The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks, resulting in over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.

Since then, experts, lawmakers, and even military officials behind the scenes have been asking a simple but haunting question: Why was that boat packed with 11 people?

“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”

One top military officer provided a plausible explanation, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, The Intercept has learned. His admission raises even more questions about a strike that a high-ranking Pentagon official called a criminal attack on civilians and resulted in a firestorm in Congress last year.

In the briefing, the high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking.

A 40-foot go-fast boat with four 200-horsepower engines sped off from San Juan de Unare on Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula deep in the night of September 1. It was “probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio would later say.

As the peñero cut through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, a secret U.S. Special Operations plane flew high above. Its transponder was “squawking” its military identity by radio. But to the 11 people on the boat below, the plane — a secret Special Operations aircraft with a non-military appearance — would have looked like a civilian aircraft. Its munitions were hidden inside the fuselage, rather than affixed visibly under its wings.

A month earlier, War Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an execute order directing Special Operations forces to attack suspected drug smuggling boats and kill their crews, according to three government officials who spoke with The Intercept. Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to attack the boat to Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, who presided over the September 2 mission — according to four sources.

Now, Hegseth and numerous military officers were watching live video of the boat as it plowed through the Caribbean waters. The Americans gathered at the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could see the men in the boat clearly, according to three government officials briefed on the matter.

The secret plane dove low enough that those on the boat noticed it, said three government officials familiar with the operation. It apparently unnerved the men aboard so much that they turned the boat around and headed back toward Venezuela.  

Bradley — now the four-star chief of Special Operations Command — consulted with Col. Cara Hamaguchi, JSOC’s staff judge advocate, before ordering SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the packed speedboat, according to government sources. In an instant, the vessel exploded and was engulfed in fire and shrouded in smoke. Two survivors pulled themselves onto a fragment of the overturned hull as the Americans watched from above.

According to officials, Bradley explained in briefings that because the September 2 attack was the initial strike of the campaign and was conducted by the secret plane, the survivors would have had no idea they were attacked by the aircraft. They probably believed the explosion was caused by a catastrophic engine malfunction, Bradley said in the briefing.

The two men were shipwrecked, helpless, or clearly in distress, six people who saw video of the attack said. Bradley watched as the injured men clung to what remained of the boat. “You had two shipwrecked people on the top of the tiny little bit of the boat that was left that was capsized,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said on CNN after viewing video of the attack.

Three sources familiar with briefings by Bradley provided to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as well as the Senate and House Armed Services committees confirmed that the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for roughly 45 minutes. “They had at least 35 minutes of clear visual on these guys after the smoke of the first strike cleared. There were no time constraints. There was no pressure. They were in the middle of the ocean and there were no other vessels in the area,” said one of the sources.

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Bradley again turned to Hamaguchi for guidance on whether he could legally attack the shipwrecked men. Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections, according to the lawmaker.

Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including that lawmaker who viewed the video, said that the survivors waved their arms and, logically, must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All believed the men were signaling for help, rescue, or surrender. “Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” said one of the sources, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”

Raising one’s hands is a universal sign of surrender for members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked — are considered hors de combat, the French term for those no longer in the fight, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit on this point. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.

Bradley found a workaround. While he declined to comment to The Intercept, a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.” About 45 minutes after the men had been thrown into the water, a second missile screamed down on Bradley’s order, killing them. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, President Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that those killed by U.S. forces were “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” and members of a “designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

But from the very beginning, questions swirled among members of Congress and their staffers about the identities of those killed in the attack — and why there were so many of them.

During a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last fall, Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett — a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff — was asked if any of the people aboard the boat on September 2 could have been human trafficking victims. “They could be,” Bennett replied, according to two people present at the briefing. 

One of the government officials at the briefing explained that questions arose about the few boats targeted by the U.S. with greater-than-expected numbers of people on board; the September 2 strike was singled out due to the especially large number of passengers.

Out of more than 60 strikes since, only four involved boats with six or more people aboard, almost all of them in the initial wave of attacks. In October 2025, there were two strikes on boats with six crew members and one with eight people on board. Since then, just one other vessel has had as many as six crew.

Sources and methods of identification were a major topic of the fall briefing, where it became increasingly clear that JSOC did not positively identify everyone on the boats, said the official. “Questioning then led to trying to understand who these people could be,” that official said.

The second source at the briefing said they were astonished by Bennett’s candor that victims of human trafficking might have been among those killed. “I was surprised. But only by the admission,” said that official.

Military officials with knowledge of the strikes also discussed the likelihood that some of those on board were being trafficked, were part of a more generalized smuggling operation, or had simply hitched a ride on the vessel, said another government official who was not at that briefing.

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In later classified briefings, the Pentagon’s story of who was aboard the vessel changed — but only marginally, said two government officials. Just one person aboard the go-fast boat on September 2 was a member of a so-called “designated terrorist organization,” while 10 were “DTO affiliates,” according to the officials who received those later briefings. Both said that they were under the impression that little more than a conversation with a DTO member might confer affiliate status but said that the military’s explanations were vague.  

For weeks, The Intercept has sought to speak to Bennett, the deputy director for Special Operations on the Joint Staff, about the strikes and his briefings. “RADM Bennett is unavailable for an interview,” Maj. Annabel Monroe, a spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Intercept. “As a matter of policy, the Joint Staff does not confirm specific operational details or comment on ongoing or potential future military actions.”

Asked specifically for comment from Bennett and the Joint Staff about the trafficking remark and about how many victims of U.S. boat strikes may have been passengers of any sort, such as trafficking victims, smuggled persons, or paid passengers, Monroe replied: “Nothing further to add.” 

Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, said the command was unaware of any allegations of victims of trafficking being killed on September 2 or in subsequent strikes.

“Targeting decisions are based on comprehensive assessments and reviewed through established processes,” a spokesperson for U.S. Southern Command told The Intercept. “Every narco-terrorist killed … was an affiliated member of a Designated Terrorist Organization actively transporting illicit material along known trafficking routes in international waters.”

A classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — drawn up by an interagency lawyers working group including representatives of the CIA, the State Department, White House counsel, Department of Justice, and the Department of War — claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because they generate revenue for cartels with whom the Trump administration claims they are in a “non-international armed conflict.” Government officials told The Intercept that the memo was not actually signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser until days after the September 2 attack. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations.

Six current and former government officials briefed on the boat strikes or with experience in counter-narcotics smuggling efforts said that while the vessel struck on September 2 might have had cocaine on board, the sole intent of its voyage was not drug trafficking.

“No one would smuggle cocaine with 11 people on board their drug-running boat,” said one of the current officials, noting that it was a waste of space, fuel, and created security risks. “It just is not done. Full stop.”

That official, who talked with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, said that the vessel’s profile more closely matched that of a ship smuggling various types of cargo, including people. 

Retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin, said the number of passengers was an obvious red flag. “I’m disappointed in the quality of planning for this operation,” he told The Intercept. “There appears to have been a lack of knowledge and expertise in what cocaine smuggling operations look like.”

The vessel that would become the target of the first Trump administration boat strike reportedly left San Juan de Unare in Venezuela on the night of September 1. The 11 men aboard all hailed from that town or nearby Güiria, coastal communities on the Paria peninsula in Venezuela’s Sucre state. It’s an impoverished region where 90 percent of the population is food insecure; the nongovernmental organization Transparencia Venezuela identified the area as the country’s prime center of, and transit hub for, human trafficking.

Reporting by Venezuela’s El Nacional identified Güiria and San Juan de Unare as having gone from fishing and tourist centers to “corridors of organized crime,” as the economic crisis in the country “drove many fishermen to replace fishing with smuggling gasoline, migrants, and eventually, drugs.” Some boats are known to carry mixed cargos of drugs, weapons, and people.

A 2020 report on human trafficking in the Caribbean found that Venezuela was “the greatest supplier of trafficking victims to Trinidad and Tobago” — and that 43 percent of those trafficked from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago travel from Sucre. It cited a Venezuelan government official who drew specific attention to Güiria due to its proximity to Trinidad and Tobago, stating it was “frequently used clandestinely for human trafficking.” A 2025 U.S. State Department report also highlighted the “long-standing allegation that national guard and coast guard members active in coastal states, such as Sucre and Falcon, facilitated the transport of trafficking victims to Aruba, Curaçao, and Trinidad and Tobago.”

A recent investigation by a consortium of journalists from Venezuelan outlets noted immigrant transport, people smuggling, and human trafficking is integral to the desperately poor population of Güiria and “as ordinary a job as teaching school — only far better paid.” The journalists wrote:

In this Venezuelan town, people do not call the illicit transportation of drugs and other goods … to neighboring Caribbean islands or Colombia’s Guajira Peninsula “drug trafficking” or “smuggling.” They call them vueltas—literally “runs” or “jobs”—borrowing the slang Colombian traffickers use for narcotics shipments, contract killings, or debt collections.

For many people in Güiria, those vueltas are the only path to a decent life.

According to a 2025 analysis by InSight Crime, a think tank that studies organized criminal activity in the Americas, gangs from Sucre are involved in “cocaine trafficking, human trafficking and smuggling, arms trafficking, and the contraband of animals and minerals.” Roughly 30 percent of trafficking victims who pass through the region wound up in sexual exploitation networks, Transparencia Venezuela found.

While trafficking victims are often assumed to be women and girls forced into sexual slavery — and many are — men and boys represent nearly half of the total number of human trafficking victims worldwide. And males are frequently mentioned in reports on Venezuela. A 2019 State Department investigation of human trafficking, for example, noted Venezuelan men were “increasingly vulnerable to forced labor in destination countries, including islands of the Dutch Caribbean.” A 2023 State Department report noted “an increase in male Venezuelan labor trafficking victims” in Trinidad and Tobago. It also details “migrant smuggling, which serves as traffickers’ primary method of transportation of victims from Venezuela.”

Between 2019 and 2022, 69 percent of Venezuelan immigrants in South America interviewed by the Mixed Migration Center reported having hired smuggling services to leave their country.

In 2023, the Curaçao Public Prosecutor’s Office also put out a warning about child trafficking, particularly from Venezuela: “Trafficked children range in age from 4 to 15 years old and are often transported in boats that also carry drugs and firearms on board.”

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An investigation by The Associated Press into the lives of nine of those slain in boat strikes examined the life of one of the men killed in the September 2 attack: Luis “Che” Martínez. The AP found that Martínez, a 60-year-old local crime boss, made his living smuggling both drugs and people across borders, according to several people who knew him. He had been incarcerated in late 2020 on human trafficking charges after a boat he had operated capsized, killing almost 25 people — including two of his sons and several other relatives, according to local reporting at the time. He was eventually released from custody and returned to smuggling people and narcotics, acquaintances told the news outlet.

In the aftermath of Trump’s first boat strike, the size of the death toll immediately surprised those knowledgeable about illicit trade in the region. “With 11 people on board, there could have been a human smuggling element as well,” InSight Crime observed just after the September 2 attack, noting that such go-fast boats generally have a crew of two or three people. “You do not need 11 people on board a single vessel to smuggle drugs, even for a very big consignment.”

“I would have expected much more attention to what smuggling operations look like and how to distinguish serious bulk cocaine smuggling boats from inter-island smugglers that might be primarily carrying passengers,” said Baumgartner, the retired Coast Guard rear admiral.

When questioned just a day after the initial strike, at a press conference in Mexico City, Rubio explained the reasons for the attack by first mentioning human trafficking. “The President of the United States has determined that narcoterrorist organizations pose a threat to the national security of the United States,” he explained. “They are traffickers of people, they are traffickers of deadly drugs,” he said.

Facing outrage over the extrajudicial killings, Bradley has attempted to quiet questions about who the U.S. has targeted.

In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Bradley confirmed significant involvement in the boat strikes by the National Security Agency. He has also reportedly told lawmakers that U.S. intelligence officials had verified the identities of the 11 people on the boat on September 2 and validated them as legitimate targets. But Special Operations Command would not confirm what Bradley told lawmakers about the identities of the 11 people killed. And numerous government officials who spoke to The Intercept said that claims that intelligence “confirms who these people are” — as Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson asserted in December — is a rhetorical sleight of hand, if not an outright lie.

JSOC did not know the names or supposed affiliations of all persons aboard the vessel struck on September 2, numerous government sources told The Intercept.

Two sources specifically mentioned that some passengers were identified only by an obvious nom de guerre. “I don’t think we knew the identities of any of the people in the boat. We might have known one or two. … But we certainly didn’t know the identities of all 11,” Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said in December. “I don’t think we have any idea, who precisely, any of the individuals in these boats are.”

“Srikes [sic] are deliberate, lawful, and precise — aimed squarely at narco-terrorists and their enablers, not civilians,” a Southern Command spokesperson told The Intercept by email. “SOUTHCOM has full confidence in the operational and intelligence professionals who inform our missions.”

SOUTHCOM routinely claims, in fact, that “intelligence” confirms that targeted vessels are “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” But last week, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, revealed that “the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria” involved in the boat strikes.

Behind closed doors, in fact, Pentagon officials don’t even pretend that they need to know who they are attacking. “They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, told The Intercept in October. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate.”

Most of the government officials, including lawmakers briefed on the attacks, who spoke with The Intercept said that they believed the vessels targeted in the campaign are involved in illicit trafficking and are not simply fishing boats. But without stopping and searching boats, many said it was impossible to know for certain who and what is aboard a particular vessel.

In late April, Bradley told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the boat strikes are built upon the targeting procedures of the post-9/11 drone wars. “It is based off of the lessons learned and the processes perfected over the last 25 years of persona targeting,” he said, referring to strikes targeting people. Over that span, the U.S. has consistently killed civilians the world over — from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Somalia and Libya to Yemen — due to intelligence failures and targeting errors.

“There has never been a ‘perfecting’ of persona targeting. Just because the U.S. military — and other U.S. forces — conducted many strikes against known targets under the moniker of counterterrorism does not mean that they became significantly better at it over time,” said Sarah Yager, a former senior adviser to the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Over those same two decades being lauded as a time of learning lessons for the U.S. military, human rights groups documented repeated civilian deaths tied to flawed intelligence or assumptions or bias.”

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept, for instance, revealed a raft of errors leading up to a drone strike in Somalia that killed three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The Pentagon’s inquiry found that the Special Operations forces who conducted the strike were confused, despite months of “target development,” and argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle. They mistook a woman and child for an adult male and never even knew how many people they killed.

“When Adm. Bradley references ‘the lessons learned and the processes perfected over the last 25 years of persona targeting,’ he’s actually invoking an architecture that human rights groups criticized regularly for overconfidence in the intelligence, confirmation bias and assumptions, and institutional incentives to interpret ambiguity as threat confirmation,” Yager said.

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Five experts, including current and former government officials, say that it’s impossible that the U.S. has not killed innocent people in its boat strike campaign given the long-standing limitations of U.S. targeting procedures, such as an overreliance on signals intelligence, or SIGINT. In recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio admitted that the U.S. has erroneously identified boats as possible targets, only to pull back. “I can tell you they do walk away from strikes,” he said. “There are multiple times that I’ve been aware of … because it doesn’t meet the criteria or because there’s doubt.”

“Secret planes and SIGINT aren’t the answer. Confirmation bias continues to be a problem,” one government official briefed on the boat strikes told The Intercept. That official said it was far more likely that U.S. forces had misidentified or outright failed to notice a person aboard one of the boats that have been struck than that they knew the names and affiliations of everyone they had killed.

Government statistics confirm the limitations of intelligence, profiling, and the ability of U.S. personnel to identify supposed drug traffickers from afar. Between September 1, 2024, and October 7, 2025, the Coast Guard interdicted 212 boats headed toward the U.S. that it suspected of drug-trafficking. Forty-one of them, or about 20 percent, had no illicit contraband on board, according to official statistics. As for ships just off the coast of Venezuela, the amount wrongly suspected of carrying drugs was a shade higher: 21 percent.

When asked about the statistics showing 1 in 5 vessels had no drugs aboard, Yager told The Intercept that “positive identification of both targets and civilians has been a known problem in the U.S. military kill chain.”

“In the case of the boat strikes, that’s a high rate of mistaken identity,” she said. “My guess is that the U.S. military has no idea who these people actually are before moving to kill them.”

The post Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking appeared first on The Intercept.

Steve Hilton, a conservative former political aide and commentator, finished second Tuesday, a week after the state’s nonpartisan primary day. He will compete with Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary under President Joe Biden. The pair edged out Tom Steyer, a billionaire philanthropist who ran on a progressive platform.

The ascension of Hilton, a conservative power player endorsed by President Donald Trump, suggests dissatisfaction with the slate of Democratic candidates on offer in the open primary and an inability for Steyer, who has never held elected office, to break through with a campaign vowing to help redistribute the wealth.

It also offers Becerra an easier path to election, with California voters expected to skew heavily Democratic in November.

Becerra, who ran a relatively quiet campaign focused on his credentials, previously served as California attorney general under Govs. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom. He came under fire for his work in that office, as The Intercept reported last month. In 2018, Becerra’s office pushed for the state Supreme Court to artificially inflate the IQ of an intellectually disabled Black man in order to execute him, and he fought to uphold death penalty sentences during the Covid pandemic, despite a moratorium Newsom imposed. Becerra has also been criticized for his alleged mishandling of migrant children who were in his office’s care while serving as HHS secretary. 

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His primary campaign managed to overcome those criticisms, racking up high-profile endorsements from figures including Reps. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., and Ted Lieu, D-Calif., as well as several notable labor unions. Becerra’s campaign was also boosted by the rapid and scandalous departure of former front-runner Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including rape. Swalwell denied the allegations but swiftly resigned from Congress and ended his gubernatorial campaign, clearing a path in the centrist lane that Becerra quickly filled. 

Hilton, meanwhile, spent months neck and neck in the polls with Steyer, a former hedge fund manager who used his immense wealth to fund his campaign yet ran on what was widely considered the most progressive platform in the race, earning the head-turning endorsement of Our Revolution, the group founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. 

While he’s a relative unknown in the United States, Hilton has a reputation in the United Kingdom for helping to orchestrate the rise of former British Prime Minister David Cameron. If he manages to defeat Becerra in November, Hilton will be California’s first Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger, the architect of the state’s open primary system.

The post In California, a Former Biden Official and Fox News Personality Will Face Off for Governor appeared first on The Intercept.

Plainspoken populism won the oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran support among fed-up Mainers, who nominated him in a landslide that The Associated Press called with just 8 percent of the vote in.

“Over the last nine months I have seen Mainers come together behind a vision to take back our power from corporations and billionaires,” Platner said in his acceptance speech Tuesday. “I love every single one of you. Everyone who has shown up at a town hall, who has knocked on a door, who cast their vote — not for me but for a vision of a life in Maine that you can afford; a life of dignity and a government that actually serves its people.”

