done their share of propaganda-laundering as well. 

But as with Meta and its algorithms, the entertainment industry’s motives have, until now, been more straightforward, like gaining access to government sources and selling movie tickets. War profiteers that do news and movies as a side hustle have far more to gain, and they’re likely to push their narratives far more aggressively because the stakes are so much higher.

Ellison-owned outlets are already deploying their playbook to counteract the public backlash to surveillance. The Free Press segment is not the only time Oracle and Flock’s interests have converged. The Intercept recently reported that a shady astroturfing firm called Neighbors for Strong Communities, which ran deceptive AI-generated campaigns in support of the Paramount–Warner merger, has also “partnered” on PR campaigns with Flock. (There’s no known corporate partnership between Oracle and Flock, but both companies are undoubtedly invested in shifting the conversation around surveillance in a less skeptical direction.)

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But that’s nothing compared to what the Ellisons and their ever-expanding pool of our personal data could accomplish in the AI era, especially when paired with a media juggernaut created by cozying up to the same authoritarians that Oracle hopes will buy more of its tech.

Despite their billions, the Ellisons would likely never have gained their media stronghold without their social, political, and economic ties to Trump. So while there’s plenty of room to disagree on what role the courts should play in checking predatory practices by tech companies like Meta, this much shouldn’t be controversial: Oligarchs should not be colluding with the government to shape what the next generation thinks.

The post The Ellisons Could Make a Killing in Big Surveillance With the Paramount Merger appeared first on The Intercept.

At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race — and faced criticism from other candidates in the race. The food delivery giant’s settlement agreement, the largest worker settlement in the city’s history, brings further scrutiny to those donations.

Through that election cycle, DoorDash spent around $1.4 million against Mamdani and in favor of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The company was one of the top donors to the biggest outside spender in the election, a virulently anti-Mamdani super PAC called Fix the City. 

While on the campaign trail, Mamdani had promised to regulate delivery apps and further protections for delivery workers, proposals that earned him the support of delivery worker groups.

At the time, DoorDash’s large spending raised eyebrows. Now, the company has to pay its workers around 100 times the amount it spent attempting to influence the election, owing to a mayoral administration that refused to overlook concerns with the company’s conduct.

“It’s not a contribution, it’s an investment, with the donor or investor expecting something in return,” said Greg Coleridge, a former co-director of Move to Amend, an advocacy group that seeks stringent regulations against corporate money in elections. “Here is an instance where organized money from a company that was trying to avoid being responsible and accountable, was unsuccessful.”

Announcing the new settlement, Mamdani said, “The size of this settlement shows the damage done to workers by wage theft. But it also shows that enforcement matters.”

In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)

The Smear Campaign Against Mamdani

DoorDash contributed $1 million to Fix the City, a super PAC that spent $31 million in the mayoral election, accounting for close to half of the total outside spending in the race, largely funded by big corporations and billionaires. DoorDash made the payment in May 2025, at a time Mamdani’s campaign was gaining significant momentum ahead of the mayoral primaries in June.

Fix the City ran a barrage of ads, phone calls, text messages, and other forms of political communication seeking to prevent a Mamdani victory and portraying him as a politician with “radically dangerous ideas” and “a risk New York can’t afford.”

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The group artificially altered Mamdani’s beard in a campaign mailer and made it appear longer and darker, an act that the Muslim mayoral candidate had called out as “blatant Islamophobia.”

At the end of video ads by Fix The City, a campaign finance disclosure in small text at the bottom of the screen read, “The top three donors to the organization responsible for this advertisement are Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, John Hess.”

DoorDash also gave $1.8 million to Local Economies Forward NY, a super PAC that contributed more than $360,000 to Cuomo’s campaign.

Aided by corporations like DoorDash and billionaires like Bloomberg, the overall independent spending by super PACs seeking to defeat Mamdani was more than eight times what was spent in his favor, according to The Intercept’s analysis of data published by the NYC Campaign Finance Board.

A Historic Settlement

DoorDash’s settlement followed an investigation by the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The Mamdani administration said that the investigation “found that DoorDash deliberately paid workers below the Minimum Pay Rate or not at all.” 

Under the settlement with the city, the food delivery giant will pay over $115 million in worker restitution and over $16 million in civil penalties and administrative fines.

Two weeks after assuming office, the Mamdani administration warned delivery apps to comply with worker protections, sending notices to DoorDash and others, and announcing a lawsuit against the delivery app Motoclick.

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The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection’s citywide investigation into DoorDash began after dozens of workers reported that the company had failed to pay them or had paid them late for work they had performed.

As part of the settlement, DoorDash must submit detailed compliance data reports to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection every month for three years, and the company’ activities will also be monitored through workers sharing data with the city.

The settlement announced by Mamdani is not the first run-in that DoorDash has had in recent years with restitution payments in New York. 

In May 2024, the company agreed to pay $75,000 in a settlement after New York Attorney General Letitia James found that the company routinely rejected applicants with criminal histories in violation of the New York City Fair Chance Act. In February 2025, the attorney general settled with DoorDash for $16.75 million after the company used tips to subsidize workers’ guaranteed pay.

“They knew that by having a mayor who’s willing to put resources [for workers], it’s gonna be detrimental to their corporate model,” said Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project, a group that organizes for low-wage immigrant workers and had helped several DoorDash workers file complaints with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. “DoorDash decided to invest money in trying to buy our city’s democracy.”

The post DoorDash Spent $1.4 Million Trying to Stop Mamdani From Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why. appeared first on The Intercept.

Another U.S. soldier died this month, according to newly released Pentagon statistics that classify the death as “non-hostile.” A female soldier was on a military flight headed to Saudi Arabia when she suffered an undisclosed “medical incident,” a defense official told The Intercept. Another 66 U.S. personnel have also been wounded in action just this month, according to that official. This has pushed the official count of war casualties above 850. Almost half the total — 419 wounded or dead — have occurred since Iran stepped up attacks in early July.

The Pentagon’s official total of dead and wounded personnel, as documented over almost six months of reporting by The Intercept, has been a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. official previously called a “casualty cover-up.”

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Since the beginning of the Trump administration’s war with Iran, the War Department has posted the official count of military casualties on the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the White House. Casualties were initially tallied under Operation Epic Fury. Since July 7, they are now counted separately on a webpage with a generic title: “Overseas Operations.” 

Prior reporting by The Intercept found DCAS is missing hundreds of wounded or dead personnel from the Iran war. The Pentagon’s list of the names of the dead is, for example, missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count. Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.” 

Three U.S. contractors based in the region have also died during the conflict, according to an official who spoke with the Washington Post. 

For months, The Intercept has found anomalies with the counts offered on the DCAS website. On April 21, for example, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public acknowledgment by the War Department. Despite repeated questions for months, the Pentagon has not commented on the disparities in its casualty count.

A U.S. government official previously told The Intercept that scores of casualties added to DCAS last month was “an accounting trick” designed to dampen depressing statistics. That official accused the Pentagon of “slow-walking” the total for weeks. “They wanted the heat on them to slow down after the really devastating attacks,” that source told The Intercept, referencing attacks on U.S. bases in July that exposed the vulnerability of U.S. troops to Iranian attacks. Official statistics now show that the Pentagon admits that 352 personnel were wounded or killed in July and none died or were injured in August.

DCAS counts 11 hostile deaths in 2026, all resulting from the Iran war. This is the highest total of military personnel killed in action since 2021. Including non-hostile deaths, DCAS counts 19 dead due to the Iran war, but fails to count Davius. Also missing is Sgt. Devin Seibel who died in Irbil, Iraq, on May 31 in a training accident, according to a military press release.

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More than 580 military personnel have died this year, across the world, according to Pentagon statistics. The War Department lists 114 as accidental and 14 as homicides. As of September 21, there are also eight personnel whose deaths are listed as “undetermined.”

The female soldier who died this month has yet to be identified but was over 35 years old, according to DCAS information.

Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez did not reply to repeated requests for comment or clarification for this article.

The post Another U.S. Soldier Is Dead as Iran War Casualties Rise appeared first on The Intercept.

This is the story of how — and why — it happened.

The deal had been in motion for more than a year before the Leavenworth City Commission conceded to the controversial project, one that would allow the private-prison operator CoreCivic to reopen its notorious prison and fill it with immigrants. They did so after a protracted battle with the company, one that made them cogs in a vast deportation machine. 

“I don’t want them to be in jail,” Leavenworth Mayor Nancy Bauder said of the more than 500 immigrants held at the facility as of August, the last publicly available count. “I think it’s horrendous. My moral objection to this is very strong.”

But as the Trump administration and CoreCivic carried out an aggressive campaign to expand the federal detention network, city officials said they concluded they couldn’t afford to fight it. They tried to sue to stop the project, but instead spent more than a quarter-million dollars fighting it in court, draining city funds, before CoreCivic offered a $1.5 million impact payment to reimburse the city’s legal costs and pledged $400,000 a year to the local government. 

“They just bought their permit,” said Michael Sharma-Crawford, chair of the Missouri/Kansas chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, or AILA.

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The Leavenworth facility, for years marred by an ugly history of overcrowding and understaffing, is now the Midwest hub for the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants. Under this hub-and-spoke model, which has gone little noticed by the public even now, ICE moves detainees and staff between smaller facilities — the “spokes,” which include facilities such as regional jails — and a larger facility as a center of operations — the so-called “hub.” Using this model, ICE is able to obscure the scale of its operations and quickly move immigrants through the system, from arrest to detention to fast-tracked deportation flights out of the country.

“Leavenworth’s capacity is going to be that hub in the Midwest, to draw down from Minnesota, Chicago, Indiana, to house all that detention,” Sharma-Crawford said. Two other immigration attorneys who represent clients in the region corroborated the operational pattern through their own clients’ transfers and named additional “spoke” facilities feeding the pipeline.

The Midwest Regional Reception Center, as it’s now known, in Leavenworth is a critical site for the Trump administration, whose promises of 100,000 beds for immigrant detention stalled out at around 66,000 in July and had run into multiple obstacles across the Midwest. In Illinois, a 2021 state law ended immigration detention statewide. Minnesota remained a possible location for a hub, but the process moved slowly; CoreCivic’s shuttered Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton had long sat idle before its recent sale, and ICE needed to get a Midwest hub up and running immediately. Proposed sites were contested one after another: A potential warehouse for up to 10,000 detainees in south Kansas City was killed by community opposition, and facilities were either blocked or contested in Shakopee, Minnesota; Romulus, Michigan; Hudson, Colorado; and McCook, Nebraska. The Midwest’s largest operational ICE detention center, GEO Group’s North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan, is geographically isolated, hours from any major airport, and has been mired in controversy over a hunger strike, a death in custody, and hundreds of unlawful detention rulings. 

Leavenworth, a town with a corrections history stretching back over a century, seemed to offer the path of least resistance.

“Aggressive and Unlawful”

The City of Leavenworth fought the facility in court for months. CoreCivic countersued, and the Department of Justice intervened on CoreCivic’s side, accusing Leavenworth of “aggressive and unlawful” interference.

In the meantime, the fight threatened to bankrupt the city. Records obtained through the Kansas Open Records Act show the city paid roughly $820,000 in legal fees to Spencer Fane LLP over 12 months, about 6 percent of its general fund. The bill was a drain, but not a death blow. The city’s foremost concern was the takings clause, which allows the government to seize private property for public use, City Manager Scott Peterson said. A state judge had directed CoreCivic to follow the permit process, and if Leavenworth denied the permit, CoreCivic could argue bad faith, claim the city had effectively seized its property, and sue for damages, Peterson said, leaving Leavenworth to choose between greenlighting a facility it opposed or gambling on a lawsuit it might not survive. The alternative, Bauder, the mayor, said, was the federal government acquiring the building, which would eliminate local oversight entirely.

Both the city and county rejected the facility early on, local officials said. Residents protested its reopening and offered impassioned testimony against it at public hearings.

CoreCivic structured the $1.5 million impact payment in part to reimburse the city’s legal costs from the company’s lawsuit. When asked about the arrangement, CoreCivic instead reiterated its promised $1 million one-time impact fee, $250,000 a year to the city, and $150,000 a year to the police department.

Mayor Pro Tem Rebecca Hollister, who cast the sole dissenting vote on the 4-to-1 decision, explained her objection was procedural and understood it had no bearing on the outcome: “It was an inevitability.”

The Hub 

On January 14, two months before the vote, CoreCivic detention officer Brittany Williams reached out to city leadership to voice her support of the facility, an unusual move for a rank-and-file corrections officer with no role in the municipal permitting fight. In the email to Assistant City Manager Penny Holler, Williams said the company transferred her to Oklahoma to help open Diamondback, a sister CoreCivic facility. She wrote that she was currently assigned to TransCor America, a private transportation company that contracts with ICE to move detainees around the country, in her case from ICE’s Kansas City, Missouri, field office “to where they are needed to go.” The email, which was entered into the public record before the February 2 hearing on the special use permit, or SUP, to allow the facility to house immigrants, inadvertently revealed ICE’s hub-and-spoke detention model was already in motion in the region, shuffling detainees and staff between facilities and states.

The Leavenworth facility was in a strategically advantageous position to become a new hub for ICE, and Sharma-Crawford, the immigration attorney, said ICE had been eyeing the location since it closed as a federal prison. It sits just 10 miles from Kansas City International Airport, where ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations field office is a six-minute drive away. It also allows ICE to hold detainees at Leavenworth then move them through KCI to staging areas for deportation flights in Louisiana or Texas. 

“They want it short, quick,” Sharma-Crawford said. It allows ICE to claim “‘I gave them due process,’” he said, “and they’re out the door.”

On March 25, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a bond decision holding that anyone who entered the United States without authorization is ineligible for bond, a ruling that covers Missouri, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Iowa, Arkansas, and Minnesota, the states Sharma-Crawford said he expects to feed into Leavenworth. Mandatory detention across those seven states meant the government needed greater capacity from the region’s jails. Genevra Alberti, former chair of the local AILA chapter, whose attorneys represent clients throughout the area, named additional “spokes” in the system: Chase County in Kansas, and Greene, Ste. Genevieve, Phelps, and Ozark counties in Missouri. Enough local jails plus a CoreCivic facility, she said, can hold and process as many people as a mega-detention center. 

“It makes sense that they’re doing this in smaller areas, because no one’s paying attention,” Alberti said. “There’s definitely a method to this. They know if they do this in the massive cities, there’s going to be more light shed on what they’re doing.”

In Leavenworth County, the CoreCivic-run ICE detention center is one of five major correctional facilities, which provide a total of roughly 6,000 beds. Up the road, FCI Leavenworth, a federal Bureau of Prisons facility, held ICE detainees in what Alberti called a “black hole” for a full year before the SUP was approved. Last May, the ACLU wrote to the warden documenting limited time outside and no exercise for detainees. Peterson, the city manager, confirmed the federal prison doesn’t answer to the city, and there have been no community relations meetings for more than a year.

The county’s other major prisons are the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks and the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth and Lansing Correctional Facility. Rounding out the cluster is the Grossman Center, a federal halfway house run by the private prison giant GEO Group adjacent to CoreCivic’s site.

The SUP the city approved authorizes “jail or prison” use at the Leavenworth site without restricting it to ICE detention. The concentration of prisons meant the workforce, the infrastructure, and the institutional muscle were already there. Reopening one more facility for ICE required little more than a single municipal approval.

The Immigration Courts 

Once their clients are fed into one of the deportation regime’s hubs, immigration attorneys say it’s become an increasingly byzantine process to find them, plan their defenses, and get them out of detention.

Working with clients imprisoned at Leavenworth is chaotic and difficult from the moment they arrive, the attorneys said. To schedule a televideo call the lawyers must email their state bar cards and licenses, and they are subject to automatic, one-hour cutoffs. CoreCivic has repeatedly demanded attorneys file formal representation paperwork before they’ve even met the detainee or agreed to take on the case, Alberti said. 

Valerie Sprout, a Kansas City immigration attorney with 15 years of experience, said she wasn’t even able to locate the facility in ICE’s call-scheduling portal. 

“We didn’t know how to contact that client,” Sprout said. “We were on our listserv, frantically sharing information, because you have people there that you have no access to.”

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Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, rejected these characterizations, saying video visitation calls run in 30- and 60-minute sessions, calls are not automatically cut off, and staff accommodate requests for more time. He said the forms identifying a detainee’s lawyer are standard and a pre-representational visit can occur without one, adding that legal representatives may visit their clients seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Some of the details of the internal dysfunction detainees face only come to light after they’re released. According to Alberti, a former client took over running the laundry for roughly a week because no one was washing detainees’ clothes. She was promised token pay, either a dollar an hour or a dollar a day, but was never paid.

The obstacles extend into the courtroom. Detainees are increasingly given remote, on-camera hearings, never physically appearing before a judge. The Kansas City Immigration Court, part of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, holds jurisdiction over Leavenworth’s detainee docket. Just six judges, working across three courtrooms and a small pro bono room, carry more than 1,000 cases. 

“So far, I haven’t seen any of them in person,” Alberti said of the judges, which she said makes it more difficult to tell how they’re weighing cases.

Sprout, who is also a board member of Asylum Clinic Kansas City, has witnessed the shift to teleconferenced hearings firsthand. 

“All detained cases are over video. No detained cases are in-person, which I feel is just an incredible violation of due process, especially in asylum cases, because the threshold issue in every asylum case is to determine whether the respondent is credible,” she said.

Former prosecutors and military lawyers preside over the hearings. Allan F. John-Baptiste, a former Bureau of Prisons lawyer, was appointed during the first Trump administration. Jared Grimmer, a former Air Force judge advocate general, accepted a temporary appointment in October 2025. Katherine Estes ran military personnel law at the Pentagon. Scott Ison is a local-level Missouri prosecutor. After the Trump administration fired or pushed out more than 100 judges last year, none of the newly appointed Kansas City judges have a background in immigration law, according to the official bios provided in a DOJ press release announcing their appointments.

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Created in the wake of 9/11 and historically invoked only sparingly, the EOIR-43 automatic stay allows the government to override an immigration judge’s bond order without review or appeal. Records obtained by Documented through a records request show the Department of Homeland Security used it 877 times over a three-month period in mid-2025. Faced with these stays, Alberti has filed two federal habeas corpus petitions for clients at CoreCivic Leavenworth. The first was for a young woman with a pending petition for legal status as a victim of crime and no criminal history who entered the country as a baby; she was released after roughly two weeks. As of this spring, the second remained in detention. 

Another recent petition put the conditions themselves before a federal judge. Katsiaryna Bartko, a Belarusian asylum-seeker detained at Leavenworth, filed a pro se petition in August over her medical care. In an order appointing her counsel, U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree found she brought “a viable deprivation-of-medical-care” claim and noted it was undisputed that her recent test results showed worsening thyroid levels. Bartko, who depends on hormone medication after surgery for thyroid cancer, had not seen a specialist since her transfer, according to court filings. CoreCivic and ICE dispute she was denied appropriate medical care. After a fourth hospitalization and 106 days in ICE in custody, she was released on recognizance on September 16.

One of Alberti’s clients, who was detained at Leavenworth but has now been released, told her that guards and ICE officers sometimes asked her to act as an interpreter for other detainees without pay. No one on staff spoke Spanish, the client told Alberti, and when officers needed to communicate, they relied on a translation app rather than a live interpreter. 

Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said in a statement to The Intercept that “any claim that a detainee is required to translate for staff communication is false” and that the facility uses a contracted translation service with a live translator reached through devices, computers, and phones. 

About six weeks after the facility began accepting detainees in May, Sharma-Crawford reported at the first community oversight committee meeting that detainees did not have access to their own charging documents. Without them, he said, the lawyers weren’t able to formulate a defense for their clients.

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When asked about that allegation by The Intercept, Gustin said that concern involved a single detainee whose documents were provided upon request. He also said detainees keep their charging documents with them from the time they arrive and any suggestion to the contrary was “false.”

But for those who’ve been made party to the system, the situation has begun to feel intractable.

“We cannot stop the federal government from incarcerating these people,” Bauder, the mayor, had said. “We can’t stop them, but we can try to make it better for them here.”

The community’s only check on CoreCivic was the CoreCivic Community Relations Advisory Board, required as a condition of the special use permit. But while the board streamed their meetings publicly, it existed in a purely advisory capacity, Peterson, the city manager, said. Enforcement power lay with the city, not the board, and to act on any issues it flagged, the city of Leavenworth would have to sue. 

On the city’s working relationship with CoreCivic in the first weeks, Peterson said, “For now, things are great,” before adding, “How long is this sustainable? How long does it go?”

