On Thursday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested an Ecuadorian man at a court at 26 Federal Plaza and a man from the Dominican Republic at another court at 290 Broadway, both in Lower Manhattan. The arrests continued on Monday, when ICE agents detained a third man, originally from Guatemala, at 290 Broadway.

In legal filings challenging the detentions of the men taken Thursday, advocates with the nonprofit Make the Road New York accused ICE of not only violating their clients’ right to due process, but also of brazenly flouting a federal court order.

The judge’s order barred ICE from making arrests at Manhattan immigration courts in all but a narrow handful of exceptions, while a similar ruling issued on June 23 from a federal court in California applies nationwide.

By detaining the men at court on Thursday, ICE appears to be directly contravening the New York order without yet providing a justification, according to Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y.

“ICE continues to flagrantly violate the law by arresting immigrants who are attending their mandatory court hearings, despite a court order mandating an end to courthouse arrests,” Goldman said in a statement to The Intercept, adding that his office was working to get the men released.

ICE appears to be acting outside the law, according to Murad Awawdeh, the head of the advocacy group New York Immigration Coalition.

“We’re witnessing ICE, yet again, operate in a lawless and rogue fashion and not following court orders,” Awawdeh said. “We’re supposedly a nation under the rule of law, and our judicial branch has said that this agency must stop engaging in this lawless behavior, and they continue to do so.”

In its habeas corpus filings, lawyers from Make the Road demanded that the two men arrested Thursday be released and allowed to continue navigating the immigration process.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for ICE denied that the agency had violated any court order. The spokesperson did not explain how the arrests fit into the exceptions to the ban on courthouse arrests put in place by the federal judge.

No Exceptions

From May 18 until last week, just two arrests had taken place at Manhattan immigration courts; in both cases, the detainees were swiftly released after lawyers and immigrant rights groups mobilized to invoke the federal judge’s order.

That has not been the case for the men arrested on Thursday and Monday. All three men have since been transferred to detention centers, according to ICE records.

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“Warehousing Human Beings”

The Dominican man arrested Thursday is currently being held at ICE’s Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, while the Ecuadorian man arrested the same day is being held at the D. Ray James ICE Processing Center in Folkston, Georgia. The Guatemalan man arrested on Monday is being held at the Orange County Detention Facility in upstate New York. (The Intercept is withholding the detained men’s names because of the sensitive nature of their cases.)

The arrests appeared to end a brief period of calm at Manhattan immigration courts in the wake of the May 18 ruling by Judge Kevin Castel requiring ICE to revert to a policy put in place in 2021. The Biden-era policy allowed for courthouse arrests with prior authorization in only a handful of instances, including when a person might pose a threat to national security or to public safety — narrowly defined as cases in which agents are in direct pursuit of a subject or if it would not be possible to make the arrest in another location.

In their statement, the ICE spokesperson pointed to a conviction for trespassing on the part of the Dominican man and a 2025 conviction for disorderly conduct on the part of the Ecuadorian man.

One immigration lawyer said the courthouse arrests were part of a growing pattern of increased ICE detentions.

“For whatever reason, that order is essentially being disregarded, and we’ve seen a pretty significant uptick in detentions,” said Benjamin Remy, senior coordinating attorney at the immigration protection unit of the New York Legal Assistance Group.

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In the year and a half since President Trump returned to office and unleashed the agency as part of his mass deportation agenda, ICE has repeatedly been found in violation of orders around the detention of immigrants. The alleged violations have been ramping up in recent months, according to advocates and court records.

“We’ve seen ICE have a fairly flexible and adaptive relationship when it comes to the truth and the facts,” Remy said, “and to complying with court orders and frankly to rule of law as a fundamental concept.”

An Impossible Bind

Beginning in May 2025 and continuing for almost exactly a year, ICE arrests at 26 Federal Plaza, 290 Broadway, and another immigration court at 201 Varick Street were commonplace, with hundreds of people swept up by masked ICE agents when they showed up for scheduled hearings. According to an analysis published last August by The City Reporter, a local news site, more than half of courthouse arrests nationwide were taking place in New York.

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Like the overwhelming majority of people arrested in immigration courts over the past year, the men arrested over the past week were following demands made of them by the immigration system.

Both men arrested last week had fled home due to persecution, entered the U.S., and been detained before obtaining release as their cases proceeded, according to petitions filed on their behalf by Make the Road New York. When summoned to court, both showed up as instructed.

ICE has repeatedly defended the arrests as legitimate. Immigration advocates, however, have warned that it puts immigrants in an impossible bind, forcing them to decide between risking arrest by following the law and showing up to court, or losing any chance of lawfully remaining in the country by skipping a hearing.

“It is not uncommon for me to encounter folks walking into court in the morning already just sobbing,” Remy told The Intercept. “These arrests are discouraging the legal process. It’s discouraging people’s fundamental constitutional right to due process and to be able to have their day in court.”

The post ICE Flouting Federal Judge’s Order to Stop Arresting Immigrants at New York Courts appeared first on The Intercept.

Since Trump returned to the White House, DOJ prosecutors have moved to seek the death penalty against at least 42 defendants in 34 cases, according to figures compiled by The Intercept, based on legal records and data from the Justice Department and Federal Capital Trial Project. In at least two additional cases, federal prosecutors have conveyed their plans to seek death but have not yet submitted a notice of intent — the formal legal filing telling the defense and presiding judge that the DOJ seeks to execute a defendant. By comparison, the DOJ authorized some 38 capital defendants total over the course of Trump’s first term.

Many of the new cases have originated in places where the death penalty has been abolished — states like New Mexico, Colorado, and Maryland — as well as jurisdictions where there is no history of capital punishment, like the U.S. Virgin Islands. More than 70 percent of the defendants are people of color, most of them Black.

The spike in new death penalty cases is a striking illustration of Trump’s longtime enthusiasm for capital punishment, which led him to carry out an unprecedented execution spree in the months before he left office in 2021. It’s also in stark contrast to the Justice Department under President Joe Biden, who put capital prosecutions almost entirely on hold — and whose attorney general, Merrick Garland, deauthorized dozens of pending death penalty cases upon taking office.

Trump’s ramped up authorizations won’t necessarily bring a wave of new death sentences. Only a relative handful of federal capital authorizations end up going to trial — and fewer still result in a death sentence. Although executions have been on the rise across the United States since Trump retook office, new death sentences have been on a consistent decline for decades. Prosecutors have become more reluctant to seek death sentences, and jurors have also been less and less willing to send defendants to death row.

“The American public has made a very, very decisive turn away from the death penalty during the last 20 years,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “Twenty years ago, we had five times the number of new death sentences than we had last year.” Although Trump’s DOJ “purports to be acting consistent with the will of the American people,” she said, “those are American juries that are making different decisions now.”

The Trump administration’s death penalty plans have already come apart in many cases. Since then-Attorney General Pam Bondi first started filing notices of intent last year, roughly a third of the defendants have seen the death penalty taken off the table. In numerous cases, the presiding judge has struck down the government’s authorizations. In one case involving two co-defendants, the DOJ has withdrawn its prior authorization. And two cases have been resolved with guilty pleas.

This still leaves at least 27 defendants currently facing capital trials. With Blanche, who was previously Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, vying to become attorney general, there is no reason to expect the push to send people to death row to slow down anytime soon.

The defendants facing the death penalty under Trump have been accused of grisly crimes, from mass shootings to gang murders. But if there’s one thing driving Trump’s escalating pursuit of new death sentences above all else, it is his sustained rage at Biden, who took the historic step of commuting 37 death sentences before leaving office, leaving three people on federal death row. Trump railed against the commutations in a Truth Social post on Christmas Day, wrongly referring to them as pardons and telling the commuted prisoners themselves to “GO TO HELL!”

Upon returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump immediately signaled his intent to repopulate federal death row, proclaiming in an executive order that his administration would “pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” Framed as a rebuke to Biden’s act of clemency, which he derided as a “mockery of justice,” it also called on states to step up their own efforts to execute people — and to try to seek new death sentences at the state level against the 37 men whose federal sentences were commuted.

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Pam Bondi Is Pushing Death Sentences for People Spared By Her Predecessor

A month later, in February 2025, newly installed Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo to DOJ prosecutors directing them to seek death wherever possible. “Absent significant mitigating circumstances, federal prosecutors are expected to seek the death penalty in cases involving the murder of a law-enforcement officer and capital crimes committed by aliens who are illegally present in the United States,” Bondi wrote. She ordered prosecutors to prioritize capital cases involving gang members and people accused of international drug crimes. And in an unprecedented move, Bondi announced that the DOJ would review every decision in which the Biden administration declined to seek a death sentence to determine whether prosecutors should pursue the death penalty after all.

The attempt to turn Biden’s “no-seeks” into capital prosecutions has proven mostly unsuccessful. Of hundreds of cases reviewed by the DOJ, prosecutors ended up filing a notice of intent against 15 defendants who had previously been told they would not face the death penalty. One by one, the new capital authorizations were smacked down by presiding judges, several of whom scolded Trump’s prosecutors for their ham-fisted efforts to win death sentences in cases that, in many instances, were already set for trial. Currently three cases remain in which prosecutors are still seeking to move forward with a capital trial despite the Biden DOJ’s previous decision not to seek death.

It did not take long after Bondi was fired for her replacement, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, to make clear he intended to continue Trump’s death penalty push. In late April, he released a 48-page report by the Office of Legal Policy, which outlined in detail Trump’s plans to ramp up new death sentences and speed up executions. Titled “Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty,” the document again framed Trump’s commitment to capital punishment as a response to Biden’s dereliction of duty — and in particular to his betrayal of victims’ families.

The report included a chart showing Biden’s DOJ’s rejection of capital cases, casting Garland as an outlier among other attorneys general. By contrast, the report devoted little space to Trump’s new authorizations, avoiding entirely its mostly failed attempts to reverse Biden’s “no-seeks.” Nor did it hint at the fact that Blanche, like previous attorneys general, would himself issue a flurry of no-seeks in death-eligible cases upon taking over — something that is standard practice at the DOJ. Death penalty cases are, after all, at least in theory, reserved for only the most serious crimes. “To pursue use of the death penalty in the manner that is set forth in Trump executive order would require an almost singular focus on seeking death sentences to the exclusion of so many other priorities,” Maher said.

While the Blanche report is certainly cause for concern, Maher said a lot of it read as a wishlist more than an achievable blueprint. “The majority of that report, I thought, reflected the Trump administration’s grievances about lawful decisions made by the previous administration,” she said. “To me it was more like a campaign website instead of a measured legal document by a government agency.”

“These executive orders, these memoranda — everything is changing by the day,” she said. “We just don’t know how this is all going to play out.”

What might be most sobering about Trump-era capital punishment is not the way it differs from past presidents but how it remains consistent. In the hands of an administration overtly committed to white supremacy, the defendants chosen by Trump’s DOJ for capital trials look a lot like the defendants who have always faced the federal death penalty.

More than 70 percent of Trump’s authorizations have been against people of color, most of them Black. This is strikingly consistent with the federal death penalty’s overall track record; according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 73 percent of capital defendants authorized for death penalty pros­e­cu­tions from 1989 to June 2024 were people of color.

The racial disparities in the federal system have been well-documented for decades. Yet, apart from the most high-profile cases, Americans are generally unaware of capital prosecutions brought at the federal level since most authorizations never lead to a death penalty trial — let alone a death sentence. This leaves the most dramatic racial disparities hidden from view. Data from the Federal Capital Trial Project shows that, in the state of Maryland, for example, which has sent only one person to federal death row since the late 1980s, DOJ prosecutors have authorized death penalty prosecutions against more than 30 people, the majority of whom were Black. The rest were Latino.