Platner’s appeal seemed unshaken amid months of

negative press stemming from his inflammatory comments on Reddit and an ill-advised tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. But a recent series of damaging stories in national media, including revelations in the Wall Street Journal about extramarital sexting and allegations in the New York Times of abusive behavior in past relationships, have given some voters and political observers pause. Others say that in Maine, a fiercely independent state where residents nurse a healthy suspicion of influence “from away,” Platner supporters have dismissed those stories as meddling from an establishment fearful of a political maverick.

“From what I can tell, I don’t think the Times piece moved the needle much,” said Shay Stewart-Bouley, a longtime Maine resident who has written both critically and supportively of Platner on her blog, Black Girl in Maine. “I heard some women say it made them uneasy, but I haven’t heard anyone say it changed how they’re going to vote.”

In other cases, the coverage appears to have cemented Platner’s status as an outsider to an establishment embodied by Collins, who has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997. Like many incumbents nationwide, the Republican senator will have to run amid a shrinking job market and rising costs, points that Platner has seized on throughout his campaign. And Collins’s association with the establishment could prove a major liability, even among onetime supporters of President Donald Trump, according to Charles Pray, a former state senator and veteran figure in Maine Democratic politics.

“Part of Trump’s rise was a total frustration with incumbents and people in power, and a lot of people who were Trump supporters who hoped he was going to address rising grocery prices and stuff now see him saying that affordability is not an issue,” said Pray. “Well, affordability is a big issue in Maine, and I think that hurts Collins.”

Platner faced a nominal challenge in Tuesday’s primary from Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but remained on the ballot, and from David Costello, a former Democratic nominee in the 2024 Senate race who was little more than an afterthought in the latest contest.

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Just days before the primary, the Times reported disturbing allegations about Platner, including that an ex-girlfriend accused him of drunkenly locking her in a room during a fight and physically restraining her at times. (Platner has acknowledged the relationship with the accuser, a longtime Republican operative in Washington, but denies he engaged in violent behavior.)

Pray said that among people he’s spoken with, the allegations, while concerning, are undercut by Collins’s support for the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh despite the sexual assault accusations against him, and by her support of Trump despite the many accusations against him and his consistently hostile behavior toward women interviewers.

“I think people aren’t buying the double standard. She confirmed Kavanaugh, she supports Trump despite his behavior,” Pray said, pointing to the president’s recent outburst on NBC News. “I spoke to three women, including Republicans, who were very upset by that and who said ‘Susan just goes along with that.’”

To Platner’s most ardent supporters, the revelations look like meddling by an establishment that never wanted him to be the candidate, said Andy O’Brien, a former state senator who writes about politics in the state and supports Platner. (O’Brien works for the AFL-CIO of Maine, which has endorsed Platner, but did not speak to The Intercept on behalf of his employer).

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“So many people know Graham, and they listen to what he says, they don’t listen to all the crap coming from Washington and New York and California,” said O’Brien. “They like Graham because he speaks to them, and they believe him and trust him. They know he had a messy personal life. I think that there’s a lot of grace that they’re showing him, partly because of his post-traumatic stress from combat and also because there’s this sense that Trump has already lowered the bar so much.”

Mostly, however, Mainers are weary of the national attention the primary brought to their state — with little hope in sight of a let-up, Stewart-Bouley said.

“The general mood is people are really tired of this primary,” she said before Platner’s Tuesday night victory. “But if Platner wins, I suspect we’re not going to be out of the woods.”

In his remarks Tuesday, Platner acknowledged errors in his past and thanked the people of Maine for putting their trust in him despite them.

“Redemption is not just some simple or easy destination. It’s a journey. I’ve made mistakes in my life. Mistakes that I regret, that I live with and that I continue to learn from. And I’m still far from perfect. But every day I wake up and I try to be a little bit better and a little bit kinder than I was before,” Platner said. “And if you give me the chance, I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator.”

Update: June 9, 2026, 9:39 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with news of Platner’s victory in the Maine primary.

The post Graham Platner Wins in Maine, Turning Anti-Establishment Fight on Susan Collins appeared first on The Intercept.

The second-place finish for Raman means that in the coming months, Bass will have to grapple with a challenger from her left. The incumbent mayor’s establishment bonafides at once lend her a strong political apparatus and make her the object of voter frustration. Raman, meanwhile, will face an uphill battle against the entrenched Democratic machine, which helped Bass easily secure a first-place finish. The embrace of mail-in voting by Angelenos slowly turned the tide for Raman, who initially trailed Pratt when polls closed last Tuesday.

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Under California’s nonpartisan, open primary system, all viable candidates stood for the same June election — putting Pratt, a Republican, in the same primary as the heavily Democratic field. The top two advance to a runoff in November, meaning Los Angeles voters will choose between two Democrats in the general election ballot.

The emergence of Pratt, who rode a wave of outside conservative funding, prompted an intense debate among the city’s left on how to vote in the open primary. Rae Huang entered the race early on a progressive platform of strident police accountability measures, free and fast buses, and public housing. Raman, a city councilmember, decided to run at the last moment, with polls quickly showing she had a clearer path to a November runoff to fend off Pratt. Huang and her supporters insisted that she had the bolder leftist vision for the city, while Raman’s backers accused the Huang campaign of splitting the left amid a real threat from Pratt. The left is now faced with the task of repairing its fractures ahead of the November runoff. 

Following Zohran Mamdani’s successful run for mayor in New York City, pundits were quick to ponder whether Los Angeles might be having its own Mamdani moment. But closer watchers of LA politics have been asking whether a different New York import could improve elections in the nation’s second biggest city: ranked-choice voting.

A ranked-choice voting system allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. The system often leads to opponents with similar platforms and voter bases to cross-endorse, as was the case with Mamdani and his fellow progressive opponent Brad Lander, which helped stave off the more conservative-leaning former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In the LA race, ranked choice would have allowed Raman and Huang to forge a similar alliance without compromising their positions and cooling the fierce debates among their supporters.

“We’ve heard lots of voters that they are voting strategically, they try and follow the polls instead of supporting their real favorite — that’s the narrative that I think ranked-choice voting would solve,” said Rachel Hutchinson, deputy director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonprofit that is pushing for ranked-choice voting across the U.S., including in Los Angeles, where City Council has until June 26 to decide whether to place a measure on the November ballot that would implement the system in future elections.

“Not only do people not have to drop out, but they can actually act civilly toward each other, especially if they share an ideology or they represent a similar community,” Hutchinson continued. “Voters under this system would feel more empowered to vote their conscience because they can still support their candidate.”

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Raman joined the LA City Council as part of a wing of left-leaning victories that shifted the city’s political calculus, and has cast herself as a pragmatic leader with an eye for policy. But she faced challenges garnering support from the left amid accusations of flip-flopping and cozying up to entrenched local power. Despite running on defunding the police in 2020 as the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America elected to the council, Raman repeatedly voted to expand the Los Angeles Police Department budget, although she has pushed back on plans to expand the force. In 2024, Raman accepted an endorsement from Zionist group Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles, which opposed a ceasefire in Gaza, for which she was widely rebuked and even censured by DSA–LA.

Even though Raman and Huang are both DSA members, the local chapter declined to reopen the endorsement process for them. Raman’s three DSA colleagues on the City Council opted to endorse Bass. 

Bass focused much of her fire on attacking Raman, despite arguably having the biggest ideological disagreements with Pratt. Bass and Raman were once allies: Bass campaigned for Raman in 2024, and Raman supported Bass in her previous mayoral race. But once Raman launched her last-minute campaign, Bass criticized her for claiming to be an outsider with no control over the current issues plaguing the city, despite Raman having spent years in City Hall. 

On Monday, the local publication LA Material released a text message Bass sent Raman shortly after the latter filed to run; it contained only a tweet announcing Raman’s filing and a woman shrugging emoji.

Bass’s tenure as mayor has been rife with controversy, particularly over her handling of the deadly 2025 Pacific Palisades fire. The mayor was in Ghana attending an embassy party when the fire broke out, and she returned home the following day, with her city and reputation in tatters. Bass’s office has also been criticized for watering down an after-action report on the Palisades fire, including allegations that she scrubbed the most damning findings about the city’s shortcomings in responding to the blaze. 

Her supporters are quick to point out that the Santa Ana winds, and not Bass, fueled the intense fire. And in fact, President Donald Trump, who endorsed Pratt, also shares blame for the slow recovery effort. The president and Republicans in Congress have declined to release the $34 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency aid requested by California Gov. Gavin Newsom for assisting fire survivors. 

The controversy over the fires largely fueled the campaign of third-place finisher Pratt, a former television star on “The Hills” who has never worked in politics and is best known for getting into public spats with his female co-stars. He centered his pitch on his anger at Bass’s handling of the Palisades fire — which consumed his home as well as thousands of others — as well as his disdain for the city’s homeless population, whom he called “bums” and “zombies” and argued should be arrested en masse.

Housing experts told The Intercept that Pratt’s assertions were completely divorced from reality. But they pointed out that the lack of significant progress on the issue of homelessness in Los Angeles under Bass has emboldened figures like Pratt to swoop in and spread misinformation and dangerous propaganda.

The post Democratic Socialist Overcomes GOP-Funded Opponent to Advance in Los Angeles Mayor Race appeared first on The Intercept.

Lawmakers and military experts told The Intercept that Section 224, named “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” is highly irregular — and closely resembles a bipartisan bill backed by the pro-Israel lobby that died in Congress earlier this year.

“I can’t think of another example of Congress formalizing integration of critical national security technologies with a foreign power,” said retired Air Force Lt. Col. William Astore.

Unlike traditional foreign military aid programs, Section 224 would establish a framework for integrating Israeli-developed technologies directly into U.S. research, procurement, manufacturing, and acquisition processes — which military experts warned would be complicated, if not impossible, to unwind. It would apply across areas including AI, autonomous systems, cyberwarfare, biotechnology, missile defense, and defense industrial production.

Astore, who has taught military history at multiple institutions, said he’s particularly concerned about the AI component. “Israel is a leader in using AI predictive models and programs to surveil and kill people, using manned and unmanned drones,” he said. “The ‘smart,’ even autonomous technologies Israel has used against Palestinians could very well be used by the U.S. government against American citizens — especially the so-called radical left that President Trump appears to see as domestic terrorists.”

The debate is raging as Congress prepares to take up the fiscal year 2027 NDAA, a routine piece of legislation that spells out congressional priorities and budgeting for the armed forces. The House Armed Services Committee approved the legislation on Thursday evening; it now advances for consideration by the full House.

A handful of legislators from both parties have rebuked Section 224. Among them is Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican known for opposing all foreign military aid — a stance that drew the ire of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and drove millions in spending against him in the recent primary he lost to a Trump-backed challenger.

Massie was quick to condemn the proposal before it moved forward, writing: “If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor.”

Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat and Massie’s frequent collaborator, attempted to do something similar at the committee stage. On Thursday, Khanna introduced an amendment seeking to remove Section 224, arguing that Congress should not deepen military integration with Israel at a time when lawmakers are increasingly questioning the future of the U.S.–Israel relationship. But the amendment failed in committee after opposition from both Republicans and Democrats, including Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., who argued the U.S. benefits from access to Israeli military technologies developed under real-world combat conditions, citing missile defense, drone warfare, and other emerging capabilities as areas of mutual interest.

According to its proponents, the goal of Section 224 is to transition Israel away from decades of dependence on U.S. taxpayer-funded military assistance and toward a model centered on trade, co-development, and defense partnership — mirroring a desire expressed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

With the Obama-era Memorandum of Understanding with Israel set to expire in 2028, Israel and its backers in Congress are searching for new ways to preserve U.S.–Israeli military collaboration. The current U.S.–Israel MOU provides approximately $3.3 billion annually in foreign military financing and $500 million annually for missile defense cooperation, totaling $38 billion over 10 years through 2028.

Netanyahu stated in January that he hoped to replace Israel’s dependence on American military assistance in the next decade. Less than a month later, lawmakers in both the House and Senate introduced the United States–Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security (FUTURES) Act of 2026, a bipartisan proposal designed to expand U.S.–Israel cooperation in many of the same tech and AI areas as Section 224.

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The FUTURES Act was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Ted Budd, R-N.C., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and in the House by Reps. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, and Don Davis, D-N.C. All four sponsors have received substantial campaign support from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups.

The legislation also received public backing from both AIPAC and FDD Action, the advocacy arm of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has long advocated for deeper U.S.–Israel defense and technology cooperation.

The FUTURES Act did not advance as standalone legislation — but many of its core concepts later reappeared in Section 224 of the FY2027 NDAA. Legislative records and congressional offices contacted by The Intercept indicate that Section 224 adopts the same initiative and many of the same provisions previously proposed in the FUTURES Act, including language related to integrating Israeli-origin technologies into U.S. military programs, defense industrial cooperation, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, biotechnology, cyber capabilities, and joint research and development.

The Intercept contacted the House Armed Services Committee and the Department of Defense, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s office, seeking clarification on the origins of Section 224 and whether Pentagon officials participated in its development. Neither the committee nor the Pentagon responded to requests for comment before publication.

The Pentagon’s refusal to answer questions about Section 224 comes amid renewed scrutiny of U.S.–Israel intelligence relations. Reporting published this weekend by the New York Times and Military.com detailed Defense Department concerns regarding Israeli espionage risks, raising additional questions about efforts to deepen technological integration between the two countries.

Wes Bryant, a former Air Force special operations member who previously served as chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, argued that deeper military integration raises broader concerns about the technologies and doctrines the United States may adopt through closer cooperation with Israel.

“Israel is a terrorist state, wantonly committing atrocity and genocide largely facilitated by its use of AI, and we are further along on the same path but, at the very least, complicit,” Bryant said. “And moreso the more we militarily integrate and partner with Israel.”

In a piece for The Guardian, the co-authors of the upcoming book “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power,” Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick, described Section 224 as “not an alliance with a talented and responsible ally that will help keep the US safe, but a trap being set by Israel and its lobby to bind our country to a state that, for all its past promise, has gone rogue.”

The post Congress Is Trying to Permanently Integrate U.S. and Israeli Defense Tech appeared first on The Intercept.

Friends and family feared the worst. Muhammad, an army veteran and activist serving the longest federal sentence of any 2020 Black Lives Matter protester, had been a target inside the state prison because of their outspoken political beliefs and organizing efforts while incarcerated, several of their friends and supporters told The Intercept. 

“We were calling everyone,” said Christopher Kuttruff, a close friend and supporter. “We were terrified that they were in the hospital or dead …your mind obviously goes to the worst places.”

For weeks, the activist disappeared from all tracking systems. The best Muhammad’s supporters could ascertain by early April was that they had been transferred to a “confidential location.” Late that month, Muhammad was able to get a letter out to their partner from Kirkland Correctional Institute, in South Carolina, an intake facility 3,000 thousand miles from Oregon — or, as Regan puts it, “as far away from me as possible.”

Muhammad described the conditions at Kirkland as deplorable, claiming that incarcerated people are denied access to enough water, food, and recreation, and are forced to sleep on mats on the floor, which sometimes get confiscated as punishment.

The South Carolina Department of Corrections had little to say of Muhammad. In mid-May, the state’s prison system told The Intercept they had no record of someone named Malik Muhammad anywhere in their custody; the prison system did not respond to a follow-up query in June. The activist had become a living ghost within the carceral system. 

Even now, friends and family struggle to reach Muhammad, with only the occasional letter or call to the few people approved to contact them serving as proof of life. 

Because she is not licensed in South Carolina, Regan said she has “not been able to speak on the phone or in person in an attorney-client privileged manner since their transfer,” seriously impeding her ability to represent her client. She had to hire a local attorney to speak with them in person and collect potential evidence.

Millions of people flow through the U.S. prison system every year. And every year, an untold number of them vanish off the map, lost in a massive system that is legally obligated to watch over them. In New Mexico, Stephen Slevin spent nearly two years in solitary confinement in county jail after county officials appear to have simply forgotten about him after charging him with driving under the influence. Slevin never saw a judge or a lawyer and had to pull his own tooth due to consistent medical neglect.

Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for the Prison Policy Initiative, said that people getting lost in the prison system is “pretty common,” even when they haven’t moved as far away as Muhammad. “There’s never any effort made by prisons to tell incarcerated people’s families, ‘Hey, we’re moving this person,’” said Bertram.

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As the Trump administration ramps up its use of incarceration as a method of immigration enforcement, concerns are mounting about the already stretched system’s ability to keep track of the people within its care — and the opportunity such lapses in oversight create for authorities to target activists and dissenters adversarial to the government.

“Not only is [Malik] intelligent,” said Regan, a founder and director of litigation and advocacy at the Civil Liberties Defense Center, “but Malik is Black, Muslim, an anarchist, [and] a political activist, and they have targeted Malik as a result of all of those things.”

Muhammad, who was arrested in October 2020, received the harshest sentence out of the hundreds of protesters hit with federal charges in the wake of the 2020 summer protests for racial justice. After tens of thousands were arrested in some of the largest mass arrests in history, many were released without charges or saw their cases dropped, but some prosecutors pushed for harsh sentences and elevated state or local infractions to the federal level, arguing that rioters were masquerading as protesters.

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Muhammad pleaded guilty to both state and federal charges, including two counts of “unlawful possession of a destructive device,” for throwing a Molotov cocktail during a protest in East Portland. In 2022, the then-25-year-old was sentenced to 10 years in state prison.

Their plea agreement specifically stated that they would serve their time in Oregon state prison, near their supporters and community. Regan says that Oregon’s prison system has reneged on the agreement — illegally transferring Muhammad interstate as retaliation for their activism while incarcerated — in another attempt by the criminal legal system to punish Muhammad for their organizing.

“Normally, they would have been sentenced to the federal prison system,” said Regan. However, “because their friends and family and supporters at the time were based in Oregon, they explicitly negotiated an outcome that ensured that they would remain in Oregon.” 

Federal prisons tend to be “better,” said Regan, because they often have more funding, allow for more freedom of movement, and have marginally better food. Put it this way, she said, “generally speaking, if you had a choice between Oregon State Prison or Federal Prison, most people would choose [federal].” But instead of relative comfort, Muhammad chose community.

Prisons are essentially a “black box” where people can disappear into solitary confinement or be transferred without their family’s knowledge, according to Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative. 

“There’s so many constant questions that you live with as the loved one of an incarcerated person, and then when that person suddenly disappears, it’s terrifying,” said Bertram.

To make matters worse, she said, “prisons have a kind of nasty habit of not telling the family when someone dies or is transferred to an outside hospital, or needs emergency care,” compounding concerns for people who cannot locate their loved ones on the inside.

