When a grand jury in Harris County, Texas, charged the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officer behind the wheel last week, the indictment pointed to a broader pattern in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants and activists. The charge was assault with a deadly weapon; the weapon was the vehicle.

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, claimed Parra Hernandez ran in front of the government vehicle; surveillance footage of the incident shows him running away from the car moments before he is hit. (An attorney for the ICE officer accused of assault against Parra Hernandez told The Associated Press his client had not committed any crime.)

In the same month, an unmarked ICE vehicle speeding the wrong way down a one-way street in Long Beach, California, struck a bicycle ridden by Ricardo Gonzalez, whose daughter later said he was a U.S. citizen. An agent immediately drew their gun on Gonzalez, who was later hospitalized for his injuries. The government said the man was not struck, but video released by the New York Times showed the ICE vehicle swerving into the bicycle.

Three days later after the collision in Long Beach, Antonio Moreida stood in the street in Woodland, California, outside Sacramento, documenting an unmarked ICE vehicle when the black Chevy Tahoe accelerated toward him. When the SUV hit him, Moreida told a meeting at Woodland City Hall last week, he was knocked to the ground — and the driver of the Tahoe did not stop to check on him.

The Department of Homeland Security said Moreida jumped onto the hood of the unmarked car, but when video of the incident showed him standing in place, local police and the mayor publicly disputed ICE’s account.

Weaponized Vehicles

In the national conversation about ICE’s heavy-handed crackdown on immigrants across the country, much has been made of the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that immigrants and activists “weaponized” their vehicles against federal agents. After immigration officers shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was targeted by ICE, and community defender Renée Good in separate incidents, the government said the civilians had used their cars to attack agents — allegations that have not been borne out in criminal charges, or were called into question by witness accounts and video analysis.

What happened to Parra Hernandez, Gonzalez, and Moreida, however, was the opposite of what the government said about Good and Salgado Araujo: It was ICE agents who weaponized their vehicles against civilians.

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As the Trump administration ramped up deportations over the last year, federal agents have effectively turned their cars into massive, deadly blunt objects. Common tactics, known collectively as “offensive driving techniques,” include ramming the cars of immigrant targets and activists; “brake-checking” volunteers trying to observe ICE activity; and, in some cases, outright driving into civilians. The Intercept reviewed two dozen cases of ICE using vehicles against civilians in these ways, including multiple incidents where victims were hospitalized or even died from their injuries.

“Vehicles are another tool ICE agents are using with unchecked force, just like their guns, Tasers, and pepper spray,” said Hannah Stauss, co-director of Hands Off NYC, a group that opposes ICE’s presence in New York City. “ICE’s deranged use of vehicles effectively weaponizes them against our immigrant neighbors and rapid responders, and will continue to kill people. We are witnessing in real time the results of a federal agency being allowed to operate with impunity, in secrecy, and with unfettered violence.”

In a statement to The Intercept that compiled past responses to the incidents in this article, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said, “ICE is instituting additional training including, crowd control measures, additional training for high-risk vehicle stops, a live-fire cover course for officer safety, and medical training.”

The spokesperson did not respond specifically to allegations about the incident involved Parra Hernandez; said Gonzalez was not struck by an ICE car; and blamed Moreida for the accident because he was in the roadway.

“Offensive Driving Techniques”

In federal policies and memos, the maneuvers used in the incidents reviewed by The Intercept, along with testimony from rapid responders, are referred to by federal agents as “offensive driving techniques.” They are part of a wider patten of aggressive driving by law enforcement officers across the country, but especially by federal agents with little accountability and nearly blanket backing from the Trump administration.

Last October, Leo Martinez was monitoring immigrations agents’ activity as a volunteer with VC Defensa, a community defense group in Ventura County, California, when an unmarked ICE car rammed his pickup truck. ICE agents arrested Martinez and later released him without charge.

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In March, they did it again: Three unmarked government vehicles rammed Martinez’s car as he sought to reverse away from them. The federal agents broke his window and dragged him out. Martinez, who was hospitalized from his injuries, was again released without charge. (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond specifically to questions about the incidents involving Martinez.)

“They run stop signs, red lights, they’ll cut off complete intersections, and they rarely turn on their lights,” Martinez told The Intercept. “They’ll slam on their brakes in the middle of the freeway, in the middle of the street. Sometimes they’ll do sudden U-turns in the middle of nowhere and cut off traffic in both directions.”

When activists are monitoring federal agents, one of the most common ways for ICE to leverage their vehicles as physical threats is the “brake check,” a move where a car suddenly breaks to cause the car behind it to slow down — or slam into its rear bumper.

“Brake-checking” doesn’t appear in official guidelines as an “offensive driving technique” with good reason: It is considered to be illegal in all 50 states, covered by various statutes like reckless driving or other anti-road-rage laws. Yet VC Defensa volunteers, who like Martinez monitor ICE activity, said that when they follow ICE vehicles to alert the community with horn-honking, they keep a distance of two to three car lengths because federal agents so frequently brake-check volunteers.

Federal agents use “offensive driving techniques” so often in Ventura County that VC Defensa volunteers sometimes identify the unmarked cars by the body damage that characterizes them.

Customs and Border Protection, another agency that, like ICE, is under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, expanded its agents’ discretion and ability to use these techniques during abduction operations after President Donald Trump took office for a second term.

A previous 2023 Customs and Border Protection pursuit policy largely prohibited officers from boxing in vehicles or making vehicle contact with another vehicle in motion. A partially redacted 2025 CBP directive gives officers broader discretion to use offensive driving techniques and ignore traffic laws.

“Most federal agencies are not well trained in police-citizen interactions, traffic stops, and pursuits,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology and criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina who helped Customs and Border Protection rewrite their car-chase policy under the Biden and Obama administrations.

In December, ICE agents in Elgin, Illinois, chased a Venezuelan man until his car and the ICE vehicles crashed. State investigators found the ICE agents likely conducted an “unskilled precious immobilization technique (‘PIT maneuver’) and lost control of the vehicle.” (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the target of the raid rammed an ICE vehicle into a tree.)

In January, Christian Molina, a U.S. citizen, was preparing to pull over for an ICE traffic stop in Minneapolis when the agents rammed the back of his car, injuring his back. The agents said they would pay for the damage, but left without providing contact information. (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond specifically to questions about the incident involving Molina.)

In June, agents conducted a high-speed chase through a residential neighborhood of Chicago, blowing through intersections until finally ramming their target’s car. (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed the target of the immigration enforcement action for the accident because he fled from ICE.)

“It’s disheartening to see some sort of federal agents or law enforcement driving so aggressively in a residential area,” one neighbor told Block Club Chicago. “I have a kid who’s two and we go out for walks all the time. We could have been crossing the street when they came through the intersection.”

High-Speed Chases

Following the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in July, the Department of Homeland Security ordered a temporary halt to traffic stops.

The day the directive was issued, ICE chased a group of roofers in Texas, blowing through a stop sign and over a speed bump without sirens. A mother driving her son to the theater was forced to swerve into a ditch to avoid a collision.

“They speeded right next to me,” the mother told the Texas Observer. “They hit the speed bump so bad that, when they got in front of me at high speed, I had to go to the right.”

If she had not swerved, she said, “they would have hit me.”

Some of these car chases have turned deadly in the very places where local police are restricted from chasing suspects because of the attendant dangers.

In February, agents undertook a high-speed chase in pursuit of Oscar Vasquez Lopez outside of Savannah, Georgia. Vasquez Lopez’s car struck a teacher, killing her.

The Savannah Police Department only allows pursuits when the suspect has committed or is attempting to commit a forcible felony, and the risk of not capturing someone outweighs the risk of the chase. Vasquez Lopez had no criminal record, only a civil deportation order from 2024.

Two immigration car chases in New Jersey, where police face similar restrictions at the statewide level, resulted in hospitalizations. (In the Texas case, the Georgia case, and the New Jersey case, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed the target of the immigration actions for causing unsafe conditions by fleeing.)

“They are not required to follow local agency policies (the same as other agencies), but they must be held responsible for their actions under state and federal law,” Alpert, the criminology professor, said. “The failure to evaluate these behaviors in a full, complete and transparent manner leaves us all in the dark.”

Earlier this month, the AP reported on an internal memo to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division that banned agents from conducting high-speed car chases. The directive still allows trained agents to make traffic stops and undertake offensive driving maneuvers.

Ramming Pedestrians

ICE agents’ vehicles are not just recklessly pursuing and ramming vehicles driven by who they thought were targets for immigration enforcement. In multiple filmed interactions, agents have driven into pedestrian rapid responders and protesters.

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In Woodland, California, ICE agents crashed into Moreida as he sought to collect their license plate information. After a major workplace raid in Los Angeles in June 2025, a news helicopter filmed the moment a protester walked in front of several ICE vehicles. One slowly sped up until it knocked him to the ground.

“It’s a disproportionate use of force. An individual is not going to win a fight with a vehicle,” Alpert, the criminology professor, said. “I’ve never seen any state or local law enforcement ever use a vehicle properly to hit or to run into a civilian.”

In other incidents, federal agents have weaponized their vehicles against crowds of activists. (Asked about the protests incidents mentioned in this article, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed “anti-ICE agitators.”)

In the aftermath of an ICE shooting this month in the New York City neighborhood of Marble Hill, immigration agents were seeking to move a man with a gunshot wound — whose car, with his 5-year-old son in the back, smashed into a concrete barrier during the incident — from a hospital to a detention facility. As government vehicles left the hospital in a speeding caravan, a bicycle was nearly hit by an federal agent in a black vehicle, which honked its horn, according to video of the incident. In another social media post, an ICE agent in an unmarked vehicle continued driving even with six protesters walking in front of it.

In July 2025, in San Francisco, after ICE clashed with protesters while moving detainees from the immigration courthouse to unmarked vehicles, several protesters clung to the hood of the car until they were physically thrown off when the vehicle sharply accelerated.

“I absolutely worry about ICE agents hurting people or killing people with these aggressive driving maneuvers,” said a New York rapid responder. “In order to avoid having their movements in vehicles documented, ICE agents will dramatically accelerate far beyond safe speeds for a dense urban environment like New York City.”

The organizer, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from the government, reported that agents drive at high speeds into oncoming traffic, run red lights, and abruptly turn without signaling. They rarely use emergency lights or sirens. These tactics align with the pattern of behavior described by Martinez in California — but in a city where rapid responders and neighbors are more often on foot or riding bicycles, not in their own vehicles.

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When ICE agents brought a detainee to a Brooklyn hospital after a violent arrest in May, hundreds protested outside the hospital. One TikTok video from the night captured the moment an unmarked ICE vehicle drove into several gathered people, accelerating sharply until they leapt out of the way.

“Given the frequency with which these agents are engaging in aggressive maneuvers to try and lose rapid responders or prevent documentation of their movements,” the organizer said, “it is honestly only a matter of time until an ICE agent seriously injuries or kills a cyclist or pedestrian in New York City.”

The post “Offensive Driving”: ICE’s Deadly Weaponization of Vehicles Against Civilians appeared first on The Intercept.

Several observers familiar with the case said the grand jury is likely related to the extradition effort.

The refusal of the grand jury witnesses to testify takes on added importance because the U.S. is pursuing Chambers’s extradition based on a criminal complaint, not an indictment, according to his Spanish lawyers. The criminal affidavit, signed by a single FBI agent, includes three charges related to his support for pro-Palestine causes.

The distinction, critics of the extradition case say, highlights how the case is hung on one agent’s complaint, which remains under seal, rather than a grand jury investigation to determine if the state had sufficient evidence to indict Chambers.

“The complaint is not only vague and weak, it’s not normal,” said Aitor Martínez, one of Chambers’s Spain-based lawyers. “In 20 years of practice, I’ve never seen a U.S. extradition request based on a criminal complaint.”

Martínez pointed to a statement from a summary of the complaint contained in an international arrest order reviewed by The Intercept and directed at Spanish authorities that says, “If Chambers’ extradition to the US is granted, another charging document called an indictment will be sought from a federal grand jury.”

Xavier de Janon, the executive director of the U.S.-based National Lawyers Guild and who is not working directly on the Chambers case, said, “Seeking an extradition without there being an indictment puts the cart before the horse.”

“If he is extradited under a criminal complaint,” said de Janon, “he can’t even fully challenge the charges, because he hasn’t been indicted.”

The State Department referred questions to the Department of Justice, which declined to comment.

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Two of the three charges underpinning the extradition request against Chambers — riot and incitement to riot — are related to allegations that he helped fund a late-2023 protest in Merrimack, New Hampshire, against an Israeli weapons manufacturer, according to the summary of the complaint contained in the arrest order. The summary says Chambers provided funds for demonstrators used to purchase materials such as smoke bombs and to help cover protesters’ legal fees.

The third charge is international money laundering related to more than $7 million he transferred to bank accounts in Tunisia, where he was living in 2024. The Trump administration, according to the international arrest order, says the money was used to fund Hamas, which is a proscribed terror group in the U.S. The order does not say he is charged with material support for terrorism.

Chambers’s family and supporters and multiple representatives of Club Africain, a Tunisian soccer club, have said the money was used to pay the club’s debts and related expenditures such as training grounds. The club’s fan base has long supported Palestinians.

Grand Jury Refusal

Two women who participated in the 2023 protest against a factory operated by the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems recently announced their intentions not to cooperate with a November 4 grand jury hearing where they have been summoned as witnesses.

“If they are being summoned now, this suggests that the grand jury seems to be linked to Chambers’s case,” said Martínez, his lawyer. “It seems like a fishing expedition against him.”

Kira Kelley, an attorney for the two women, said, “Context clues suggest this is about Fergie.”

If the pair don’t answer questions from a federal prosector before the New Hampshire federal grand jury, they could risk a possible jail sentence for contempt.

Nonetheless, the two women — Bridget Shergalis and Sophie Ross — shared a statement with The Grayzone Thursday announcing their intention to refuse to testify. In an interview on the same day with The Intercept, the women recounted being under investigation for a year over the protest and being threatened with felony charges that carried potential sentences of decades in prison.

Shergalis and Ross said they turned down several deals for their cooperation. By the end of the ordeal, they were found guilty of misdemeanor offenses and received 60-day jail sentences.

Following that experience, said Ross, the pair decided to reject the subpoena to testify before a grand jury.

“It was an easy decision for both of us,” Ross said.

Shergalis and Ross are slated to testify on Wednesday, at which time they plan to assert their Fifth Amendment rights and decline to answer any questions from the federal prosecutor.

At that point, a hearing before a judge may be scheduled, to determine whether to hold Shergalis and Ross in civil contempt, which could result in up to 18 months of prison, according to Kelley.

Martínez, who also worked on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s defense team, said the decision by Shergalis and Ross recalled that of Chelsea Manning, who twice refused to testify against Assange before a grand jury, serving time in prison in both instances. 

“It’s like Chelsea Manning, years later,” he said.

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Shergalis and Ross decided to go public with their plans after speaking with organizers behind the recently-launched NSPM-7 Defendants Union, a nationwide project for protesters targeted by the Trump administration’s efforts to criminalize dissent as laid out in last year’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7. The document, part of a broader effort to paint left-wing activism as terrorism, directs the FBI to go after “violent and terroristic activities” associated with “anti-fascism.”

The NSPM-7 Defendants Union is centered around signing a pledge to follow practices such as not cooperating with law enforcement, adopting collective legal strategy when possible, and publicly announcing those strategies — a goal that runs against the secrecy surrounding federal indictments.

While secrecy benefits prosecutors before a grand jury, said Shergalis, “It’s good for all of us to be as transparent as possible.”

Shergalis, Ross, and Chambers have each signed the pledge, and the grand jury decision appears to be the first public test case of the union’s ideas.

“We should celebrate people across the country deciding to assert their legal rights boldly against the federal government and its NSPM-7 policy,” said de Janon, of the National Lawyers Guild. “We’re seeing NSPM-7 result in unprecedented levels of prosecution against protesters.”

“This Is Bad Faith”

Meanwhile, Chambers remains imprisoned in Madrid, as the Spanish courts decide whether to grant the U.S. extradition request or not.

Chambers has applied for asylum in Spain and, if his application is granted, he would be released and the U.S. extradition request would be denied. He cannot be extradited until the asylum case runs its course.

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A self-described communist and anti-imperialist, Chambers is heir of the Cox family, owners of Atlanta-based telecom giant Cox Enterprises. As part of a settlement in which his family severed ties with him at the time, he sold stock back to them in mid-2023 worth about $250 million.

Since then, he has been funding an estimated 100 humanitarian and left-wing projects in 20 countries, according to his partner, actress and activist Stella Schnabel, including aid projects in the Occupied Gaza Strip.

As for the Trump administration’s case, Martínez, the Spanish attorney, underscored how the criminal complaint against Chambers raises charges related to the protest against the New Hampshire factory for Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, but leaves out how federal prosecution efforts ended up with minor convictions for Shergalis, Ross, and other activists.

“The people who carried out the acts received a minor sentence,” he said. “They leave this out. This is bad faith.”

“Why don’t they tell this to Spain?” he said. “It’s likely that Spain won’t turn someone over based on actions that got 60-day sentences.”

Martínez said Chambers’s opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza is the real reason behind the case. “I believe this is part of the persecution against pro-Palestine protest. The U.S. has even sanctioned the International Criminal Court because of this.”

Of Chambers’s case, Martínez said, “This is one more attack.”

The post Fergie Chambers Faces Extradition to U.S. Despite Never Being Indicted, Says Lawyer appeared first on The Intercept.

Officials in the state have prepared for months against the possibility of election interference from federal officials, and the state remains on high alert in the run-up to the general election on November 3.

Training materials for law enforcement officials in the state, obtained by The Intercept through a public records request, were updated this year for the elections to include explicit references to federal statutes barring armed federal agents from polling sites. 

In an interview with the New York Times this week, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said the inclusion of such references was a direct defense in response to the fearmongering around election integrity from President Donald Trump and his administration.

“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections,” Bellows said. “It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”

Bellows’s office offered up the training slideshow, which cites a U.S. law that bars armed civil or military officers from posting at voting sites, to law enforcement personnel in the run-up to Maine’s primary election in June and again in the lead-up to the general election on November 5.

Nationwide, Democratic officials have expressed fears that the Trump Administration might weaponize U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other federal agencies to undermine the rights of voters. In New York, state Attorney General Letitia James issued a reminder to voters that federal officials may not “police the polls,” and the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP called out the assignment of federal election monitors to two counties in the state as potential intimidation.

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The Trump administration, meanwhile, has sounded the alarm about the alleged scourge of non-citizens on the voter rolls, sending agents from the FBI and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division to probe alleged fraud. A handful of people in California, New York, and North Carolina have been indicted for allegedly voting as non-citizens, but a review of similar cases by the Washington Post found that such cases were often the result of honest mistakes.

In Maine, worries about federal interventions at polling places flared when — following a slew of social media videos from Trump allies suggesting that fraud is already taking place among the state’s Somali American community — a local outlet reported that the Department of Justice would be sending election monitors to the state.

Jon Fetherston, a journalist with the far-right Maine Wire, which is funded by conservative megadonor Leonard Leo, was seen following people in and around an early voting site at Lewiston City Hall and aggressively questioning them. (The Maine Wire did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Critics said the moves were tantamount to voter harassment, but Maine Wire editor-in-chief Steve Robinson later defended them as an act of election transparency. Robinson, who has led a crusade against what he alleges to be a network of fraud in the state’s Somali American community, questioned the role of interpreters tasked with helping “jobless Somali bums” cast their ballots.