Foreclosing on the Future

With the hub-and-spoke model, the Trump administration planned for mega-detention centers with 7,500 to 10,000 beds as the hubs, but the 1,033-bed Leavenworth facility became a hub at a fraction of the size, inviting far less scrutiny than a mega-center would. Its reopening spurred community mobilization, but not the same national level of fanfare or resistance — as was the case with “Alligator Alcatraz,” the now-shuttered detention center in the Florida Everglades — which has worked in the Trump administration’s favor.

“DHS has taken a two-pronged approach to this,” Peterson said. “They are both contracting with private organizations like CoreCivic and GEO Group to manage their detention population, but then they are also just directly acquiring properties to manage themselves.”

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The administration’s mass deportation agenda has remained paramount despite its growing unpopularity with the American public. The Leavenworth location had been a federal priority from the start, identified in ACLU Freedom of Information Act disclosures alongside other proposed reopenings. It was named in ICE’s emergency justification as one of three publicly identified among nine no-bid detention contracts. It was selected for its central location within ICE’s Chicago area of operations. With warehouse acquisitions stalled, Leavenworth, the Midwest regional hub, may represent the Trump administration’s new default model when ambitious, public-facing expansions become too politically or financially costly to defend. 

In July, CoreCivic’s sold two of its largest California facilities, Otay Mesa and California City, to DHS for $1.5 billion. The company will continue operating both and plans to sell off more jails. Under this hybrid arrangement, federal ownership can put facilities beyond the reach of many state and local regulations, limiting outside scrutiny even as courts test its limits.

Last month, the pattern played out again. On August 4, CoreCivic announced the sale of the shuttered Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minnesota. The following day, in a second press release, it announced the $238 million sale of Leavenworth’s Midwest Regional Reception Center, recasting both as a single $734 million deal. Under the arrangement, the company expects to keep operating both facilities through their existing ICE contracts.

At Leavenworth, the contract expires in September 2027. City officials learned of the sale the morning the news broke and were notified by CoreCivic rather than the federal government, raising questions as to whether its permit and oversight conditions would survive federal ownership. Even as these sales closed, CoreCivic said it had opened preliminary discussions with ICE about selling still other facilities.

Rep. Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin Democrat who toured the facility on September 9 to meet with two detained constituents, said it was under active construction to add capacity, telling reporters “everywhere we went, they were building.” A DHS spokesperson confirmed the agency acquired Leavenworth and the Appleton facility to create additional detention space.

Alberti sees these actions as the administration waging a “war of attrition” on immigrants, their families, and their advocates.

Leavenworth fought this outcome through every channel available to a local government — in the courts, at the commission, through public protests, and in open hearings packed with residents. Nevertheless, CoreCivic and DHS jammed the approval through. Once the facility was operational, the federal government purchased the building outright, severing the meager leverage the city extracted as the price of its consent. In May, DHS quietly disbanded its own internal detention oversight office after a funding lapse, leaving no federal watchdog to fill the void. Rebranded as an expansion of ICE’s immigration capacity, this series of federal acquisitions represents the quiet desecration of the public trust. More troubling still is the notion that across America, other Leavenworths may still be unaccounted for and effectively shielded from the public’s knowledge or scrutiny. Without the tools to meaningfully oppose the expansion of Trump’s anti-immigrant regime, communities are left without recourse, making them nodes of a vast, and violent, machine.

This story is part 2 in a two-part series. Read the first part here.

The post How a Small Kansas City Became a Critical Hub for Trump’s Deportation Regime Against Its Will appeared first on The Intercept.

Volunteers who showed up a few months ago asking, “Where do I buy a whistle?” are now trained and committed members of an “ICE Watch” movement, said Zach Mueller, whose anti-authoritarian group States at the Core started hosting trainings earlier this year. “They’re not in the normal cast of characters that have been showing up to rallies over the last several decades,” said Mueller. Now, they’re planning to fan out to their local polling places and defend their neighbors’ rights to vote.

The ICE-watchers-turned-poll-watchers are preparing for the worst despite a temporary win the voting rights movement secured last week, when the Supreme Court upheld a decision to block a Trump administration rule that would have let the U.S. Postal Service refuse to deliver ballots from states that don’t share their voter rolls with the federal government, among other new constraints, which advocates warned would lead to chaos and uncounted votes. While that plan was foiled for the midterms, other electoral threats abound.

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“There are 100 different scenarios that you can run through,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible. “Could be ICE at the polls, could be Trump getting every Republican to swear to sabotage the results … Could be something after the fact, seizing ballot boxes or refusing to acknowledge the results. Who knows?”

What is clear, Levin said, is, “If you think that some Democratic politician is going to have some neat trick in the back pocket that they going to pull when it happens, you’ve got another thing coming.”

Federal interference at the polls is illegal. Despite lawsuits seeking to block federal immigration officers from poll sites, administration officials have continued to threaten their presence anyway. Earlier this month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that immigration agents could be deployed at polling places if there is a “threat” or if they’re serving a warrant. And President Donald Trump has previously said that federal agents and the National Guard could be sent to polling locations.

Levin’s organization, which co-sponsors the No Kings protests, has launched “election protection” training programs to help people prepare to mobilize for different election sabotage scenarios, including federal immigration agents at the polls, and Mueller’s group has expanded its trainings to include election protection trainings known as “Beyond ICE Watch.”

“Ultimately this is going to come down to: Do you have a sufficient number of people organized and prepared to push back when shit hits the fan, or don’t you?” said Levin.

In the past two years, Levin said, an elite class composed of “media and business and law firms and universities” and parts of the Democratic establishment, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have capitulated to the authoritarian whims of the Trump administration.

“The only thing that has changed anything over the last 22 months has been normal, everyday people deciding they weren’t going to put up with this shit,” said Levin. “They organized, they reached out, they formed communities, and they pushed back.”

Last year, the Save America Movement, a nonprofit political and pro-democracy organization that rose up in opposition to Trump, launched “liberty vans” in Los Angeles.

The vehicles are staffed with organizers trained in documenting and deescalating violence from federal law enforcement agents. “Our perspective was that if everybody in America knew what it felt like to be in Los Angeles during that summer, nobody would be OK with this,” said Mary Corcoran, who serves as the group’s executive director.

The project later expanded to other cities including Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis.

Now, Corcoran plans to deploy a similar strategy in battleground states. The group is working with major civil and labor rights figures like Rev. Al Sharpton and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to send volunteers — including trusted community leaders like clergy members — trained in deescalation, documentation, and local voting laws to precincts with large Black, Latino, and Asian populations in North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and Michigan.

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Corcoran said the precincts they chose are all electoral power centers with large minority and immigrant populations. “If they were successful in intimidating even 10 percent of those voters from coming back this midterm cycle, it could easily swing the outcome statewide,” she said.

Corcoran is hopeful that people knowing they will not be alone at the polls will help them feel safer, but she acknowledges that this election cycle will be a new test. “Voter intimidation has always been around,” she said. “But ICE is a new X factor in this election.”

For the NAACP, voter intimidation is a familiar threat, even if the players have changed, explained Dominik Whitehead, the group’s head of membership. “Much of this we’ve seen before,” said Whitehead. In Georgia and other battleground states in 2024, there were at least 227 bomb threats targeting polling locations and election-related offices, many of them in Black precincts.

The NAACP is “going to defend democracy and ensure voters have access to the ballot box, as we have done for the last 117 years,” said Whitehead. But like Corcoran, he acknowledges that these are “different times.”

ICE has “no jurisdiction” to prevent anyone from voting, something the NAACP has been including in their messaging to voters, he said. However, Whitehead said that they’re still anticipating the agency’s presence. He said the NAACP is “working closely with immigrant organizations” and focusing their election monitoring efforts in places like Michigan, Florida, and Texas, where they expect threats against Muslim, Latino, and Black Caribbean immigrant communities.

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Voting by mail has already begun in several key states, including Alabama, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. For Mueller and States at the Core, the real test will come after Election Day.

“There is a real question mark in my mind about what is the reaction from the authoritarian movement to this election,” said Mueller. “And it’s worth thinking more about how folks are planning, not just for the lead-up version to this, but what happens on November 4th and afterwards.” 

The Trump administration’s attacks on mail-in voting, for example, will likely become an issue again. Concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the new rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that his issue with the new rule was its timing.

The post They Trained to Protect Immigrants From ICE. Now They’re Prepping to Defend the Midterm Elections. appeared first on The Intercept.

Now, a new petition signed by more than 160,000 people, including the backing of actor Javier Bardem, is calling for Pink’s removal from her UNICEF USA role. The petition organizers, Swifties Against Genocide, named for fans of the pop singer Taylor Swift, said that Pink’s remarks sidelined concern for Palestinian children and “fueled ongoing conflict and struggles for visibility and empathy.” 

“As individuals who care deeply about the welfare of children around the world, we must hold UNICEF Ambassadors to the highest standards of neutrality and compassion,” the organizers wrote. “Palestinian children, like all children affected by genocide, deserve ambassadors who unequivocally extend support and empathy towards their plight.”

The petition is the latest example of the type of public pressure supporters of Palestine are seeking to exert amid a tidal shift of sentiment in the U.S. on Palestine and Israel over the past three years. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has dramatically soured U.S. opinion on Israel, with a majority viewing Israel unfavorably and more Americans taking a sympathetic view of Palestinians. 

The transformations have played out in the current midterm election cycle, with candidates pushing to sever military ties with Israel winning in primaries across the country. In the past several weeks, the subject has upended mainstream popular culture, with battle lines being drawn over a stadium concert tour by pop icon Ed Sheeran.  

The pressure on UNICEF to part ways with Pink is tied up with a strategy among Palestine solidarity activists to extract a price from Israel for its continued occupation and genocide of Palestinians. 

For Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow with Al-Shabaka U.S., the petition is “a clear attempt to draw a new line in the sand and make the point that choosing to take the moderate lane is unacceptable.”

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“These past couple days have proven that being shamelessly pro-Israel, or even refusing to take sides in the face of a genocide, is no longer the safe route,” he said, citing a shift of the “cultural hegemony” in the West.

Though Sheeran himself — who said at his latest concert that he was listening to both sides — is not a target of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, the cultural backlash to his move to take Macklemore off the tour reinforced the logic of the growing movement, Natasha Lennard recently wrote in The Intercept.

Representatives for Pink, UNICEF, and Change.org did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Other advocates for Palestinian rights reaffirmed the petitioners’ aims.

“Pink should step down. UNICEF itself has called Gaza a graveyard for children. Its ambassadors are supposed to speak for those children, not attack the people who do,” said Raed Jarrar, the advocacy director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “Whether UNICEF removes her or not, it’s time for her to step down.”

Attacking Pro-Palestine Speech

The controversy involving Pink kicked off during Sheeran’s show at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4.

Macklemore, one of the opening acts, spoke out against Israeli apartheid and the genocide of Palestinians, addressing Jewish people in the crowd to say that criticism of genocide and the Israeli government “is in no way a criticism of you.” 

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After backlash from pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League — and perhaps more critically, pressure from billionaire Robert Kraft, the deeply pro-Israel owner of the New England Patriots and Massachusetts’s Gillette Stadium — Sheeran dropped Macklemore from his tour. Then came the backlash to the backlash, with other opening acts on the tour and even Sheeran’s backing band dropping out in solidarity with Macklemore. 

Pink, the pop star who rose to fame with a string of hits in the early 2000s, waded into the controversy early on. After attending the September 4 show, Pink reshared a social media post from the group Stop Antisemitism that said Macklemore’s claims of a genocide were “false” and that concertgoers were owed apologies and refunds.

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“I don’t need anyone fired, and I don’t need a refund,” she later wrote on Instagram, explaining why she reshared the post. “What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, ‘That scared me, and it scared people I love’ — without being told our fear is just propaganda, and without being told I’m somehow cool with genocide because I noticed?”

She added that the protest slogan “From river to the sea” and the use of the term “Zionist” have become “a slur.”

Pink said that “nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child.” She mentioned her experience as a UNICEF ambassador visiting children born in war zones. She “grieved every one of them, on both sides of that fence,” she wrote.

Yet Pink’s grief, or any celebrity’s, has done little to change conditions on the ground for Palestinian children. Just on Monday, an 11-year-old boy was shot to death by the Israeli military in one of Gaza’s apparent “safe zones.”

UNICEF, which operates in Gaza, itself reported that Israeli attacks have killed at least 300 children in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire agreement last October. Food insecurity and lack of access to clean water also remain issues due to Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid from entering the Strip.

In her social media post, Pink said she does not speak for Israel but reiterated her stance that “Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians deserve a future that honors their humanity and their aspirations.” She said she was not “going to litigate a complex war in an Instagram caption, and I’m not going to recite anybody’s slogan to earn back a follower.”

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Over the weekend, the petition calling out Pink also drew the support from Javier Bardem, an outspoken advocate for Palestine and major funder of the Palestinian film “All That’s Left of You,” who shared the petition on his Instagram profile. 

“She can not defend children’s rights,” Bardem said, “while not condemning the genocide in Gaza.”

The post Pink Supported Macklemore’s Firing. Now Activists Want UNICEF to Cut Ties With Her. appeared first on The Intercept.

An email first sent over the weekend sent by Fetterman’s campaign came from the address “info@gopsquad.com” and vowed: “I’m always going to reject Socialism and the Anti-American way of life.” Other recent appeals sent from the same address encourage readers to help President Donald Trump pass new voting restrictions, to read an “urgent memo” from House Speaker Mike Johnson on fighting the left, and to back Republican Mike Rogers for Senate in Michigan over Abdul El-Sayed, whom the email compared to a terrorist and a “threat to our way of life.”

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The email from Fetterman’s campaign comes as the senator has moved closer to the Republican caucus, rankling his Democratic colleagues and spurring rumors that he might switch parties. He received the maximum allowed contribution from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, as The Intercept reported in July. But the use of Republican fundraising infrastructure represents a new step in Fetterman’s confounding electoral strategy.

The Fetterman campaign also sent copies of the fundraising email from alternate GOP domains including “unshakeableconservatives.com” and “freedomfaction.net.” It’s possible that Fetterman for PA rented or bought a GOP email list, something campaigns commonly do for targeted outreach, but the campaign’s specific arrangement is unclear. The text retreads major talking points that the Democratic senator delivered in a controversial video appearance at the Republican party’s midterm convention earlier this month, where he railed against “extremes” and promised to “stand with America.” 

Fetterman’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Former Fetterman staffers, who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal, condemned their old boss’s pivot and suggested he’d betrayed his previous supporters.

“After taking contributions from millions of small-dollar donors who wanted a Democratic Senate, John Fetterman turned around and became Donald Trump’s useful idiot,” said one former staffer. “Now, it’s no surprise that he has to resort to GOP donors to prop up his dismal fundraising numbers.” 

With two years left in his first term, Fetterman has made himself the subject of a series of political upheavals and dramatic reversals. The image he was heralded for upon his 2022 election — a gritty, heterodox, and unpredictable model for the future of the Democratic Party — has all but crumbled.

Staffers, donors, previous supporters, and his Democratic colleagues have fled from Fetterman’s orbit in droves as he’s aligned himself with Republicans on Trump’s war with Iran, U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean, and funding the Department of Homeland Security amid a slew of killings, shootings, and misconduct by federal immigration agents.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported on his resistance to carrying out his daily responsibilities as a senator — which marked a stark contrast from his energy for showing up on Fox News, where he made more than 50 appearances in the first six months of this year. The senator has particularly alienated former supporters on the left with his hardline support for the Israeli government, which he has offered unconditional support throughout its genocide in Gaza.

Fetterman’s critics are looking for a candidate to primary him in 2028 as he fields questions about whether he plans to join the GOP — or run for reelection at all, given his sinking popularity among his own party and outrage from former supporters over his rightward turn. 

Fetterman’s coziness with — and popularity among — Republicans doesn’t necessarily mean he’s likely to join the GOP conference, said several former Fetterman staffers who spoke to The Intercept. They predicted that Fetterman might follow in the footsteps of former Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who consistently blocked their party’s more progressive measures and then became independent. That, according to one former staffer, would let him maintain the wildcard he’s curated over four erratic years in office. 

“He loves being the enigma,” another former staffer told The Intercept. “He loves the, ‘Well, you’re gonna have to see what happens.’”

As Fetterman’s staffers struggled in recent months to get him to do basic parts of his job — including fundraising — his office reached out to staffers for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to ask him to talk to Fetterman in an attempt to right what they saw as a sinking ship, according to a former staffer. The staffer said that Schumer agreed, but Fetterman refused to talk to him. Schumer’s office has said the two are in communication and met for dinner in August. 

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If there’s a lesson to be learned from Fetterman’s explosion onto the national stage and the trail of disgruntled staffers, organizers, and small-dollar donors left in its wake, it has little to do with political ideology and more to do with psychology, former staffers told The Intercept. Fetterman views himself as a renegade and an outsider above all else, according to his former staff. He has long struggled with depression, and while campaigning in 2022, he suffered a stroke whose effects led him to use assistive technology in the Senate and continue to be felt in other ways.

Notwithstanding any decision he might make about switching parties, the conservative world has welcomed Fetterman with open arms. In July, Fetterman attended a retreat in Montana hosted by Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media scion behind Fox News, at the network’s invitation, according to two former Fetterman staffers. At the retreat, Fetterman spoke on a panel alongside Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala. Fetterman’s attendance at Murdoch’s event came several days after he launched an unusual bipartisan fundraising committee with his Republican counterpart in Pennsylvania, Sen. Dave McCormick. 

While Fetterman’s campaign has previously used the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue for communications, including in a recent text for a joint fundraiser with McCormick, his campaign sent recent fundraising texts using another platform, including a link with the name “Save America 26.” 

Fetterman’s campaign also recently redesigned its website to use his antagonistic persona in its favor. The website boasts that Fetterman “thinks for himself. You should too.”

Fetterman isn’t an average Democrat, his new website reads. “John doesn’t look like a typical politician, and more importantly, he doesn’t act like one.”

The post John Fetterman Is Fundraising on GOP Donor Email Lists appeared first on The Intercept.

Mohammadjamal Azizi and Hannaneh Alikaram requested asylum after arriving in the United States in late 2024, for fear of the persecution they would likely face as Christian converts in Iran, where they had twice been arrested due to their faith.

Since arriving in the U.S., they have faced sharply different versions of American justice, the result of a process advocates refer to bitterly as “immigration roulette”: Azizi — who goes by the name Liam — has been free for more than a year, after his asylum claim was granted, while Alikaram has suffered 21 months in detention, more than a year of that coming after her claim was rejected. 

Until recently, it is likely that Alikaram would not have spent nearly as much time in detention as she has. But amid the twin agendas of mass detention and mass deportation, the Trump administration has swept aside years of precedent by locking up people who would previously have been allowed to fight their cases from outside detention, while going after communities formerly protected from deportation due to the likelihood of persecution back home.

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Iranians have found themselves the crosshairs. Last year, amid the so-called 12-Day War between the U.S.–Israel and Iran, senior officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a scheme to begin deportations to Iran, a plan that resulted in three planes full of Iranian deportees being sent back to Iran on charter flights.

Those flights were suspended earlier this year after the U.S. and Israel launched the ongoing war on Iran, but multiple Iranians with final orders of removal have been deported to countries where they have no ties, including Panama and the Central African Republic. With so-called third-country flights leaving every month or so, Azizi and his wife live in constant fear that Alikaram might be put on a plane to a country where she knows no one and from which she has little hope of escaping.

Leaving detention after seven months, Azizi headed to the Iranian American hub of Los Angeles, where he has spent the past year working any job he can find to raise money for legal bills and fighting for his wife’s release. By the logic of the U.S. immigration system, that should be a simple prospect: As the spouse of an asylee, Alikaram is eligible for a status known as derivative asylum, a process intended to ensure family unification and act as a backstop against situations like the one in which Azizi and Alikaram find themselves, according to Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, a former immigration judge fired by the Trump administration last year.

“The person gets to have derivative asylum because family unity is a central tenet of our immigration system,” said Rey Caldas. “This is your money and my money that are being wasted in detaining this woman who is unquestionably eligible for asylum as the spouse of an individual that has been granted asylum.”

The couple currently has a petition for derivative asylum before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and have filed a petition for habeas corpus seeking to secure Alikaram’s release on the basis of prolonged detention. Amid the uncertainty, with no end in sight to his wife’s detention, Azizi said their separation — and his feeling of helplessness in the face of bureaucratic cruelty — weighs on him daily.

