Angry farmhands faced off against activists who flew their drones overhead, with the operators secure in the knowledge that the Federal Aviation Administration allows licensed pilots to soar over farmland as long as they followed its rules and regulations.

Now, a new chapter has opened in these drone wars: The FAA has launched an investigation of an animal rights activist whose group’s videos of conditions at California cattle ranches sparked outrage, with the agency simultaneously proposing new rules that could prevent the pilots’ flyovers altogether.

The same company whose ranch is at the center of the allegations against the pilot is pushing for government restrictions on drone flights in the name of protecting the “national food supply chain.”

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It is unclear whether the investigation represents a routine administrative step or the beginning of a broader crackdown, activists affiliated with the group Direct Action Everywhere said, but the group is watching closely.

“We know the industry lies about us, including saying our footage is edited,” Cassie King, a spokesperson for the group, told the Intercept. “What would be most concerning is if the FAA believes those lies at face value and tries to take licenses away from drone pilots who are operating safely to expose to the public what animals are suffering, and basically just to help the industry shut down that work in the public interest.”

The FAA does not comment on open investigations, a spokesperson said.

Drones Against Cruelty

The advent of drones gave animal rights groups a major leg up in their long-running campaign against big farms, which they allege routinely deploy abusive and cruel behavior against chickens, cows and calves, pigs, and other species bred for human consumption.

For years, diehard activists faced arrest and prosecution for sneaking onto farms with cameras to document conditions. Those same activists have gone legal in the drone era, since federal law largely allows licensed drone pilots to fly over farms and capture video of the conditions below.

The activists’ videos have already created major headaches for cattle farmers. In February, a Direct Action Everywhere pilot caught ranch hands in California’s Central Valley kicking young calves and pulling them with pliers. One of the workers involved was fired, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Now another Direct Action Everywhere pilot is facing turbulence. Joseph Allman received a letter in July notifying him that he was under investigation by the FAA. Allman says it is the first time the agency has opened an investigation into someone affiliated with Direct Action Everywhere.

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Allman has been a licensed pilot since 2016 and previously operated a commercial drone business. In recent years, he has pivoted to activism, using his skills to fly drones over farms across California and providing instruction to prospective pilots for Direct Action Everywhere.

While Allman says he carefully follows FAA rules is in the air, he faces criminal charges — apparently unrelated to the federal investigation — for an incident that happened on the ground. Allman and other activists are accused of removing two baby goats they said needed medical attention from a farm during a May 2025 action at a Kings County, California, dairy farm.

The FAA investigation of Allman pertains to a different business, Grimmius Cattle Co. Allman says the only formal information he has received is that a complaint was filed against him on February 24 about a flight he conducted over the company’s East Ranch property in Strathmore, California.

The day before that complaint was made, Allman said, one of the company’s security workers confronted him as he flew a drone over the property. The worker accused him of flying the drone without having it in his line of sight, according to Allman, which would violate FAA regulations. Allman denies that allegation.

It is not clear who filed the complaint against Allman. Grimmius Cattle Co. did not respond to requests for comment from the Intercept.

Coming Crackdown?

Allman said he has great respect for the FAA. But he has grown concerned because the agency has not responded thus far to requests from him and his lawyer for further information about the claims against him, he said.

The mere opening of an investigation is not necessarily cause for alarm, according to Douglas Marshall, a law professor and aviation consultant who wrote a book on drone policy.

“It’s just a form letter,” he said. “They crank them out. It takes them all of 15 minutes to do it. It often just ends right there.”

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Still the agency takes “blatant” violations of its rules and flight restrictions seriously, Marshall said. Because investigations can result in heavy fines and the possibly revocation of a license, he often advises pilots to seek help from a lawyer, which Allman has done.

Part of Allman’s fears stem from industry’s push for a broader crackdown on drone pilots, he said. The FAA is pursuing a new regulation that could prevent pilots from flying over agricultural facilities. When the agency put out a public request for comments on new rules for “fixed site facilities,” agricultural businesses responded by asking for strict restrictions.

One commenter was Grimmius Cattle Co. Its chief operating officer Austin Flores complained that an activist group had submitted more than 30 hours of footage of another farm to law enforcement agencies.

“This is the end goal of these surveillance campaigns: to generate enough material to file complaints, trigger investigations, and create regulatory and legal pressure against lawful agricultural operations,” Flores said in a written statement submitted on July 6. “The footage is a tool, and producers have no current airspace protection to prevent it from being gathered.”

Flores cast tighter regulations as key to protecting the “national food supply chain.”

“Without clear restrictions, agricultural operations are left in the same position as any other unprotected airspace, open to anyone, for any purpose,” he said. “We believe that is a food security vulnerability that this rulemaking has an opportunity to address, and we urge the FAA to treat it as such.”

Allman said a ban would be a major setback for animal rights groups.

“The drones usually capture some sort of cruelty, and that is so important,” he said. “The industry will just say it’s a one-off incident. The drones are showing that this is not one-off, and it’s systemic.”

The post FAA Investigates Drone Pilot Who Films Animal Abusers appeared first on The Intercept.

In a new court filing seeking to overturn Jeffrey Prible’s 2002 conviction for the murder of a Houston family, Watson said he would never give the same testimony today. “Based on … changes in the field and my own increased experience and scientific knowledge, if I were asked to testify today, my answers to many of the questions asked by the State at trial would be different,” he wrote in a declaration filed on August 28. “Today I would provide more thorough and nuanced explanations.”

Watson also wrote that prosecutors “misrepresented” his testimony in both their opening and closing statements, and made “inflammatory” remarks that twisted both the science and his opinions.

Prible was accused of murdering his friends Steve Herrera and Nilda Tirado, who were found shot to death at their home in North Houston in 1999. A fire was started in an apparent attempt to cover up the crime; the couple’s three young children died from smoke inhalation. Prible had been hanging out at the couple’s home in the hours before they were killed, which made him an early suspect. But there was no evidence linking him to the scene — save for a DNA sample taken from semen collected from Tirado’s mouth. Prible had an explanation for this; as he told investigators at the time, he and Tirado had been having an affair behind Herrera’s back, and she had performed oral sex on him earlier that evening.

The case went cold until Harris County Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler took it over, reexamining the evidence and concluding that there was no innocent explanation for the presence of Prible’s DNA. Instead, Siegler decided, the semen was evidence of a brutal sexual assault that took place just seconds before Tirado was shot in the back of the head.

The theory was central to Prible’s conviction. “I would suggest to you what the evidence indicates is that the Defendant after killing Steve forced Nilda to orally copulate him at gunpoint and executed her as soon as he finished,” Siegler’s co-counsel, Vic Wisner, told the jury during the state’s closing argument. “As horrific as that sounds, that is the only logical conclusion that you can draw from that evidence.”

Siegler reiterated the claim to maximum effect: “She left this world with his penis in her mouth,” she told jurors in her closing, “hoping to God that her babies would survive the nightmare that is Jeff Prible.”

Prible was convicted and sentenced to death in October 2002; he maintains his innocence.

Prible’s case was at the heart of a three-part series published by The Intercept in 2023. The investigation explored how Siegler, who won 19 death sentences over the course of her nearly 22-year career in Houston, went on to become a true-crime celebrity in the decades after sending Prible to death row. The series also showed how her Oxygen Network true-crime reality shows — “Cold Justice,” now in its eighth season, and “Prosecuting Evil With Kelly Siegler,” starting its third season this fall — portray Siegler as a gifted crime-fighter and compassionate crusader for victims, even as she left a trail of questionable convictions in her wake.

In Prible’s case, as The Intercept’s reporting showed, Siegler built her prosecution not only on questionable claims about the DNA evidence, but also on the highly dubious account of a jailhouse informant who claimed that Prible confessed to him. This witness, it turned out, was part of a ring of snitches who cooperated with Siegler in exchange for assistance getting their own sentences reduced. During Prible’s federal appeals, multiple members of this snitch ring testified that informants offered Siegler false evidence against Prible — and one said that Siegler actually provided him with details about the case.

At best, Siegler was careless about scrutinizing the information they provided. At worst, as Prible’s lawyers argued to a federal district court, she actively conspired to win a conviction despite knowing the case wouldn’t otherwise hold up — framing an innocent man for murder.

In 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison overturned Prible’s conviction, finding that Siegler had withheld key information about her dealings with the informants from Prible’s defense. “Without question, the prosecution in this case engaged in a pattern of deceptive behavior and active concealment. And the evidence suppressed sufficiently serves to contravert the primary basis for Prible’s conviction,” Ellison wrote. “Siegler intentionally and knowingly withheld information,” he went on, and “was deceptive about her efforts to do so.”

Texas appealed the ruling to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Rather than considering the evidence that Siegler had violated Prible’s constitutional rights, the court instead reinstated Prible’s conviction based solely on procedural grounds. In the new state court filing, Prible’s legal team, led by Austin attorney Gretchen Scardino, reupped their previous allegations while also arguing to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that Watson’s recent recantation further undermines Prible’s conviction.

“This Court has not had the opportunity to review the trove of new evidence that came to light during the federal habeas proceedings, until now,” they wrote. “And even beyond that new evidence, there has been a significant development in Prible’s case.” Watson’s declaration cites “significant changes in the field of forensic biology, in the progression of the scientific methods used to analyze the evidence in Prible’s case, and in his own scientific knowledge,” they continued. “This new evidence shows that Prible is actually innocent.”

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Watson first expressed misgivings about his trial testimony and the way it was weaponized in an interview with The Intercept in 2023. His answers were more definitive than they should have been, he said, and he certainly did not intend to endorse the state’s insistence that there was “no way in the world that semen wasn’t deposited either moments before or seconds after Nilda died.” “‘No way in the world’ is not something I would have said,” Watson told us.

The DNA from Tirado’s mouth was one of three samples collected after the murders. DNA matching Herrera, Tirado’s boyfriend, was also found on vaginal and anal swabs. At Prible’s 2002 trial, Watson testified he’d never before been able to extract a male DNA profile from an oral swab, and that his understanding was that sperm wouldn’t persist in the oral cavity absent Tirado’s murder. Siegler crudely emphasized these findings during her closing argument. To believe Prible’s claim that he and Tirado had engaged in consensual sex, she declared, jurors would have to believe that he had “some kind of magic semen … that somehow lives longer than any of y’all’s or any other man’s in this whole universe.” Moreover, “you’ve also got to believe that his semen is so tasty that she walked around savoring the flavor of it in her mouth for a couple hours. That’s the only way it’s going to end up still in her mouth after she’s dead.”

In his new declaration, Watson took exception to Siegler’s closing. “I never testified to this, nor would I,” he wrote. “These inflammatory remarks are not only scientifically baseless, but also highly inappropriate.” Not only has his original understanding changed, Watson wrote, there is also no way to determine which of the three DNA samples was left first. In other words, while the state’s case was built on the assumption that Prible’s DNA was deposited last, in reality it was not scientifically possible to make such a claim.

Central to Prible’s new filing is a Texas law that explicitly offers defendants an opportunity to challenge their convictions based on new scientific evidence. “Although there was little available literature on the subject at the time, the scientific consensus today is that spermatozoa can survive in the oral cavity of a living person for up to fifteen hours — and even longer in a deceased person,” his legal team wrote. Their argument is supported by a new report from a second DNA expert, who explains that recent scientific advancements show that Watson’s testimony was, as Prible’s attorneys write, “wholly unsupportable.”

How the Harris County DA’s office responds to the new evidence remains to be seen. Kelly Siegler did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, Assistant Federal Public Defender Nat Lombardo wrote, “Jeff Prible has spent nearly half his life on death row for a crime he did not commit. … This evidence supports Jeff’s account, from the very beginning, of what happened that night. Put simply: if Jeff were tried today, the State would have no case. We hope the DA and the courts do the right thing and give Jeff Prible his life back.”

Prible, who has been on death row for nearly 24 years and has seen dozens of his neighbors taken to the execution chamber, remains hopeful. “The way I see it, it is a true test of faith,” he wrote in a message to The Intercept. “I know in my heart of hearts my best days in this life are still yet to come!”

The post A True-Crime Star’s Lurid Claims Sent a Man to Die. Her Key Witness Just Recanted. appeared first on The Intercept.

Created by tech giant Palantir, a CIA-backed firm known for data mining and using artificial intelligence for everything from warfighting to “predictive policing,” the ELITE app helps ICE target immigrants and issues a “confidence score” for how accurate the information on a target is. The app analyzes data from government agencies and other sources, producing dossiers on targets, compiling them into lists, and mapping their locations.

The debut of ELITE — Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting — came just as ICE added over 12,000 employees through an expedited hiring surge, placing a badge and a gun in the hands of new recruits in record time, thanks to cuts to ICE’s training curriculum.

Thousands of the new ICE hires, then, were able to hit the streets without cleared background checks, according to reporting by Reuters in early 2026.

The hiring spree at ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, coupled with the powerful new handheld technology of the ELITE app, created potential civil liberties nightmares and threats to national security, according to ICE whistleblowers, former Department of Homeland Security officials, and legal experts who spoke to The Intercept.

“No one should have been hired by DHS before background reviews were completed. This never happened in previous administrations,” said Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Homeland Security. “Furthermore, giving the newly hired ICE ERO staff access to sensitive databases such as ELITE threatens public safety by allowing non-vetted teams to access and potentially misuse data.”

The ELITE app, Callahan said, did not go through the usual process government tools undergo to prevent abuses and ensure privacy rights.

“It’s one of the first applications they give new officers so they can start working,” said one ICE deportation officer who came through the hiring surge. “You can access it without full background clearance.”

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“Some of these guys should’ve never been hired, let alone have access to the information on ELITE,” the officer, who asked for anonymity to protect their livelihood, told The Intercept.

Every ICE deportation officer is issued a phone, where the ELITE app comes standard, according to five ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept. (Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Palantir responded to requests for comment.)

The five ICE officials, who each work in different regions across the country, said deportation officers without completed background checks continue to work in all their jurisdictions, some of whom were hired nearly a year ago.

No Privacy Assessment

ELITE’s user guide identifies a dozen distinct sources that the app draws from. The databases include sensitive data sets like addresses, criminal histories, immigration records, court rulings, and other personal information about both immigrants and U.S. citizens.

Much of that information would constitute what the government calls PII, or personally identifiable information. According to a Department of Homeland Security document that catalogs the agency’s use of artificial intelligence, the ELITE app does involve PII.

A 2002 law, however, says that government agencies must conduct and publish the findings of a “privacy impact assessment” for “all new or substantially changed technology that collects, maintains, or disseminates personally identifiable information (PII),” according to a Justice Department summary of the statute.

The processes are designed to assess how technology affects personal privacy and outline what safeguards are in place to ensure accountability if systems are misused.

Yet the Department of Homeland Security privacy office hasn’t published an assessment for ELITE, according to Callahan, the former Homeland Security official, who also served as the department’s chief privacy officer.

“The DHS privacy office should have worked with ICE to publish a privacy impact assessment,” said Callahan, noting a general lack of productivity by the privacy office. “In fact, the DHS privacy office has only published one PIA all year. In comparison, I published 228 PIAs in my three-and-a-half years as privacy officer.”

The failure to conduct a privacy impact assessment has a profound impact on transparency and accountability, the very aspects of privacy policy the E-Government Act of 2002 was intended to regulate.

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“This is not a technicality,” said Clare Garvie, a privacy lawyer and deputy director of technology policy at the New York University Law School’s Policing Project. “PIAs are an essential component of transparency and privacy governance, they are how the public understands what information is collected about us, how long it is kept, who can use it, and what remedies exist if it is wrong or subject to misuse.”

“If ICE can’t fulfill this prerequisite,” Garvie said, “I lack confidence in its ability to use the tool in a lawful, privacy-protective manner in the field.”

The Department of Homeland Security site for cataloging its uses of AI does list a privacy impact assessment on its page for ELITE, but the assessment is not actually for the ELITE app. Instead, the link goes to a 2019 privacy assessment for ICE’s Enforcement Integrated Database.

The Enforcement Integrated Database is just one of the systems ELITE incorporates into its searches, meaning the PIA only scratches the surface of what personally identifying information appears in ELITE and how the app organizes the data.

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“The document DHS points to as fulfilling this obligation was updated in 2019, years before it acquired ELITE,” said Garvie. “This PIA completely fails to describe the app’s data sources, its AI analysis, or the inferences it produces that are used to focus immigration investigations and removal operations.”

Public concerns surrounding the incorporation of AI surveillance in law enforcement — including ICE’s new AI initiative to combat doxing of its staff — are reaching a boiling point in the U.S. today, leaving some ICE officials concerned.

“I know I sound crazy, but this is 1984 shit,” said another ICE official familiar with ELITE who requested anonymity to protect their job. “ELITE is used on illegal immigrants right now but can easily be used on Americans.”

The post ICE Gave New Hires Access to Restricted Info on Palantir App Before They Passed Background Checks appeared first on The Intercept.

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey comfortably defeated Rep. Seth Moulton in his Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, in what the media — and Moulton himself — had described as a “generational” challenge.

The framing is understandable: In a country suffering under gerontocratic rule, Markey is 80 and Moulton is 47.

Age, however, was the least of what was at stake in Moulton’s run from the decaying center of the Democratic Party. Moulton ran on a conservative line, recycling right-wing talking points and echoing Donald Trump to suggest, erroneously, that Democrats have been failing because they have not been conservative enough.

Markey may be 80 years old, but his campaign did precisely what Democrats must if they want to appeal to progressives and bring in a broad working-class voter base: He ran on issues of economic inequality, taxing billionaires, green energy, and universal health care — all while refusing to jettison support for vulnerable minorities, especially trans people.