In the wake of the Maine Wire controversy in Lewiston, Bellows confirmed to the Maine Morning Star that a wave of federal election monitors would be headed to polling sites in Lewiston and Portland.

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The Department of Justice on Tuesday confirmed to The Intercept that it intends to send election monitors to Maine for Election Day, but did not elaborate or respond to specific questions about where the monitors were to be sent. 

“We will have around 1,000 monitors in counties throughout the United States, but we will not share the full list until Election Day,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Intercept in an email Tuesday. “All monitors must meet the same legal and ethical requirements, including that they not interfere with the voting process. Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate.”

Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Collins Takes Right-Wing Bait

With Maine a key battleground state for control of Congress — Democratic challenger Troy Jackson is seeking to topple long-serving GOP Sen. Susan Collins, and the Democratic House candidate Matt Dunlap is seeking to best former Gov. Paul LePage in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District — temperatures are running high in the state.

Progressives in Maine worry that even without a robust federal presence at voting places — whether monitors are armed or not — activist campaigns like the one undertaken by the Maine Wire journalists could pose a potential threat to voters’ rights.

“Basically, if you were walking into City Hall and you were Black, you could expect to have this guy come up to you with his phone and ask you all sorts of rude and obviously racist questions,” said Ben Chin, co-director of the progressive Maine People’s Alliance. “We’re trying to encourage everyone to come out to vote, but it makes sense why that might give people pause. You hear a guy like that is outside a polling location, it’s reasonable to wonder, ‘Should I go down there right now?’”

In a statement to The Intercept, Bellows said the state and the city of Lewiston were taking steps to ensure that voters could cast a ballot free of harassment.

“We have received complaints about the intrusive filming, photography, and harassment of voters in the City of Lewiston by political operatives,” Bellows told The Intercept in a statement. “All voters should be able to exercise their right to vote without feeling watched, questioned, or harassed, and we take these allegations seriously, particularly when it appears that voters were targeted for no other reason than their race or ethnicity. We understand the City of Lewiston has taken steps to address the problem, and we will continue to monitor the situation.”

Collins, meanwhile, took the Maine Wire’s reporting seriously after Fetherston asked the senator at a campaign event about the role of interpreters, which he and the Maine Wire cast as “electioneering.”

“I’m unaware of those allegations, but certainly only Americans should be voting in American elections,” Collins said. “And it is troubling to me if people are being accompanied into voting booths and handling ballots in a way that is not sanctioned by law.”

The post Trump Vows to Send Election “Monitors” to Maine After Far-Right Conspiracies Spread appeared first on The Intercept.

Grissett was stunned. He later summed up his reaction: “Vindication.”

McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. He insisted he was innocent — and Grissett believed him. There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory’s teeth.

Grissett was never convinced by the so-called bite mark. At McCrory’s 1985 trial, he said, Grissett’s own dentist sat through the expert testimony and found it preposterous. “He says, ‘There’s no way that guy can say that,’ Grissett recalled. “I mean, anybody with common sense would know that.”

In a September 21 ruling describing the case against McCrory as “thin,” Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself “is grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies. It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation.”

Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison.

The ruling was not only momentous for McCrory, who has insisted on his innocence for more than four decades, but it also marked a new victory in the long legal battle against junk forensics — and the discredited discipline of bite-mark analysis specifically.

Yet more than a month after the decision, McCrory remains behind bars with no sense of when he might walk out. Although his lawyers asked the court to free him on bond pending the state’s decision to release or retry him, the Alabama attorney general’s office filed a motion last week asking Huffaker to reconsider his order overturning the conviction. The state’s appeals will likely drag out McCrory’s ordeal through the holidays and into next year.

In a statement, McCrory’s current legal team praised Huffaker’s “explicit acknowledgment that criminal convictions based on discredited bitemark evidence cannot stand.” Mark Loudon-Brown, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, and Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project, said they are “grateful for the decision and look forward to continuing our fight to bring Mr. McCrory home.”

In 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing the flaws in the state’s conviction. The case attracted additional media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. Despite the glaring problems with the evidence against McCrory, Alabama courts have routinely rejected his appeals and in 2023, the state’s parole board denied McCrory release.

Julie Bond McCrory’s body was found inside her home in Andalusia on May 31, 1985. Her head was bashed in, and she’d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. The couple’s son Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his bed. Police quickly pointed to McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he’d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.

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The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives found no physical evidence to connect McCrory to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two windows in Julie’s bedroom that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys’ backyard and who, just weeks after Julie’s murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime. 

Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence against McCrory: a pair of small indentations on the back of Julie’s right arm, which prosecutors concluded was a bite mark made by McCrory’s teeth.

To sell this theory, the state employed famed forensic dentist Richard Souviron, a star prosecution witness in the recent and sensational trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Souviron initially said he couldn’t definitively link the two marks on Julie’s arm to McCrory’s teeth, at trial he was unequivocal that they matched.

Bite-mark analysis is based on a two-pronged foundation. First, that the shape and arrangement of our teeth are unique, like DNA, and second, that skin is a suitable substrate for recording this uniqueness. As it turns out, there’s no science backing either assertion. In fact, research into the discipline has routinely found the opposite — that human dentition is not unique and that skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury. This makes bite-mark analysis a random and entirely speculative practice.

Still, after taking center stage at the Bundy trial, bite-mark analysis took off in the 1980s and ’90s and, despite not having any basis in actual science, made its way into courtrooms around the country, turning forensic dentists like Souviron into newsmaking, swashbuckling crime fighters.

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In the years that followed, however, bite-mark analysis was increasingly called into question and ultimately exposed as junk science, a subjective pattern-matching practice that has led to dozens of wrongful convictions. At least four of those, including McCrory’s, are cases in which Souviron served as the prosecution’s expert.

In 2019, Souviron recanted his testimony in McCrory’s case, providing an affidavit to Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, who presented it at a 2021 evidentiary hearing in Andalusia. “As a forensic odontologist I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” Souviron wrote. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim in this case, assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks, could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual, such as Mr. McCrory.”

Despite the fact that their key witness had disavowed the evidence they used to send McCrory to prison for life, prosecutors fought to preserve their conviction. At the 2021 hearing, they insisted that McCrory was guilty, based on the same evidence they presented at trial. They recast the supposed bite mark as “teeth marks,” implying that, while bite-mark analysis may be discredited, the study of “teeth marks” is a separate and valid discipline. Even if Souviron had not testified for the state, they argued, jurors could have looked at photos of the marks on Julie’s body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that McCrory inflicted the wounds.

Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short, who presided over the hearing, agreed with the prosecutor. So did the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld his ruling in favor of the state. But Huffaker did not.

Huffaker took exception to the notion that analyzing “teeth marks” is somehow separate from bite-mark analysis. It is clear, he wrote, “that bitemark identification is based on analysis of individual teeth markings.”

But “most importantly, the state court unreasonably determined that, even without Dr. Souviron’s expert testimony, a reasonable jury could compare the bitemark evidence with McCrory’s dentition themselves and find that it belonged to McCrory,” Huffaker wrote. “This finding blinks reality in light of the evidence presented by McCrory at the postconviction evidentiary hearing.” In a footnote, he added that “if an expert could not testify about bitemark identification because it is junk science, a jury should not have been allowed to consider it either.”

McCrory is not the only person who is still fighting for his freedom decades after being convicted based on discredited junk science. Last year, Chris Duncan was declared innocent nearly 30 years after being sent to Louisiana’s death row based on bogus bite-mark evidence. He was released one day before Thanksgiving. In his case, a video showed the state’s supposed bite-mark expert manufacturing the evidence that was used to convict Duncan.

As in McCrory’s case, Louisiana prosecutors have nevertheless continued to insist their case against Duncan is solid. And as in McCrory’s case, this has not gone over well with some judges. Earlier this year, Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Judge John Weimer wrote that bite-mark evidence “should be discarded and no longer have a place in the realm of forensic science.”

“Long ago, some who were thought to have the best and brightest minds of that time endorsed ‘trial by water’ as a means of determining a person’s guilt or innocence. We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “Thankfully, as scientific knowledge evolved, there was a realization that these practices had no basis whatsoever in logic, reason, or the search for truth, and the practices were discarded.”

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There’s a Junk Science Crisis in Criminal Convictions. Sonia Sotomayor Calls It Out in Alabama Bite-Mark Case.

As the holidays approach, McCrory’s family remains hopeful that he will soon walk out of prison. His son Chad, who is now in his 40s, has attended a dozen parole hearings with the hope of one day seeing his father released.

Grissett, McCrory’s former lawyer, reached out to Chad to share his hope that McCrory will finally come home. While memories have faded in the tight-knit community of Andalusia, many people remember McCrory’s case, he said.

“Everybody sees this was junk science,” Grissett said. “You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that.”

It’s “sad that it’s taken this long,” Grissett said. It haunts him that “somebody’s still out there who murdered this lady. And I’m afraid that they’re not gonna look into that.”

The post Prosecutors Want to Keep a Man in Prison for His Wife’s Murder — Despite Judge Saying Their Evidence is Junk appeared first on The Intercept.

It was the last time anyone would hear from her. When Resendiz’s friend arrived at the barracks 15 minutes later, the pair was nowhere to be found.

“The Navy failed her,” Resendiz’s mother, Esmerelda Castle, told The Intercept. After her daughter’s disappearance, friends and family spent a week scrambling to find Resendiz. Castle found the Navy’s reports in that time unclear, delayed, or downright false.

A first-of-its-kind Intercept investigation has found critical shortcomings in the U.S. military’s procedures for documenting and preserving records of homicides that result from domestic abuse, including intimate partner violence. The Pentagon’s mandated reports to Congress appear to substantially undercount these killings, omitting nearly half of cases.

In the six years before Copeland’s murder of Resendiz, the Pentagon recorded 41 domestic abuse-related homicides committed by service members. The Intercept identified nearly twice as many: at least 73 potential cases involving 79 victims — almost all of them women — during the same period. Reports for fiscal year 2025, when Resendiz was murdered, are due in November.

The Intercept examined publicly available news articles, obituaries, court records, memorials, and other data to investigate the specifics behind the Defense Department’s numbers. Reporters also used data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request on Army noncombat fatalities to match names, because some news coverage did not mention the victims’ and alleged perpetrators’ military service.

A killing qualified for the dataset if it occurred in fiscal years 2019 to 2024; if the perpetrator was a member of the military at the time of the crime; and if the case involved a homicide. The database only includes cases where a victim of the violence had dated or was in a romantic relationship with the suspected perpetrator, and it includes multiple women living abroad who were foreign citizens dating American troops.

In the fiscal years since the second Trump administration took power, The Intercept found at least 10 service women or women working for the Defense Department have died from intimate partner and domestic violence, six of them killed by male co-workers. An additional 10 civilian women have been killed by male military personnel in intimate partner violence-related homicides during the same period.

A Pentagon spokesperson acknowledged The Intercept’s queries about the discrepancy in homicide rates but did not respond to detailed questions before publication.

“At this moment in our country’s history, I am afraid these numbers are going to increase even further,” said Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Nursing who has been studying domestic violence in the military for decades. “We need primary prevention for everyone in the military and their partners.”

The findings come in the wake of President Donald Trump’s August announcement of a Military Spouse Commission, led by Jennifer Hegseth, the wife of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other high-level military leaders. The commission’s mandate is to guide policy around issues affecting military families. Though intimate partner violence and spousal abuse have concerned military family advocates for decades and thousands of new cases are reported each year, the commission does not mention the issue as one of its areas of focus.

The Navy and DoD have said in public statements and communication with members of Congress and Castle that while “proper procedures were followed” following the death of Resendiz, they have identified several processes that require further review.

“What Are the Statistics?”

Copeland killed Resendiz on May 29, 2025. In the days after Resendiz’s disappearance, her friends filed missing person reports and called Castle in Texas, who in turn called the Navy. None of them knew that Resendiz was dead.

The Navy’s official timeline of events says it did not start investigating her disappearance as a crime until a missing person’s report was filed on the 31st, and that Castle did not reach out until that day. Phone records she shared with The Intercept and members of Congress show she started calling on the 29th.

“I was told she was found, and that the original missing person’s report was exaggerated,” Castle recalled. “I didn’t think for a second that the Navy would lie to me.

Technically, Resendiz had been found — a Navy chief searching for her had seen Resendiz’s body packed under the covers in Copeland’s bed around 10 a.m. on the day of her disappearance. They assumed she was asleep, according to evidence later revealed during trial. But as Castle tells it — including in a congressional inquiry she wrote requesting a deeper investigation— a Navy chief claimed on the phone to have spoken to her daughter in Copeland’s room.

She had been dead for hours.

“He had Angie wrapped up in a blanket on his bed,” said Castle. “It was against policy for her to be in the barracks. And they just turned their backs and left.”

Intimate partner violence in the military has long been a problem with unclear signs of progress. Killings in the 1990s on bases such as Fort Campbell made national headlines, leading Congress to establish the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence in 2000.

Campbell, the nursing professor, was part of the effort, which issued over 200 suggestions for improvement by 2003. “Most of the recommendations we made a long time ago were never implemented,” she said. For one, she’d repeatedly requested better recordkeeping.

“One of the things I kept asking was, ‘What are the statistics on intimate partner homicide in the military?’ We could never get them,” Campbell said. “And in the military’s suicide reports, you cannot determine how many suicides were part of homicide–suicides, where a service member killed a civilian wife or partner before killing himself.”

This lack of clarity sounded familiar to Priscilla Rodriguez, who spent 10 years in the Marine Corps before working in strategic communications for the Navy.

Rodriguez experienced domestic violence that met the Defense Department’s criteria from her husband, an active-duty Marine at the time, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. Her husband pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child abuse in civilian courts, and military legal authorities recommended domestic violence charges. “The command chose not to pursue military legal action,” Rodriguez said.

The Intercept’s analysis of the rates of domestic abuse reported in Pentagon data found intimate partner violence among married military couples was at least four times higher than the civilian rate. The Pentagon does not report the rate of abuse involving unmarried intimate partners, like Resendiz and Copeland.

Gaps like these make it difficult to have a thorough reckoning of the problem’s scale. “When accountability is inconsistent,” Rodriguez said, “it sends a message that abuse can and will remain hidden.”

“I Knew My Kid Was Not Coming Back”

Copeland kept Resendiz’s corpse hidden in his barracks room for four days, until June 2, 2025, when he put her body into a duffel bag and dumped it in a wooded area behind a nearby elementary school.

By then, he was being questioned by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service on her whereabouts, and Castle was still wondering about her daughter’s safety. She’d asked naval authorities to have her daughter give her a call, and when it never came, she contacted the base again.

A Navy official suggested her daughter may have gone AWOL.

“I didn’t believe that,” Castle said. “My kid is scared to miss work. She won’t take off.”

Castle flew to Virginia herself.

Resendiz had been dead for a week. Castle felt she wasn’t getting the information she needed after the Navy and local authorities had put out a statewide missing person’s alert. She requested that she be let into her daughter’s barracks room.

“I didn’t want anyone else touching her stuff,” Castle said. “It was how she left it. There was still paint out; she had started painting again. Her yoga mat was still out. She had planned on returning. I knew my kid was not coming back.”

She spent two more days in Virginia searching for her daughter, talking to local news, and asking naval authorities to give more updates.

“They didn’t declare her AWOL or dead,” Castle said. “They said she was duty status unknown. I was worried they were going to wash their hands of her.”

On June 7, Castle flew back to Texas. Police found Resendiz’s body in the duffel bag two days later.

A History of Violence

Jermiah Copeland was convicted of Resendiz’s murder on June 8, 2026. According to evidence entered into court records in his murder trial, he had also been accused of two instances of domestic violence, three sexual assaults, indecent recordings, and other crimes from during and before his Navy service.

“He had a history of violence against women starting in high school,” Castle said. “And was still allowed to join with the charges against him. Then he was accused of raping another service member, and he was transferred. There were no safeguards in place at the new command.”

The absence of safeguards against intimate partner violence in the military is part of a broader set of structural and cultural failings, experts told The Intercept.

“There are many disincentives for a couple, particularly when one or both partners are on active duty, to seek help,” Campbell said. “Active-duty women who were being abused told us: ‘If my commanding officer knew, I would never get the next promotion.’ There is considerable stigma, even for the victim. That makes the violence much more likely to escalate and makes it more likely that we eventually end up with homicides.”

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Research indicates that the military’s hypermasculine culture and systematic mistreatment of women play a role in the increased risks of intimate partner violence. Some studies suggest that veterans offend at higher rates than those on active duty.

A previous Intercept investigation found active-duty Army women were more likely to be killed by fellow service members than by enemy combatants and had a higher per capita risk of homicide than their fellow male soldiers between the years 2011 and 2025.

More than 70 percent of the victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at some point. Army women faced an intimate partner homicide rate at least three times higher than women nationally; controlling for those killed by service men and male veterans alone, it was double.

The military’s systems for identifying and responding to abuse, meanwhile, have come under repeated scrutiny. A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found the department “has not collected and reported accurate data for all domestic abuse allegations received,” leaving it unable to assess the scope of alleged abuse.

The same can be said for homicides.

Almost a third of the 79 victims The Intercept found were killed in murder–suicides. Firearms were used in over two-thirds of the fatalities. Twenty-five of the victims were service members. Multiple homicides involved corollary victims who were not partners, including children, who research shows make up a sizable amount of intimate partner violence-related deaths.

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Women in the Army Are More Likely to Be Killed by Fellow Soldiers Than Enemy Combatants

In response to The Intercept’s questions, the Department of Defense stated that data in its domestic abuse reports does not constitute estimates, as it is only using aggregated data from the Family Advocacy Program Central Registry, a database run by the DoD. It further stated it did not have any more information to share on the matter.

“Right now, unless an incident is reported to the Family Advocacy Program,” said Campbell, “nobody knows about it. Those reports are only the tip of the iceberg.”

Data tracking failures have had deadly consequences. The Air Force failed to submit the criminal history of a former service member convicted of assaulting his wife and stepson to a federal database that could have prevented him from purchasing firearms. In 2017, he killed 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

When Rodriguez reported her own abuse to the DoD, she felt that they didn’t consider the previous information they had available. Installation-level committees review reported allegations and determine whether they meet criteria to be input into the central registry. But the process is plagued with issues, experts who spoke to the Intercept revealed, from investigation procedures to data tracking.

“I was terrified to disclose the full extent of the abuse I was experiencing,” Rodriguez said. “What stands out to me now is that the Family Advocacy Program already had access to my husband’s history. Given that history, I believe the conversation should have been much broader than simply asking whether I wanted to report anything. I left that initial interaction without understanding what support existed or how I could safely leave.”

While navigating her own case, Rodriguez was also watching the same problem surface through her communications work for the Navy.

“Headlines I monitored involved active duty and Marine veterans accused of intimate partner homicide,” Rodriguez said. “At the same time, I reviewed serious incident reports that were elevated to senior leadership. … The narrative often indicated that intimate partner violence or domestic violence was a contributing or co-occurring factor.”

Navy criminal investigative data showed domestic violence-related deaths increasing as Rodriguez was trying to raise the issue in 2022. She tried to compile domestic violence awareness resources, but she recalled being told the need wasn’t there.

“I was told there was ‘no demand signal,’” Rodriguez said. “It felt completely disconnected from the reality my family and so many others were living.”