Trump’s recent authorizations replicate this trend, with DOJ prosecutors in Maryland filing notices of intent against four defendants, three of them Latino and one of them Black. (The former three, alleged MS-13 gang members from Baltimore, have since seen their authorizations thrown out by a judge.)

Since last year, Trump’s DOJ has also authorized death penalty prosecutions of four people in the Eastern District of Missouri, which is home to St. Louis. As with every other federal authorization from the same jurisdiction to date, all of them are Black. (Two of these defendants have since seen their authorizations withdrawn by the DOJ.)

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Trump’s execution spree six years ago briefly put the racism of the federal death penalty on display. The eighth man put to death, Orlando Hall, had been sentenced to die by an all-white jury in Texas, where, according to his lawyer’s last legal filings, federal prosecutors were “nearly six times more likely to request authorization to seek the death penalty against a Black defendant than a non-Black defendant.” Co-defendants Christopher Vialva and Brandon Bernard, who were executed less than three months apart, were sent to death row by a federal prosecutor who openly told me that people considered him “crazy” for allowing a single Black man to serve on their jury.

At that time, the U.S. was experiencing a supposed reckoning over race, which made such cases all the more disturbing to those paying attention. Yet the executions had been made possible by a Democratic party that paved the way for Trump’s killing spree by expanding the death penalty in a way that was racially skewed from the start. That Trump’s aggressive death penalty push is no more racist than what came before speaks volumes about what capital punishment has always been.

The post Trump Has Already Launched More Death Penalty Prosecutions Than in His Entire First Term appeared first on The Intercept.

Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.

The months after the October 7, 2023, attacks saw a wave of questionable mainstream news stories about alleged sexual assault in Hamas’s attacks that day on Israel.

It would be years before the American press began to deal with sex crimes against Palestinians imprisoned by Israel as part of its brutal occupation.

It’s a reckoning that is long overdue.

Sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in detention is both a systematic and a decades-old practice — a well understood dynamic that is being put in the spotlight this week in a new report from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, a group of Palestinian and Arab feminist researchers and organizers.

The extensive 188-page report, parts of which were shared with The Intercept in advance of publication, situates recent, high-profile news stories detailing the rape and sexual assault of Palestinians in Israeli detention as part of “a wider system of sexualized and gendered violence spanning detention, warfare, surveillance, reproductive destruction, family separation, domicide, and the desecration of Palestinian bodies” over decades.

The report, “A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians,” brings together witness and survivor testimonies; news coverage; academic research; United Nations reports; and findings from human rights groups, like the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, and Israel-based B’Tselem; along with declassified Israeli archival material.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces denied allegations of mistreatment of Palestinians in detention and said the military could not comment on specific cases without more information about the detainees.

“The IDF rejects allegations concerning the systematic abuse of detainees, including allegations of stripping detainees of their clothes and sexually assaulting detainees during interrogations in detention facilities under its responsibility,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept. “Allegations of misconduct by IDF soldiers are examined and handled accordingly. In appropriate cases, criminal investigations are opened by the Military Police.”

The United Nations added Israel in May to a blacklist of countries found to be committing sexual violence in war zones, citing 31 cases of sexual violence perpetrated in the last two years by Israeli forces against Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The new Palestinian Feminist Collective report underlines that the U.N.’s findings are merely the tip of the iceberg.

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The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé

The compilation of harrowing details from a multiplicity of sources offers a chilling rebuke to those who have sought to discredit Palestinian victims’ claims or dismiss cases of sexual assault and rape perpetrated by Israeli forces as rare aberrations.

Crushed testicles, genital beatings, rapes of detainees including children and the elderly — the report, like a number of the previous human rights reports it draws from, shows that such abuse is, according to the authors, “institutional practice rather than individual misconduct.”

Rape by Trained Dogs

A section of the report shared with The Intercept includes the detailed testimonies of multiple released Palestinian prisoners. A 42-year-old woman arrested in Gaza while going through an Israeli military checkpoint in November 2024, for example, described being stripped, blindfolded, and handcuffed to a metal table and raped vaginally and anally by Israeli soldiers.

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“I felt a penis penetrating my anus and a man raping me,” the woman said, in testimony originally collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “I started screaming, and they beat me on my back and head while I was blindfolded. I felt the man who was raping me ejaculate inside my anus.”

She then recounted subsequent vaginal rapes.

A 41-year-old Palestinian father arrested at Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2023 and held for 22 months in Israeli prison reported, “One of the soldiers raped me by violently inserting a wooden stick into my anus. After about a minute he removed it and then inserted it again more forcefully.”

Other accounts from boys and men detail anal rape by soldiers and prison guards using carrots, bottles, batons, and other sharp objects.

The report also includes multiple accounts claiming the use of trained dogs as sexual threats and tools of direct sexual violence.

When the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof last month reported on widespread and extreme sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli detention, including the use of trained dogs to rape detainees, the backlash from Israeli authorities and pro-Israel mouthpieces was as swift as it was predictable.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs slammed the article as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press” — a typical retort that deems any criticism of Israeli brutality to be antisemitic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to sue the Times for defamation. No such lawsuit has materialized, bound as it would be to fail and risk a court process revealing further horrors perpetrated by Israeli forces.

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Meanwhile, for Palestinians and advocates of Palestinian liberation, Kristof’s report was perhaps only surprising for its presence in the New York Times. Reports of rape, sexual violence, and sexual humiliation in Israeli custody have been widespread well established for years.

Pro-Israel media outlets like Bari Weiss’s The Free Press attempted to discredit and debunk the testimonies in Kristof’s article, particularly those from formerly detained Palestinians who alleged that trained dogs were used to rape prisoners. Such abuse was impossible, the critics claimed — despite the fact that, according to survivors, Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, as well as Nazi prison commander Klaus Barbie, reportedly used dogs to rape and sexually torture prisoners.

The “Predatory State” report lists 10 specific incidents of rape or severe sexual assault involving trained dogs, as reported to human rights groups by victims themselves or firsthand witnesses.

“The shock came when they forced me to lie down, and a dog climbed on top of me and tried to insert its penis into me,” one detainee testified, in a report first compiled by Euro-Med and cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. “At first, I did not understand what was happening, but then I realised that I was being raped.”

“They unleashed police dogs on us again, allowing them to tear into our flesh,” a 48-year-old man arrested at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza told the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in further testimony cited by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. He reported that one dog attacked a fellow detainee and “started mauling his genitals (penis). He bled to death in my arms.”

“Violence Across Decades”

The report authors note that “sexual torture has often preceded the deaths of detainees and prisoners and therefore must be considered part and parcel of the crime of genocide waged against the Palestinian people.”

This statement covers more than just Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza: The Palestinian Feminist Collective report is explicit in including accounts of sexual violence reportedly carried out by soldiers as well as settlers in the West Bank.

“They zip-tied my penis, tightened it and then dragged me all around the village,” a Palestinian man, Qusai Abu-al Kebash, told B’Tselem of a reported assault at the hands of settlers in his West Bank village earlier this year.

In response to credible claims of sexual assault, particularly in Israel’s Sde Teiman military prison, Israel’s defenders have attempted to downplay incidents as aberrations or outliers in the fog of war.

“This is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,” Jonathan Conricus, a former Israeli military spokesperson, now fellow at the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told The Free Press.

He was responding to an incident caught on video of Israeli soldiers appearing to beat and brutally sodomize a Palestinian prisoner with a knife. Conricus blamed “reservists without the right training” who “were called up to be prison guards” — but rejected any claims of systematic abuse.

All charges were dropped against the soldiers accused of sexually assaulting the detainee. Numerous Israeli lawmakers, including far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, condemned the military for even attempting to charge the soldiers.

Reports like the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s further give the lie to excuses like Conricus’s.

“The Sde Teiman footage should have shattered the fiction that Palestinian testimony is unproven until Israeli perpetrators record themselves,” legal scholar and human rights attorney Noura Erakat told The Intercept. “Still the debate focuses on whether individual soldiers received direct orders, rather than how a state has sanctioned, protected, and repeated this violence across decades.”

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Video of Sexual Abuse at Israeli Prison Is Just Latest Evidence Sde Teiman Is a Torture Site

In a statement shared with The Intercept, Loubna Qutami, a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, said, “This report names what Palestinians have long known and what the world has too often refused to hear: Israel’s sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians is systemic, historical, and constitutive of Israeli colonial rule.”

According to Igal Dotan, an Israeli attorney cited in the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s report, “The situation before the war was very bad, but it is not comparable to what happened in Israeli prisons after October 7.”

Dotan’s clients include a “severely disabled” 14-year-old Palestinian boy, diagnosed with autism, who was, the report notes, “reportedly sexually, physically, and psychologically assaulted while in detention.”

Before October 7

The Palestinian Feminist Collective refuses to begin its history of sexual and gendered violence on October 7. The report includes testimonies of sexualized violence gathered from oral histories, declassified archives and historical documents, dating back to the Nakba in 1948, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what are today’s Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

The long history of systematic displacement and dehumanization of Palestinians is run through with sexualized violence — as is common in situations of oppressive, militarized violence and population control.

“‘A Predatory State’ documents how sexual torture is a technology of Israeli rule: a means of terrorizing Palestinians and advancing a project of destruction,” Erakat told The Intercept. “Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.”

With the genocide in Gaza ongoing and Israeli expansionist violence continuing in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, such accountability seems beyond our current horizons of expectation.

More evidence of the sort compiled by the Palestinian Feminist Collective is unlikely to change that; it is not for lack of evidence that Israeli forces continue to carry out war crimes with impunity.

The urgency is to act on the ample evidence we have.

“The report is a call upon all responsible citizens to stay united,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, in a statement on the Palestinian Feminist Collective report, “not just to end genocide, but to fight once and for all this testosteronic model of power that roots and grows through subjugation and repression.”

Update: July 2, 2026
This story has been updated to include a statement from the Israeli military received after publication.

The post How to Show That Israel’s Sexual Violence Against Palestinians Is Systemic — and Has Gone on for Decades appeared first on The Intercept.

The far-right Supreme Court majority marked the final day of Pride month with an anti-trans decision upholding state bans on trans girls from playing girls’ sports. That the ruling from the right-wing court had been long expected made it no less horrendous.

With a 6–3 judgment applying to two cases, one from Idaho and one from West Virginia, the court gave states nationwide carte blanche to discriminate against trans girls who want to play on teams consistent with their gender. The ruling does not constitute a nationwide ban on trans athletes, and trans girls can continue to compete in states without bans. Twenty-seven states currently have bans on the books against trans girl athletes. All those bans — and whatever new ones come into place — can stay in place.

One of the cases was just about a single girl seeking to participate in her school sports.

Pointing to the absurdity, the legal scholar and trans rights advocate Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky, “Just absolutely insane to me how many millions were spent and the massive political and legal effort exhausted just so a state can ban a single trans girl from playing sports with her friends in school.”

This was always the plan for the anti-trans zealots who saw girls’ sports as an easy entry point from which to decimate trans people’s civil rights protections. It’s no surprise then that the consequences of the rulings threaten to go far beyond school and college athletics.

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As multiple critics of anti-trans sports bans stress, efforts to exclude trans athletes also open the door to the abuse and harassment of any girls alleged to appear insufficiently feminine. Genital inspection and genetic testing requirements are the next logical steps — steps that have already been proposed by Republicans in several states.

The Supreme Court majority argued that the anti-trans bans do not violate either Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that proscribes sex-based discrimination, or constitutional guarantees of equal protection.