“Being separated from Hananneh is unbearable,” Azizi wrote in a statement to the court filed earlier this year. “Every night I go to sleep wondering if she is safe in detention. Every day I wake up with anxiety that she might be taken away from me and sent back to a country where she could be imprisoned, tortured, or even killed just because she sought freedom.”

Azizi and Alikaram married in 2018 and lived together in Isfahan, Iran, where both had gone to university. Azizi worked as a software engineer, while Alikaram ran a greenhouse business, cultivating plants and posting playful videos to YouTube in which she coached plant lovers on topics ranging from prepping plants for autumn to guarding against pests. In the videos, which include jokey, spliced-in clips from “Lord of the Rings” and Miyazaki films, Alikaram comes across as a happy young woman enamored with the natural world.

The couple found their way to Christianity first through friends, members of Isfahan’s sizable minority of Armenian Christians. Christians have lived in Iran for more than a millennium, and Iran’s constitution affords protections allowing ethnoreligious communities, most notably Armenians and Assyrians, to practice their faith and organize their families and communities accordingly.

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But the situation is very different for converts like Azizi and Alikaram, who are considered by Iran’s theocratic government to be apostates, and are subject to harsh punishments — up to and including execution. As a result, converts must worship in secret, in an underground network of so-called home churches.

It was in these home churches that the couple began exploring Christianity and where, in January 2024, they were baptized into the Anglican church. But it was also in a home church where the two met with their first experience of state terror, Azizi and Alikaram told The Intercept in telephone interviews and related in court documents. On March 5, 2024, they were worshipping with a handful of others in a home church in Isfahan when members of the pro-government Basij militia burst in, having been informed of the gathering by neighbors. Alikaram and Azizi, along with others, were taken into custody. Alikaram was beaten so badly she passed out and had to be hospitalized.

On June 9, 2024, after relocating for their own safety to the capital of Tehran, Alikaram and Azizi were arrested again on charges of practicing a foreign religion and inviting others to practice Christianity. She was held for two days, and he for four. After that ordeal, they decided it was time to leave. They secured a visa to enter Brazil, and left Iran on November 3, 2024. Five days later, a court in Tehran issued warrants for their arrest, according to court documents.

Azizi and Alikaram entered the United States on December 26, 2024, after an arduous trip overland from Brazil that took them through more than half a dozen countries. En route, they traveled through the infamous Darién Gap and spent two days as captives of a criminal group in Tapachula, Mexico, an ordeal that ended only after paying thousands of dollars for their release. 

In Mexico, they registered for CBP One, the mobile app designed by the Biden administration as the only method by which potential asylees could file a claim. Due to the danger in Mexico, including threats from a smuggler, Alikaram and Azizi said smugglers forced them to join a group of migrants from India, Iran, and a number of African countries in crossing the border wall separating Tijuana and San Diego.

“They told us, ‘You have to cross the border, you cannot stay in Mexico,’” Azizi recalled the smugglers saying. “It was out of our hands.”

On the other side, they soon found themselves in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol, who searched the migrants and separated the men from the women. 

“We told them we are married, we showed them our marriage certificate,” Azizi told The Intercept. “But they didn’t care. They separated us.”

In early January 2025, Alikaram was sent to Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, while Azizi was sent to another facility in Louisiana before ending up at a detention center in Houston, Texas. 

They have been apart ever since.

Alikaram went before Judge Jennifer A. May for her asylum hearing on July 2, 2025. May, who was appointed in 2018 under the first Trump administration, appears to be in line with the policy objectives of the current administration. Between 2021 and the end of 2025, she denied asylum in 91.8 percent of the cases she heard, according to data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects data on immigration judges.

The hearing took place at a time in which judges were under ever greater pressure to deny claims, according to Rey Caldas, the former immigration judge, who was fired last year amid a purge of the immigration court system by the Trump administration.

“It was evident to me when I was on the bench, and it’s certainly evident to me now that they are exerting massive pressure so that judges deny all applications,” Rey Caldas said. 

In the hearing, which was conducted over Webex, May drilled into Alikaram’s claim, asking for details about her baptism, whether or not she had owned a Bible, and her reasons for converting to Christianity. Alikaram, clearly nervous, stumbled over her words at times, and at others gave answers that clashed with evidence provided to court. Some details also appeared to get lost in translation. At one point, a reference by Alikaram to the Basij, the paramilitary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was transcribed as “a siege.” 

May did not find Alikaram to be credible. In her decision denying Alikaram’s asylum case, May focused mostly on what she described as inconsistencies in Alikaram’s testimony, including how long she’d been attending home churches and details of her arrest — inconsistencies that Alikaram and Azizi later blamed on her nerves while testifying. But May also tried to downplay the likelihood that Alikaram would face persecution if she returned to Iran.

“I find there is no independent evidence to show that the respondent would likely be tortured in Iran,” May wrote. “[T]his court is aware that Christians have been arrested and sent to jail for some period of time. But looking at the amount of people in Iran, the amount of people who are converts to Christianity, I cannot find that that percentage would be more than likely or not torture or persecution [sic] for this respondent.”

Six days later, Azizi who at the time was being held at a detention facility in Texas, went before Judge Nimmo Bhagat, fully expecting that his claim would be denied as well. To his shock, however, the judge approved his claim for asylum, and just two weeks later he was a free man.

“I was shocked,” Azizi said. “I thought if my wife couldn’t get asylum that I’d have no chance. But they gave me asylum.”

A spokesperson for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the branch of the Justice Department that oversees immigration courts, declined to comment. Neither ICE nor USCIS responded to requests for comment.

In light of his wife’s asylum denial, Azizi’s successful claim was a godsend for them both. Despite May’s decision, Alikaram should now be eligible for derivative asylum, upon which her own claim and its denial has no bearing.

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The couple filed for derivative asylum in December, after the Board of Immigration Appeals denied Alikaram’s appeal of May’s decision. USCIS issued a notice of receipt, and even scheduled an appointment in Jackson, Mississippi, for a biometrics appointment. But ICE failed to produce Alikaram for the appointment, and the derivative asylum process now appears to be languishing in limbo.

In April, Alikaram’s attorney, Emily Trostle, filed a petition for habeas corpus in an attempt to secure Alikaram’s release from detention. That case, too, has stalled, forcing Trostle to file a petition last week to expedite the process.

In detention, meanwhile, Alikaram is suffering from poor nutrition, failing eyesight, and severe anxiety and depression. 

“I can’t bear it anymore,” she told The Intercept in a telephone interview. “I know God has a plan for me, but sometimes now I say, ‘Just kill me so my husband and my family can move on with their lives.’”

The post Immigration Roulette: Husband Granted Asylum, Wife Locked Up Awaiting Deportation appeared first on The Intercept.

The slogan reflects the city’s deep anger over the killing of two U.S. citizens by federal officers in January. It also reflects Frazier’s belief that the backlash gives him the edge in the race to serve as Minneapolis’s top prosecutor.

Frazier, a public defender turned state representative, is vying with former federal prosecutor Anders Folk in the race to become Hennepin County Attorney. The county, which includes Minneapolis, was beset by violence and chaos this winter amid a Trump administration immigration crackdown known as “Operation Metro Surge.”

Before the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the contest was shaping up as a referendum on so-called progressive prosecutions — fallout from a debate that began six years ago after George Floyd was murdered by former police officer Derek Chauvin.

Now it has morphed into something more. Either Frazier or his opponent will likely decide whether to prosecute the federal immigration agents who killed Good and Pretti. Those stakes give the race national implications, Hamline University political science professor David Schultz said.

“People are going to be looking at this race and asking: What does it tell us about holding law enforcement accountable?” he said. “If you hadn’t had Metro Surge, if you hadn’t had George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, it would be: Minneapolis is holding an election for county attorney — no big deal.”

Walking the Block

A county attorney in Minnesota has broad responsibilities that range from general counsel for local government to prosecuting crimes to pursuing child support cases.

Voters, however, only wanted to talk about one thing as Frazier canvassed the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis earlier this month: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s winter invasion. Without prompting, two voters in two blocks thanked him for his campaign promise to go after ICE.

The reminders of Minneapolis’s turbulent decade are everywhere in the city. A couple blocks away from a campaign field office, one building is still tagged with “#JUSTICE4GEORGE” graffiti. Within a short drive, the memorials for Good and Pretti are overflowing with flowers and handwritten tributes.

In an interview with The Intercept, Frazier was careful to say that he has not made any decisions about cases involving federal agents. Any explicit statement to that effect could be used to throw him off the case.

“But I don’t see it any different than saying we’re going to go after crime,” Frazier said. “We’re just making it very clear and very explicit that if you come here, regardless of what your title is, and if you violate the law here, there will be accountability for that.”

A native of the South Side of Chicago, Frazier moved to rural Minnesota for college and never left the state. He has three daughters and went from serving as a Hennepin County public defender to state representative for New Hope, a suburb of Minneapolis.

The 47-year-old built strong connections with the state affiliate of the Democratic Party and Minnesota’s powerful labor movement. His day job outside of his part-time legislative position is as an attorney for the state’s main teacher union.

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If he is elected, Frazier will likely face crucial decisions about whether to file or continue pursuing charges in the Good and Pretti killers. The sitting county attorney, Mary Moriarty, began the investigation into those killings with the aid of state Attorney General Keith Ellison, but she could leave the ultimate charging decision up to her successor. Frazier says he has no confidence in parallel federal investigations.

“I have no trust whatsoever in a Donald Trump-led Department of Justice actually getting us any justice or accountability for what happened here,” he said.

“Tagged With Trump”

His opponent, Folk, brings a strikingly different resume and support base to the race.

A Minnesota native and 49-year-old first-time candidate who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, he worked his way up through the ranks at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis, where some of his most notable early cases focused on Somali American men accused of traveling to the Horn of Africa to fight for the designated terror group al-Shabaab.

After a stint at a national law firm, he returned to the U.S. attorney’s office in 2018 to serve as first assistant. He was briefly the interim top prosecutor after the resignation of the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in 2021. During that stint, he signed Chauvin’s indictment on federal civil rights charges connected to the murder of George Floyd.

In 2022, he left public service and became a partner at the white-shoe law firm Jones Day, which has helped corporations fight union campaigns.

His blue-chip resume attracted support from wealthy campaign donors and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who endorsed him early on.

Folk, whose campaign declined a request for an interview, leans on his prosecutorial experience to make the case that he is best suited to prosecute federal officers.

“These are cases we’ve never done here in Minnesota,” he said in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio last month. “These are going to be cases we’re doing for the first time in the history of this state. And I think it just really speaks to how critical it is to have that deep experience doing federal criminal prosecution work because that’s where these cases are all going to end up.”

While campaigning on his experience at the U.S. attorney’s office, however, his job as a federal prosecutor also presents a liability. Frazier routinely notes that Folk rejoined the office when Trump was president. That association has hurt Folk as much as anything else, said Schultz, the Hamline law and politics professor.

“He is tagged with Trump, he is tagged with the federal prosecutor’s office,” Schultz said.

“It’s guilt by association.”

Mary Moriarty’s Shadow

Frazier took 36 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary last month to Folk’s 23 percent. That lead makes him the “heavy” favorite but not the inevitable winner, Schultz said.

Folk’s supporters have bristled at the claims that he was a Trump lackey. In the run-off, Folk played up his connections to the Biden administration.

Yet Folk has played the guilt-by-association game, too, by tying Frazier to the current county attorney, Mary Moriarty.

Moriarty ran as an outspoken progressive when voters were outraged over her predecessor’s handling of Floyd’s murder. She promised to transform the office with a restorative approach and fresh reviews of past incidents of police brutality.

She followed through on those pledges but drew political flak for the way in which she went about it.

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Former Democratic allies, including state Attorney General Keith Ellison, castigated her over her handling of a case where two teen boys were accused in the killing a young mother and she sought to prosecute them as juveniles. Democratic Gov. Tim Walz eventually took her off the case and handed it to Ellison, a move she called undemocratic.

With her political fortunes sinking, Moriarty decided not to run again last year, well before Operation Metro Surge began. During the election, Frazier’s critics have sought to cast him as her second coming.

Folk quickly name-checked Moriarty when he was asked about his differences with Frazier in a recent radio interview.

“Not unlike my differences with Mary Moriarty, I’m somebody who has stood up in court and prosecuted for the people of the state of Minnesota,” Folk said. “And Cedrick Frazier has never done that. He has never been a prosecutor and has no experience there.”

Frazier chooses his words carefully when he talks about Moriarty’s legacy. He has positioned himself as more progressive than Folk and promised to continue some priorities, such as the police accountability project. Yet he has sought to distance herself from Moriarty on other issues. Though Moriarty changed the office’s policies to avoid charging juveniles as adults, Frazier says he is open to the possibility of such charges.

“I don’t know why it’s fair for him to say I’m going to be Mary Moriarty 2.0, but we can’t truthfully, truthfully say and talk about the fact that you worked under Donald Trump and you’re a partner at Jones Day,” Frazier said.

The family of the woman slain by the two teens said they felt betrayed by Moriarty’s decision to charge them as juveniles instead of adults. Frazier said that he will be more skillful in talking to community members than Moriarty. He will bring the same approach to killings perpetrated by law enforcement officers, he said.

“I’m going to have use-of-force experts right there with me, helping to inform me when I make those decisions,” he said. “And I’ll be very clear: If the case can’t be charged, I will go out and I will have that tough conversation with the community.”

The post Decision on Charging Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s Killers Looms Over Minneapolis DA Race appeared first on The Intercept.

The facility, which had long been plagued by overcrowding, chronic understaffing, and deadly violence, closed later that year after a Biden executive order against all private prison profiteering put its century-long run to an end. 

Then came the second Trump administration and its plans to supercharge the business of incarceration in the United States.

As of March, the notorious prison is back up and running, and this time it’s being filled with immigrants, the majority of whom have no criminal conviction, as part of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s brutal deportation regime targeting noncitizens.

Last month, CoreCivic sold the facility to the Department of Homeland Security for $238.4 million, although it expects to keep operating the site under its existing ICE arrangement. But local officials tell the story of a massive for-profit prison company steamrolling community opposition as well as the city’s own established processes, and ultimately forcing their hand to participate in a project of mass detention — a system that advocates and former employees say has led to unsafe, violent conditions for both detainees and employees.

Current conditions for detainees held at the Midwest Regional Reception Center are hard to verify from outside. In its reporting on the sale, the Kansas City Star put the facility’s population at 365 men and 112 women, a count shared at a July 28 community advisory board meeting. The paper described two local groups in contact with detainees and their families, among them Northland Neighbors United, which said in a July statement that detainees have reported medical neglect, inadequate food, and prolonged lockdowns. CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin told the Star the allegations do not reflect how the facility operates.

For Esmie Tseng, the communications director for the ACLU of Kansas, coverage of these city meetings sanitizes the reality for detainees.

“We’re making a contract out of putting people in cages,” Tseng said. “This isn’t just moving widgets from one place to another, or manufacturing notebooks and pens. This is profiting off of people being put in cages.” 

The Pitch

By early 2025, the city of Leavenworth had already said “no” multiple times to deepening its involvement in immigration detention. After Trump’s reelection, CoreCivic tried again, working with city officials for three months before announcing on a Zoom call it would reopen the facility as an immigration jail without waiting for a special use permit, or SUP, to be approved. The city sued to force CoreCivic to go through its permitting process, and the company countersued, arguing its federal contract allows it to bypass local law. In June 2025, a Leavenworth State District Court judge granted a temporary injunction barring CoreCivic from operating without a special use permit. 

During that first push on March 25, 2025 — the day the city commission was scheduled to meet in closed session about the ICE contract — John Malloy, CoreCivic’s vice president of federal partnership relations, emailed Leavenworth’s commissioners with what seemed like an attractive financial offer: “300 well-paying jobs at starting salaries of $28.58/hour,” more than $1,000,000 annually in property taxes, a $1 million one-time impact fee, and annual payments to the city and police department. The final permit set CoreCivic’s impact fee at $1.5 million, which City Manager Scott Peterson said covered the city’s legal bills.

Malloy also emphasized the city’s approval process must move quickly to meet growing demand to ramp up the number of available immigration prison beds.

“While ICE’s pressing need for capacity dictates the speed at which we must move to hire and ready the facility … we do not wish this speed to harm what we hope will be a long-term beneficial relationship with the City,” Malloy wrote in the email. He added this expedited timeline would not allow for “a protracted permitting process.”

He also touted that the community response to job postings had already been strong, with more than 500 applicants “in the hiring process” and more coming in every day.

Levering, an Army veteran and Native American, heard a version of that pitch five years earlier in a cold call from a recruiting agency. Back in 2020, when CoreCivic was contracted to run the facility as a federal prison by the U.S. Marshals Service, the recruiting agency offered her 12-hour shifts and only three days a week, she told The Intercept. The schedule sold her. With four kids in school, the promise of four days at home made the job feel like an ideal fit for her busy life. She saw the work as service, an extension of her years in the Army. In hindsight, she said, “Obviously, [that’s] not the case, because it’s a private prison.”

Mike Trapp, co-founder of the Carceral Accountability Council, said CoreCivic hires people the state prison system and Federal Bureau of Prisons might otherwise have turned away over physical and age limitations, because the company has “lower standards of entry.” 

But Bill Rogers, a former guard at the facility under the Marshals contract, said there were effectively no hiring standards. 

“You gotta pass their background check … and you gotta be breathing,” he said. “Think about the people you’re going to get to work at a facility if you really just don’t care.”

One year after Malloy’s email to persuade city officials, the facility already had 150 employees on its payroll, halfway to the 300 jobs Malloy had promised. At a February 2 hearing, the city’s planning commission voted 5-1 to recommend approval of CoreCivic’s special use permit. The City Commission granted final approval on March 10 by a vote of 4 to 1.

The Arithmetic of Danger 

Levering’s schedule amounted to a minimum six-day, often seven-day, workweek, with shifts of 12 hours or longer plus mandatory overtime, she said. Levering rarely saw her four children, who were then in middle and high school. The evenings she’d pictured spending time with them at home never came to pass.

After onboarding, officers were promised 40 hours of continuing training annually, Rogers said. He received that training for about his first two years, he said, until staffing ran too thin to pull officers off the floor. Left to teach herself, Levering said she learned more from prisoners than her peers or her supervisors. They told her who to keep an eye on, how to read danger on the floor, and where to set boundaries.

In response to questions from The Intercept, Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said the company’s training “meets or exceeds” the standards of the American Correctional Association.

Levering said that during her time at the facility, shifts that called for 24 to 25 officers often had just five or six. Within months, CoreCivic began eliminating bubble officers, who monitor units from a secure, elevated central control booth known as the “bubble.” These officers are critical for safety, as they control access to different zones of the prison by electronically opening and closing doors. Their elevated position also allows them an eye-in-the-sky perspective, where they can be the first to spot emergencies before they escalate.

In an interview, Shari Rich, who worked at the facility for nearly 13 years and counts Levering as a close friend, traced Levering’s assault to CoreCivic’s decision to eliminate bubble officers.

“It should never have happened,” she said of Levering’s assault. Rich placed the blame squarely on CoreCivic eliminating bubble officers. She said she previously watched a case manager get brutally attacked by an inmate while the bubble ran with one person, a post she understood was supposed to be staffed by two or three. 

Rich is still speaking out against the company, she said, because of what happened to Levering.

Years earlier, a 2017 Justice Department inspector general audit had flagged the facility’s failure to staff mandatory security posts, warning it compromised safety and security.

Officers were increasingly posted alone, sometimes responsible for two 64-person units, Levering said. 

“They were hiring kids right out of high school,” Levering said, calling them “sitting ducks.” Without enough officers, downstream everyday functions also collapsed. Recreation stopped when there was no one to run it, Rich and Rogers said. Officers were pulled off their units for weeks at a time, according to Rogers, which left inmates in day rooms with no one to turn to. The locks to the cells were breaking, Levering said, even as CoreCivic refused to put enough people on the units to keep them secure. The ACLU and federal public defenders confirmed that detainees, unable to lock their own cells, built makeshift barricades and armed themselves.

The day an inmate split Rogers’s head open with a food tray, he said he was covering three units alone with no bubble officer watching. He had already emailed the warden about the lack of coverage. He lost his radio in the assault, stranding him and unable to call for backup. The wound took 14 staples to close, he said. Rogers also said he was required to finish his shift before driving himself to the hospital. All the warden had to say to him about the incident was that “the takedown you did was a little rough,” he recounted.

“How do we expect them to act?” Rogers asked. “We have to bear some of that responsibility. … We lost control of that place.” 