Meanwhile Moulton, claiming to represent a break in the status quo, repeated precisely the tired centrist playbook that has both failed America’s multiracial working class and failed to win elections. He punched left and, as Markey himself highlighted, threw trans kids “under the bus.”

In a risible misreading of the Democrats’ 2024 presidential election loss, Moulton suggested that his party had shown too much care for trans rights. (It had not.)

“I have two little girls,” Moulton told the New York Times just after the November 2024 election. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”

It was only last month that Moulton offered a tempered apology for the anti-trans remarks — and only because Markey had lambasted him during a debate.

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“He just took the whole playbook of MAGA and Trump, and he blamed those kids for the loss,” said Markey, who has been consistent in his advocacy for trans rights. “We should have been loving those kids. There’s only 12 trans athletes in the whole of the NCAA. We should have been embracing them.”

Indeed, we should question the validity of this so-called “debate” entirely: Why did the moderator of a Senate primary debate even feel the need to ask a question about trans girls in sports at all?

This is not, after all, a political problem in need of addressing in Massachusetts, or anywhere else. It is a ghoulish far-right panic that has been baselessly elevated into a hot-button issue, with the help of Democratic cowardice.

Fox News, of all places, noted that Markey is “one of the few Democrats running this midterm cycle who is continuing to push for transgender rights, particularly in sports” — as if that were a bad thing.

“There is good evidence that transgender issues were a major part of Markey’s victory, too,” wrote reporter and trans advocate Erin Reed. “In the final days of the campaign, a UMass/Amherst poll asked primary voters how a candidate who embraces anti-trans positions or policies would impact their vote. In that poll, a whopping 67% stated it would make their vote less likely for that candidate.”

Markey, the longtime incumbent, was already at an advantage. And no doubt proselytizers for Democratic Party conservatism will stress that Markey’s victory in deep-blue Massachusetts cannot offer lessons for Democrats running in less progressive territory. This again would be to selectively learn the wrong lessons from Kamala Harris’s spectacular 2024 failure.

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It should not need repeating that Democrats in 2024 campaigned on Republican talking points, with Harris donning khaki for photo ops at the Arizona border. If Donald Trump’s campaign attacking trans people gained purchase, it is because Democrats roundly failed to answer it by demystifying right-wing anti-trans fearmongering. They also failed to offer a robust, class-focused platform to vote for.

Being nearly half someone’s age does not constitute a generational challenge; contesting the staid ways of a generational establishment does. Moulton did nothing of the sort.

Markey said it best on Tuesday: “Generational change isn’t about compromising.”

The post Seth Moulton Sold Out Trans Kids — and Lost His Senate Race appeared first on The Intercept.

“This reporting is absolutely FALSE,” said Tricia McLaughlin, then a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, in a statement. “Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus had FULL medical, prenatal care.”

The statement, labeled as a “Fact Check,” said the Guatemalan-born Monterroso Lemus had “received prenatal care, including an ultrasound and OB-GYN visit.”

Neither side of the disputed account provided evidence to back up their claims.

Now, federal government documents obtained by The Intercept appear to undermine the Trump administration’s version of events. The documents show a lack of basic care needed for a healthy pregnancy, according to expert analysis. One document from an outside healthcare center made after the stillbirth describes a “pregnancy complicated by lack of PNC” — meaning prenatal care.

“The administration was engaged in CYA — cover your ass,” said Dr. Andrea Schecter, an OB-GYN physician with a decade’s experience working with high-risk pregnancies, including those of immigrants. “They know that what they provided is probably not sufficient care.”

“Flouting the Directive”

The new records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, include documents from Monterroso Lemus’s visit to Ochsner LSU Center, a healthcare facility in Shreveport, Louisiana, after she complained for days about not feeling fetal movement. It was the only recorded instance of her leaving Richwood Correctional Center, an ICE detention facility run by the family-owned private prison giant LaSalle Corrections.

The Ochsner LSU documents, produced after the stillbirth, say that Monterroso Lemus had told medical staff at Richwood that “this pregnancy didn’t feel right a couple days ago but nothing was done.”

Other new records include timelines produced by ICE that show a referral for an OB-GYN appointment but don’t indicate that any visit was scheduled or took place, or that Monterroso Lemus ever received an ultrasound.

Asked about the new documents, a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security simply repeated the previous claims that Monterroso Lemus received regular, timely prenatal care without responding to queries.

On May 9, ten days after losing her son, Monterroso Lemus was shackled, put on a plane, and deported to Guatemala, causing her postpartum visit to be canceled.

“Everyone knows that ICE and DHS lie on a daily basis — and Americans have witnessed the deadly consequences of this administration’s reckless actions for nearly two years,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., when asked about the case. “The Trump administration’s barbaric treatment of pregnant women in immigration custody is unconscionable.”

In fact, the Trump administration is detaining many more pregnant women than before. During the Biden administration, for example, ICE would detain about a dozen pregnant women nationally during a year, said Eunice Cho, an immigration attorney with expertise in detention conditions. During a congressional visit to Louisiana’s Basile detention center last April, however, there were 14 in that one facility.

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According to a 2021 ICE directive, “Generally, ICE should not detain, arrest, or take into custody for an administrative violation of the immigration laws individuals known to be pregnant, postpartum, or nursing unless release is prohibited by law or exceptional circumstances exist.”

Cho said, “The Trump administration is flouting the directive.”

Murray introduced legislation last year to codify in federal law the notion that pregnant women should not be detained, as well as other standards. The bill remains in committee.

“This case stands out as an example of the enormity of the tragedy pregnant women and families are facing because of the Trump administration,” Cho said, of Monterroso Lemus’s experience. “The bottom line is: No one deserves to be treated like this.”

The Timeline

Monterroso Lemus, now 38 years old, met her neighbor Gary Bivens in Lenoir City, Tennessee, about six years ago. The pair began to grow close about four years ago, after Bivens lost his wife to a heart condition.

Monterroso Lemus became pregnant, and the couple had an OB-GYN visit in February. They had plans to get married when ICE detained her in mid-March.

After ICE transferred Monterroso Lemus multiple times, on April 2, she arrived at Richwood Correctional Center, in Monroe, Louisiana.

Most of the documents obtained by The Intercept are emails between officials with ICE and at its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, where officials sought to rebut Monterroso Lemus’s statements to the media by compiling information on her medical care while detained.

The timeline included in the documents, annotated and labeled as a “[f]ull overview of her care,” begins on April 2. Versions of the timeline are included in several other places in the documents.

The timeline has nine entries under what is called a “List of medical visits.” Four of them are visits to a nurse. Two others are labeled “Mental Health Visit.”

On April 17, according to the timeline, she visited the on-site medical provider for what is labeled “prenatal care non–compliance.”

Monterroso Lemus told The Intercept that visit was due to her unwillingness to continue taking 12 pills daily, including what she said may have been vitamins and others for constipation and headaches. She had been taking them for three days.

“I felt that they made me sick,” she said. Also, “other people told me to watch out for the medicine they give you.”

On April 29, after several days of not feeling any fetal movement, Monterroso Lemus was transferred to Ochsner LSU. In the presence of several federal guards, she delivered a stillborn fetus at about 23 weeks of pregnancy.

Monterroso Lemus said she had tried to get medical attention during the days before the tragedy.

“The worst part is, I told them I felt bad — and they didn’t pay attention to me,” she said.

What’s missing from the timeline — any indication of having an OB-GYN visit before she stopped feeling fetal movement or of receiving any ultrasound — makes it difficult to understand what caused the stillbirth.

“There are some reasons this could’ve happened that would have been identified by comprehensive prenatal care,” Schecter, the OB-GYN expert, said. “At some level, they know this.”

No Ultrasound?

A separate timeline in the documents refers to medical care Monterroso Lemus received during the several days in late March that she was detained at Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama. There, it says, she got a “fetal doppler,” which measures fetal heartbeat, but is not the same as an ultrasound.

Nonetheless, the “Fact Check” DHS published months later read, “she received prenatal care including a fetal doppler ultrasound.”

Schecter told the Intercept, “A fetal doppler is just audio, but it is not the same as an ultrasound, which is visual.”

“That is not an adequate assessment of the health and well-being of the pregnancy. It absolutely is not full prenatal care,” she said.

Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who researches health care in immigration detention, said, “Full prenatal care would include an ultrasound and an anatomy scan.”

“We already know that doesn’t generally happen in immigration detention,” said Zeidan.

Of the DHS “Fact Check,” Zeidan said, “They’re not being truthful about what happened.”

The experience Monterroso Lemus faced in ICE detention is not unique, according to several experts consulted by the Intercept.

“Unfortunately, this story is consistent with reports made by pregnant women in ICE detention,” said Cho, the immigration attorney. “There’s a lack of prenatal care, indifference to very serious symptoms, and a lack of treatment.”

“Waiting for My Baby”

By the end of May, the Nashville Banner had published an article in which Monterroso Lemus said, “They didn’t give me medical attention.”

The remark touched off a flurry of activity within ICE and DHS.

On June 25, at 4:41 p.m., McLaughlin, then a DHS spokesperson, wrote to another official whose name is redacted: “Wow so this is all garbage claims. This is FALSE. She had FULL medical, prenatal care. We have documentation to show it.”

The following day, DHS published its “Fact Check” — the same document the agency sent The Intercept when confronted with discrepancies.

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Meanwhile, Monterroso Lemus and Bevins haven’t seen each other for 15 months. They communicate by WhatsApp regularly, using a translation app. On separate calls with The Intercept, both described suffering depression.

Bivens drives 100 miles every day to and from his $26-an-hour job as an iron worker. He regularly sends part of his paycheck to Monterroso Lemus. He says he’s bought a plane ticket to Guatemala for December and has created a GoFundMe to help pay for the cost of moving his tools and other things needed for the couple to start a new life in the Central American country.

The GoFundMe includes a photo of her holding her baby, taken in Ochsner.

He has also engaged attorneys and sued the federal government.

“I don’t consider the way they treated her the American way,” he said. “My family goes back a long way in Tennessee. I have a great-grandfather who fought for the Confederates.”

He added, “I just want someone to be held accountable.”

Monterroso Lemus said she doesn’t think much about the officials who set in motion the events leading to the loss of her son and deportation.

“God will take care of all of them,” she said.

Bivens said he keeps the ashes of his son on a table by his bed in Lenoir City. It took him a while to figure out, but he’s obtained the paperwork needed to take the ashes with him to Guatemala in December.

“I’m waiting for my baby,” said Monterroso Lemus. “That would give me some peace.”

The post Trump Admin Said She Was Lying About Stillbirth in ICE Custody. New Evidence Points to Lack of Prenatal Care. appeared first on The Intercept.

Of the more than $170 billion that President Donald Trump secured for his border regime in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” nearly $50 billion is allocated to border wall construction. Even with these enormous resources, however, the administration continues to face challenges constructing its monument to violent exclusion along the southern border through tribal, private, and state lands.

For nearly a month, the key force standing in the way of Trump’s border wall project in southeast Arizona has been a person sitting in a 200-year-old tree.

More precisely, at every moment since late July, one person — although not always the same person — has been on a platform in the branches of a giant cottonwood tree in Lochiel, Arizona, with an expanding encampment of primarily local activists 50 feet below.

The protesters’ aim is to stop the ongoing construction of two parallel, 30-foot-high border walls ripping through the remote San Rafael Valley.

Miles of the double wall structure have already been built in the area. This part of the valley is sparsely populated and hardly ever used as a border-crossing site by humans, but is renowned as a unique wildlife migration corridor. According to the Sierra Club’s borderlands coordinator, Erick Meza, the region is “a biodiversity hotspot and the most important jaguar corridor that we have left in the U.S.”

Residents from Lochiel and the surrounding area, including from Sonora, Mexico, had been coming together regularly for over a year for binational gatherings to organize against wall construction. They shared music, art, food, and ceremonies across the border, which is demarcated there by only a rancher’s wire fence.

The planned double wall structure, with a 60-foot no man’s land in between, would not only devastate the land and its ecosystems — it would also sever the binational life worlds of the area.

The “happenings,” as organizers called the gatherings, escalated into a continuous protest and tree sit when construction workers with government contractors Fisher Sand & Gravel crushed three giant cottonwood trees, known locally as “grandmother” trees, in one day on July 27.

Local activists moved in swiftly to save the last cottonwood standing on the U.S. side of the border, and the tree sit began.

“Momentum had been growing locally in the region to try to make more of an intervention,” said an Arizona-based participant in the tree sit, who asked for anonymity out of concern for government repression. “People got together that night and decided to go down and set up a tree sit in that final tree on the U.S. side, which was planned to be cleared.”

Ever since, a tree sitter has been in the cottonwood at all times, numerous participants told The Intercept.

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“U.S. Customs and Border Protection identified four cottonwood trees on federal land in Lochiel, Arizona, that needed removal for planned border wall construction,” said a spokesperson from CBP. “Preconstruction surveys found no active migratory bird nests, and environmental monitors were present at the start of clearing activities to ensure work was limited to the identified trees. Three trees have been removed, and the remaining tree is scheduled for removal.”

Meza, of the Sierra Club, told The Intercept that the government’s environmental survey was out of date and that the day before the cottonwoods were felled, he had taken video of an active nest in one of the trees.

“The next day, they had sent the contractors to take down the trees,” he said. “Their environmental monitor was not present.” Meza added that “when people saw what happened, the community in general got outraged.”

For participants in the Lochiel encampment, protecting the remaining “grandmother” is an anchoring point for the protest, but stopping the border wall and all it represents is the organizing principle.

“Some people are tree sitting and supporting the tree sit. Some people are more focused on getting into the roads, and intervening in construction work that’s happening,” the tree-sit participant said. “Now there’s a whole zone of a few miles where they’re having trouble building. And as camp grows, the ability to affect construction also grows.”

The remaining cottonwood itself is on federal land, but the encampment, just feet away, is technically on private land. It’s a unique setup, organizers told The Intercept, in which local ranchers and authorities oppose the border wall construction, and construction workers cannot risk forging forward in the path of the tree as a person remains perched in its branches. The small standoff is becoming a growing site of border resistance, and the construction of Trump’s wall in the area has been disrupted for a month.

“Living Things on the Land”

At a time when jack-booted agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are terrorizing communities nationwide and over 73,000 people are held in ICE detention, the defense of a remote stretch of borderlands may seem a minor struggle.

The binational protest around the cottonwood, however, exemplifies what it looks like to take strategic action to disrupt the infrastructure of the border regime.

“Something happens along these borderlands,” said another participant in the tree sit and encampment, Uni Yuchi Trejo, a first-generation Mexican American. “You still feel the way the land moves here, how the living things on the land migrate and move with it.”

Trejo highlighted other sites of resistance along the Arizona border, like fights waged by the Tohono O’odham Nation to block the wall on its sovereign and sacred lands — fights that are heating up just this week.

Compared to other struggles against border enforcement, the Lochiel encampment has seen remarkably little law enforcement repression, despite creating disruptions to a major border infrastructure project.

One protester was arrested in late July by local sheriffs for blocking construction workers on a roadway but was released the same day without charge; the sheriff himself is on the record as opposing the border wall construction. And with the encampment on private property, it remains relatively protected from federal law enforcement sweeps.

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According to activists on the ground, a second tree sit on the Mexico side of the border was initiated last week but ended after a few days, following reported interventions from Mexican law enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

The relative peace the Arizona-based activists have enjoyed stands in stark contrast to the brutal persecution others opposing border regime enforcement have faced in places like Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas; Spokane, Washington; and Minneapolis. The Arizona demonstration also sits in the legacy of site-based struggles not tied directly to the border, like Stop Copy City in Atlanta, or the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock — movements that have also faced ruthless repression.

This might speak to the place of the border wall in the Trump administration’s current priorities. Even for an anti-immigrant fascist like Stephen Miller, swift border wall construction in the San Rafael Valley is not an urgent matter, owing to the minuscule number of border-crossing attempts there. Those that do attempt to cross are already facing long odds against a system designed to push them into death’s grips.

Though the environmental destruction of border wall construction is well established, a spokesperson from Customs and Border Protection absurdly pointed to people who might attempt to cross as the real environmental threat.

“While concerns exist about impacts to sensitive areas, it is important to note that illegal immigration itself poses significant environmental challenges,” the spokesperson said. “High volumes of unauthorized crossings often result in substantial amounts of trash, pollution, and damage to natural resources, including sensitive habitats and agriculture.”

Suffice it to say, the people crossing borders do not tear down ancient trees, plow over tribal burial grounds, or cut off wildlife corridors. Not to mention that no “high volumes” of crossings occur in the San Rafael Valley.

As Arizona-based reporter and author of “How to Close a Camp,” John Washington, told Democracy Now!, “People, I think, are right to point out that this very much smells of a boondoggle — that no one is crossing here, and yet they are spending maybe a half a billion dollars on just this about 27-mile segment of wall to devastate the local ecosystem.”

“The Border Is Everywhere”

“We’re taking the proactive stance of: ‘No, we don’t want the wall and we’re going to make sure you’re not doing it through Lochiel,’” said Kate Scott, a local resident and co-founder of the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center, who was among the original organizers against border construction in the region. “And we will hopefully have inspired people all across the world, wherever their horrible border walls are, and to question them in a way that’s most defiant.”

Activists on the ground are aware that reaching remote Lochiel is no easy task, so organizers are encouraging action wherever people can undertake it.

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One target of activists’ campaigns is Fisher Sand & Gravel, the contractor working on the wall, which has received around $1.5 billion in government contracts in Arizona alone. (Fisher Sand & Gravel and its parent company, Fisher Industries, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Subcontractors working on the project are falling under scrutiny, too.

“The border is everywhere,” said Trejo, the Mexican-American land defender, “which means that there are subcontractors and there are power players maybe in your backyard, maybe in your city, maybe an hour drive from where you’re living.”