Even the dissenting liberal justices ceded vital ground in the moral struggle for trans rights. Though they sided with the trans students’ claims under the equal protection clause, they agreed with the conservatives that trans-exclusionary, sex-segregated school sports bans did not violate Title IX’s prohibitions in schools.

The liberal stance paints a telling picture of the decimated state of trans rights. The far right has been able to pursue its trans-eliminationist agenda to an extraordinary degree in part because liberals and even some leftists have been willing to throw trans people under the bus, if not fully align with fascistic anti-trans fearmongering.

The idea that trans girls pose a threat or danger to cisgender girls playing sports remains a myth without any evidence or grounding, conjured from whole cloth by anti-trans ideologues looking for a wedge issue to pass overreaching anti-trans laws.

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Today, the strategies dreamt up by well-funded think tanks and advocacy groups like the rabidly anti-trans Alliance Defending Freedom have again paid off: According to the highest court in the land, trans exclusion in sex-segregated sports does not violate civil rights.

Even more anti-trans bathroom bans and other policies of exclusion from public life will no doubt follow.

Anti-Trans Eliminationism

The West Virginia case was brought by Becky Pepper-Jackson, a high school student who has identified as a girl since she was 8 years old, takes puberty blockers, has a birth certificate recognizing her as female, and just wanted to compete on the athletics team with other girls.

Writing the majority opinion upholding the ban against her participation, Justice Brett Kavanaugh described trans girls and women and “biological males.”

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Earlier this week, anticipating the court’s ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Chase Strangio wrote, “I hope that everyone who, like me, loves sports will pause to think about what it means to exile a group of young people from the social, cultural, and emotional experience of being part of a team.”

The legal arguments for permitting anti-trans discrimination are by now familiar: The bans are not discriminatory, anti-trans bigots say, because they apply equally to those they deem biologically male and those they deem biologically female.

The fact that anti-trans discrimination is unavoidably a matter of sex-based discrimination is neatly avoided in a way that erases the sex-based reality of trans people from existence. Little matter that no current state laws are on the books relating to boys’ sports.

It evidently matters even less to the Supreme Court justices that sex and gender do not exist in the sharp binary that sports bans and other anti-trans policies demand.

In an unnecessary and cruel concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas went out of his way to note, “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe they are.”

This tells us all we need to know about the right’s designs on trans existence, reflecting an anti-trans eliminationist ideology that flies in the face of medical consensus and empirical evidence.

[newsetter][/newsletter]

As New York Times Magazine writer Ruth Padawer noted in an extensive 2016 feature on the practice of so-called “sex-testing” in sports, endocrinologists and geneticists have for decades challenged the delineations and exclusions such tests purports to achieve.

“Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw,” Padawer wrote.

Not that this has mattered to the sports regulators and gender-conformity zealots, committed as they are to the brutal racist legacy of gender policing, and desperately pushing to exclude trans people from public life.

“No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” Kavanaugh had the audacity to say at the end of his opinion, upholding laws designed precisely to ostracize and vilify trans children.

The post Even the Liberal Supreme Court Justices Ceded Ground in the Fight for Trans Existence appeared first on The Intercept.

The Trump administration attacking the right to publish or report information is a given at this point. The president has threatened journalists for everything from questioning the wisdom of his failed war with Iran to touching the peeled lining of his renovated reflecting pool. 

Tantrums like those may now feel routine, but this week marked a new front in Trump’s war on information: Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines he didn’t even write. He’s one of eight defendants sentenced on Tuesday to a combined 450 years — the first prison sentences against so-called “antifa” handed down under the framework of NSPM-7, President Donald Trump’s sweeping “counterterrorism” memorandum to clamp down on dissent from the left.

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The prosecution’s theory was that Sanchez moved the zines, which discussed anarchism and other anti-government ideas, to conceal evidence in the case against his wife, Maricela Rueda. Rueda attended a July 4, 2025, protest at the Prairieland immigration jail in Texas where a police officer was shot. (She was not accused of shooting him or having anything to do with the shooting but was herself sentenced to 70 years.)

But that nuance is cold comfort: It assumes that simply possessing years-old political pamphlets that said nothing about the protest or shooting could somehow constitute evidence of a crime. Sharing the political ideology of the shooter, the government contended, meant Rueda and her co-defendants were culpable for the shooter’s actions — and by allegedly attempting to prevent officers from finding out about Rueda’s ideology, Sanchez shared in the blame as well.

We’ve reached the point in the erosion of the First Amendment where the government considers possession of anarchist zines and membership in a terrorist cell to be more or less the same thing. Once the box of zines was discovered, there was no need to prove Rueda planned or had any idea that anyone would be shot at the protest. 

What’s worse is that this will likely only ramp up the administration’s efforts to criminalize being in possession of information. Whatever you may think of former CNN host Don Lemon, he’s no anarchist or extremist, and the content of his broadcasts bears little resemblance to the zines Sanchez was convicted of transporting. And yet, after indicting him and independent journalist Georgia Fort on frivolous charges relating to their livestreaming of a protest at a Minnesota church, the government sought a warrant to obtain the identities of subscribers to their YouTube channels.

Fortunately, a judge rejected that warrant. But it’s a chilling revelation of the administration’s modus operandi. Lemon and Fort’s YouTube subscribers would, of course, have no knowledge of what happened at the church protest beyond what was publicly broadcast. Their identities are as irrelevant to whether Lemon and Fort committed a crime as the box of zines was to Rueda’s case. The only conceivable reason the government might want a list of YouTube subscribers is to keep an eye on people who watch disfavored shows. 

And let’s say someone who’d watched Lemon and Fort’s livestreams and then heard about their arrests had cleared their browser history because they (rightly) feared the administration might target them. Could they then be prosecuted for concealing evidence under the same logic applied to Sanchez? If they’d downloaded the video, could they be accused of possessing contraband? Would forwarding a link equate to trafficking? 

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It all sounds preposterous, but virtually nothing is too absurd for this Department of Justice. In fact, it’s already argued that documents investigative reporters receive from whistleblower sources can constitute contraband. (It’s worth pointing out that Joe Biden’s DOJ used this same logic when it pursued its own ridiculous “transporting” of information case against Project Veritas for moving Ashley Biden’s diary across state lines). 

These frivolous actions create a catch-22 for all Americans. The more people are investigated for engaging with ideas the administration deems dangerously anti-government, the more likely others are to conceal evidence of their own controversial beliefs — not because they are evidence of any real crime but because prosecutors are out of control. But if they do so, they risk incriminating themselves. 

NSPM-7, which was issued last September, tasks federal agencies with dismantling networks of “anti-fascist” actors, a purposely overly broad term since expanded to include those with “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.” 

Given that antifa, as a singular, cohesive organization, is a figment of the right’s imagination, agents cannot accomplish that task by uncovering a membership registry. They can only do so by identifying people with viewpoints they consider “extreme,” like anti-ICE protesters officers have told they’re being added to watchlists, or pro-Palestine opinion writers they’ve sought to deport. 

In Chicago and other cities ICE invaded, activists and organizers packaged whistles and zines to distribute to residents. Under the logic of NSPM-7 and Sanchez Estrada’s conviction, that is a network of actors engaged in organized political violence. If you read one of their zines, you could be deemed a member of an illicit enterprise, and if you hide one, you’re covering for criminals.

The government argued that the Prairieland defendants are different. One prosecutor said: “People with that kind of extremist beliefs need extra time in prison. They believe violence is justified.” U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, in handing down the sentences, reportedly said he wanted to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.” But lots of people believe political violence is sometimes justified. If someone who believes punching Nazis is justified attends an anti-Nazi protest where someone else punches a Nazi, are they at risk of being convicted of assault alongside the actual assailant, particularly if they have some anti-Nazi literature on their bookshelf? The answer is far less obvious than it used to be.

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The administration has vowed the Prairieland case “will not be the last” of its kind. We must take it at its word. The next one might also involve protesters from the political fringes rather than ordinary Americans reading, say, The Intercept, or watching Don Lemon on YouTube. But what about the one after that? We’re not as far away as you might think. Stephen Miller has called the whole Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization” — clearly invoking the language of NSPM-7. Trump has labeled his political opponents “the enemy within” and the press “the enemy of the people.” 

Whoever said slippery slopes are a fallacy never met Donald Trump. If Sanchez Estrada indeed moved the zines because he foresaw their being used to tie his wife to a nonexistent terrorist network and a shooting, he should be commended for his prescience. Maybe more of us should think like Sanchez Estrada.

Or would that be a crime?

The post 30-Year Sentence for Transporting Zines Is a Five-Alarm Fire for Free Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

The New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, one of the so-called fusion centers that serve as intelligence clearinghouses for cops, warned in a bulletin earlier this year that disaffected Americans were increasingly blaming society’s ills on rich people and corporate bigwigs.

The report specifically cited the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 — allegedly by Luigi Mangione — as an expression of anti-fat-cat rhetoric. To the analysts at the New Jersey fusion center, Thompson’s killing hinted at a larger trend.

“Public discourse increasingly attributes the challenges faced by the middle and lower classes to the actions and influence of wealthy corporate executives,” the fusion center memo says.

By warning corporate security outfits of the danger posed by average Americans who blame their problems on the actions of corporate executives, the report effectively dedicates public resources to securing a private system that has made the few extremely wealthy at the expense of the many.

Michael German, a former FBI agent specializing in domestic terrorism and longtime critic of fusion centers, said that by warning CEOs of threats, the bulletin was effectively taking the side of the rich and powerful over ordinary people who are critical of inequality — a typical dynamic at fusion centers.

“The way it’s written, the report seems to be putting forth the view that that is an extremist viewpoint, rather than something that the state has some responsibility in correcting,” German said. “All the resources of the national network of fusion centers, which includes federal resources along with state and local resources, are devoted toward providing security information to private entities.”

Brian Thompson Murder

The “Quarterly Executive Threat Watch” bulletin warned corporate bodyguards to switch up the daily routines of execs, limit information on public engagements, and remove bosses’ personal information from the web. The report says bosses should “remain vigilant of lone offenders with personal grievances.”

“Following the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the current political climate, there is a heightened threat environment surrounding corporate executives,” the report says. “Online glorification of the murder of Brian Thompson and calls for violence are still apparent and further create a risk for a lone offender attack.”

A spokesperson for New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, the agency that oversees the fusion center, did not respond to a request for comment.

Days after Thompson’s killing in late 2024, Mangione was arrested and charged with the murder, allegedly motivated by injustices in the healthcare system. The then-26-year-old quickly became a cause célèbre for a wide array of supporters and a bête noire of right-wing figures, including those at the Trump administration, who branded him as a violent extremist.

Mangione’s legal team declined to comment on the fusion center report, but has in the past decried attempts to tie him to unrelated acts of violence.

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The report went on to cite a list of seemingly disparate incidents to highlight a possible surge in threats to the wealthy, including a satirical Christmas wishlist that called for sabotaging CEOs; a handful of 4chan posts calling for violence against executives at Netflix and elsewhere; a “far-left forum” calling for a campaign against people tied to a mining project in Michigan; and an act of vandalism by pro-Palestine activists at the home of a New York Times executive.

Another incident that made the list was the federal case against the so-called Turtle Island Liberation Front, a group of left-wing activists arrested last year whose alleged bomb plot appears to have been largely driven by a member of their group who was a longtime paid FBI informant.

“The problem with a lot of these fusion center reports is that they take a handful of incidents, not necessarily related to one another, and use them to justify and amplify these threats without any kind of analysis,” said German. “Rather than actually looking at data, their performance is measured by the number of reports they produce.”