In Regan’s view, there are “a number of reasons” to characterize Muhammad’s transfer as retaliatory. For starters, she said this is part of a pattern of behavior from the Oregon prison system. In 2024, The Intercept reported that Muhammad had been effectively held in solitary confinement, which in Oregon is called “special housing,” for more than 250 days — despite the fact that Oregon limits the use of this type of confinement to 90 days.

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She said Muhammad had met people in prison, many who’d been through excessive solitary, and suggested that they could become potential plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit the Oregon Justice Resource Center is seeking to file against the state prison system. “The prison is, of course, retaliating against them for basically assisting a nonprofit legal organization in bringing a giant lawsuit about the abuses of solitary confinement in the Oregon prison system,” Regan said. 

Oregon flatly denies sending Muhammad to South Carolina as retaliation.

“These decisions are not made lightly and require a thorough review process conducted by all parties. In the case of Mr. Muhammed [sic], there is extensive background for the reasons [they were] a candidate for an Interstate Compact,” Amber Campbell, communications manager at the public affairs division for the Oregon Department of Corrections, wrote in a statement to The Intercept. 

Muhammad’s advocacy and community building inside have consistently put a target on their back, said Jeremy, a close friend and pen pal. Friends described Muhammad as “empathetic,” “generous,” and “passionate,” as eager to sing for their cellmates as they are to share a book on political theory. 

Now, Muhammad’s friends and family have to sit and wait, and hope the prison system won’t lose them all over again. 

Correction: June 8, 2026, 1:56 p.m. ET
This story previously misstated which legal organization is seeking a class-action lawsuit against the Oregon state prison system; it is the Oregon Justice Resource Center.

The post They Were Serving the Longest Federal Sentence of Any 2020 BLM Protester. Then They Vanished in Prison. appeared first on The Intercept.

In addition to passionate debates about the Olympics themselves — the geopolitics of the Games and their effect on local hosts — Wasserman has come in for criticism over his ties to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, his support for Israel, and the potential that the Games might bring him profits through his role as a talent manager for entertainment stars.

The controversies, especially revelations about his relationship with a member of Epstein’s inner circle, nearly led to Wasserman’s ouster from his role atop LA28, the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee.

Now, another personal wrinkle is coming to light: Wasserman’s daughter, Stella, is training to compete for the Israeli equestrian team at the 2028 Games.

Stella Wasserman, 21, is training to compete with the Israeli team in the show jumping competition, according to a recent profile in World of Show Jumping, a trade publication covering the sport. Instagram accounts for Stella Wasserman and her mother, Laura Ziffren Wasserman, posted in the wake of the article to celebrate Stella’s plans to compete with the Israeli team.

There’s a very real possibility that the man responsible for orchestrating an American Olympic games will have a child competing for another country that has become an international pariah due to its genocide in Gaza and wars with Lebanon and Iran — a team that is likely to face protests in LA. (Casey Wasserman, Stella Wasserman, LA28, and the Israeli Olympic committee did not respond to requests for comment.)

Casey Wasserman is himself an outspoken supporter of Israel. In December, he took a trip to Israel during which he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pledged that the safety of athletes, and particularly Israeli athletes, was his “number one concern,” according to Algemeiner, a right-wing, New York-based newspaper covering Jewish issues.

“If you’re claiming that this thing that you’re promoting so heavily is going to bring all these benefits to Los Angeles, but you’re also promoting the interests of a foreign genocidal state — and on top of that your daughter is representing that state in the Games — that’s a conflict,” said Miguel Camnitzer, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace Los Angeles. “Somebody else, without those very personal connections to Israel, might be able to make a different call, but he’s unable to.”

Wasserman, a longtime local powerbroker and grandson of Hollywood Golden Age tycoon Lew Wasserman, has been central to bringing the Games to Los Angeles, a role that has come under increased scrutiny due to his ties to Epstein and the late pedophile’s former companion, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

While his connections to the Epstein world were known to some degree for years  — he rode with Bill Clinton on Epstein’s private jet for a humanitarian mission to Africa — the release of the so-called Epstein files earlier this year revealed graphic sexual emails between Wasserman and Maxwell. The revelations sparked a backlash from some of the artists represented by his eponymous talent agency, which in March changed its name to The Team; Wasserman also announced he would be selling the company.

This week, Wasserman reaffirmed that he has no plans to step down as the chair of LA28.

Olympian Hypocrisies

Despite her young age, Stella Wasserman is an accomplished show jumper and owns at least four competition horses, according to a report in the Chronicle of the Horse.

It is common for athletes from one country to compete for a country in which they hold dual citizenship; the International Olympic Committee requires that competitors be nationals of the countries on whose behalf they are competing.

Amid the genocide in Gaza, the Israel connection underscores arguments from critics of the Olympics who say that the Games whitewash human rights abuses by nations taking part — and that international approaches to the Games foster a global double standard that penalizes some nations while allowing others to compete. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian teams were barred from competing in the 2026 Winter Olympics; Israel has faced no such sanction.

The yearslong campaign by Wasserman and others — including former Mayor Eric Garcetti — to host the Olympics in Los Angeles has met with stiff opposition from local activists. Forming a coalition, dubbed NOlympics, the activists sought to call attention to the ways in which they say the Games would exacerbate issues of affordability, surveillance, and anti-immigrant policing by federal law enforcement.

“When we started organizing against the Olympics 10 years ago, LA was already reeling from homelessness, housing shortages, brutal policing, and ICE. And 10 years later these issues are all worse,” said Jonny Coleman, an organizer with NOlympics LA. “Mega-events like the Olympics or the World Cup don’t necessarily create problems from whole cloth, but they accelerate them.”

In December, LA28 announced it had raised more than $2 billion in sponsorship revenue, according to Reuters. If the costs of the Games exceed what the Olympic committee is able to fundraise, however, Los Angeles would be on the hook for the first $270 million of over-cost expenses, with the next $270 million to be covered by the state of California.

The Games, activists said, could be a boon for Wasserman. Wasserman chaired a host committee to bring the Super Bowl to LA in 2022; his client Kendrick Lamar was featured in the halftime show — a coveted slot not least for the millions the exposure can bring.

For Coleman, Casey Wasserman’s relationship to Ghislaine Maxwell and Stella Wasserman’s potential competition on behalf of Israel only further highlights the corrupt nature of the Olympics.

“We know these mega-events are a way to legitimize awful regimes,” said Coleman. “It’s disgusting, but I don’t really care about the supposed integrity of the sports, personally. So yeah, let her play — why not?”

The post Daughter of 2028 Olympics Chair Dreams of Competing in LA — for Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

In a recently published policy paper arguing a full-throated embrace of data center nationalism, Anthropic said that “it’s essential that the US and its allies stay ahead of authoritarian governments like the Chinese Communist Party,” lest the world fall into the grips of tech-powered tyranny. Anthropic and its peers, the company claims, will form a bulwark of democratic values, protecting societies at home and abroad from repression.

Left unmentioned in the document — and seldom publicly acknowledged — is the fact a slice of Anthropic is owned by the Emirati dictatorship of Abu Dhabi, a repressive and authoritarian monarchy.

Anthropic’s policy paper, published in May, tours the same Sinophobic territory heavily trod by its chief competitor OpenAI and a wide swath of the tech industry, who know a “race” with China — the finish line never quite defined — is a weighty cudgel against regulation.

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Anthropic is aware of which way the wind blows from Washington to Silicon Valley, and it shrewdly casts the development of machine learning models not just as a matter of hardware and software, but of ideology and geopolitics. “Democracies, not authoritarian regimes, must lead in AI development and deployment,” the company says, or else an era of “authoritarian AI” will begin.

“Already, the CCP is using AI to censor speech, repress dissidents, hack governments and corporations across the world, and strengthen the People’s Liberation Army,” Anthropic writes, and to “enforce draconian policies on ethnic minorities” using machine learning-powered methods like biometric collection and facial recognition.

The policy paper isn’t a condemnation of any of these AI uses per se; the United States is already eagerly using these technologies for intelligence, military, and ethnic minority-repression purposes today. Residents of Tehran, which Anthropic has helped bomb since the start of the joint U.S.–Israeli war against Iran, might question the company’s argument that American AI supremacy is a matter of global “safety.”

Though the policy paper focuses on China, the company has long stated it opposes authoritarianism broadly: “AI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries,” CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a 2024 blog post.

This is not merely a battle between the U.S. and China, Anthropic says in the May paper, but a war between democracy and “authoritarian governments” broadly construed.

But Anthropic’s anti-authoritarian fervor seemingly does not extend beyond China to the Middle East, where Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund invested in Anthropic twice this year. In February, Anthropic announced it had raised $30 billion in capital from a group of investors that included MGX, the AI-focused investment vehicle of a Emirati government capital controlled by Abu Dhabi’s royal family. Anthropic’s most recent May 28 $65 billion capital round, bringing its valuation to $965 billion, also included MGX.

Like China, the United Arab Emirates outlaws almost everything associated with democratic society: Political parties, a free press, freedoms to associate and assemble, open elections, due process, and free speech are nonexistent. Political dissidents face torture, and any speech, online or offline, that causes “damage to national unity” risks life imprisonment or the death penalty.

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Emirati authoritarianism isn’t contested by the U.S., Anthropic’s primary governmental customer. The State Department’s 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices assessed the UAE faces “credible reports of: disappearances; arbitrary arrest or detention; transnational repression against individuals in another country; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including censorship; and prohibiting independent trade unions or significant or systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association.” Freedom House, a State Department-backed think tank, gives the UAE a score of 18 out of 100 on its “Global Freedom” index.

Anthropic declined to comment. MGX did not respond to a request for comment.

Given that MGX bought into Anthropic at its Series G and H investment rounds, relatively late in the venture capital game, it’s likely that the UAE’s stake in the company is relatively small and its influence limited. But Anthropic’s willingness to sell part of itself to an authoritarian monarchy suggests at least that its mission of “ensuring democracies lead” comes with asterisks.

“Like China, the UAE is at the forefront of AI-based authoritarian surveillance,” said Matthew Tokson, a law professor at the University of Utah who focuses on the security implications of artificial intelligence.

Tokson added that while he generally agrees with Anthropic’s calls to restrict processor exports to China and other measures to bolster American AI firms, he doesn’t buy the nationalist rhetoric, which he attributes to the company’s anti-regulatory agenda rather than patriotism. The more Anthropic and its competitors can convince the public that their bottom line is a matter of national security, the more likely Washington is to take a light touch.

“The fact that Anthropic is partly owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, which is similar to China in its extensive use of AI surveillance to support an authoritarian government, suggests that its anti-authoritarian arguments are more based on a cynical policy position than a sincere passion for democracy or antipathy toward authoritarian governments.”

Many of the emirate’s long record of repressive acts and rights violations are connected to MGX via its chair, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Through his position as the emirate’s national security and intelligence chief and his business portfolio, including chairmanship of the AI firm G42 (itself a founding partner in MGX), Tahnoun has been linked to a bevy of campaigns to surveil and hack into the phones of Emirati dissidents, human rights advocates, and others the monarchy deems an adversary, according to news media reports and scholarly research. A 2020 investigation by Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab placed “Spy Sheikh” Tahnoun at the center of myriad hacking, espionage, and surveillance operations. A 2025 Wired profile of Tahnoun similarly described him as Abu Dhabi’s “spymaster sheikh,” noting G42’s “special areas of strength in state-sponsored hacking and surveillance tech.”

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In 2019, the New York Times reported a covert Emirati government campaign to conduct surveillance through an instant messaging app called ToTok, an app itself Marczak tied to Tahnoon and through G42 in his 2020 analysis. The Wired profile described Tahnoun’s ambitions to “dominate AI” noted that “an engineer who worked at G42 at the time told me that all of the [ToTok] voice, video, and text chats were analyzed by AI for what the government considered suspicious activity.”

G42 declined to comment, and neither it nor MGX responded to interview requests for Tahnoun.

There is reason to believe G42 and MGX have already deployed Anthropic’s powerful large language models. A review of DNS data — internet records that connect website names to numerical addresses understandable by computers — show both G42 and MGX have both configured their servers to allow personnel to access Anthropic tools like Claude, the company’s flagship large language model.

Anthropic has been more candid in internal communications about its stance on authoritarianism.

“Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” Amodei wrote in a 2025 memo on Gulf State venture capital obtained by Wired. He wrote that such investment would boost “dictators” and conceded that it would give an authoritarian government “some soft power” to wield against the company. Nonetheless, Amodei dismissed the risk of hypocrisy as a “Comms Headache” — a function of “very stupid” commentators “having a poor understanding of substantive issues.”

Principles aside, Amodei explained in plain terms why he was interested in doing business with a repressive Gulf State. “We gain a very large benefit,” he wrote, “from having access to this capital.”

The post Anthropic Says We Must Stop Authoritarian AI. But What About Its Authoritarian Investors? appeared first on The Intercept.

Hundreds of detained people launched a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, over Memorial Day weekend to protest inhumane conditions at the immigration detention facility run by the for-profit company GEO Group. Protesters flocked to the scene to echo detainees’ pleas for release and better conditions — and were met with brutal tactics from federal, local, and state law enforcement officials, who beat, tear-gassed, and arrested protesters.

“Detainees are raising that they have no access to quality medical care, that they’re not getting needed medications,” Andrea Sáenz, a former federal appellate immigration judge who was fired by the Trump administration last year, tells The Intercept Briefing. “They don’t have enough food to eat. The food that they are getting is spoiled. They’re facing hostility and harassment and violence from the guards.”  

This week on the podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks to Sáenz and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior policy fellow at the American Immigration Council, about the conditions at the 1,000-bed jail and other detention centers across the country. The Trump administration has restricted members of Congress and state officials from oversight of federal immigration detention centers. “ICE doesn’t want people to see the way that they’re treating human beings in these facilities,” says Sáenz. 

Intercept reporter Noah Hurowitz, who covers federal law enforcement and immigration, was on the scene at Delaney Hall on Monday. He describes the violence that erupted outside of the facility between protesters and law enforcement officers.

“The ICE agents on the scene were quite willing to use violence at times against protesters,” says Hurowitz. “But from everything I saw, the Newark and New Jersey police were much more indiscriminate with their violence and much more willing to attack outright and fire tear gas and really put people in danger.”

Reichlin-Melnick says that the Trump administration’s war on immigrants should concern everyone. “We’re seeing every government database being turned into a tool of the mass deportation state, and that is something that impacts all Americans,” he adds, “because you cannot carry out a mass deportation of 4 percent of the U.S. population without fundamentally transforming the United States into more of a police state.” 

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

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. 

Noah Hurowitz: And I’m Noah Hurowitz. I cover federal law enforcement and immigration at The Intercept. 

JW: Noah, you were outside Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, on Monday afternoon after dozens of protesters were arrested the night before after clashing with state and local police. Noah, what can you tell us about what went down and why protesters were out there in the first place?

NH: The current wave of protests outside Delaney Hall started around May 28, and it was called in solidarity with detainees inside the facility who were withholding labor and hunger striking, some of them, to protest really bad conditions inside the jail, including bad food, maggots in the food, inadequate medical care. There’s all sorts of complaints that we’re hearing from people inside. A wife of one of the hunger strikers called on local organizations to rally in solidarity.

Now, the way that it began was, for several days, there were protesters standing directly outside one of the entrances to Delaney Hall. And the way it would go for several nights was that basically after dark, the protesters would be standing along the entrance. And every time a car had to go in or out, the ICE agents who were standing outside — full kit, masks — would push out and try to clear the way for cars to come in or out.

That is usually when some of the more spectacular clashes that you may have seen took place. So they’d be swinging batons, they’d be hitting people with pepper sprays. It was pretty ugly, but it was this weird choreography of static, static, static — and then conflict when the ICE agents would attack, and then back to a sort of status quo.

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But when state and local police arrived on the scene and tried to secure the area around Delaney Hall, that’s when things got really ugly. So on the night of Friday, May 29, and really on the evening of Saturday, May 30, there were these widespread scenes of disorder as police came in with riot shields and gas masks and started firing tear gas.

A number of people were injured, including a freelance photographer for The Associated Press who suffered a pretty severe injury to her leg. Everyone that I spoke to said that as rough as ICE could be — and as daunting as the image of these masked guys just taking swings at protesters was — it really got so much more chaotic when state and local police got involved.

Now, Mayor Ras Baraka declared a curfew, which is ironic because Mayor Baraka was previously arrested protesting conditions at ICE, and he’s, from the beginning, taken a stance of what’s happening at Delaney Hall is unacceptable but protesters need to be peaceful. The way that was enforced was very not peaceful.

On Sunday night, there was a curfew imposed for 9 p.m., and they had also set up a frozen zone on the industrial corridor that Delaney sits. So they had set up police checkpoints about a half mile in either direction so that protesters couldn’t even get in front of the detention facility anymore.

On Sunday night, according to a number of my colleagues who were covering it that night and other reporting that I’ve seen, after 9 p.m., when the curfew was imposed, police began to kettle protesters. They began to surround them and prevent them from leaving, saying that they were now in violation of the curfew.

They let media leave for the most part if they were able to show credentials, but a handful of more citizen journalists were arrested that night. They held dozens of protesters and a handful of reporters in jail. After a certain point, they needed to be released on Monday afternoon.

So when I arrived on the scene, late on Monday afternoon, people were just starting to get released. It was a pretty tame scene. No one was able to get close to the facility. The police had set up these free-speech zones with several dozen protesters there with signs and megaphones. There were many dozens of police and a lot of media.

When 9 o’clock rolled around, most of the protesters started to filter out, with the exception of a handful of protesters who played this brief game of cat and mouse with the police. As police were advancing, they were backing up to the supposed “free-speech zone” about 500 yards away.

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There were no arrests that night that I saw. There was a number of Newark community leaders on the scene who were also trying to bring down the temperature, which protesters were not happy about because they felt like this was just an effort to diffuse things.

From what I saw, the ICE agents on the scene were quite willing to use violence at times against protesters in order to maintain that entrance. But from everything I saw, the Newark and New Jersey police were much more indiscriminate with their violence and much more willing to attack outright and fire tear gas and really put people in danger.

JW: You and I have both covered the aggressive and deadly tactics used by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. Noah, how is what we’re seeing different in New Jersey than what we saw in Minneapolis or even Chicago last year? Or is this just a continuation of more of the same?

NH: I think it’s a continuation of what we saw in those other places with some notable differences. Minnesota and in Chicago, the police and the state and local officials there got a lot of flak from the Trump administration for speaking out against the ICE raids that were happening and for taking a step back.

Here, the rhetoric was there from the state and local officials. Both the mayor and the governor were speaking quite stridently against the alleged abuses at Delaney Hall and against the violence being used against protesters. But they also seemed a lot more willing to use their authority to diffuse the protests, which has led to a lot of criticism from protesters who were saying that they basically were trying to co-opt this protest, they were trying to prevent any problems for their own political calculations — that law and order were their first priority, rather than the lawless and lack of order behavior of ICE agents and of this privately operated detention facility.