Gustin said CoreCivic does not supply specific figures about staffing in any of its prisons for “safety reasons,” but added, “We are appropriately staffed based on the number of individuals in our care.” CoreCivic attributed staffing shortages to Covid, despite the 2017 audit, which found chronic understaffing years before the pandemic. In 2021, ACLU affiliates and federal public defender offices in four states jointly documented an average of nearly 37 violent incidents per month at CoreCivic Leavenworth between May and July of that year, just months after Levering was attacked.

Asked about the 2021 conditions, Gustin said “staffing was the main contributor to the challenges.” He also said incidents from “more than five years ago” do not reflect conditions in the facility today. 

What the Machine Produced

On the day of the incident that would leave her permanently disabled, Levering said that she and her co-worker Diana Polanco were the only two officers on the floor. It was Polanco’s second day on the job, and she wasn’t yet OC certified, a prerequisite for carrying pepper spray.

Levering remembers the inmate being released directly into her path but little else about the assault.

“My eyes were closed, and I was in the fetal position on the ground. I didn’t know he was stabbing me, because your adrenaline’s going,” Levering said. According to the Leavenworth Police Department report, she was stabbed four times in the ear, once in the arm, and twice in the abdomen. Before anyone reached her to help, she remembered wondering, “Where the hell is everybody?”

Polanco tried to step in to help Levering. She suffered a broken jaw, stab wounds to her back and face, fractured ribs, and lasting nerve damage.

Levering’s injuries were catastrophic. She lost 24 inches of her colon and spleen, according to the incident report. A punctured lung was not disclosed to her for a year, until she says a doctor seemingly mentioned it by accident. She has received 16 facial reconstruction surgeries, and five years later, she is still undergoing medical procedures related to her injuries. She lives with permanent facial paralysis, chronic vertigo, chronic gastrointestinal issues, and walks with a cane. Her PTSD, aggravated by serving in Iraq, is debilitating. After 10 months as a prison guard, she now lives on $825 a month in disability payments.

Warren Richardson, the federal prisoner who attacked Levering and Polanco, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and assault with a dangerous weapon, and was sentenced to 300 months. The federal record describes the attack as “nearly killing” both women.

Over roughly five years at the facility, Rogers said he was assaulted seven times, and no one from CoreCivic asked if he was OK or offered counseling. Since the injuries were on the job, Rogers said the company was responsible for his medical expenses. But the invoices remained unpaid and were forwarded to a collections agency instead, he said. Trapp, of the Carceral Accountability Council, has watched the job take its toll on Rogers.

“When he gets talking about some of the deaths that he witnessed, he’s re-experiencing it. I can see it in his eyes,” Trapp said. “I’ve worked with a lot of trauma survivors, and I’m not qualified to make a diagnosis in the state of Kansas, but I see it, the hauntedness.”

Rich couldn’t understand why other injured officers were paid settlements while Levering only had her initial medical bills covered, despite suffering from permanent disabilities. With no further support from CoreCivic, the Carceral Accountability Council launched a GoFundMe to help with her continued recovery.

CoreCivic did not respond to detailed questions about the February 6, 2021, attack, the uncertified officer on the floor, or its treatment of Levering afterward, including whether it provided any support for her injuries.

The ICE Escalation in a Town of Prisons

Widely known as one of the nation’s quintessential prison towns, Leavenworth, Kansas, has been in the corrections business for more than 150 years. The Army raised Fort Leavenworth above the Missouri River in 1827, and later established what remains the U.S. military’s only maximum-security prison. Kansas opened its state penitentiary in neighboring Lansing in 1868. By 1903, the federal penitentiary had taken its first prisoners. Convicts built much of it, marching over from the old military prison at Fort Leavenworth each day. For generations, guarding prisoners has been one of Leavenworth’s steadiest livelihoods, work that has employed hundreds across the fort, the state pen, and the federal walls.

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In the U.S., the private prison industry is worth somewhere around $6 billion, much of which comes from government contracts. Corrections Corporation of America, which later rebranded as CoreCivic, opened the Leavenworth Detention Center in 1992 as the country’s first for-profit maximum-security prison under direct federal contract. Gustin, the company’s spokesperson, acknowledged “there were challenges as that contract neared expiration” but said the company was otherwise “proud of the operational track record we’ve built.” 

CoreCivic, which owns more prisons and jails than any private company in the country, has a documented history of neglect, safety failures, and worker exploitation. In 2021, while still under the U.S. Marshals Service contract, Kansas federal Judge Julie Robinson called the facility “an absolute hell hole.” 

But with the advent of the Trump administration’s mass detention and deportation system, the company is looking forward to a bright — and very profitable — future. On a February earnings call, CEO Patrick Swindle called Immigration and Customs Enforcement “our first customer 43 years ago” and “our largest customer for over a decade.” The company’s profits reached $116.5 million in 2025, a nearly 70 percent increase over the previous year, and ICE revenue more than doubled in the final quarter. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law in July 2025, directed roughly $45 billion to expanding ICE detention, nearly quadrupling the agency’s annual spending. On the call, the company said it could supply ICE with nearly 13,000 more beds for the Trump administration’s expansion, a figure Swindle said “does not include additional capacity we may be able to provide through other means.”

Of those beds, 1,033 are in Leavenworth. Nine days after the city commission vote on March 10, CoreCivic reopened its doors and began housing ICE detainees. As a condition of approval, the special use permit required the city to establish a community oversight committee.

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Behind every understaffed shift and unanswered emergency code at Leavenworth is a facility expected to generate $60 million a year. To Levering, CoreCivic’s profit incentive means “they don’t see us as humans, or the inmates as humans. … We’re all numbers to produce for them.”

Promises Made, Promises Broken

The warning bells about Leavenworth started ringing years ago. The 2017 inspector general report concluded the facility had concealed triple-bunking, where a third bed was installed in several cells meant to house two inmates, from auditors staging full staffing and cleanup on inspection days. Those concerns went unaddressed, Rich said, save for a scramble to paint and clean before each audit. CoreCivic’s own internal investigation concluded the bunks had been removed “intentionally to conceal” the practice, and the company responded to its own finding by instituting ethics training and a non-retaliation policy for employees reporting misconduct.

Among the promises that haven’t come to fruition are good-paying jobs for the community. Malloy, the CoreCivic vice president, had promised “starting salaries of $28.58/hour.” But CoreCivic’s current Leavenworth listings show multiple positions below his pledge: certified medical assistant at $21.19, medical records Supervisor at $23.92, facility locksmith at $26.08, and treatment counselor at $26.96. The detention officer rate, the most dangerous and high-turnover role, sits at $28.25.

Gustin called any notion of a wage discrepancy “false” and said the figures Malloy offered were “an approximate starting wage for a detention officer position.”

Malloy also pledged to use “area construction contractors and labor.” But a building permit dated March 19, dated six days before Malloy’s email, shows CoreCivic had already hired Texas-based Bass Roofing for $1,145,600. CoreCivic hired the contractor; the contractor employed the workers. Gustin confirmed the company chose an out-of-state contractor that “handled similar work at another one of our federal facilities, which required special clearances for workers,” and said it favors providers who meet “stringent labor requirements.”

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Rogers, the former prison guard, had spoken at city commission meetings about the roofing project, alleging that instead of bringing jobs to the community, the project relied on undocumented laborers. On April 17, 2025, CoreCivic’s deputy general counsel sent him a cease-and-desist letter, copied to the Leavenworth Police chief, which sharply disputed those claims. 

“To ensure that its contractors’ employees are legally authorized to work in the United States, CoreCivic requires all contractors, including Bass Roofing and Extra Squares Roofing (whose employees are working on MRRC’s roofing restoration) to strictly comply with Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, requirements and participate in E-Verify,” the letter read. “Our review of this confirms that any representation that undocumented or unauthorized workers have worked on the MRRC project is false.”

Six days later, outside counsel sent a defamation threat demanding he retract his statements. The letter cited his 2020 termination for “excessive force,” setting an April 25, 2025, deadline for Rogers to publicly detract his allegations.

That date passed; no lawsuit has materialized. To Rogers, the letter was a clear attempt to intimidate him into silence. CoreCivic did not say whether the threatened lawsuit was ever filed, and Gustin dismissed former employees-turned-critics, saying there “have only been a few former employees who have spoken out” about the facility.

The Gap

Rogers said that at first, the schedule was easy: eight-hour training shifts, Monday through Friday. In Tennessee, a 2023 audit by the comptroller found turnover among correctional officers at the four prisons CoreCivic runs for the state averaged 146 percent, a staggering figure compared with 37 percent turnover at the state-run facilities. As of mid-August, Leavenworth reportedly holds more than 500 detainees, still well below the 1,033-bed capacity CoreCivic projected.

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There has also been a worrying continuity in top leadership: The warden running the ICE operation, Misty Mackey, was the assistant warden at the same Leavenworth facility in February 2021.

The city commissioners faced an impossible task that stood to devastate Leavenworth no matter which way they voted. 

“It’s a lot to ask five part-time citizen-legislators to put their city on the line to be singularly responsible for stopping the mass deportation agenda,” Trapp said.

Levering, who watched officers treat American inmates “like they’re subhuman,” expects immigrant detainees to fare even worse. “They’re still human beings first, just like you and I,” she said.

The chasm between what CoreCivic promises a community to set up its ICE operations and what it actually delivers may be measured in emergency rooms and disability checks. The same company that has now supercharged the mass detention of immigrants left Marcia Levering living on $825 a month with lasting disabilities and buried Bill Rogers in medical bills as he copes with PTSD.

“If they did to Marcia Levering what they did,” Rogers said. “If that’s how they treated her — then why would they care about a detainee?”

This time, the people on both sides of the door have less protection than before.

This story is part 1 in a two-part series. Read the second part here.

The post ICE Revives Former “Hellhole” Prison — And Hires the Same Company To Run It appeared first on The Intercept.

Days after pressuring pop singer Ed Sheeran to drop rapper Macklemore from his tour over the latter’s “Free Palestine” remarks, Kraft claimed in a statement posted to social media that “for decades” he has “supported efforts that create opportunity for Palestinians,” such as initiatives to “to build businesses, create jobs, and forge relationships” between Israelis and Palestinians. The claims were made as a part of Kraft’s pledge to give $2 million to “aid in the region.” 

Kraft did not disclose which organizations would receive his money.

Nor did he mention his long history of donating to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, an organization that collects money on behalf of Israeli soldiers, and the United Democracy Project, the super PAC of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies to tilt American politics in favor of Israel. Kraft has also given money to a host of pro-Israel advocacy groups that attack critics of Israel, spread content that critics warn is Islamophobic, and have steadfastly defended Israel against mounting evidence of its ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Intercept’s analysis of tax forms since 2006 show that Kraft’s charity group, the Kraft Family Foundation, has donated $196,000 to the Friends of the IDF and an additional $123,000 to other organizations — Brothers for Life and Friends of Israel Disabled Veterans — that directly benefit Israeli military soldiers. In his seven separate donations to the Friends of the IDF, Kraft earmarked the money to “Promote education for young Jewish soldiers.”

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Since 2020, Friends of the IDF has poured more than $20 million into its lone soldier program, which supports young Jewish Americans, and Israelis who have no familial support, to serve in the Israeli military’s reserve soldier program, according to an investigation by The Intercept. The program has continued throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Kraft has organized trips to Israel for former and current NFL players, including a 2017 trip in which he led a delegation of former players on a visit to an Israeli Air Force base, organized by the Friends of the IDF.  

In 2019, Kraft gave $20 million to found a new organization, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, now known as the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate. Upon its founding, Kraft pledged the organization would oppose the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, claiming the Palestinian rights movement “and other efforts to delegitimize and undermine the State of Israel are the most disconcerting times for the country I love so much.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reciprocated the love when Kraft announced the new group while accepting an award for his Israel advocacy, declaring, “Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft.”

Over the years, Kraft’s foundation has also given $63,500 to the right-wing media watchdog group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, which has run pressure campaigns against news outlets, journalists, students, and scholars it deems anti-Israel and has routinely denied Israel’s genocide in Gaza, dismissing such evidence as “the Gaza GenoLie.” When Kraft gave $36,000 to CAMERA in 2018, the donation included a memo, “fighting antisemitism.”

In 2011 and 2012, Kraft’s foundation donated $50,000 to boost the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which the Council on American-Islamic Relations considers a core part of what it refers to as the “U.S. Islamophobia Network.” As Kraft gave to the think tank, it launched campaigns targeting U.S.-based groups decrying Israel’s human rights violations against Palestinians, such as attacking human rights groups Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine as having ties to “extremist groups” and claiming they were a part of a “web of Hamas support.” The group has more recently dismissed protests against Israel’s genocide as Hamas propaganda. 

In addition, Kraft’s foundation donated $150,000 from 2008 to 2018 to the pro-Israel organization, Middle East Media Research Institute, co-founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer and counterrorism adviser to several Israeli presidents. The group’s website says it exists to “bridge the language gap between the West and the Middle East and South Asia” by translating Arab language media into English. However, journalists and experts have noted selective translations of Arab articles and statements to misrepresent policies of Arab governments as extremist or violent.

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Aside from his donations to nonprofit groups, Kraft has been an active donor to AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project. Through his limited liability company, the Kraft Group, Kraft has given $3 million to the super PAC since its founding in 2022, including $1 million in donations this midterm cycle. During this midterm election cycle, AIPAC has flooded races to oppose candidates who criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza and U.S. military support for Israel, helping make several primaries among the most expensive on record. 

It’s not clear whether these entities were the ones Kraft claims have created jobs and spurred dialogues between Palestinians and Israelis. Kraft, however, is also a regular donor to local Jewish groups in Massachusetts, such as Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston; Temple Emanuel in Newton; and Jewish Family & Children’s Services in Waltham.  

Kraft and the groups mentioned in this story did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

The post Robert Kraft Claims His Donations Help Palestinians. Turns Out He’s Funding Friends of the IDF. appeared first on The Intercept.

Yes, there’s destruction all around. But these players have carefully concocted a plan: to hasten a familiar vision that combines biblical, militant, and futuristic images of the end times so they can save themselves.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy interviews award-winning authors and documentarians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose new book, “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” maps the players who want to speed up the end of the world. 

“We didn’t feel that the old ways of understanding who Trump is, what he’s trying to accomplish — even what fascism is — was fully capturing what we were seeing. Here we’re thinking about invading Greenland, declaring Canada the 51st state, creating an ICE army, the relationship with El Salvador’s maximum-security prisons. So we’re trying to map this,” says Klein. It seemed to be “a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but there is a horizon for the in-group after the cataclysm, and we weren’t seeing that in this politics. It was much more about bunkering down in and taking breakdown for granted.”

“End times fascism is an alliance of three main components,” says Taylor. The religious fundamentalists who helped elect Donald Trump, wanting to hasten along a violent Armageddon so Jesus will return. The tech accelerationists “exalting in the possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over.” The ethnonationalists who view immigration as an existential threat, so they fortress the border and hoard resources. “These different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage,” says Taylor.

It may sound bizarre. And it is. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it, Klein says. “This is a really dangerous pattern of thought: that out of the worst things possible comes the beautiful, glorious golden city. And that’s the template of all of these action films and video games, and it leads one to embrace the worst and to not fear what we should fear,” says Klein. “When Trump shares a video of a remade Gaza with a Trump Tower, he’s doing a version of that story. When Sam Altman says he’s summoning a digital god, and we’re going to have utopia with AI, and yeah, let me cover the whole world with data centers and accelerate the climate crisis because it’s going to be utopia … he’s doing the story. So we have to be able to identify it — because we’re all living with the consequences of this terrible story and we need better stories.”

“In this moment, we’re up against a fascism that is against all humans, in a way. We quote Kelly Hayes, an activist based in Chicago, and she says, ‘Every fascism has its subhumans, and for techno-fascists, it’s just humans in general.’ This is opening up a bigger fight beyond ‘I am a man’ to just like, this is life versus the machines, and there’s something very unprecedented about that and potentially very unifying,” says Taylor, noting that the collective uprising, across the political spectrum, against data centers shows people breaking free of one so-called inevitable future.

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. Today, we’re going to talk about the apocalypse. 

NBC: You truly believe AI can kill us all in less than a decade? 

Jacob Coxon: Yes, I do.

AL: If you’ve been disturbed by the increasingly dystopian flavor of today’s world, you’re not alone. It can be hard to keep track. 

And if you listen to this show, you’re familiar with the imagery: Masked agents in the streets. Soldiers clad in camo patrolling U.S cities. Mounting numbers of U.S. strikes committing extrajudicial killings of civilians in international waters. And a populace faced with a literal war against machines — not just at home but around the world. 

U.S. Central Command’s Adm. Brad Cooper: First our war fighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools.

AL: Washington is in turmoil over calls coming from inside the house to regulate AI before it’s too late. President Donald Trump has called the whole dustup a “hoax,” even as MAGA architect Steve Bannon appeared alongside Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to promote human control over AI, as Congress balks at renewed public pressure to do something — anything — before they recess again until November.

Bernie Sanders: When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry.

Steve Bannon: All they’re trying to do is to use a crisis and turn it to their advantage, turn it to their advantage by creating a moat, a cartel, where not only can’t other aspiring companies get in, but more importantly, they’re going to have a liability shift to the American people.

AL: None of this would come as a surprise to our guests today, award-winning journalists and documentarians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose latest book documents the end-times ideology that unites the players trying to hasten just the final doomsday AI leaders are warning us about.

Today, we’re discussing the players responsible for bringing the most Orwellian features of our collective imagination to life. And we’ll break down just what their project entails: prophecy as policy, and speeding up the end of the world to save the chosen few. 

Klein and Taylor’s new book is called “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World.” 

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker and also the bestselling author of “Doppelganger,” “No Logo,” and “The Shock Doctrine.” She is an associate professor of geography and a co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, and she writes a regular column for The Guardian. 

Naomi Klein, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Naomi Klein: Thank you, it’s great to be with you.

AL: Astra Taylor, also an award-winning journalist and documentarian, is a co-founder of the Debt Collective. She is the author of “The People’s Platform,” which won the American Book Award; “Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone”; and “The Age of Insecurity.” Taylor regularly writes for publications including The New Yorker and the New York Times. 

Astra Taylor, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Astra Taylor: Really excited to be here.

AL: I want to start with how you conceptualized this idea. How did you come to develop the notion of “end times fascism”?

NK: It was born of the early weeks of the new, the second Trump administration — really trying to put our fingers on the continuities and the ruptures of what we were seeing. Both Astra and I had been doing a lot of public conversations, webinars, and we both remember the first Trump administration.

So we were familiar with certain things that we were seeing, but we didn’t feel that the old ways of understanding who Trump is, what he’s trying to accomplish — even what fascism is — was fully capturing what we were seeing. Here we’re thinking about invading Greenland, declaring Canada the 51st state, creating an ICE army, the relationship with El Salvador’s maximum-security prisons. So we’re trying to map this.

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For me personally, I was finding that a lot of people were reading and talking about earlier books of mine, like “The Shock Doctrine,” as a way to understand it. I was feeling like it does not actually capture the full thing. 

History does not just repeat on a loop. We often talk about how it accumulates, it compounds. So as people who are pretty keenly attuned to both political and ecological crises, we were noticing that the planet is a player in our politics, and that this seemed to be a kind of fascism that was different in that it didn’t have a future horizon. This was a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but there is a horizon for the in-group after the cataclysm — and we weren’t seeing that in this politics. It was much more about bunkering down and taking breakdown for granted. 

Those are the origins of it. We’re not saying it’s wholly new; we’re saying that history moves and takes us to new places.

AL: Astra, for people who haven’t read the book, can you tell us briefly, like, a top-level view of what you’re arguing?

AT: We’re arguing that the far right has taken a new apocalyptic turn. To emphasize what Naomi just said, we’re interested in the continuities, but we’re also interested in what has changed.

People for a while have been wondering, is this the F word? Is this fascism? If so, what does that mean for us? This book attempts to answer that question by really taking seriously what has changed. And as a consequence, how has the right wing changed? 

The fascism of the 20th century emerged out of certain catastrophic conditions, the sort of classic fascism, which also had antecedents in colonialism and Jim Crow. It also didn’t come from nowhere. But it was a phenomenon that emerged in the wreckage of the First World War and the Great Depression. It was a response to those crises. 

Today, we’re living in an age of crises that were unimaginable a century ago. Climate change, an era of nuclear weapons — nuclear weapons were not known to Mussolini or Hitler — artificial intelligence, forms of wealth that are incredibly concentrated and incredibly global, social media, incredibly networked media technologies. This planetary scale has shifted the kind of fascism that we’re responding to.