Fusion Centers

Fusion centers, which bring together state and federal law enforcement agencies to share intelligence on potential terror threats, rose to prominence in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The centers operate under state authority, often with grants from federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security.

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While data on any terror plots actually foiled by fusion center operations is scant, they have been roundly criticized for compiling surveillance and data on protest movements, communities of color, student organizers, and, recently, critics of AI data centers.

New Jersey’s only fusion center, officially known as the New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, has been criticized for operating outside the typical oversight to which most state agencies are subject.

A 2023 report by Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights warns of the potential for abuse in the New Jersey fusion center. The report cited the fusion center’s practice of drafting dossiers on “known troublemakers” and its reliance on so-called “intelligence-led policing,” a practice of surveilling and data collection that the American Civil Liberties Union has cited as a potential violation of the right to due process.

The Quarterly Executive Threat Watch, the bulletin that included the warning for CEOs, appears to be internally categorized as terrorism-related intelligence and was later disseminated by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer to recipients across the country. (CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Then there is the issue of the center’s shadowy public-private partnership. The New Jersey fusion center does not make public which private agencies or organizations it partners with, or to whom it disseminates reports.

The January report drew heavily on the work of SITE Intelligence, a for-profit firm that has come in for criticism because of its labeling Islamic charities as terror fronts and mistakenly identifying video game footage as terror propaganda.

Like its counterparts across the country, the New Jersey fusion center feeds its reports into a national network of public and private agencies dedicated to the gathering and dissemination of information about potential threats — a practice that frequently crosses the line into surveillance of political speech, according to German and other critics of fusion centers.

“There is a lack of public accountability here,” German said. “Because they’re joint enterprises, it’s very ambiguous who is actually in charge and who is responsible for ensuring that the participants within these centers are acting in accordance with the law.”

The post Cops Warn CEO Bodyguards That Luigi Mangione Fever Could Spark Class War appeared first on The Intercept.

“The punishment must fit the crimes — not the headlines, not the politics, not the fears that have been mongered about the case,” he said.

Instead, O’Connor gave Sanchez Estrada a 30-year term.

The lengthy sentence was among the eight harsh terms handed down by judges in two courtrooms in Fort Worth on Tuesday to activists who played roles at or after the July 4, 2025, protest at Prairieland Detention Center. Their sentences — longer than any of those received by members of the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol — capped a case that is widely regarded as the Trump administration’s first major victory in its crackdown on left-wing activism.

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The defendants were convicted at trial in March. Prosecutors convinced a jury that the fact that the eight defendants present at the protest wore all black and used the Signal encrypted messaging app supported their material support of terrorism charges. Sanchez Estrada, who was not at the protest, was convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents.

Only one of the defendants, Benjamin Hanil Song, was accused of firing a gun at a police officer, who left the scene with an injury to his neck; Song was convicted of attempted murder. Still, federal guidelines calling for harsher sentences for all because of links to terrorism — which were applied by O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, and U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee — meant that all the defendants faced long prison terms.

Their only hope ahead of the simultaneous twin hearings was that the two judges might break sharply with federal guidelines. Instead, O’Connor and Pittman chose to make an example of the defendants.

Several defendants said Tuesday that they never intended to hurt anyone. Their only hope was to show solidarity with the detainees by staging a noise demonstration with fireworks, they said.

“When I went to protest on the night of July 4, it seemed more like a party to me than anything else,” Autumn Hill told the court Tuesday. “We didn’t expect or want any violence or destruction of property to occur.”

Prosecutors, however, seized on the fact that the protesters arrived at the scene with guns and fireworks. O’Connor, the judge, said several times that the defendants had committed an “assault on democracy.”

“What happened here was not by any stretch of the imagination a protest,” he said during the sentencing of one defendant.

So it went repeatedly in the two courtrooms as the judges brushed aside the defendants’ assertions that they were attempting simply to show solidarity with the detainees inside the ICE facility. Song, the sole defendant convicted of attempted murder, received a 100-year prison sentence.

The other defendants’ arguments that they should be distinguished from Song because they never fired a gun won them little relief.

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The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine

Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, received a 70-year sentence, longer than most of the other defendants because of her alleged role in a conspiracy to commit obstruction by asking Sanchez Estrada to move the zines after her arrest.

Hill, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris, and Elizabeth Soto all received 50-year sentences for their roles in protest at the Prairieland detention facility. A ninth defendant, Ines Soto, awaits a July sentencing.

The defendants’ relatives and supporters said at a press conference after the sentencing that they had harbored few illusions about their likely sentences. They have now placed their hopes on appeals.

The Prairieland case should be placed in the context of a larger crackdown on anti-government protesters, supporters said.

The protest that triggered the case came months before the September killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which prompted President Donald Trump to issue an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorism group and a presidential memo dubbed NSPM-7 calling for a broader crackdown on the left. Following those directives, federal prosecutors upped the charges facing the Prairieland defendants. FBI Director Kash Patel also made clear the importance of the case to the Trump administration by posting about it on social media in October.

In a press release Tuesday, the Justice Department hailed the case as “the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump’s executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025.”

“Today’s sentencings show the FBI remains committed to identifying, locating, and dismantling Antifa and its funding networks across the country,” Patel said in a statement.

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More indictments against activists have followed since the issuing of NSPM-7, most recently the charges in Minnesota earlier this month against 15 people accused of trying to impede federal agents during the immigration crackdown there.

“It’s not just here in the north Texas area,” said Tamera Hutcherson, a local activist who served as a member of Batten’s defense team. “This is also now in other parts of our country, and it concerns me what this means for our free speech, as well as our right to protest. If we are to bring a medical kit to a protest, does that mean we are a criminal now? If we are to even just attend a noise demonstration, does that mean we are a criminal now, and we may not return home to our loved ones?”

Justice Department prosecutors pushed back against the idea that the defendants had been convicted merely for expressing their First Amendment rights. What distinguished them from other protesters was their belief that they were justified in using violence to accomplish their goals, said Frank Gatto, an assistant U.S. attorney for the northern district of Texas.

“The very crux here is their firm belief that the use of violence is justified,” Gatto said during the sentencing of Evetts.

Although the case centered on the government’s claim that the defendants were affiliated with antifa, prosecutors offered little evidence of that at trial. Even Pittman, the judge who oversaw the trial, questioned whether he needed to mention antifa in his jury instructions.

Still, the movement of various anti-government and antifascist zines led directly to the conviction of Sanchez Estrada, whose case stood out from the others because he was not accused of attending the July 4 protest at the ICE detention center.

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Weinbel, the public defender, said the zines that Sanchez Estrada moved were his own and protected by the First Amendment. None of it helped convict the other defendants at trial, Weinbel said.

“At the heart of this case is a simple truth: Mr. Sanchez moved a box,” Weinbel said. “He is not a murderer, he is not ISIS, he is not a foreign terrorist.”

Sanchez Estrada said he still could not understand why he was convicted.

“I am a father, I am a husband, I am a teacher, a poet — I am many things, Your Honor, but I am not a terrorist,” he told the court.

O’Connor said he disagreed with the idea that moving the box of the zines was harmless. At the time of Sanchez Estrada’s actions, Song was still on the run from police.

“What was at stake at that time was a known terrorist was on the run for shooting a police officer during a terrorist attack,” he said.

The post Prairieland Defendant Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Moving a Box of Antifascist Zines appeared first on The Intercept.

The 35-year-old asylum-seeker from Belarus has spent nearly a year at Farmville Detention Center. There, he says, he’s experiencing medical neglect as a tumor grows on his arm. 

“It hurts when you touch it,” Shcharbachenia told The Intercept, holding his arm up on a video call to show a growth the size of an egg. He said he’d lost feeling in the fingers on his right hand, and though he requested to see a specialist in December, as of last week he hadn’t seen one nor received a diagnosis. Instead, as Shcharbachenia attested in an internal oversight complaint to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. government illegally tried to deport him back to Belarus, where he fled political persecution in 2021.

Shcharbachenia is one of thousands of immigrants being held in detention facilities where the federal government or private contractors control their access to food and medical care. Soon tens of thousands more could be joining him, as the Trump administration and Congress move to rapidly expand the deportation and detention machine. And advocates warn that Farmville, purchased last year by private prison contractor CoreCivic for $67 million, has long been dogged by allegations of neglectful and unsanitary conditions.

“Dogs” live better than detainees there, Shcharbachenia told The Intercept. “I want people to know what really happens inside here.” 

The Intercept spoke to Shcharbachenia via a Russian translator arranged by an abolitionist organization, Free Them All VA, and reviewed several complaints he submitted to the DHS Office of Inspector General about the lack of medical attention for the enlarged mass on his arm and his treatment on the attempted deportation flight. When The Intercept called the inspector general’s office to discuss Shcharbachenia’s case, the number was no longer in service.

Earlier this month, Congress approved roughly $70 billion for immigration enforcement efforts. Last year, the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act allocated more than $170 billion over the next four years for immigration enforcement. And the Trump administration has been rapidly purchasing detention centers with a plan to have the capacity to detain 100,000 immigrants at once.

“What we expect is that the mass infusion of cash will only put online more detention facilities that are going to be run as private businesses, and offer the bare minimum at the cost of human life and human suffering,” said Sophia Gregg, senior immigrants’ rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia.

Gregg said that there’s no indication that the administration will manage these new facilities, many of which are converted warehouses and “temporary shelters,” any better than the current ones in operation.

“They’re using detention as a form of punishment as a way to get people to relinquish their rights to remain in this country and creating conditions that ultimately create suffering in order to induce people to elect to be removed,” she said. “And so with that being the goal of the administration to deport people as quickly as possible, they have no incentive in creating conditions that are humane.”

In fact, Shcharbachenia believes he was targeted for just that reason. In May, he was caught sharing “know your rights” information with new detainees, and guards soon placed him in solitary confinement. He was there for two weeks, Shcharbachenia recalled, and only let out of his cell with his legs and arms bound by chains.

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In a statement to The Intercept, CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd said the contractor does not use solitary confinement and instead opts for “restrictive housing,” a term that describes confining a detained person in isolation from other people. He denied allegations of retaliatory treatment.

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

When Farmville Detention Center opened in 2010, its initial owners, Immigration Centers of America, argued that private management would be more humane than what the government could provide. They sold it to the community as “almost a summer camp environment,” said a spokesperson for Free Them All VA, which has been monitoring the facility for years.

Instead, advocates argue they created a hellscape for immigrants. 

In 2015, a guard pepper-sprayed a detainee while he was in full restraints and confined to a medical isolation cell, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement records released under the Freedom of Information Act. In another instance from the same records, a detainee was restrained to a bed and chair for over four days. The “vendor” at the time, Immigration Centers of America, did not deny the incident but said that the action was justified. ICE responded that they would not sanction the facility for the use of force. 

The facility did receive a “one-time deduction” of its monthly invoice after detainees found “white worms” in their food, but only because Immigration Centers of America had posted a memorandum threatening anyone who “attempted to degrade the reputation of” the facility, which the government interpreted as threatening complainants.

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In 2020, detainees initiated a hunger strike to demand their release as Covid swept through the facility. In August of that year, 72-year-old Canadian man James Hill died after contracting the disease inside. Instead of responding to the growing concerns about the spread of the coronavirus, guards reportedly used pepper spray against detainees on hunger strike. 

Then CoreCivic bought the facility in 2025.

“Things since [the facility] moved to CoreCivic have only gotten worse,” said Gregg. “Medical services are difficult to get for individuals, if not impossible.”