JW: We’re going to get into all of that and much more in our next conversation. I speak with Andrea Sáenz, a senior counsel at Co-Counsel NYC, a nonprofit providing immigration legal services and training. She previously served as an appellate immigration judge with the Board of Immigration Appeals in the U.S. Department of Justice from 2021 to 2025.

Also joining us is Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior policy fellow at the American Immigration Council, where he works to break down the complex reality of immigration law and policy to the media, policymakers, and the general public. 

NH: Hell yeah, let’s get into it.

JW: Andrea and Aaron, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: Thank you for having us.

Andrea Sáenz: Thank you.

JW: Andrea, we just heard from my colleague Noah Hurowitz, who’s been reporting from Delaney Hall. Detainees have been holding hunger and labor strikes at the New Jersey detention center. What more can you tell us about the conditions at Delaney that sparked these strikes?

AS: What’s going on at Delaney is really a microcosm of what’s happening all over the country in terms of incredibly harsh and inhumane conditions in ICE detention, that don’t have any accountability. 

At Delaney in particular, detainees are raising that they have no access to quality medical care, that they’re not getting needed medications. They don’t have enough food to eat. The food that they are getting is spoiled. They’re facing hostility and harassment and violence from the guards.

I’ve been really gratified to see elected officials and press and others paying attention to this. But unfortunately, it’s something that we’re seeing all over the country, from Adelanto to Dilley to Camp East Montana in Texas.

JW: So Aaron, your organization, the American Immigration Council published a report earlier this year about the Trump administration’s immigration detention expansion efforts this term. A section of the report reads, “A system of detention, which did not fully take off until the mid-1990s, is now on track to rival the entire federal criminal prison system by the end of President Trump’s second term in office. This expansion is fueled by an unprecedented increase in funding provided by Congress in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Combined with ICE’s annual appropriations, ICE has nearly $15 billion per year to use on immigration detention through the end of fiscal year 2029.”

Aaron, what can you tell us about the scale of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand detention centers? 

ARM: Since taking office, Trump expanded the scale of the detention system by 75 percent, rising from about 40,000 people in detention when he took office in 2025 to over 73,000 people in detention in January 2026. While that number has fallen somewhat in the months since “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis, the Trump administration is sitting on an unprecedented pot of cash that they can use to keep expanding the system even bigger.

JW: Andrea, I want to bring you in. We’ve been hearing about these efforts from the Trump administration to convert warehouses to detention centers. What do we know about those plans, and what can we surmise about what those conditions could look like?

AS: What we know is that the government has spent a whole lot of money to buy large facilities without really having any plan of how they’re going to humanely keep human beings there. We know this because they haven’t even had the plans to figure out how they’re going to handle water and trash and things like that at these facilities, and that’s been the source of some lawsuits. 

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But I think we have reason to be incredibly worried that the government is in no position to hold a large number of human beings. Delaney is a good example because it’s the largest facility on the East Coast. It can hold up to 1,000 people. We’ve got a human rights situation going on inside, pepper-spraying a U.S. senator on the outside.

So I can only imagine if you were to try to expand the capacity of these facilities, the government just doesn’t have the infrastructure, the accountability, the oversight to care for people. As we’re seeing the numbers of deaths in ICE detention rise — I believe it’s 18 deaths just in this calendar year, which is unprecedented. What really worries me is that these are preventable deaths, and that we’re going to see more of them if the government’s permitted to keep expanding, literally warehousing human beings in this way.

The key difference now is the speed at which the Trump administration is expanding the system and the ways in which accountability has been dismantled. When Trump took office, there was the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties inside the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman as internal watchdogs. Within the first month, the Trump administration slashed their staff to the bones and has since dismantled the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman entirely, shutting it down despite a congressional mandate that the office remain in existence. With no internal accountability, that’s left only external accountability, and there they are trying to prevent members of Congress from going into detention centers.

The end result of this is that conditions are worsening, deaths are rising, and the need for reform is growing every day.

JW: That lack of transparency that you’ve mentioned is something that’s come up a lot in our reporting — the inability to monitor what’s happening inside of these facilities is incredibly concerning.

Andrea, I want to ask, from your perspective, what does access look like even for immigration attorneys that are trying to reach their clients?

AS: It’s a good question because there are lots of ways that we should be able to know what’s happening in the detention center. It’s not intended to be a secret.

I’ve been representing detained people for 18 years, and it’s always been part of the practice to drive out and physically see your client, have them sign papers, that their family members are allowed to visit them. And that when they have a court hearing, they’re either produced in person or they’re there on video, and observers can come and watch because it’s a public court hearing.

Right now, what we’re seeing is that all of those things are being obstructed. It’s incredibly hard to even find out where your client is anymore because they’re being transferred from state to state. They disappear off the public detainee locator. ICE is not responsive. 

As Aaron mentioned, there aren’t oversight agencies to complain to, and the immigration court system is increasingly keeping out observers and press from even watching these hearings to know what’s happening.

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And then, of course, on the oversight side, as we’ve been talking about, part of what’s happening at Delaney, the reason why this escalated with elected officials, is because they wanted to get inside the facilities and exercise their right to oversight. They’ve been denied that right and in New Jersey, you have state health officials who weren’t allowed to go inside and inspect. And so ICE doesn’t want people to see the way that they’re treating human beings in these facilities. 

But at least I’m gratified that people from lawyers to family members to elected officials keep trying.

JW: Do we have a sense of whether or not conditions are deteriorating? Obviously, these are horrific conditions that we’re describing, but maggots in the food, lack of access to medical care, these are not necessarily new issues inside of detention facilities.

Aaron, are we seeing a much worsening of conditions, or is there just a lot more attention on this issue right now?

ARM: It’s a little bit of both. There are some issues that you’re seeing raised in the media and brought to people’s attention now that aren’t new. As you said, maggots in food, bad medical care. This is not a new problem.

When you look at spoiled food, there are DHS Office of Inspector General reports going back many years which document violations of standards at Essex County Jail outside of New York City, a jail that is no longer working with ICE. Inspectors went there in 2018 and found spoiled food, covered in mold in the fridge that was being served to people. So that’s not a new issue.

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But what is new is the way in which the Trump administration has made getting out of detention more difficult so that more people are being detained there. Before last year, the Trump administration adopted the legal position saying that essentially any person who ever entered the United States across the southern border is permanently barred from seeking release on bond, even if they’ve been here for 20 years with no criminal record.

That means more people in detention, more overcrowding, and as they open up these new facilities or repurpose old facilities, like Delaney Hall, it’s clear that there isn’t enough staffing to keep these places operating at the capacity that they are operating. This is not a problem that’s also unique to immigration detention.

There is a shortage of corrections officers in jails and prisons nationwide and a shortage of prison healthcare providers. One of the biggest ones, Corizon, actually went bankrupt two years ago. Given that, it’s not a surprise that the administration is failing to meet the standards that it is legally required to meet.

AS: I do think that conditions are deteriorating. And I think another factor is the increased enforcement itself is causing severe overcrowding, including in these facilities that were intended to be holding facilities. So one of the places that conditions have been the source of lawsuits is in places like the Baltimore Hold Room, 26 Federal Plaza in New York City.

These are facilities where people are supposed to be taken for an hour or two after they’re arrested by ICE, and instead people have been packed in like sardines, sleeping on the floor next to toilets, and judges have had to order that you can’t hold people overnight there. So that’s part of the problem.

A second aspect to the problem is because ICE enforcement is so indiscriminate at the moment, and, that’s gone back and forth with time, but I do think it is worse than I have ever seen it, that ICE is not holding back from arresting very young people, very sick people, very old people’s moms and dads. So you have medically vulnerable and sick people in ICE detention with these conditions, and you’re setting up a recipe for disaster.

JW: To your point, at The Intercept, we’ve covered the detention of pregnant women and postpartum women who previously have been exempted, generally speaking, from detention, who are now in these facilities, who are lacking access to medical care, water, all of these necessities you need to thrive in pregnancy.

[Break]

JW: The Trump administration recently made some pretty significant changes to the green card process. Aaron, can you walk us through what they did and how it’s going to impact people applying to become permanent residents?

ARM: A couple weeks ago, the Trump administration put out a memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, America’s legal immigration benefits agency. That memo said that for the first time ever, adjustment of status where someone applies for a green card from inside the United States, would no longer be treated as a normal part of the legal immigration process, but would instead be treated as an extraordinary benefit and only given in an act of administrative grace.

This was particularly strange because adjustment of status is the norm by which about half of all people get their green cards. These are people who are in the United States already, living here either on a visa or seeking to change their status. So it could be anything from a foreign student who comes here, falls in love with an American at college, and applies for a green card, to someone present on an H-1B visa for 10 years who is seeking to finally get their green card and become a lawful permanent resident.

Almost immediately, this set off a lot of backlash, and the administration has had to walk this back a little bit because their initial suggestion in this memo was that potentially as many as half a million people a year would have to leave the United States and seek an immigrant visa in their home country if they wanted to get a green card that they were legally entitled to.

Silicon Valley was not happy. A lot of people were very clear that this seemed like an unnecessary process because the vetting that someone gets inside the United States is identical to the vetting that they get if they’re outside the United States seeking a visa, which means the only difference is where the bureaucrat is deciding this.

Is it a bureaucrat at a consulate abroad deciding if you get a green card, or a bureaucrat at an office in the United States? From the government’s perspective, that should make no difference, but for the immigrant themselves, this means time away from their family and home in the United States, time away from their job, and the possibility that if there’s some error or red tape, they might not be able to come back for maybe weeks, months, or longer, which just threw a wrench in a lot of people’s plans for staying in this country and being on a path to citizenship.

However, crucially, the administration, ever since they put out that vaguely worded memo, has been trying to walk it back somewhat, and is now suggesting it may apply to a much more narrow group of people, potentially people who overstayed visas years ago and are trying to get a green card through a spouse, which would be a lot narrower a group, but still impact potentially tens of thousands of people.

JW: I’m not going to lie, this does seem like quite a mess. 

Andrea, are we seeing other ways that the Trump administration is targeting people with legal status?

AS: Yes. What really the big picture here is that’s alarming to me with both the green card memo and some of the decisions coming out of the Board of Immigration Appeals that I used to sit on, is that there is this level of contempt and dismissiveness even for people who have forms of status.

So it really, I think, gives lie to that idea that the administration or Republicans are only interested in illegal immigration, they’re only interested in people who are out of status. Because you’re also seeing increased targeting and detention of Dreamers, people with DACA, young people with special immigrant juvenile status who have an approved application to stay in the U.S. and are in a line to get their green cards, people who have visas for being victims of violent crimes or trafficking.

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These are all kinds of status that already exist in law that Congress has created, and you’re seeing these people additionally detained and put into proceedings. And the Board of Immigration Appeals is putting out case law day after day saying, “These classes of people are not special. They’re not worthy of particular protection. They can all be denied bond. They can all be put in removal proceedings and detained.”

JW: And we’ve also obviously seen a targeting of U.S. citizens who’ve stood up for immigrants as well. Since Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and former Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino “retired” after violent raids in Minnesota killed two American citizens, it appears the Trump administration has at least toned down publicizing these aggressive raids.

But has there actually been a shift in tactics under the new DHS secretary? Aaron, I want to start with you, and then Andrea, I want to get you in as well.

ARM: The short answer is it does appear that yes, they have pulled back from the aggressive raids that were really characteristic of the Noem term, in particular under the leadership of Gregory Bovino, a mid-level Border Patrol official who was unexpectedly elevated to the position of “commander-at-large” of DHS operations in the interior.

What we are seeing now is a return in some ways to the more traditional targeted so-called enforcement tactics, where ICE officers have lists of people that they are specifically intending to arrest, go out into the communities to arrest those specific people. 

But we are seeing a major increase in so-called collateral arrests. If they arrest that one person, they also might arrest everyone else in the building who’s nearby or anyone who looks like an immigrant near there. The end result of this is that the administration is now arresting slightly fewer people than during Operation Metro Surge. Detention numbers have come down, about 10 to 20 percent from the height of that operation.

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But they are building out a more robust enforcement capacity, and especially relying on state and local police who are cooperating with them through so-called 287(g) agreements, agreements that allow local law enforcement to act as ICE officers. So the Trump administration’s new plan is to gradually build up the capacity rather than rushing out to make splashy headlines, and they believe that is more sustainable in the long term, both from an enforcement perspective and also importantly from a political perspective.

AS: We are seeing not only a decrease in maybe these large-scale campaigns that have a cute nickname. We’re also seeing a decrease in courthouse arrests, partly because they were stopped by litigation. But I am continuing to see waves of street enforcement and street arrests that are often racially motivated, and I think we have to keep our eye on that.

Early on during the Los Angeles ICE surge, we saw a lot of those stories of ICE stopping people, regular people, Latino people walking down the street, going to school and work, including U.S. citizens, and that got a lot of press. I think those arrests are still happening; they’re just happening one at a time in less obvious ways.

I do a lot of habeas corpus litigation, and so I get a lot of emails and calls about who has been arrested. And, Aaron mentioned this idea of targeted arrests, which is what ICE says that they’re doing, that they’re looking for a particular person who has a criminal arrest or who has a prior deportation order.

But there are a lot of arrests in which ICE says that they’re looking for a target, and really what they have done is drive up next to a Latino person and ask them for their ID and then arrest them — when they were very obviously not the target that they were looking for. So I think we can’t let the idea of targeted enforcement cover the actual reality that people, especially people of color walking down the street, have something to fear from ICE.

I think it’s a terrible state of affairs, but I think we have to continue to be vigilant and push back on it.

JW: In that vein, how would you characterize this phase of Trump’s immigration agenda? Where is Trump in this? What is the end goal here that we can visualize at this stage?

AS: This is part of the question is, like, how much does Trump himself have to do with this as opposed to other people in the administration?

We’re in a transitional phase as we have new DOJ and DHS leadership. Certainly, the people in the administration like Stephen Miller, who have had an agenda all along, are intending to decrease the amount of immigrants in the United States, both legal and undocumented. And that it’s intentional to have people be scared of the kind of enforcement that I’m talking about that the administration hopes that a lot of people will get scared and frustrated and leave the United States, including through things like the green card memo, that it’s just so confusing and overwhelming and expensive to stay here that people will pick up and leave, even at incredible cost to our economy and to our fabric as a community.

What’s exactly coming next I can’t say, but I’m guessing that there is more to come. Trying to advise clients in this atmosphere, trying to advise immigrant communities is really hard. People are scared, and it’s hard to tell them not to be.

What we are seeing them do is attempt to take a system that was always imperfect but strived towards due process and basic principles of fairness, and turning it into an assembly line for deportations — one in which basic legal rights are tossed aside and procedures are followed potentially to the letter, but in clear violation of the spirit.

You see this with new policies like “mega master” calendar hearings, 100 people scheduled for a hearing with maybe 72 hours of notice, maybe sent by mail or email that they might not even know about the hearing ahead of time because they were scheduled for a hearing in 2027, and all of a sudden they’re told, “Show up two days from now in New York City. Oh, and by the way, you might not have a lawyer.”

You have no idea what’s going to happen to you. When you show up at that hearing, you’re told, “You have 20 days to get everything on file. We don’t care that you don’t have a lawyer. We’re moving forward.” If you miss that hearing, you’re ordered deported immediately.

They’re doing this even for children, and they’re firing the judges that were seen to be too liberal or too willing to grant cases, even if those cases were legally meritorious. The asylum grant rate has dropped to less than 10 percent of cases, when before it was 30 to 40 percent of cases were granted. All of this is a system that is being systematically turned against the immigrant and against the idea of a fair day in court.

However, given the scale of immigration court backlogs, there are still over 3.2 million cases pending in the system. It’s not clear whether they will actually be able to clear these backlogs by the time Trump leaves office. Crucially, all of this funding in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the funding that Congress has been debating, the additional $70 billion for CBP and ICE that’s being debated in the most recent reconciliation bill — that is all set to expire at the end of Trump’s term, by the end of fiscal year 2029.

So we are in a situation where they may get all of this infrastructure in place, and then who controls Congress in 2029 will determine whether that infrastructure has to be slashed back and whether we can get some handle on the system and help right the ship.

JW: I want to get into control of Congress in just a moment.

But Andrea, first I wanted to ask you, because you have personal experience with being pushed out because of the perception of your views on immigration. So I’m curious, how are you viewing this effort by the Trump administration to push anyone out who could have any sympathy for immigrants in the system?

AS: So I was an appellate immigration judge on the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is the second level of the immigration court system. I was on the BIA for three and a half years during the Biden administration. Starting last year, the administration started to fire both trial-level immigration judges, and they also fired all of the remaining Biden appointees off of the BIA, which is the body that sets case law.

It’s been honestly devastating to see this happen to an administrative court system that obviously needed improvement, but was functioning and had a lot of excellent public servants that were trying to give people due process day in and day out. The Biden administration had really tried hard to put people with a variety of professional experience on the bench, both the federal bench and the immigration bench, in terms of not only having all prosecutors on the bench there because they can be good judges too, but also putting people who had been defense attorneys and civil rights attorneys, like myself. I think that had made the court system stronger and better.

One thing I can say is that when I was a judge, I didn’t have any pressure coming from the top telling me how to rule. We had training, we had expectations, we had normal job evaluations, but I didn’t have anyone looking over my shoulder and saying, “Why did you do that?” Or “You’re not allowed to do that.”

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What’s coming out now is that’s exactly what’s happened to the immigration court system such that it’s no longer independent. You have leadership of the system watching which judges grant asylum too much, which judges grant bond too much. It destroys any idea that judges are being allowed to apply the law independently as opposed to enacting a political agenda.

It’s also just exhausting and confusing for the immigrants actually appearing before the court, not knowing if they’re going to get a fair day or they’re just going to be immediately deported without a chance to present their evidence. It’s a crazy time to be an immigration lawyer and have to do hundreds of hours of work not knowing if you’re going to get a judge who’s going to give you 10 minutes to present your case.

So certainly a lot of us are gearing up to do more federal court and appeals work, but the bigger issue is that the immigration court system has ceased to function in a way that lets judges make decisions independently.

JW: Aaron, I want to get back to your point about Congress and the midterms.

So we’re obviously in the middle of an election year. What are you hoping to see from candidates on immigration, and what do you hope legislators change if they actually make it to Congress?

ARM: What we need to see is a fundamental rethinking of what interior enforcement looks like inside the United States.

Polling consistently shows that the American public believes ICE has gone too far. As much as 2 out of every 3 Americans think that the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has gone beyond what they want. But at the same time, people still do want some form of immigration enforcement.