Our argument is that, as a response to these crises, the fascism of today has abandoned the idea of Armageddon ever ending, of there being a future horizon for their in-group. And that end times fascism is actually an alliance. Fascism is always an alliance, an uncomfortable alliance of different groups.

But end times fascism is an alliance of three main components. The book analyzes them, in the ways that they overlap and the ways that they actually conflict.

The religious end-timers who are a major force in the U.S. government and the Israeli government, and more broadly, who have a messianic conviction that the end is nigh and that the Messiah will come, and they want to accelerate what they see as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

The tech end-timers — the tech-right — that is playing with a similar script in the sense that they’re imagining a future where they have created a digital super intelligence or maybe we’ve left the planet.

And then the ethno-nationalist end-timers who view immigration as an existential threat and believe the only response to the increasing disasters and insecurity is to fortress the border and bunker down and save their in-group.

So these different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage. 

There’s old, classic features of fascism: a supremacist thinking, eugenics thinking; a willingness to indulge in violence; a sense of woundedness. Fascism is always a movement of the powerful injured, so their sense that they’re under siege from below. These dimensions, though, have been updated for our new risk-filled era. So the book looks at the coalition and their strengths, but also their weaknesses.

AL: The book is an exploration of how deeply so much of the far right and its grip on sectors from tech to the military has been driven by what you’re talking about, this apocalyptic worldview.

One question I wanted to put to both of you is, when you think about this, how do you understand a vision that is so destructive also being so unifying for these coalitions that you’re talking about?

NK: As Astra was saying, fascism always arises during moments of crisis. Actually, there’s always a kind of a pincer of real crisis. 

When Mussolini and Hitler rose up, the real crises of the wreckage of the First World War, economic desperation, cities choked with orphans, maimed soldiers. These were really genuinely horrific times. In response to what many people understood as the savagery of capitalism revealing itself was a rising militant left.

This was also the years after the Russian Revolution, and it was the years when socialists were saying, “We want a revolution in every country.” It was a global movement, and it was a movement that was saying, “You can’t actually have socialism in one country.”

So elites in every country were quite terrified that the response to these real crises would come for them, come up, would come for the system itself.

And so fascism pivots. It recognizes the rage, and it says, “Your rage is real. We feel it. Hey, here’s who to blame. It’s the immigrants crossing the border. That’s the real invasion. They’re coming for your stuff. They’re coming for your jobs. They’re the reason your life is painful,” and offers up all of the other scapegoats. So that can be unifying. It’s an old trick. That’s the Trump playbook. It’s the [Javier] Milei playbook. It’s the [Jair] Bolsonaro playbook. It’s a global playbook.

This is the other thing that we’re trying to do in the book, is wrench the U.S. out of its parochialism a little bit and be like, actually, the laboratory for this in many ways is more Latin America and Europe. It’s coming at a delay in the United States. And though it has particular characteristics in the United States, and in every country there’s particular characteristics, this is very much a global phenomenon.

But I think we wrote the book because we actually think it’s not that unifying. That scapegoat move is always going to be an effective move, but the nature of this alliance is almost uniquely unsteady because, where it’s useful to look at what is the same and what is different with 20th-century fascism, and — here I should add, massive asterisk: We’re not nostalgic for 20th-century fascism. Ye olde fascism. Don’t want that.

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But it is useful to look at the fact that Mussolini really did, and so did Franco, invest in major public works projects. Hitler did make the trains run on time, famously. Our fascists don’t care about trains, airports. They fly private. They can live with a level of chaos. They deliver less for their own base, for the people who elected them.

We see these ruptures really clearly. In things like Steve Bannon going off on the tech oligarchs, which I never thought people should take all that seriously because he has his own tech oligarchs who’ve been funding him all along.

But we should take seriously these extraordinary uprisings against data centers, where people at the grassroots are finding they have more in common with the people they’ve been warring with over the culture wars they’ve been steadily fed, and going like, “Actually, we all really do agree that we don’t want to live under constant surveillance by Silicon Valley, and we don’t want this data center in our backyard, and we don’t want our kids taught by AI.” Hey, like this is a hell of a lot better than what we saw a few years ago at community meetings. It’s the instability that is really most interesting to us.

By taking them seriously and highlighting how nihilistic and how apocalyptic and how exclusive the vision is, we think we make them weaker, not stronger. We’re saying, “Don’t be afraid to look at this, because actually the more you look at it, the more we drag it into the light, the more vulnerable it is.”

AL: You mentioned this, Astra, laying out the major players in “End Times Fascism” as the religious right, Big Tech, and aspiring bunker-builders, as you describe them, namely those leading the anti-immigrant movement and trafficking in great replacement ideology that’s shaping U.S. policy.

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I want to start with the religious right. This is something we’ve discussed at length on this show, but I want to ask you all, what is something you think the general public understands the least about the extent to which messianism and the end times fixation that comes with it undergirds this political moment and shapes the Trump administration in particular?

AT: People have a vague sense that Trump wouldn’t have been elected if he hadn’t had the support of white evangelicals. He famously got around 80 percent of the evangelical vote in both 2016 and in 2024. So I think people have a sense that the religious right is behind a guy who is incredibly immoral — it feels like a cognitive dissonance there, right? How is this sexual predator who’s been divorced multiple times the hero figure for this group?

Part of what explains that, though, is that they are really occupying a parallel universe. Portions of the evangelical right or Christian Zionists are committed to a version of theology where they think what’s in the Bible is literally going to happen, and that what they need to do is hasten along the sequence of events foretold — most violently and strangely in the Book of Revelation — that bad things will happen on Earth, and that means we’re moving closer to the day when there will be Armageddon and Jesus will return.

Even to a lot of Christians, this seems ridiculous. But there are people at the upper echelons of the U.S. government today who really believe it, and who see acts of violence — acts of terror — as felicitous signs.

We quote pastor John Hagee, who’s a very popular leader of a megachurch in Texas, and he’s just like: Everyone! All my thousands of followers! Call the White House and tell them that you’re so grateful for the war in Iran because that means that the end is nigh, and that means we’re that much closer to being hoovered up in a magic escalator to heaven.

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They have this theological investment in war in the Middle East and this idea that Jesus won’t return until biblical Israel is restored, which is not just the West Bank and Gaza but large swaths of other countries. They’re making common cause with Messianic Jews in Israel who, again, aren’t the whole of the government but have managed to control very powerful portions of it.

What we’re trying to convey is that we actually need to pay attention to what these folks are doing. It doesn’t need to be the majoritarian strand to be an incredibly dangerous one.

One of our recurring jokes — it’s not even a joke, really — as we wrote this book and also as we talk about it, is that to even quote these people makes us sound insane. Because they’re doing things like importing the perfect red heifers from Texas to bring them to the Middle East. Then literally the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is flying over to visit these cows and go: Oh my gosh, I don’t see any spots on them. This is so great. The Bible is coming true.

These people are running the government, and we need to take seriously the risk that that poses to all of us. Again, it’s based on this idea — we return to the narrative in the Book of Revelation because it’s sort of the fundamental mythological script that these three groups are playing with, it’s the root of this apocalyptic strain.

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It essentially is a narrative that says, in the end times, there will be war, there will be pestilence, there will be floods and fires, but that just means we’re getting closer to the end when the chosen few will reach their utopia. It’s a very dangerous script.

For this part of the end times fascist alliance, it’s a literal interpretation of that script. But it’s one that has suffused our culture more broadly. This linear narrative of: Out of catastrophe, the promised land. That narrative is being followed in different sometimes secularized ways by the other parts of the right-wing alliance.

NK: If there’s one thing I learned from writing a book about people who lost their minds during Covid and then became the U.S. government, it’s that nothing is too stupid to actually manifest in reality. I’m not being glib.

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In “Doppelganger,” I quote Philip Roth saying, “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” being a kind of a mantra for our time. But that was before RFK Jr. was put in charge of Health and Human Services. There can be this smug response from liberals of like, “That’s just too silly for me to even have to care about.”

One of the things we dug up in the book is this story that was new to me, which was that in 1969 a Christian fundamentalist named Denis Rohan actually did succeed in firebombing Al-Aqsa [Mosque]. That’s very important to this theological story because the idea is that you have to build the “Third Temple” where Al-Aqsa is in order to create the conditions for the Messiah’s arrival or return, depending on which version of the story you believe. That relates to why you need those spotless red heifers, et cetera. So they are trying to fulfill this. 

But as Astra was saying, this is both a literal threat of, like, it’s literally possible that there could be — as these ideas have become more and more powerful and more mainstream within the Israeli and U.S. government, and as people who were once seen as fringe terrorists like Itamar Ben-Gvir enter the government — it’s becomes more and more possible and more likely that people will do the self-fulfilling version of this prophecy.

Because the prophecy is, first, you have to have Armageddon. And if you were to actually destroy Al-Aqsa and try to rebuild the “Third Temple,” that’s a surefire recipe for World War III with nukes.

So they are creating the story that they claim is inevitable. It’s not inevitable, but they are actually doing their best to fulfill it for all of us. We can’t afford to ignore them. But it’s also a pattern of thought — this is a really dangerous pattern of thought that, out of the worst things possible comes the beautiful, glorious golden city. And that’s the template of all of these action films and video games, and it leads one to embrace the worst and to not fear what we should fear. 

When Trump shares a video of a remade Gaza with a Trump Tower — he’s doing a version of that story.

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When Sam Altman says he’s summoning a digital god, and we’re going to have utopia with AI, and yeah, let me cover the whole world with data centers and accelerate the climate crisis because it’s going to be utopia, and we’ll all just be lying around just being in awe of the wisdom that AI has unleashed for us — he’s doing the story.

So we have to be able to identify it — because we’re all living with the consequences of this terrible story, and we need better stories.

[Break]

AL: This is a good segue into talking about perhaps one of the most visible manifestations of this apocalyptic project, as you mentioned, Naomi: AI and data centers, which you all situate as part of the doom cycle. You get into this question, but I want to talk with you both about how this particular issue has brought so many of us together in unified hatred.

I love this portion of the book where you talk about this. Across the ideological spectrum, why do people hate data centers so much? What exactly is so universally repulsive about them and what they represent?

AT: This is the kind of thing that gives you hope in humanity. Why do we hate data centers? Listen to the guys running these tech companies. They’re like, “Hi, we’re going to suck up all of the energy. We’re going to raise your electricity bills. We’re going to build these big, ugly city-sized buildings that have basically no jobs, that screech and scream all night long, destroy your property values. And guess what you’re going to get in return? You’re going to get no jobs in the future for you or your kids. You’re going to live in a world that is hollowed out because everybody’s talking to their chatbot, maybe dating a chatbot. Then also guess what? It might destroy everything, because it might turn on you. So how does that sound?”

AL: Doesn’t that sound great?

AT: Of course, people are like, “Actually, that sounds terrible. We never asked for this.” 

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Now, what’s interesting is these guys also have all their little podcasts where they talk amongst themselves too, so they’re like, “Geez, did we market this wrong?” And you’re like, yeah, you did, because actually you told us what you really want — which is you foresee a future with no human workers, and full of human alienation and loneliness, where one or two companies control the entire economy and maybe destroy humanity.

The reasons people object to this are obvious. It’s also building on years and years of a mounting tech-lash on both the left and the right. For different reasons, people were critical of the tech sector, and so that is also part of the foundation.

It’s really important, when Naomi said that they’re utilizing the same template — this, out of catastrophe, some kind of renewal for the chosen few. When you hear these folks talk about it, one of the founders of Google said it was “species-ist” to care about the fate of humanity, as opposed to exalting in the possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over. That somehow we’re just close-minded for wanting to actually make a better world for human beings.

They literally talk about AI as a god or as a demon. And so they’re playing with these religious tropes. Of course, somebody like Peter Thiel and other high-powered people in Silicon Valley are increasingly coming out as Christians. Most famously, in his lectures about the Antichrist, which — tellingly — he says is somebody who wants to bring about control of AI, or like Greta Thunberg, some climate rationality.

So they’re playing with these overt theological elements. But ultimately what’s underpinning it is a material drive to own as much of the economy as possible, even if it destroys the lives of billions of people.

NK: On that last point, it’s a very profitable dream. I think that that’s true, honestly, for the theologians as well, that this is always, as [Karl] Marx said, there are opiate qualities to the story that heaven awaits, and yes, you’re suffering in the here and now, but do these things and you’re going to be in paradise.

That’s always been a story that has been very helpful to elite interests. The fact that the richest men on the planet are now telling it to us about their tech that is rapidly making them into trillionaires. It doesn’t mean they don’t believe it, but they certainly have motivations for telling us these stories. For telling us that we’re being speciesist and that we have to go along in this way.

But just on your point, why are people rejecting it? There’s this little detail that we came across in the story of one of the data center fights that I think people are by now very familiar with or should be familiar with. I think Intercept readers are familiar with what Elon Musk has done in Memphis. It’s a story of unbelievable environmental racism. The siting of these massive data centers that are impacting a majority-Black part of Memphis, Boxtown, which has these long roots of resistance. 

It’s called Boxtown because it was built with the discarded parts of railway cars that were then turned into homes. Because it was unincorporated — and this is true of many Black communities — it was also chosen to be a place with very high levels of industrial pollution. It has a very strong environmental justice community, and it has all of this historical resonance because this is where Martin Luther King Jr. went to stand with the sanitation workers, which the organizers that we interviewed in Memphis consciously see the struggle as being part of that lineage and see the sanitation strike in Memphis as being the beginning of the environmental justice movement in the United States because it was a fight against a toxic workplace and work conditions. 

But the detail that I was referring to, in that fight that I think often gets overlooked, is that the reason that Musk chose Memphis to build what he calls Colossus — the largest supercomputer in world history, and then he built a couple more — was because he needed to do it quickly. So he decided that he needed to find a place that would give him all the giveaways, but also where there was an empty building. He didn’t want to have to build a building from scratch. He wanted to move into a preexisting building. 

In Memphis, they found a factory that was empty and in very good condition, and it was an Electrolux factory. If you look into the history of the Electrolux factory in Memphis, it’s a story of de-industrialization and free trade and broken promises because this is a factory that actually was producing ovens and other appliances, and it was moved from Canada to Memphis — from Quebec to Memphis — under NAFTA rules chasing lower wages.

So 3,000 higher-paid jobs became less than 1,000 lower-paid jobs in Memphis with contractors and so on. You see this race to the bottom. All these things were promised. They didn’t create nearly as many jobs with the Electrolux factory as they said they would. The wages weren’t as good as they said they would be. They said that all these other factories would open up, too. They didn’t. 

So the re-industrialization didn’t happen with Electrolux. But then there’s this empty building, and Musk moves in, and it’s barely any jobs. We call it a ghost factory. That image of the abandoned factory was the image of the de-industrialization of the NAFTA years. But now we have this new image, which is a reoccupied former factory that once had almost 1,000 workers and now is just a bunch of buzzing computers, and whose end goal is to eliminate everyone’s job.

So why would people accept the trade-offs of that, because Musk also rigged together all of these polluting gas turbines in order to get it online quickly? 

This is what we mean by history compounds. It’s not a loop. It’s more like a spiral taking us somewhere.

AT: Martin Luther King, those were the famous protests, of course, with the “I am a man” sign, where the aspiration was like, “I’m a man, recognize me as equal and human.”

In this moment, we’re up against a fascism that is against all humans, in a way. We quote Kelly Hayes, an activist based in Chicago, and she says, “Every fascism has its subhumans, and for techno-fascists, it’s just humans in general.” This is opening up a bigger fight beyond “I am a man” to just like, this is life versus the machines, and there’s something very unprecedented about that and potentially very unifying.

AL: You both pointed this out, and you get into this in the book, as to why tech giants like Elon Musk were so quick to jump on this right-wing train with the explosion of AI and how they abandoned progressive promises on the environment to warfare.

For our listeners, I’m wondering if you can walk us through that. As you point out, many of those promises were largely performative in the first place. But what made it so easy for tech titans to switch political teams here? What, if any, responsibility do Democrats hold in this dynamic?

NK: Lots of responsibility. [Laughter.]

Huge amounts of responsibility because I think that it was the Democrats — and Clinton, Obama — who first under Clinton accepted the idea of the internet as a frontier zone that couldn’t possibly be regulated or taxed. And then this continued under Obama with this very tight relationship with Silicon Valley and a revolving door of lots of people from the administration going off and taking jobs at Uber and Google and Microsoft.

Buying into this idea that these companies were blue and green and a new era — leaving sort of the dirty industrialization behind — and I think really participated in a lot of rhetoric that many of us understood to be hollow at the time, that they could be trusted to do voluntary net-zero, and they were greening their businesses, and it was all solar power and rainbows.

Under Biden, there did begin to be some changes. Astra can maybe talk about this more in terms of the intersection of the tech-lash and the fact that the Biden administration did start — not doing enough — but started doing things like hiring Lina Khan and introducing some regulations.

AT: The actions that the Biden administration took I think also should be credited to grassroots pressure to the tech workers who were organizing in the major companies. There were Google workers who walked out, both demanding better policies around sexual harassment, but also into certain military contracts.

There was a general sense from progressives and liberals that the tech sector was actually not bringing about the democratic transformation that they had so loudly promised in the years before. The Biden administration was making some moves that I think to us seemed pretty modest. It’s not like there were baseline privacy protections. It’s not like they were breaking up the tech monopolies, but yes, they hired Lina Khan and started to put up some basic regulations on crypto. That said, they did bail out Silicon Valley Bank, which was a crypto scandal. Then the folks they bailed out immediately made huge campaign contributions to Donald Trump. So that to me is a sort of parable for everything that went awry.

Ultimately though, end times fascism is a response to material conditions. Part of the Democratic failure was that they didn’t rein in concentrated wealth while they could. They didn’t regulate Big Tech when it was smaller and easier to do so. They never put constraints on these companies, and then at a certain point, they’re so big, they’re so powerful, that they’re like, “We don’t have to listen to our customers or to the public or to elected officials anymore.” 

This is part of what happens when they start the rollout of generative AI. ChatGPT comes on the scene in 2023, and, again, the public is not asking for this technology. They’re not asking for a job-destroying technology. The tech sector knows that they’re going to have to shove this down people’s throats. What they needed was a strongman to help them do that, and so the alliance with Donald Trump was a merger of convenience. 

What they got was a government that was going to roll out the red carpet in the sense of, “Yes, here’s the frontier,” you know, “No rules. Go for it.” What the Trump administration got was a bubble to dramatically inflate the stock market, and also a partner for the fossil fuel industry because this has given a lifeline to the fossil fuel sector, along with the attacks on renewables. It was a win-win for both camps.

Silicon Valley has a long history of libertarianism, of anti-democratic thinking that was marginal. But its moment has come. Its moment has come because of these underlying material changes. At a certain point, you’re so rich you don’t have to pretend to be nice anymore.

AL: This is a good segue into the final thing I want to end on, which is, and we haven’t really talked as much about the bunkerism and the anti-immigration as much as I wanted to get into. But it’s part and parcel of the thing that was at least in the back of my mind as I was reading this, which is like, where is all of this fricking money coming from?

How is it possible to unleash endless amounts of capital to slash red tape, for not just AI infrastructure and data centers, but also the explosion of Trump’s nationalized police force going after immigrants. When on the flip side, all we hear about policies that actually the public is asking for — to your point, Astra — Medicare for All or substantial climate policy or like green infrastructure policy, all you hear is, “We can’t pay for it.”

So I wonder if you all could talk about that contradiction, and what is the path out of that in terms of flipping that argument on its head? We have the money to pay for anything. We’re just paying for the wrong things.

NK: This is often felt very acutely in the communities that are fighting back against the data centers. We quote KeShaun Pearson in Memphis who heads Memphis Community Against Pollution. He’s also Rep. Justin Pearson‘s brother. He talks about what kind of infrastructure they actually need. We’re getting this data center, but we’re not getting transit, we’re not getting books for our schools. There’s so much else, green energy, no shortage of ideas. The money clearly is there if we decided to spend it differently. 

This is part of why we’re seeing a surge of support for democratic socialism, because people understand that they have been lied to, that there was way more that we could be asking of governments. Even if you look at Trump’s tariff regime and the abandon with which he breaks the trade deals that the U.S. has entered into, shows that these deals were not as binding as we were told, and that they also could’ve been changed, but they could’ve been changed in the interests of working people instead of in the interests of corporations. So a lot more is possible. 

But that said, Akela, it’s very frightening. The decisions that are being made are clearly designed to both hollow out the state and create a time bomb in the stock market that is rigged to explode on working people, on pensioners — and for the people who created this crisis to rapture themselves out of it.