Shcharbachenia, who was picked up by immigration agents at a truck stop in Virginia in August 2025, agreed with Gregg’s assessment of the care. He said the facility’s ventilation system is dirty, and it’s often freezing inside. The water is “undrinkable,” he said, and the food is disgusting and “artificial.”

Shcharbachenia, who primarily speaks Russian, said CoreCivic staff have denied access to a translator or any assistance in filing his asylum claim. He said he had received documents related to his claims while in detention, but without a translator, he was unable to do anything about it.

In February, two months after he requested urgent medical attention, Shcharbachenia said he was finally seen by an onsite doctor about his arm, but he claims that she only measured the growth on his arm and did not provide any treatment, and that he still has not seen a specialist. He said he also had a telehealth appointment, but it was for mental health care. In a letter from Shcharbachenia to the DHS Office of Inspector General in March, he detailed his medical condition and repeated requests to receive outside “specialist evaluation and imaging.”

Todd, the CoreCivic spokesperson, told The Intercept that he was unable to comment on whether Shcharbachenia had seen a specialist or received a diagnosis but said he was seen multiple times by onsite medical staff. 

“The safety, health and well-being of the individuals entrusted to our care is our top priority, and we take seriously our responsibility to adhere to all applicable federal detention standards at our Farmville Detention Center (FDC),” Todd wrote in a statement to The Intercept. He denied Shcharbachenia’s claims about his lack of access to a translator as well as the state of the drinking water and ventilation system, arguing that it’s the same “clean drinking water” that supplies the local community, and that the staff drink the same water and use the same ventilation systems.

On May 20, after his two weeks in isolation, ICE moved Shcharbachenia to a facility in Chantilly, Virginia, according to a separate complaint filed with the DHS Joint Intake Center. He recalled an agent asking him if he was ready to fly to Belarus.

ICE flew him to Turkey, where he begged not to be returned to Belarus as best he could in English. He said he showed officers documents he’d printed out on human rights abuses in his home country and warned that if he returned, he would likely be murdered, leaving his two daughters fatherless.

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But it was to no avail. He was flown from Turkey to Azerbaijan, where was able to speak with immigration officers who understood his native Russian. He refused to board the next plane to Belarus.

Shcharbachenia said that agents from the United States and Azerbaijan began to argue, but because he did not have his passport, he was unable to leave the airport. ICE eventually escorted him back to Turkey, where he was placed in a cell in the airport.

What happened next still haunts his dreams.

“They took out of their backpacks some white plastic collars, like dog collars,” he said, referring to U.S. immigration agents. As they entered the cell, Shcharbachenia said he begged a Turkish police officer who was present for asylum. He said a U.S. immigration agent approached him from behind and hit him across the head, causing him to lose consciousness.

Shcharbachenia said he woke up on the floor with another officer “choking him so hard he couldn’t breathe.” Shcharbachenia passed out again and awoke with the plastic collars around his legs and arms, Shcharbachenia told The Intercept and wrote in three complaints filed with internal DHS oversight agencies. 

Shcharbachenia was eventually transferred back to Farmville, where he said he received no medical treatment for the injury he sustained from being hit on the back of the head. Todd, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said that the assault and head injury were not reflected in Shcharbachenia’s medical records.

As for the growing mass on his arm, Shcharbachenia said he has made multiple grievance requests for treatment. He said staff at first promised to get him an appointment within the month, but eventually, Farmville Detention Center stopped responding. 

Update: June 23, 2026, 10:53 a.m. ET
This story has been updated with an additional statement from CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd sent after publication.

The post ICE Tried to Deport an Asylum-Seeker. Now He’s Being Denied Care for a Growing Tumor in a Private Prison. appeared first on The Intercept.

On May 29, along with scores of others, Rozendaal responded to calls on social media to gather outside of Delaney Hall, the immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey.

The privately run U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility had, in recent weeks, become the site of daily protests, spurred by a detainee hunger strike against alleged ghastly conditions inside.

When Rozendaal went to Delaney Hall, he took his cello with him. 

“I consider music to be a de-escalatory thing to do,” he told The Intercept. “I sat down on the concrete barricade facing north and started to play.”

That night, however, the scene outside Delaney Hall quickly took a violent turn. New Jersey State Police and ICE agents issued a dispersal order and began to clear protesters from the area by force — with officers deploying chemical weapons and charging protesters on horseback. 

“As I played, I saw this wall of plastic riot shields and cops in tactical gear advancing,” Rozendaal recalled. “There were tear gas canisters flying overhead. I could see horses behind the riot shields, flash-bangs. So it was quite dramatic.”

Moments later, Rozendaal was arrested by the New Jersey State Police and, according to an arrest report viewed by The Intercept, charged with one count of obstructing law enforcement. The charge was minor — but a week later, things took a strange turn when Rozendaal received a call from the FBI. 

“The agent said, ‘We’re calling because you were arrested at Delaney Hall,’” Rozendaal told The Intercept. (The FBI declined to comment.)

In the following minutes, Rozendaal said the agents asked if he would be willing to provide the FBI with information on protesters that they described as “anybody planning to go to Delaney Hall with not the right intentions.”

“So, I mean, they were asking me to inform,” Rozendaal said.

Mainstay FBI Tactic

Rozendaal is not the only Delaney Hall protester to receive a call from the FBI.

In the weeks since arrests began stacking up at the protests — approximately 90 people have been arrested so far — at least half of those taken into custody have received calls from federal agents looking for information, according to Benjamin Van Meter, a deputy public defender with the Essex County Public Defender’s Office who represents a number of protesters facing charges.

Van Meter lodged a complaint with authorities over the matter, claiming the FBI contact with his clients violated their constitutional rights.

The phone number used to contact Rozendaal, according to call history logs reviewed by The Intercept, is registered to the FBI’s New York field office and is posted online as an anonymous tipline.

Rozendaal said he rejected the offer immediately and, when the agent attempted to question him further, invoked his right to remain silent, ending the conversation.

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The FBI has a long track record of trying to turn protesters, political dissidents, and ethnic and religious minorities into informants. The strategy, which is still commonly used today, can serve agents by both collecting information while stoking distrust among members of political movements and religious communities, according to Amol Sinha, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s New Jersey chapter.

“With every major protest movement in United States history, there have been attempts at infiltration and attempts to disrupt them and to sow discord,” Sinha said. “The FBI has repeatedly been on the wrong side of history every time they’ve tried these tactics of infiltration.”

Sinha said it was important for anyone approached by federal agents to remember their right to remain silent and to ask for an attorney to be present for any questioning.

“Unless the FBI produces a warrant, you have the right to refuse entry, ” Sinha said. “You certainly have the right to stay silent and to demand a lawyer. You are not under any obligation to speak to them about anything — especially if they are charging you with a crime.”

“The Rights of Our Clients”

Samuel Becker, another protester facing local charges after an arrest outside Delaney Hall, told The Intercept he too got a visit from federal agents in the days following his arrest.

“The FBI would rather intimidate and punish the people protesting outside of Delaney Hall than investigate the physical, sexual, and psychological violence that ICE agents and their auxiliaries are inflicting on detainees across this country every day,” Becker said.

Van Meter, the public defender, wrote a letter to Robert Frazer, the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, and two high-ranking FBI officials in New York and New Jersey, demanding that the FBI stop their attempts to question his clients without an attorney present. (The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.)

“These attempts at contacting our clients at their homes and by phone violate their right to counsel and we ask that you immediately cease and desist from all attempts to question or interrogate our clients without their counsel present,” Van Meter wrote in the letter, dated June 9. “Any further efforts to question our clients are a continued violation of their constitutional right to counsel and our office remains ready to seek all available relief under both state and federal law.”

In a statement to The Intercept, Karen Paff, a spokesperson for the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, said Van Meter and his colleagues were simply looking “to ensure that the rights of our clients are respected.”

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“When law-enforcement officers seek to question individuals who are represented by counsel about matters within the scope of that representation, it is our responsibility to notify the appropriate agencies that counsel has been assigned and that any such communications must comply with the law,” Paff said. “This is not a new or case-specific practice. It is a routine part of our responsibility to clients in any matter where represented individuals may be approached for questioning.”

For Rozendaal, the intent of the FBI agents who sought him out seemed to go beyond just fishing for information.

“I think the real intent is to divide us, to make us scared to talk to each other, too scared to talk in general, scared to go to Delaney Hall,” Rozendaal said. “It won’t work.”

The post FBI Tried to Flip Anti-ICE Protesters Into Informants appeared first on The Intercept.

At the June 3 protests outside the detention center sparked by a hunger strike inside, detectives in plainclothes worked alongside uniformed officers to arrest Samuel Becker, a protester alleged to have thrown items into a fire days earlier, according to a criminal complaint. 

The protests had taken place for nearly a month outside Delaney Hall, a privately run ICE facility located on an industrial corridor in Newark, New Jersey, where detainees and their families have complained of poor conditions and retaliation by staff.

The operation was strictly aimed at arresting Becker, 30, who is accused of dragging a tarp into a fire during a raucous protest several days earlier, according to the complaint filed in Newark Municipal Court by police officer Elddy Torres.

“A PLAN WAS DEVISED TO DEPLOY TWO UNDERCOVER NEWARK POLICE DETECTIVES TO MONITOR AND REPORT REAL TIME INFORMATION TO SURVEILLANCE UNITS,” Torres wrote, describing what happened after Becker was identified. “AS THE UNDERCOVER DETECTIVES REMAINED WITHIN THE CROWD, BECKER WAS OBSERVED COORDINATING PROTESTERS PAST THE BARRICADED PROTEST ZONE.”

Law enforcement presence at protests can have a chilling effect, said Amol Sinha, the executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, who declined to discuss the specifics of the arrest, with which he was not familiar. The psychological effect of undercover officers — and the fear of undercovers — stands out as especially problematic.

“The use of plainclothes officers presents the concern of people constantly being surveilled when they are engaging in First Amendment-protected activity,” Sinha told The Intercept. “These are moments that should be celebrated as part of democracy and not viewed through the lens of suspicion.”

While the use of undercover officers at protests is not unusual, advocates said the tactic could raise questions about suppression of speech if the aim goes beyond keeping the peace, according to Aedan Neary, a defense attorney in Kearny, who is not involved in the case.

“The concern arises out of the question of, at what point do the actions of these undercover agents become a pressure tactic as opposed to a law enforcement tactic?” Neary told The Intercept. “Is this being used to ensure that things remain peaceful? Or is this more about gathering intelligence?”

ICE Role Unmentioned

The arrest and police report also raise thorny questions about cooperation between ICE and local authorities, which is prohibited for immigration matters by a New Jersey state law passed in March.

According to Becker and two eyewitnesses to the arrest, ICE agents led the ambush that led to Becker’s detention and initially took him into custody.

“An ICE agent chased and grabbed me and quickly handed me over to an NPD officer,” Becker told The Intercept in a written statement. “The NPD officer brought me back over to the other side of the street and sat me down on the side of the ICE minivan that led the ambush.”

While Newark police and Becker’s accounts align on basic details — such as the time and location of the arrest behind Delaney Hall, where protesters had gone to monitor vehicle traffic in and out of the facility — the complaint by Torres, the officer, says the arrest was the work of Newark police with the support of Essex County Police, omitting ICE’s role.