Castle feels that the knowledge of Copeland’s history of abuse could have saved her daughter’s life.

“No one knew anything about him,” Castle said. “The leadership created an environment that allowed him to harm women.”

Winnable Cases

Since her daughter’s murder, Castle has been at work pushing the Navy and Defense Department to strengthen their responses to intimate partner violence. Her work led to the Navy changing its policies in July on how it transfers sailors with allegations of sexual violence.

Her wins, including potential plans by the Navy to change how it classifies missing sailors, are the latest in a long string of limited efforts toward progress.

“Records are important,” said Castle. “With my daughter, they didn’t want to classify her case properly at first. For the military, if something isn’t in a database, it doesn’t exist.”

Following the high-profile 2020 murder of Army Spc. Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood — and two years after domestic violence became classified as a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice — Congress gave independent military prosecutors the power to decide which cases to bring to trial.

Domestic violence prosecutions climbed, with charges brought in 359 cases last year alone, up from dozens of cases four years earlier. But Pentagon data identified at least 25,000 intimate partner and spouse abuse victims, and 37,000 cases, from 2021 to 2024.

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And while domestic violence prosecutions increased, military prosecutions of sexual assault — often related to intimate partner violence — fell by almost 60 percent in the past five years, based on data from its annual sexual assault prevention reports. A 20 percent drop occurred from 2024–2025 alone, and The Intercept’s analysis of military court data shows the trend is continuing into 2026.

“In the Pete Hegseth era, sexual assault prosecutions have dropped significantly. Domestic violence is essentially filling that gap,” said Paul Newell, an Army veteran and activist who tracks military suicide, sexual assault, and domestic violence while engaging with members of Congress on the issue.

Newell thinks the trial counsel’s office is “going for what they feel are stronger, more winnable cases,” he said. “They’ll tell you that their conviction rates at trial are still high, which shows that really, they’re just getting rid of the bad cases,” he said. “But we’re not down 60 percent in sexual assaults happening.”

The Pentagon stated in response to The Intercept’s questions that it does not have any additional information to share on why prosecution rates for certain crimes are dropping.

The Intercept also discovered preferential treatment in trial outcomes: Analyzing over 650 military court cases with guilty verdicts from 2021 on, reporters found less senior Navy, Marine, and Army service members had higher chances of losing their benefits and received more jail time after being convicted for domestic violence. Senior ranks closest to retirement received the best conviction outcomes, even compared to those of the same rank as them who had fewer years in service.

Newell feels that these discrepancies give perpetrators increased power over their victims. “The justice system should not take time in service into consideration since that’s prioritizing the perpetrator. If the punishment for domestic violence is a discharge where you lose benefits, it should be applied equally.”

In April, Hegseth directed installation commanders to allow service members to request permission to carry privately owned firearms on bases while off duty. He framed the change as a way to protect service members from attacks on military installations.

Campbell disagrees.

“I have reviewed far too many domestic violence homicide records,” Campbell said. “It is clear to me that, in many cases, there might have been a fight, and somebody might have been hit, but nobody would have died if there had not been a gun right there.”

Rodriguez, who is now studying public health, is calling for recurring anonymous surveys using specific questions to measure the prevalence of intimate partner violence, standardized tracking, independent evaluation, and public reporting.

Castle is still mourning her daughter and still pushing the Navy to reveal the full details about the investigation into her death. To add to the insult, she remembered the shock she felt late last June, when the Navy sent Resendiz home to Texas in a casket. Naval officials had told Castle that everything was taken care of, she recalled, including cleaning the body.

The Navy acknowledges that it failed to clearly inform Castle of her daughter’s true state. She was returned to Texas in decay, her body crawling with maggots.

“There’s nothing that can be done for her,” said Castle. “That’s injustice, and that’s what drives me. None of these women volunteered to be violated in this way.”

How we analyzed the data

Reporters searched through multiple databases to identify the number of potential victims of intimate partner violence, using definitions provided by health and policy research alongside government organizations, comparing it to the last six years of available DoD reporting from 2019 through 2024. The case of a U.S. Air Force airman who kidnapped and murdered a Mennonite woman in 2020 didn’t meet criteria because evidence revealed no previous or current relationship. The case of a soldier who was convicted a year later of the murder of a woman in Texas did, as evidence indicated they had a relationship before the woman’s death.

Cases were broken down by the year of the offense, gender of the alleged perpetrator and victim, and branch of the perpetrator and victim, if applicable.

To analyze court data, reporters from The Intercept pulled all court cases pertaining to domestic violence from the years 2021 to 2026 from the websites of the Air Force, Navy/Marines, and U.S. Army. Navy/Marine data was only available starting in 2021.

Data included the offense type, rank of the accused, and whether the cases ended in acquittal, dismissal, or conviction. For those convicted, the analysis included the amount of jail time given and whether offenders received a punitive discharge, which costs them military retirement and other benefits.

Retirement eligibility was calculated based on pay information provided in court documents, which in the military is based on years served. Air Force data could not be used for this analysis due to a lack of documentation and apparent discrepancies between the number of cases reported to Congress and those available on the Air Force portal.

To obtain the number of cases the DoD is prosecuting for sexual assault, reporters utilized Annex B of the DoD’s Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military to calculate the number of unrestricted reports made to military authorities and the amount sent to the military justice system to begin the judicial process. 

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing suicidal thoughts or for those close to them, by chat, text, or telephone. Service members can dial 988 and press 1 to reach the Military and Veterans Crisis Line. Support is free and confidential.

The post Pentagon Records Missed Almost Half of Troops’ Domestic Abuse Killings appeared first on The Intercept.

The videos, provided to The Intercept in response to a public records request, come on the heels of leaked footage that exposed how a needlessly aggressive and reckless police confrontation of two suspected shoplifters led to 1-year-old Kohen Wiley’s violent death in his mother’s arms.

While the newly released videos include redacted versions of the previously leaked footage — including body camera footage for some of the officers, as well as Walmart surveillance video — the new footage reveals for the first time the body camera video belonging to the Senatobia police officer who fired the shots that killed Kohen Wiley: Sgt. Hunter Foster.

While the state concluded that the shooting was “justified” based on a probe by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the videos show how police escalated a non-life-threatening situation — one that could have ended with a mere shoplifting charge — by pursuing Kohen’s mother, Vel’lesiya Wiley, and the driver, Latoya Ferrell, after they ran from the store and tried to drive away.

Foster’s body camera footage makes clear that he positioned himself in front of the vehicle, aimed his gun at the car, and fired the fatal shot into the passenger side window after the car was moving past him and posed no threat.

This is consistent with the conclusions of Dr. Roger Mitchell, a forensic pathologist hired by Kohen Wiley’s family, who determined in June that the fatal bullet was most likely fired into the side window, entering his small body on his right side and exiting his left.

The release also includes a 10-page, heavily redacted investigative report by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which the state attorney general relied upon in concluding that the shooting was justified.

The report’s narrative is misleading: Its only description of the shooting is that one officer “discharged his firearm” after the car “sped toward the officers.” The report does not discuss the fact that the firing officer was beside the car when he first fired, which is clear in Foster’s body camera footage. The report also redacts Kohen Wiley’s cause of death.

Foster resigned from the Senatobia police department on Wednesday. Afterward, Foster’s lawyer told CNN, “The driver of the vehicle was attempting to kill those 5 officers, and Hunter Foster had no choice but to discharge his weapon.” (Neither Foster nor his lawyer responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

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Residents of Senatobia had called for months for the body camera footage and Walmart surveillance videos to be released. After the state attorney general announced that the police had been cleared, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which houses the state’s Bureau of Investigations, told The Intercept that the videos would be released after the family had a chance to watch them.

Instead, as with the attorney general’s announcement, the family first saw the leaked videos on social media. By the time Kohen Wiley’s parents and grandparents met with state officials to view the videos on Thursday morning, most of the footage had been circulated online. At a press conference on Thursday afternoon, Kohen’s maternal grandmother, Veronica Roberson, called it “a slap in the face.”

Roberson said she’d been haunted by the word “justified” all week, slamming the idea that Foster fired the lethal shots because he feared for his life.

“You shot my grandbaby from the side of the car,” she said. “How are you in danger?”

“Get the Car!”

The incident began with what appeared to be a routine occurrence in retail outlets all over the country: a shoplifting allegation.

The earliest footage is from a Walmart security camera. An apparent Walmart employee dressed in a black hoodie is stationed by the store entrance when Wiley and Ferrell approach, carrying a child and a box of diapers. They pause at the door and appear to have a brief exchange with the Walmart employee before breaking into a run toward the parking lot.

In body camera footage, which begins moments later, the staffer in the hoodie appears in the doorway of a small security room, where other Walmart employees, three Senatobia police officers, and two Tate County sheriff’s deputies are gathered around a pair of computer monitors. According to the MBI report, the officers had been called to the store in response to a complaint that a man was sexually harassing customers.

The employee in the hoodie tells the cops and Walmart staffers that two people are running and gestures toward the store entrance.

Moments later, the five officers dash from the room and out into the parking lot, running toward a gray sedan. A sheriff’s deputy reaches the driver’s side door and puts his hand on the hood of the car while someone yells “stop.” The car backs up and starts to turn, but hits a parked SUV. Someone yells, “Stop the car!”

As the officers continue to run toward the car, it begins to move forward. At one point, two officers are directly in front of the vehicle, including Foster, the police sergeant identified as the shooter, who aims his gun at the front windshield.

The car starts to turn left, away from the three officers on the vehicle’s right side, and either narrowly misses or grazes Foster, who stumbles to the passenger side and aims his gun at the window. He then appears to fire three shots in rapid succession.

As the car pulls away, the officers continue their pursuit.

“Get the car! Get the car! Get the car!” one of them yells.

The gray sedan pauses briefly before taking off again.

The records released by state officials do not include any footage of what happened after the officers return to their vehicles. But the leaked footage, which was compiled into a nearly 7-minute long video, shows Foster pacing next to a police vehicle outside the nearby Highland Hills Medical Center an hour and 20 minutes after the shooting.

“I didn’t even see a fucking baby in her lap,” Foster says.

His colleague responds that nobody else did either: “All I saw was two females in the car.”

Reckless and Aggressive

As the leaked video began to circulate on social media on Tuesday, much of the attention focused on the moment the car moved toward Foster.

The Senatobia Police Department claimed from the start that the car drove toward officers and nearly hit one, suggesting the shots were fired in self-defense. Darkhorse Press, the independent Mississippi outlet that first published the leaked footage, even stated in a headline that the car “actually hit at least two officers.”

Among those who have repeated a version of this story is Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, who said the driver tried to “run over the policeman,” despite admitting that he had not actually watched the footage.

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What the videos show is that the police officers themselves needlessly escalated a shoplifting incident into the scenario that they claim put them at risk. Almost immediately after being informed that two people were “running,” the five armed officers sprinted out to the parking lot, surrounded the car, and, at various points in the confrontation, drew their guns. They also positioned themselves in a way that cut off any escape route for the driver.

These are reckless, aggressive tactics in response to a minor shoplifting charge. They also violate best practices in policing.

Most departments today prohibit officers from standing in front of the possible escape route of a car when someone inside is suspected of only minor offenses. Many also require officers to get out of the way of a vehicle if it drives toward them. While most departments authorize a police officer to use deadly force if they “reasonably” believe it’s necessary to protect their or others’ lives, this generally does not excuse using lethal force if the “reasonable” fear arose from a cop’s own violation of department policy.

Policies and best practices, however, don’t establish the bounds of legal liability; they are related but separate. Under the landmark Supreme Court case Tennessee v. Garner, a police officer can use deadly force if he “has a good-faith belief that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The law is less clear about criminal liability when an officer’s own illegal or ill-advised actions caused the circumstances that led him to fear for his safety.

Other examples of self-defense law hold people criminally liable if their own actions put them in harm’s way. In general, those cases indicate that a person can’t argue self-defense after killing someone if they instigated the altercation that led to the killing — even if it was reasonable to deploy lethal force when they did.

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By that standard, if an officer puts themselves in the path of a moving vehicle, they shouldn’t be able to justify lethal force by claiming to fear for their life because the vehicle was about to hit them. The law, however, isn’t crystal clear on this, and there’s at least some indication that the current Supreme Court may adopt a more lenient standard for police officers.

Moving Vehicle

Most police departments prohibit officers from shooting into moving vehicles unless someone inside poses a direct threat to the safety of others unrelated to use of the vehicle itself — for instance, if the person is armed and shooting at people. The reason is simple: Killing the driver of a moving car does not stop the car and can therefore exacerbate threats to public safety.

Like many other departments, the Senatobia police department’s policy contains vague language warning officers that firing into moving vehicles is dangerous to bystanders and unlikely to stop a car; it reads more like guidance than prohibition. One portion of the policy, however, is much clearer: Officers “will not” discharge firearms into a fleeing vehicle — with “will not” underlined for emphasis.

It seems clear from the leaked footage that Ferrell, the driver, maneuvered the car in what appeared to be an attempt to flee rather than to kill or injure officers. The video shows her at first trying to reverse away from police. After striking the SUV, however, she then appears to try to drive around and then between the officers. She then strikes another car while trying to drive away.

Foster’s actions aren’t consistent with any reasonable concept of self-defense. Footage shows that he fired at least three shots into the passenger side of the car. This was already apparent in the leaked body camera footage. It’s even clearer in the newly released video from Foster’s camera. By the time he fires the first of the three shots, he is clearly beside — not in front of — the car. By the time he fires the last shot, the car has passed him.

Even if Foster wanted to claim that he fired to disable the driver — and, again, his own department firmly prohibits shooting at a fleeing car — he fired through the passenger side window. He did so despite being told that there were two people inside, which means that whatever the driver was doing, he was also putting the other person at risk. 

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Trust What You Can See With Your Own Eyes

Ultimately, the videos depict a driver showing far more awareness for the officers’ safety from behind the wheel than Foster showed for the occupants of the car — or the surrounding bystanders.

Police policies should reflect how people behave in the real world, and people accused of stealing tend to flee. For armed officers to quickly escalate a shoplifting allegation puts everyone nearby at risk. Amid the frenzied response from the cops, Ferrell struck two other cars while attempting to escape. Anyone in or near those cars could have been injured or killed. Foster also fired his gun in a crowded parking lot. That, too, could have resulted in additional death or injury.

The police had other options. They could easily have written down the car’s license plate or obtained the plate number from the numerous surveillance tools at their disposal: their body camera footage, Walmart security footage, or one of the many Flock cameras nearby.

If they had to arrest the women, they could have done so later, at home and under less duress. They may not have caught Wiley or Ferrell red-handed with the alleged stolen goods, theoretically making a shoplifting prosecution more difficult. Creating an obstacle to prosecuting a shoplifting case, however, should be an easy tradeoff for not putting lives at risk.

Walmart’s Role

Finally, the leaked video footage raises important questions about Walmart’s role in Kohen Wiley’s death. The company has yet to publicly comment about the incident — and has not responded to repeated inquiries from The Intercept.

When the Walmart employee in the hoodie entered the room where officers were viewing security monitors, he told them that two people were fleeing the store. He did not say that one of them had a baby in her arms, even though surveillance footage showed Wiley carrying Kohen as she passed him. This would prove consequential, as Foster said in video footage that he had no idea there was a baby in the car.

Does Walmart policy require staff to tell police when a suspected shoplifter is accompanied by children? And how often does Walmart call on police for such minor crimes?

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Congress Might Give ICE the Power to Go After Shoplifters

This isn’t the first time aggressive policing of shoplifting at a Walmart has resulted in the death of an unarmed person. Earlier this year, deputies shot suspected shoplifters in two separate incidents at Walmarts in Florida. When police tackled a fleeing shoplifter in Anchorage, Alaska, recently, he pulled a gun and shot two officers before they returned fire, killing him.

Over the last 10 years, police have also shot suspected shoplifters at Walmarts in Miami; Decatur and San Antonio, Texas; Tempe, Arizona; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Chester, South Carolina; and Lake Forest, California. Most of the suspects were armed, but gunfire erupted only after police confronted them for shoplifting.

Walmart seems to have wavered over the years between aggressive crackdowns on suspected shoplifters and more lenient policies that factor in whether the suspect has been accused before, the necessity of the items they’re accused of stealing, and the value of the stolen goods.

Like many national retailers, the company’s policy when it comes to its own employees is to avoid confrontations with suspected shoplifters. A previous lawsuit revealed that the company’s stated policy as of 2010 was “PUT PEOPLE FIRST” (all caps in original) and prioritized “the physical well-being of suspects, customers and Walmart associates.”

That policy means little if the store simply outsources enforcement to police who take a far more aggressive approach. Walmart itself has also been criticized by police groups, who claim that cost-saving reductions in staff have made the store a more attractive target for shoplifting, which then leads to more calls to police.

And in Senatobia, the last high-profile incident of police violence before Kohen Wiley was killed took place in 2025 — at the same Walmart parking lot.

Even the best policing policies are useless if they aren’t enforced. And officers are rarely prosecuted, period. Foster’s resignation is at least some form of accountability, but the insistence from state officials that police did nothing wrong means there will be little to stop similar killings from happening again.

This week, residents of Senatobia returned to the Walmart for a vigil in honor of Kohen Wiley, in the same place where a makeshift shrine once stood. A community gathering has also been scheduled next weekend to mark what would have been his second birthday.

At the press conference Thursday, family and activists vowed to keep fighting for justice. As with so much police violence, however, the most pressing question isn’t whether Foster himself is punished. It’s whether we’re willing to tolerate more deaths like that of Kohen Wiley — whether Senatobia, Walmart, and the state of Mississippi will do anything to make clear that a 1-year-old’s life is more important than a pack of diapers.

The post Bodycam: Cop Was Not in Danger When He Fired Shots That Killed 1-Year-Old Kohen Wiley appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, Senatobia residents got their answer: Officials plan to do nothing. “In this incident, the Attorney General’s Office found the use of force was justified,” Republican Mississippi AG Lynn Fitch announced in a three-sentence news release posted on her official website.

The announcement was met with anguish and outrage from people inside and outside the state. The Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus demanded more information. “Kohen Wiley was a baby,” said state Rep. Kabir Karriem, who chairs the MLBC. “He posed no threat. He deserved protection, and he deserved a future. His family is owed more than a conclusion. … Announcing that a review is complete does not fulfill the responsibility to explain how a police encounter ended with a baby dead.”

The attorney general’s decision followed a probe into the case by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which was “responsible for conducting a thorough and impartial investigation,” as Mississippi Department of Public Safety Press Secretary Alex Gibert wrote to The Intercept on Tuesday. The email said that the probe “remains open and active.” But in a subsequent phone call, Gibert said that the investigation “involving the officer is closed.”

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Gibert reiterated what the agency has previously said: that body camera footage and other investigative materials will be made available through public records requests. But she added that nothing will be released until after officials meet with Kohen’s family. “We are meeting with the family later this week,” she said.

As recently as Monday, however, the family maintained they had received no communication from the state. Kohen’s grandmother, Veronica Roberson, told Mississippi Today that she found out about the attorney general’s decision on Facebook and that no one had reached out. The outlet also reported last month that, although the investigation was complete and on the attorney general’s desk as of mid-September, no one had interviewed Kohen’s mother, Vel’lesiya Wiley, who was holding her child in her lap when he was shot dead by police. This called into question whether the investigation is as “thorough” as authorities have claimed. Asked by The Intercept whether the MBI investigation sought to interview Wiley, Gibert said she could not comment.