If you look at the SpaceX IPO and the ways that it was written in such a way to force regular investors who just have parts of their pension invested in the stock market to have to invest in this very high-risk company — at the same time as Musk has completely protected himself. Or even if you look at something like the “Board of Peace,” which is an escape plan for the Trump administration. They’re hoping it will give them immunity indefinitely and control indefinitely. These are positions for life. They are thinking about the next stage. 

Part of what Astra and I are talking about is, this is not old-school colonialism in the sense that the imperialism that “discovered the New World” was based on this idea of boundlessness. What we think we’re seeing with seizing Venezuela’s oil or seizing Canada’s water or seizing critical minerals in Greenland is much more like super-sized “prepping” and making sure that as this all goes down, they have access to the resources, that this elite group of people has access to the resources they need.

It’s not necessarily as thought out as I’m making it sound. Maybe it is, but it’s more of an impulse. The impulse is not one of expansion and domination and boundlessness; it’s bringing the resources into the bunker, and also extracting from the state everything that you possibly can for this kind of next phase.

AT: Just to add on what Naomi said. It’s a really good way to put it, which is the sense of boundlessness versus the awareness today that boundaries are being crossed. So yes, they might superficially be climate denialists. We see the Trump administration killing renewable projects and scrubbing the word “climate change” or mentions of greenhouse gas emissions from websites. But these people are not idiots. 

All those guys in Silicon Valley, they know climate change is real. Many people in the Trump administration do as well. So it’s that sense that, yeah, real boundaries are being pushed past in terms of the chemistry of the planet, in terms of the concentration of wealth, in terms of what these incredibly dangerous technologies are capable of. And instead of pulling back, they’re pressing the gas on those fronts, knowing that it will be catastrophic for the majority of people.

And when you are playing with fire like that, you need an ideology to rationalize the damage. That’s where fascism is useful, because it tells you a story that you deserve everything you’ve got. You deserve to be a trillionaire. You deserve to have your luxury bunker, you deserve to have the first flight out of the disaster zone because you’re superior for whatever reason. Because of your race, because of your religion, because of your passport, because of your superior genes, because you’re a genius or whatever.

There’s a feedback loop where the sense of superiority justifies the destruction, and then the destruction fuels more fascist thought. We need to break that cycle by saying, “No,” like, “That’s totally unacceptable and won’t work out for the vast majority of us. Let’s pull the emergency brake before it’s too late.”

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AL: I want to thank you both for taking the time and remind all our listeners you can read “End Times Fascism” now. You all have a very wonderful section talking about the politics of hereness and how we chart our way out of this, and we didn’t get to talk about that, but I wish we had more time. Naomi and Astra, thank you both so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

AT: Thanks for having us.

NK: It was such a pleasure.

AL: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Video production by Sean Turner. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Apocalypse Now: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance appeared first on The Intercept.

Hegseth’s Theology and the Question: What Would Jesus Do?

There is a question Christians have been asking for generations: What would Jesus do?

It is a deceptively simple question that is printed on bracelets and bumper stickers, taught to children in Sunday schools, and invoked when Christians are discerning how faith should shape public life. The question becomes considerably more demanding when the decisions at stake concern war, immigration, poverty, political power, and the use of military force.

In addition to the recent attention about his military strategy, social and political beliefs, and leadership style, Pete Hegseth’s public theology deserves serious attention from those unfamiliar and disinterested in religion as well as adherents of Christianity.

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As secretary of defense, Hegseth has increasingly spoken about American power in explicitly Christian language. He has hosted Christian worship at the Pentagon, invoked Scripture in connection with military service, emphasized the Christian foundations of the United States, and described some Trump administration policies — including border enforcement — as “biblical.” Indeed, speaking at a Christian media convention last February, Hegseth connected the health and founding of the United States with Christianity and characterized border and immigration policies as mandated in the Bible.

The question about Hegseth’s faith and religious practice, however, cannot simply be whether he is sincere. The question is more fundamental: What kind of Christianity is being proclaimed when the language of Jesus is attached to military power? Or perhaps a simpler but harder question: In the face of war, authoritarianism, economic, environmental, and political crises: What would Jesus do?

A Christianity of Power

The Christian faith has always contained competing visions of what it means to follow Jesus. There is a Christianity that blesses kings, armies, empires, and national ambitions. There is another Christianity that remembers a Palestinian Jewish leader who was unhoused and a migrant and was executed by an imperial power after heralding the arrival of a radically different kingdom. This distinction matters a great deal.

Hegseth routinely emphasizes strength, warriors, national identity, borders, enemies, and divine blessing. And joining forces with Israel to prosecute the war with Iran has only heightened the stakes of his rhetoric. Early in the conflict, Hegseth cited Psalm 144, including its language about God training hands for war and fingers for battle.

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There is nothing inherently un-Christian about a person in the military having a sincere religious faith. People of faith serve in the armed forces for many reasons. Generations of religious scholars and adherents have considered war and conflict as it relates to the faith through theories and practices of religious pacifism, “just war,” defensive war, theologies of self-defense, conceptions of the last days, and the ethical limits of violence in humanitarian conflicts, among others. The theological problem arises, however, when the power of the state begins to present itself as an instrument of God’s purposes.

That is a very old temptation.

Empires have long claimed divine sanction. Kings have declared their wars holy. Nations have wrapped their ambitions in sacred language. And Christians have at times sought to confuse the interests of the nation with the kingdom of God. But Jesus does something profoundly disruptive to this arrangement: He refuses to identify God with Caesar.

The People at the Margins

Consider where Jesus directs our attention. Throughout the Bible, Jesus embraces people whom those with power, military might, and wealth have pushed aside: the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, immigrants, women, children, tax collectors, and those treated as religious outsiders.

In Matthew 25, one of the most famous Bible passages — sometimes called the “Last Judgment” — Jesus identifies with the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these,” he teaches, “you did for me.”

That is not an incidental teaching. It is a political and theological reorientation. And it is directed at nations, not simply individuals or religious congregations.

The question Jesus asks his followers is not first, “How strong is your nation?” It is not, “How effectively have you defeated your enemies?” It is not even, “How faithfully have you defended your borders?” Instead, he asks: How has your nation treated the most vulnerable among you? This matters enormously when Christian language is used to justify violent and exclusionary immigration policy or when it is used to promote cutting off families from food or lifesaving healthcare.

If we claim that border enforcement is “biblical,” then Christians must practice the Bible’s extraordinary insistence on welcoming the other. After all, Scripture commands God’s people to remember that they, too, were once strangers in a foreign land, and the way to honor and worship God is by welcoming the immigrant neighbor. If Matthew 25 means what Christians have traditionally claimed, Christ is encountered precisely among the hungry, the unhoused, the incarcerated — and that as long as anyone is unfree and impoverished, it is the responsibility of the nation to do something about it.

Theology of the Enemy

There is another problem with a Christianity centered on military strength: its understanding of the enemy. Christianity does not teach that some people become less human because they are someone’s adversaries. It does not profess that God blesses battleships nor justifies genocide (even if Hegseth’s spiritual adviser claims it does).

Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies may be among the most difficult teachings in the entire New Testament. It is also one of the clearest.

Jesus does not say, “Love your friends and destroy your enemies.” He says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Jesus does not say, “Blessed are the powerful because they shall dominate.” He says, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the descendants of God,” and “Blessed are the poor for they shall be first under God’s reign.”

That does not mean that people of faith must be naïve about violence. It does not mean governments face no genuine security threats. It does not erase the moral complexity of protecting human beings from violence. But it does mean that people who call themselves Christians should be extraordinarily cautious whenever military violence is described as holy, righteous, inevitable, or divinely ordained.

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Christian tradition contains a long history of wrestling with war. It also contains an even deeper tradition of martyrs, peacemakers, conscientious objectors, abolitionists, human rights activists, and nonviolent movements that have insisted that human beings cannot be reduced to enemies.

On “Christ Is King”

One phrase that increasingly appears in Hegseth’s public religious rhetoric is “Christ is King.” On the surface, this is an ancient Christian confession. But Christians should be careful about what happens when it is fused with nationalism. If Christ is King, then Caesar is not. If Christ is King, then the nation cannot be God. If Christ is King, then military might cannot be the ultimate measure of righteousness. And if Christ is King, then Christians must remember what kind of king Jesus was.

Jesus did not arrive in Jerusalem on a tank. He did not establish his kingdom through an air campaign. He did not recruit an army to seize the Roman state. Jesus entered the city on a donkey. He washed his disciples’ feet. He touched people considered untouchable. He fed hungry crowds. He stood with the condemned. And when his disciples reached for weapons, Jesus told them to put them away. This is not weakness; it is a different conception of power and a different idea of violence, military and force. And it stands worlds away from the Hegseth’s professed belief in a conquering Christ.

Christian nationalism raises the question of who counts as part of the nation — and, implicitly, who counts as part of the Christian community. Hegseth’s religious politics have attracted scrutiny because of his association with a conservative Reformed Christian milieu and his willingness to amplify figures and institutions associated with Christian nationalist ideas. That should concern Christians not because Christianity should be banished from public life, but because Christianity is too important to be reduced to a tribal identity. There is no nationalism in the Sermon on the Mount; there is no exceptionalism in the Last Judgment.

Jesus did not teach his followers to build communities divided by race, citizenship status, wealth, or political loyalty. The early Christian proclamation was astonishing precisely because it created a community in which Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female could belong together.

Christianity becomes spiritually dangerous when it is transformed from a call to discipleship into a badge of national membership, and a cross becomes something very different when it is used to sanctify exclusion, violence, and war, especially against the poor and marginalized.

So, What Would Jesus Do?

Let’s stop treating “What would Jesus do?” as a sentimental slogan. Instead, ask the question concretely.

What would Jesus do when a family fleeing poverty and violence arrives at the border?

What would Jesus do when a child is separated from a parent?

What would Jesus do when a nation considers going to war?

What would Jesus do when military personnel are asked to kill (and the nation suggests canceling student debt to those who sign up to do that killing)?

What would Jesus do when poor communities are abandoned while enormous resources flow into weapons?

What would Jesus do when a government claims God has blessed its political program?

And what would Jesus do when Christians begin to believe that their nation has a special claim on God?

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The Gospels give us clues. Jesus runs toward suffering rather than away from it. Jesus challenges religious authorities who use God to legitimize their own power. Jesus feeds people rather than lecturing them. Jesus welcomes the stranger. Jesus stands with those society declares expendable. And Jesus tells his followers that greatness consists not in domination but in liberation. That is a radically different theology of power.

Another Christian Patriotism

Christianity offers an alternative to nationalism that does not require Christians to abandon love of country, but it begins by refusing to worship their nation. It means loving one’s neighbors, including neighbors who have crossed a border. It means seeking peace rather than glorifying war. It means protecting human life rather than measuring success by military superiority. It means asking whether public resources are being used to ensure that every person has food, housing, healthcare, education, dignity, and a meaningful opportunity to flourish.

And it means remembering that the Bible’s central story is not the triumph of one nation over all others. It is the liberation of an oppressed people. It is the insistence that Pharaoh does not have the final word. That is why the question “What would Jesus do?” cannot be separated from the question raised by Florence Reece’s popular song written in 1931 in Harlan County, Kentucky, during the union organizing drive of the United Mine Workers: “Which side are you on?”

Christian faith does not ask us to look down from the Pentagon, the White House, or any other seat of power and decide which people deserve compassion. Instead, Jesus teaches us to love God, love your neighbor, love even your enemy — and recognize Christ in the people that those in power tell you to hate and fear.

When Christian nationalism asks its followers to choose between faith and the stranger, between military might and peacemaking, between national supremacy and human solidarity, Christians — including the Christians in the highest reaches of power — should ask a different question. Not “How can we make America powerful enough to win?” But: What would Jesus do?

The answer begins where the Gospel always has: feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrant, freeing the oppressed, and telling the people at the bottom that God has not forgotten them. That is not a weak Christianity. It is Christianity’s most dangerous claim about power: The last shall be first. The mighty shall be brought down. And the kingdom of God belongs not to those who dominate, but to those who serve.

The post Pete Hegseth’s Unholy War appeared first on The Intercept.

The group, Neighbors for Strong Communities, asked Ashley Smith to speak out in support of Flock’s controversial license-plate readers. The nonprofit even offered to use artificial intelligence to help her draft an email to public officials.

There was only one catch: Smith, a mother of four, said she noticed that she would only be supplied with text if she indicated she supported the Flock cameras.

Instead of offering support, Smith dashed off her own email — an outraged missive to her elected officials and a local blog outlining what she saw as an insidious PR campaign.

“If the interests beyond this surveillance technology will work this hard to deceive you to win a vote, what will they do with the database of our every movement?” she said. “A company that manipulates and manufactures fake neighbors is not a company that will honor our data policies, audit logs, or the privacy of the people of Knox County.”

The text message to Smith revealed little about the Flock campaign’s origins.

As it turns out, the campaign was the product of a “partnership” between Flock and a newly created nonprofit that has used similar tactics in support of the controversial proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. Opponents of the merger derided the nonprofit’s work there as corporate “astroturf” — the practice of drumming up fake grassroots support.

The combination of texts and AI-generated messages fell short of swaying public officials in Knoxville. Last month, the county commission became the latest municipal body to vote to cancel the Flock contract.

In both the Paramount and Flock cases, however, Neighbors for Strong Communities’s work has raised questions about what counts as truly grassroots organizing.

“One of the concerns of the people with the Flock cameras is: Can we trust you?” Smith told The Intercept. “And this sort of manipulation of people’s desires already shows that they are secretive, and they are not willing to share the honest information.”

Flock and Neighbors for Strong Communities did not respond to requests for comment. On its website, the nonprofit said it had a lead role in the pro-Flock campaign. “Flock Safety brought experience with public safety technology. Neighbors independently designed and managed the resident-engagement campaign, helping Knox County residents share their experiences directly with local decision-makers,” the organization said.

There are, however, no signs of a genuine upswell in grassroots support for Flock, said Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy organization that is critical of both the Paramount merger and Flock.

“This is very much an astroturf project. I mean, there are no neighbors and there are no communities,” he said. “What makes it astroturf is the fake grassroots nature of it.”

“You’re talking about literally one of the most unpopular technologies,” Aaron added, “that has people taking chainsaws to light poles because they don’t like being spied on.”

“This Is So Shady”

Neighbors for Strong Communities’s text messages can look like they come from nearby.

The text Smith received about Flock cameras came from a Knoxville area code. In California, residents received text messages about the Paramount merger from a Los Angeles area code.

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In both cases, residents were presented with a series of questions whose answers would, in at least some cases, be used by Neighbors for Strong Communities to draft AI-generated emails to public officials.

Despite the area codes it sent texts from, Neighbors for Strong Communities was incorporated in Washington, D.C., in June.

Although the group does not list a board or staff members on its website’s “About” page, its incorporation papers show that its directors include several political consultants, including at least one former registered lobbyist.

At least two directors at Neighbors for Strong Communities also helped found Influent, a company that uses AI to generate letters to elected officials. Text messages to Knoxville residents linked to a URL with the word “influent” in the address. Whether Influent has a business relationship with Flock is unknown. (Influent did not respond to a request for comment.)

The page on Neighbors for Strong Communities’s website dedicated to Knox County features an image of a man with six fingers — a rare condition that is also a hallmark of AI-generated imagery. The page says Flock’s supporters are “real people.”

Smith said she was confused to receive the text message from Neighbors for Strong Communities, which she had never heard of despite her long involvement in local politics. In its message to her, the group seemed to play up a local connection.

“Knox County Neighbors for Strong Communities is asking local residents to speak up in support of responsible license plate readers with strong privacy protections before the vote on Monday,” the text message said. “Answer 2 quick questions and we’ll help you generate a personalized message urging local leaders to support this practical public safety tool.”

She filled out the form from Neighbors for Strong Communities twice, at first indicating her opposition to license-plate reader cameras, she said. Only on the second attempt, when she pretended that she supported the cameras, was she given the draft of an email to her county commissioners. The draft did not indicate the use of AI or its connection to the nonprofit group.

The experience disturbed Smith, who felt certain that she would have heard of a grassroots group in Knoxville given her years of organizing in local conservative politics.

“This is so shady,” Smith remembered telling herself. “If you’re in opposition, they don’t let you send that to your commissioners. But if you’re in support, they’re sending that to all of the commissioners.”

Smith started digging — and she used artificial intelligence to help. Her searches turned up Neighbors for Strong Communities’s incorporation paperwork in Washington, D.C.

Knox shared her findings with her county commissioner Andy Fox and a popular Facebook page for local politics. She noted that the address the nonprofit provided was shared with an Italian restaurant in D.C. (The group has since updated its address, which it shares with a UPS store in Santa Monica, California.) When the Facebook page shared her findings, at least nine residents posted comments saying they had received text messages, too.

“Clearly a PR Campaign”

Neighbors for Strong Communities’s intervention came at a perilous moment for Flock.

The company had already reaped more than $2 million from the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, but county commissioners said they had never been asked to approve a contract.

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Residents on the right and left were raising concerns about privacy protections and the camera network’s history of being used by rogue law enforcement officers to stalk former romantic partners.

The nonprofit’s outreach effort appears to have generated a flurry of emails to commissioners arguing that the cameras were needed to prevent crime. Former at-large Commissioner Larsen Jay shared eight emails that he received from constituents supporting the use of license-plate readers.

None of those emails were identical, but their language was similar enough to raise red flags for Jay, whose service on the commission wrapped up at the end of August.

The emails Jay shared with The Intercept appear to come from genuine residents of the Knoxville area. Two residents confirmed to The Intercept that they had sent emails in support of Flock, although one said she had since switched her position.

While several emails contained personalized details, Jay said he considered the pro-Flock emails to be “form letters” nonetheless. In face-to-face conversations, Jay said, opposition to Flock ran 99-to-1.

“It’s just clearly a PR campaign,” Jay said. “Don’t use my people. That’s how it felt when I started to realize what it was.”

“These Are Real People”

At some point after the pro-Flock campaign came to an end, Neighbors for Strong Communities posted a defense of its tactics on its website.

The group acknowledged that it used “technology” to help residents craft missives to county officials. It said, however, that all of those residents were asked to sign off on the AI-generated drafts.

“Technology played a role in this campaign, but it was never the point,” the group said on its website. “These are real people with real experiences. Whether someone ultimately agrees with every policy position or not, their voices deserve a place in the decisions shaping their community.”

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It remains unclear how the group handled responses from residents who oppose the use of Flock’s cameras. The group said on its website that it “listened” to those responses but did not comment further when asked.

Flock’s partnership with Neighbors for Strong Communities largely flew under the radar until weeks later, when the nonprofit partnered with Paramount Skydance on its proposed merger. Critics of the merger noticed the group’s earlier work in Knoxville and began asking questions about why a nonprofit would work on such disparate campaigns.

Merger critics said the nonprofit’s work in California had all the hallmarks of a phony “astroturf” campaign, which is designed to generate the appearance of grassroots support.

The group drew more negative attention recently, when a merger critic discovered that its AI text generator flipped her criticism of the deal into support. The nonprofit’s spokesperson blamed “a recent system upgrade.”

In Knoxville, Neighbors for Strong Communities appears to have disclosed — at least after the fact — that it “partnered” with Flock on the pro-camera campaign. Still, the group has not disclosed the sources of its funding.

Thomas Lyon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business who has studied corporate public relations, said that a campaign can still be classified as “astroturf” even if it generates letters or emails from ordinary citizens. In the pre-AI era, Lyon said, public relations firms running “astroturf” campaigns for corporations would sometimes call people and offer to draft them letters to public officials over the phone.

The company associated with two of Neighbors for Strong Communities’ directors, Influent, promises on its website that it has a different approach from other corporate influence campaigns.

“Generic astroturf form letters are destined for the trash bin,” the company says in promotion materials. “Every Influent letter, Tweet, phone call, and message is tailored to the individual — each one unique, reflecting the authentic voice of its sender.”

Neighbors for Strong Communities’s own website features similar language stressing the authenticity of supporters’ messages to public officials.

By that measure, at least, the nonprofit missed the mark, according to another county commissioner. Andy Fox — Ashley Smith’s representative on the commission — told The Intercept that he received dozens of “template” emails in support of Flock.

He said, “It doesn’t feel right to me.”

The post Facing Outraged Residents, Flock Got Help From Group That Uses AI to Rally Public Support appeared first on The Intercept.

The New York Times recently published a sweeping accounting of President Donald Trump’s campaign against the American press: FBI agents arriving at reporters’ homes, subpoenas for journalists’ records, Pentagon access restrictions, regulatory pressure on television networks, numerous lawsuits against news organizations, and an increasingly politicized Federal Communications Commission.