“ONE OF THE NPD UNDERCOVER DETECTIVES ADVISED US THAT THE GROUP WAS PLANNING TO LIGHT THE DUMPSTER ON FIRE AND PUSH IT IN THE REAR FENCE EXIT. A PLAN WAS DEVISED TO INTERRUPT THE GROUPS CONDUCT AND DISPERSE THEM BEFORE THEY COULD HURT ANYONE OR CAUSE ANY DAMAGE,” said Torres’s complaint. “NUMEROUS NPD DETECTIVES AND ESSEX COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE SWAT PERSONNEL RESPONDED TO THE AREA TO MOVE THE GROUP ALONG.”

At least one of the vehicles that arrived in the convoy to make the arrest, Becker told The Intercept, was driven by ICE agents, converging on the group at the rear of Delaney Hall.

According to Becker, his interaction with that initial ICE agent making the arrest indicated some degree of intelligence sharing between federal authorities and local police.

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“As I was surrounded by ICE agents and the arresting officer, one of the ICE agents accused me of [setting a] fire a different night,” Becker told The Intercept in a statement. “The ICE agent’s words matched the language NPD used when it put out a statement about my arrest the next day.”

In a statement made in a Facebook post announcing Becker’s arrest, Newark Public Safety Director Emanuel Miranda said, “He was identified by Newark Police as the individual responsible for setting a dumpster fire during the weekend protest at Delaney Hall and also attempting to start a second fire there on Wednesday night.”

The two eyewitnesses, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, confirmed Becker’s account of the arrest in interviews with The Intercept.

No Sanctuary

While no law in New Jersey prohibits local police from cooperating with ICE on non-immigration matters, such collaboration has become a hot button for Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who oversaw a zealous crackdown on protests outside the facility despite publicly opposing President Donald Trump’s deportation blitz.

The recent sanctuary law prohibits New Jersey police from assisting immigration agents in enforcement of federal immigration law, but leaves room for exceptions, including the enforcement of state criminal law.

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The ACLU’s Sinha said that his organization had pushed for a broader version of the law that would have prohibited any collaboration between police and ICE.

“This is why we were advocating for an end to collaboration, period,” said Sinha. “We wanted to make sure that there was no instance of collaboration between immigration enforcement and law enforcement, and the fuller version of the law that did not ultimately make its way through the legislature would have prevented that sort of collaboration.”

Catherine Adams, a spokesperson for Miranda, the public safety director, told The Intercept, “To ensure that public safety is provided to peaceful protesters in accordance with their First Amendment rights, and for the safety of other members of the public, as well as the Officers at Delaney Hall, we deploy plainclothes officers, cameras, drones, etc., to identify those at the protest site who unlawfully damage property, start fires, or commit other crimes.”

Lifeline for ICE Operations

Demonstrations outside Delaney Hall were relatively small but attracted attention due to the ferocious responses from ICE agents and employees of GEO Group, the private prison firm that operates the jail.

Over the course of several weeks, ICE agents repeatedly charged protesters in an effort to clear them from the entrance to allow vehicles to move in and out of the facility, often deploying batons, pepper spray, and pepper balls against demonstrators, as well as taking some into custody.

Becker suffered an injury during a charge by ICE agents, when one agent swung a baton so hard that it fractured Becker’s shoulder, according to his account. On the night of his arrest, Becker’s arm was in a sling.

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After initially keeping a wide berth from the clashes, state and local police operating under orders from Baraka and New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill — both of whom are Democrats who have spoken out against ICE crackdowns — involved themselves in policing the protesters in late May. The scene immediately became even more volatile, with police firing tear-gas canisters, charging protesters on horseback, and kettling dozens of protesters for mass arrest. 

On May 31, Baraka instituted a curfew in the vicinity of Delaney Hall, and Newark police set up barricades to keep protesters more than half a mile away from the facility for several days. In the weeks since the curfew ended, protests have continued sporadically, but with less intensity or energy as in the initial weeks.

Baraka has repeatedly sought to minimize the city’s role in policing the protests, claiming he was trying to “bring down the temperature,” not bring an end to protests. That posture eventually shifted.

“It is not the responsibility of the Newark Police Division to secure a private facility,” Baraka said in a June 4 statement. “Our intention was never to protect Delaney Hall or HSI” — ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division — “but to bring calm. It is a clear contradiction to the city’s position with GEO group to remain there.” 

For Becker and many other protesters, the presence of police from various agencies in New Jersey were a godsend to ICE and GEO Group — not to public safety.

“State and local police ramped up their repression of the protestors because ICE agents were having an increasingly difficult time carrying out their daily operations at Delaney Hall by themselves,” Becker said. “Without the ramped-up support of the state and local police, ICE and GEO would have continued to encounter growing difficulty suppressing the strike and operating the concentration camp.”

The post Undercover Cops Infiltrated Delaney Hall ICE Protest to Spy and Make Arrest appeared first on The Intercept.

Within an hour, police had found a white van, crashed into it twice on purpose, and fired 27 shots at the driver while the vehicle lay on its side, burning. At least eight cops watched as 34-year-old Navy veteran John Andrew Jenuwine bled out and died inside.

Of several inconsistencies in the police response, one stood out: The only physical description provided to the dispatcher was that “two Black guys” were driving the van, and a caller said they’d brandished a handgun at his wife. Jenuwine was white, driving alone, and unarmed.

That’s not what police told Jenuwine’s parents when they contacted them the following evening, 17 hours after killing their son.

“We were told that there was an exchange of gunfire, and that John was killed,” John’s father, Larry Jenuwine, told The Intercept. “Call it naïveté or whatever you want to call it, but our first thoughts were, ‘Oh my God, what did he do, why did he cause this?’” 

On the phone with Larry and Kelly, John’s mother, a deputy with the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office claimed their recently deceased son had a gun. But Jenuwine, an industrial field engineer traveling to repair million-dollar lasers, just had his work equipment; no gun was ever found in his van. And the officers who caused two intentional collisions appear to have violated their own policies, which the department updated after the police killing of George Floyd — testing the limits of post-2020 police reforms.

The Jenuwine family is now suing Washtenaw County and eight sheriff’s deputies who responded to the case for wrongful death; for violating John’s constitutional rights to protection under the law, and against unreasonable searches and seizures; and for gross negligence and willful misconduct, including improper use of deadly force. The suit seeks to hold the county responsible for what it calls the sheriff’s failures to train officers and enforce its policies.

“Come to find out, he didn’t do anything to cause any of this,” Larry said. “He was not the guy that they were supposed to be chasing.”

Less than 15 minutes elapsed between the time Washtenaw County Sheriff’s deputies incorrectly identified Jenuwine’s van and when they started shooting. Officers fired their first shots seconds after causing Jenuwine’s vehicle to flip on its side and catch fire. 

Only seven out of the 27 shots fired hit Jenuwine. None of them alone was responsible for killing him, according to an independent autopsy obtained by Jenuwine’s family and described by their attorneys in a press conference last week, which found he bled out and died over time. While Jenuwine struggled and died, dashcam footage shared with The Intercept recorded officers outside discussing whether any of the shots had hit him. 

After several minutes had passed, one officer said over the radio, “He’s kicking around inside the vehicle right now.” None of them called for emergency services.

According to the footage, an edited version of which was viewed by The Intercept, Jenuwine lay dying in the van for at least five minutes. 

“The cruelty of it, I suppose, is what strikes me the most,” said Maura Battersby, one of the attorneys representing the family. “If aid had been rendered, he may have survived this.” 

Of the four deputies attorneys said fired shots, two names have been publicly released: Jacob Gombos and Jonathan Earley. Both received awards in 2024 for distinguished service; Gombos got the department’s Life Saving Award. 

The sheriff’s office placed Gombos, Earley, and the other deputies involved on paid administrative leave pending an investigation by Michigan State Police, which was completed last month and is now pending review by the Michigan attorney general. The state AG will decide whether to bring criminal charges against any of the officers in the case. 

A spokesperson for the Michigan State Police confirmed that their investigation is closed and referred questions to the attorney general’s office, which did not respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office and the Ypsilanti Police Department did not respond to requests for comment. 

The case has brought renewed scrutiny to the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office, which is currently facing dual lawsuits from whistleblowers who claimed the department hired unqualified officers and fired them in retaliation for reporting it. Both plaintiffs are former office staff who said they were fired after raising concerns that Sheriff Alyshia Dyer and other staff pushed them to hire candidates who had lied about their qualifications and in one case had an “extensive” criminal history. Another sheriff’s deputy resigned in March while under investigation for allegedly having a sexual relationship with a subordinate officer. Dyer herself was also independently investigated last year after a partially burned cannabis cigarette was found in her county-issued vehicle. (She denied it was hers, and an independent report could not determine whether the joint belonged to Dyer.)

“It seems like every day we hear something about the Washtenaw Sheriff’s department,” Kelly Jenuwine told The Intercept. “They are in the news constantly, and it’s not for a good reason.”

Jenuwine’s killing raises a new round of questions about the efficacy of police reform. In 2024, Michigan implemented new statewide guidelines restricting vehicle pursuits to “protect the lives of innocent bystanders.” Following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office released a memo outlining how its policies aligned with a series of proposed reforms pushed by activists against police violence that grew out of 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri. And the sheriff’s office adopted a new use of force policy in 2022, which classifies intentional vehicle collisions — known as a “PIT” maneuver, a precision immobilization technique — as deadly force. 

“That’s something you’re trained not to do,” said Todd Flood, the lead attorney on the Jenuwines’ case.

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The new policy also guides officers to “seek voluntary compliance and operate with minimal reliance on the use of force,” using techniques in crisis intervention and “rapport-building communication,” and try to de-escalate, even after using force. It requires a mandatory medical evaluation when deadly force is applied, if an officer observes an injury, or if they believe one has occurred; and it ties the degree of appropriate force to how certain they are that the subject committed a crime. The policy states: “Sheriff’s Office employees shall never employ excessive force.”  

Officers did not verbally engage with Jenuwine a single time, Battersby told The Intercept.

“I would have expected them to be calling out over the loudspeaker,” Battersby said. “There were many instances in which they were in close proximity to him, and it doesn’t appear that they did that.” 

At a press conference after the shooting, the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office played a dashcam video that showed Jenuwine reversing his van and driving on the wrong side of the road. Before the sheriffs hit Jenuwine’s van in the first PIT maneuver, the dashcam video cuts ahead, with the video timestamp jumping forward 30 seconds.

The Jenuwines said what they describe as John’s “execution” changed the way they look at law enforcement after having considered themselves generally supportive of police. “I want the people that executed my son to never have the opportunity to work in law enforcement again,” said Kelly. 

“They ran around with those guns like they were playing video games, guns held sideways,” Larry said, referring to the dashcam footage. “I’m still struggling with this and I anticipate that’s going to be a continuing struggle.”

Despite believing the vast majority of police were “good, honest, hard-working people,” he said, “I don’t believe these guys that were involved in this shooting were. And that’s the kind of people we need to get out of that system.”

“We want to make sure that the people involved in this, in John’s death, are held accountable,” Larry said. “We’re hoping that there will be criminal charges as well, but we can’t count on that.”

Jenuwine liked to spend his time outdoors fishing and hunting with his family, his parents told The Intercept. He was on his high school football team, spent six years in the Navy, and was a member of a Detroit motorcycle club. When he was growing up, he and Larry worked on cars and tractors together.

On what would have been Jenuwine’s 35th birthday last month, his parents said they spent the evening crying over a birthday cake. 

“Those officers get to go home to their families every night,” Kelly said. “What Larry and I get, we get a box of ashes and a lock of my son’s hair.”

The post Police Chased the Wrong Man, Then Shot Him and Watched as He Bled Out appeared first on The Intercept.

The latest revelations about the far-reaching and deeply felt impacts of the campaign known as Operation Metro Surge come in a Human Rights Watch report published Thursday.