The man who killed Baby Kohen, as the child is now known, was identified by the press as Senatobia Police Sgt. Hunter Foster, who fired his gun into the car where Wiley was riding in the passenger’s seat on June 14. The exact circumstances that led to the shooting remain murky. Police said that officers responded to a shoplifting call at the Walmart; a two-page incident log released to The Intercept via a public records request contained no information about the shooting but noted that the items allegedly stolen were baby clothes and a pack of Pampers.

In a video posted on social media shortly after her child was killed, Wiley said she got into the passenger’s seat of the Ford Fusion after the driver, Latoya Ferrell, was stopped on her way out of the store. Police accused the women of trying to flee; according to Wiley, when she saw officers approach with guns drawn, she said, “I raised my baby up” to warn that he was in the car. Then the police shot him. Ferrell was also struck and was hospitalized, but survived.

The Senatobia Police Department immediately claimed that the car drove toward police, almost hitting them — an account swiftly echoed by the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. But to date, officials have released no evidence to support this account. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who took the family’s case, hired an outside pathologist to do an external examination of the child and to review visual evidence. The medical examiner concluded, based on the appearance of the injuries and path of the fatal bullet, that the officer shot the baby from the side of the car, undermining the police’s version of events.

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The announcement by the attorney general has renewed long-standing calls for video to be released. In a press conference held earlier this month, local activist Patrick Lumumba of the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency accused the state of tailoring its investigation to support a lie — that Wiley and Ferrell deliberately sought to strike Foster with the car.

“If video footage would prove that, they would have released it the next day,” he said.

The killing of Kohen Wiley drew national attention to Senatobia, a small city just south of Memphis, Tennessee. City leaders mostly refused to address the killing, save for a brief, scripted video released by Senatobia Mayor Greg Graves a few days after the shooting. By the time Kohen’s family laid him to rest in late June, the police narrative had prompted many inside and outside Senatobia to blame Kohen’s mother for his death, with rumors suggesting that, rather than charge the police officer, authorities would charge the mother and driver.

The child’s death followed years of warnings by Black residents over the police’s treatment of adults and children alike. Among the string of high-profile incidents was the jailing of a 10-year-old boy for public urination, as well as the violent arrest of two sisters, 13 and 14, outside a public housing complex. According to the girls and their mother, then-police chief Richard Chandler personally ordered one of the girls to “get your Black ass out of the road” before forcing her to the ground. And on Mother’s Day 2025 — in the same Walmart parking lot where Kohen Wiley would be shot dead — a female officer forced a woman out of her car in front of her young children for sitting in a handicapped parking space.

In the summer of 2025, the Senatobia Board of Aldermen dismissed Chandler, replacing him with interim police chief Harold Vanderford, a move aimed at restoring trust, as one alderman put it. But the killing of Kohen Wiley revealed that, in reality, nothing had changed.

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Residents of Senatobia, including one former law enforcement officer, told The Intercept that the institutional culture brought by Chandler remained entrenched, with Senatobia officers showing disdain and disregard for the community. City records also showed that the chief had pushed the city to adopt new ordinances that would bring in revenue for the police department, while expanding punishment for misdemeanors like loitering.

At several board of alderman meetings over the summer, Lumumba and other activists reminded city leaders that they’d warned officials about the danger posed to Black residents by Senatobia police. At the same time, Mississippi Today revealed evidence that Foster had a history of racist remarks. Just days before he shot Kohen Wiley, Foster was accused of making racist comments to a Black colleague, who later left the police department. Foster is still on the force, on paid leave.

Then, in late August, Mississippi Today exposed racist text messages sent by Vanderford himself. The text messages dated back to the summer of 2025 and contained more than a dozen uses of the N-word. City leadership initially tried to sweep the scandal under the rug: Vanderford claimed that the messages were created by AI and, after a closed-door meeting, the mayor and members of Senatobia’s board of aldermen announced that Vanderford would stay on. But individual aldermen pushed back publicly. On September 1, Vanderford tried to resign, only for the board to announce that they had voted to fire him. Vanderford was replaced by a Black woman, Senatobia Police Lieutenant Angelica Maze.

In a statement accepting the appointment as interim chief on September 5, Maze did what the police department had previously failed to do: express “heartfelt condolences to Kohen Wiley’s family and to everyone in the community who has been affected by this tragic loss.”

In another statement on Monday, after the attorney general announced the use of force was justified, Maze acknowledged that the community “may have questions, concerns, and strong emotions, and we respect everyone’s right to express their views peacefully.”

With the body camera footage likely to be released within the next several days, a new round of waiting begins in Senatobia. In the meantime, the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency released a statement on social media.

“This was never just a news story for us. It was personal – many of us are residents of Senatobia and parents of vulnerable children. … We are also human beings who need time to grieve, reflect, and process everything that has transpired.”

The post Kohen Wiley’s Family Says Investigators Didn’t Contact Them Before Concluding Cops Did No Wrong appeared first on The Intercept.

Hegseth’s plan apparently won’t come to fruition. Amid outcry about the barbarity and optics of streaming the planned execution by firing squad — scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood — President Donald Trump on Thursday called off the broadcast. “I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump posted on his social media website.

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Some news outlets, such as The New York Times, framed the planned killing as an aberration, claiming that “such a broadcast has little precedent, and releasing video of executions is most often associated with extremist militant groups like the Islamic State.” This narrative, however, overlooks a forgotten American cultural history in which filmed executions turned government killings into spectacle.

The practice of filming executions in America is effectively as old as cinema itself.

In 1897, a few years after the first motion pictures began to be exhibited in the United States, a Missouri farmhand named William Carr was convicted of murdering his daughter and sentenced to death by hanging. Filmmaker Frederick Guth, of the American Phonographic Company, who had previously recorded an interview with Carr in prison, opted to film the execution as well — marking a grim milestone as history’s first filmed execution. The resulting motion picture, “The Hanging of William Carr” (1897), was first exhibited in Kansas City and St. Louis, then screened around the country.

The following year saw the nationwide premiere of “An Execution by Hanging,” otherwise known as “Execution of Negro at County Jail, Jacksonville, Fla” (1898). It showed the hanging of Edward Heinson, who was convicted and sentenced to death for criminal assault of a 14-year-old white girl. Illustrating racist views that have long shaped the American criminal legal system and the death penalty, the catalog of the film’s production company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, teased the film as depicting “a very ghastly, but very interesting subject.”

As these early films were distributed across the nation, they were met with interest and outcry. The journal Phonoscope at the time described the filming of Carr’s execution as “revolting,” while the Cleveland Leader cautioned that the film may have “brutalizing effects” on viewers. Some newspapers even claimed that during the hanging of Carr, Guth had hired people to storm the gallows to create added pandemonium.

Soon, the burgeoning cinema industry came to adopt a different practice for the growing number of films about executions. Filmmakers started blending reality with fiction, by combining clips recorded at actual execution locations with fictionalized reenactments of the killings themselves.

For instance, after Thomas Edison’s Edison Studios failed to gain permission from the authorities to film the actual execution by electrocution of President William McKinley’s assassin, filmmakers combined exterior location shots on the day of the killing with footage of a mannequin to depict the actual death in “Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison” (1901).

Edison was no stranger to the format: He had previously produced numerous historical execution reenactments like “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots” (1895) and “The Execution of Joan of Arc” (1895). His studio also dabbled in zoosadistic entertainment, with films showcasing actual animal deaths, such as “Electrocuting an Elephant” (1903), which presented an elephant named Topsy being put to death for killing a spectator who had burnt her trunk with a cigar.

In 1905, American Mutoscope reused the title of its earlier film, “An Execution by Hanging,” this time depicting a reenactment of the hanging of Mary Rogers, who was convicted of killing her husband (alternate title “Execution of a Murderess”). Along with what were apparently genuine location shots, American Mutoscope incorporated reenactments of the moment of death. The film was released as part of a trilogy, including “Reading the Death Sentence” and “Reprieve from the Scaffold,” with the third installment presenting an alternate fictional ending in which Rogers was not killed.

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Other films around the turn of the century used a similar technique to conflate reality and fiction, with film catalogs accentuating the lurid nature of these pictures. The description of “Beheading a Chinese Prisoner” (1900) in the Lubin production company catalog reads: “The executioner displays the head to the spectators to serve as a warning for evil doers. Very exciting.” Lubin had also earlier produced another execution reenactment, “Execution of the Spanish Spy” (1898).

Many films focused on executions carried out by mobs rather than the government. There was “Edison’s Lynching Scene,” also known as “Lynching of a Horse-Thief” and more coyly as “A Frontier Scene” (1898), as well as “Lynching Scene: A Genuine Lynching Scene,” also known as “Lynching Scene at Paris, Texas” (1897) from the International Film Company, and “A Lynching at Cripple Creek,” otherwise known as “Tracked by Bloodhounds” (1904).

The motion picture camera, of course, wasn’t the only new technology at that time shifting the public’s perception of execution. When William Kemmler was killed in the first electric chair execution in New York in 1890, the American media heralded a “new era in capital punishment.” Witnessing the new death technology, even in reenactment form, would prove to be a fascination for filmgoers over the years.

“Death in the Electric Chair at Sing Sing” (1902), the final installment in American Mutoscope’s five-part “A Career of Crime” series, is described in the company’s 1902 catalog as “an accurate and thrilling representation of an electric execution at Sing Sing.”

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As the novelty of new execution methods wore off, their cinematic popularity likewise began to taper, though film promoters occasionally used the electric chair as a prop outside the cinema to attract moviegoers in the 1930s. At the same time, as the practice of public hangings faded in the U.S. and executions moved indoors, authorities began restricting access to death chambers to select groups of family members, victims’ relations, official personnel, and chosen media. It’s a practice that continues to this day, preventing actual recordings of executions from reaching the public.

With the advent of grindhouse exploitation cinema in the 1970s and the home video boom of the 1980s, however, the American entertainment industry once again found a way to court audiences by depicting executions. 

Taking up the mantle of films that blended real footage and reenacted execution scenes were movies like “The Electric Chair” (1976), whose theatrical promotional materials prominently featured the titular chair and touted that “scenes in this picture were filmed in an actual death house. What you will see is real.” The infamous shockumentary “Faces of Death” (1978), whose marketing material similarly emphasized its staged electrocution scene, enticed viewers to “experience the graphic reality of DEATH, close-up.”

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In the bloody wake of “Faces of Death” came a seemingly endless parade of straight-to-video death compilations, spanning from the late 1970s to the mid-2010s, which made death something to be consumed in private in the home, versus as theatrical spectacle. The films, which spliced together clips of executions with other atrocities, have titles such as “Dying: Last Seconds of Life” (1988) and “Executions 2001” (2001).

“Death Watch,” a typical entry in the genre released on VHS in the late ’90s or early ’00s, adequately summed up its genre: “unedited first-hand footage of death, vivisection, autopsy, cremations, suicides, tortures, decapitations, state and governmental executions, animal ingestion of humans, as well as human limb extraction.” Its cover featured an electric chair, echoing the posters promoting films such as “The Electric Chair” (1976) and “Death in the Electric Chair at Sing Sing” (1902).

When Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging on December 30, 2006, a security guard used his cellphone to record the execution. The phone video was promptly released on DVD in the U.S. under the title “Sad Damn! Who’s Sane?” Though still listed on online retailers like Amazon, the DVD is now long out of print, much like turn-of-the-century execution films.

The proposal to livestream Hasan’s firing squad execution would have, in some ways, marked a significant change in course. The killing would have been the first known execution to be recorded and disseminated by the government itself, rather than a film studio. Critics lambasted Hegseth’s plan as violent propaganda that could invite similar brutality against American prisoners abroad. Trump himself reportedly expressed hesitation about the imagery, fearing footage of the U.S. military killing Hasan, who uses a wheelchair after injuries during the Fort Hood shooting, might result in him being celebrated as a martyr.

The post America’s Sordid History of Filming Executions as Entertainment appeared first on The Intercept.

After being detained for five days in an airport hotel, a mother filed suit against a longtime Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractor on behalf of herself and her now 23-month-old son, alleging false imprisonment among other counts.

The lawsuit was filed on September 29, more than a year after an investigation by Injustice Watch and The Intercept revealed MVM Inc. had confined Valentina Galvis, an asylum-seeker from Colombia, and her then seven-month-old infant, a U.S. citizen, in a room at the Sonesta Chicago O’Hare Airport Rosemont last summer. In that reporting, Galvis had described her captivity in stark terms, detailing how she and her son were locked in a room with no way to communicate with the outside world and no idea when, if ever, they would be set free.

Galvis is seeking monetary damages for the alleged harm and injury she and her child suffered as a result of the detention following their arrest by ICE at a Chicago immigration court in June 2025. Galvis named the Sonesta International Hotels Corporation and affiliated companies that own and operate the hotel as defendants in the complaint. 

The lawsuit also named five Sonesta and two MVM executives and employees. It identifies JoAnna Granado as the MVM employee who transported Galvis and her son from the hotel to a federal office in Chicago on the day they were released, drawing on the original reporting in which Granado confirmed she was involved in the family’s detention.

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Granado and other individuals named in the suit couldn’t be reached for comment. MVM didn’t respond to questions about the lawsuit. During the original investigation, Sonesta said that it “does not condone illegal behavior of any kind” at its hotels. The company declined to comment on the lawsuit. 

The suit accused both the ICE contractor and the hotel of detaining Galvis and her child for profit, and alleged the companies engaged in a civil conspiracy by working together to use the hotel room as a detention cell.

“MVM, a federal contractor, physically seized, transported, and confined Ms. Galvis and her infant son,” the suit claimed. “Sonesta knowingly provided and maintained the hotel room used as a makeshift detention cell, profiting from the arrangement while a mother and her infant were locked inside.” 

The suit seeks more than $50,000 in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages, and demands a jury trial.

In the complaint, Galvis alleged that her detention at MVM’s hands caused her and her baby a range of physical, emotional, and caregiving harm. Her son had just recently started transitioning to solid foods before the pair were seized by ICE; the suit alleged the infant was provided only scraps of food that were nutritionally inadequate for his age. Meanwhile, confinement-induced stress caused Galvis to decrease her breastmilk production at a time when her son needed it most. 

Her baby suffered sleep disturbance and a worsening skin condition, the lawsuit claimed. While MVM had given Galvis an adequate change of clothing, the garments provided for her baby didn’t fit him. Because no laundry service was available, Galvis “washed [the infant’s] clothing in the bathroom sink multiple times,” she stated in an affidavit filed with the court, hanging “the wet clothes near the bed where the air conditioning would dry them quickly.” The infant wore only diapers while his clothes were being washed, and left the hotel on a Tuesday wearing the same outfit he’d worn since he and Galvis were detained by ICE the previous Thursday, according to the affidavit.

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In court documents, Galvis alleged MVM confined her and her infant to a room near O’Hare International Airport. Galvis said she was sometimes told she would be taken to a Texas detention center and, on one occasion, that she would be deported to Colombia. She was released by MVM after a federal judge ordered that Galvis and her baby couldn’t be removed from Illinois. 

The practice of using hotel rooms as makeshift detention sites has drawn little media attention; far more scrutiny has centered on conditions inside the growing network of ICE detention centers around the country. An inspector general’s report published last month found that ICE had failed to manage its detention space contracts. When asked about it at a September 30 press conference, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended facility conditions, saying detention centers meet and often exceed federal standards — and that comfort isn’t the department’s priority.

“We’re not providing Holiday Inns,” said Mullin.

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While ICE agents don’t generally place people in hotels, the agency contracts with MVM to transport immigrant children and families; the contractor sometimes places them in hotel rooms across the U.S. Since fiscal year 2020, MVM has received more than $1.3 billion in ICE contracts, much of it for transporting families. 

The lawsuit doesn’t name the federal government as a defendant. 

William G. McLean III, who represents Galvis and her baby, underscored the companies’ role in their confinement. “The corporate defendants in this case unlawfully imprisoned and permanently traumatized my clients,” he said, “over five terrifying days after the Department of Homeland Security illegally arrested them.”

Galvis remains at risk of deportation — a final decision on her asylum claim is still pending in immigration court. She’s currently in therapy after an evaluation determined she’s experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the detention.  

“I isolate myself to avoid anything that reminds me of what happened. I stay home and I do not go outside unless I really need to,” she said in an affidavit. 

“Even now, when I go out, I get very nervous, and I feel terror.”

The post Mother Sues ICE Contractor for Jailing Her and Her Baby in a Hotel Room appeared first on The Intercept.

In the mode of historic fascist regimes, President Donald Trump’s administration sent federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid the home of a political opponent, singled out for her race and religion, in a transparent effort to strip her of her citizenship.

On Monday, agents with Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative wing, conducted a search of the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with federal officials describing the incursion as part of “an ongoing federal criminal investigation.”

HSI was previously known for targeting human traffickers, drug smugglers, and war criminals. But under the second Trump administration, the unit has been increasingly focused on investigating protesters and immigration fraud.

That latter category is exactly what Trump administration officials have been prejudiciously applying to Omar for months. In March, Vice President JD Vance said, “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America.”

And, last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that “something is going to happen” on the Omar case, with immigration czar Tom Homan confirming an investigation.

The ICE raid against Omar, however, is an extremist escalation in Trump’s long-running threats to denaturalize the member of Congress, who was born in Somalia but came to the U.S. as a refugee when she was a young child. Omar, who has denied the repeated allegations of immigration fraud, is on the ballot for reelection in November.

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Not only does the raid send a chill to all naturalized citizens who, like Omar, oppose the Trump regime, it is also one of the most ominous signs to date of how dangerous Trump and his acolytes can get in the next two years.

With his popularity tanking and his grip on power growing tenuous, Trump is becoming a flailing tyrant. Meanwhile, he has been granted extraordinary executive power by a loyalist Supreme Court and has purged the federal government of practically all checks and balances. It’s a recipe for immense harm.

A Nakedly Fascist Move

Debates about whether the Trump regime qualifies as fascist are old, tired, and not worth retreading here.

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There can be little doubt, though, that targeting a racialized political opponent for deportation three weeks before an election is a nakedly fascist move — especially in the context of the far right’s evermore vitriolic attacks on Somali communities nationwide.

“Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last week. “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”

 It was nothing short of an exhortation to a race war.

As his popular support continues to wane, we can be sure that the president and his white supremacist Cabinet will marshal the force of the federal government in even more fascistic ways.

Many means of stopping Trump have been defanged, as the raid itself makes clear.

We cannot rely on the courts. The warrant to search Omar’s home, for instance, was signed by a judge.

The judicial system, indeed, has permitted vast swaths of Trump’s anti-immigrant excesses. Courts have also sent activists to prison for decades for attending protests against the federal government. And, while some federal judges and even the Supreme Court have pushed back on some of Trump’s agenda, it is also the courts that have covered the president with impunity. We know, too, that this administration routinely disregards court orders in the knowledge that it will not face consequences.

There is little more optimism to be had on the congressional front. Even if Democrats take back Congress in November, they must reckon with an embattled authoritarian executive with a fully funded standing militia — namely, ICE.

Democrats should unite to stop Trump’s efforts to lawlessly deport a colleague based on a racist political witch hunt, but we can expect little congressional action beyond condemnatory statements. Indeed, all too many centrist Democrats have been happy to throw left-wing colleagues, particularly Muslims like Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to the wolves.