“Almost 20 months into Mr. Trump’s second term, his long-running media clashes have grown into a sweeping campaign to control speech in America that stands out for applying so many levers, so fast, all at once,” Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jim Rutenberg wrote. “Each time the president assails what has long been considered protected speech … he is eroding norms and undercutting the role of an independent press.”

All told, it is a damning inventory.

It is also difficult to read without noticing who occupies almost every frame: Us.

Reporters. Editors. Television hosts. Networks. Publishers. Their lawyers. And the access our industry has become so reliant upon. 

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The Times is right about the threat. Trump has indeed weaponized government agencies and private litigation against news organizations in ways that seriously threaten the First Amendment, although judges have repeatedly rebuked parts of the administration’s legal strategy. But Trump’s attacks on free speech have extended well beyond the journalism, from ICE protesters in Los Angeles to faculty in solidarity with Palestine on college campuses. But somewhere along the way, the American press began conflating two things: press freedom, with the conditions under which the press had become accustomed.

Those are not the same thing.

Free speech was never free.

It was wrested loose. Sharpened and stretched, stifled and reborn, often on the backs of those who put the pain and personal safety of others ahead of their own.

In 1892, a little more than two decades after the nation wrenched itself back together from war, Ida B. Wells challenged the lies white Memphis terrorists used to justify lynching Black men in her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In retribution, a mob ransacked her office and destroyed the paper’s printing equipment. Wells happened to be away. Threatened with death if she returned, she continued her investigation from the North. There was no White House Correspondents’ Dinner, no presidential press core podium to be invited to, no shining press awards. As a Black woman, she couldn’t even vote; in her isolation, her best job security was to carry a pistol. 

“It is with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed. Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so,” she wrote in her book on the excruciating personal trade-off she made to pursue her work: perspective. Her fear, exhaustion, and isolation existed beside something larger: actual bodies, tangible violence, and lived injustice.

I will be candid: Melancholy abounds. I write this as a journalist who has grown depressed while slinking through the yearly industry conferences, newsrooms, and brown bag luncheons. There is a palpable dread to most discussions, with an acknowledgment that the world is less fair, less stable, and overwhelmingly more difficult.

We talk about everything. Except the necessity to win, and most importantly, for who.

Israeli airstrikes and other attacks are still killing and displacing Palestinians in Gaza, where the United Nations reported last month that medical shortages and restrictions on critical supplies continue to undermine an already devastated health system. In the West Bank, settler violence, backstopped by the Israeli military, is a daily and growing threat. Israel’s war on Gaza has now killed nearly 300 journalists — more news gatherers than in both world wars, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan combined.

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The Times in particular has done more than almost any other media outlet to launder the justification for this ongoing death and destruction, and to police the language we’re allowed to use when discussing it, which didn’t warrant any mention in its attacks-on-free-speech roundup.

In the U.S., ICE arrests reached nearly 51,000 in August alone as the Trump administration dramatically expanded immigration enforcement. Many of those being detained had no criminal record, while courts continue battling out the administration’s detention practices. A Department of Homeland Security watchdog reported on Monday that immigrants at Florida’s now-defunct “Alligator Alcatraz” prison were confined for more than an hour at a time in outdoor metal cages known as “calming areas” that were barely larger than a phone booth.

Government coercion and obfuscation is difficult; it doesn’t hold a candle to death, subjugation, and the powerlessness of victimization.

As Wells put it, I’ve had the displeasure of covering a national violence, I’ve also had the displeasure of living it. 

There is nothing in my day job that can match the pain, or permanence, of a loved one ripped from your household, the lifelong inequity of being racially outcast, or the haunting mental anguish those events leave behind as an inheritance. 

As a result, there is a vibrating dis-ease — something close to nausea — in listening to tales of journalists ground under the boot of power, only to hear complaints of our own injury grow so loud that it begins to obscure the suffering beyond us. Maybe that is part of the point of these attacks in the first place: Hurt us until our wounds become the horizon. Hurt us into forgetting those hurt more.

Those starved in Gaza at the United States’ discretion. Those suffering and dying around the world after our medical aid is withdrawn. The millions of Americans living a crisis away from ruin because they were stripped of their healthcare.

We need to fight even harder for truth, not because journalists are the principal victims of its erosion, but because the people paying a far higher price outside the newsroom’s walls are the reason we do this work at all.

That discrepancy may also help explain why Americans increasingly roll their eyes when journalists describe threats to journalism as threats to democracy.

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In 2025, Gallup found that only 28 percent of Americans trusted newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly — the lowest level ever measured. When Gallup began asking the question in the 1970s, the figure ranged between 68 and 72 percent. 

There are many reasons for that collapse, from deepening partisanship and a fragmented information ecosystem to the hollowing out of local news.

But I understand some of the suspicion.

I understand why nobody wants to invest in a product from an industry that refuses to admit it wants to win.

And by “win,” I mean something that journalists have become strangely embarrassed to admit we want: to make it harder to abuse human beings without anybody knowing.

There is nothing neutral about that mission.

And there never was. 

Perhaps the mistake comes from imagining freedom, and by proxy freedom of press, as a possession rather than a practice — a right handed down and intact, rather than a capacity that must be worked, tested, and fought for when the cost of exercising it rises.

In his 1951 book “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” writer Eric Hoffer captured the appeal of fascism in five unsettling words, uttered by an ardent young Nazi: “to be free from freedom.” He used the quote to examine an uncomfortable possibility — that freedom may not be innate to the human mind, but something closer to muscle — strengthened under strain, grown through resistance, and, if left unused, atrophied.

Press freedom lives under the same rule. Its value is not measured by how easily journalists can exercise it, but by what survives when power becomes hostile.

Our charge is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Journalists’ own comfort was never part of the equation.

The post The New York Times Conveniently Forgets the Real Stakes of Attacks on Free Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

It has been an excellent 48 hours for Schadenfreude.

Unprincipled pop star Ed Sheeran dropped principled pop star Macklemore from his U.S. stadium tour, following pressure from rabidly pro-Israel billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft over Macklemore’s wholly anodyne on-stage calls to free Palestine.

Macklemore has been loudly calling for an end to the genocide for over two years; it was only when facing the loss of future revenue that Sheeran asked his longtime friend to leave the tour.

Now, Sheeran is in a well-deserved pickle.

Every single one of his other support acts, including his backing band Beoga, have quit the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. Finneas, Danish group Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe, and Beoga explicitly condemned the silencing of Palestine solidarity.

“I have decided to withdraw from my upcoming tour dates with Ed Sheeran. I stand with Palestine and its people,” Finneas said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Sheeran has been widely lambasted for his spinelessness.

“Imagine being a Palestinian kid and seeing he did a concert for Ukraine but when over 20,000 Palestinian children are killed he’s silent,” wrote beloved children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel on Instagram, referencing Sheeran’s 2022 performance raising funds for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.

The backlash facing Sheeran has been a pleasure to observe. Seeing unscrupulous claims to purported apolitical neutrality revealed as hypocrisy and cowardice is validating.

Something bigger, too, may be unfolding. The response to Sheeran could mark a long, long overdue sea change in popular culture around Palestinian solidarity.

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Under the current paradigm, speaking out against Israel’s genocide and occupation has been extremely costly for celebrities. The case of Macklemore and Sheeran should herald an era in which, instead, devaluing Palestinian lives is deemed a career liability.

“The reason most famous artists continue to stay silent on the genocide in Palestine is simple: they’re afraid speaking up will lose them money,” wrote comedian Sammy Obeid on X. “So the solution is simple: make their silence even more unprofitable.”

The logic of economic boycotts — from South Africa to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement — is to extract material costs for participation in oppressive regimes.

Sheeran is not a BDS target. The movement is explicit about only targeting select corporations and institutions that “play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.” But l’affaire Macklemore, as it has unfolded so far, may nonetheless affirm the logic of BDS.

The point is that Sheeran’s actions once again treated anti-Palestinian censorship as an uncontroversial norm, and the path of least resistance. The reaction to Sheeran suggests that, at the very least, after three years of livestreamed genocide, this norm is finally losing its hold in the cultural mainstream.

So far, Sheeran has not canceled his tour. He will likely be able to find scab artists to step in and replace his opening acts and supporting band.

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Given the public furor over his dropping Macklemore, however, musicians will be weary of backlash for stepping in. Indeed, it’s likely only explicitly pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian artists who would; Sheeran can’t help himself to the lie of neutrality anymore.

And now none of his chosen musicians will perform with him, despite describing him as a friend. It is his position that they have deemed unacceptable.

The Real Stakes

The backlash arrives as such a relief only because the so-called Palestinian exception to free speech has been so thoroughly normalized.

Yet even if this does mark a watershed moment for mainstream culture, it can hardly be called a victory as the genocide in Gaza continues and West Bank pogroms escalate.

Donald Trump this week approved a $2.8 billion arms sale to Israel, including 40,000 one-ton bombs renowned for mass civilian annihilation. The stakes of Ed Sheeran’s tour pale in comparison.

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That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Israel’s impunity-drenched eliminationist project has always relied on international disregard for Palestinian lives and mainstream accordance with pernicious and false pro-Israel narratives about Jewish safety. Every effort, in every sphere, to end that status quo should be celebrated and escalated.

“I am not complicit,” Sheeran wrote in a statement, which only seemed to confirm his complicity. “I have my personal views on this devastating conflict” — employing the verbiage of those who refuse to name a genocide. “There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics — my audience includes young people, often children, of all backgrounds.”

Recall, again, that he played a concert to raise funds for Ukraine in 2022.

It bears emphasizing that Macklemore said nothing remotely antisemitic. He called for a “free Palestine”; he also called for a “free Congo” and “free Sudan.” He condemned Israeli war crimes and added, “To all my Jewish brothers and sisters, criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you.”

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The reaction of Kraft and Zionist groups like the Israeli–American Council is, meanwhile, profoundly antisemitic, and generative of antisemitic violence: They suggest that we Jews should feel aligned with the genocide of Palestinians, and thus hurt by calls to end it.

A Fox News host said, of Macklemore’s performance, that “Free Palestine” is the new “Sieg Heil” — itself a vile act of Holocaust erasure.

And, as a friend of mine rightly noted, “The new Sieg Heil is the regular Sieg Heil.” Neo-Nazis abound.

Kanye West, who has spewed explicit anti-Jewish slurs and released a song called “Heil Hitler,” performed at stadiums that sought to ban Macklemore. Because, once again, this is not about Jewish safety; it’s about upholding the conflation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and crushing Israel-critical speech.

None of that is new. What feels new is that it isn’t working: Artists and supporters are rallying to Macklemore’s support, and Sheeran looks like a gutless idiot.

Being a “nice guy” can no longer sit comfortably alongside refusing to condemn a genocide that our home countries have backed and funded. That is a step in the right direction.

The post Ed Sheeran’s Craven “Neutrality” Is a Watershed Moment for Mainstreaming Palestine Solidarity appeared first on The Intercept.

Any such undertaking would always have been fraught with potential traps. For the city’s first democratic socialist mayor, changes to criminal policy would have made Mamdani a prime target for conservative backlash. It’s a well-worn playbook: He would be blamed for any level of crime in the city. The mayor and his allies, even among them advocates hoping he’d go further to curb police abuse, understood the threat well.

Still, Mamdani had little trouble during his bombshell campaign convincing leftists that his sweeping vision for a socialist-governed metropolis included criminal policy reforms that would satiate them.

He promised to eliminate some of the most notorious of the New York Police Department’s institutions — a widely criticized gang database and infamous Strategic Response Group, which responds to protests and whose officers have histories of higher complaint rates. Mamdani outlined an ambitious vision to divert police away from responding to mental health crises, proposing an Office of Community Safety.

New data on how much the New York City is spending to pay for police misconduct, however, has heightened concerns among advocates that paltry rate of changes to policing under Mamdani could lead to even higher payouts in coming years. The first six months of the Mamdani administration saw $53 million in police misconduct settlements, according to an analysis of NYPD data by the public defense group Legal Aid Society.

If the figures continue to grow at that rate under Mamdani, it will make 2026 the fourth year in a row that police misconduct settlements top $100 million.

The payouts under Mamdani so far cover conduct that took place under his predecessor Eric Adams’s administration, but criminal policy experts worry that, without major changes to policing, the new mayor will put the city on the hook for similar payouts in the future. That’s especially true if he maintains an approach to policing that they say is not all that different from the policies he campaigned against.

“What is concerning is that if we don’t see the kind of shift in tactics away from the kind of NYPD activity that has been driving these misconduct complaints and settlements, we’re going to see these numbers continue to balloon absent a new course from the administration,” said Michael Sisitzky, assistant policy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

More Broken Windows

The settlements represent the kinds of abuses of aggressive enforcement of “quality of life” policing and the deployment of specialized units like the Strategic Response Group that characterized the Adams administration, Sisitzky added.

“Those have yet to really be reined in under the Mamdani administration,” he said. “So, while he can’t be held directly responsible for all of the numbers reflected in this first tranche of data in terms of settlements payouts, we’re going to continue to see large volumes of complaints being filed, of settlements being reached, unless we see a change in tactics and a shift away from the kind of policing policies that drove these settlements in the first place.”

Even as Mamdani made campaign promises on policing, he went out of his way not to bash the NYPD or offer too much specificity about addressing the department’s biggest issues. During the election, that didn’t worry too many of his supporters. There was too much at stake for purity tests. Let him win first, many criminal justice advocates thought — and then they’d see what he could do.

While, as mayor, Mamdani takes his biggest swings at the city’s billionaire class, the steps he has taken on criminal policy seem tailored to avoiding political pitfalls.

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Along the way, he has notched small victories. He made progress on police body cameras and cutting down on low-level cycling offenses. Pushing to close the jails on Rikers Island, he has opened alternatives to jails and shut down a vacant one. Though he ended his pause on sweeps of encampments for the unhoused, he ordered that they be led by homeless service workers. And he installed the first permanent chair of the NYPD’s oversight body in six years.

Nine months into Mamdani’s first year in office, however, the NYPD itself has changed little.

Mamdani’s office declined to comment but provided background information on what it said were his criminal policy accomplishments, including a budget increase for a police oversight board.

“Deference to Tisch”

One of the things reform advocates were mostly able to set aside during Mamdani’s campaign was his pledge to keep on Adams’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.

The daughter of a prominent New York family of billionaires, Tisch was first appointed by Adams. With crime rates falling and her tenure at the NYPD winning plaudits from the likes of Donald Trump to the American Enterprise Institute, Mamdani pledged during his campaign to keep her on.

Widely viewed as a political play, the move alarmed many reformers, who voiced criticisms but held out hope that Mamdani’s proposals would at least start a long project of changing policing from the bottom up, despite Tisch’s perch at the top.

With Tisch helming Mamdani’s NYPD, however, reformers’ fears have been borne out. The department has continued to pursue what Tisch describes as “quality of life” crimes — just the kinds of crime Mamdani campaigned on diverting police away from — and what reform advocates like Sisitzky say is a continuation of the failed “broken windows” policing fads of 1980s and ’90s. The strategy’s inherent focus on the most visible issues like panhandling, public urination, and sleeping on the subway effectively criminalizes poverty while letting violent crime and its root causes go largely untouched.

“The main critique is: There’s been a lot of backtracking on promises without any kind of affirmative vision for what policing could look like in his administration,” said Amanda Jack, director of policy for criminal law reform at the Legal Aid Society. “It has all been deference to Tisch.”

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The NYPD’s focus on those “quality of life” offenses also looks little different from its approach under Adams. Data from the NYPD’s first quarter under Mamdani “was a continuation of broken windows policing, and, in some cases, an expansion,” Sisitzky said.

During his four years in office, Adams oversaw a surge in enforcement of low-level offenses. Mamdani’s first quarter in office saw more criminal summonses in that category than the first quarter of 2025 under Adams, temporarily driven by increased enforcement against people being in a park unauthorized or biking on the sidewalk. Toward the end of Mamdani’s first quarter, he announced that the NYPD would stop issuing criminal summonses for minor traffic offenses for cyclists.

Arrests for other offenses like subway fare evasion are on a similar track: During the first quarter of the year, Mamdani’s NYPD arrested 3,188 people for not paying the subway fare, down from 3,696 such arrests during the same period of Adams’s last year in office. Many of the subway arrests, Sisitzky said, focused on people without housing.

“This is an administration that promised, at least during the campaign, that they were going to be taking a fairer, more equitable, more justice-oriented approach to policing,” Sisitzky said. “And we haven’t seen that translate into a meaningful shift away from the ‘broken windows’ approach that has long subjected New Yorkers to racially biased policing.”

Deportation Pipeline

While making New York a sanctuary for immigrants is a centerpiece of Mamdani’s agenda, continuing the kinds of enforcement practices that disproportionately bring immigrants into contact with police make them more vulnerable to Trump’s mass deportation machine, said Yasmine Farhang, executive director of the Immigrant Defense Project.

“Increased NYPD policing necessarily increases the risk of ICE policing for non-citizens,” Farhang told The Intercept. When an immigrant has an encounter with a police officer for any reason, “their risk of getting later funneled into detentions, deportations, increases regardless of the outcome.”

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Even if no one is charged with a crime, if they are fingerprinted by police, those fingerprints are sent through a state criminal system shared with the FBI, which is shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “That pipeline of fingerprint sharing from the point of NYPD to ICE happens right now just by default.”

Mamdani supports policies that protect immigrants, and his former colleagues in Albany are pushing state-level sanctuary laws, but those efforts mean little if they aren’t paired with changes that reduce encounters with police.

“The risk is increased,” Farhang said, “of ICE identifying and targeting someone, whether or not a local agency is actively colluding with them or not.”

Gangs and Goons

Among the biggest disappointments for criminal justice advocates who support Mamdani are his abandonment of promises to deal with some of the city’s most heavy-handed policing.

During the campaign, Mamdani said he would get rid of the NYPD gang database and its Strategic Response Group, as well as standing against the sweeps of homeless encampments. Instead of following through, Mamdani implemented gang database reforms, left the Strategic Response Group in place, and walked back his pledge to end the encampment sweeps.

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The Strategic Response Group, which is known for brutal crackdowns on protests from Black Lives Matter to campus movements against the genocide in Gaza, is also a major source of the conduct the city is paying so much for.

When asked Monday about his administration footing the bill for a new lawsuit over the Strategic Response Group’s conduct, Mamdani said the allegations were “incredibly troubling.” He restated his commitment to “decoupling” the response to terrorism, which is in SRG’s remit, from the response to the First Amendment-protected protesting.

Without substantive shifts on how police operate, criminal justice advocates said, the city will continue to pay out big settlements.

“There’s just a cycle of impunity that is ever-present in the NYPD,” said Divad Durant, a member of the Justice Committee, an organization that fights police violence in New York City. “And the lack of discipline is what keeps this cycle going.”

Political Miscalculation?

Critics of Mamdani’s approach to policing aren’t necessarily trying to position themselves against him, said Jeremy Saunders, co-executive director of VOCAL-NY, which works on issues like mass incarceration and homelessness. They just want him to do what he campaigned on.

“We have heard from numerous people inside of City Hall an acknowledgment that, ‘Yes, we understand this frustration,’” he said. “And that’s really all they can explain.”

Saunders said it was possible that Mamdani calculated that Tisch’s relationship to the Trump administration would help create a “buffer” from the president’s wrath.

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“Also,” Saunders added, “there’s this very real concern about crime going up or any backlash that could happen to the mayor around seeming like he’s allowing crime.”

The response from advocates at groups like VOCAL-NY, Saunders said, is that the very political trap he’s trying to avoid is set up by the mistakes that Mamdani is repeating: criminalizing poverty and homelessness.

“The mayor has to accept — and he knows — that the NYPD has the New York Post on speed dial,” Saunders said. “There is nothing he can do that will stop the New York Post and high-ranking people inside the NYPD from undermining the mayor’s agenda.”

Saunders pointed to Mamdani’s decision to stand behind a rent freeze despite pushback from the landlord class.

“We would urge the mayor and his inner circle to take that same approach,” he said. “Listen, for us to actually solve a problem, we have to invest in and politically support real solutions to ending these problems, even if that will lead to some blowback.”

“The best thing for him to do,” Saunders said, “is exactly what he campaigned on: Show New Yorkers, ‘I’m going to make this city work. I’m going to make it livable for all of us, and I’m going to prove it. I’m going to show you.’”

The post NYPD Misconduct Payouts Still Soar Under Mamdani — And May Keep Growing appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., a centrist who leads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, privately urged fellow Democrats to support advancing a crypto bill that would have created a regulatory framework for the industry, according to reporting in Politico.