Based on more than 130 interviews, video analysis, and government arrest data, the report documents a dizzying array of abuses over the multi-month siege of Minneapolis and St. Paul — from lethal violence to free speech violations, unlawful detentions, and more.

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While many of the abuses are well-known — including the killings of Minnesota residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents — others occurred in the shadows of the infamous campaign.

Among the most troubling accounts are those provided by healthcare and mental health professionals.

According to the report, the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Minnesota saw a 120 percent increase in calls and a “significant increase” in the number of people struggling with suicidal thoughts or actions during Metro Surge. One medical provider knew of at least three teenagers who attempted to take their own life after their parents were detained in the crackdown, with one of the adolescents doing so on a “frequent” basis.

“One goal of the report is to bring light back to the full scope of the harm, and not only the harm that we saw in terms of violence in the streets, in terms of abusive detentions,” Reagan Williams, the author of the new report, told The Intercept, “but also the effects that that had for aspects of daily life for everybody here — the impact it had on people’s ability to leave their homes, to go to doctor, to go to school, to go to work.”

Human Rights Watch found the combination of violence and racial profiling that defined the crackdown caused many Minnesotans to forgo medical care.

The day after Good was killed, nearly a third of one healthcare provider’s patients — mostly Somali or Spanish-speaking immigrants — did not show up for pre-scheduled appointments. Another provider said the number of in-person visits at their office dropped by as much as 50 percent.

When Williams arrived in the Twin Cities, her focus was the kind of violent interactions documented in viral videos proliferating from Minnesota. She soon learned those weren’t the only issues community members were desperate to discuss.

“People that we talked with expressed emotions of exhaustion, fear, frustration, immense stress,” she said. “They expressed particular concerns for children, medical providers in particular, the impact of missing school, of knowing violence is happening in their communities — for immigrant children and children of color, the fear of having a parent taken, of themselves being taken.”

“Children are particularly vulnerable to long-term impacts of this kind of acute violence and stress,” Williams added. “Those are impacts that will continue on.”

“Near-Total Impunity”

Described by Trump administration officials as the largest immigration enforcement operation in history, the crackdown in the Twin Cities began in December and stretched into February. Thousands of officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol conducted roving arrest operations throughout the area.

More than 4,000 immigrants were arrested during Metro Surge. At roughly 100 arrests per day, it was the highest per capita arrest rate in the country; 64 percent of immigrants arrested in the campaign had no criminal record.

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“In Minnesota, US citizens and immigrants alike were racially profiled in the ordinary course of their day — approached by federal agents while driving, while at work, or while shoveling snow,” the report said. “Minnesota residents of Somali and Latin American descent were notably targeted, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of these communities are US citizens or have green cards.”

A hotline run by the National Lawyers Guild recorded 524 cases of the U.S. citizens detained during the surge, though the figure is believed to be a significant undercount. A survey by the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego earlier this year found that nearly a third of Minneapolis residents experienced an interaction with federal agents; of those interactions, nearly half occurred “at or near a school, healthcare facility, childcare facility, courthouse, or place of worship.”

The new report follows a fresh tally from Minneapolis officials, announced last week, estimating that Metro Surge cost the city nearly $700 million. A nonprofit serving tenants in Minnesota described the economic fallout as a “crisis,” the Human Rights Watch report said, with an 85 percent increase in people seeking rent payment assistance.

In one Minnesota school district, attendance dropped by nearly a third during the government operation. At least 14 incidents of immigration enforcement reported at or near campuses, including the arrest of a preschool teacher, a special education staff member, and a parent at a school bus stop.

“If I told you every time ICE was near a school,” the district’s superintendent told Human Rights Watch, “you’d stop reading my messages.”

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Considering the sweeping impacts of the crackdown, Human Rights Watch is calling for an overhaul of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol; congressional investigations into the actions of officials involved in the operation; legislation to prohibit immigration arrests at sensitive locations such as schools and hospitals; and a host of other reforms.

To date, the report said, “The many abuses committed by federal agencies during Operation Metro Surge have so far been met with near-total impunity.”

The post ICE’s Unseen Toll in Minneapolis: Suicide Helpline Calls More Than Doubled During Surge appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice unsealed a federal indictment on Tuesday announcing hefty charges against 15 antifascist protesters for alleged actions taken in response to the brutal U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement surge in Minneapolis earlier this year.

The federal prosecutor in the case, Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, warned that more arrests and charges could follow.

Once again, prosecutors are throwing extreme and overreaching charges at activists in a scrambling effort to criminalize organized, collective opposition to Trump’s most violent policies.

The Minneapolis indictment exemplifies the Trump regime’s escalating strategy: Criminalize whole political movements with claims of collective liability and “conspiracy,” and treat typical acts of protest, constitutionally protected speech, association, and political identification as criminal acts.

Call it the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach.

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The indictment, Rosen said, is a part of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, initiative to target and prosecute leftists and antifascists as terrorists.

Minneapolis is not an incidental target for Trump’s Department of Justice. The city unleashed an oftentimes-inspiring response to the ICE crackdown: mutual aid organizing, confrontational protest, blockades, and strikes in response to brutality set a national example for how to fight back when federal agents descend on a city to kidnap our immigrant neighbors.

 “Conspiracy” to What?

The “conspiracy” in Minneapolis according to the government, involves purported antifa activists acting with the aim of impeding ICE operations and injuring officers. The indictment names no federal officer injuries, and only minor incidents of property damage — like a protester leaving a dent in an ICE vehicle from kicking it.

Among other pieces of evidence cited for the alleged criminal conspiracy are the most basic protest strategies, including self defense, nonviolent tactics, and First Amendment-protected activity.

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The use of encrypted Signal chats to communicate protest plans is cited again and again in the indictment.

The government points out that organizers employed phrases like “become ungovernable” — a liberatory slogan so common it has spread to cute animal memes.

Demonstrators are accused of building and advocating for the use of shields at protests outside an ICE detention facility — the sort of protests in which, in Minneapolis and nationwide, federal agents have beaten people and fired rubber bullets and tear-gas canisters directly at heads and bodies.

The indictment even claims that people tracking ICE vehicles and alerting others to their presence, as agents prowled neighborhoods looking for immigrants to kidnap, is evidence of criminal conspiracy.

That certain protest activities may have indeed impeded ICE in its efforts to ruin lives and whiten the country do not make those activities illegal. Minor violations and property damage may involve unlawful acts, but do not constitute a mass criminal conspiracy.

Certainly, none of it calls for unleashing the vast resources of the federal government against protesters. The Trump administration, however, has made its own strategy clear: Make the stakes of association with political movements dangerously high.

And if the cases fall apart? Well then, movements have still been disrupted by lengthy, frightening, and expensive legal processes; antifascist political activity is chilled nonetheless.

Nationwide Assault on the Left

The Minneapolis charges do not stand alone. Recent weeks have seen an array of federal arrests, prosecutions and raids aimed at Trump’s favored targets: antifascists, Palestine solidarity activists, and voting rights advocates. 

Protesters who participated in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement were hit last week with new federal charges under the NSPM-7 initiative — despite the fact that state cases against the movement for the very same incidents have consistently collapsed.

This month, the FBI also raided the homes of numerous Palestine-solidarity activists connected to the University of Michigan, with eight activists indicted on federal charges for allegedly aiming to “intimidate” university officials in protests aimed at ending the school’s investment in Israel’s genocide. FBI agents also raided the offices of an Ohio voter-registration organization, seizing employees’ phones and computers.

These are unabashed authoritarian tactics to chill whole swathes of political activity, the likes of which have a long history in this country, from multiple Red Scares and the deadly COINTELPRO effort last century against Black-liberation struggle, to the mass repression in response to Black Lives Matter uprisings in the last decade.

Such repression is not the sole preserve of Trump’s regime or Republican administrations, but we are witnessing an escalation in authoritarian efforts to criminalize political resistance.

The assault on the left has been, perversely, carried out in tandem with brazen attempts to lavish Trump’s violent far-right supporters with impunity, government jobs, and even financial rewards.

When the Spaghetti Sticks

Sometimes the spaghetti does stick. In March, a Texas jury found eight defendants guilty of terrorism charges for simply being present and wearing black at a protest in which a shooting took place outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility in Northern Texas.

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The ruling was a major victory for the Justice Department — a case in a Trump-friendly jurisdiction, presided over by a Trump-appointee judge, the government’s flimsy effort won through.

In Spokane, Washington, three anti-ICE demonstrators were convicted in May on conspiracy charges for impeding federal officers in a case with similarities to the Minneapolis indictment. The original federal prosecutor in the Spokane case resigned instead of signing indictments against protesters; he did not believe they were warranted, he said. As is a pattern with Trump’s Department of Justice, however, the prosecutor’s successor moved forward with charges. Six people took plea deals, but three refused, wanting to defend their First Amendment rights in court. For typical protest activity, they were convicted of federal conspiracy charges. They face up to six years in prison.

Trump’s lawyers are not famed as skilled practitioners, but they know how to navigate an unjust system with brute force, willing to pour unending resources into crushing ideological enemies and symbols of resistance.

Just consider the extraordinary, ongoing efforts to deport Palestinian activists like Mohsen Madawi and Mahmoud Khalil, or a Salvadorian immigrant with legal status, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

With an ideologically aligned far-right Supreme Court, Trump has ample reason to relentlessly push politically motivated cases, even those thrown out in lower courts.

Antidote to Collective Guilt

Cases like Prairieland threaten to set frightening precedents, but the lesson they offer is not that federal prosecutors have somehow now cracked the mass-prosecution code after other collective liability efforts had failed. Rather, the lesson is an older one, about solidarity.

Prosecutors in the Prairieland case relied heavily on the testimony of cooperating defendants, who testified against co-defendants as a part of plea deals. Without that testimony, the case would likely not have played out the same way.

“If people hadn’t cooperated in Prairieland, the case would’ve been extraordinarily different,” said Xavier T. de Janon, an attorney with the People’s Law Collective, which is representing Stop Cop City protesters in state-level cases. “Their entire prosecution was made possible by cooperators, and their investigation was successful because people cooperated very quickly.”

De Janon nonetheless stressed that, while the federal government was successful in the Prairieland trial, the Justice Department has accrued “hundreds of failures.”

In Stop Cop City cases so far, as was the case in the mass federal prosecution against the so-called J20 protesters at Trump’s first inauguration, no defendants aided prosecutors as cooperating witnesses. Efforts to isolate and criminalize “bad protesters” failed, and collective prosecutions, based on the flimsiest of claims, collapsed.

The response to ICE in Minneapolis and St. Paul was powerful precisely because residents blended tactics of mutual aid, community support, mass mobilization, and militancy. The worst possible response to the Justice Department’s sweeping indictment would be for certain elements of the movement to follow the government’s lead and demonize antifa associations and confrontational protest.

The government is escalating a well-worn strategy to disarticulate and defang movements.

“This is a fascist society, not just the government, but the fabric of society,” said de Janon. “People thinking, ‘If I go to a rally, I might be charged with a federal felony and spend 25 years in prison’ — it is outrageous.”

There is no denying that the Department of Justice is attempting to make the stakes devastatingly high for even minimal association with today’s liberatory movements, from antifascist immigrant defense to Palestine solidarity.

The price for failing to stand together against this fascist overreach is, however, far higher still.

The post Trump’s Spaghetti-Against-the-Wall Indictment Against ICE Protesters — and How to Fight It appeared first on The Intercept.