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Elected leaders, from the national to municipal level, should be strategizing about how to protect their constituents from Trump’s worst extremes in the knowledge that he and his allies will escalate further. Impeachment should be a priority, yes, but so too should passing laws to dismantle and defund ICE, among other measures — just the sorts of things mainstream Democrats have refused to countenance.

If not the courts or elected leaders, what then? The answer is clear: Trump’s desperate authoritarianism must also be met by mass popular and militant opposition.

It is not enough to vote in November, then cross our fingers for two more years. Organizers on the front lines defending immigrant neighbors against ICE are exhausted and need numbers and support.

Activists facing trial or already sentenced to decades in prison for resisting Trump’s regime need ongoing legal support and funding. Readiness is all.

This is not to suggest that we must live in a state of paralyzing fear of an evermore delusional tyrant. The point, rather, is to recognize the danger and go on.

Resistance to Trump, to the border regime, and to racist state violence already exists; it must be supported, expanded, and the subject of an escalation of our own.

The post ICE Raid on Ilhan Omar Shows How Dangerous Two Years of Flailing Trump Could Get appeared first on The Intercept.

There were two types of protests, said Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge Michael McCarthy, who oversaw the ICE agents in a St. Paul, Minnesota, field office who conducted the investigation.

“Peaceful protest is a protected right, and a cornerstone of our democracy,” said McCarthy. “When protest turns into rioting, violence or criminal activity, it becomes unlawful and it will not be tolerated.”

McCarthy’s comments stood in stark contrast with ICE’s record in Minneapolis, where a federal judge had been forced to issue an injunction to stop federal agents from pepper-spraying and arresting peaceful protesters during their enforcement blitz, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

Legal experts, too, had criticisms of the indictment: The Justice Department, one pointed out, had concocted a federal conspiracy out of what would normally be misdemeanor charges.

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In the months since, criticisms of the case have only grown louder. Court filings revealed that McCarthy’s agents secretly infiltrated groups that preach nonviolence, including labor unions and nonprofits. They also wielded subpoenas in a fruitless hunt for financiers of “domestic terrorism,” taking a cue from President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 labeling swaths of the far left as terrorists.

The Trump administration has won some success in going after left-wing protesters under NSPM-7, but the Minneapolis case is proving to be more challenging.

In other prosecutions targeting activists, like the Prairieland case in Texas, mainstream groups have shied away from supporting the defendants. In Minnesota, though, groups once wary of being associated with the 15 defendants, many of whom are self-described anarchists, have rallied to their side.

Powerful labor unions that make up the backbone of the state’s progressive movement have raised funds on behalf of the defendants, incensed at the infiltration from federal undercover agents. Rather than dividing and conquering the left, the case has united it.

Supporters of the defendants, who have collectively come to be known as the Minneapolis or Minnesota 15, recently packed a bowling alley for a fundraiser. On October 3, hundreds of labor union members marched through downtown Minneapolis, demanding that the charges against the activists be dropped.

Meanwhile, the defendants themselves have so far mounted a unified, joint defense; none of them have taken a plea deal.

“They’re trying to split the movement and absolutely failing,” said Emmett James Doyle, a defendant in the case. “There’s been just complete solidarity behind us from basically every sector of Twin Cities life.”

“Can’t Indict 100,000 People”

Doyle’s ruddy face and wild beard would have been at home in Big Bill Haywood’s Industrial Workers of the World a century ago. By day he’s a union carpenter, by night he plucks a banjo and sings songs about America’s radical past.

Federal prosecutors allege that he brought those songs to life on the streets of Minneapolis.

In a 94-page indictment, prosecutors claim that Doyle and the other 14 defendants were members or associates of a group called Direct Action Minnesota that “infiltrated and exploited lawful protests” to target ICE.

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Prosecutors painted a dark picture of DAMN. Their tactics allegedly included blocking access to a federal building used by ICE with disabled cars or trailers, bringing shields and gas masks to protests, and, in one instance, following an ICE agent across state lines to his home in Wisconsin.

Government attorneys also leaned heavily on the defendants’ comments to each other in private messages about their frustration with more mainstream protesters and the need for “militant” action.

Despite the prosecutors’ claims about rioting and violence at the June press conference, however, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, was unable to identify injuries to federal officers when reporters pressed him.

There are committed anarchists among the defendants charged in the indictment, several defendants told The Intercept, but there was little difference between what they did and what thousands of Minneapolis residents did during the federal immigration crackdown.

Ordinary Minnesotans walked frigid streets with whistles dangling from their necks to alert their neighbors about ICE raids. They sent license plate numbers of federal vehicles to Signal group chats. Members of rapid-response networks trailed suspected agents in their cars.

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The indictment is replete with examples of protesters trailing agents in vehicles, a tactic known as “commuting.” Yet that was a tactic so widely employed by rapid-response groups in Minneapolis that it was even adopted by a congressional candidate in a suburban district who recently won his Democratic primary.

“I think there are people in the government who really do believe that there is like a small cabal of people who are fomenting all the dissent, and if you get rid of them, that everyone will be quiet,” Doyle said. “And that’s fundamentally wrong.”

Doyle, like the four other defendants interviewed by The Intercept, declined to discuss the specific allegations in the indictment, citing advice from his attorney.

Still, another defendant, Treasure Thoreson, was adamant that none of the defendants ever used violence. Thoreson is a special education teacher whose elementary school’s lanyard was still dangling from her neck during a recent interview. She believes the group was targeted because of its radical views.

“They clearly had people that they had identified as problematic in some way and have been trying to tie these people to leading the resistance,” Thoreson said. “They can’t indict 100,000 people, so really, they’re just trying to find people to make examples of.”

“Attack on the Movement’

Thoreson said she has received steady support from her teachers union since the indictment.

She and many other defendants believe the charges against them are a way of attacking Minnesota’s powerful labor movement. By the count of defendants who spoke to The Intercept, at least 11 of the 15 have been involved in union organizing.

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The internal Homeland Security Investigations files unearthed by the defense team lend credibility to this theory. Undercover agents attended an organizing meeting at the United Labor Centre, a building that houses multiple unions. HSI, the investigative wing of ICE, also subpoenaed the financial records of the SEIU and the Communications Workers of America as part of an overlapping probe into “domestic terror financing.”

Several defendants interviewed by The Intercept were amused at the idea that they were receiving funding from mainstream organizations. They have long lobbed critiques at the labor movement’s institutional core from its fringes.

After some initial hesitance, unions and nonprofit groups responded in force to the case. Days after the indictment, some labor groups signed onto a joint statement denouncing the charges. After a court filing from the defendants revealed the subpoenas of the unions’ financing, more labor organizations raised their voices.

“Generally speaking, the labor movement is awfully conservative — too conservative — on issues like this, and can sometimes be scared out of solidarity with people who are fighting back,” said Kieran Knutson, the president of CWA Local 7250 in Minneapolis.

More unions rallied, Knutson said, as it became clear that prosecutors could not point to examples of physical harm, as union locals pressured statewide organizations, and as the defendants themselves articulated why the case was important.

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“These are active people in the labor movement, and I think in many ways people see them as an expression of the movement as a whole,” Knutson said. “And these charges were an attack on the movement as a whole.”

Knutson said he knows the value of solidarity: In 1993, he was charged with assaulting a man wearing neo-Nazi patches during an antiracist demonstration on the University of Minnesota campus, according to news reports from the time. He was acquitted with the help of attorney Keith Ellison, who later went on to win election as the state’s attorney general.

“I know what it’s like to have the weight of the charges just hanging over you,” Knutson said.

The leading candidate in the Hennepin County Attorney race, state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, who also works as a lawyer for labor union Education Minnesota, told The Intercept in a recent interview that the charges should be dismissed.

“I think they’re trying to, for lack of a better word, ‘Trump’ up some charges to continue his pursuit of retribution against Minnesota,” said Frazier. “I mean, look, they don’t like labor groups.”

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A broad coalition of labor groups including the state AFL-CIO endorsed an October 3 rally and march in support of the defendants, another sign that skepticism of the case has gone mainstream.

Hundreds of janitors, teachers, public employees, and hospitality workers joined the march, said Isaac Sant, a defendant and longtime labor organizer. He said seeing them on the streets was “humbling.”

Sant recently joined defendants from other cases with political overtones, including Prairieland, to form what they are dubbing the NSPM-7 Defendants Union.

“I can only speak for myself, but I don’t have any problem linking my case to the Prairieland cases. I think what happened to them was a travesty and a miscarriage of justice,” Sant said. “I think it’s very important that we stand in solidarity with people who are in that position, and especially with people who are getting railroaded even worse than we are.”

The post Trump Wanted Minnesota 15 Case to Be Another Prairieland. Instead, Twin Cities Rallied Behind Anti-ICE Activists. appeared first on The Intercept.

Outraged New Yorkers poured into the streets Thursday night and soon clashed with the New York City Police Department, inflaming a perennial point of tension for the city’s socialist mayor. Mamdani has faced criticism from his left for neglecting to pursue aggressive reforms of the NYPD and distrust from his right for having vowed to rein in the department. Now, as residents recover from the latest in a string of violent episodes in President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants, Mamdani is tasked with shielding his city from ICE and controlling his local police.

“We know that ICE is rotten to its core,” Mamdani said Thursday night, standing side-by-side with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a holdover from the Adams administration known for pushing to expand the department’s sweeping surveillance apparatus. While Mamdani has made his disdain for ICE clear, his detractors argue the mayor must do more than deliver harsh words. 

Mamdani’s rhetoric marks “a great first step,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “But what is the city going to do other than deliver that? What are the actionable ideas that they’re planning? That’s the piece that we need to be pushing more on hearing about, because we’re gonna keep being in the same situation.” 

Legally, there isn’t much Mamdani can do to keep federal immigration agents out of the city. Despite the steps he’s taken to curtail their access to city property or stop the federal government from illegally accessing New Yorkers’ private data, Trump and the federal agencies sending ICE to New York are the only ones who could actually stop them from coming. 

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But Mamdani’s administration could make it harder for ICE to operate in New York by exerting more control over the NYPD, immigration advocates argue. The department later showed up at the protests on Thursday night, and rapid response activists at the scene alleged its officers were speaking with agents from Homeland Security Investigations, which they viewed as evidence of coordination. 

Pete Gizas, director of the White House National Security Council and Homeland Security Investigations New York Acting Special Agent in Charge, was at the scene liaising directly with NYPD personnel, according to two rapid responders who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation from law enforcement agencies. 

One rapid responder said Gizas was there for hours, “speaking directly to both NYPD and federal personnel. He had HSI officers in his immediate area going door to door, getting into apartment buildings.” Another witness confirmed that they’d seen Gizas interacting with the police. 

“If NYPD is in fact an agency that is controlled by the mayor of New York and by the people of New York, then why is a crime scene, a shooting scene, being presided over by Homeland Security Investigations?” said the first rapid responder, who added that they’d seen members of the ICE investigative unit going in and out of the local NYPD precinct. 

The NYPD doesn’t have an official partnership with ICE, which would be prohibited by sanctuary city laws and a state law passed in August. But the department has been notified of ICE activity in the city and shares information like fingerprints with federal agencies, which in turn shares that information with ICE. 

Awawdeh said even if the police aren’t helping ICE detain people, they’re still helping them move freely around the city and carry out their operations.

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“They’ll not cooperate or work with ICE on immigration enforcement, but then when they do crowd control, it does end up becoming collusion because then you’re still helping them do the thing you’re not supposed to be doing,” he said. 

ICE directed questions about Gizas being at the scene to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, an NYPD spokesperson said, “The NYPD does not conduct civil immigration enforcement.”

Mamdani has already faced a barrage of criticism for his abandonment of several police reform promises he made on the campaign trail. Advocates want him to get rid of Tisch, who is widely associated with the “tough-on-crime” tenure of former Mayor Eric Adams, and disband a controversial unit often deployed to protests known as the Strategic Response Group. (Mamdani has said he still wants to disband the unit but has not provided a plan or a timeline to do so. His office and an NYPD spokesperson told The Intercept that the unit was not deployed on Thursday.)

According to eyewitness accounts and footage of the protests shared on social media, NYPD officers pushed demonstrators, including knocking down Democratic congressional nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier. But there don’t appear to have been mass arrests. In a statement to The Intercept, an NYPD spokesperson said the agency arrested five people at the protests and issued them tickets to appear at the precinct.

“We’re seeing both the shock of ICE’s violence, but we’re also seeing this aggressive treatment of the protesters and of the response to people who are speaking out,” said Yasmine Farhang, executive director of the Immigrant Defense Project. 

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Mamdani’s office called the ICE shooting “heinous” and said it “underscores the dangers that ICE operations create in our communities.” 

“The Mayor and the NYPD will review all of the events of the last 24 hours,” the spokesperson said, “including ICE’s shooting; the Police Department’s response to that incident and the ensuing protest; the staging of ICE operations in privately-owned parking lots; and every action the City can take to protect New Yorkers from ICE’s terror.”

The Socialist Stance

Mamdani’s strongest political base of support has directed its ire at Tisch, not the mayor. In a statement from the NYC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose organizing operation helped one of its own get elected mayor, the group called for Tisch’s firing and condemned the NYPD without mentioning Mamdani by name. 

Asked why Mamdani didn’t just direct the NYPD not to respond to protests, NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo said the group hadn’t yet been in touch with City Hall but that the police response fell on Tisch, who read out Belgal’s criminal record at her appearance with Mamdani Thursday night. Gordillo also said it was time for the mayor to move forward on campaign promises like disbanding the Strategic Response Group, although the unit wasn’t at Thursday’s protests. 

“The mayor and we all agree that ICE is not making New Yorkers safer. Democratic socialists have to defeat Trump if we want to abolish ICE,” Gordillo said, pointing to the seven DSA members likely heading to Congress next session, including Avila Chevalier. “The mayor helped us elect several of those people. That’s really the top priority. Because until the federal government changes, the tools that we have in New York City are pretty limited.” 

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In an interview about Mamdani’s policing policies earlier this month, Gordillo’s co-chair, Grace Mausser, said the group was being careful about how it was approaching pushing Mamdani to do more on police reform while balancing the political risks. In light of the shooting, Gordillo said, there may be an opportunity to up the pressure. 

“There’s an opening among the public right now that means we can harness public anger and public support to make changes for the better in the NYPD in a way that maybe felt harder a few weeks ago,” Gordillo said. 

Farhang said she welcomed Mamdani’s pledge to demand that Trump end all ICE enforcement operations in New York City, but there are other, less obvious ways to end local collaboration with ICE. 

“People justifiably are focused on the role of the NYPD at the site of a protest, and those are important conversations,” Farhang said. “But every single day, we know that the Department of Corrections, the Department of Probation, and also yes, the NYPD, they are continuing to communicate and collaborate with ICE.”

City Council officials recently reintroduced two bills that would limit that sort of cooperation. They’d been sitting “for years,” Farhang said. Now, she added, with so many people “unequivocally saying that ICE is an agency whose mission is squarely to terrorize communities, and that there’s no bounds to their violence, we ask people to take that next step and say, if that’s the case, there is no justification for collaboration at all.”

ICE has surged operations in cities around the country, particularly targeting blue cities with so-called sanctuary city laws that strengthen protections for immigrants. 

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“This surge that’s happening in New York City is happening all across the country. In California, in Illinois, in anti-sanctuary states as well,” said Naureen Shah, who leads immigration policy and advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union. “So for any community that’s bracing for or experiencing a law enforcement surge, it is really vital that police departments are not providing cooperation to the street arrests, either formally or informally.” 

Cities and states can’t stop ICE from doing federal law enforcement, Shah added. But, she said, “they can hold officials accountable for the abuses they commit.”

The post ICE Shooting in NYC Inflames Mamdani’s Policing Problem appeared first on The Intercept.

The shooting took place around 4 p.m. in Manhattan’s Marble Hill neighborhood, according to a statement from the New York Police Department. The NYPD said the victim was taken to a local hospital and was conscious, but provided no further information about the victim.

Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., told The Intercept that there was a child in the car and that the child is OK, which New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani later confirmed in a statement.

“This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds,” Mamdani said. “We believe the child was physically unharmed.”

At a press conference, Espaillat said that he attempted to visit the shooting victim in the hospital, but was prevented from doing so by federal authorities.

“I went to the hospital to see the victim,” Espaillat said, “but we were not allowed by ICE agents to go in the room.”

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A neighbor, Iris Rosa, said the shooting happened just as a nearby school was being let out. After hiding in a store for a few minutes, she said she went to look at the scene and said it looked like agents had shot into a car.

The victim, Rosa said, was on the ground bleeding and being held down by the agents. A baby, she said, was in the car and was held by ICE agents until someone picked the child up.

Photos of the aftermath of the shooting, taken by a neighbor and obtained by The Intercept, show apparent government agents in plain clothes and tactical vests pinning a man on the asphalt. Another man in a high-visibility vest is clutching an assault rifle while holding a phone between his cheek and shoulder.

Rosa, the neighbor, said a man with a high-visibility vest appeared to be posing as a construction worker, but as she watched, Rosa told The Intercept, the man took the vest and put it in a nearby vehicle.

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ICE agents routinely pose as construction workers in order to stakeout targets for immigrations.

Representatives of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said the shooting occurred during “a targeted enforcement operation.”

“During the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon and the criminal illegal alien was injured,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “ICE officers immediately rendered aid. The individual is alive and at a local hospital. The FBI and HSI are on the scene. The incident remains under investigation.”

The victim is the latest of at least 25 people to be shot by federal immigration agents this year. In July, after two fatal ICE shootings and a botched arrest in Las Vegas by plainclothes agents wearing hooded sweatshirts, the agency mandated a new dress code for field operations.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she had been briefed on the shooting. “We expect federal authorities to provide a full and transparent accounting of the circumstances surrounding this incident,” she said on X.

“ICE’s violent tactics are a clear danger to all New Yorkers, as today’s shooting in a residential neighborhood demonstrates,” said Murad Awawdeh, the head of the advocacy group New York Immigration Coalition, in a statement. “This incident is another reminder of the unchecked, rampant violence ICE has been spreading throughout our communities.”

This is a developing story and may be updated.

The post ICE Agent on Scene of NYC Shooting Was Posing as Construction Worker, Eyewitness Says appeared first on The Intercept.

Like the rest of the state, the hamlet is about 90 percent white. Williston has seen few of the sorts of large-scale Trump administration immigration operations that have sparked raucous protests. Aside from a few raids against migrant farm workers, there has been little in the way of detentions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The town is, in other words, a surprising scene for the robust protests that erupted there over the past two years, with hundreds protesting against ICE.

The explanation lies in a low-slung modern building with façade of glass and dark-blue ribbed sheet metal: ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, a facility designed to help identify, track, and arrest deportation targets across the country. Along with other Department of Homeland Security infrastructure in the area, the NCATC made Williston into a hub of anti-immigration enforcement.

The protests, however, weren’t initially met with the sorts of crackdown against speech experienced by other anti-ICE protesters. The local prosecutor for Chittenden County, where the surveillance center is located, repeatedly opted not to prosecute protesters arrested at the facility.

As the Trump administration ramped up its attacks against left-wing protesters, however, Williston was not spared. Beginning in September, state and federal authorities have found ways to levy criminal charges against activists.

In late September, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark introduced surprise misdemeanor charges against 13 protesters for allegedly participating in a July sit-in at the NCATC. Then, last week, federal prosecutors unveiled surprise charges against five people, some of whom were already being charged by Clark. The five people facing federal charges, ranging in age from 22 to 80 years old, are alleged by federal authorities to have disrupted operations at the NCATC on multiple occasions.