“Right now we’re at a really crucial point, where those of us that have been holding space and ground are seizing more of it each day. And so imagine if the 30, 40 holding that space becomes a 1,000 or becomes 5,000. What kind of opening will that then create?”

Correction: August 27, 2026, 2:30 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct an errant spelling of Kate Scott’s name.

The post A New Tree-Sit Movement to Block Trump’s Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

The Cato Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the Society for the Rule of Law filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Tuesday arguing that the Trump administration illegally targeted protesters based on their ideology.

A wide-ranging ICE investigation in the Twin Cities resulted in the June indictment of the protesters, widely known as the Minneapolis 15, for allegedly using criminal methods to try to block the administration’s crackdown on immigrants.

The defendants were “members and associates” of Direct Action Minnesota, a protest group that used aggressive actions to disrupt the crackdown, according to the indictment.

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Yet a court filing from the defense earlier this month revealed that ICE sent undercover agents to spy on a much broader array of groups, including mainstream organizations such as local labor unions and the youth-led Sunrise Movement.

The defendants filed a motion asking the judge overseeing the case to force the disclosure of even more files, alleging that they will show that the government illegally targeted left-wing protesters for their politics rather than their alleged crimes.

On Tuesday, the right and libertarian-leaning groups came to the left-wing protesters’ aid with the friend-of-the-court brief. The groups, which are represented by the legal nonprofit Protect Democracy, argue that the facts revealed so far support the defendants’ claims.

The groups pointed out that some of the government’s own files say the origins of the investigation into left-wing protesters lies in a memo that President Donald Trump issued after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

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Known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, the memo called for a crackdown on groups espousing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” accusing the groups of terrorism and political violence.

“The limited public disclosures here confirm the investigation for this case originated under NSPM-7,” the groups said. “Those disclosures also indicate the investigation was part of a larger strategy to target those who espoused views opposed to immigration enforcement and engaged in associational activity disfavored by the government. NSPM-7 effectively uses the domestic terrorism label to justify criminal investigations into disfavored groups that would not otherwise be targeted.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge David Schultz is set to consider the defendants’ request to force the government to hand over more confidential files at a court hearing on Thursday.

Federal prosecutors filed a motion opposing the release of more files last week, arguing that they have already turned over more evidence than legally required and the defendants have not met the high legal burden of showing that they were the targets of selective prosecution.

Prosecutors argued that the actions of alleged members of Direct Action Minnesota, or DAMN, who are accused of blockading a federal building and tailing federal agents to their homes, were a far cry from the thousands of “peaceful” protesters who took to the streets earlier this year after the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

“In this case, the defendants actively conspired to shut down a federal facility and they were successful on at least two occasions,” prosecutors said. “In fact, DAMN members were openly hostile and critical of individuals who advocated for peaceful, nonviolent protests.”

The post Conservative Groups Side With Minneapolis Protesters Against Trump Crackdown appeared first on The Intercept.

Minutes after Riverton police officer Brad Herzog ran 31-year-old Daniel Torrez Perez’s name through a law enforcement database one night in April 2025, his phone rang. It was the FBI.

“Every bell and whistle went off,” said Jack Griffin, the agent on the other end of the line.

Herzog had pulled Torrez over for going 15 miles above the speed limit on a rural two-lane highway just northeast of Springfield, Illinois. Herzog ran Torrez’s name and date of birth on his squad car laptop to confirm his identity. His search tripped a federal alert, and within minutes Griffin was on the line.

The exchange was captured on body-worn camera footage obtained by Injustice Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Torrez had an administrative Immigration and Customs Enforcement warrant, meaning ICE was seeking to arrest him for deportation.

Griffin was with the FBI, not ICE. His call that night reflects the bureau’s increased role in immigration enforcement in the second Trump administration.

Under state law, Herzog couldn’t hold Torrez for federal agents.

In 2017, Illinois passed the TRUST Act on the principle that immigration is governed by federal civil law and local police have no business enforcing it. It was a sentiment bipartisan enough that a Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, signed it.

The law limits Illinois law enforcement agencies’ ability to assist immigration agents: They can’t transfer people to ICE custody without a criminal warrant signed by a judge, allow ICE agents to call or visit someone in a local jail, or “assist in any capacity with an immigration agents’ enforcement operations.”

Griffin knew that the immigration warrant was off-limits to Herzog.

“I know you can’t act on that,” Griffin told him. “I know this puts you in a weird bind.”

Then the FBI agent offered a way around it: Torrez also had an outstanding state warrant on a DUI charge, he noted. Herzog couldn’t arrest Torrez on the immigration warrant, but he could arrest him on the state one. The charge had nothing to do with immigration, but the outcome Griffin wanted was the same. 

“You can take him under the state warrant, and that would hold him overnight,” Griffin said. “I don’t wanna miss my opportunity here.”

Herzog agreed to arrest Torrez on the state warrant and book him into the local jail, ensuring he wouldn’t be released that night.

“I appreciate that, thank you very much,” Griffin said, adding that he’d look for Torrez the next morning.

“Sounds good,” Herzog replied.

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In the first 15 months following President Donald Trump’s return to office, local officials from at least 75 agencies across Illinois fed information to federal immigration agents, sometimes in apparent violation of state law. In over a third of Illinois counties, at least one police department, sheriff’s office, or state’s attorney’s office collaborated with federal agents. At least 150 people in Illinois were swept into the immigration system this way, in a state that presented itself as a shield against it.

Injustice Watch’s investigation draws on more than 30 hours of body-worn camera footage, 394 records requests, and more than 100 court filings, as well as conversations with more than 20 people who were flagged, detained, or deported, and more than 50 of their relatives. Many would talk only on the condition of anonymity, afraid of retaliation or ashamed of what had happened to them.

Illinois’s TRUST Act is one of the strongest laws in the nation meant to protect immigrants and has often been cited as a national model. More than a dozen states, including New York and California, have similar laws.

But the records unearthed in Illinois show a pattern of continued collaboration with federal immigration agencies that raise questions about the limits of such laws: Sheriffs honoring ICE detainers the law forbids them to honor. Police departments emailing federal agents the home addresses, employers, and daily whereabouts of people stopped for speeding. A local detective asking ICE to run the immigration status of an armed-robbery victim. Officers with a local badge and an ICE email address, sharing immigration data that’s supposed to be off-limits to them. Jails releasing people directly to waiting ICE agents, at the federal government’s direction.

The TRUST Act came with exceptions: Police can act on a federal criminal warrant, volunteer someone’s immigration status, or release an arrest report on request. And it left shared databases untouched — simply running a name through a law enforcement database is enough to trip a federal alert, the way it did the night Torrez was pulled over.

Some agencies refused to turn over records sought through FOIA requests; Injustice Watch is suing more than a dozen local, state, and federal agencies to pry them loose. The true count of people swept up under local-federal collaborations is almost certainly higher, in part because of missing records.

When taken one by one, collaborations between local officials and federal immigration agents may appear as small, isolated incidents. But at the end of that paper trail are at least 150 people uprooted from their lives in Illinois and funneled into the deportation system, in a state whose leaders had promised over and over again that it wouldn’t happen here.

Collaboration by Keystroke

The most common kind of collaboration was also the simplest: a local official pulling up a record and emailing it to an ICE agent. Roughly 85 such exchanges appear across the records reviewed by Injustice Watch.

The TRUST Act specifically prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from “providing information in response to any immigration agent’s inquiry or request for information regarding any individual in the agency’s custody” unless required to by a judge’s warrant or federal law.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an Ohio State University law professor who studies how criminal and immigration systems intersect, describes this type of collaboration as one built on “the kinds of professional relationships that commonly develop among law enforcement officers, especially in small communities where people know each other.”

Most are “entirely aboveboard,” he said, but they can sometimes “clash with directives, like what we see in the TRUST Act.”

In Tinley Park, a southwest Chicago suburb, communications with ICE agents flowed freely.

It started, the department’s emails show, at an early 2025 law enforcement meeting in Hinsdale, where Tinley Park detectives met Homeland Security Investigations special agent Daniel Mejdrech. Word moved through the department that Mejdrech, as one officer later put it in an email, “may be interested in cases with individuals with warrants that are not citizens or on a visa.”

In March 2025, Detective Justin Rzeszutko emailed Mejdrech a suspect’s passport photo and asked for “recent USA entry/exit photos.” The agent wrote back that the man had used aliases, had been deported from Canada, and sat on “a watchlist,” and offered to help locate him if the detective sent along addresses or associates. When Rzeszutko later secured an arrest warrant, Mejdrech volunteered muscle: “If you want manpower when you grab him, say the word and I can bring some folks.”

In April 2025, an ICE agent asked Tinley Park officer Jason L’Amas for “lead data” on a man the officer had stopped for speeding. The officer sent back the man’s driver’s license number, home address, phone number, and employer, and flagged where to find him: “His crew is doing work in Tinley Park currently.”

Months later, in a case first reported by the Chicago Tribune, L’Amas emailed an ICE deportation officer a report about a different man; days later, the ICE officer wrote back: “Just a heads up we took this guy into custody today.” Injustice Watch identified the man and confirmed he was deported to Honduras.

Ed Yohnka, a director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said these two exchanges may have violated the TRUST Act. Individual officers using informal connections with federal agents to share information about people they’d encountered without a warrant “is not supposed to be something that state or local police inquire about,” he said.

The first email exchange, he said, was a sign of something broader: a culture or belief in the Tinley Park Police Department that assisting with immigration enforcement was appropriate behavior, despite state law.

Tinley Park Police Chief Thomas Tilton didn’t respond to questions about his officers’ interactions with federal immigration officials. Neither did Village Manager Pat Carr.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has extraordinary power to investigate TRUST Act violations: He can hold hearings, examine officials under oath, and issue subpoenas for records. But he rarely exercises that authority.

“The Attorney General’s office uses a compliance-oriented approach in carrying out its TRUST Act enforcement responsibilities,” Raoul said in a statement. “This approach includes providing trainings, technical assistance and nonregulatory guidance to law enforcement agencies throughout Illinois.” He declined to answer questions about Tinley Park or to specify how many times his office has taken enforcement action under the statute.

The ACLU of Illinois, meanwhile, has long pushed the attorney general’s office for increased monitoring of the law.

“One of the things that we often see in law enforcement generally is that individual officers too often believe that they can apply their own judgment to what should be permissible as opposed to what is required” under the state and federal law, said Yohnka. “And then there isn’t the kind of vigorous accountability for those actions.”

The Officers with Two Badges

In Hoffman Estates, a detective found a federal contact in his own department. Tom LaPak has been a police officer there since 2001 and, since 2004, a Homeland Security Investigations task force officer assigned to its financial investigations group. He carries a village badge and uses an ICE email address.

That’s because task force officers like LaPak are local cops the state cross-deputizes to work federal criminal cases.

The TRUST Act carves out room for this: It allows local officers to work with agencies like Homeland Security Investigations on criminal matters “in order to ensure public safety.”

The law doesn’t allow federal agents to use that partnership to enforce immigration law. For example, the law draws a line between tracking down a scam ring and checking a victim’s immigration status.

Records reviewed by Injustice Watch show some officers appeared to have crossed that line anyway.

On the morning of September 4, 2025, Marc Shaw, a Hoffman Estates detective, emailed LaPak about an armed robbery — but not to ask about the robber.

Shaw wrote that “some red flags have been raised with the victim.” The case might be staged, he suspected, to support a U visa claim.

A U visa offers a path to citizenship for certain victims who report crimes and cooperate with police. Both that protection and Illinois’s own TRUST Act rest on the same idea: encouraging immigrants to come forward to law enforcement agencies without triggering their own deportation.

But Shaw’s email treated a victim’s possible path to protection as a reason to suspect him of fraud.

“I was wondering if it’s possible to check his citizenship status to see if I’m tracking this correctly or the issues that have been arising are coincidental,” Shaw wrote. 

LaPak wrote back the same afternoon. “I’m still waiting on confirmation, but it appears he is a Visa overstay,” he wrote. “He should have left the U.S. in 2016.”

“Ok thanks that’s definitely good to know,” Shaw replied. “I appreciate it!”

Reached by phone, Hoffman Estates Police Chief Kasia Cawley said her department didn’t violate the TRUST Act. She also defended her detective, who she said had recently participated in a training on spotting U visa fraud and had a hunch that something was off because there were no witnesses to the crime, she said. 

The man was never charged — or told his status had been checked.

Cooperation with task force officers ran the other way, too, with the federal government reaching through them to enlist local officers in immigration operations.

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On January 13, 2025, a week before Trump’s inauguration, a Homeland Security Investigations Chicago supervisor emailed dozens of agents and task force officers about “several operations in furtherance of the new administration’s objectives.” A joint operation with Enforcement and Removal Operations — ICE’s deportation arm — was set to run January 21 through 27. It would focus, the email said, on “non-citizens who pose the highest public safety risk,” along with employer inspections of area businesses.

“It is important that as many personnel as possible — including our task force officers — participate,” the supervisor wrote.

The distribution list included officers at police departments in Urbana, Peoria, Decatur, and across central Illinois — local cops looped into the planning of a federal deportation operation.

Two police chiefs reached by Injustice Watch distanced themselves from the operations. Urbana Police Chief Larry Boone said his task force officers joined a Zoom briefing but didn’t participate in removal operations. Peoria’s chief, Bradley Dixon, said his officers didn’t either. Decatur chief Brad Allen did not respond to questions.

Collaboration by Default

When Riverton officer Herzog ran Daniel Torrez’s name the night of that traffic stop, he didn’t contact the FBI; the database did.

Fingerprints taken at booking are automatically routed through a network of databases that flows from the Illinois State Police to the FBI. From there, they reach the Department of Homeland Security, where they’re checked against immigration databases. An arrest for almost anything — a DUI, shoplifting — can surface a decades-old immigration record and tell ICE exactly where to find the person.

Injustice Watch reviewed more than 40 federal court affidavits in which a fingerprint taken at a local booking and matched against federal records helped build an immigration case.

Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a former Department of Homeland Security attorney, said the automatic sharing of data “is a fundamental threat to protective laws for residents and visitors in any given state.”

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In a statement, a spokesperson for the FBI said agents “work within the law and policy to support our partners in immigration enforcement and protect the U.S. from a variety of threats.”

In interviews and emails, local police chiefs described the booking process as one beyond their control. Fingerprints are automatically sent to the state and federal systems, and local agencies can’t opt out of the system or dictate what Illinois State Police or federal agents do with the data. As O’Fallon chief Kirk Brueggeman put it, the department has “no say in how a federal agent — operating under a different set of laws — uses those resources that we do not control.”

Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly didn’t respond to questions about how his agency transmits data to federal agencies.

Kelly was handpicked by Gov. JB Pritzker, who consistently made promises to protect all residents across Illinois. Shortly after Trump was elected in 2024, Pritzker told cable news, “I’m going to do everything I can to protect our undocumented immigrants.” At a conference this past April, he recalled how he’s been standing up to Trump’s anti-immigrant policies since the president’s first term.

Pritzker didn’t respond to questions about how state police share immigration-related information.

The automatic transmission of data is so pervasive that it even touches the few departments that, in a review of public records, turn ICE away when it comes knocking.

In February, Zenobia Jones, an administrative staffer for the Atlanta, Georgia, immigration court prosecutor, asked Aurora police records staff for documents related to an individual — but didn’t get far.

“The Illinois TRUST Act generally prohibits local law enforcement from sharing information with federal immigration agencies with limited exceptions,” wrote Aurora police records manager Elizabeth Robles. Jones never wrote back. Two months later, an ICE deportation officer named Gregory Ortiz made a similar request from the same department. Robles handed Ortiz the same response. Ortiz never wrote back, either.

But for all the resistance the Aurora Police Department put up against ICE requests, it couldn’t stop the automatic sharing of fingerprints gathered in the course of routine arrests — three of which, court records show, were used as part of federal immigration cases.

Honoring ICE Detainers

The U.S. Marshals Service takes custody of people accused in federal criminal cases, as well as some of those serving shorter sentences. Because it operates no jails of its own, the agency contracts with local jails for bed space, including facilities in Illinois.

The TRUST Act bars Illinois jails from similar contracts with ICE, and explicitly bars them from honoring ICE detainers — civil requests to hold a person past their scheduled release. It also prohibits jails from handing anyone over to ICE.

Some jails do it anyway, at the Marshals’ direction.

In October 2025, a man who’d pleaded guilty to drug charges was in Marshals custody at the Marion County Jail in southern Illinois. Marshals administrator Lauren Patterson emailed an ICE agent asking if the agency could take him from the jail, then told the jail ICE would collect him on October 12.

That day, a sergeant confirmed to Patterson and several ICE agents that the man “was picked up by ICE approximately 0715 this morning.”

Two months later, the Marshals Service instructed the jail to release another man into ICE custody, and once again, the jail obliged.

Marion County Sheriff Kevin Cripps, who runs the jail, insists his office did nothing wrong. 

“We at no time had contact with ICE,” he said. His jail houses people for the Marshals Service, and when he releases them he does so only while “acting under their authority.”

Documents reviewed by Injustice Watch suggest a similar pattern across other Illinois jails. In effect, the Trump administration, not Illinois law, decides whom a state jail releases to immigration agents.

In a statement, the Marshals placed responsibility on the sheriffs. 

“Should state law prohibit the jails from honoring detainers,” a spokesperson said, the agency “would anticipate that the jails follow their state law.”

Asked whether his office would do anything to address the practice, Attorney General Raoul declined to answer.

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State laws bind local officials but can’t bind the federal government. As García Hernández, the law professor, explained, “the Marshals Service or DHS, they can come knocking as often as they like” — it’s up to local officials to abide by state law. But, he added, so many loopholes are baked into laws like the TRUST Act that it can “allow the exceptions to swallow the rule.”