Her pleas fell on deaf ears, however, as progressives including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., mounted a public campaign against the bill. The critics said the bill would allow President Donald Trump to add to the $1.4 billion in crypto profits he pocketed last year.

When it came time for the final vote, Gillibrand joined all Democrats in voting against a motion to advance the bill. Four Republicans also voted against the motion, which fell far short of the 60 votes needed to proceed to a full debate. The final tally was 49–50.

Gillibrand’s flip-flop reflected the bind that Trump has placed on moderate Democrats during his second term. Many of those centrists previously backed crypto-friendly regulations, but the historic scale of Trump’s profits on his meme coin and other crypto ventures has made them reluctant to publicly side with the industry.

Gillibrand’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, the progressive group Demand Progress criticized her for previously trying to rally support for the bill.

“While Sen. Gillibrand switched her support for the bill at the last minute, we deserve to know why she tried to get her colleagues to rubber-stamp this corrupt crypto deal, particularly at a time when she is claiming to oppose Trump’s corruption,” said the group’s corporate power policy adviser, Ella Fanger.

Gillibrand has long been one of the crypto industry’s most outspoken supporters in the Senate. Before the vote, an aide argued in a written statement that it would be best to proceed to debate on the Clarity Act, stating, “Senator Gillibrand would relish the chance to debate real ethics reforms on the floor — in full view of the public, seven weeks out from the midterms.”

Trump and Senate Republicans tried to win over the dozen or so Senate Democrats who have proven friendly to the crypto industry in the past with concessions they said would rein in the president’s crypto ventures.

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In remarks on the Senate floor, one of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy., highlighted Gillibrand’s role in negotiations over the text as evidence of its bipartisan backing. Lummis also argued that the White House had conceded virtually everything that Democrats had asked for when it came to ethics provisions over the course of months of negotiations.

“President Trump gave more than anyone in this town expected, twice. It is time for this body to take yes for an answer,” she said. “Take the win.”

Warren and others warned that the supposed concessions were shot through with loopholes.

“We need crypto regulation, but voting to proceed to this bill is a vote to bless Donald Trump’s corruption,” Warren said hours before the vote.

One key provision that Democrats had sought would allow state attorneys general to initiate enforcement actions against the president for ethics violations. However, staffers for Warren on the Senate Banking Committee said that the provision included in the latest version of the bill text was essentially a dead letter, because political officials directed by Trump could issue a legal opinion shutting down the enforcement action.

Another provision of the bill allowing Trump to put his crypto assets in a supposedly “blind” trust would not prevent him from favoring the industry to increase his own profits, minority staffers for the Senate Banking Committee said.

Trump’s self-dealing was not the only issue hanging over the legislation. The banking industry also flexed its political muscles on the Hill by arguing that the bill would enable crypto start-ups to steal deposits from small local lenders.

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Tuesday’s vote could create a liability for Democrats heading into the midterms. Crypto industry super PACs have a massive war chest that they could use to target vulnerable Democrats — a tactic they deployed during the 2024 election.

Voters want to know that candidates are willing to defy well-funded industries, Warren argued, pointing to the growing number of candidates who bucked crypto during the primary season and won nonetheless.

“The crypto industry doesn’t want to just lobby Congress, they want to buy the Congress that will be favorable to them,” she said. “It is our job when we run for elected office to stand up and do what’s right.”

The post Crypto Darling Gillibrand’s 11th-Hour Flip-Flop Helps Block Trump Crypto Bill appeared first on The Intercept.

Commentators have been strikingly sympathetic toward Clancy, showing compassion for her struggle with severe postpartum mental illness. Meanwhile, the unnamed juror, who is Black, has been widely criticized for allegedly violating his duty to follow the law. The press has dug into his own criminal history, from reports of domestic abuse, which were dismissed, to failure to pay rent.

The attention devoted to the Clancy trial — and the wave of anger over the juror’s intransigence — stands in sharp contrast with the silence over a different murder case, which is about to culminate in an execution.

At the Georgia death penalty trial of Stacey Humphreys, who was convicted of committing a double murder, a lone juror “appears to have singlehandedly changed the verdict from life without parole to death,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote last year. The woman’s actions, she concluded, amounted to “extreme juror misconduct.” Yet the high court has refused to consider Humphreys’s case — and media attention on the upcoming execution has been virtually nonexistent.

“The whole legal commentariat weighed in on what happens when a juror didn’t follow the rules in the Clancy trial,” organizer Hannah Riley Fernandez, director of programming at the Center for Just Journalism, wrote on social media, “meanwhile GA is about to kill someone whose juror did the same & MUCH more.”

Humphreys was sentenced to die in 2007 for murdering two real estate agents, 21-year-old Lori Brown and 33-year-old Cyndi Williams, at a model home just outside Atlanta. Pretrial publicity led to a change of venue, and the jury was sequestered over the course of the monthlong trial. The local sheriff’s department escorted jurors between a Holiday Inn and the courthouse.

The story of what happened in the jury room is contained in years of legal filings and affidavits signed by investigators and jurors themselves. The jury foreperson was repeatedly interviewed by Humphreys’s defense team and testified in court. She described how the lone holdout, Linda Chancey, signaled her intentions even before the jury had voted to convict Humphreys, announcing “something along the lines of ‘he’s guilty and he deserves to die.’”

Most of the jurors were inclined to agree with Chancey at first. But at Humphreys’s sentencing trial, defense lawyers revealed their client’s harrowing upbringing. From the time he was a toddler, witnesses said, Humphreys had been brutally abused by his parents, leading to psychological problems that indelibly shaped the rest of his life. “This testimony was impactful to the jurors tasked with balancing Stacey’s terrible crime and the rage-filled, abusive household where he grew up,” lawyers later wrote in his clemency petition.

Juror affidavits described a sense of grief for family members on both sides. One said she’d been especially struck by the testimony of Humphreys’s older sister Dayna, who recalled how her brother “took most of the beatings for her.” Despite an initial internal vote in which several jurors favored a death sentence, they eventually agreed that he could be sufficiently punished without being executed. On the second day of deliberations, 11 jurors voted for life without parole. Only Chancey was opposed.

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After hours of additional deliberation, the foreperson wrote a note to the trial judge saying that they were “unable to come to a unanimous decision on either death or life imprisonment without parole.” Under Georgia law, a judge faced with a non-unanimous decision is supposed to dismiss the jury and sentence a defendant to either life or life without parole. But Chancey insisted on editing the note, revising it to include the word “currently” in two separate places, which left the impression that jurors might eventually agree. Upon receiving the note, the trial judge directed jurors to keep deliberating.

After that, a member of the jury later said in an affidavit, Chancey “snapped.” Fellow jurors said she screamed and threw photos of the deceased victims at them, demanding to know whether they “want this to happen to someone you know.” Things got so contentious that the foreperson sent another note asking to be removed from the case due to Chancey’s “hostile” behavior. But the judge again directed them to keep working.

Chancey did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Chancey also revealed something to her fellow jurors during deliberations that she had kept hidden from the court during voir dire. While she’d previously disclosed that she had been the victim of an attempted armed robbery of her home but that she’d escaped before the perpetrator was able to get inside, she later told fellow jurors that he assaulted her in her bed. Had Chancey revealed this during jury selection, lawyers have argued, she would almost certainly been struck from the panel.

Instead, Chancey was seated on the jury and hijacked the deliberations. According to other jurors, she said that they had to vote unanimously on a sentence or Humphreys might eventually walk free. Confusing instructions from the judge deepened this misimpression, according to the foreperson. Along with the rest, she ultimately capitulated and changed her vote to death. “I cried the entire time,” she said.

Humphreys, now 52, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on September 16 at 7 p.m. He is one of two people set to be executed this week, despite the fact that a majority of their trial jurors wished to show mercy. On September 17, Alabama plans to kill Jeffery Lee, whose jury voted 7 to 5 to sentence him to life without parole. At the time of Lee’s trial, Alabama judges had the power to override a jury’s decision. Despite the jury’s vote, Lee was sentenced to die.

Several national outlets have covered Lee’s plight. But Humphreys’s looming execution remains overlooked. One reason may be that the legal issues are technical and complex — a “procedural thicket,” as Sotomayor described it, that has prevented any court from addressing the disastrous deliberations at Humphreys’s trial.

In Georgia and other states, courts are not supposed to allow juror affidavits to undermine a verdict, with some narrow exceptions. Humphreys’s lawyers learned about Chancey’s behavior soon after the trial and obtained affidavits anyway, seeking to challenge the death sentence on direct appeal. But rather than argue that juror misconduct violated his right to a fair trial, they argued that the judge’s instruction to keep deliberating was coercive.

When state post-conviction lawyers later sought to argue that Chancey committed misconduct, Georgia courts ruled that it was too late: Because Humphreys had never sought to argue the claim, his attorneys were now barred from doing so. Similar procedural barriers then prevented Humphreys’s federal legal team from bringing the challenge into federal court.

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Humphreys was scheduled to be executed last December, but was temporarily spared amid a separate legal fight over alleged conflicts of interest by members of Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles. Among the five members with the power to decide whether Humphrey would live or die were two people involved in the trial. One had worked as a victims’ advocate; another was the former sheriff of the county where the trial took place.

An Atlanta judge agreed that the board member who had worked as a victims’ advocate had a conflict of interest but disagreed about the ex-sheriff. He ultimately concluded that the clemency board could simply move forward without the former. Humphreys’s lawyers describe this as both unprecedented in Georgia and unfair to their client. Humphreys “will not only be required to convince three out of four presiding Board members,” they argue, “he will be judged by the very Board members that only last December were adverse parties in his legal action.”

As Humphreys’s lawyers prepared for his clemency hearing, scheduled for the eve of his execution, his legal team pursued an array of last-minute avenues to save his life. Georgia law allows prisoners one chance to file an “extraordinary motion for a new trial,” which the defense team submitted to argue for a resentencing trial.

In advance of a hearing on the matter last week, the lawyers submitted an unusual collection of affidavits. The documents described Chancey’s controversial role on a public committee assembled in 2020 to handle a dispute over a local Confederate monument, which Chancey defended. With the Covid pandemic underway, meetings were public and held via Zoom; one former mayor of the city recalled receiving “numerous emails from concerned members of the community who were honestly shocked and horrified by her behavior.” A historian said in one affidavit that she was insulting toward him and others, questioning their qualifications and derailing attempts at civil debate. “Because of her,” he wrote, “the meetings devolved into a shouting match.”

At a hearing on September 10, a state lawyer slammed the affidavits as an attempt at “character assassination,” while a defense attorney said they showed a pattern of “failing to deliberate in good faith.” The judge said he would not consider the affidavits but commended the lawyers’ efforts on behalf of their client. He briefly addressed Humphreys, who was watching from the prison. “I hope you realize what wonderful people you have working for you,” the judge said. In a written order, he rejected the motion for a new sentencing trial.

If Humphreys is executed on Wednesday night, it will be the end of a long road that has proven traumatic for countless people — including the jury foreperson, who took the stand at last week’s hearing. The trial left her disillusioned with the justice system, she testified. She said she’d sought guidance from the trial judge to no avail and remained devastated by her own vote 20 years ago. “I felt I had failed in many, many ways.”

But a state lawyer argued that one should expect emotions to run high in a death penalty trial. “I hope people are fighting,” she said. “I mean, you can’t even get 12 people to agree on a pizza topping, but you’re talking about life or death here.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “you do have a very strong personality that can, you know, rule the day.”

Update: September 17, 2026, 12:20 p.m. ET
On Wednesday, September 16, Cobb County Superior Court Judge Tyler Browning issued a stay of execution for Stacey Humphreys, to grant a hearing on a new legal challenge by defense lawyers. Under Georgia’s Survivor Justice Act, which was signed into law in 2025, prisoners are eligible for potential resentencing if they can prove that their crimes were a direct result of significant abuse. Georgia has not contested that Humphreys was a victim of early childhood physical and sexual abuse — and Browning concluded that Humphreys is entitled to a hearing to determine whether he is entitled to relief. In his order, Browning conceded that Georgia’s higher courts might disagree. “Should the Georgia appellate courts rule prior to the currently set execution date and time of September 16, 2026, at 7:00 pm. EST, that the Defendant is not entitled to a hearing,” he wrote, “the Court will consider lifting the stay so that the execution may proceed as scheduled.” But the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the stay, leaving Humphreys’s execution paused until further notice.

The post A Lone Juror Hijacked Deliberations. This Time, a Man Faces Execution. appeared first on The Intercept.

As the conflict has engulfed the region, the military has grappled with a growing list of challenges: Iranian attacks on U.S. bases and warships in the Middle East, depleted stockpiles of defensive munitions, increasing casualties, maintenance issues on ships, lengthy troop deployments, complicated logistics, flagging morale and a host of other issues that have taken a heavy toll on troops, damaged military readiness, and a strained Pentagon budget — contradicting months of rosy pronouncements by the Trump administration.

Both officials said that Iran is facing extreme economic pressure, according to intelligence reports. The first official characterized recent Iranian attacks on warships with ballistic missiles as a “go for broke” strategy to increase economic pressures on America ahead of the U.S. midterms. That official said it was unclear which country would “blink first.”

Trump suggested on Sunday that the U.S. could “stay and keep the oil” in Iran, like the neo-colonial resource grab the administration is carrying out in Venezuela. The second official said that a U.S. occupation of Iran would be “almost impossible” and that the idea was “nonsensical obviously.”

Iran’s ability to overwhelm U.S. air defenses in the Middle East using attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, as previously reported by The Intercept, has left the U.S. military in a precarious state. The Trump administration failed to appreciate Iran’s military prowess, said the first official. The other pointed to a “complete lack of planning” for the war. Since July 7 alone, there have been hundreds of U.S. casualties caused by Iranian attacks, according to official Pentagon statistics.

The officials said the military’s ability to function at peak capacity was crippled in the opening hours of the conflict when an Iranian missile and drone attack on February 28 destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the region’s most critical logistics hub. The Pentagon claimed for months that the strikes did not significantly impact military operations, but last week acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted “they blew the hell out of Bahrain.” More than six months after the attack, Naval Support Activity Bahrain remains a shambles. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, the Navy’s highest-ranking officer, during a recent town hall.

A Wall Street Journal investigation previously found that rebuilding the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, barracks, and communication towers at NSA Bahrain may cost more than $400 million, which the second official said could be an underestimate if it’s ever attempted. Naval Forces Central Command referred questions about the cost estimate to Central Command, which did not respond.

Trump has touted the destruction of Iran’s navy as one of his signature accomplishments of the war, but the officials pointed to the severe strain placed on U.S. naval forces in the region. With the home of the Fifth Fleet knocked out and other ports in the region within range of Iranian missiles and drones, the Navy found itself facing the daunting challenge of maintaining a flotilla of more than 24 ships — including two massive aircraft carriers and numerous guided-missile destroyers and cruisers, attack submarines, or supply ships deployed at any one time.

While aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered, the planes and helicopters on them, as well as the other ships, require millions of gallons of fuel each week. And the sailors aboard the ships require hundreds of thousands of meals. This means Navy ships need to haul supplies more than 2,000 miles from a longtime U.S. base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. A War Department inspector general report released on Monday noted that the shift in “naval bases and support ports posed significant challenges,” pointing specifically to the “issue with shifting logistics support and infrastructure to Diego Garcia” and the challenges of “extended sea transit requiring 14- to 18-day logistics cycles.”

“It’s difficult and ultimately unsustainable,” said the second official, who told The Intercept that White House assumptions that Iran would “crack” before the Navy have yet to be borne out.

The Navy has just 11 aircraft carrier strike groups, and amid the ongoing strain of extended deployments, its oldest carrier, the USS Nimitz, has seen its service life extended. So far, four of the 11 carrier strike groups have already been deployed to the Middle East during the war. Some of the remaining carriers are undergoing substantial repairs and will not be ready to deploy again for years.

The USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group completed a record-breaking, 11-month deployment that also included the invasion of Venezuela. (Under normal conditions, a carrier would visit port about once a month to allow its crew to rest.) The ship was, according to a Presidential Unit Citation, under “persistent threat from enemy missiles and one-way attack drones” during its deployment to the Middle East.

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Early in the Iran war, the Ford suffered extensive damage from a laundry fire and a malfunctioning fire-suppression system that forced crew members to manually fight the blaze for around 30 hours. The fire halted sorties for two days, and around 600 sailors lost access to their bunks due to the damage. The Navy claimed few casualties from the blaze, but reports soon emerged that the more than 200 sailors were treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations.

The Ford has also been plagued by plumbing issues for years. During just a four-day span in 2025, there were 205 breakdowns. Before the Ford left the Caribbean, it was facing constant issues with the nearly 650 toilets aboard. And then in the Middle East, the carrier again suffered from clogged, excrement-filled toilets, according to video obtained by CNN. 

Another carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, spent most of its nine months at sea with no port calls, leading to reports of rampant morale problems, supply shortages, and suicide attempts, with at least one crew member going overboard. At an August 11 town hall in San Diego, families expressed deep concerns about their loved ones to Cao, the acting Navy secretary. But Trump dismissed worries about the sailors, saying the Lincoln’s deployment was “not nearly long enough.” Last month, the Lincoln was relieved by the USS George Washington, allowing the heavily rusted Lincoln to pull into Thailand for a port call. 

Those ships have left the region but sailors remain under persistent threat. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted a U.S. aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer with ballistic missiles this month, according to Central Command. CENTCOM did not reply to a request for additional information about the strikes.

Despite months of claims by Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated, Iran has attacked more than 15 bases across the Middle East, according to information from U.S. officials and Iranian reports.

Stocks of advanced air-defense missiles, like Patriot and THAAD interceptors, are so depleted that U.S. forces are not shooting down all Iranian missiles and drones aimed at U.S. and allied targets across the Middle East, according to U.S. officials who spoke to The Intercept as well as numerous press reports.

Trump and Hegseth have pushed back on these claims. Trump posted on Monday that the U.S. is “producing more Exquisite and Elite Weapons than at any time in our History,” but the aforementioned inspector general report immediately contradicted the president, revealing that the conflict has resulted in “strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.”

“I have all the munitions necessary to both defend our forces as well as conduct a broad range of contingencies,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM chief, told Congress in May. But even the Pentagon admits that 410 U.S. troops have been killed or wounded since July 7 alone. Three U.S. soldiers were killed during Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks on Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base on July 17 and 18, for example. And an Iranian drone attack on Erbil Air Base, Iraq, on July 18 killed one soldier and left another injured during what CENTCOM called a “controlled detonation” of the downed aircraft.

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The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute. About 65 percent of Patriot interceptors were expended between February and July, leaving fewer than 830 remaining from a pre-war total of 2,330, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The number of THAADs dropped from more than 450 to less than 270.

On Sunday, Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, continued to downplay the risks of depleted stockpiles and told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he wasn’t worried for the safety of U.S. troops. “I’m not concerned at all,” he replied when asked about defending against Iranian attacks. CENTCOM did not reply when asked if Cooper would resign if U.S. troops were killed or wounded in future attacks.

In addition to the destruction of NSA Bahrain, the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, was severely damaged by Iranian missiles early in the war, rendering it inoperable. Both were recently attacked again, raising questions about whether either will ever be rebuilt. Iran also struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan last week, damaging multiple U.S. military aircraft, according to the second U.S. official. In response, U.S. forces fired a “significant” number of Patriot interceptors to protect U.S. forces, the second official said.

U.S. officials confirmed that Iran has also attacked Tower 22, a U.S. military outpost on the northern Jordanian border with Syria. Satellite images as well as photos and videos circulating online indicate the base suffered extensive damage. (In 2024, a drone attack on Tower 22 by an Iran-backed militia killed three U.S. troops.) 

Iran says it has also attacked U.S. military facilities at Jordan’s Prince Hassan Air Base and King Faisal Air Base; and Kuwait’s Al-Adiri base, Ahmed Al-Jaber Air Base, Camp Doha, Ali Al Salem Air Base, and Camp Arifjan. Last week, the IRGC announced its forces had “simultaneously attack[ed] the American bases in Jordan, Bahrain, and Erbil,” including “a combined missile-drone attack on the headquarters and residence of the American commander of the Ali al-Salem base.”

CENTCOM failed to respond to a request for comment about attacks on its outposts or provide its own official count of the number struck. But the Pentagon inspector general report revealed Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.” It also disclosed that “dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged,” including four F-15 fighter aircraft, 12 KC-135 refueling aircraft, and as many as 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones.

The post Iran War Has the U.S. Military on the Brink of a “Breakdown” appeared first on The Intercept.