So I would love to see legislators look at revamping the system towards one that embraces principles of compliance and proportionality, accountability and safety, really focusing on actual public safety threats, not people who’ve been here for 20, 30 years who’ve never had any interaction with the criminal justice system.

At the same time, help restore a system that allows judges to decide that deportation doesn’t make sense in every case. Right now, our interior enforcement system has not been updated in 30 years. We are using laws that were crafted by Congress in the height of the tough-on-crime era of the 1990s.

We live in a very different time today. Most Americans believe there should be some form of path to legal status for people who have been living here for years without getting in trouble, working hard, raising a family, and being productive members of their community. But the law just doesn’t reflect that, and so Congress really needs to sit down and think through what kind of compromise will produce a better system that helps Americans and doesn’t take us further down this path of mass deportations, which just tear communities apart.

AS: I agree with Aaron’s frame, but I also want to say that I think we have a bigger issue that we’ve spent years now hearing this administration dehumanize immigrants and talk about people who are in our neighborhoods and communities like they are less than, that they don’t care about their families the way we do, and that asylum is a fraud on the system, that people don’t deserve asylum.

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Both administrations recently, frankly, have done that. So I think going forward, it’s time for us to not be afraid to say that immigrants are an incredibly important part of our communities, and also that there is a place for the United States to welcome bona fide refugees and asylum-seekers. Both the refugee program and the asylum adjudication program have been totally decimated in recent years. And of course, we need regulations on that program. We need ways to handle the backlog.

But at its core, we have to decide that the United States is a place where people who are fleeing persecution and torture can, at least in some instances, find safety here. I think that’s part of our historical heritage that we shouldn’t turn away from. I don’t think candidates should be afraid to say that, at risk of seeing “soft on immigration.” 

It’s time to stand up for people who are an incredibly important part of our communities, and acknowledge their contributions, and then figure out what’s a system going forward that allows people to work and live in safety together.

JW: Just thinking about everything we’ve discussed today, there is so much happening in the immigration space, so much horror, frankly. What should people be paying attention to right now? Aaron, I want to start with you.

ARM: I think with everything else going on in the world right now, with the war in Iran, rising gas prices, and the deconstruction of the American state by the Trump administration, it’s easy to let the immigration issue fall by the wayside now that they are trying to be a little bit more quiet.

But every single day, the administration is arresting around 1,000 people, or slightly more than 1,000 people, and many of those have been members of our communities for decades. They have family members here. The climate of fear and surveillance that is being imposed on immigrants is growing.

That is something that impacts all of us. We saw this week the Trump administration say that they wanted to try to restrict undocumented immigrants from even having bank accounts. We’re seeing every government database being turned into a tool of the mass deportation state, and that is something that impacts all Americans because you cannot carry out a mass deportation of 4 percent of the U.S. population without fundamentally transforming the United States into more of a police state.

That should concern everybody, even if it’s not something that they’re seeing on the headlines because of splashy raids in American cities.

AS: A lot of this news is really sad and hard to keep reading. I feel that myself as someone who has to for my job, continue to read immigration news. I would encourage people to continue to pay attention to stories of courage and people who are bringing the conditions of detention centers and what’s happening to their families to light.

I just spoke yesterday to a client of ours who was released from Delaney Hall on Monday because of a habeas corpus petition that we won. I was asking her what people need to know, and while she was telling me about the poor medical care and the lack of food, I was just really struck by her care for the other people who were still detained there and her spirit and the way that when she was released from that facility, the protesters outside cheered and chanted her name.

There are folks inside Delaney and hunger strikers in Adelanto, people in Camp East Montana have brought a lawsuit to complain about their own conditions. And so there are a lot of examples, from Minnesota to detention of people being courageous and having hope in these times.

So that’s what I hope people can keep watching for and participating in.

JW: That’s a really beautiful message. And we’re going to leave it there, but Aaron, Andrea, thank you both so much for joining us on the Intercept Briefing.

ARM: Thank you for having me.

AS: Thank you.

JW: That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor in chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slipstream provided our theme music. This show and your reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you.

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The post “Warehousing Human Beings” appeared first on The Intercept.

In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, local health workers have been battling the devastating virus without adequate supplies, testing materials, or international support. The outbreak is further complicated by the rare strain of the disease, known as Bundibugyo, that standard field tests often miss and for which there are no vaccines or therapeutics. At least 62 people in Congo and one in Uganda have died according to WHO, but experts say this is likely a significant undercount due to the outbreak emerging in a remote, war-torn region.

“The outbreak had a big head start, and we’re still behind, but under the leadership of the Government of DRC, we are catching up,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told journalists on Wednesday, after a visit to the epicenter of the outbreak. African health officials say that it might take nine months or more to get a handle on the outbreak.

Experts say Trump administration policies — like dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and withdrawing from WHO — have undermined global health security and negatively impacted the response to the outbreak. The U.S. had been the largest provider of humanitarian assistance and health sector support to the Democratic Republic of Congo, funding more than 70 percent of humanitarian work there, according to a 2025 report from Physicians for Human Rights which noted the aid cuts have “severely harmed” public health and humanitarian efforts, including infectious disease control. The Trump administration has reportedly even barred some U.S. health officials from communicating with counterparts at WHO.

In the face of criticism of a U.S. failure to quickly respond to the Ebola outbreak, State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott lashed out at WHO and heaped praise on his boss. “The security concerns in the area – which President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to address – and the WHO’s delay in informing the world of concerns until May 15 has had an impact,” he told The Intercept.

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Public health experts say Piggot’s response exposes a fundamental confusion about how authorities combat infectious disease. “It reveals a lack of understanding about how international health regulations work and what a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ actually is,” Margaret Harris, a former senior WHO official and a medical doctor who responded to Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in the mid-2010s and Congo in the late 2010s, told The Intercept.

On May 5, WHO issued an alert of a high-mortality outbreak in Congo’s Ituri Province, which included deaths among healthcare workers. On May 14, blood samples were finally analyzed across the country, in the capital, Kinshasa. A day later, the analysis confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease, a strain of Ebola.

Dr. Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, explained that affected nations are the lead actors. “WHO does not declare. It’s the member states who declare,” he told The Intercept on Thursday. “On the 15th, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda declared. On the 16th, we declared the presence of Ebola, and on the 17th, Director-General Tedros declared this as a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’”

Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, WHO Africa’s Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response, further explained that under the well-defined protocols, states have the obligation to declare an outbreak after which the WHO informs the rest of the world and begins providing support. “There is a clear, well-defined methodology and it is clearly outlined in the international health regulations,” she told The Intercept.

The response is markedly quicker than in some previous outbreaks. During the 2014–16 Ebola crisis in West Africa — when more than 28,000 people were infected and more than 11,000 died in the largest ever outbreak of the disease — WHO became aware that Ebola was spreading in Guinea in March 2014 but did not declare a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” until almost five months later.

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Blame for any lag in response is not the fault of WHO, argued Harris, noting that USAID previously supported NGOs and healthcare workers in rural communities on the front lines of such outbreaks. “Dr. Tedros declared it without even calling the emergency committee together, so he wasted no time once they had information about the extent of the outbreak and the fact that clearly it had been running silently for a long time,” said Harris. “But the silence of the outbreak is not something you could lay at the feet of WHO. You lay that at the feet of a very fragile health system in the middle of a conflict that the rest of the world should be doing something to stop.”

The number of suspected Ebola cases in Congo has been reduced from over 1,000 last week to 116 as teams work through a backlog of tests. Experts say many suspected cases turned out to be malaria. This large number of people with untreated malaria demonstrates, they note, the chronic healthcare deficiencies in the region and a need for a comprehensive focus on public health there.

“We also need to remember that Ebola is only one health threat among many that these communities face,” said Tedros. “One of the things I heard from the community leaders is that they worry that the response to Ebola may take resources away from the health and humanitarian services they rely on for their many other needs.”

The Trump administration has faced scrutiny for pouring money into an Ebola quarantine and treatment center for infected Americans being built in Kenya, as a group of distinguished physicians, nurses, public health professionals, and humanitarian workers, including former top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called for Americans exposed to Ebola to be brought home for treatment. “We are deeply concerned by reports that the United States government is pursuing a policy under which American citizens with Ebola exposures requiring quarantine, isolation, or medical care would be transferred to a facility in Kenya,” they wrote in a letter to Congress, noting the “profound legal, ethical, and human rights concerns associated with preventing American citizens from returning home for care or diverting them to third-country facilities.”

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down on plans to bar Americans with Ebola from being treated in the U.S. “We cannot and will not allow any ‌cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” he said.

“It really sends the wrong message — that it’s a terrifying thing that you can’t possibly allow to arrive at your borders,” said Harris. Kenya has never experienced an Ebola outbreak, making it a perplexing choice of location for a treatment facility.

The U.S. could have set up a facility in Congo, Harris said, which has the most experience and expertise, having stopped 16 previous outbreaks. Or it could bring its citizens home for treatment and quarantine.

“If you’re going to not treat U.S. citizens on-site in DRC, bring them back to the U.S.” said Harris. “You’ve got one of the best health systems in the world, and you’ve got some of the brightest and best in the world in your country. So why aren’t you mobilizing them and showing that America is truly great?”

The post Trump Administration Tries to Shift Blame for Ebola Response appeared first on The Intercept.

The second measure failed 324-92 Thursday afternoon, a day after passage of a war powers resolution focused on Iran sent a message to the Trump administration.

Ninety-one Democrats voted for the measure sponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to block U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Lebanon. 117 Democrats voted against.

Citing a range of drafting concerns, Democratic leaders voted against the resolution but promised to support a tweaked version from Tlaib in the future.

At least some pro-Israel Democrats, however, said they opposed to anything that would tie Israel’s hands in Lebanon.

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Tlaib’s measure would have halted U.S. involvement in the Israeli assault on Lebanon without further congressional approval. The Israeli attacks have claimed at least 3,500 lives, displaced over 1 million people, and left wide swaths of the country, including entire towns, in ruins.

The war in Lebanon, which Israel had continued over reported objections from President Donald Trump, is widely seen as an obstacle to a deal with Iran to end the U.S. war there. Iranian officials have excoriated the Israeli attacks and threatened to suspend talks because of them.

U.S Aid for Israel War?

The Trump administration has not explained the extent of its involvement in the war being waged by right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel says its attacks are aimed at Hezbollah fighters despite the growing civilian death toll.

There are widespread suspicions that the U.S. government has provided support for the attack in the form of intelligence sharing and other coordination. The administration has not responded to a May 4 letter from Sen. Pete Welch, D-Vt., about whether and how the U.S. is aiding Israel.

Tlaib spoke out in support of her measure during a debate on the House floor on Wednesday.

“This vote on the Lebanon war powers resolution is a clear moral choice: Do you stand with the Netanyahu government and Trump’s endless war crimes, or do you stand with human life, peace, and justice?” she said.

In response, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast, R-Fla., accused supporters of the measure of serving as “proxies for Hezbollah.”

That kind of language was not limited to the GOP. It echoed a similar statement made by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., on social media last month.

“Hezbollah is evil — kneecapping our ability to track and respond to their terror serves nobody except Hezbollah and its Iranian overlords,” he said about Tlaib’s resolution.

Other Democrats said they were opposed to the measure on more technical grounds. In a joint statement Thursday, House Democratic leaders said they were worried that it might prevent the U.S. from securing its embassy in Beirut or assisting the country’s official military, the Lebanese Armed Forces.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass.; and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said they were opposed to the measure that was up for a vote Thursday, but would support another one that Tlaib has introduced addressing those concerns.

Hassan El-Tayyab, the legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, said he was optimistic that support for halting U.S. involvement in the Lebanon war would grow in a future vote.

“If we don’t stop what’s going on in Lebanon, getting a true and lasting ceasefire with Iran is virtually impossible,” he said. “So it is critical we try to curtail U.S. involvement in any operations in Lebanon.”

The post House Dems Coming Around on Iran War — But Won’t Vote to Stop Israel’s Destruction of Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.

As Israel’s standing in the U.S., and among liberals in particular, continues to crater, the mainstream American media is vaguely taking notice. But when they report on this increasingly potent political dynamic, national publications continue to frame it as a tension among Democratic voters — rather than a tension between Democratic voters and their party leadership. 

“A Democrat’s Dodge on AIPAC Points to the Party’s Tensions Over Israel,” read one recent New York Times headline. “Tensions over pro-Israel lobbying group highlight rifts in Democratic primaries,” read another Reuters headline. “Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza has driven a significant, deeper-than-ever divide among Democrats,” NBC News reported last week. “The U.S.-Israel alliance has rapidly gone from a point of bipartisan consensus to a wedge issue dividing both parties,” opined the Washington Post.

All of those were just last month, but the false equivocation goes back further. “The Democratic primary electorate,” The Hill informed readers in March, “is increasingly divided over Israel.” “Israel tensions threaten Dems’ midterm plans,” Politico announced in a January headline, which continued in the piece: “Just as Democrats are finding their footing by focusing on affordability, their differences on Israel are threatening to tear them apart.” “New York City’s annual Israel Day Parade has long been considered a bipartisan tradition — but this year, the event is becoming a symbol of the growing divide within the Democratic Party over Israel,” Sinclair’s National News Desk reported last week. 

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There’s only one problem with the “tensions,” “divided,” and “wedge issue” framing: It is not supported by any polls. The “divide,” such as it is, is increasingly not among Democrats or even liberals; it is between the supermajority of Democratic Party voters and party leadership. While party leaders such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and big Democratic donors, are pro-Israel, actual Democratic voters have moved on from Israel with remarkable speed and consistency. Let’s take a look at the polling:

• According to an August 2025 Quinnipiac poll, 77 percent of Democrats think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza versus 11 percent who say it is not.
• According to a May 2026 New York Times/Siena poll, 74 percent of Democrats oppose “providing additional economic and military support to Israel,” while 20 percent support doing so.
• According to a June 2026 Institute for Global Affairs/YouGov poll, 67 percent of Democrats think the U.S. relationship with Israel does more to hurt the U.S. than help it, and only 5 percent think it does more to help than hurt. 
• According to a May 2026 NBC News poll, 67 percent of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis (17 percent). Just 13 percent of Democrats have a positive view of Israel, and 57 percent, a majority, have a negative view.

To contextualize that 13 percent — which is down from 34 percent of Democrats who said they viewed Israel positively back in 2023 — it’s even lower than the number of Democrats who say they support traditional right-wing stances, such as:

• Allowing teachers to lead children in Christian prayers in public schools (18 percent, Pew 2024)
• Making all abortions illegal (14 percent, Pew 2024)
• Not mandating MMR vaccines in schools (14 percent, Pew 2025)

The media justifiably treats all of these issues as Republican or conservative-coded views. Yet support for Israel is still treated as a mainstream, if contested, liberal value.

In reality, it’s simply not: It’s overwhelmingly a Republican, right-wing view not backed by a supermajority of Democrats. So why has this consistently misleading narrative in U.S. media been allowed to persist? 

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There’s an obvious tension over Israel and the U.S. role in supporting it, which has been writ large in high-profile battles, from Democratic Senate campaigns to debates over the Democrats’ platform. The media has to cover that tension, but describing it more accurately — as a divide between party elites and the rank and file — is an awkward narrative, one that requires a deeper class and material analysis.

So instead, it’s just indexed under the misleading and generic label of “party divisions.” Naturally, Israel is not a 100–0 issue in favor of Palestine among voters, but no issue is that one-sided. A minority of Democrats support all kinds of relatively fringe, right-wing opinions. Here are some of them compared alongside the issue of Israel–Palestine. The percentage of Democrats who: 

• Support sending military aid to Israel: 20 percent
• Believe teachers should be allowed to lead children in Christian prayers in public schools: 18 percent
• Say all abortion should be banned: 14 percent
• Have a positive view of Israel: 13 percent
• Support a ban on same-sex marriage: 11 percent
• Believe Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza: 11 percent
• Believe there is solid evidence of “widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election”: 10 percent

Polls are not a perfect snapshot of political beliefs and can be somewhat contradictory (a profile of the 2 percent of Democrats who think Israel is committing genocide and have a positive view of the country would make an interesting read). But polls over the past three years, and the last few months in particular, show a very clear trend that support for Israel is now an increasingly fringe belief among Democrats. It’s worth emphasizing that the issue of Democratic voters souring on Israel is not particularly sectarian, either, with Jewish Democrats, especially those under the age of 35, steadily abandoning Israel. A Washington Post poll from October found that among Jewish Americans ages 18 to 34, only 36 percent claimed to have an “emotional attached to Israel,” and half agree with the broad liberal consensus that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

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But if watching how Democratic leadership and the party’s funders continue to back Israel to the hilt was your only barometer, you might assume there’s been no shift in public sentiment at all.

The dynamic is playing out over efforts to push a war powers resolution to end U.S. support for Israel’s bombing and occupation in Lebanon. On Wednesday, Axios, citing “numerous” anonymous “House Democrats” and “aides,” attempted to paint a Rep. Rashida Tlaib-led bill to end U.S. support as a provocation dividing Democrats. “An impending House vote to constrain the Trump administration from joining Israel’s war in Lebanon has some Democrats fuming that one of their own members is forcing them to take an agonizing vote,” reporter Andrew Solender lamented.

But what Solender fails to note is that Tlaib’s bill is overwhelmingly the majoritarian position among Democrats. A recent Arab American Institute commissioned poll found that 62 percent of Democrats “believe the U.S. should take more steps to pressure Israel to stop bombing and leave southern Lebanon,” and only 17 percent disagree. The substance of Tlaib’s bill is the Democratic voter position by almost 4 to 1. The tension in this story, such as it is, is between anonymous “Democratic leadership” and rank-and-file Democrats. And we know this because every single source in the Axios article opposing the war powers resolution had to be anonymous, while everyone supporting it proudly put their name on their quotes. What does this tell us about how popular support for Israel’s boundless violence in the Levant is? 

Meanwhile, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other majority pro-Israel groups are well aware of the existential shift that’s underway and have responded by intervening in primaries at an unprecedented clip. Already in this midterm cycle, as Donald Shaw at Sludge reported, “four major pro-Israel committees — AIPAC’s PAC, its outside spending arm United Democracy Project (UDP), the closely aligned Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) super PAC, and the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Victory Fund — have poured nearly $50 million into congressional races nationwide.” Receiving money from AIPAC has become politically toxic for Democrats, so much so that the lobbying group is deploying an elaborate web of shell organizations to funnel money to their preferred candidates.

Still, AIPAC is heading into the midterms bigger than ever, and its allied super PAC has a staggering war chest of nearly $100 million on hand — up from $35 million in 2022, when AIPAC first began directing funding in congressional campaigns. Since then, it has spent over $221 million, not including the $100 million set aside for the 2026 midterms.