In some counties, sheriffs aren’t taking direction from the Marshals Service and are instead honoring ICE detainers directly — a direct violation of the TRUST Act. Records indicate that at least four counties have done so since Trump returned to office. 

In late June 2025, Hancock County State’s Attorney Bobi James emailed ICE agent Ron Shevela about an upcoming plea deal that would release a man her office was prosecuting. But there was a snag: The agent would be out of town until July 1, and the prosecutor worried nothing would keep the man jailed past his release.

“I could send you a detainer before then, if you’d like,” wrote the agent. 

“That would probably be necessary,” James replied. 

Two days later, the ICE detainer landed in the jail administrator’s inbox.

Hancock Sheriff Travis Duffy didn’t respond to questions about the detainer; neither did prosecutor James.

Xanat Sobrevilla, who co-founded the advocacy group Organized Communities Against Deportations, said that for the families she works with, the trust communities have tried to build with local agencies is eroding.

“It’s hard to continue to believe in something that continues to hurt you,” she said. 

After Riverton officer Herzog pulled Torrez over just outside Springfield, Torrez spent that night in the Sangamon County Jail, exactly as the FBI agent on the phone had wanted. Hours later, he was in ICE’s grip.

In an affidavit, ICE deportation officer J.R. Hentz said Torrez was taken “into custody inside the booking area of the Sangamon County, Illinois jail” the day after he was arrested.

Sangamon County Sheriff Paula Crouch didn’t respond to a request for comment; neither did her husband, Riverton Police Chief Bob Crouch.

Injustice Watch confirmed Torrez was deported to Guatemala late last year.

Click to explore some of the documents from this investigation.

The post Local Cops Flout Sanctuary Law to Help ICE Deport Immigrants appeared first on The Intercept.

Then 11 years ago, he married his partner, a U.S. citizen. Together, they had two children, who are also citizens. The couple filed a petition to grant him legal status through their marriage, but then Daniel was issued a deportation order, which presented a barrier in his case.

It’s hard to comprehend how it can be so difficult to legally stay with one’s family, but Daniel, for whom The Intercept is using a pseudonym, would soon face an even more mystifying hurdle: He recently received a letter from the government saying he owes about $368,000, according to his attorney, who recounted his tale.

Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order using a never-before-touched law to levy fines on an immigrant for each day he “willfully fails or refuses” to leave after receiving a removal order. Trump’s order also increased the fine from $500 to $998 per day to, supposedly, update it for inflation.

The Trump administration quickly started issuing fines as high as $1.8 million — the maximum penalty for the maximum five-year period, although unpaid fines can also accrue interest — to immigrants last year. As of July, more than 100,000 immigrants had received notices of fines, totaling more than $84 million, according to the government.

The administration says it will forgive the debts if immigrants leave the country.

Daniel is eager to pay as much as he can, fearing the financial and immigration repercussions of not responding to the notice he received. But there’s a big problem: He can’t.

And it’s not for a lack of funds. Instead, Daniel simply doesn’t have the information necessary to make a payment; the government never provided it to him. The letter he received informing him of the fines he owed had a blank field where there should have been an identification number for the online payments system. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)

Daniel and his wife tried putting his Social Security number and the alien number that tracks him in the immigration system into the website. Neither worked. His wife even tried calling to find out how to pay, only to sit on hold for over an hour and a half and then have the call disconnect.

“It’s ‘Hurry and pay — oh, by the way, we’re not going to give you any appropriate information,’” said Melanie Zamenhof, a senior attorney on the New York Legal Response Team at Neighbors Link, who has been helping Daniel.

Daniel’s experience is not unique. Zamenhof hasn’t had a single immigrant client who was able to successfully pay the fine the administration levied against them. No one at her organization has, either.

No Way to Pay

The letters immigrants are receiving about the fines are typically brief.

They include the date an immigrant was issued an order of removal and a checked box saying, “You willfully failed or refused to depart from the United States pursuant to the order.” Based on that, the letters say, “you are subject to a civil monetary penalty.”

The letters don’t explain how the figures have been calculated, whether interest has been applied and at what rate, or even when the fines started being tolled or when they might stop.

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The letters say recipients only have 15 business days after issuance to formally contest the fines, though many received them after the period had expired.

“Like any bill that anyone receives,” Zamenhof said, “you always want an explanation of benefits, some breakdown.”

This year, the helpline at Neighbors Link started getting calls from about a dozen immigrants saying they’d received letters. The callers asked the attorneys where they should go to pay what they were told they owe.

“All the attorneys are like, ‘What a great question. Where do you pay it?’” Zamenhof said.

Finding a working website to pay the fines leads to dead ends. Typically, immigration-related fees are paid to other agencies, such as the Department of Justice or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, but none of those avenues work for the failure-to-leave fines.

Instead, a sheet included with the government letters offers “payment options.” Those include a QR code that points to pay.gov and instructions to search for “DHS Civil Penalty and Fee” in a box on the website.

The pay.gov website is frequently down, Zamenhof said, and when it’s working, the option to pay the civil penalty is sometimes not on the dropdown menu.

The government also no longer accepts cashier’s checks or money orders, Zamenhof said, which means the fines can only be paid with a debit or credit card — a hurdle on its own for any immigrant who can’t qualify for a U.S. bank account yet.

Meanwhile, to get through the payment system an immigrant must have a payor number; the information sheet says they need a “penalty tracking number.” That’s supposed to be on the letters they receive about their fines, but Zamenhof has seen multiple letters like Daniel’s, where the field for the number is left blank.

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Even if someone were able to get through to a payment page, most don’t have these vast sums of money at hand. Attorneys at Neighbors Link have seen amounts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; the fines go as high as $1,820,352.

A recent report from the New York University Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic found that none of the immigrant advocates they spoke to had clients who were able to pay.

“They’re always going for the maximum amount that they think they can charge based on just the passage of time,” said Hasan Shafiqullah, the supervising attorney for immigration at the Legal Aid Society. “Nobody has that money laying around.”

A Willful Failure?

There doesn’t appear to be any way to make a partial payment or set up a payment plan. All the while, the fines and interest keep accruing as people are unable to pay any of it off. Even if someone pays the entire amount, it’s not clear that will stop more fines from accruing.

The Legal Aid Society is among a coalition that sued the Department of Homeland Security over the fines, arguing that they have not been legally assessed nor that recipients have a meaningful opportunity to contest them.

“They’re not making an individualized determination about: ‘Am I unwillful?’” Shafiqullah argued. “The fact that I have a removal order and I’m physically present isn’t enough to show that I willfully failed to depart. Y’all didn’t make an individual determination, there’s no space on the form to do that.”

According to the New York University report, 71 percent of survey respondents had legal immigration status or protection against removal or were in the process of pursuing remedies.

The immigrants who come to the Legal Aid Society often have or are seeking permission to stay in the country. Some have an order of supervision from ICE that allows them to stay and work; others are seeking legal status through visas for victims of crime or through their family members.

Some of the people facing the fines have even successfully reopened their immigration cases and no longer have an order of removal.

“They’re not willfully failing to depart, they’re doing all the things they’re entitled to do under the law,” he said.

Even when immigrants in these situations have appealed their fines, Shafiqullah said, they’ve been denied.

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Failure to pay could result in the government seizing assets, including people’s homes, or wage or tax refund garnishment. As of May, the administration had initiated over 50 lawsuits against immigrants to get them to pay, in some cases seeking their tax refunds. One immigrant woman says the Treasury Department seized her and her U.S. citizen’s joint tax refund and reported her to credit bureaus.

The administration is also sending the debts to collections agencies, which are adding hundreds of thousands on to the original amounts in administrative fees.

Not paying could also harm potential pathways to legal immigration status: Judges can deem unpaid debt to the government a negative factor — potentially leading green card applicants to be labeled as “public charges,” blocking them.

Zamenhof, the lawyer from Neighbors Link, has been urging clients to document their attempts to pay their fines — recording how many phone calls they made and taking screenshots of the faulty website portal being down or broken — in case their debt is brought before a judge.

Daniel and his wife are ready to pay a quarter of what the government says he owes and find a way to pay down the rest, though they would still like to understand a breakdown of how the charges and interest were calculated.

“They’re very eager to comply with this, even though they dispute and don’t agree with the total amount,” Zamenhof said.

Constant Fear

For now, Daniel lives in constant fear because he can’t pay. He worries that his wages, tax refund, and children’s college fund could all be at risk of government seizure. Will debt collectors show up at the couple’s door and shake them down? Worse, will ICE show up and detain Daniel?

Even if none of this comes to pass, there’s still an open question: Will owing outstanding fines to the government harm his attempt to reopen and terminate the removal order against him and become a green card holder through his wife? What will a judge say?

“Is it now going to be seen as a negative factor,” Zamenhof said, “despite all of our best efforts to comply?”

The post Immigrant Wants to Pay $368,000 in Fines, but Broken Payment System Won’t Let Him appeared first on The Intercept.

Somewhere in a sweltering desert, cockroaches scurry around the cell of Carlitos Ricardo Parias. He holds up a plastic bottle, gazing at the worm-like creatures swimming in his drinking water. His other arm is turning purple from a gunshot wound for which he says he hasn’t received proper medical care.

His gulag isn’t in a distant Soviet or banana republic. It’s about an hour and a half from Disneyland, in a small California town called Adelanto.

After Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers shot and detained Parias last October, the Los Angeles-based journalist will cross 300 days in ICE detention on Monday. His horrifying conditions aren’t unique among immigrant detainees, but Parias’s case is extraordinary. Perhaps no journalist has endured such a sustained sequence of violence, prosecution, and imprisonment at the hands of the U.S. government.

Several American journalists have spent months in jail to protect their sources: New York Times reporter Judith Miller (85 days in 2005), writer Vanessa Leggett (168 days ending 2002), and freelancer Josh Wolf (226 days ending in 2007). Last year, Emmy-winning journalist Mario Guevara spent more than 100 days in immigration detention before being deported, prompting national outrage.

Parias long ago surpassed Wolf’s record for the longest known time a journalist had spent in U.S. custody.

He was already prolific on social media when the immigration enforcement surge began last summer. He worked independently as Richard Noticias LA, with over 100,000 followers on TikTok. He built that audience by chasing crime stories across California neighborhoods often overlooked by larger outlets. This time last year, the Los Angeles City Council presented him with a proclamation honoring his efforts.

Federal authorities say Parias is an undocumented immigrant who had previously evaded arrest. But their account does not explain a growing mountain of evidence.

On June 13, 2025, Parias arrived at an immigration raid in South LA ready to film as usual. According to witnesses, a federal agent ran into him with a vehicle. Parias was then handcuffed and left on a sidewalk while the agents continued their work. Videos show him crying out in pain and grasping at his injured leg. Agents never provided medical attention. Eventually, a Good Samaritan pulled up in a private vehicle and took Parias to the hospital. An agent briefly stopped them but let Parias leave — handcuffs still on.

Four months later, Parias was driving along a quiet block near downtown LA. Multiple unmarked vehicles pulled up around him, carrying masked men who turned out to be federal agents. Immediately and without warning, they smashed his window, as bodycam footage later showed. Panicked, Parias stepped on the accelerator — a meaningless move in a small car physically pinned by multiple large SUVs. Tires spun, the vehicles didn’t budge, and Parias quickly took his foot off the gas.

One agent struggled to open the passenger door. He fumbled with his gun, as his own bodycam showed, juggling it back and forth between his hands before shooting Parias in the elbow. A U.S. marshal was also hit and was expected to recover.

As federal immigration agents’ violence once again sent Parias to the hospital, the agents scurried into the security office of a nearby strip mall to check for surveillance footage. They downloaded it onto a thumb drive and deleted it from the mall’s system.

Prosecutors charged Parias with assault on a federal officer, offering a version of events that omitted critical context. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli fired off a social media post suggesting Parias had been trying to avoid deportation agents for months:

“This morning, Parias rammed his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in and ordered him to submit to arrest. Parias, who had previously avoided capture by immigration authorities, refused to comply with agents’ orders and escalated what could have been a simple arrest into a life-threatening situation.”

Essayli’s post included a single screenshot from their lone copy of the mall’s footage. The full video would have painted a very different picture. He didn’t release it.

Evidence wasn’t the only thing withheld from Parias, who was discharged from the hospital days later while still on morphine. Taken directly into a federal criminal detention center in downtown Los Angeles, he was supposed to receive high doses of ibuprofen. Once in court for his initial criminal hearing, the judge learned he wasn’t being given the prescribed treatment for his gunshot wound. The pain caused Parias to twist in his chair. Flummoxed, the judge implored a U.S. marshal to expedite his return to a facility where he could be given medication. The marshal refused.

Moments later, Parias’s lawyer asked the judge if his client’s teenage son — who had not been allowed to communicate with his father since the shooting — could give him a hug. Citing security protocol, the marshal also vetoed this small act of humanity. As Parias was whisked away, his son shouted across the courtroom in Spanish, “te amo” (“I love you”).

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Parias was eventually granted bond in his criminal case. But accepting it would have meant marshals turning him over to immigration authorities, who could immediately transfer him to their own distant facility with potentially worse care. He didn’t take the offer.

The government transferred him anyway. Adelanto is difficult to visit, hours from his lawyers and family in Los Angeles, not to mention the court itself. Prosecutors still hadn’t turned over the mall footage. But bystander videos began to undermine the government’s account. The judge ultimately threw out all criminal charges with prejudice, finding that the government had violated Parias’s constitutional rights.

The proceedings to deport Parias continue. For now, he’s stuck in Adelanto.

Even in detention, Parias remains a journalist. The government gave him a new beat. He began reporting on the horrid conditions that he and other detainees endure. Through video recorded by his visitors and accounts relayed to other reporters, Parias exposed the worm-like creatures in drinking water and cockroaches in cells.

His gunshot wound was being treated with vitamin D and Bengay. “What I saw looked like an arm that was on the verge of being amputated,” said Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif., who visited Parias at Adelanto in May. His situation inspired her to propose legislation addressing medical neglect in immigration facilities.

The government recently said it plans to ship him even farther away, to a facility in San Diego where he can receive medical care. The move will make it even harder for his family and lawyers to visit — and end his reporting on Adelanto’s rancid conditions.

Parias — and his reporting behind bars — is getting more media attention, but that coverage doesn’t always recognize how this all started because he was doing his job as a journalist.

America has imprisoned journalists before. It has even killed them. But what has happened to Parias is something different: A journalist was injured while documenting government power, shot during an attempt to arrest him, prosecuted, repeatedly denied medical care — and then left in immigration detention, where he has continued documenting the conditions around him.

The government’s powers to enforce immigration laws and prosecute crimes do not erase the First Amendment. Journalists don’t surrender their rights because they lack immigration status. And the government can’t make a journalist disappear simply by locking him in a cell.

At some point, the question stops being what else will happen to Parias. It becomes what America is willing to let happen to a journalist.

The post ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He’s Approaching 300 Days Behind Bars With a Festering Wound. appeared first on The Intercept.

The Sunrise Movement has long preached nonviolence even as it pursues aggressive tactics, such as making a racket outside of the hotels where ICE agents sleep.

But the group’s public commitment to peaceful protest did not spare it from a months-long, aggressive campaign of government snooping that included ICE agents attending its meetings and protests undercover, subpoenas of its financial records, and at least one apparent attempt to entice an organizer into backing more confrontational tactics.

Sunrise Movement Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay said in an interview Thursday that the government’s tactics are a sign that the Trump administration is losing the battle for public opinion.

“What this is meant to do is scare protesters and scare people away from joining protest groups,” she said. “It is very essential that we remember that actually what we are doing is incredibly normal, it is incredibly popular, and we cannot let ourselves be scared out of organizing.”

Operation Puppet Master

The revelations about the tactics ICE used against Sunrise, along with a wide variety of labor unions and protest groups, came in a court filing from a defense attorney for one of 15 Minnesota activists charged in June for trying to stop the federal government’s immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities.

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Shortly after federal agents killed Alex Pretti on January 24, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations opened two investigations it called “Operation Puppet Master” and “Project Whipple Shield,” the latter a reference to the federal building that was the site of many ICE protests.

Supposedly, those probes would focus on a network supporting “violent opportunists and agitators.” In reality, the investigative reports that the federal government has turned over to defense attorneys show that undercover ICE agents secretly recorded at churches, libraries, and schools even when organizers stressed the importance of nonviolence.

In the case of Sunrise, undercover agents were already targeting the group before the killings of Pretti and Renee Good.

Sunrise is a national organization with a Twin Cities chapter. Long known for its aggressive climate advocacy, the youth-led group pivoted just before the start of the federal government’s crackdown on immigrants in Minnesota to fighting the Trump administration’s authoritarianism.

One of the group’s most famous early acts was occupying then-Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office in support of the Green New Deal. It brought that same energy to the protests in Minneapolis, playing a key role in the nighttime noise protests targeting hotels in the Twin Cities that were allegedly hosting ICE agents. But it has always counseled its supporters to remain peaceful, Shiney-Ajay said.

“We are a strictly nonviolent movement. We make that very clear in almost every training we run, in all the meetings we run,” she said.

Yet almost as soon as Operation Metro Surge started, ICE agents were attending Sunrise trainings on the sly.

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Undercover agents attended a “How to stop ICE” training that Sunrise hosted at a church on December 13. By December 22, an undercover agent had been added to the Signal group for planning one of Sunrise’s hotel protests. On January 9, two undercover agents attended a noise demonstration outside a Hilton Hotel, noting that a member of the crowd set off fireworks at one point.