Activists in Vermont took note of the timing: The cases came as they ramped up to launch a concerted week of protest actions against the ICE intelligence hub.

“Our assumption,” said Julie Macuga, an anti-ICE organizer involved in the protests, “has been that they did this so close to the week of action in order to try to intimidate people, in order to make people think twice about doing civil disobedience, for fear that they’re going to get charged.”

ICE in Williston

As ICE’s budget has ballooned under the Trump administration, the agency poured billions of dollars into development projects designed to expand surveillance capabilities. With astronomical goals for its deportations and a growing crackdown against dissenters, the surveillance infrastructure would provide the agency with a network of spyware for tracking migrants, protesters, and political opponents.

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“What we’re seeing is this really huge increase in access to surveillance at both the national, state, and local level,” Michelle Dahl, an attorney who serves as the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “We’re seeing that play out now in these types of surveillance dragnet centers.”

The NCATC is one of only two facilities like it in the nation. It is designed to rapidly respond to requests for information from field agents by using both open-source intelligence gathering and advanced surveillance tools to scour the internet and trawl social media for leads.

Although ICE has had facilities in Williston for years, significant efforts have been made to expand the scope of facility’s operations under the Trump administration.

According to government contractor recruiting documents first posted by ICE in 2025 and reposted this August, the NCATC is designed to employ at least a dozen analysts to answer requests 24 hours a day, coming up with target information in as little as 30 minutes. The facility operates in tandem with the office running ICE’s national tipline and its National Law Enforcement Support Center — two other major ICE facilities based in Williston.

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Dahl said that despite its location, the gathering of resources in Williston is characteristic of the “fusion center” model designed to allow rapid dissemination of information between national facilities, federal agents, and local police departments.

“The fusion centers don’t have to be located in any place to collect surveillance — that’s how highly networked surveillance is across the country,” she said. “They could put it literally anywhere and be able to access the entire nationwide network.”

“No Real Precedent for It”

As a result of ICE’s expansion in Vermont, the NCATC has quickly become the subject of one of the the state’s largest recurring protests. Over the past year, hundreds of people attended rallies outside the center.

Some demonstrators took up nonviolent direct action. In one instance, clergy entered the halls and blocked an entrance. Dozens were arrested as part of the protests, but none were charged — until late September, when Clark, Vermont’s attorney general, began taking up cases that Sarah George, the state’s attorney in Chittenden County, had declined to pursue.

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“We had been checking the docket and were under the impression that charges were not being pursued,” recalled Roan Wade, who was one of the 13 people charged for protesting at the facility. “It was definitely kind of a shock to have that happen.”

It later emerged that the charges had stemmed from an unusual move: The Vermont State Police began circumventing George and instead took their cases directly to the attorney general’s office. Unlike in other cases, the Vermont State Police never delivered these the charges to George’s office.

“There have been cases that Sarah George has declined, but these 13 cases were never even brought,” said state Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that the unprecedented move appeared to be legal in Vermont. “This type of stepping outside of our normal court system, as far as I can tell — and I also spoke to actual attorneys in the system — there’s no real precedent for it.”

“Extremely Concerning”

The decision to prosecute protesters for anti-ICE activity quickly ignited a firestorm among the Vermont Democratic Party establishment — which Clark, the attorney general, belongs to.

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Within days of the decision becoming public, the state Senate majority leader, treasurer, and a host of representatives, candidates, and local officials all issued condemnations of the charges and Clark’s unusual actions.

“I found that decision to be extremely concerning,” Nikhil Goyal, a state Senate candidate in one of the districts containing charged protesters, told The Intercept. “There is enormous precedent, both in and out of our state, where prosecutors don’t use precious resources to go after peaceful protesters simply trying to stop a fascist machine from kidnapping our neighbors.”

Wade, one of the charged protesters, says that the decision to prosecute is emblematic of wider trends among the national left, who have at times been starkly divided in their treatment of anti-ICE protests.

“It highlights some of the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party,” they said. “The same folks who claim to be opposing Trump and fighting this fascist administration are also prosecuting protesters.”

Soon, the federal charges would come down against the five additional protesters.

The Eve of Protests

The charges, both in state and federal court, were filed just ahead of the beginning of a national “week of action” organized by activists opposed to ICE’s operations in Vermont.

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Organizers say that they expect hundreds of participants and that the protests are slated to be the largest instances of direct confrontation to ever target ICE’s national surveillance center. Some organizers say the arrests are only helping to fuel further activism.

“All it’s really done is bring a lot more attention to the issue,” said Macuga, the protest organizer.

For their part, the Vermont State Police indicated that any further charges pertaining to protests at the facility will continue to circumvent local authorities and instead be referred directly to the attorney general for prosecution. (The State Police did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Repression breeds resistance,” said Wade, the protester. “If anything, it’s caused a lot more outrage.”

The post Feds Charged Activists Just Before Major Anti-ICE Protest in a Tiny Vermont Town appeared first on The Intercept.

“Why did you kill Barry Van Treese?” one asked.

Justin Sneed, 49, didn’t answer, his handcuffs and waist chain clanging as he walked. With a short, graying goatee and long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, Sneed maintained a hollow stare. Inside the courtroom, his lawyer directed him to a chair just in front of the jury box. Sneed sat, his hands clasped in front of him, and kept his gaze toward the floor. Directly across the room was Richard Glossip, the man nearly executed for killing their boss — a grisly murder that Sneed actually committed.

Sneed was 19 years old when he beat Van Treese to death at the Best Budget Inn, a rundown motel Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. Sneed admitted to the January 1997 murder but swore Glossip put him up to it. Glossip insisted he was innocent and, apart from Sneed’s account, there was scant evidence connecting him to the crime. Still, in exchange for a life sentence, Sneed became the state’s star witness against Glossip, clinching his conviction and sending him to death row.

It would not take long for Sneed’s story to start falling apart. Glossip’s original conviction was overturned after a state court found that Glossip’s trial lawyers failed to present critical exculpatory evidence — a video of Sneed’s police interrogation that showed Oklahoma City detectives pressuring him into implicating Glossip. Nevertheless, in 2004, a second jury reconvicted Glossip and again sentenced him to death.

In 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Glossip’s conviction, concluding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. The justices found that Sneed lied on the stand, dismantling the basis for the state’s case. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. “Thus, the jury could convict Glossip only if it believed Sneed.”

Many expected Glossip’s saga to end there. Instead, Oklahoma announced it would retry Glossip for first-degree murder, once again relying on Sneed. “The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,” prosecutor Jimmy Harmon told Mai earlier this year.

Glossip’s attorneys have strenuously objected to the state’s plan to use the same discredited evidence for a third time. They are also adamant that they should have a chance to put Sneed on the witness stand, so that Mai can assess his credibility before trial. It is this insistence that led Glossip and Sneed to sit face to face in court for the first time in decades.

Glossip, now 63, was released on bond in May. He sat at the defense table in a navy suit and crisp white shirt while the daylong hearing got underway. Mai had convened the September 30 proceeding to consider a flurry of defense motions, many of which centered on Sneed’s role in the case. Sneed had been subpoenaed in advance of the hearing, which attracted a gaggle of reporters to Mai’s courtroom. But it was unclear whether he would take the stand.

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Much of the time was spent listening to lawyers on both sides argue over ongoing conflicts in the case. Glossip’s legal team has repeatedly clashed with prosecutors over the state’s obligation to disclose evidence before trial. The constant disagreements have threatened to derail Mai’s tight trial schedule; after initially setting Glossip’s trial for September, she has since pushed the trial date to December 7.

But that too seems vanishingly unlikely. As the hearing dragged on, the bigger question was whether a trial will happen at all.

It was exactly 11 years earlier, on September 30, 2015, that Glossip came perilously close to being put to death at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, only for officials to realize at the eleventh hour that they had procured the wrong combination of drugs to carry out his lethal injection. In the decade that followed, Glossip’s defense attorney, Don Knight, reinvestigated the case and uncovered a trove of evidence previously withheld by the state. He also secured a host of new witnesses who came forward to say that, despite the state’s portrayal of Sneed as a hapless dolt who was entirely under Glossip’s control, Sneed was actually cunning, volatile, and entirely capable of murder on his own.

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The revelations eventually prompted a bipartisan group of Oklahoma lawmakers to question Glossip’s conviction and seek an independent investigation into the case. In June 2022, the law firm Reed Smith LLP published the first in a series of exhaustive reports, unearthing even more evidence undermining prosecutors’ theory of the crime and revealing that the state had willfully destroyed key pieces of evidence before Glossip’s 2004 retrial. The following year, newly elected state Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced his own probe into the case. That investigation found myriad problems with Glossip’s prosecution, persuading Drummond that Glossip’s conviction and death sentence should not stand.

Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction but it refused, once again setting Glossip up for execution. The attorney general took unprecedented steps to spare Glossip’s life, ultimately joining Glossip’s efforts to get the case before the Supreme Court — and taking a victory lap after the justices finally ruled in Glossip’s favor in February 2025.

But just a few months after the high court ruling, Drummond did an abrupt about-face, announcing that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder. The reversal coincided with Drummond’s campaign for governor, which ended in a primary defeat this past August. In the meantime, defense attorneys repeatedly reiterated Drummond’s own critiques of the case, emphasizing that, until recently, he vehemently criticized the same evidence his prosecutors plan to reuse.

Among these criticisms were key concessions Drummond made regarding misconduct by Connie Smothermon, the lead prosecutor at Glossip’s 2004 retrial. At the heart of the Supreme Court ruling was that Smothermon not only failed to disclose key notes about Sneed’s psychiatric history, but also failed to correct portions of Sneed’s testimony that she knew were false.

Drummond also conceded that Smothermon improperly sought to alter Sneed’s testimony before he took the stand at the retrial to make it fit the forensic evidence. At Glossip’s first trial, Sneed denied attacking Van Treese with a knife even though a knife was found at the scene — and despite the medical examiner’s findings that there were puncture wounds on Van Treese’s chest. Midway through Glossip’s second trial, Smothermon wrote a note to Sneed’s defense attorney, indicating that there were inconsistencies Sneed needed to clear up.

“Our biggest problem,” Smothermon wrote, “is still the knife.” When Sneed later took the stand, he testified that he did, in fact, stab Van Treese.

Glossip’s attorneys did not discover this note until 2022. In its ruling, the Supreme Court agreed with Drummond that Smothermon violated Glossip’s rights by trying to modify Sneed’s testimony mid-trial. Yet Drummond’s own prosecutors now argue that there’s no evidence that Smothermon’s mid-trial intervention “improperly influenced” Sneed’s testimony.

In early September, Glossip’s attorneys filed a motion urging Mai to put Sneed on the stand to clear this up. “No court has yet held an evidentiary hearing to determine the full scope of the … violation,” they wrote, “its effect on Sneed’s testimony, and what procedures may be necessary to prevent the jury from being deceived about what Sneed remembers versus what he was coached to say.”

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In a surprisingly candid reply, Joshua Lockett, deputy chief of the Oklahoma attorney general’s criminal appeals unit, wrote that it is unreasonable to expect Sneed to be able to answer questions about the knife and his shifting trial testimony after all these years. “Any evidentiary hearing would be unable to disentangle the source of Sneed’s knowledge” — whether it came from Sneed’s memory about the night of the crime, or from what he “absorbed” from Smothermon’s mid-trial note, he wrote. “That sorting would have been difficult in 2004,” he wrote. “It is impossible in 2026.”

In other words, the state appeared to be conceding that its star witness cannot now reliably recount what happened the night he murdered Barry Van Treese.

Hanging over Wednesday’s proceeding was an uncomfortable reality that has dogged the state’s case for years: evidence that Sneed has repeatedly tried to take back his claim that Glossip coerced him into murdering Van Treese.

In October 2014, nearly a year before Glossip’s near-execution, Sneed’s adult daughter O’Ryan Justine Sneed sent a letter to the Oklahoma Board of Pardon and Parole, urging them to grant clemency to Glossip. “For a couple of years now, my father has been talking to me about recanting his original testimony,” she wrote. “I feel his conscious [sic] is getting to him.”

Among the most compelling pieces of evidence to emerge since then are two handwritten notes, penned years apart, in which Sneed indicated he wanted to retract his testimony. In 2003, a year before Glossip’s second trial, Sneed wrote to his public defender, Gina Walker, asking, “Do I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that.” In 2007, he sent Walker another letter: “There are a lot of things right now that are eating at me,” he wrote. Things he needed “to clean up.” Walker, who has since died, discouraged him from coming forward.

Both of these notes came from Sneed’s public defender file. Ordinarily such communications would be shielded from release by attorney-client privilege, but in this case the public defender’s office provided the documents to investigators with Reed Smith. Glossip’s attorneys argued that there is reason to believe that there may be additional material in Sneed’s file that could cast further doubt on his story.

But whether the lawyers might be entitled to any of these records depends on a key question: Did Sneed consent to the disclosure of the records in the first place?

Over the state’s objections, Mai said she would allow Sneed to take the stand for the “limited purpose — and I do mean limited purpose” of asking Sneed whether he ever consented to his records being released. “I will allow for very limited questioning of Mr. Sneed as to that topic,” she said.

Sneed shuffled to a wooden chair next to the judge’s bench and sat awkwardly, his legs spread wide and his gaze still fixed on the ground.

In response to questions from one of Glossip’s defense attorneys, Sneed said he never consented to the release of materials from his public defender file. But he also said that he met with investigators with Reed Smith while accompanied by the head of the public defender office. Perhaps more perplexing, Sneed said he knew by then that his files had been released to investigators because he’d seen it broadcast “on the media, when it was on the television with the news reporters.” When the investigators tried to interview him, “I just didn’t answer their questions, didn’t try to go into details about anything,” Sneed said, “because I was actively upset about the fact that [the files] were released anyway without my consent.”

The testimony was confusing and brief, an unsatisfying turn on the stand that did nothing to answer any of the long-standing questions about the state’s star witness or how he would testify about the murder this time around.

As they have for months, lawyers with the attorney general’s office spent much of the day pushing back hard on the notion that Sneed should take the stand before trial to discuss the knife, his public defender file, or anything else. In court, Knight pointed out that prosecutors have met with Sneed repeatedly over the last year and a half, and yet have only turned over to the defense brief summaries of those conversations. Taken together, the state’s maneuvering suggests prosecutors are far less confident in their case against Glossip than they have previously claimed.

In a statement to The Intercept, Knight said he was struck by prosecutors’ efforts to keep Sneed from testifying. “For 29 years, this case had been marked by prosecutorial errors and misconduct,” he said. “And now they can’t even trust the testimony of the only witness that says Rich was involved in this murder. But they can’t hide him forever. We look forward to spending a couple of days with Mr. Sneed on the stand at trial.”

As Sneed was led out of the courtroom, reporters surrounded him again as he made his way to the elevators. “All these years later do you have any regrets?” one asked just before the doors closed. Sneed did not answer.

The post The Key Witness Against Richard Glossip Just Returned to Court. It Didn’t Go Well. appeared first on The Intercept.

How much does it cost to get more information about a cop who punched someone in the face?

If you guessed anything lower than $2.5 million, you’d be wrong — at least according to the city of Eugene, Oregon.

In August, the local news outlet Double Sided Media filed a public records request for records about police officer Justin Peckels, which focused on potential misconduct between 2018 and 2026. Peckels has been the subject of community complaints, including for punching a resident in the face during a traffic stop, making the records vital for oversight and their release clearly in the public interest.

The city’s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04. (A separate request by the outlet for similar records concerning a former police officer, Eric Klinko, was met with a comparatively modest estimate of $195,869.52, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)

“Once the City receives payment of $2,484,599.04 staff will continue processing your request,” the letter from the department’s public records division read. “If the actual cost of processing your request exceeds the amount you have paid the City, you will be required to pay the difference before the City will provide the records you have requested.”

Peckels’s file is either the largest in the world, or city officials have intentionally maintained their databases in such a way as to ensure fulfilling public records requests is prohibitively expensive. The city’s response points, at a minimum, to the latter. It justified the multimillion-dollar price tag by claiming it couldn’t narrow the custodians whose records it would need to search, despite the targeted nature of the request, and maintained it must search all records of all city employees, past and present.

By that logic, if someone ever worked in Eugene’s parks and recreation department, their records could contain responsive information about police misconduct, and must be manually pulled and reviewed, one by one.

This goes far beyond incompetence. It’s an intentional effort to make a response artificially voluminous — and cost prohibitive — to intimidate the journalist into dropping it entirely. 

Normally, agencies are required to search the specific custodians most likely to possess responsive records, not every groundskeeper or clerk on the city payroll. If the city were acting in good faith, officials would have asked Double Sided Media to help them identify the most likely record-holders, not take it upon themselves to cast a citywide dragnet as its first step.

What makes Eugene’s money-grab particularly galling is its technology double standard. While it apparently can’t invest in efficient search software, the police department recently signed a two-year $342,000 contract for nearly 60 AI-powered Flock automated license plate readers. This project was so secretive that the ACLU of Oregon had to sue the city for records about how the cameras were being used and demonstrates, among other inclinations, the city’s eagerness to employ sophisticated software to deploy against residents. 

Yet that technological sophistication disappears as soon as a journalist requests public records about the department’s internal accountability process, and simple keyword searches are suddenly cumbersome. 

Troublingly, Eugene’s $2.5 million bill is not an anomaly.

In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.

The same year, the Drug Enforcement Administration told a requester it would cost $1.46 million for records about the DEA’s role in the search and capture of the Mexican cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

In 2019, the Army tried to charge $300,000 to release military base water test results for the presence of toxic chemicals. The Army agreed to waive the exorbitant fee after facing intense backlash. 

The list goes on and on.

Luckily, records requesters seeking federal documents have a defense against these capricious invoices. Recent FOIA amendments aim to ensure if an agency misses its response deadlines, it can’t charge most fees. 

At the local level, however, these protections disintegrate. While Oregon grants agencies the discretion to reduce fees when the disclosure would benefit the public, agencies routinely ignore these provisions.

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For small newsrooms like Double Sided Media, a $2.5 million invoice is effectively a gag order that was never actually about covering costs, but bullying the requester to drop their inquiry (all while Eugene Police Department launches its own “press” initiative to document its policing). It also sets the precedent for using this chilling tactic on any journalist or watchdog as it sees fit. 

Double Sided Media is rightly appealing the fee estimate, and it should prevail. But cities like Eugene will continue these efforts unless lawmakers across the country force agencies to adopt fee caps, mandate public-interest fee waivers for journalists, and require agencies to procure software that allows them to respond to records requests in an efficient and timely manner.

Until then, police departments will likely continue to issue multimillion-dollar ransoms for their records — weaponizing the public’s right to know into another avenue for police to operate with impunity.

The post Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop appeared first on The Intercept.

The reviews found that staff across multiple ICE detention centers mismanaged medication, skipped physical exams, ignored lab orders, and delayed treatments for sick detainees. Detention staff often failed to properly document or communicate the status of their deteriorating patients. In several cases, they failed to provide timely or appropriate life-saving care during emergencies.

“It’s very clear that the rampant systemic medical abuse is a core feature of the immigration detention system,” said Stacy Suh, program director of the Detention Watch Network, upon reviewing the topline findings. “You can’t get well in a detention center.”