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The two most powerful Democrats in the country, Jeffries and Schumer, are prominent and consistent backers of Israel, despite their party’s sizable shift. Jeffries was the largest recipient of pro-Israel money in the House last election cycle out of 435 voting members. And Schumer, who has explicitly said his “job” is to “keep the left pro-Israel,” spent last weekend marching in a pro-Israel parade in New York City alongside war criminals and self-identified “fascists.” Leadership, like its Big Donor base, is entirely out of sync with the current sentiment within the party.

It’s not just pro-Israel donors driving this “wedge.” Backing Israel and the endless arming of its military has been, and continues to be, a boondoggle for the broader U.S. military–industrial complex that captures the Washington consensus. Of the some $22 billion in military aid that Israel has received since October 7, 2023, roughly 75 percent has gone to U.S. arms companies that themselves employ an army of lobbyists and think tank boosters to promote Israel and its sprawling, seemingly never-ending expansionism and mass violence.

Despite 77 percent of Democratic voters saying Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, only 8.5 percent of Democrats in Congress have. Despite Democratic voters sympathizing more with Palestine than Israel at a ratio of 4 to 1, the number of Democrats in Congress who put the rights of Palestinians ahead of the interests of Israel could likely be counted on one hand. How long will our media continue to act like there is meaningful disagreement among Democrats, as such, when — among the rank and file — it’s an issue as settled as prayer in public schools, abortion, and climate change?

As the gap between the will of Democratic voters and its leadership grows more and more apparent, our media will continue to vaguely acknowledge this “division” without identifying the actual source of it. It’s not between the voters themselves, whose opinions are measurable and consistent, but between the voters and the leaders they elected — in theory — to represent their interests.

The post The Real “Divide” Among Democrats Over Israel Is Between Party Leadership and Voters appeared first on The Intercept.

To any reasonable person, a ceasefire is exactly what it sounds like: It is the total cessation of military attacks to end a war. But to the mainstream American media outlets covering the U.S.–Israel war with Iran, what constitutes a “ceasefire” is a rhetorical exercise.

Today, Iran launched missiles at the international airport in Kuwait. As the New York Times reported: “The barrage was one of the biggest attacks on a Gulf nation since the U.S.-Iran cease-fire took effect in April.” ABC News’s live update coverage ran with the breaking news headline “Iran targets US forces, Kuwait airport amid ceasefire.” Over at CNN, the headline was “Kuwait’s airport attacked as fresh Iran-US strikes strain ceasefire.”

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Of course, Iran’s latest campaign didn’t come out of nowhere: It comes two days after the U.S. announced that it had bombed radar and drone sites in the country, and one day after Israel bombarded south Lebanon with airstrikes and artillery yet again, reportedly killing at least four people across two towns.

All that bombing, and all of its attendant death and suffering, sure doesn’t feel like a “ceasefire” in any real sense. Still, the Times, along with other national news outlets, continues to spin the fantasy that the ceasefire is intact — only now it’s increasingly “fragile” or “tested.” The paper of record has gone so far as to say that it “hangs in balance.” 

In a piece of news analysis in the Times last week — on the heels of the U.S. bombing Iran for the second time in three days — the paper made the case that “a truce isn’t necessarily doomed if the missiles are still flying.” It also argued that while a ceasefire might sound like an end to the bombing, the geopolitical definition hinges on whether both sides agree that a “ceasefire” remains in effect.

If government officials call it a ceasefire, who is the New York Times to question it?

For many months, another ceasefire in name only has been touted in Gaza. What that’s looked like in practice is Israel relentlessly bombing the Palestinians on a near-daily basis. Al Jazeera reported that since the “ceasefire” in Gaza was announced in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 922 people and injured 2,786.

To the people of Gaza and of south Lebanon, there is no ceasefire. Continuing to carry water for the idea that we’re no longer at war, or that there’s been any meaningful progress made to end this war, is to provide cover for the U.S. and Israel, the countries that launched this war of aggression and continue to execute it. It also provides President Donald Trump with the political cover he so desperately desires as he realizes that he’s powerless to end the deeply unpopular war he started with Israel, and that no number of testy phone calls will move the needle if our ally won’t agree to a true ceasefire.

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The mainstream media is perfectly comfortable spinning the fiction that we’re currently in a gray zone somewhere between war and peace because the stakes are an abstraction. To them, blindly supporting American imperialism and Israeli aggression are baked-in ideological assumptions, not matters of life or death. It’s no coincidence that the New York Times has done more than any other media organization to massage the language around Israel, Gaza, and Iran to an extreme degree.

But words like “ceasefire” matter a great deal, which is why it’s critically important for the media to call out acts of war for exactly what they are. In this way, the brutal fact of war is black and white: Your country is either killing people with the bombs it’s dropping, or it’s not. Failing to acknowledge that reality is worse than dishonest — it is to irrevocably deprive those paying the highest price of their humanity.

The post Stop Calling It a Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

In the race for Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s seat in San Francisco, the YIMBY state Sen. Scott Wiener secured a comfortable victory with more than 40 percent of the vote, according to The Associated Press, which made the early call. Local politician Connie Chan earned the second spot, leaving Saikat Chakrabarti, a prominent figure in national progressive politics, off the general election ballot in November.

In Los Angeles, AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Jimmy Gomez easily won a spot on the November ballot, according to a call from the AP. Despite the election-day revelation of a House Ethics Committee investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against him, Gomez fended off a challenge from the progressive insurgent Angela Gonzales-Torres by a wide margin. Results are still coming in, but Gonzales-Torres appears likely to face off against Gomez again in the general election thanks to California’s “jungle primary” system, in which the top two candidates move on to a runoff.

Meanwhile in Sacramento, longtime establishment Democrat Rep. Doris Matsui is currently leading progressive City Councilmember Mai Vang, though that race remains too close to call. 

In these three solidly blue districts, each race has been viewed as part of a wider battle for control between a Democratic establishment seen as faltering in the face of the second Trump administration and a progressive wing that has grown in influence in the decade since the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — and argues the establishment strategy gave rise to Trump in the first place.

Chakrabarti, Gonzales-Torres, and Vang all had the backing of Justice Democrats, a group that supports progressive challengers in primary elections and helped elect members of the Squad in Congress. Earlier in the evening, Justice Democrats notched a victory when Dr. Adam Hamawy, a former combat surgeon who volunteered in Gaza and faced a barrage of attacks that often peddled in Islamophobic tropes, comfortably beat a crowded field of Democrats in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District.

Justice Dems Co-Founder Won’t Replace Pelosi

Justice Democrats had hoped to elevate Chakrabarti, one of its co-founders, to Congress. After earning his fortune at the tech firm Stripe, the centimillionaire worked on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and became chief of staff to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Chakrabarti grew to become an influential activist in progressive politics, but he was often a divisive figure, known for riling Democrats online and antagonizing Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who he hoped to succeed. Pelosi, who won her last reelection with 82 percent of the vote in her district, ultimately endorsed Chan, a San Francisco Board of Supervisors member. When The AP called the race for Chan, she held a lead of 13 percent over Chakrabarti.

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Chakrabarti, Chan, and Wiener all jockeyed to be seen as the progressive in the race: All three campaigns call for Medicare for All, the overturning of Citizens United, and abolishing or defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yet differing views on Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and wealth taxes on billionaires, which Wiener and some of his richest tech-and-development-friendly backers oppose, became notable wedge issues. 

While Wiener and Chan have come to embrace placing conditions on offensive weapons to Israel, Chakrabarti advocated for a total arms embargo on the country. Wiener’s previous support for pro-Israel bills in the state legislature and his earlier opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza drew intense scrutiny during the race, and anti-genocide and anti-Zionist protesters at times disrupted his events on the campaign trail. 

The weekend before the primary election, the race was jolted with final-hour reporting from Drop Site News that revealed the pro-Israel lobby giant, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and its offshoot, Democratic Majority for Israel, had been funneling money into a super PAC supporting Chan. Chakrabarti used the revelation to claim that AIPAC had attempted to keep him out of the general election because of his support for Palestinian human rights, suggesting a degree of collusion between Chan and AIPAC.

Chan, in turn, rejected Chakrabarti’s claims as “absurd and laughable.” She restated her campaign pledge against accepting AIPAC donations and her advocacy for Palestinian rights.

AIPAC-Backed Incumbent Holds Strong Amid Scandal

In Los Angeles, Gonzales-Torres, a community organizer, also made her opposition to the pro-Israel lobby and Israel’s genocide in Gaza a major part of her platform against Gomez. Despite the incumbent’s earlier vows that he would try to rid his fundraising of corporate backers in favor of grassroots support, Gomez’s previous two reelection bids in the 34th Congressional District have been fueled by special interest groups, such as the cryptocurrency industry and AIPAC and DMFI.

AIPAC has continued to support Gomez in the current election cycle, pouring nearly $150,000 into his 2026 run, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Gomez has consistently voted to send military aid to Israel. 

The race was rocked after CNN reported Tuesday that Gomez was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations of sexual misconduct against Gomez. The news came months after the New York Post alleged Gomez, who is married, was spotted kissing the staffer of another member of Congress in 2023 at a party hosted by then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. Swalwell resigned from Congress and ended a California gubernatorial campaign earlier this spring after reporters unearthed allegations of sexual assault from a former staffer, as well as accusations of sexual misconduct from other women, which he denies.

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Gonzales-Torres had previously called into question Gomez’s close relationship to Swalwell and asked whether Gomez, who backed Swalwell’s campaign for governor, had knowledge of the incidents at the time. On Tuesday, she wrote on X that if Gomez “has nothing to hide, he should have no concern. But if there was any criminal behavior that he witnessed, participated in, or helped conceal, we will find out and we will help ensure accountability and justice.”

Gomez, in a statement to CNN, admitted to “personal mistakes outside my marriage that have caused real pain to my wife and family,” but insisted he did not break the law or House ethics rules.

Gomez has thrice fended off another progressive challenger, attorney David Kim, who in 2020 trailed by 6 percentage points in the November general election and came only 3 points from winning in the 2022 general election. Gonzales-Torres, who had previously volunteered for Kim’s campaign, believes her campaign can build on that success and defeat Gomez. 

Insurgent Against Husband-and-Wife Dynasty

In California’s 7th Congressional District, Vang is facing off against a powerful Democratic family. Matsui has held her House seat since 2005, winning after the death of her husband, Bob Matsui, who had represented Sacramento in Congress since 1979.

Vang’s campaign criticized Matsui’s acceptance of corporate donations and painted Matsui as out-of-touch with a transforming Democratic voter base. Vang championed policies that have animated the left, such as Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Green New Deal. At the time of publication, Vang is in a tight battle with a pro-Trump Republican candidate, Zachariah Wooden, a student at California State University, Sacramento.

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Many primaries across the state, such as the Matsui–Vang contest, remain too close to call, with huge numbers of votes left to count and final positions far from settled. That includes the race for California governor, where moderate Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican commentator Steve Hilton are neck-and-neck, with billionaire Tom Steyer, around whom progressives had coalesced, trailing in third at the time of publication. In the LA mayor’s race, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass secured her spot in a November runoff, with reality TV personality Spencer Pratt leading Nithya Raman, a progressive councilmember. 

Other progressive candidates led their races on Tuesday, including Jane Kim, who is running for the state’s insurance commissioner with the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders. In Los Angeles, city attorney candidate Marissa Roy, who drew support from the city’s progressive base, is ahead of the incumbent, Hydee Feldstein Soto, who caught heat for defending LAPD’s brutal tactics against protesters and for deciding not to charge members of a Zionist mob that attacked UCLA’s pro-Palestine encampment.

This is a developing story and will continue to be updated.

The post Establishment Dems Stave Off the Left in Key California Congressional Primaries appeared first on The Intercept.

Adam Hamawy beat a crowded field of Democrats in the state’s 12th Congressional District. The winner of the primary is expected to coast to victory over Republican Gregg Mele in the November general election.

His victory came despite a flurry of right-wing media reports that sought to tarnish the progressive candidate as an Islamic extremist because of his 1995 trial testimony for a religious leader convicted of plotting terror attacks.

Hamawy said he was being targeted with outdated “tropes” as a Muslim in politics. His campaign, which was supercharged by an ad campaign from the independent super PAC American Priorities, demonstrated the growing influence of pro-Palestine donors in contested Democratic primaries.

Hamawy stood out among the 13 candidates in the race vying to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman because of his compelling backstory and the large ad spend on his behalf by American Priorities, the super PAC founded to counter AIPAC’s influence in Democratic politics.

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Working as a combat surgeon in Iraq in 2004, Hamawy helped save the life of Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., when her helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, which led to the loss of both her legs. In 2024, he also went to Gaza to provide medical aid to Palestinians wounded by Israeli forces and was temporarily trapped there after Israel closed the Rafah border crossing. When the crossing was reopened, Hamawy was among a small group who refused to leave on demands that more medical workers be let in.

Pointing to his experience as a physician, Hamawy staked out policy positions that included support for Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and opposing military aid to Israel. He drew endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and the Sunrise Movement, in addition to Ocasio-Cortez.

In a joint statement, two progressive, pro-Palestine groups hailed Hamawy’s win. The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project and Justice Democrats said they spent a combined $200,000 in support of his campaign.

“Voters were drawn to Dr. Hamawy’s candidacy because he knows firsthand the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza like few do — having worked to save the lives of Palestinian children under bombardment and unimaginable conditions,” the groups wrote. “His experience is necessary in Congress now more than ever, as too many of the people meant to represent us continue to look the other way while our tax dollars fund injustices here and abroad.”

Trailing Hamawy was East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen, a centrist with the backing of his county party who ran as a pro-Israel candidate.

Hamawy competed for the progressive vote against Sue Altman, a longtime activist in New Jersey who served until recently as the state director for Democratic Sen. Andy Kim. Her endorsements included former Sen. Bill Bradley and the New Jersey Working Families Party, which she previously led from 2019 to 2023. She ran far behind Hamawy.

Hamawy’s win was a notable accomplishment for American Priorities, which only launched in February. The group’s first major pick, Nida Allam, fell just short of toppling incumbent Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee in North Carolina. It had better luck in Pennsylvania, where progressive state Rep. Chris Rabb won his district’s Democratic primary last month.

Hamawy’s campaign represented an even bigger test for American Priorities, since he was a first-time politician with a relatively low profile before launching his campaign. The group said at the end of April that it was planning to spend $2 million to boost Hamawy.

Hamawy was polling at only 5 percent of the electorate in a March 30–April 1 poll sponsored by his campaign. By the first week of May, however, the outside support helped power him to first place, with 19 percent support compared to Altman’s 12 percent, according to another poll sponsored by his campaign.

The wide-open nature of the primary and large number of undecided voters helped make it hard to gauge who had the edge. Further complicating matters was a surge of negative press focusing on the brief testimony Hamawy, then 26, gave at the 1995 trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, commonly known as the “The Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted of planning terror attacks.

Hamawy said he had known Abdel-Rahman as a leader in the Egyptian community in New Jersey and condemned extremism of all stripes. He noted his own long service for the U.S. military as well as his experience as a first responder during the September 11, 2001 attacks. “Any Muslim is going to be called a terrorist at some point, and these tropes are outdated and worn. Unfortunately, they continue to be used right now,” Hamawy told the New Jersey Monitor. “These are not serious arguments, and they’re getting old.”

This developing story has been updated.

The post Adam Hamawy, Doctor Who Volunteered in Gaza, Poised to Become Pro-Palestine Rep. From New Jersey appeared first on The Intercept.

La Tilde quietly began development early this year and appears to still be a work in progress, pitching itself as a modern media brand for Latin American audiences with articles published in both Spanish and English. Its name references the accent mark emphasizing vowels in Spanish; “news with an accent” is the site’s catchphrase.

“The tilde is not an ornament. It is a millennial arrow designed to provide direction, save space, and turn up the volume,” a narrator states in a promotional video for the site bearing telltale signs it was AI-generated, such as a newspaper whose sloppily rendered headline reads “SO THEE HOUTIERRER TO TO GHAHOBATEE,” followed by imagery of two medieval monks. “That is why we place the accent on what matters. From the regional pulse and your well-being, to the big ideas and the global context.”

So far, La Tilde’s coverage amounts to an unusual blend of personal finance tips (“Why instant payments matter so much for your business and your wallet”) and articles extolling the value of U.S. military operations in Latin America (“Operation Absolute Resolve: The mission that captured Nicolás Maduro and set a new standard for precision and coordination”).

Its article on the U.S. abduction of the Venezuelan president praises the mission in Trumpian prose, calling it “The Perfect Operation – Coordination, Timing and Precision at an Unprecedented Scale,” and “a military operation of coordination and accuracy never seen before.” Citing “information obtained exclusively by La Tilde,” it describes the operation’s tactical brilliance, flawless execution, and incredibly precise coordination of military assets in the air and on the ground.

If this reads like Pentagon a press release, that’s because it is. An explanation for its glowing coverage of the U.S. military can be found after clicking a small link tucked at the bottom of the site. “La Tilde is a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government,” its About page reads.

This easily missed disclosure language is identical to two other Pentagon-sponsored propaganda sites recently revealed by The Intercept.

Targeting audiences, foreign or domestic, with state-run information campaigns remains a politically sensitive topic, and a token disclosure that La Tilde is a U.S.-funded platform allows the American government to say it technically informed readers about the actual source of the information.

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According to a defense official familiar with U.S. information operations, La Tilde is operated as a military messaging platform for U.S. Special Operations Command South, or SOCSOUTH, which executes special forces missions throughout South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. When asked about SOCSOUTH’s role behind La Tilde, spokesperson Trevor Wild replied with the text of the site’s About page noting that it’s a government operation, but declined to comment further.

U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, which is broadly responsible for coordinating military assets in the countries La Tilde targets, denied involvement. SOUTHCOM “does not fund, operate, or have any official association with La Tilde,” according to spokesperson Steven McLoud, who did not respond to further questions.

Unlike most news websites, La Tilde carries no bylines, masthead, or mention of actual staff of any kind. Although the site claims it employs “dozens of freelance reporters and content creators,” at least some of the site appears to have been generated by a large language model. Running articles through Pangram, an AI-text detection service, produced multiple hits for both English and Spanish writing either partially or entirely written by machines (though such tools are known to deliver false positives).

Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and former Pentagon cyber-policy adviser, told The Intercept he was struck by site’s shoddiness, describing it as “AI all the way down.”

Despite the low quality of AI-generated articles, this approach could help the Pentagon spin up propaganda efforts faster than in the past. “If you can generate new content and even news fronts at the flip of a switch, your influence operations can shift target and focus much more quickly,” Brooking said. “That seems to be the thinking behind recent AI-powered Russian and Chinese networks, for instance.”