The killing of Pretti — and the ensuing nationwide backlash against ICE — appears to have done nothing to slow the investigation. One week after Pretti’s slaying, two undercover agents attended a Sunrise Movement Twin Cities training on “resistance skills” hosted at a public library.

The meeting included primers on deescalation at protests, and the ICE agent noted that it was “made clear that the Sunrise Movement organization focused on ‘peaceful’ protests.”

That did not stop the undercover agent from making a private approach to one of the organizers, according to a report the agent produced. The agent told the organizer that he worked in construction and “could build items that might assist other groups with more ‘direct-action’ protests.” When the undercover agent declared that “going to jail did not bother him,” the organizer “acknowledged” the agent’s comments and took down his phone number, according to the report.

Kevin Riach, the attorney representing one of the defendants in the indictment targeting Minneapolis activists, said in a court filing this week that that report was one of several showing that ICE’s undercover agents “actively participated in organizing and directing the groups they were surveilling, at times working to entice people into discussing or committing crimes.”

By the start of March, the federal government had scaled down its immigration crackdown in Minneapolis — but it was continuing to investigate groups such as Sunrise.

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On March 9, ICE sent a subpoena to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for the nonprofit’s wire transactions dating back to January 1, 2023, long before Trump was even elected to his second term. That same date, ICE also sent a subpoena to the Clearing House, a private wire transfer company, for years of financial records from Sunrise and several labor unions.

The Sunrise Movement was never given notice of those subpoenas or an opportunity to contest them, Shiney-Ajay said.

Training for This Moment

None of the activists who were eventually charged in a June 16 indictment were members of the Sunrise Movement, Shiney-Ajay said.

ICE declined to offer an explanation for why it investigated Sunrise and the other groups.

“HSI investigates individuals and organizations when there is just and legal cause to do so and within the scope of its legal authorities. To preserve the integrity of our work and protect law enforcement sensitivities, we do not comment on ongoing investigations, investigative tactics, or procedures,” an agency spokesperson said.

While it had never been confirmed that ICE was closely studying the Sunrise Movement before this week, Shiney-Ajay said it had long been treated as a possibility. The group was specifically concerned that federal agents might act as provocateurs at protests.

“We put a lot of work into training de-escalation and safety leads at all of our protests,” she said. “I certainly think that that was a worthwhile investment, reading these things now.”

She said it was “telling” that the investigation was led by the Department of Homeland Security rather than the FBI, which might be constrained by more “rules and regulations.”

The revelation of the widespread ICE probe has already sparked another backlash.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has received funding from conservative and libertarian donors, said it found the investigation disturbing.

“Some activists have violated federal law, and the government is entirely justified in investigating and prosecuting them. But criminal conduct by some members of a movement does not justify government surveillance and investigation of anyone who shares their broader political goals. That type of aggressive scrutiny chills protected speech and association. It will likely make many Americans think twice before joining a protest, attending a meeting, donating to an advocacy organization, or speaking out at all,” said Aaron Terr, the group’s director of public advocacy.

On Thursday, a coalition of dozens of Minnesota groups promised that that they would not be cowed.

“We know the truth, and we will not be intimidated,” the groups said. “When self-serving politicians are losing, they lie and attempt political repression, trying to silence the voices of those who bravely stand up to them. Minnesotans will not be intimidated or divided by sham accusations or investigations of some of the countless groups and community members who organized, acted, and stood up together to protect their neighbors during Operation Metro Surge.”

The post Secret ICE Agent Tried to “Entice” Minneapolis Activists Into Confrontational Tactics appeared first on The Intercept.

The Ivy League university had previously told Momodou Taal and Amandla Thomas-Johnson that they could finish their degrees with funding abroad, according to both Taal and Cornell’s graduate student union. After the Trump administration began to pursue both students in March 2025, Taal and Thomas-Johnson fled to Cairo and planned to complete their studies there. Taal’s attorney said the students are not sure if there’s a deportation order against them, but Homeland Security Investigations, the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement intelligence division, has launched inquiries concerning both of them, and Taal was ordered to appear at an ICE office last year. The students believe they would likely be detained by immigration authorities upon return to the U.S.

Now, the school says the two students must teach on campus in Ithaca, New York, this fall or lose their funding.

“Either they knew I can’t come back, which is probably most likely, or they actually want me to come back and get arrested on arrival,” Taal told The Intercept in an interview. “Because of my Palestine activism, I’ve been treated even differently than people who are in similar circumstances.” 

The school has previously worked with other students experiencing visa issues to continue their studies abroad with funding, noted Taal and Ewa Nizalowska, president of the Cornell graduate student union.

Cornell declined to comment on Taal and Thomas-Johnson’s cases, but in a written statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson called the idea that the university was targeting students for protest activity “untrue and unfounded.” The spokesperson added that “Cornell University remains deeply committed to helping international students continue making academic progress when they encounter visa or travel-related challenges.”

The Cornell funding is the sole source of financial support for Taal and Thomas-Johnson, they told The Intercept. Losing it would hurt their ability to pay for housing, food, healthcare, and other living expenses.

“I have no money. … I’m where I am because the cost of living is cheaper,” Thomas-Johnson said. “I go through day-to-day anxiety — how can I be expected to finish a Ph.D.?”

“If I don’t get funding, I’m going to be homeless,” Taal said. “I’m not going to be able to make rent.”

The Cornell spokesperson added that the students outside the U.S. can apply for fellowships for funding, but those opportunities for the coming semester were closed months ago, Taal said.

“Cornell knows full well that Momodou would be immediately detained and sent to one of the places where more people are dying than ever before, facing all sorts of abuse, simply for his speech,” said Eric Lee, a civil rights attorney representing Taal. “For the university to claim that they’re offering something fair is a level of cynicism which can only be deliberate by an institution with the experience of Cornell.”

In March 2025, Taal, a British and Gambian dual citizen, and Thomas-Johnson, also a British citizen, fled the country amid a rash of deportation cases in which the Trump administration was targeting international student activists who had been involved in campus protests against Israel’s genocide and apartheid of Palestinians. They were trying to avoid the treatment given to high-profile figures like Columbia University students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Madhawi. 

Taal and Thomas-Johsnon had taken part in a September 2024 protest that shut down a Cornell job fair where weapons manufacturers Boeing and L3Harris, which supply weapons to Israel, had booths. The pair of students were suspended for the incident and banned from campus with threat of possible expulsion, which would have exposed them to deportation.

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After Trump took office in early 2025, Taal sued the administration over its executive order targeting pro-Palestine international students, arguing it denied activists’ First Amendment rights. Days later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement ordered Taal to surrender to authorities, and agents appeared at his student housing apartment. After a federal judge declined to block Taal’s deportation, Taal decided to leave the U.S. on his own to avoid ICE detention facilities known for their brutal living conditions. Thomas-Johnson followed suit, fleeing to Canada, then Switzerland, Senegal, and Ghana, before eventually joining Taal in Cairo. 

The Intercept’s reporting later revealed that leading up to their departures from the U.S., Google had secretly handed ICE agents the students’ Gmail account information and complied with a federal subpoena demanding their bank and credit card numbers.

“Given Cornell’s very positive relationship with the Trump administration, and its willingness to make all sorts of concessions to the attack on educational institutions, the question should be posed to them, whether such an agreement has been made about Momodou,” Lee said, referring to Taal’s funding options.

Last November, Cornell inked a deal with the administration to give the government $60 million and capitulate to the government’s inquiries into diversity initiatives and antisemitism in exchange for restoration of federal funding to the school.

More recently, the Cornell chapter of a pro-Israel alumni group called Alums for Campus Fairness began circulating a mailer praising university President Michael Kotlikoff for taking “action to support Jewish students” and “meaningful action to address campus disruptions.” The mailer, reviewed by The Intercept, did not name Taal or Thomas-Johnson, but indirectly applauded “banning a leading agitator from returning to campus.” The Intercept found last year that a similar pro-Israel alumni group at Columbia had coordinated to arrest and deport pro-Palestine student protesters.

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On June 10, Cornell’s graduate school administration sent Taal a letter about his funding options for the upcoming school year. According to the letter, reviewed by The Intercept, Taal could either return to campus and accept a teaching assistant position, apply to be in absentia and seek external funding like a fellowship, forfeit funding and pay tuition on his own, or take a leave of absence.

“Our department funding sources are limited to teaching assistantships,” the letter reads. “This requires you to be on campus in Ithaca, NY to assist with classes. The College of Arts and Sciences restricts classes to being taught in person and on campus. Online courses are not permitted.”

Taal said he was planning to finish his dissertation by spring 2027. He received his most recent stipend from the school in May, and under normal funding circumstances, he would have gotten another stipend this month. 

Taal’s 2022 acceptance letter to Cornell, reviewed by The Intercept, shows annual funding of $67,000 would be guaranteed for the first five years of his program. Taal is in the fifth year of his program in the Africana Studies department. Emails with his department from March, also reviewed by The Intercept, showed discussions about committing to “future funding.” 

Cornell extended a similar offer to Thomas-Johnson, who is in his sixth year of the program: He could continue to receive funding by teaching several courses in his department of Literatures in English, also on campus. He said he had previously taught a freshman writing seminar via Zoom earlier during his program due to unrelated visa issues, and both students questioned why the university could not accommodate the same. Even after he further explained his immigration situation and danger of returning to the U.S., he said the university doubled down on the in-person requirement.

Thomas-Johnson and Taal both said their departments and faculty have been accommodating and supportive about their situations and suggested the funding decision likely came from the university administration.  

The graduate student union filed grievances alleging the offers breach their collective bargaining agreement with the university. At a meeting, Cornell administrators told the union the university did not have the obligation to fund international students who are facing visa issues, Nizalowska said. 

The policy was a “clear reversal,” Nizalowska told The Intercept. Last year, she said a Cornell administrator told the union that individual arrangements were being made to ensure that graduate students with visa issues or difficulty returning to the U.S. could complete their degrees remotely with continued funding from the school. 

“We know that it’s no coincidence that Momodou and Amandla are the first two grads to be impacted by this policy change, as two grads who dared to speak out against Cornell’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine, as further exemplified by Cornell’s deal with Trump,” she said. “But we know that many more grads will be impacted by Cornell’s refusal to fund grads who are stuck abroad, whether or not they have been involved in protests against the genocide in Palestine.”

The Cornell spokesperson denied that it was in violation of any policy or had engaged in political targeting. “Cornell’s approach to graduate student funding is longstanding, and there has been no change in, or deviation from, university policy,” the spokesperson wrote. “Graduate funding decisions are unrelated to [protest] activity or to the November 2025 agreement between Cornell and the federal government.”

Taal has considered returning to Gambia, where he has family, but he said unstable internet and electricity access would make his research difficult. He and Thomas-Johnson have their reservations about relocating to Britain, where both have relatives, because of that government’s similar targeting of pro-Palestine activists. 

Earlier this year, Taal reported being detained by British authorities for six hours upon landing at London’s Heathrow airport. While he was in custody, officers confiscated his phone and laptop, took his DNA, and questioned him about “the mosque I attended growing up, the Islamic teachers I followed,” and about whether he had read Karl Marx.

The detention came days after United Nations Special Rapporteurs appointed by the UN’s Human Rights Council wrote a letter to Cornell President Kotlikoff, warning him of “serious concern over the reported human rights violations against Mr. Taal and Mr. Thomas-Johnson” over the school’s handling of their disciplinary cases related to the 2024 protest. 

“They’re trying to continue making an example out of me and Momodou for our political choices,” Thomas-Johnson said. “It’s easy for them to sideline us for what we stand for and who we are.”

Correction: August 14, 2026, 11:17 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to clarify which student taught a Zoom class from abroad due to previous visa issues; it was Thomas-Johnson, not Taal.

The post Cornell to Pro-Palestine Students Targeted by ICE: Come Back to the U.S. or Lose Funding appeared first on The Intercept.

Black spent more than three decades on death row before he was killed by lethal injection on August 5, 2025, at Tennessee’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. He’d been convicted in 1989 for killing his girlfriend, Angela Clay, along with her two young daughters. Black insisted he did not commit the horrific murders, but he was swiftly found guilty and sentenced to die.

Over the decades that followed, Black’s lawyers argued that his intellectual disability should have barred him from facing the death penalty. The district attorney’s office that convicted him even conceded that they were right, but the courts disagreed. By the time Tennessee prepared to kill him, Black had been diagnosed with dementia, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure.

Defense attorneys argued that Black’s poor health put him at serious risk of a torturous execution, raising specific concerns over his implanted heart defibrillator and pacemaker. Experts warned that the device could deliver painful shocks before he died. To their dismay, Black did suffer on the gurney — although not for the reasons they most feared. Prison staff struggled to insert an IV in Black’s arm, spilling blood on the floor. The drug that was supposed to kill him — a massive dose of the fast-acting barbiturate pentobarbital — did not work as intended. Media witnesses said they could hear Black moaning in pain.

Childs was not at the prison on the morning his father was killed. He was at home in Nashville after a sleepless night. “You know, I’m putting myself in his shoes,” he said. “How would I feel knowing that this is my last day on earth?” It wasn’t until he watched a local news segment that Childs learned things had not gone well. “It messed me up, I ain’t gonna lie,” he said. “I can’t imagine being there, viewing this, seeing this happen.”

Black’s execution reignited controversy over capital punishment in Tennessee, where advocates had warned against executing him with a new protocol that had not been subjected to legal review. The one-drug pentobarbital method had been introduced by the state following complications with its previous, three-drug formula, which was itself adopted despite ample warnings that it violated the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Nevertheless, Tennessee pressed forward — with disturbingly predictable results.

On May 21, just nine months after Black’s painful death, Tennessee attempted to kill 57-year-old Tony Carruthers, convicted in 1996 of a triple murder he swore he did not commit. As in Black’s case, prison staff tried clumsily to place the IV lines for lethal injection. But this time they never finished. Carruthers spent 40 minutes being poked and prodded, only for a physician to enter the chamber and attempt to place what is known as a central line in his chest. The descriptions of what followed were harrowing. As Carruthers’s attorney, Maria DeLiberato would later write, “I saw the process unraveling with my own eyes.”

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“The executioners draped Mr. Carruthers in a blue surgical cloth with a hole for his face,” she wrote. “When the doctor prodded Mr. Carruthers’s chest with a scalpel or large needle, Mr. Carruthers cried out in pain. But the doctor continued to push into his chest. Mr. Carruthers started groaning. … I told him that I was sorry. Mostly, I tried to hold his gaze and reassure him that we were still fighting for him.”

The ordeal ended only after the governor himself finally intervened, issuing an executive order putting off Carruthers’s execution for a year.

The temporary reprieve raised hopes that Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee might put all executions on hold. Instead, the state soon announced it intended to proceed with the next one. Before long, officials at the Department of Correction were preparing to kill 66-year-old Anthony Darrell Hines. He is set to die on Thursday at 10 a.m. — one of three people scheduled to be put to death in the U.S. on the same day.

It was Hines’s looming execution date that prompted Childs to speak publicly again about his own father’s death. This past weekend, he joined anti-death penalty activists for a protest known as the “March 4 Mercy.” On the Sunday before every execution, activists walk nine miles from the prison on the city’s west side to the Tennessee State Capitol downtown. With temperatures in the 90s and the air thick with humidity, the marchers were drenched in sweat as they made their way across town. Walking at a steady pace, Childs held up a sign for passing cars that read “Justice Requires Mercy” and “Blessed Are the Merciful.”

Childs could not begin to comprehend what had happened to Carruthers. But he also couldn’t shake the mental torture of a looming execution over everybody involved. It must impact everyone, he said, including the people witnessing and carrying it out. “Some of those people probably never want to do that again.”

Tennessee’s persistence in carrying out lethal injection is part of a recent spike in executions in the U.S. In Oklahoma, at the same time as Hines is set to be put to death, executioners plan to kill 70-year-old Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez inside the state’s death chamber in McAlester. Then, at 6 p.m., Alabama intends to execute 41-year-old Jeremy Williams at Holman Penitentiary in Atmore.

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The last time the country saw three executions scheduled for the same day was in 2018, when Alabama, Texas, and Florida were supposed to kill three different men. Only one execution moved forward that day; in Texas, the governor granted a rare clemency request. In Alabama, which intended to execute Doyle Hamm, a terminally ill man in his 60s, the lethal injection was suddenly stopped because of problems setting IV lines. It was the first in a series of botched executions that would make Alabama infamous for torturing people condemned to die.

Although Tennessee has made the most recent headlines following its disastrous attempt to kill Tony Carruthers, both Oklahoma and Alabama have long been known for their own ugly track records. It was Oklahoma, after all, where a medical examiner first invented the three-drug protocol that originally comprised lethal injection, later griping that he never intended for it to be managed so incompetently. After the state made international headlines for the harrowing 2014 execution of Clayton Lockett, famed death row prisoner Richard Glossip was nearly executed using the same method the following year — only to be spared at the last minute after officials realized they had procured the wrong drug. Glossip, who has insisted on his innocence for three decades, was released on bail earlier this year to await a new trial.

In Alabama, after officials were forced to call off Hamm’s execution, the state took three hours to place IV lines in the body of a man named Joe James, whose execution is believed to be the longest in U.S. history. The state’s ongoing inability to carry out lethal injection ultimately led to a cruel new invention for executions: death by nitrogen hypoxia. Earlier this year, a judge declared the method unconstitutional, prompting the state to revert back to lethal injection.

In many ways, the controversy looming over Hines’s scheduled execution is a variation on a very old story. Lethal injection may be cloaked in the veneer of a surgical procedure — the doctor who tried to help the state kill Carruthers referred to him as a “patient” — but, in reality, it has always been a crude human experiment, using the tools of medicine in order to kill. In Tennessee, concerns over potential pain and suffering during lethal injection have prompted some people facing execution to instead choose the electric chair.