At least 56 people have died in ICE custody under the second Trump administration. ICE’s own Health Services Corps conducts a “mortality review” following an in-custody death to assess whether appropriate medical care was provided. The findings of this report are based on medical records and staff testimony. (ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

A total of eight such reviews related to detainee deaths from 2025 were published in a trove of 25-plus documents on ICE’s public records library on September 25. Four days later, a little after a lawyer representing this reporter in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit noticed these documents, ICE appeared to have pulled them offline and de-indexed them.

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While they were no longer available through internet searches, the records remained live on internet archives of the webpage. The larger trove of mortality reviews was first reported on by The American Prospect and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The eight reports contain granular details of the medical events leading up to 2025 deaths in custody of Johnny Noviello, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, Marie Ange Blaise, Nhon Nguyen, Oscar Duarte Rascon, Santos Reyes Banegas, Tien Xuan Phan, and Chaofeng Ge. They provide the most comprehensive view yet into the escalating death toll in detention during President Donald Trump’s second term.

“Egregiously Managed Care”

The mortality review for Vargas, a 32-year-old from Mexico, found several clear examples of what ICE’s reviews called “inappropriate” care.

Vargas had complained of dizziness and blurred vision upon arrival at the Florence Detention Center in Arizona on August 4 last year. His labs also showed signs of uncontrolled diabetes. Ten days later, Vargas tested positive for Covid and was moved to a medical unit for isolation. His symptoms were treated with just a one-time dose of acetaminophen.

When Vargas’s chest X-rays later showed signs of pneumonia, he was treated with antibiotics that “did not align” with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, his ICE mortality review concluded. On August 30, a few days after being released from isolation, Vargas reported having trouble breathing. He was treated with albuterol, an asthma inhaler.

This was “not the right or sufficient treatment for someone at this level of respiratory distress,” said Dr. Katherine Peeler, a medical adviser with Physicians for Human Rights and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, who reviewed the reports for The Intercept.

A day later, the symptoms worsened. He was complaining of shoulder pain, but wasn’t checked for oxygen levels. An employee found Vargas unresponsive later that day.

“This is a case of pretty egregiously managed care,” Peeler said. “Waiting for an emergency is not a way to treat people who are sick.”

The findings appear consistent with a new report by the advocacy group the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project surveying 64 detainees at Arizona ICE facilities.

“With essentially no oversight,” Liz Casey, a social worker and author of the report, said in a statement about the report, “it is nearly impossible for individuals in detention to get any assistance for urgent issues like medical neglect or abuse.”

Preventable Death

Another mortality review uncovered fresh information in the death of Noviello, a 49-year-old Canadian national, on June 23, 2025, at ICE’s Federal Detention Center in Miami. Noviello’s autopsy ruled that his cause of death was a preventable form of kidney failure.

When Noviello entered the ICE facility, he had a documented history of seizures and high blood pressure, for which he was medicated. The intake nurse at this facility ordered labs and allowed Noviello to continue taking his prescription medications himself.

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The labs were never completed, according to the new documents. Noviello was referred to a behavioral health specialist because he reported using one of his anti-seizure medications, a benzodiazepine, for anxiety.

On May 29, a corrections employee flagged Noviello for “a possible hunger strike” and medical staff started logging an increase in depression, disorientation, and poor hygiene. By June 20, detention staff put Noviello in solitary confinement “for increased observation” and confiscated his medicine to administer at the officer’s station.

Three days later, a behavioral specialist documented that Noviello had not received his medication and referred him to a psychiatrist.

The ICE death review found that the provider in charge “did not place pill line orders, obtain vital signs, conduct a physical examination, or document a follow-up plan.” When Noviello was found unresponsive on the floor later, the staff did not “provide effective CPR or secure his body to the gurney during transportation,” the auditors concluded.

Botched Emergency Responses

Botched emergency responses were noted in two other cases.

Blaise, a Haitian national and the only woman who has died in ICE custody so far during Trump’s current term, entered the Broward Transitional Center in Florida with elevated blood pressure in April 2025. Twenty days later, she collapsed.

Her mortality review found that health staff didn’t give her rescue breaths and “failed to initiate” CPR “despite Ms. Blaise’s pulselessness.”

“Between 8:45 p.m. and 8:58 p.m., health staff monitored Ms. Blaise pending EMS personnel’s arrival,” the report notes, instead of actively trying to resuscitate her. They also did not record her vital signs during the response. 

The review of Chaofeng Ge’s suicide death at the Moshannon Valley facility in Pennsylvania also pointed to insufficient medical care, said Peeler, the Physicians for Human Rights adviser.

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Ge’s transfer summary had mentioned a past suicide attempt, a mood disorder, and use of antidepressants, but the provider in charge of his care “did not take appropriate action,” according to the review.

Four days in, guards found him hanging in a bathroom stall at around 5:20 a.m. Instead of immediately cutting him down, they left the scene to first call for help and thus “delayed life-saving measures” by 5 minutes, the report said. Staff “lacked knowledge” of basic life-saving measures, the report found, noting they did chest compressions too fast and delivered rescue breaths inconsistently.

Revelatory Reports

The reviews of Nguyen and Rascon, in which ICE auditors determined that medical care met adequate standards, were nevertheless revelatory. Both men entered ICE custody extremely unwell. Nguyen’s diagnoses included dementia; Rascon, 59, appeared to have late-stage Alzheimer’s, multi-organ failure, and several infections. Both volleyed back and forth between detention and local hospitals.

In Nguyen’s case, ICE’s own medical staff noted that it did not have the resources to care for Nguyen, who was 55, or assist him with his daily life — and requested his release from custody.

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As the Trump administration undertook its deportation blitz, the number of people in immigration detention ballooned, from 40,000 people in January 2025 to nearly 66,000 by December 2025, according to the American Immigration Council.

At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security gutted oversight and transparency mechanisms.

“We’re seeing record numbers of people, including elderly people, people who are pregnant, people who have serious medical issues,” said Suh, of Detention Watch Network. “All of those folks are now being funneled into detention into a system that does not provide adequate health care — and has never provided adequate health care.”

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing difficulties or those close to them, by chat or by telephone at 988.

The post ICE Deleted Reviews for Deaths in Custody That Cited Shoddy Medical Care appeared first on The Intercept.

Rumors were spreading for weeks in the spring of 2022. At Arizona State Prison–Marana, the talk centered on an employee of Management and Training Corporation, or MTC, the Utah-based for-profit prison company that ran the facility. A clerk at the commissary, Alicia Simmons, had been carrying on an illicit sexual relationship with an incarcerated person.

In April, the situation exploded onto the radars of top prison officials. A fight broke out between two prisoners that two former MTC employees who spoke to LOOKOUT and The Intercept later said was over Simmons. After the fracas, according to a state-level investigation, Simmons admitted to having sex, sometimes four times a week, with an incarcerated person. She was let go by MTC and served with a search warrant for her phone and car. The Arizona Department of Corrections Special Investigations Unit conducted an official probe.

According to an internal report on the sexual abuse allegations filed at the prison in the wake of the affair, a high-ranking prison guard at the detention facility prepared a “PREA packet,” an initial recitation of allegations and evidence made in compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.

The PREA packet cleared the way for information about the allegations to become public: Its existence would be noted the following year in a legally mandated PREA audit. The audits must be published by all carceral facilities covered by the law at least once every three years and must list all incidents and allegations of sexual contact between staff and incarcerated people.

And yet, a year later, Marana’s PREA audit said nothing about the allegations against Simmons.

“There was no reported incidents of sexual abuse or sexual harassment reported within the last 24 months,” according to the final October 2023 PREA audit.

Now, a former employee of MTC who worked at the Marana prison is speaking out for the first time about what top officials at the facility knew ahead of the PREA audit’s publication. The whistleblower, Alex Randall, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept that he had direct conversations about the sexual abuse allegations with the warden, other officials, and Simmons herself. Randall said he was not the only MTC employee the warden discussed the matter with.

“I was sitting in with my manager, me, and the warden when the warden told us all about what happened,” Randall said of the day Simmons was issued a warrant and let go from her position.

Randall’s account — including of what prison leadership knew about the allegations — was corroborated by another former employee at Marana with direct knowledge of the warden’s conversations. The second former employee spoke to LOOKOUT and The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. An Arizona Department of Corrections Information Report prepared by a prison staffer on the day of the incident also said information about allegations of sexual contact between a staffer and an incarcerated person was provided to the warden.

The incarcerated person denied having sex with Simmons, according to a later Department of Corrections investigation, and Simmons was not referred to outside law enforcement for criminal prosecution.

Despite widespread knowledge of the allegations and the official paper trail, the warden at the time — Jeremy Casey, who is listed as the primary contact in the audit — verified in the published report there were no reported incidents of sexual abuse or harassment. (Simmons, MTC, Casey, and the Arizona Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

There were at least two other incidents of sexual abuse reported during the period covered by the 2023 PREA report, according to Arizona Department of Corrections investigative reports obtained through public records requests. One was from August 2022 about an employee allegedly kissing an incarcerated person and having an email correspondence with him that was “sexual in nature.” In another case, just weeks before the 2023 PREA audit was conducted, the corrections department’s Criminal Investigative Unit conducted interviews about an allegation that a prison guard had encouraged an incarcerated person to perform oral sex. Those allegations also should have appeared on the subsequent PREA audit but did not.

In 2023, Arizona State Prison–Marana was closed and languished in dormancy until it was sold to back to MTC in 2025 — just as the Department of Homeland Security was looking for more bed space to detain immigrants.

Reopening as ICE Camp

Randall’s insider account of the lapse in PREA reporting and other conditions are resurfacing Marana’s checkered history at a critical moment for the prison.

Last year, after selling the prison back to MTC, the Marana facility is slated to reopen as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. Federal officials, according to government documents, want to nearly triple the prison’s capacity to roughly 1,300 beds, according to a Department of Homeland Security floodplain notice. It is unknown when the prison is set to reopen.

“ICE is pursuing all available options to expand detention bedspace capacity, including partnerships with state and local governments to house detainees at existing facilities,” Fernando X. Burgos, a public affairs officer for ICE, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept.

The plan is facing significant oppositions from local residents and officials who say they are being cut out of any oversight for reopening the prison.

Critics of the plan say the failure of MTC to properly deal with the sexual abuse allegations and other problems, including those stemming from what insiders say were staffing and resource issues, raise serious questions about the company’s future running a massive immigration detention center at the same location. By their nature, private prisons, which cut costs for the sake of their bottom lines, are predisposed to the types of conditions that can lead to abuses like sexual misconduct and encourage shoddy reporting by officials, critics of the Marana facility argued.

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“The whole business model is taking an inherently expensive proposition — the care and feeding of thousands of people, the running of a small city — and skimming a profit off the top,” said Caroline Isaacs, the executive director of Just Communities Arizona, a nonprofit working on criminal justice reform; she is also a member of Pima Resists ICE, known as PRICE, which opposes reopening the prison as an ICE camp.

Isaacs pointed to wider allegations about other MTC facilities, including in Arizona, and said local activists are “very familiar with the terrible track record of MTC.”

She added, “It’s baked into the business model of for-profit incarceration.”

“Holy Shit, I’m Fucked”

Randall, who took the job as an accounting clerk at the Marana prison in June 2021, said Simmons exhibited odd behavior as soon as he met her. He said he saw her emerge from the commissary area “sweating bullets,” even during cool months, despite having no obvious physically straining work to account for it.

Then, in April 2022, Randall said he was standing outside alone when Simmons came rushing toward him.

“She goes, ‘Holy shit, I’m fucked,’” Randall said.

Simmons disappeared into a manager’s office, according to Randall, and in short order, two other guards ran toward the commissary area. Randall said he later learned two incarcerated men had gotten into a fight there.

According to Randall’s account, Casey, the warden, later told Randall and his manager what had happened: Simmons was suspected of having sexual contact with multiple people held at the prison. The fight allegedly stemmed from jealousy between two of the men who were said to have had sexual relationships with Simmons. (The man at the center of the April 2022 allegation later denied having sex with Simmons; in a follow-up interview with the inspector general’s office, he said he was gay. Simmons later denied the second affair, according to an Arizona Department of Corrections investigation.) Both men were placed in segregation and interviewed by prison officials; one was ultimately transferred to a different facility, Randall said.

Simmons was let go the same day, according to Randall and a Department of Corrections investigation. Randall said that nearly all employees of the prison knew about the allegations.

Randall said, “A lot of the guards were saying, ‘Well, this isn’t the first time this has happened here.’”

The Admission

According to Simmons’s own account, she repeatedly had sex with an incarcerated person.

Arizona law says that all sexual contact between incarcerated people and prison staffers or contractors is considered felony sexual abuse because people behind bars cannot legally give consent.

“That staff member should have been referred for prosecution,” Brenda Smith, a professor at American University’s law school and the director of the Project on Addressing Prison Rape, said of the Marana case, noting that such sexual contact may be considered a constitutional violation.

Though the law is clear that prison staff engaging in any sexual contact with incarcerated people is abuse, Simmons’s case is complicated — and raises vexing questions. Simmons admitted to having sex with a person in custody, but she also told state investigators that she was coerced.

The details of Simmons’s case were recounted in an April 2022 investigative report from an Arizona Department of Corrections Office of Inspector General, which was obtained by LOOKOUT and The Intercept through a public records request.

According to an interview with Simmons described in the report, she was asked if she had engaged in sexual activity with one of the incarcerated people and said yes. She had done so “multiple times,” she said. Simmons, however, told investigators she was frequently threatened, including physically, into having sex with the incarcerated person.

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According to the inspector general’s report, “Ms Simmons said she was scared and felt she needed to keep having sex with inmate [redacted] or she would lose her job.”

She complained to investigators that there were no cameras in the commissary room where the events took place.

Despite the threats related by Simmons to investigators, there were “a handful of times she was okay with having sex with inmate [redacted] but not all the times,” the report said.

The inmate Simmons said she was having sex with, however, denied any sexual contact with her, according to the inspector general’s report. That led the investigator to conclude that “there is not enough evidence to prove” they did have a sexual relationship. The case was “submitted to administration for review and processing,” according to the investigative report. (The Arizona Department of Corrections did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the status of the investigation.)

No criminal charges were filed in Marana, Tucson, or the relevant counties, according to an extensive records search. The Arizona Attorney General’s Office confirmed that it received no criminal referrals on the matter.

Smith, the law professor, was not surprised that the incarcerated man denied the allegation of an illicit affair. There was little to gain, she said, by admitting anything. Spurring an investigation or prosecution could cause headaches at the facility or lead to potentially negative consequences for the man in custody.

“He gets moved. He might lose his job,” Smith said, referring to jobs held in prisons by incarcerated people. “All of those things are really important for him to ultimately leave the facility with conditions that are favorable for him.”

Denying such an incident, especially in a carceral setting, Smith said, is “so common for vulnerable people who are victimized.”

Prison With Problems

The Simmons case wasn’t the only documented incident of alleged sexual abuse at the Marana prison. Enrique Olivares-Pelayo, who was detained in the prison for around 11 months in 2011, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept that he had a sexual relationship with a staffer at the prison. After rumors began circulating about them, he said, the employee was fired. (PREA standards were only fully implemented and mandated by the Department of Justice in 2012.)

Manara’s history goes well beyond unreported sexual misconduct, extending to broader concerns about the MTC facility. Randall; the second former MTC employee; Olivares-Pelayo; an Arizona Department of Corrections memo; and the inspector general report all made allegations about conditions at Marana — for imprisoned people and staff alike.

Two persistent issues revolved around the quality of food for incarcerated people and the high heat inside the facility. Olivares-Pelayo and Randall both said incarcerated people had to find ways to beef up their calorie intake because they were served substandard meals. Incarcerated people would sometimes fatten up squirrels with corn chips, Olivares-Pelayo said, and then cook them to eat for extra calories. He said the squirrel meat tasted “like rabbit, kinda mid.” A 2010 memo from the Arizona Department of Corrections found that “Kitchen sanitation was substandard.”

The same memo said that all the living areas for incarcerated people were “extremely warm and humid.” It noted that the prison’s swamp cooling system seemed not to be working, an observation echoed by Olivares-Pelayo based on his stay there. He said the facility often felt like a “convection oven.”

The Marana prison, Randall said, was plagued by widespread drug use before it closed. Drug use came up in the inspector general office’s report as well as in a list of investigations conducted by Arizona Department of Corrections about Marana, also obtained by records request.

Olivares-Pelayo said proper reporting channels were rarely followed during his time there 15 years ago. The prison, he said, was effectively a free-for-all for incarcerated people. Guards did rounds but almost never cracked down on anybody for infractions. Prisoners routinely tattooed each other, for instance, which was officially banned, though consequences were rarely if ever meted out.

Incidents of violence or misconduct, Olivares-Pelayo said, were handled inside the prison to prevent conditions there from being made public.

“People would be punished internally,” he said. “They always covered up their dirty stuff.”

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MTC has faced consequences before, in Arizona and elsewhere, for its prison conditions. When, in 2015, a riot broke out at an MTC-run prison in Kingman, Arizona, a Department of Corrections investigative team concluded poor conditions — citing, for example, a hunger strike because of issues with “food service operations” — had precipitated the incident.

“Based upon the observations and reviews of available materials, inmate interviews, staff contacts and interviews,” a report on the incident said, “the Assessment Team concluded that the inmate population at ASP-Kingman was dissatisfied with their conditions of confinement. Thus, they rebelled by way of rioting.”

Citing investigators’ finding that MTC operated with a “culture of disorganization, disengagement, and disregard,” then-Gov. Doug Ducey canceled the company’s contract for the Kingman facility.

Left Out of Audit

The allegations against Simmons and two other allegations of sexual misconduct against guards were omitted, the Marana PREA audit was certified on December 1, 2023, with a declaration that the prison was in full compliance with all 45 applicable PREA standards. The audit, conducted over a three-day site visit from October 16 to 18, reported that the finding of zero sexual abuse allegations was “verified by the Warden, Chief of Security, PREA Compliance Manager, Investigator, Classification, Health Services Administrator, Random staff, Random and targeted inmates.”

It also found no incarcerated people had been placed in segregation for sexual-abuse-related reasons in the prior 24 months.

Randall, along with the other former employee who corroborated his account, disputed both claims, citing in particular the solitary confinement of the two men who were alleged to have fought over Simmons.

“That was the first time we used our segregation unit, at least since I’ve worked there,” Randall said of the 2022 incident.

He said the prison kept records on disciplinary matters that should have included whatever investigative paperwork was generated from the Simmons case.

“I know for a fact they kept those investigation records,” Randall said.

Incidents of sexual abuse in prison are frequently omitted from PREA reports, said Smith, the law professor.

“A lot of it depends on how committed the agency is to a full audit,” she said.

According to Smith, PREA compliance has gotten worse after the Trump administration last year made significant funding cuts, canceling an estimated $16 million to the Department of Justice’s National PREA Resource Center.

“For a PREA audit to be missing an incident of abuse that multiple prison employees confirm took place,” said Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist for the Prison Policy Institute, “shows two things: One, that the prison is failing to take sexual abuse seriously and, two, that the PREA auditing system has some major flaws.”

ICE Expanding

After the state of Arizona’s 2025 sale of the prison, ICE announced in February 2026 that the Marana facility was slated to reopen as an immigration detention center. The contract had been won by the buyer, MTC. In the contract announcement, ICE included a boilerplate stipulation: “The contractor shall also abide by the March 7, 2014, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regulation under the Prison Rape Elimination Act.” A February 25 federal procurement memo named MTC as “the sole owner and operator of the Marana detention facility that meets ICE requirements.”