An analysis of subdomains hosted on LaTilde.co reveals the site plans to launch bespoke versions for readers in Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, and Peru.

Some pro-U.S. content is clearly tailored to these national audiences. An article filed to the site’s “In Good Hands” section highlights the benefits of U.S.–Panamanian joint jungle warfare training exercises, regaling readers with how “temperatures and heart rates climb at the Cristóbal Colón Naval Air Base as Panamanian security forces push forward through the ‘Green Mile,’ the demanding final test of the Combined Jungle Operations Course.” Such joint initiatives are, according to La Tilde, a bulwark against China’s efforts to engage in similar joint exercises in Latin America. Rather than engage with “Beijing’s predatory practices,” the article suggests countries should follow Panama’s lead and “seek training opportunities closer to home or with longstanding partners such as the United States.”

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The article makes no mention of the controversy surrounding PANAMAX, a joint military exercise between SOUTHCOM and the Panamanian forces that has sparked increased protest on the grounds it violates national sovereignty. Permanent U.S. military installations in Panama were shuttered in 1999 as part of a 1977 treaty between the two countries; Panamanian opposition parties decried the reestablishment of an American military presence under the guise of joint exercises as a “camouflaged invasion.” Participants in the 2025 PANAMAX exercise La Tilde is pushing include the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, a Pentagon training institute whose graduates included thousands of Latin American death squad gunmen and dictator Manuel Noriega.

The importance of military and intelligence-sharing compacts with the U.S. is a recurring theme. “Far from weakening sovereignty, this kind of cooperation can strengthen it,” one article says.

Other stories from La Tilde argue the American side of Latin American controversies, similarly downplaying issues of national sovereignty. One piece describes how the U.S. abduction of Maduro “has reawakened a long-contained hope among millions of Venezuelans inside and outside the country.” Another alleges Ecuador is a nexus of the international cocaine trade, echoing claims the Trump administration has used to expand Operation Southern Spear, SOUTHCOM’s Caribbean airstrike campaign that has killed more than 200 civilians to date.

It’s unclear who exactly is operating the site on a day-to-day basis. A similar network of military propaganda pages, descendants of an Obama-era information warfare program called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, appears to be administered by military contractor General Dynamics Information Technology. Renée DiResta, who co-authored a 2022 report on online propaganda efforts backed by U.S. Central Command, told The Intercept that the TRWI successor websites share a common Google Ads identifier code owned by General Dynamics, according to a recent comprehensive analysis of the network she conducted. La Tilde also runs a legal disclosure with identical language as those sites.

General Dynamics did not respond to multiple requests for comment about La Tilde.

Halcyon Group International, another information warfare contractor that operates Diálogo Américas, a similar pseudo-news site backed by the Pentagon, told The Intercept it was not involved with La Tilde.

Design of the La Tilde website was subcontracted to Antpack, a Colombian digital marketing firm. Multiple files hosted on the site created by the AI image-generation service Midjourney contain the word “Antpack” in their name. The Intercept signed up for a user account on La Tilde, part of planned functionality that will let readers comment and save articles for later. Once registered, The Intercept was able to view comments left on a non-public version of the site used by its developers, who posted under names corresponding to LinkedIn profiles of Antpack employees. Antpack did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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U.S. Special Operations has a long record of leading the American internet propaganda efforts, ranging from high-tech efforts to less-sophisticated projects like phony online newsrooms. SOCOM has since 2018 operated the Joint Military Information Support Operations Web Operations Center, which coordinates information warfare and online psychological operations.

The Intercept reported in 2023 that SOCOM was working on acquiring state-of-the-art “deepfake” video fabrication technologies to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” according to procurement documents. La Tilde appears to be using low-effort AI tools rather than anything cutting-edge. Art accompanying its stories often includes portion of the prompt used to quickly generate the image in the file name, and shows mixed results, such as a rendering of the White House portico missing several of its columns or a diploma with garbled text. Photographs illustrating pro-SOUTHCOM messaging, however, are drawn from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, an official Pentagon media library.

“The intent is probably to fill these sites with generic material, build an audience base, and then slip in more pieces of explicit propaganda, like that rather fulsome recounting of the U.S. attack on Venezuela,” Brooking said. “This is how you build these sorts of networks. But the content is lazy, the AI is bad, and the required disclosures make the whole thing a farce.”

The post The Pentagon Is Running an AI Propaganda Mill Targeting Latin America appeared first on The Intercept.

A fusion center in Philadelphia combed through spicy internet comments from AI critics and concluded there is a growing risk of physical violence against data centers from “domestic violent extremists,” ranging from white supremacists to anarchists.

“Domestic violent extremists (DVEs) are likely interested in targeting artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, posing a physical and cyber threat to infrastructure in the Philadelphia regional area,” the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center wrote in a December alert.

The fusion center distributed its warning, marked “for official use only,” through the national fusion center network of state, local, and federal police agencies.

Like many of the reports produced by fusion centers, the bulletin points to news reports and social media posts, but cites little in the way of tangible threats. It acknowledges “a lack of specific information on plans to target AI data centers in the Philadelphia area,” but warns law enforcement that three planned data center facilities in the region could become targets of future protests.

Some of the anti-AI posts included in the document reflect hyperbolic anti-AI rhetoric that is widespread across social media, including an unnamed internet user who “indicated a desire to ‘burn down’ data centers.” Other examples of potentially terroristic posts included references to a fictional anti-robot movement in the science fiction novel “Dune” and a Facebook meme.

The fusion center, housed inside the Philadelphia Police Department, warned that “disruptive First Amendment activity” is an “indicator” of risk from “Domestic Violent Extremists,” an expansive term favored by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

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Fusion centers, which sprouted up across the country after the September 11, 2001, attacks, have long been criticized for doing little to thwart actual terror plots and too much to subject lawful protesters to suspicion and surveillance. They have previously warned local cops about the supposed threat from Black Lives Matter protesters and Keystone XL to Line 3 pipeline opponents.

Pennsylvania has its own history of counterterror agencies targeting advocacy groups. In 2010, then-Gov. Ed Rendell apologized for the state Department of Homeland Security contracting with a private firm to produce fearmongering reports on groups including anti-fracking activists.

When it came to the recent data center activist report, longtime Philadelphia civil rights lawyer Paul Hetznecker said he was troubled by the fusion center’s association of AI skeptics with terrorists.

“Those are legitimate, popular political concerns that are raised by local communities,” Hetznecker said. “This particular report from [the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center] reflects a very dangerous attempt to characterize that protected First Amendment activity — activity which is fundamental to our democracy — as something other, something more dangerous, a breeding ground for something more sinister.”

In response to questions emailed to the Philadelphia Police Department and the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center, a spokesperson responded with a statement asserting that the center “recognizes and respects the rights of individuals to lawfully express opinions, engage in peaceful advocacy, and participate in protected First Amendment activities.”

“Fusion centers exist to help stakeholders understand emerging threats and hazards that could impact public safety, critical infrastructure, major events, government facilities, businesses, and the communities we serve,” said Sgt. Eric Gripp, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Police Department. “These assessments cover a wide range of topics and are designed to provide situational awareness, not to characterize lawful activity or constitutionally protected speech as criminal conduct.”

The Intercept obtained the Philadelphia report as part of a larger cache of such documents from local fusion centers. It adds to growing evidence that counterterror officials are putting data center skeptics under a microscope. Last week, Wired magazine reported on other notices from local intelligence agencies warning about “anti-tech extremism.” Journalists Ken Klippenstein and Dan Boguslaw also reported on a document from the U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau warning of the potential for anti-data center violence.

The reports are tied to a genuine upswell in popular pushback against data centers. The opposition extends well beyond the mishmash of far-right and far-left groups identified in the Philadelphia fusion center’s report. Seven out of 10 Americans oppose having data centers as neighbors, a recent Gallup poll found.

The fusion center report frames the outcry as a potential first step toward violence, telling local police with jurisdiction over the roughly 16 data centers near Philadelphia that they should be aware of angry online posts.

The report warns about posts on an “anti-capitalist blog that remains popular amongst local anarchist extremist collectives.”

Under a title urging “Butlerian Jihad Against AI” — a reference to a book in the Dune science-fantasy series about humans revolting against their intelligent computer overlords — a post on the Philly Anti-Capitalist blog said “only we can decide to smash the screens that are brainwashing us into submission. The time is now, the day is here, ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!”

The post was unattributed, did not include targets for attack, and included a cartoonish sketch of an old-fashioned computer struck by arrows. Nevertheless, local intelligence analysts appeared to take the threat seriously.

The bulletin also ticked off other signs of anti-data center furor. There was a meme post on shared on a local Facebook account with text reading: “I cannot escape the feeling that I am morally obligated to sabotage AI data center infrastructure.” Commenters on the post had discussed a proposed Amazon data center near Berwick, Pennsylvania, as a “potential target,” according to the report. The Intercept was able to find other versions of this meme posted to Facebook and Instagram unrelated to the targeting of specific, physical data centers.

The fusion center bulletin also said that white supremacists and members of the dark online subculture dubbed “nihilistic violent extremism” by the FBI had agitated online against data centers.

The document also mentioned a DHS report highlighting a thread on an online image board where users discussed using magnets, explosives, or even — in an idea that reflected a sci-fi movie trope — an electromagnetic pulse weapon to take out data centers.

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The fusion center analysts appeared to take seriously other rhetoric proposing dramatic attacks. “In addition to general anti-AI data center rhetoric, online users have recently discussed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) for carrying out attacks varying from simple swatting and hoax threats to property damage, arson, and even the use of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) material,” the report said.

Hetznecker, the civil rights lawyer, said the idea of a nuclear threat raised concerns for him about the quality of the fusion center’s sources and its conclusions.

“That appears to be an effort by law enforcement to hype up the threat where there may be no threat at all,” he said. “To increase scrutiny on First Amendment activities by lumping in those activities with the most extreme, possible scenarios one could imagine that have no factual basis.”

The Philadelphia fusion center report specifically warned authorities of the likelihood that new local data centers could be the target of protest.

“There is potential for significant pushback to the three newly proposed AI data centers in the Philadelphia area. Indicators of an increased threat in the short term may consist of more disruptive First Amendment activity in opposition to AI data centers, small acts of vandalism, online calls for action to boycott and or protest local AI data centers in the Philadelphia area, and extensive criticism of higher utility bills resulting from AI data centers,” the report said.

The mention of boycotts, criticism, and other activities protected by the First Amendment raised red flags for Hetznecker.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we see heightened law enforcement scrutiny on legitimate expressions of AI data center concerns, and I hope that would not chill the appropriate dialogue that needs to occur on the impact of data centers on local communities,” he said.

Update: June 1, 2026, 11:01 a.m. ET
The article was updated with a statement from the Philadelphia Police Department received after publication.

The post Philly Cops Admit That They’re Tracking “First Amendment Activity” Critical of AI appeared first on The Intercept.

The revelation comes amid renewed scrutiny of DiNapoli’s spending spree on Israel Bonds, a financial instrument that directly funds the state of Israel. DiNapoli, the administrator of New York pension funds, is facing his first primary fight in 18 years as comptroller, and the branded, non-tradeable assets have become an issue in the race.

The trip was paid for by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which has a financial relationship to Israel Bonds, the organization that issues Israeli government debt securities in the U.S.

In a February 2, 2024, letter to the comptroller, the New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government approved reimbursement for DiNapoli by the JCRC, but raised concerns that the sponsored trip could create an appearance of potential improper influence.

The ethics commission informed DiNapoli that several commissioners raised concerns “the proposed reimbursement could give reasonable basis for the impression that a person could improperly influence you,” according to the letter, which was obtained through a public records request and shared exclusively with The Intercept.

DiNapoli has been an enthusiastic backer of investing New York pension and investment funds in Israel Bonds. Amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, efforts by the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel have gained steam — including campaigns urging divestment from Israeli bonds. DiNapoli tilted in the opposite direction, including a $20 million New York pension fund investment in Israel bonds in the wake of the October 7 attacks.

According to an itinerary of the trip drafted by JCRC and obtained by the group Jewish Voice for Peace New York, DiNapoli was slated to meet with Israel Bonds staffers. In 2024, according to its website, JCRC received financial backing from Israel Bonds — which Jewish Voice for Peace organizers said could hint at a potential improper influence. The Israel Bonds donation was for a float in the 2024 Israel Day parade organized by the JCRC, a spokesperson for the group said. DiNapoli regularly attends the rally, including in 2024.

On Sunday, DiNapoli and other state and local electeds marched in the parade again, joined by an array of extremist Israeli political figures including Bezalel Smotrich, the current finance minister and a far-right champion of illegal settlements.

“By participating in trips organized and paid for by an organization that receives institutional donations and is closely and publicly aligned with Israel Bonds, while simultaneously promoting his office’s ongoing investments in Israel Bonds, Comptroller DiNapoli engaged in a foreign policy function far outside his statutory mandate as a fiduciary to millions of pensioners and public employees,” Lisa Mulleneaux, a researcher with JVP’s “Break the Bonds” campaign, wrote in an October complaint to the ethics commission.

“This represents a serious violation of his ethical obligation under §74(3)(f) to avoid any impression that his official duties can be swayed by outside groups,” Mulleneaux wrote. “At minimum, it undermines public trust in the independence of the Comptroller’s office and the integrity of the state’s investment decisions.”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for DiNapoli pointed to the ethics commission’s ultimate approval of the JCRC reimbursement and said his office was unaware of any ethics complaint filed in relation to the trip. (The New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government declined to comment.)

In his 18 years as comptroller — and particularly in the months and years following October 7 and the launch of Israel’s genocide in Gaza — DiNapoli has turned the state’s pension fund into one of the largest holders of Israel Bonds nationwide. Since the February 2024 trip, Dinapoli has invested $120 million of the state’s common retirement fund in the instruments, bringing the total investment of state pension funds in Israel Bonds to $332.5 million.

“Officials like Comptroller DiNapoli are responsible for the safeguarding of pension funds through strategic investing that prioritizes the needs of public sector workers and retirees,” said Dani Noble, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace. “Instead, Comptroller DiNapoli is investing the NY pension in Israel Bonds — unrestricted loans to the Israeli military and government used for every aspect of violence against Palestinians.”

Israel Bonds in Primary

DiNapoli’s fervent support for Israel Bonds have become a talking point in his primary race, with challengers Raj Goyle and Drew Warshaw both pledging to divest from investments in Israel should they take office.

Running from DiNapoli’s left, Goyle’s and Warshaw’s positions are in line with former New York City comptroller and current House candidate Brad Lander, who chose not to buy new Israel Bonds while overseeing the city’s pension fund.

For the most vocal critics, the moral argument against public investment in Israel Bonds is paramount. Becky Silber, a New York state employee and member of Jewish Voice for Peace told The Intercept that she was horrified to learn in 2024 that her hard-earned retirement funds were being used to send money to the state of Israel.

“When I became aware that my pension fund was being used to fund Israel, I was gutted, honestly,” Silber told The Intercept. “I was horrified watching the news coming out of Gaza. I was checking every purchase in the grocery store to make sure that my money wasn’t funding it. And so to learn that hundreds of millions of dollars of my pension fund were being sent to Israel with no guardrails on how it was spent, that was devastating.”

Critics of the investments also point to a fiscally responsible argument against the bonds. Unlike traditional foreign-debt assets, Israel Bonds cannot be sold on a secondary market and instead must be held until they mature. That makes them a potentially unsound bet, especially considering the rapid decline of Israel’s credit rating in recent years.

“It is hard to justify this as financial prudence or an effective strategy for diversification, especially when many other comparable investments are less risky; more transparent; and more liquid,” said Kaycee Wimbish, a Kingston, New York, resident active with the Mid-Hudson Valley chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “These utterly disproportionate investments reveal a hidden political agenda.”

The post New York Comptroller’s Trip to Israel Raised Ethical Concerns, State Commission Said appeared first on The Intercept.

Kareem, whose name has been changed to protect his safety, had lived in the close-knit West Bank city for years, but he’d long known he would one day need to leave. It was March 2024, and the Tel Aviv Court for Administrative Affairs had recently ruled that LGBTQ+ Palestinians can petition for asylum in Israel — upending years of precedent that considered them ineligible. The following month, Kareem crossed into Israel, a country that has occupied the West Bank for more than twice as long as he’d been alive.

Supporters of Israel have long pointed to the “only democracy in the Middle East” as a purported safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community. While detractors say the argument amounts to “pinkwashing,” the use of LGBTQ+ inclusion to distract from moral and legal violations in other spheres, the Israeli government has doubled down on the concept, invoking it often to distract from violations of international law. In a speech before the United States Congress on July 24, 2024, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mocked protesters holding “Gays for Gaza” signs, saying they “might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.’”

As Netanyahu spoke, Kareem was living legally in Israel, believing his status secure while an administrative storm was brewing behind the scenes. Palestinians like Kareem might be safer by virtue of the distance from their families, but the bureaucratic process of seeking asylum imposes its own dangers. In interviews with The Intercept, Kareem and multiple advocates and lawyers for Palestinian asylum-seekers described how Israeli authorities put asylum-seekers through permit revocations, instability, and, in many cases, coerce them into sharing information with Israel’s internal intelligence agency.

Kareem felt this pressure, he told The Intercept.

At a processing facility at Sha’ar Ephraim, a crossing point in the separation wall west of Tulkarm in the northern West Bank, Kareem recalled, Israeli authorities repeatedly pressed him for information on friends and family still living in the West Bank, anything that might be of use. The implication was a quid pro quo: intelligence in exchange for an easier permit approval process.

“When you are in such a fragile situation, you cannot be in the territories [the West Bank], and you don’t have status in Israel, the security bodies like the police … use this weakness and they try to get information or get someone’s cooperation from those people,” Kareem’s attorney, Tamir Blank, told The Intercept. “They promise them that they will not deport them or put them in jail.”

Kareem didn’t have the kind of information necessary to secure such a process. He found himself, like so many Palestinian asylum-seekers in Israel, in a series of cascading double binds. After they flee, they find themselves trapped: Leaving the West Bank for Israel carries with it the stigma, true or not, of having collaborated with Israeli authorities, making it even more difficult to return, and leaving nowhere else to go.

Home to about 30,000 Palestinians, Ramallah is small and insular, but it contains a space for queer Palestinians to hold conversations that aren’t always possible elsewhere in the West Bank. A loose network of activists hosts weekly community meetings that range from knitting circles to conversations dissecting the Eurocentricity of LGBTQ+ identity terminology in Arabic. During Ramadan this year, as rockets flew overhead during the Israel–U.S. war on Iran, they hosted a queer iftar in the city.

Kareem was active with the group for a year before rumors made their way to his parents. They had long suspected “there was something off with me,” Kareem recalled.

It also did not help that the family, as is typical of Ramallah’s upper class, is conservative and politically involved.