But lethal injection remains the prevailing method — and lawyers have little recourse when it comes to fighting against it. Years of U.S. Supreme Court rulings have inoculated lethal injection against legal challenges, no matter how much evidence reveals it to be torture. As Justice Samuel Alito reasoned more than a decade ago in upholding Oklahoma’s three-drug protocol, preserving the death penalty is ultimately more important than devising a humane way to kill the condemned. “Because capital punishment is constitutional,” he wrote in 2015, “there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out.”

There is one way in which Tennessee’s current lethal injection controversy is different from what came before. Despite the state’s attempts to keep the identities of executioners secret, the doctor who tried to assist in the killing of Tony Carruthers was revealed earlier this year as Dr. Mark Fowler, whose medical background includes working in an emergency room as well as, more recently, according to a profile in the Guardian, “weight loss and aesthetic clinics.” Fowler also writes opinion columns “for his local newspaper, the Union City Daily Messenger, that are reproduced by the conservative blog the Patriot Post.”

Most alarming for those facing execution, Fowler also lacks the qualifications to do what the job entails, according to attorneys for Hines. Last year he admitted under oath that he had not placed a central line in 13 years and lacked the privilege to do so at a hospital. Yet the Department of Correction has refused to assure attorneys that they will not rely on him. The department “knows that Dr. Fowler can’t do the job the protocol requires him to do,” Hines’s lawyer said in press statement this week, “and we’ve seen what that means in practice: a torturous, failed procedure that leaves staff, witnesses, and the prisoner traumatized.”

Fowler has declined to speak with reporters, and it remains unclear whether he will participate in Hines’s execution. Whether he does or not, Hines’s age and poor health puts him at heightened risk of pain and suffering as his execution approaches. In December he had the first of two strokes, according to his attorneys. “The prison initially called for an ambulance to transport him to an outside hospital for care,” the lawyers wrote in legal filings, but the corrections department’s medical contractor “inexplicably turned the ambulance away, determining that an in-house CT scan would suffice.”

Despite a scan eventually confirming the stroke, Hines was denied proper care, his lawyers said, and he “suffered another stroke in mid-January and collapsed, hitting his head. Since that time, he has been confined to the prison infirmary, where he remains paralyzed on the left side, has partial left-sided blindness, and has suffered severe muscle atrophy.”

Today, according to advocates who regularly visit people on death row, Hines remains isolated from the rest of the condemned population. As with Byron Black, whose shower chair had to be moved along with him to the “death watch” cell where he would spend his final hours last summer, prison staff recently had to devise ways to accommodate Hines’s hospital bed in the area near the execution chamber. When the time comes, he will be lifted from the bed and strapped to the gurney — a “grotesque spectacle,” in the words of his attorneys. 

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Nevertheless, the governor, who is just months away from leaving office, remains unmoved. On Monday, he announced that he would not intervene to stop Hines’s execution.

Whatever happens in the death chamber, there are some signs that some of Tennessee’s staunch conservatives are starting to worry that the state is starting to look bad. In June, nine senate Republicans wrote to Lee, asking him to spare Hines, who they describe as “profoundly disabled,” and questioning whether the state is currently equipped to carry out executions. “Repeated failures of this kind do not advance justice,” they warned. “They obstruct it, prolong the suffering of victims’ families, and hand the opponents of capital punishment their most effective argument against a penalty Tennesseans have chosen to keер.”

Update: August 14, 2026, 12:34 p.m. ET
Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, was executed on Thursday, August 13, for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jenkins. He died by lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Asked if he had a last statement, Hines replied, “Not right now, thank you.” According to media witnesses, he then said, “Tell my son I love him.” After the drugs were administered, according to media witnesses, “Hines grunted then took three choking breaths. That was followed by multiple quieter, labored breaths.” His time of death was 10:43 a.m.

Members of Jenkins’s family were at the prison for the execution. Her adult daughter Melissa said, “This doesn’t bring closure, nor does it bring my mother back. But it does bring justice.”

In a statement, Hines’s attorney Katherine Dix said, “What we witnessed here today is not normal, and I urge us all to not become numb or indifferent to the cruelty,” the statement continued. “The leaders of this state repeatedly invoke the sanctity of life, but today the State put to death a man who was blind and paralyzed on his left side, could not walk, and was in constant pain. They lifted his body onto a gurney and wheeled him to the death chamber. May God have mercy on us all.”

The post Tennessee Plans Another Execution Despite Its Brutal Recent Mistakes appeared first on The Intercept.

The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, or CORCA, was introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, last year with wide bipartisan support. The bill is aimed at limiting coordinated retail theft and shoplifting, which lawmakers allege is happening at “unprecedented levels” as organized criminal gangs steal merchandise from stores and resell the goods online. According to the legislation, the perpetrators “are often polycriminal organizations, using profit from the reselling of stolen goods to support crimes involving drugs and weapons trafficking” while facilitating “human smuggling,” all of which is “funding nefarious groups and activities and threatening the integrity of the international economy.”

The bill would give Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority to coordinate federal efforts against large-scale shoplifting. ICE would establish a so-called “Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center” that would bring under one roof analysts and agents from myriad agencies, including the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and Secret Service. The goal is to centralize investigative data and establish “a secure system for sharing information regarding organized retail and supply chain crime threats by leveraging existing information systems at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice.”

It’s unclear if ICE agents themselves would have the authority to confront alleged suspects. DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Civil libertarian groups are disturbed by legislation they say constitutes a major expansion of domestic surveillance and policing by DHS, which was founded largely to tackle matters of counterterrorism, civil defense, and other matters of national safety, and ICE, whose purview is immigration enforcement and transnational crime.

Jina John, senior policy counsel for AI, privacy, and technology at the ACLU, told The Intercept the bill could grant DHS increased surveillance powers. “This would formalize a mechanism for retailers to share data about consumers with DHS as well as state and local authorities relating vaguely to ‘threats,’” she said. “The risk here is that when retailers share information, it’s not a specific clip of footage related to a specific theft, in practice, they are sharing continuous footage. That means access to FLOCK license plate readers in retail parking lots and surveillance cameras at stores and malls.”

The Center itself would be staffed in part by ICE agents and helmed by a director handpicked by the head of ICE. The bill allows the Center to share information deemed confidential under federal law, which includes the “identity, confidential statistical data, amount or source of any income, profits, losses, or expenditures of any person, firm, partnership, corporation, or association.” Such disclosure would require the sign-off of the Center’s director.

“Given that this director will be named by ICE, an agency that has acted without any regard for the law, this is probably not the best person to make such important judgments,” ACLU senior counsel Nina Patel told The Intercept.

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Despite sustained opposition to DHS and ICE under Trump’s second term by congressional democrats, CORCA was co-sponsored by 13 Democratic members of the Senate, including Amy Klobuchar, Mark Warner, and Democratic Whip Dick Durbin.

In a July letter opposing the bill, rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, NAACP, and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law cautioned about the establishment of “essentially a new fusion center, nominally for the purpose of addressing retail theft.” Like DHS itself, fusion centers are a post-9/11 creation intended to thwart acts of international terrorism. Over the past two decades, their mission has widened and now encompasses, for example, the surveillance of political protests.

The premise that organized retail theft is a rampant crime phenomenon, rather than a new name for the timeless petty offense of shoplifting, is disputed and controversial. In 2023, the National Retail Federation, a trade group that supports the bill and whose warnings are cited in its text, retracted a report claiming organized retail crime was responsible for 50 percent of the nearly $100 billion worth of merchandise that went missing in 2021. The true number was found to be closer to 5 percent of that sum.

The companies on whose behalf the NRF lobbies are inclined to support legislation dedicated to safeguarding merchandise and profits. Should it pass, CORCA would deepen collaboration between corporate America and DHS and expand the country’s public-private surveillance apparatus. “Companies determined by the Executive Associate Director to have significant interests” in retail theft could be granted information-sharing agreements with the government about threats, investigations and loss prevention activities, according to the bill’s text.

The ACLU and other civil liberties groups insist ICE is so lawless it can’t be trusted with new powers. “As a result, ICE would have more access to information and more sway over local law enforcement — which means more opportunities for ICE to misuse data and target people in violation of their rights,” Patel said. “ICE cannot be trusted.”

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In May, the House passed CORCA and referred it to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Grassley and Durbin are now hoping to turn it into law as an amendment to the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, the Pentagon’s annual funding bill that historically passes easily with bipartisan support. Despite the fact that CORCA is intended to protect store shelves from thieves, and not the United States from foreign militaries, both senators are urging the acceptance of the amendment on the grounds that it will “reduce violent crime.”

A press release from Grassley’s office last month included exhortations to include the amendment in the NDAA from executives of Amazon, Home Depot, and the International Council of Shopping Centers, among others.

The post Congress Might Give ICE the Power to Go After Shoplifters appeared first on The Intercept.

A banner frames the display, featuring a celestial image of baby Kohen wearing gingham overalls. A handwritten sign reads, “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied.”

In the parking lot, a cop pulled a gun on a gray Ford Fusion on a Sunday afternoon and fired while Kohen’s mother held him in the passenger’s seat. A bullet struck the child on his right side, tearing through his small body and exiting his left. The driver, who was also hit, sped to a hospital, but it was too late. At 19 months old, Kohen was dead.

The killing sparked anguish and rage in Senatobia, a small city some 40 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. At protests and press conferences, people demanded answers, while officials stayed mostly silent. It took several days for the mayor to deliver a scripted video statement that did not even include the child’s name.

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation announced a probe into the case. Speaking before an agitated crowd, state Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell said this could take months, refusing to say when — or even whether — his agency would provide further updates.

Until then, the official narrative would be a version of a familiar tale told by those who kill under color of law: On June 14, Senatobia police got a shoplifting call from Walmart over baby clothes and a pack of Pampers diapers. According to an MBI press release, officers tried to stop “two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store.” The suspects “drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one.” That’s when an officer fired.

Police offered nothing to back the story. A witness video captured mostly chaos as the car drove off, while a woman who asked not to be named told a local TV station she saw police chasing the car before hearing gunshots. Nevertheless, the police narrative took off. On Facebook pages like “Senatobia Happenings UNCENSORED,” commenters blamed Kohen’s mother for his death.

The accusations escalated after famed civil rights attorney Ben Crump took the family’s case, with critics accusing him of stoking racial grievances for profit. When Crump released a video of Kohen’s mother, Vel’lesiya Wiley, telling her side of the story — saying she “raised my baby up” to warn officers that Kohen was with her — a wave of racist vitriol followed. Some demanded to know why Kohen wasn’t in a car seat. Others said she’d used him as a “human shield.”

The comments were shockingly cruel. They also ignored what Black residents of Senatobia, which is about 40 percent Black, had long insisted: Police treated them with contempt and brutality.

A year earlier, at the same Walmart where Kohen was killed, a police officer forced a woman from her car in front of her children for parking in a handicapped spot — part of a string of violent incidents that made national news. In the summer of 2025, Senatobia’s board of aldermen finally voted to dismiss the police chief.

By then, the department had already hired the officer who would later be identified in the local press as involved in killing Kohen Wiley – a police sergeant who’d been previously sued for misconduct while working at two different law enforcement agencies. Just two days before Kohen was killed, a Black officer filed a complaint against him for making a racist remark.

To racial justice activist Patrick Lumumba, the decision to hire such a man was emblematic of the city’s disregard for Senatobia’s Black community. “You think they didn’t know about his past?” he asked. “But who was he gonna hurt? If he hurt anybody it wasn’t gonna be white people.”

On the last Saturday in June, as the family laid Kohen to rest, the Senatobia Walmart was relatively quiet. A police car was parked across the shopping plaza, where protesters had gathered the day before. At an empty restaurant where a TV played “Leave It to Beaver,” a young white employee said no one had come in all day, blaming the “rioters” for keeping customers away.

At the memorial site, a white woman retrieved a bouquet of dried flowers blown away by the wind. She defended the protests, adding that they had been peaceful. For all the speculation and rumor, she said, no one really knew what had happened. But nothing could justify shooting a 1-year-old boy.

“The whole thing is very, very sad,” she said. “No mother should have to bury her child.” She did not wish to share her name. “I don’t want to stir any trouble.”

“Outside Agitators”

Senatobia, the seat of Tate County, sits on the northern tip of the Mississippi Delta, a mostly rural region famous as the birthplace of the blues. Downtown, historical markers boast connections to Black musicians like pioneering country singer O.B. McClinton. “Being in the small contingent of African-American performers in country music was never a cinch,” his marker reads, “but McClinton often dealt with the subject good-naturedly in shows and songs.”

Easier to miss are the places that once saw violent attacks on the civil rights movement. Just north of town, on Highway 51, a marker commemorating the site where James Meredith was ambushed and shot during a solo march from Memphis to Jackson has been knocked from its post; it currently sits on the ground. After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. resumed the 1966 march alongside other civil rights leaders, they passed through Senatobia, in the same spot where the Walmart now stands.

The activists were widely depicted as radical outsiders — “Hard Core Civil Rights Militants,” as one headline read. But the march included locals; many offered their homes to the visitors at great personal risk. “Most people would sleep in the backyard of people’s homes because they were scared they would bomb the home,” recalled independent publisher Gloria Zuurveen, a Senatobia native whose aunt hosted activists. “But she said, ‘No, y’all ain’t sleeping in my backyard. Come on in this house.’”

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The claim that protesters were “outside agitators” was a common refrain — a persistent way to dismiss any movement. When local pastor Michael Cathey, Senatobia’s first Black alderman, led boycotts of its public schools and businesses in 1987 — part of a wave of similar actions across Mississippi — some suggested they’d been orchestrated by the NAACP. “I’d like to see local people solve local problems without outside assistance,” the mayor told reporters.

In reality, “the whole community took a stand,” Cathey recalled. “The school buses ran empty. Nobody went to the store.”

Cathey has been outspoken about the killing of Kohen Wiley. His congregation, the West Gilmore Church of Christ, hosted the viewing for the toddler in June. “The city government is hiding behind the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation,” Cathey said. Their excuse is that they must wait on the state. “But that’s not true. The city can speak to the matter. … They need to be working to make sure we have transparency. But it’s not happening.”

Cathey said that the case had attracted many activists from outside Senatobia, making the protests easier for officials to ignore. But a bigger problem, Cathey and others said, is the refusal of elected leaders to represent their constituents.

Cathey served as an alderman for over 30 years, leaving office in 2017. In the decade since Donald Trump’s rise, he said, local conservatives have increasingly modeled themselves after MAGA politicians, shedding any pretense of concern for Senatobia’s Black community. Unlike the civil rights era, in which the federal government forced states like Mississippi to expand hard-fought legal rights, Trump is doing the opposite: weaponizing his office to turn back the clock on equal rights.

“What we see Trump doing on a national level, we have that same attitude locally,” he said. “And I don’t see it just being a Mississippi problem. It’s a national problem.”

Law and Order

Not that long ago, the South seemed poised toward progress.

As protests spread across the country after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, many declared it time to break from the past. Confederate monuments were toppled and, in some states, lawmakers passed criminal justice reforms to roll back the legacy of racial violence.

In Mississippi, lawmakers did what once seemed impossible: Vote to replace the state flag, eliminating its Confederate iconography. Senatobia Republican Trey Lamar pushed the effort, calling it “something I knew in my heart for a long time was the right thing to do.”

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Such symbolic gestures, however, did not translate to systemic change. Before long, Mississippi politicians were disenfranchising Black residents in sweeping new ways. Lamar became the chief sponsor of legislation to create a new, state-controlled court system in the majority-Black capital city of Jackson, usurping the power of the city’s elected judges and handing it to white state lawmakers. The measure was about crime control, Lamar insisted. It had nothing to do with race.

But “law and order” has long been a code for racial politics. In Senatobia, where a “Back the Blue and Trump” parade was held in 2020, the mayor and board of aldermen started making changes of their own. The city’s Black police chief, a 26-year department veteran, was replaced with a white man who had only recently joined the force.

The new chief, Richard Chandler, was given free rein to transform the department. Some moves seemed sensible enough. Senatobia police officers were paid as little as $13.75 per hour when Chandler arrived, and he successfully argued for better wages. But other decisions raised red flags. Despite the department’s small size — some 30 officers in a town of roughly 8,500 — Chandler formed a SWAT team and assigned a dozen officers to the unit. One was a 22-year-old recent recruit who described herself as “an adrenaline junkie,” as she told reporters. “I want to kick down doors and go in there and arrest the bad guy.”

The stated goal was modernization; the city built a new police station, bought a fleet of new vehicles, and hired a grant writer to seek federal funds. Chandler also pushed aldermen to pass new ordinances aimed at increasing revenue. Between 2021 to 2025, according to city meeting records, the board voted to add financial penalties to punish misdemeanor drug charges, loitering, and “nuisance level gatherings.”

The fines, ranging from $25 to $1,000, would inevitably target those who could least afford it. “There was no consideration to how it affected the citizenry,” said Cathey, who attended many of the meetings. “It was just about making money.”

It wasn’t long before a string of shocking incidents were caught on video. In February 2022, police violently arrested a man named Rodney Rucker, who was warming up his car outside a local motel before an early shift at McDonald’s. Camera footage showed police accusing him of having white powder under his nose and, when he refused to leave his vehicle, smashing his window and breaking his phone. No drugs were found in the car.

In 2023, Senatobia police followed a teenager into the home of a local barber named Mark Lesure, ostensibly because the young man matched the description of a criminal suspect. Video showed Chandler choking Lesure before being accidentally tased by his own officer.