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A more recent floodplain notice from the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, indicates federal officials aim to expand the facility well beyond its original 513-bed design to roughly 1,300 beds. The expansion, according to the government notice, will come through the addition of temporary housing, with renovations potentially allowing parts of the facility to open even while construction continues elsewhere on the site.

The plan has drawn opposition from Marana residents and local officials, including town Council Member Patrick Cavanaugh and the community group Pima Resists ICE. The locals said the state government, the feds, and MTC left them out of any meaningful discussions about how the expansion would be managed.

Pima County Supervisor Jen Allen, who has been openly critical of the prospects of a new detention camp opening in the county, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept that the state’s sale was an example of “bad business and bad decision-making at all levels.”

“It’s still shocking to me that the state of Arizona knew full well of MTC’s history: of riots, prison escapes, and cover-ups,” Allen said. “And despite this, still chose their $15 million sale over protecting Marana and Pima County residents from an unaccountable, untrustworthy, and dangerous prison operator.”

Meanwhile, with controversies raging over the swelling numbers of those detained by ICE, the death rate in immigration detention camps has more than doubled since President Donald Trump began his second term, according to recent reporting from Reuters.

Isaacs, of Pima Resists ICE, said that, in tandem with ICE’s widening crackdown, MTC’s record of obfuscating problems should strike fear in the hearts of local leaders.

“ICE clearly has no idea what they’re doing, and they don’t care,” she said. “There could be lawsuits or strain on the infrastructure of the town.”

“Nobody knows what’s going on, and nobody will know — until it’s too late, until very bad things happen.”

The post Prison That Didn’t Report Sex Abuse Allegation Against Staffer to Reopen as ICE Camp appeared first on The Intercept.

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In a filing in state court, The Intercept accused the city of Alvarado, Texas, and its police department of refusing to release records sought under the state’s Public Information Act. The news outlet asked a judge to order the city to release records of police communications on the days before and after a noise demonstration outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland detention facility that turned violent.

Despite The Intercept agreeing to pay hundreds of dollars for the records, the city has failed to process the payment and left the records request in limbo, according to the complaint and to attorney Terry Mutchler, a veteran defender of records access who is representing The Intercept in the case.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and this is one of the singularly most distressing cases that I’ve seen in terms of public access to records,” Mutchler said. “This is stonewalling on steroids.”

“The Intercept cut the check, and now the city won’t cash the check and they won’t give us the records — it’s radio silence,” said Mutchler. “This is a situation where the public officials should be ashamed of themselves for forgetting who they work for.”

A representative of the Alvarado city government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The complaint stems from a request filed under the state’s Public Information Act by freelance journalist C. Frances, who, on behalf of The Intercept, sought records of communications by Alvarado Police Department personnel in connection to a noise demonstration on July 4, 2025, at the Prairieland facility. The protest devolved into an armed confrontation and shots were fired. An Alvarado police officer suffered non-life-threatening injuries in the shooting.

More than a dozen protesters, including people present that evening and others with varying levels of involvement in the protest, were arrested in the aftermath of the incident.

That case against the protesters became a proving ground of the Trump administration’s war on the activist left, ending with hefty sentences for many of the co-defendants, including Benjamin Song, who was sentenced to 100 years in prison for attempted murder and other charges. Song and other defendants are set to appeal their convictions.

The records saga began on February 16, when Frances submitted a request to Alvarado city government for internal and external communications to and from its police department between July 4 and July 18, 2025. Over the next month, amid a back and forth with city officials over the scope of the request, Frances eventually narrowed her request to all email communications directly related to the incident. Weeks later, the city told Frances the bill for the records, including labor hours spent processing and redacting them, would come to $854.17.

Months later, after a back and forth referred to by The Intercept’s counsel as a “tortured procedural history,” The Intercept decided to pony up for the records and issued a payment for the full amount requested in April.

“Despite receiving payment,” The Intercept wrote in its filing Friday, “neither the City nor the Police Department have produced any of the responsive emails, have not certified that no responsive information exists, have not obtained or communicated any attorney general decision authorizing continued withholding of the requested information, and have not otherwise responded substantively to the Request.”

The post The Intercept Sues Texas City Over Refusal to Release Police Records on Prairieland Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

Nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains, just minutes away from Asheville, the center first opened in the 1960s as a “haven for troubled children,” in the words of the press. It was supposed to be an alternative to more severe “training schools,” but by the 1990s was skewed toward punishment. According to former staff, progress was measured in points, which were added or subtracted according to a child’s behavior. Infractions ranged from having “contraband” — including pencils or pens, which were allowable only in sanctioned study areas — to running away.

The system didn’t work for Pike. “She was not following the rules or she was doing something to sabotage herself,” one social worker would later testify at a hearing in Pike’s case. Although her violations weren’t generally serious, they did keep her stuck in place. Most kids stayed at the center for a few months; Pike stayed for well over a year.

It seemed possible that Pike might not actually want to go home. From the time she was a little girl, she’d been hurt and neglected by the adults who were supposed to protect her. Months before arriving in Swannanoa, Pike had been temporarily removed from her home by the state’s social services agency, which found that her mother’s live-in boyfriend was physically and sexually abusing her. Shortly afterward, Pike wrote a letter to her best friend saying she wanted to kill herself. Among a list of reasons, she wrote that she’d been raped by a different man, a neighbor who assaulted her when she was 11 years old.

Nevertheless, Pike stood out among her peers at the juvenile center. She was engaging and intelligent; she earned her GED and became a teacher’s assistant. “Christa was open and willing to grow,” one counselor would later write in a clemency letter on Pike’s behalf. “Though she had psychological struggles and resulting behavioral difficulties, I could see that Christa was a good child who was trying to find her place in the world. I never saw Christa act aggressively or violently. She was trying to figure out how to heal from her traumas.”

Pike finally left Swannanoa in March 1993. The following year, the counselor got a letter from her in the mail. “She shared that she would be visiting Asheville soon and invited me to meet up with her,” the counselor recalled in the clemency letter. But the visit never happened. In January 1995, Pike was arrested alongside two other teenagers while enrolled at a Jobs Corp program in Knoxville, Tennessee. At 18, she was charged with first-degree murder.

The crime seemed pulled from a horror movie — an act of savagery that would become imprinted in the public psyche. Nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of Pike’s classmates, had been lured into a secluded corner of a city park, then beaten, bludgeoned, and slashed with a boxcutter. Her body was found naked from the waist up. On her chest, her attackers had carved a pentagram.

Pike admitted her guilt within days. In a tape-recorded statement to investigators, she sobbed that she had begun hitting Slemmer and just didn’t stop. “I literally thought I was going crazy cause I’d never seen myself act like that before in my life,” she said. Before long, witnesses came forward with disturbing new details. In the public’s eye, Pike transformed from an 18-year-old who committed a shocking act of violence into a woman driven by the devil himself.

Weeks after her 20th birthday, Pike was convicted and sentenced to die.

Pike had been on death row for nearly 30 years when Tennessee announced her execution date: September 30, 2026. In a lengthy clemency petition submitted earlier this month, Pike’s lawyers urged Gov. Bill Lee to spare her life. They told a story of Pike’s upbringing that her jury never heard, a childhood shaped by untreated mental illness and sexual abuse beginning when she was just two years old. They enclosed dozens of letters from people who have known Pike over the years, including in North Carolina.

One of the letters came from the lawyer who represented Pike in her first juvenile delinquency hearing, not long before she was sent to Swannanoa. Now a retired tribal court judge, he was filled with regret. “In my view, this proceeding was the most pivotal event of Christa’s sad childhood,” he wrote. It set in motion everything that would follow. Rather than treating her like a vulnerable child in need of support, the juvenile system had compounded her trauma through more punishment, with devastating consequences.

“I regret to tell you, Governor, that we in North Carolina — myself included — failed Christa,” he wrote. He urged Lee to make up for his state’s mistakes. “She is so much more than the darkness which has followed her from childhood into adulthood.”

If Lee does not show mercy — and barring any last-minute intervention by the courts — Pike will be executed by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on Wednesday at 10 a.m. She would be the 19th woman executed in the country in the modern death penalty era — and the first woman put to death in Tennessee in two centuries.

Pike, who turned 50 this year, has spent her entire adult life at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville, nearly all of it in solitary confinement. Although there was one other woman living under a death sentence when Pike first arrived at the prison, her sentence was commuted and she was paroled in 2011.

One of Pike’s co-defendants was released long ago, while the other, her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, remains eligible for parole. Shipp was 17 when he participated in Slemmer’s murder, which prevented prosecutors from seeking the death penalty under state law. In a letter asking Lee to grant clemency, Shipp’s trial lawyer wrote that he was surprised that Pike’s attorneys had not emphasized her boyfriend’s role at her 1996 trial. “When I represented Tadaryl in his 1997 trial,” he wrote, “the defense I presented was to shift as much blame as possible to Christa.”

Like many women condemned to die, Pike became an object of lurid fascination. In 1998, after Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker, interview requests poured in from talk shows, filmmakers, and journalists all over the world, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel, which compared the level of interest to that of the late Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. Pike, the newspaper said, “has become a death-row celebrity, a child star of the true-crime beat.”

The article described Pike as a “savvy subject,” a kinder version of an accusation that has followed Pike from the start: that she reveled in her notoriety while showing no signs of remorse. For many people, including Slemmer’s mother, who plans to witness Pike’s execution, the image of an unrepentant killer basking in attention has remained fixed in time. So has the claim by the lead detective that Pike was filled with excitement by the murder. He told interviewers in the 2025 podcast series “Unrestorable” that Pike was “giddy” while recounting what she’d done. “This was the greatest thing that ever happened to her,” he said. “She was just happy as a lark.”

Audio of Pike interrogation’s does not match these descriptions — and numerous people who know Pike say that she has expressed remorse for years. One woman, who began visiting her 30 years ago, wrote in a clemency letter that Pike has matured into a compassionate person who cares for those around her. “She has told me repeatedly that she would trade places with Colleen Slemmer so that her mother … could have her daughter back,” she wrote.

Although the Tennessee Department of Correction routinely denies interviews with people under a death sentence, Pike addressed the matter through one of her attorneys for the 2025 podcast. The older she has gotten, she said, the more she has absorbed the magnitude of what she stole from Slemmer and her family. “She had a whole world of her own that I just jerked her out of. And there’s a big empty spot there, where she could be shining right now. And she’s not.”

Pike’s case may stand out for its brutality and sensationalism, but her background shares much in common with other people on death row, especially women, whose lives are frequently marked by sexual violence and trauma. One clinical psychologist describes the amount of abuse and neglect Pike experienced from the time she was a preschooler as “almost impossible to grasp.”

This history should have been key to Pike’s defense. But like many others condemned to die, she was also tried in an era in which attorneys assigned to capital cases were often not up to the task. Pike was represented by a pair of court-appointed lawyers who were inexperienced and overworked. Neither had ever handled a capital case — nor had her trial judge.

Perhaps most telling, her own lead attorney would end up being one of a slew of people who seemed eager to cash in on the case. Post-conviction records show that he asked Pike to sign an agreement giving him the rights to her story. “My thought was, I would write a book on Christa, the human side of Christa,” he later testified at a court hearing. “I thought to do that I would probably need to get some kind of release. It was one of those spur of the moment things. I drew it up, I took it over, she signed it. Nothing ever became of it.”

“Looking back,” he added, “it’s probably something I shouldn’t have done.”

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There would be no shortage of people telling Pike’s story. Her crime has been described in countless articles, podcasts, and sensationalistic TV series with names like “Mean Girl Murders.” All of them include a disturbing and singular detail that has come to define the case: Slemmer’s body was found with a piece of her skull missing. It would be discovered in the pocket of a jacket belonging to Pike.

“When the piece of skull got out, that’s kind of the death knell for Christa,” a former Knoxville journalist who now creates true-crime coloring books told the “Unrestorable” podcast. “You’re not coming back from that.”

This ghoulish revelation fueled the belief that Pike was driven by satanic beliefs. The murder coincided with a societal fixation now known as the “satanic panic,” in which reports of devil-worshipping cults took hold across the country during the 1980s and ’90s, leading to false accusations and wrongful convictions. Fears were especially pronounced when it came to young people, who appeared to be “dabbling in the trappings of satanism,” as the AP reported in 1988, “whether serious or as a prank.” In most cases, there was nothing to back up the hysteria. But many saw Pike’s case as chilling proof that the crisis was real.

The lead investigator in Pike’s case, Knox County Police Detective Randy York, had attended a training on satanism and cults just before Slemmer was killed. In interviews, he has maintained that the pentagram was the key that unlocked the case; a woman called police to say that her daughter was in the Jobs Corp program and was worried about a satanic cult, which ultimately led York to Pike. But there was a more straightforward link: Slemmer was in the same residential program as her attackers. On the day of the murder, all four teenagers signed out at the same time. Only Slemmer failed to sign back in.

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Regardless, it was Shipp, not Pike, who was interested in satanism. The teenager kept a satanic altar in his room. But as his lawyer would later write in his clemency letter for Pike, for all the focus on satanism, “that was never the motivation behind what happened.” By most accounts, Pike targeted Slemmer because she believed that she wanted to steal her boyfriend; Pike has said she did not plan to kill Slemmer, only to fight her. But there was no explaining such a senseless crime. “We were all just really screwed up kids,” Pike said on the “Unrestorable” podcast. “We were all going through things that no one understood.”

Pike’s lawyers have long argued that the media frenzy over the crime made it impossible to get a fair trial. Nearly every prospective juror had heard of the case. News cameras filmed the trial from beginning to end, which cast further scrutiny on Pike’s demeanor. Wearing modest floral dresses day after day, Pike was deemed to be inappropriately cheerful, enjoying the limelight of her case.

In his own letter asking for clemency, Pike’s lead trial attorney, William Talman, said that he, too, was unnerved by his client’s seeming contentment at the crowds in the courtroom. As he remembers it, she told him at one point that she was “happy,” which struck him as bizarre. When he asked her why, he wrote, she responded in a way that has haunted him ever since. “It was the first time in her life that she could remember so many members of her family being there for her.”

It’s possible that Pike would have been sentenced to death no matter what her lawyers did. But her legal team has long argued that Talman and his co-counsel failed their client in key ways. On the eve of the trial, prosecutors offered Pike a plea deal that would have sent her to prison for life. She declined. Pike has said that Talman assured her that a jury would never vote to execute a pretty young girl — an account he has denied. But he conceded in court testimony that he should have done a better job discussing the offer with her.

Case records show that Talman’s most devastating blunder was his mishandling of the sentencing trial — the single most critical part of any death penalty case. Today, capital defense attorneys are trained to prioritize mitigation, delving into a client’s early life to uncover any history of abuse, trauma, and mental illness — factors that can persuade jurors to spare a client’s life. Between Pike’s age at the time of the murder and her harrowing childhood, there was plenty to draw from. A clinical psychologist hired as Pike’s mitigation expert put together binders of information that Talman planned to use. But for reasons long in dispute, Talman decided at the last minute not to call her as a witness.

At a post-conviction hearing, Talman cited two reasons for his hasty decision. For one, he had discovered during the trial that the psychologist had previously been in a romantic relationship with the lead prosecutor. Although she would testify that it was long over by then, she admitted that she didn’t disclose it as early as she should have.

The other reason, according to Talman, was that the judge ordered him to hand over copies of his expert’s binders to the lead prosecutor, who flagged parts that might bolster their case for the death penalty. “He had about a million stickies, little sticky notes, in the report,” Talman said. He feared that the file would end up doing more harm than good.

In the end, that’s precisely what happened. Talman did not call the witness with the best chance of conveying Pike’s lifelong trauma, while the state pulled the most damaging details from the defense’s own file to use against his client. In his closing statement, the prosecutor described Pike as a “monster that we have to deal with.” It took the jury less than an hour and a half to sentence her to death.

Colleen Slemmer Would have turned 51 this month. Her mother, May Martinez, has often expressed indignation over the attention devoted to Pike. She feels it has eclipsed the memory of her daughter, a caring young woman who helped students with disabilities and loved working on computers with her stepdad. Martinez told the Nashville Banner that she hopes the execution will bring her peace — “and that Colleen can always be remembered as the sweet little girl that she was.”

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Pike’s advocates emphasize that their calls for clemency should never be mistaken for a lack of compassion for her victim. As they stepped up their appeals to the governor last week, youth counselor Sarah Bailey joined a press conference in Nashville, where she said she knew what it was like to lose a loved one to homicide — someone murdered her own son. She also knew what it was like “to have adults decide who you are while you are still becoming a person.” Bailey was convicted of murder for a crime she committed at 16, a devastating mistake that for years defined her “entire identity.”

Finally, she knew Pike. When she got to prison as a frightened teenager, Pike helped her navigate the world around her. “She sent me stamps, she sent me commissary, and she sent me love,” Bailey said. “That said a lot about who she was, and that says a lot about who she has become.”

Bailey echoed what many have said about Pike in recent years. Some of the most urgent pleas for mercy have come from women whose voices are the least often heard. “I’d like to ask that you look past the fact that I am incarcerated when reading this,” one clemency letter reads. “I am an inmate; however, I am also a woman who understands the importance of seeing people as the human beings that we all are.”

“The Christa you will meet today is a far cry from the one who walked through the doors from the beginning,” the letter goes on. “For those of us who have found themselves housed near Christa she has offered hope when there should have only been despair. In a time of pain and struggle, Christa’s small voice rings out to let you know that you are not alone.”

Update: October 1, 2026
After a lengthy delay and multiple attempts to administer a lethal dose of pentobarbital, the state of Tennessee failed to kill Christa Pike on September 30. “Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital,” her attorneys wrote in a statement at 10:36 p.m. “We have not been informed as to her condition.”

Pike was scheduled to be put to death at 10 a.m. for the murder of Colleen Slemmer in 1995. One hour before the scheduled execution at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay of execution to consider a challenge brought by her attorneys stemming from the failure of Pike’s trial lawyers to present mitigating evidence at Pike’s 1996 trial. But the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay eight hours later, around 6 p.m. 

According to media witnesses, the curtain was opened at 7:27 p.m, after which Pike gave a last statement. “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love,” she said. However, Pike remained awake and, after a second dose was administered, became unconscious but could be heard snoring on the gurney. Shortly before 9 p.m., the media witnesses were removed from the room. 

The botched execution was the second time in four months that Tennessee has failed to complete a lethal injection. In May, Tony Carruthers was removed from the gurney after executioners were unable to place the IV lines necessary to administer the drugs. On that occasion, Gov. Bill Lee postponed Carruthers’s execution for a year.

Pike’s lawyers had challenged her execution in part by warning that she was at risk of being tortured. “We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy,” they wrote.

In a statement, Lee said the state would carry out a “comprehensive” investigation into what happened and postponed the state’s sole remaining execution in 2026, which was set for December. “Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” he said.

Update: September 28, 2026
On September 28, Gov. Bill Lee released a statement rejecting calls to stop Christa Pike’s execution: “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”

In a statement, Pike’s attorneys — Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, and Kelly Gleason and Randy Spivey of the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender — said they are “heartbroken” by the decision. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women,” they wrote. “We will continue to support Christa through every remaining avenue.”

The post The “Satanic Panic” Made Her a True-Crime Obsession. The Truth Is More Haunting. appeared first on The Intercept.