His father works for the Palestinian Authority, just as his father before him, who was involved with the Palestine Liberation Organization before the 1993 Oslo Accords. The family home in Al-Bireh is an old stone building, “colder inside in the winter than it is outside,” according to Kareem, and adorned with a classic Palestinian metal gate.

Aside from occasional Israeli military raids, Al-Bireh feels like the only true bubble inside of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. There are upscale cafes, flower shops, and a concerted effort by all who live there to pretend they enjoy more freedom than they do. Despite the idyllic atmosphere, there are only a handful of checkpoints by which to exit the city, all manned by Israeli soldiers.

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Kareem worked in his cousin’s welding shop in the Jalazone refugee camp, where, as he would later recount to Israeli authorities, he faced years of abuse — both sexual and physical — from his cousins, who taunted him for his feminine presentation. After Kareem’s father confronted him, he recalled, “My father was sending my cousins after me to stalk my friends and me.”

At first, Kareem thought he should flee to a different city in the West Bank, possibly Bethlehem. Israel had stopped issuing permits for most West Bank Palestinians after October 7, citing “security concerns,” and Kareem worried that his family’s associations with the Palestinian Authority would count against him. But the West Bank is small, so small that without checkpoints blocking the way, one could drive from Jenin at the top of the West Bank to Hebron at the bottom in about an hour and a half. As the crow flies, it is only 22 kilometers from Ramallah to Bethlehem. Families know each other, and word spreads fast.

So Kareem tried to fashion a life for himself in Israel. Not only would his family follow him to Israel after he fled, but so too would Israel’s occupation. His life would turn into a series of military court hearings and attempts to solicit intelligence from him by Shin Bet, Israeli domestic intelligence, with the specter of returning home meaning likely death.

Kareem secured a welfare permit by April 2024 with the help of pro bono lawyers from HIAS, a Jewish humanitarian organization that provides legal support to asylum-seekers in Israel, including a small number of Palestinians fleeing persecution. He spent months sleeping on benches and couch surfing before finally moving into an emergency LGBTQ+ youth shelter in Tel Aviv called HaGag HaVarod (“The Pink Roof” in Hebrew), where he went from never having met an Israeli who wasn’t holding a rifle to living together in shared housing. 

In October 2024, just six months after leaving the West Bank, Kareem woke up to an alert on his phone that his permit to stay in Israel had been invalidated. His lawyers advised him to leave the shelter immediately. It was operated under the Israeli Ministry of Welfare, putting him at risk of deportation without a permit.

“I was so confused. They had just given me the permit, so why would they take it away?” Kareem recounted.

His family appeared to have worked to sabotage his legal status through multiple channels. In June, they had filed a report with Israeli social services claiming Kareem was a Hamas member planning to attack civilians. When a security flag appeared in his file, triggering the revocation of his welfare permit, his lawyers raised the possibility in court that it too had been planted by his family to engineer his deportation. The Intercept attempted to reach Kareem’s father for comment but was unable to get in touch.

“I had a security block on my application,” Kareem said. “There was no way to get it back without petitioning the military commander for reconsideration.”

Nimrod Avigal, deputy director of HIAS Israel, has been tracking LGBTQ+ Palestinian asylum claims for more than a decade. He worked on Kareem’s case at the outset. “Everything became much more difficult after October 7,” he said. “Many more people were refused because of security issues, mostly related to a family member.”

Back in his hometown, rumors were circulating that Kareem was collaborating with Israeli authorities, according to testimony submitted to the Jerusalem District Court, a justification not only for his family to track him down, but also for others to help them.

His family began posting notices in Facebook groups offering a cash reward for any information leading to his whereabouts, declaring him a “missing person.” One such post appeared in a public Jerusalem Facebook group with more than 450,000 members.

His phone was flooded with calls, 60 to 80 a day, mostly from unknown numbers. Eventually, as Kareem recounted to The Intercept, he threw his phone into the Mediterranean Sea in the hopes it would solve the problem.

It did not. The family hired men in Ramallah to track Kareem down on the other side of the separation wall. “They said that they were hired by my family to look for me and bring me back ‘after I tarnished the family’s reputation,’” Kareem recalled, “and that they need to ‘wash their honor as soon as possible.’”

A childhood friend now living in Spain sent Kareem a voice memo with a warning: “Your family has placed a bounty of 35,000 shekels on your head. It is absolutely clear that this will not end well and that your family is truly determined to catch you.”

The only thing standing between Kareem and deportation back to the West Bank was his welfare permit, and now it was gone.

In a court filing, Kareem’s attorney wrote that his family members wished “to obtain information about his whereabouts and bring him to the territories, dead or alive, in order to settle accounts with him, that is, to ensure he does not remain alive.”

Israel contended in court that Palestinians in Kareem’s position were motivated not by genuine fear but by a desire to “enjoy the more liberal lifestyle in Israel, rather than facing an actual threat,” language drawn from a 2013 Israeli Inter-Ministerial Committee report on Palestinians claiming persecution based on sexual orientation.

In response to a request for comment from The Intercept, COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees civilian affairs in the occupied territories, said that permits of this kind are granted “first and foremost for the purpose of saving lives, and allow the applicant to remain in Israel until a permanent solution is found in a receiving country.”

As Kareem’s lawyers and other human rights organizations in Israel have long argued, rather than being welcomed, gay Palestinians are frequently subject to blackmail by Israeli authorities, who pressure them to provide intelligence in exchange for protection, turning their vulnerability into a tool of coercion.

In the 10 Years Tamir Blank has been working with Palestinians from the West Bank filing asylum claims in Israel, he has accepted that many of his clients will either willingly choose to collaborate with Israeli intelligence or be coerced into it.

Many asylum-seekers feel pressured to offer intelligence to Israeli authorities in the hope that it might help them obtain a humanitarian stay permit, which entitles them to the right to work. (Even that is a relatively recent development: The permits only began allowing legal employment in 2022, after extensive litigation, before which Palestinians were often forced into grey industries like the sex trade.) In one case, a transgender Palestinian woman named Zehava who fled the West Bank in 2021 died by suicide after Israeli authorities revoked her permit.

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Israel Revoked Palestinians’ Work Permits — Then Launched a Deadly Crackdown on Laborers

“The Israeli policy is to minimize the presence of Palestinians within its borders, in the West Bank and within the 48 borders,” referring to Israel’s pre-1967 territory, said Anat Matar, an Israeli academic and head of the Israeli Committee for Palestinian Prisoners. Israeli authorities deter Palestinians from fleeing to Israel with bureaucratic hurdles, she told The Intercept, as they seek to maintain a Jewish demographic majority.

Blank’s clients are often so desperate to hold onto their status, feeling pressured to offer intelligence is “not something that is unique,” he said. The authorities “use every weakness they can.”

Kareem, however, was out of luck. He had no such intelligence to offer, as is often the case with LGBTQ+ Palestinians forced to flee. According to Blank, the very fact of their social exclusion means they are rarely privy to intelligence of value to Israeli authorities, regardless of who their family members might be.

Because he was born in the West Bank and holds a Palestinian Authority-issued ID, Kareem is unable to ever obtain residency or citizenship in Israel. Doing so, Israeli authorities fear, would set a precedent for a broader right of return for Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The original welfare permit Israel issued required Kareem to pursue resettlement in a third country; there was no path for him to remain in Israel.

Reut Ahdut, of the Aguda Israel, which until 2025 ran a program offering assistance to LGBTQ+ Palestinians fleeing the West Bank, said permits that used to be relatively stable are now often granted for only one to three months, with applicants required to regularly provide evidence that they are at risk across all Palestinian Authority territories, including the West Bank.

Despite the 2024 ruling, Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority maintains that Palestinians are not subject to the United Nations Refugee Convention and therefore that it is not obligated to provide them asylum on the grounds that UNRWA, the U.N. agency mandated to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees, bears that responsibility instead. After banning UNRWA from operating on its territory in 2025, Israel demolished UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters in January. 

After a court battle at the Jerusalem District Court, Kareem’s permit was reinstated in December 2024, and he has since been able to renew it with the permission of the military commander. In its ruling, the court acknowledged that the security intelligence used to revoke his permit may have been “based on false allegations that his family has made against him, in order to bring about his deportation.”

For now, Kareem has no path out of Israel — his life suspended, renewed six months at a time.

At one point, Kareem hoped he could be resettled to Canada through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees resettlement program, but amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment even in Canada, that option has vanished.

His time living in the shelter is over. With the help of the Tel Aviv Municipality, Kareem has moved into transitional housing in the Tel Aviv area.

He keeps his lightheartedness, switching seamlessly from referencing TikToks he found hilarious, to drama at work, to decrying how life as a Palestinian in Israel has become all but impossible since October 7th.

With the Port of Jaffa to the left and the Tel Aviv skyline looming off to the right, Kareem stared out at the Mediterranean, reflecting on the past year.

“I hate the sea, I really do, and I am supposed to say at least I got to see it because of my permit. But really what I miss is my home, the West Bank,” Kareem said. “That is where I am from, but for now, the sea will do.”

The post A Gay Palestinian Fled to Israel’s “Safe Haven.” Israel Tried to Exploit Him for Intelligence. appeared first on The Intercept.

It was only when he stepped onto the carpeted courtroom at the Oklahoma County Courthouse last June that Glossip, now 63, realized how unaccustomed his body had become to anything other than concrete. He almost fell over — one of his lawyers had to catch him. “You’re not balanced for that,” Glossip said. “You’re balanced for walking on very hard floors. It’s just really weird to, like, walk on carpet and stuff again.”

Now, sitting on a mint green loveseat next to his wife, Lea, Glossip was getting used to softer surfaces, including a new pair of black moccasin-style sherpa-lined slippers.

“My leg hasn’t been swollen since I got out.”

Just five days earlier, Glossip was still locked up at the county jail with no idea when — if ever — he would be released. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court vacated his conviction in 2025, he had been held indefinitely as Oklahoma prepared to try him again. Months earlier, his lawyers had asked Oklahoma County Judge Natalie Mai to grant bond, and Mai had finally said she would issue an order on May 14. That morning, just after 10 a.m., she handed down her decision: Glossip’s bond was set at $500,000.

After that, everything happened quickly — faster than anyone expected. Lea, an attorney herself, started making calls to secure the 10 percent in cash needed for his release. The bail money ultimately came from Kim Kardashian, a longtime supporter and prison reform advocate. Meanwhile, reporters rushed to set up cameras in front of the jail; within a few hours, local ABC affiliate KOCO had established a live feed of the jail entrance, which, just after 5 p.m., captured the moment Glossip walked out.

“It’s overwhelming but it’s amazing at the same time,” he said before walking to Lea’s SUV. In a surreal scene, KOCO’s helicopter hovered above the parking lot, with reporters excitedly narrating a play-by-play of the couple’s movements as they drove away.

They eventually made their way to a quiet Italian restaurant in Lea’s central Oklahoma City neighborhood, where they sat outside under a canopy of trees. Glossip ate spaghetti and meatballs. Over the years, Lea had talked to Glossip on the phone while eating dinner there alone, which made the place feel oddly familiar. “It’s kind of weird listening to her describe these restaurants,” he said. “Now I’m sitting at them.”

The two first began corresponding after Lea watched the 2017 documentary series “Killing Richard Glossip,” and eventually married in March 2022. Glossip would spend hours on the phone with Lea as she went about her daily routine, keeping her company as she got ready for her law school classes, ran errands, and had dinner. They’d end the evening watching TV together. Over time, the daily ritual established a structure that would provide a lifeline to Glossip — and eventually ease his transition to life outside prison walls.

Sitting in the light-filled living room in their studio apartment, Glossip described how those interactions have so far helped him feel less bewildered by a world he hasn’t experienced for nearly 30 years. Still, since his release, there have been constant, small reminders of his decades of incarceration.

On his first night, he barely slept. There was the adrenaline, of course, but more than that was the silence — it was way too quiet compared to the constant chaos and noise at the county jail. And then there was the water: In prison, the sink would only run for seconds at a time and would turn off automatically. “I keep waiting for the water to go off,” Glossip said. “I’ve even walked out of that bathroom and the water was still going, and I keep forgetting I have to turn it off.”

“I always think that ‘Nah, none of that stuff’s gonna bother me,’” he continued. “But when it really actually happens, it does bother you more than you think. You start remembering things. Or something will trigger something that will bring you back to when this all happened, when it all began.”

It’s those small things — the carpet, the water, the quiet — that have a way of reminding him how much he survived.

“Once you’re out here and you see all the things that was taken away from you — and all the times they almost took everything away from me, my life and everything — you see all of it now,” he said. “And it kind of still makes me angry at times because none of this should have ever happened. And this should have never been taken from me in the first place.”

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally killed at the Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of Oklahoma City in January 1997. A 19-year-old handyman named Justin Sneed admitted to fatally beating Van Treese with a baseball bat, but insisted that Glossip bullied him into doing it. Sneed’s account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip — and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. Sneed is serving a life sentence.

Glossip always maintained his innocence, and his conviction was overturned twice. In 2001, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Glossip’s lawyers had been ineffective for failing to present key evidence that undermined Sneed’s account of the crime. But in 2004, a second jury convicted Glossip and resentenced him to death.

More than 20 years later, in February 2025, the Supreme Court again vacated Glossip’s conviction, finding that Sneed had lied on the stand during Glossip’s retrial and that prosecutors had failed to correct Sneed’s testimony. This misconduct, combined with “additional conduct by the prosecutor further undermines confidence in the verdict,” the justices wrote.

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Glossip came close to execution numerous times, as Oklahoma authorities aggressively defended their conviction despite mounting evidence pointing to his innocence. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who came into office in 2023, broke with his predecessors, taking unprecedented steps to block Glossip’s execution and to appeal his conviction to the Supreme Court. After Glossip’s high court victory, many expected Drummond to quickly resolve the case and free Glossip; Lea even bought Glossip new clothes in anticipation of his release. Instead, Drummond, who by then was running for governor, announced that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder.

Drummond’s office insisted Glossip should remain in jail — while simultaneously confirming that the state had no new evidence to support his guilt. In July 2025, a judge denied defense lawyers’ request to have Glossip released on bond, only to recuse herself from the case after she was revealed to have close ties to the same district attorney’s office that originally sent Glossip to death row. Mai, a civil judge, was ultimately appointed to the case after a string of judges stepped down for the same reason.

With Mai set to preside over Glossip’s retrial, his legal team again asked for his release on bond. On May 14, she agreed. In her order, Mai quoted a letter Drummond wrote to the parole board in 2023, expressing his view that the record didn’t support a first-degree murder conviction.

“The Court fully expects that the State will rigorously prosecute its case going forward and the defense will provide robust and effective presentation for Glossip,” Mai wrote. “The Court hopes that a new trial, free of error, will provide all interested parties, and the citizens of Oklahoma, the closure they deserve.”

Drummond did not release a statement regarding Glossip’s release. Instead, he posted a video to Facebook from the White House where he spent the day with FBI Director Kash Patel and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

On his first night home, Glossip decided he wanted to see a store. He hadn’t used a real razor in years, and he wanted some ice cream. The couple ended up at Target, which he found peaceful, especially the music. “It was like elevator music,” Lea said laughing.

The following days were a whirlwind of errands: a haircut, a grocery store, and the DMV. Did anybody recognize him, we asked. Yes, they said. Everybody, everywhere seemed to know who he was. At the barbershop, the man who cut Glossip’s hair refused to accept any payment. “He said, ‘No, it’s an honor,’” Lea recalled. “He was really happy to be the one to do that.” At Whole Foods, people glanced at them with knowing smiles, while others took surreptitious photos as Glossip marveled over purple potatoes and dragonfruit — two foods he’d never seen before.

At the DMV, when a woman called out the name “Richard,” Glossip and another man stood up at the same time. “Glossip?” he asked. Yes, the woman replied. “You’re Richard Glossip?!” the other Richard replied — and asked for a photo, which they took outside by the man’s purple car.

At Walmart, a lady simply beamed at them and said, “Welcome.”

“It kind of threw him,” Lea said. But the attention had been overwhelmingly supportive. “I think it’s nice for Rich to receive that after everything, to walk back into the world after everything he survived, and have people greet him positively.”

On Monday morning, Lea had to go back to work. Before heading out, she left Glossip keys and some cash. “Has money always been this size?” he asked. Yes, she told him. He hadn’t used cash in decades and recalled the bills being smaller. That day he didn’t venture out. Instead, he stayed at home and did chores. But the next day, he went out on his own for the first time, walking to a corner store for a Coke. “It’s you!” the clerk said.

Glossip is looking forward to exploring more on his own — he wants to walk barefoot in summer grass, stargaze, and go fishing — all provided he is home by his court-ordered curfew of 10 p.m. And he wants to renew his vows with Lea, in a ceremony outside prison walls.

“I tried never to let myself become institutionalized,” he said. “But I mean it’s hard. You go through all these horrible things and all these different dates … and last meals and everything. And then it doesn’t look like this day will ever get here. But you always hope that it will.”

Back in 2014, when he was facing his first execution date, Glossip wrote to famed anti-death penalty nun Sister Helen Prejean, asking if she could help him. Prejean reached out to attorney Don Knight, who had significant experience representing people facing the death penalty, asking if he could take on Glossip’s case; he agreed. In the decade that followed, Knight would find new witnesses and expose hidden evidence that undercut the state’s case against Glossip — and led to the Supreme Court’s decision. Knight’s zealous advocacy is responsible for saving Glossip’s life.

Discussing this, Glossip returned to some of the darkest and most traumatic moments of his incarceration — including the time he came closest to execution in 2015. Officials halted the lethal injection at the last second after realizing that they were about to use the wrong drug to kill him. That was more than 10 years ago. He would face execution again and again: a total of nine times. “They used to call me the cat man on death row,” he said.

The weekend after Glossip was released, he met up with Knight in a local park. The two sat in the sun and talked. “It was nice just to sit in that park and watch people go by,” Glossip said. “Him and I just having a conversation with each other.” He remembered what he told Knight when they first met. “‘I just want people to know the truth,’” Glossip said. “And he’s been able to do that. And that’s been pretty amazing for me because that’s what I wanted more than anything.”

A week after his release, Glossip sent Knight an update: He’d been to the park, an art fair, and brunch with two of Lea’s co-workers. It was the best week of his life, he said. 

“I’ve lived this case for so long,” he told us. “I don’t want to live it anymore.” He knows the case isn’t over, but he trusts Knight and his legal team to handle what comes next.

“They’ll make the right decisions. I know they will. I wouldn’t be out here today if they wasn’t,” he said. “So I’m just going to let them handle it. … I’m just gonna enjoy life.”

The post Richard Glossip on Life After Decades on Death Row appeared first on The Intercept.