Senatobia police made national news that same year for jailing a 10-year-old boy for public urination, a move Chandler conceded was “an error in judgement.” But he defended the violent arrest of two sisters, 13 and 14, outside a public housing complex in 2024. According to the girls and their mother, Chandler personally ordered one of the girls to “get your Black ass out of the road” before forcing her to the ground.

Finally, on Mother’s Day 2025 — in the same Walmart parking lot where Kohen Wiley would be shot dead — a female officer forced a woman named Breshari Faulkner out of her car in front of her frightened young children for sitting in a handicapped parking space.

By then many people in Senatobia were fed up — including some members of law enforcement. One retired police officer echoed what many said for years: Chandler drove out officers who lived in the community and brought in cops who would prey on the community. A number were hired after being dismissed from other departments. “They want people like that,” he said. “They can get them to do any kind of dirty work they want.”

In the summer of 2025, over angry objections by the mayor, Senatobia’s board of aldermen voted to remove Chandler. It was supposed to restore trust, one alderman said. But as Lumumba, who recently founded the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency, said, “We removed Chandler. But the culture remained.”

A History of Violence

City officials have not identified the man who shot Kohen Wiley. But it’s considered an open secret in Senatobia. A Memphis news station obtained records from the MBI that identified the officer who responded to the shoplifting call at Walmart: Senatobia Police Sgt. Hunter Foster, who has been on paid leave since mid-June.

Foster, now 33, was hired by the Senatobia Police Department in March 2025 and quickly promoted to sergeant. Two days before Kohen’s death, a fellow officer filed an internal complaint against him. According to Mississippi Today, Foster entered the booking room at the station, saw School Resource Officer Dexter Smith, and said, “‘Who is this Black motherfucker back there?’”

“The room went silent,” Smith wrote in his complaint. “I have never had any one-on-one conversation with Sergeant Foster, nor do we have any outside relationship to be on a level for him to speak to me in that manner.”

Smith quit a month after filing the complaint. In his resignation email, he cited a lack of “meaningful response or resolution,” according to Mississippi Today.

Several red flags might have prevented Foster from being hired to begin with. Before coming to Senatobia, he’d been named in two federal lawsuits, both of which were dismissed under the doctrine of qualified immunity.

In 2022, he was accused of providing a false narrative following the arrest of two men outside a Waffle House in neighboring Southaven. In a police report, Foster accused a driver of “almost running over” another responding officer, a description unsupported by video evidence.

After moving to the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department, Foster was sued for participating in the brutal assault of a 29-year-old Black woman during a traffic stop. According to the 2024 complaint, the deputies tased her, “pulled her hair, kicked her multiple times in her stomach and ribs, called her a prostitute, stomped on her face breaking her jaw in three places and knocked out multiple teeth.”

A use of force report cited injuries on the woman — including “abrasion, puncture, lacerations, (and) swelling” — and confirmed that she was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. In an affidavit, Foster said his “only involvement” was to pin her down in order to handcuff her, while providing no video footage to confirm his account. According to Foster, he tried to activate his body-worn camera only to later “realize it had never activated.”

Foster did not respond to messages from The Intercept.

“Y’all Gonna Kill Somebody”

On July 1, Ben Crump returned to Senatobia to release a report from D.C. Medical Examiner Roger Mitchell, who was brought onto the case to conduct an external examination of Kohen Wiley’s body and assess photos from the scene. A photo of the sedan showed the passenger’s side window shattered and a bullet hole in the windshield.

The findings undercut the claim that police had fired in self-defense. On Kohen’s right side, where the bullet entered, were small cuts known as “pseudo stippling,” an injury pattern commonly found on victims shot through glass. According to Mitchell, the markings suggested the bullet had been fired through tempered glass — like that found on a car’s passenger window — rather than through a windshield’s laminated glass.

But the only way to learn what really happened, Crump said, was to see the body camera footage and surveillance video that the MBI still had not released.

The following week a crowd filled a room inside Senatobia City Hall. Lumumba, the local activist, had been given time to speak at the bimonthly board of alderman meeting, along with two women from the Building Bridges Coalition. He gave the aldermen copies of Kohen’s obituary. “Kohen brought joy to everyone he met,” it read. “He loved playtime with his mom, playing with his toys, and cutting the grass with his toy lawnmower.”

Lumumba reminded the aldermen of the history of police violence in Senatobia. He and his neighbors had urged the city to act. “We told y’all, ‘Y’all gonna kill somebody,’” he said. Now, police had gone too far. “This ain’t going away.”

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Shatoya House reminded the officials that protesters are not “the enemy.” Yet that’s how they’d been treated. Police had deployed tear gas on one demonstration outside Walmart. And on the day the commissioner of public safety came to town, snipers had watched from the rooftops.

House also felt compelled to respond to an accusation about the activists. Many critics seemed convinced they were bigoted against white people. “I am not racist,” House said. “If it was your 1-year-old baby, what would your response be?”

When the speakers were done, no one said anything. With a placid air, Mayor Greg Graves simply moved on to the next agenda item.

“We must not be good enough for them to talk back to us,” one woman said loudly. Only one alderman had addressed them directly — to confirm that Foster was still collecting a paycheck. “Do the rest of y’all care?”

“No, they don’t care,” another replied.

A white lieutenant interrupted with a warning. “All right, that’s it,” he snapped.

“Let the mayor run the city,” the woman snapped back. “You a police officer, bro.”

He gave her a hard stare and nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I am,” he said. “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

Neither Graves nor individual aldermen responded to emails from The Intercept. Senatobia Police Chief Harold Vanderford said any questions should go to the MBI. “I can’t say anything or do anything until they do what they’re gonna do,” he said. In an email, the MBI wrote, “This remains an open and ongoing investigation, no further comment will be made.”

Activists are still showing up at city hall. At a meeting in late July, Lumumba introduced Kohen’s mother and grandmother to the aldermen, who again had nothing to say. Outside the most recent meeting on August 4, Lumumba passed out postcards urging people to join the cause. He was joined outside by community members wearing shirts that read, “Your baby is our baby.”

Elsewhere in town, others seem anxious for it all to go away. Last month, an anonymous woman posted in the Senatobia UNCENSORED group. Her family was moving to Senatobia but, based on what she’d seen on the page, she worried it was a mistake. “I’ve never seen so much drama and hatred,” she said. “Please tell me it’s a good place.”

Several people sought to reassure her. “I have rarely experienced any racism or hate,” one white woman wrote. The original poster thanked her. “This eases my heart.”

“You are so welcome,” the white woman replied. “I promise it’s peaceful here.”

“There will be some turmoil when the MBI releases their findings,” she added. “But it will be outside agitators. And it will be temporary.”

The post Black Residents Warned of Abusive Cops for Years. Then Police Shot and Killed a Toddler. appeared first on The Intercept.

Malik Muhammad’s transfer from the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections came almost immediately on the heels of a misconduct report about organizing protest activity about their conditions from prison.

The report — which was obtained by The Intercept and flags conversations that are critical of Israel, the U.S., and the Oregon prison system — and subsequent transfer raise serious concerns about the state of censorship and free speech within the state’s carceral system. 

In March, Muhammad vanished from every inmate tracking system without a trace, after missing a scheduled call with their lawyer. Days went by with no word. Inquiries from their attorney were met with vague runarounds from officials.

Muhammad, a veteran diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, spent much of their time in Oregon in and out of solitary confinement. As a result, trouble communicating with Muhammad was not altogether unusual. As the days of silence became weeks, however, fear set in among Muhammad’s loved ones. 

In April, Muhammad’s partner received a letter saying that Muhammad was alive — but thousands of miles away at Kirkland Correctional Institution in South Carolina.

The Oregon Department of Corrections, in response to questions from The Intercept in May, denied that Muhammad, an avowed anarchist and father of one, had been transferred as retaliation for their activism inside the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. Prison system officials said instead that there were “extensive background reasons” for Muhammad’s transfer.

A misconduct report issued in March suggests that Muhammad’s public-facing and internal activism — particularly on their blog, “Malik Speaks!” — was a major thorn in the side of the Oregon prison system. Other prison write-ups of Muhammad’s activities behind bars described to The Intercept by their attorney took a similar line, focusing on Muhammad’s organizing on their blog and communications with other incarcerated people.

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The misconduct report from March details posts from Muhammad’s blog urging their supporters to undertake a coordinated phone and messaging campaign; Muhammad wanted them to write to the prison and to public officials to call for better conditions inside and an end to Muhammad’s solitary confinement.

Oregon corrections officials are “punishing Malik for their political beliefs, for things that would normally be First Amendment protected and not within the normal scope of exceptions,” said Lauren Regan, director of litigation and advocacy at the Civil Liberties Defense Center and Muhammad’s attorney. Prison systems, she said, “hate anarchism and anti-fascism.”

The March misconduct report, which accuses Muhammad of “formulating an impact on the safety and security while promotion of security threat activity,” came only six days before the transfer to South Carolina. (The Oregon Department of Corrections declined to comment on “disciplinary matters,” citing department policy.)

To Christopher Kuttruff, a friend of Muhammad’s, it all seems like Oregon’s transfer was a ploy to make the publicity around Muhammad’s case into someone else’s issue.

“They want it to be another state’s problem,” Kuttruff said, “so they don’t face the same scrutiny.”

In the Hole

As they clutched the wrinkled pages of the misconduct report, Muhammad knew something big was about to happen.

In early March, officials flagged messages where the activist said they “have always been anti-Israel my whole life.” In another message, Muhammad says, “I’m begging for them to do it” — allegedly in reference to someone bombing the U.S. The messages prompted a further review, according to the misconduct report obtained by The Intercept.

The review turned up a message in which Muhammad called a guard a pig and said they wanted to “breakkk” their face. Muhammad maintains that the messages were spliced out of context and that the face comment was not a threat, but an insult tossed out in frustration.

Muhammad was thrown back into a disciplinary housing unit.

Weeks after their time in the “hole,” Muhammad received another misconduct report. This one, however, felt different.

“I knew that was what they were constructing to get me sent out,” they said. “I sent like a hundred letters as soon as I got the DR” — referring to the disciplinary report.

The three-page report accused Muhammad of engaging in “racketeering,” “unauthorized transfer” of digital currency, “unauthorized organization,” and “unauthorized use of info systems.” All the allegations were related to Muhammad’s blog, which they maintain with the help of their supporters and use to organize advocacy around their case and raise funds for their commissary account.

“Evidence supports that AIC Muhammad utilizes his visitor [redacted] to actively maintain a blog on his behalf while he is incarcerated,” a prison official wrote, referring to Muhammad, who uses they/them pronouns, as an “Adult in Custody.”

“His blog website,” the misconduct report says, “focuses on an organized grouping of individuals that support AIC Muhammad in his beliefs, using visual, written, and recorded readings from AIC Muhammad. These items contain his propaganda messages and are dispersed in a social seeding manner through his visitor(s) through his blog.”

The report says Muhammad had broken Oregon administrative rules on “unauthorized use of info systems” by allowing a recording from a prison call system to be transcribed and uploaded to their blog.

Another conclusion was more consequential: Citing writings on Muhammad’s blog, officials claimed that the protest organizing and political activity was having “an impact on the safety and security” of the facility. The report cited Muhammad’s encouragement of the phone campaigns and other activities related to the blog, such as purchasing left-leaning reading materials for other incarcerated people.

Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney who has litigated prison free-speech cases and is today with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that speaking out on conditions inside of prison is generally First Amendment-protected speech. Officials can’t curtail speech to the outside by exempting complaints from inside about prisoners’ incarceration.

“If an inmate,” said Fitzpatrick, “is sending a letter or posting online peacefully making their views known about, ‘Hey, here’s what’s going on inside the facility. If you think this is wrong, I suggest writing your congressman or writing the facility, and asking that something be done to fix this’ — to me, that strikes me as something that ought to be protected by the First Amendment.” 

Behind bars, though, it’s not always that simple. A chasm lies between what should fall under First Amendment protections in prison and what does in practice.

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The Supreme Court has ruled that constitutional rights apply in prison, but courts have upheld all types of restrictions on free speech, from bans on fantasy games like “Dungeons & Dragons” to medical texts like the “Physicians’ Desk Reference.” The barriers to even getting before a court to vindicate your rights are steep. 

“The on-the-ground regime of what censorship looks like [inside prisons] is pretty ridiculous, and basically stands the First Amendment on its head,” said David Shapiro, the executive director of the MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit focused on the criminal legal system. “It is close to an anything goes censorship regime.”

Muhammad’s Blog

Few people understand this better than Muhammad, who in March was racing against the clock to get help before officials could act. After receiving the report, they began furiously sending letters.

Days after receiving the misconduct report, guards ferried Muhammad, chains hanging around their belly under their jacket, onto a plane. It wasn’t until they landed in Utah that someone bothered to tell them they were headed to South Carolina, where guards at Kirkland Correctional Institution forcibly restrained Muhammad and shaved their head.

(“It is our policy to cut inmates’ hair upon arrival,” said Chrysti Shain, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Corrections, though she said she couldn’t speak directly to Muhammad’s case.)

Only one of the dozens of letters they’d sent made it through, they said, and it only arrived at its recipient after they had already been transferred.

It would be days before Muhammad was able to get a letter out to their partner, alerting their loved ones that they were, in fact, alive — just 3,000 miles away. 

Muhammad is widely liked, with a wit and intellect that obscures their relative youth, a trait that has been rewarded in prison with more than a few bumps and bruises from guards or angry fellow incarcerated people. 

At 25, Muhammad was sentenced to 10 years in prison for throwing Molotov cocktails at protests in September and October 2020. As with many of the later prosecutions in the aftermath of the George Floyd uprisings, federal prosecutors initially left the case to state prosecutors before eventually charging Muhammad federally.

Muhammad wrote on their blog that they first got involved in activism as a high schooler, after the killing of Trayvon Martin. The calling would eventually lead Muhammad to travel the country and participate in the George Floyd protests against police violence and impunity.

The blog touches on a range of topics from their life story to their treatment in prison to poems about resistance. An allegedly unauthorized audio recording cited in the misconduct report is a poem about how oppressed people are robbed of their humanity. 

“Under oppressive conditions, love is resistance as joyousness is not permitted. Like Palestinian hostages being released, but their families told not to celebrate or be joyful; like blacks showing unity, working out in solidarity, or sharing things in prison – food, or hygiene, or shoes,” said Muhammad. “Even emphasized in the visiting room, as one of my partners came to see me, their grin bright and gleamy.”

Where Muhammad sees an outlet, however, Oregon sees a threat — “an impact on the safety and security.” The actual activities at hand seem much more innocuous.

“Watching Malik’s Back”

The report accuses Muhammad of engendering a so-called “zap” phone campaign. In zap campaigns, a common protest tactic to bring public pressure to bear, organizers encourage large numbers of supporters to call or write en masse.

In this case, the declared recipients would be the detention facilities or Oregon Department of Corrections officials. The idea with the campaigns is to demonstrate wide support for a cause by overwhelming the targeted people or institutions with communications.

Oregon officials said the calls and other activities on the blog constituted the security threat.

In one post referenced by the misconduct report, the blog encourages supporters to contact the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution to get Muhammad released from solitary confinement. In 2024, according to previous reporting from The Intercept, Muhammad had effectively been held in solitary confinement for over 250 days. Oregon is supposed to limit time in so-called special housing to 90 days. 

The report does not elaborate on how receiving calls about solitary confinement placed anyone in jeopardy.

“Outsiders watching Malik’s back,” said Regan, their lawyer, “knowing what’s going on, calling the warden and saying, ‘Hey, I know that you’ve put Malik in the hole for 300 days and that Malik is on a hunger strike. What are you going to do about it?’ Those are all what little mechanisms Malik has to ensure their survival while in prison.”

Muhammad said there is nothing “untoward or illegal” about people calling to advocate on their behalf.

“A lot of the times, it’s the only way to get any traction or get anything done because they try to isolate people,” they said. “If people don’t have any knowledge of stuff that’s going on, then these people who run this as their little fiefdom, they’re able to do what they want.” 

Having a loyal community online has landed them in hot water. Officials argue that Muhammad used the recordings, as well as solicitations for donations, to “support and promote an organization,” in violation of their rules on “unauthorized organization,” “racketeering,” and “unauthorized transfer” of digital currency — a charge related to the donation solicitations.

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The report accuses Muhammad of fraud for soliciting donations under a hyperlink titled “Free Malik Now!!” It implies the money is going toward an appeal, the report says — despite also acknowledging the website explains that the funds go toward their commissary account and legal needs, as well as toward supplying books and reading materials to other incarcerated people.

The report also casts the online group of supporters that manage and visit Muhammad’s blog as “an organized grouping of individuals that support AIC Muhammad in his beliefs.”

The language about an organized group is consistent with other disciplinary matters, including transfers, behind bars. Prisons sometimes justify prison transfers by saying they are severing contact between gang members, in theory to reduce violence. Calling readers of a blog who occasionally make phone calls and donate to Muhammad’s commissary account an “organization” is a novel interpretation. 

Muhammad wants the censorship they faced to serve as a lesson.

“In this country, free speech has never been allotted to anyone, and certainly not in prison, and certainly not in this climate,” Muhammad said, “not in this steady march to fascism that we’re on.”

The post BLM Protester Transferred Thousands of Miles Away After They Organized Against Their Solitary Confinement appeared first on The Intercept.

Over 50,000 people last week risked their lives to cross the border between Morocco and Ceuta, the tiny Spanish enclave in north Africa, in the hope of making it to mainland Europe.

The vast majority have already been returned to Morocco; fewer than 2,000 refugees remain on Ceuta and are, according to on-the-ground reports, in urgent need of food and shelter. Over 80 people reportedly died during the crossings, most from drowning.

The crisis for those seeking to enter Europe through Ceuta last week, including those who have been sent back, has already been framed according to a putrid, far-right political fulcrum. As a wide array of responses to the situation on Ceuta make clear, a commitment to harsh border regimes is not the sole preserve of the far right.

Once again, liberals and centrists who claim to decry the right’s anti-immigrant stances are themselves treating immigrants as a threat to be secured against.

For the international far right, images of thousands of desperate young African men entering European Union territory — little matter that Ceuta is, in fact, not on mainland Europe — has been fodder for predictable racist fearmongering and calls for extremist border rule. Far-right leaders blamed the crossings of the left-wing Spanish government’s extremely reasonable plans to regularize over 1 million undocumented immigrants who have already been living and working in Spain for at least five months.

“It’s terrible. Remember that picture. That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” President Donald Trump told Fox News, in a groundless attempt to use the suffering on Ceuta to his advantage. A spokesperson for the White House decried Spain’s new immigration regularization proposal as “far-left, globalist policies.”

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Meanwhile, conservative and right-wing leaders across Europe and the U.K. echoed similar sentiments, conjuring the old lie of an “invasion” confronting the West. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni proposed Spain be suspended from the Schengen Area. A total of 22 EU leaders, including Meloni and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, wrote a joint letter to the European Commission expressing “serious concerns” about how Spain’s decision to grant legal status to immigrants served as a “pull factor.”

In response to these attacks and criticisms, several liberal and centrist politicians, institutions, and media organs have pushed back. Analyses in the New York Times and The Atlantic have stressed, for example, that not one of the people who crossed into Ceuta managed to make it to mainland Europe. These responses are framed as a counterpoint to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s right-wing critics.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also defended Sánchez against right-wing attacks, by praising the Spanish authorities’ “swift handling” in “successfully preventing illegal movement onwards to mainland Spain and Europe.”

Sanchez himself took a similar line.

“In less than 48 hours, my government has succeeded in fully restoring control over the border,” he wrote on Saturday in a response to criticism from other European leaders.

The mainstream defense against far-right fearmongering, then, was merely a regurgitation of the right’s anti-immigrant premise. Stopping immigrants who have been forced to take irregular routes, according to this logic, is a good thing. What the far right got wrong, by the lights of these centrists and liberals, was not their virulent racism, but rather that the claims of an “invasion” of Europe are not factually accurate.

“Spain and Germany’s centrist responses have been to ‘assure’ the E.U. that borders are fortified,” wrote migrant justice organizer and scholar Harsha Walia on Instagram. “This rebuttal simply buttresses the premise of border securitization.”

The reasons for the surge in crossings are not yet fully known; speculation abounds about the role of Moroccan and other state forces. A few things are, however, clear: Misinformation had spread in the preceding days on social media suggesting, falsely, that a recent Supreme Court ruling in Spain would prevent the Spanish authorities returning immigrants.

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In a world of increasing and inevitable mass migration, it is a moral failure to treat the swift removal of immigrants as a victory. Such a framing is also a gift to the far right, who will continue to benefit within a political consensus that treats immigration as a bad thing.

Only a few voices on the European left have placed focus where it belongs: with supporting immigrants who remain on Ceuta.

“What is happening in Ceuta is not a natural disaster, but the result of political decisions,” said Clara Bünger, a member of Germany’s The Left Party. “Germany and the EU have a duty to help with providing for refugees and to take in those seeking protection.”

“People are fleeing war, poverty, and the climate crisis,” she noted. “Higher walls won’t stop them; they will only make the escape more deadly. The most important thing now is that no one else dies.”

The post Liberals Are Ceding Ground to the Far Right on Ceuta Border Crossings appeared first on The Intercept.

Seeking to highlight ties between Columbia University and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the campus protest movement had culminated in a building occupation that ended with dozens of arrests, sparking activism on campuses across the country. At Columbia, classes went virtual or used a hybrid model.

On the day classes resumed their regular scheduling in September, one protester splattered the university’s famous Alma Mater statue in red paint.

Following the incident, New York Police Department investigators deployed an extensive array of high-tech surveillance and investigative tools to identify the alleged vandal, according to documents from the court case provided exclusively to The Intercept. Police leveraged networks of surveillance cameras and facial recognition software to pinpoint a suspect.

In July 2025, Jakhi Isaiah, a New Jersey-based activist whose legal last name is McCray, was charged for the incident.

As the nationwide protest movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza became a national lightening rod and the Trump administration began to throw its weight against activists, authorities at all levels began to expend tremendous resources against pro-Palestine demonstrators. Using intensive surveillance tools in response to relatively minor crimes became typical in cases against pro-Palestine protesters.

“I think it deliberately sends a very chilling message that you better not dissent,” said Bina Ahmad, a civil rights and criminal defense attorney has represented pro-Palestine protesters but is not working on Isaiah’s case. “How many [resources] they used for such a small charge kind of says they will go to any length to grab who they want to grab and charge what they want to charge.”

The documents obtained by The Intercept also detail how NYPD investigators appeared to have abandoned the case, before being spurred to reopen it by federal officials. Both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service, according to the documents, were participating in a separate federal investigation into Isaiah.

Facial Recognition

Columbia claimed that the paint protest had caused thousands of dollars in damage to the statue, but maintenance crews were able to clean it up almost immediately. Photographs taken by students show that, by the end of the day, all the paint had had been removed.

The hunt for the alleged vandal soon got underway.

In the days following the incident, NYPD detectives used 21 different camera angles and tracked the person that they allege is Isaiah as he moved both inside and out of Columbia’s campus.

“If you go around New York, there’s fucking cameras literally everywhere,” Isaiah told The Intercept. “That’s freaky as hell.”

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Investigators claim to have followed Isaiah’s movements using surveillance footage for more than two continuous hours surrounding the incident, tracking him even after he entered a university building and changed clothing. The person on video footage during the vandalism was masked and wore a hat. (Neither the NYPD nor Columbia responded to requests for comment.)

A camera eventually captured someone dressed in similar clothing with their mask removed while running down a nearby city street, according to the discovery documents. NYPD detectives then took the maskless image and used facial recognition tools to generate a hit on Isaiah.

Following the facial recognition ID, a probable cause to arrest notice was issued, meaning that officers Isaiah encountered would have discretion on whether or not to bring him into custody and charge him with the vandalism offenses.

Months later, Isaiah was arrested at an unrelated anti-ICE protest. Despite being in custody, he was not charged or arraigned on any offenses relating to the Columbia University incident, suggesting that the NYPD investigation against him had stalled.

Later, internal communications obtained by The Intercept revealed that while Columbia’s public safety department eventually asked the NYPD to terminate the investigation, they reversed course less than a day later, citing a “miscommunication” between university officials and the NYPD.

Newfound Attention

In June 2025, some 10 months after the paint incident, Isaiah received newfound attention from law enforcement. He was accused of being the perpetrator behind a multi-car arson carried out against NYPD vehicles at a Brooklyn precinct.

The NYPD investigation seemed to have languished, Isaiah said. Despite the police’s probable cause to arrest notice tied to his identity, Isiah said he had several run-ins with NYPD, including the ICE protest arrest, where officers stopped Isaiah, but opted not to charge him with any offenses related to the Columbia investigation.

After the federal investigation into Isaiah for arson, however, the NYPD detectives seemed to revive the case against him related to the Columbia vandalism.

Internal communications obtained by The Intercept from one week after the arson investigation began show NYPD detectives saying that “due to recent incident that occurred in the confines of the 83 Precinct involving wanted perpetrator, case has become federal and the federal authorities will continue to follow up.” Two wanted posters — one for the arson, and one for the vandalism — were attached to the email.

Following a weekslong manhunt by federal law enforcement related to the fires, Isaiah surrendered to police. (He has since pleaded guilty to one count of arson in federal court.) Following his detention by federal authorities, prosecutors in New York charged him in the Columbia paint incident.

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Federal cooperation with local law enforcement agencies has ramped up in the wake of the national protest movement against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, spurred in part by initiatives like Donald Trump’s National Security Memorandum-7 and his executive order that designated “antifa” as a domestic terror group. Highly politicized federal agencies are now more regularly working hand in glove with local police departments, who now have a mandate to pursue politicized cases, said Brendan McQuade, a criminologist at the University of Southern Maine.

“This is collaboration institutionalized,” said McQuade.

When Isaiah was finally arraigned for the Columbia paint charges, an NYPD report featured a list of 41 different “associates” — people police suspected to be contacts or who he’d been arrested alongside at protests. Isaiah believes the list is part of a wider pattern of repression and investigation of pro-Palestine protesters. He wonders whether if he had not turned himself in, the list may have been used against people in his community.

“It’s just very obvious network mapping,” he said. “If they hadn’t found me, they probably would have kept going through that list.”

Isaiah is expected to stand trial for three vandalism and graffiti-related charges in August but says that he sees his case as emblematic of larger trends in American society.

“The repression on the movement, the surveillance on the movement is often just a microcosm of the larger repression of communities as a whole,” he said.

He nonetheless remains hopeful: “Communities are still finding a way to prosper and live their lives, despite this intense level of omnipresence.”

The post NYPD Used High-Tech Surveillance to Find Gaza Paint Splatter Protester, Docs Show appeared first on The Intercept.

The spurious allegations played a key role in Donald Trump’s massive — and deadly — immigration crackdown in Minnesota over the winter.

A semiannual report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General to Congress, however, highlights a different narrative.

The report, which covers enforcement actions over a six-month period, highlights the obvious: Corporations — not small immigrant-oriented healthcare providers, or undocumented immigrants illegally taking benefits — are responsible for the vast majority of alleged fraud in the American health care system.

Released earlier this month, the report highlights billions of dollars’ worth of healthcare fraud from corporate executives.

One CEO ran a scheme to target Medicare beneficiaries with medically unnecessary medical devices. An insurance broker and marketing executive orchestrated an Affordable Care Act enrollment scam that preyed on vulnerable people experiencing homelessness and substance abuse.

While C-suite fraudsters are the stars of the congressional report and most credible research on the topic, immigrants are at the cynosure of the administration’s public fraud campaign.

Freeing Actual Fraudsters

Experts on immigrant rights and healthcare say the administration is using immigrants as a scapegoat for systemic fraud in the healthcare system that can be attributed to corporate greed, while shielding actual bad actors who profit from a broken system.

“There isn’t really clear evidence of any systemic issues implicating immigrants,” said Sarah Krieger, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “The administration’s public messaging is focusing on immigrants and immigrant workers, but that’s constructing a narrative with the intent of hurting immigrants, not with actually rooting out any problems.”

Krieger pointed to examples of the Trump administration using clemency and pardons to get corporate healthcare fraudsters off the hook.

In May, President Donald Trump granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, the owner of a mental health company, American Therapeutic, who was sentenced to 50 years for “orchestrating a $205 million Medicare fraud scheme.”

An analysis by the California governor’s office found that Trump’s pardons had wiped nearly $2 billion in victim repayment and taxpayer recovery for Medicare and tax fraud, as well as other types of fraud.

Trump Focus on Immigrants

Though immigrants aren’t mentioned once in the report itself, they have been the relentless focus of the Trump administration.

In May, Vice President JD Vance and Mehmet Oz, a television doctor who is now head of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, hosted an anti-fraud press conference.

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At the event, Vance erroneously warned that “there could be tens of billions of fraudulent payments in the California system” going toward “illegal aliens, going to fraudulent businesses.” Oz — best known for promoting diet pills — similarly claimed that hundreds of millions of dollars of “questionable expenditures” were linked to “immigration-related costs,” and that “folks who are undocumented” were fraudulently getting access to Medicaid funds in California.

The language is par for the course from administration officials. Later that month, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller went so far as to blame the national debt on immigrants committing benefit fraud.

“We could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the Treasury went to individuals who were properly lawfully correctly eligible to receive them,” Miller said at a press conference.

The public rhetoric from Trump officials would lead one to false conclusions about who commits large-scale healthcare fraud — and who benefits.

“We are seeing a trend around the administration scapegoating immigrants and not pointing to the actual bad actors: corporations,” said Isha Weerasinghe, director of the public benefits justice team at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates for people with low incomes.

$300 Billion a Year

The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association estimates that the cost of healthcare fraud could be as high as $300 billion a year.

Most of that fraud is from providers scamming patients and insurance by billing patients for services not rendered or performing medically unnecessary services for the purpose of generating insurance payments.

The administration does not want to highlight that type of fraud in their public rhetoric because they’re enabling it, said Krieger, of the National Immigration Law Center.

“The administration has cut funding for all sorts of internal enforcement mechanisms. They have provided clemency to people convicted of government fraud in the past. They’ve fired inspector generals for overseeing accountability,” she said. “They’re not actually interested in solving the problem.”

Data suggests that noncitizens are less likely to commit welfare fraud than citizens.

Weerasinghe said that the administration is using a well-worn tactic of blaming marginalized groups to take away benefits from the population more broadly. 

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“All of us know about the ‘welfare queen’ narrative, and that worked,” said Weerasinghe, referencing a racist trope popularized by Ronald Reagan to characterize Black people on benefits as greedy fraudsters. “It created a lot of hatred toward public benefits, and also this willingness for the public to be OK with this kind of crackdown that was absolutely unnecessary.”

Weerasinghe said the administration is using “the immigrant narrative in order to make their case to defer to defer funds.” Trump, for instance, recently froze more than $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota.

“They’re not interested in tackling any systemic issues that may exist,” said Krieger. “They’ve kind of constructed a problem in search of a solution, and the solution always is to blame immigrants.”

The post Corporations, Not Immigrants, Are Responsible for Vast Majority of Healthcare Fraud, OIG Report Shows appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has made it his mission to put Dr. Anthony Fauci in prison.

Last month, the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee subpoenaed Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who led the nation’s response to the Covid pandemic, to answer still more questions related to the origins of the disease.

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Paul insists the novel coronavirus was the result of the National Institutes of Health having funded gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology — essentially that the virus was created in a lab in China and unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

Fauci has maintained that while the mostly likely source of the Covid-19 virus was animal-to-human transmission but that we cannot know for certain. Paul thinks he deliberately misled the public about the coronavirus’s origins and called him to testify before the Homeland Security Committee based on supposed new evidence that comes from Fauci’s diaries.

Over 7 million people worldwide have died from Covid, with about 1.2 million of those deaths occurring in the U.S.

While the quick work to produce a vaccine undoubtedly saved many millions of lives, that level of loss is difficult to account for and has certainly taken an emotional and psychic toll on the world since. We, the public, deserve answers about what went wrong during that time and how our governments are preparing for similar outbreaks in the future such that they can prevent the loss of so much life.

That is not what Paul and his Fauci subpoena are focused on. Instead, Paul sunk his libertarian teeth into a xenophobic conspiracy theory that reinforces his ideological priors: too many government agencies that spend too many public dollars.

It’s the same reason Paul avoids the real, persistent public health crisis underlying huge spike in deaths in the U.S. from Covid — and a host of other diseases: the lack of universal healthcare.

Did the virus come from a lab in Wuhan? I certainly don’t trust Paul’s ideologically infused takes, but I’ll leave it for others to decide.

To focus on it at the exclusion of all other public health policy, though, is clearly a mistake. It’s learning the wrong lesson from the Covid pandemic.

The United States remains the only “developed” country without universal healthcare coverage.

The insurance companies and for-profit medical system insist that this is the best system to provide people with the best healthcare, but during early days of the Covid pandemic, its limitations came into stark relief. The pandemic put so much stress on our system that resulted in shortages in staff, and a decreased quality of care for those infected with virus, and all others who needed care.

Underlying medical issues exasperated Covid deaths. These are exactly the types of chronic illnesses that people suffer from because of a lack of preventative care or a failure to get treatment because of prohibitive costs — respiratory diseases, heart conditions, blood pressure issues.

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It’s notable that some of the greatest successes of Covid policy arose not from private health insurers acting on their mandates for profit, but rather by mandates and funding from local, state, and federal government. Acts of Congress forced healthcare insurers and providers into covering certain services. When testing became a feasible method of helping to prevent the spread of Covid, federal funding made it far more widely available — even for the uninsured, with the government providing reimbursement for healthcare providers who tested those without coverage.

This is to say nothing of a federal program to speed along a Covid vaccine and rush its distribution — the key to creating enough immunity to weaken the virus and lower death rates. For those who got Covid, antiviral medication, which could drastically reduce symptoms and prevent hospitalizations and even death, was available for free thanks to federal funding. In the first two years of the pandemic, around 6 million people took the drug without paying a thing.

In 2020, the American Public Health Association released a policy statement that began: “The COVID pandemic adds a new sense of urgency to establish a universal health care system in the United States. Our current system is inequitable, does not adequately cover vulnerable groups, is cost prohibitive, and lacks the flexibility to respond to periods of economic and health downturns.”

This remains true, as the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress continue their assault of existing forms of federal healthcare spending.

While Paul is focused on trying to place Fauci in prison for not confirming a conspiracy theory, more people are being crushed by the weight of medical debt due to our inadequate system, more people aren’t getting the care they need because of the costs, and more people are dying.

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The fight for universal healthcare coverage remains a vital one, as the uncertainty of when we could face another pandemic looms over us all. The longer the delay, the more unprepared we become for what’s next.

Whatever Fauci said from his perch at the National Institutes of Health about the virus’s origins, the fact of the matter remains that the government’s interventions during the Covid pandemic were overwhelmingly lifesaving. Its biggest failure — then as now — was the inability to provide healthcare coverage for all Americans.

There should be accountability for whatever role the government played in the Covid pandemic, but let’s be clear that deaths spiked in large part because of the failures of our healthcare system to cover all Americans, not because of what Fauci said in his diaries.

The post Fauci’s Diary Isn’t the Key to Why Covid Ravaged the U.S. — Our Broken Healthcare System Is appeared first on The Intercept.