When the Department of Homeland Security announced this week the arrest of 15 alleged “anti-ICE rioters” in Minnesota, it pointed directly at their Signal chats.

The indictment is in large part built upon on conversations from more than a dozen Signal groups, citing more than 100 specific messages. The case is a stark reminder that using an encrypted messaging platform like Signal is not in and of itself a magic bullet to safeguard communications. It also raises the question: How did Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit gain access to all of these communications in the first place?

The indictment doesn’t provide a clear answer. But sprinkled throughout the document are clues that suggest that law enforcement may have gained access to the physical devices of some of those indicted.

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The indictment singles out its targets for their alleged participation in local ICE rapid response networks, where volunteers monitor and report the presence of federal agents in their communities by flagging details such as the license plate numbers of vehicles used by immigration authorities. ICE watchers in Minnesota have been met with intimidation from immigration authorities amid the national outcry following the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good as they observed the actions of immigration authorities.

The 15 people named in the latest indictment are all charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure an officer,” with some facing additional charges like “solicitation to commit a crime of violence” and “destruction of government property.” Though some of the accused had court appearances on Tuesday, their defense attorneys have not as of yet been named.

The indictment comes months after FBI Director Kash Patel said in a podcast interview that federal law enforcement had started an investigation into Minnesota ICE watchers using Signal groups to share information about immigration agents.

The bulk of the indictment consists of transcripts of group messages; at various points it also makes mention of voicemails, text messages, Signal direct messages, and Signal calls. For instance, the indictment in one spot mentions that two of the indictees “exchanged approximately 20 connected Signal calls.” This hints that authorities were able to access not just group chat messages, but likely had wholesale access to the devices of at least some of those indicted.

The Signal app provides end-to-end encryption, protecting communications in transit, so that anyone monitoring your internet or cellular data connection cannot see the contents of your messages. Signal also minimizes the amount of metadata collected, so if the organization behind the app, the Signal Foundation, was served with a compulsory legal process to reveal user information, it wouldn’t even know with whom you spoke or chatted.

But all that falls apart if your device gets into the wrong hands. In order to safeguard your Signal data from someone who obtains access to your device, it’s necessary to manually harden Signal by modifying some of its default settings.

Perhaps Signal’s most well-touted security and privacy feature is its ability to set disappearing messages. Messages can be set to expire in periods ranging from seconds to weeks. A default expiration time for all messages can be selected, and specific groups and conversations can be set to custom retention times. To minimize risk, set retention times to the shortest amount feasible — minutes or hours, instead of days or weeks.

Keep in mind that Signal’s disappearing messages delete the contents of a message, but they don’t remove evidence that communications between parties occurred in the first place. This means that even if a group has enabled disappearing messages, someone who gains access to a member’s device could later determine with whom they were chatting. Therefore it’s safest to regularly delete entire groups and chats, not just the messages themselves.

Just like its chat function, Signal also keeps similar records of voice and video calls. It’s as important to delete records of the calls as it is to delete records of text messages, both within the Signal app and in your phone’s standard call history.

On iPhones, Signal can integrate its call history into the iPhone’s regular call history. This privacy-eroding feature can be disabled on Signal on iOS by tapping your profile circle on the top-left corner of the app, clicking on Settings, then Privacy, then disabling “Show Calls in Recents.”

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Additionally for Signal on iPhones, you’ll also likely want to disable settings like “Share Contacts with iOS” and “Use Phone Contact Photos” (for Android users, the equivalent is “Use address book photos”), which can be found under Settings, then Chats.

Such precautions may sound extreme, but in a recent case, authorities were able to recover deleted incoming Signal messages based on old push notifications that were archived on iPhones (the latest iPhone update fixes this issue, highlighting the importance of keeping your devices up to date). On that note, remember to either turn off Signal notifications entirely or have them display only the names of people sending messages — which should be pseudonyms, not real names.

The post How Did the Feds Get Into Anti-ICE Activists’ Signal Messages? appeared first on The Intercept.

Chair Andrea Lucas, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, proposed to rescind the “Affirmative Action Appropriate Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964” rule on May 27. The rule has proved a barrier to her efforts to bring lawsuits on behalf of white men who say they were discriminated against at work — a barrier the rescission would get rid of.

The move, which was previously unreported, comes amid Lucas’s quest to characterize all employer efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion as illegal race discrimination. The agency has filed lawsuits under her watch on behalf of white men at the New York Times and Coca-Cola, as well as investigations into Nike and Northwestern Mutual.

“This proposed rescission is part of this administration’s continued assault on equality for people of color and for women,” said former EEOC commissioner Jocelyn Samuels, who added that the change reflects Trump’s “solicitude for the fortunes of white men.”

The EEOC did not respond to a request for comment.

Rule to Fight Discrimination

The rule Lucas wants to do away with was crafted shortly after the EEOC was granted litigation authority in 1972.

Racial discrimination had been rampant throughout American workplaces, and some employers wanted to act to correct those long-standing discriminatory practices and racial disparities in an affirmative way.

Responding to the call, the EEOC crafted the rule to allow for very narrow circumstances in which it would be permissible for employers to take race into account in such efforts.

To take advantage of the rule, employers have to do an analysis showing they had shut out women or people of color for a long time — in other words, that there were “prior discriminatory practices.” Only then can a hiring process favor, say, Black candidates for a job position.

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The rule also gives employers some cover. Under the Civil Rights Act, employers can’t be held liable for taking action done in good faith to follow an EEOC regulation that was voted on by the commissioners, such as the affirmative action rule.

At least one large employer in the Trump EEOC’s sights has cited the rule. In its motion to dismiss the EEOC’s lawsuit, Coca-Cola referred to the agency’s affirmative action rule as proof that the agency has encouraged the very behavior it is now penalizing.

Samuels, the former EEOC commissioner, said Lucas’s move to get rid of the rule “could be part of an effort to remove a potential defense.”

Upheld at Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has found narrow approaches to affirmative action to be constitutional.

In the 1987 case Johnson v. Transportation Agency and the 1979 case United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, the court allowed employers, in the case of what it called a “manifest imbalance,” to temporarily take sex and race into account as part of plans to increase representation in particular jobs until women or people of color are commensurate with their share of the population.

Those decisions still stand.

“The law is set by the statute and the Supreme Court’s interpretation,” said Charlotte Burrows, a senior affiliated research scholar at New York University’s School of Law and a former EEOC chair. “The EEOC can’t change that.” 

That’s true despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College that struck down affirmative action in college admissions; that decision doesn’t apply to Title VII, which governs employment discrimination.

That doesn’t mean the administration isn’t trying to change the law.

After Lucas asked the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice to weigh in, the department released an opinion that says, among other things, that the agency’s affirmative action guidelines “run further into unconstitutional territory.”

Lucas may be trying to blur the lines between affirmative action and DEI policies, but “they are two very distinct things,” Burrows said.

Employers can engage in a variety of perfectly legal approaches to diversity, such as having DEI programs that don’t give women or people of color more advantages but simply open the doors to more people.

“It is a messaging exercise that is part of this administration’s campaign to brand any form of proactive conduct on the part of employers to anticipate, preempt, and address barriers to equal employment opportunity as unlawful, race-based decision-making that disadvantages white men,” Samuels said. “This administration’s pronouncements have had really damaging effects on proactive programs that were designed to identify and address potential barriers before they ripened into discrimination.”

Assault on DEI

Lucas recently scrapped the EEOC’s previous Strategic Enforcement Plan that included as a priority that the agency “support employer efforts to implement lawful and appropriate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) practices.” It was crafted through a lengthy public process and was slated to remain in place through 2028.

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Instead, Lucas replaced the plan with a National Enforcement Plan that prioritizes going after DEI policies.

That move came after she had already directed agency officials to compile a list of cases in line with her own personal priorities, including “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” and recorded a direct-to-camera video soliciting complaints from white men who feel they’ve been discriminated against at work.

Such cases have been accelerated through the agency’s processes, according to the New York Times, although staff have struggled to find complaints with merit.

The post Trump Admin Wants to Make It Easier for White Men to Sue for Discrimination appeared first on The Intercept.

Four UK-based Palestine solidarity activists were sentenced as terrorists on Friday for damaging military drones and other equipment at an Elbit Systems U.K. factory in 2024. Elbit, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has provided the vast majority of drones used in the Israeli military’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, among other horrors.

The terrorism sentences, handed down by Justice Jeremy Johnson, set a frightening precedent. This is the first time in Britain that anyone has faced terrorism enhancements at sentencing without actually being convicted of terrorist offenses. It is also the first time that “criminal damage” convictions have been classified as terrorism. It is not, of course, the first time that the so-called Palestine exception has entailed the setting of vile legal precedents.

As a point of comparison: The convicted activists, who are affiliated with the Palestine Action network, will spend significantly more time in prison than the majority of people arrested and convicted for participating in brutal white supremacist riots across the U.K. in 2024, 2025, and again in recent weeks in Belfast, Northern Ireland — riots in which migrant shelters have been set on fire and Black and brown people have been beaten in the streets.

The four Elbit protesters, part of the so-called Filton 25 arrested in relation to the Elbit factory incident, have already been in detention for over two years. They now face five more years in prison for criminal damage with a “terrorist connection.” One defendant was sentenced to a further three years for striking a police officer during the incident. By contrast, a 30-year-old man who kicked and punched Black man in the face amid an anti-immigrant race riot in Manchester in 2024 was sentenced to three years in jail; while labeled a “violent racist” by the presiding judge, he was not labeled a terrorist, nor were any of his fellow pogromists.

The Palestine Action activists were all previously cleared of heftier charges of aggravated burglary and violent disorder. Now labeled terrorists, however, they will be subject to at least 15 years of terrorist notification requirements, including informing the police of personal and financial details and travel plans.

The defendants were not convicted of terrorist offenses — the jury convicted them on charges of criminal damage. It was explicitly hidden from the jurors that, in finding the protesters guilty of specific criminal acts, they also opened them to hefty terror enhancements by the judge at sentencing. Justice Johnson had also set strict restrictions on the trial: The defendants were not permitted to tell the jury that their actions were motivated by a desire to save Palestinian lives and prevent greater crimes of mass slaughter; they could not mention the genocide in Gaza or Elbit’s role in it.

“Criminal damage has never been treated as terrorism within the UK justice system before, and it is completely disproportionate to do so because the offence occurred at a protest,” Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International U.K.’s chief executive, said in a statement.

“A terrorism sentence carries restrictions that stay with a person for the rest of their life. We should all be worried about what this means for other individuals taking direct action in protest at a genocide or any other issue,” Moscogiuri said. She called the sentencing a “new new low in the ongoing crackdown against protest across the UK.”

“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process,” Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told Novara Media.

Palestine Action, a loose-knit network of Palestine-solidarity direct-action advocates and activists, has faced extraordinary authoritarian crackdowns in the U.K., including a government proscription under the Terrorism Act that renders any support for the group a criminal offense.

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For simply holding signs at rallies and sit-ins that bear slogans like “I support Palestine Action,” nearly 3,000 people have been arrested. A British High Court ruled the government’s proscription of the group unlawful in February, but the ban remains in place as the government appeals the decision. Over 100 people, many of them elderly retirees, were arrested on Friday outside the sentencing hearing while holding signs in support of Palestine Action.

“Convicting activists for one charge, then sentencing them as terrorists, is more outrageous than the proscription of Palestine Action. Everyone needs to mobilize against it,” said Ammori.

As ever, the “terror” label here tells us more about the ideological priorities of the authorities that apply it than it does about the nature or moral standing of any acts deemed “terrorism.”

The treatment of violent anti-immigrant racists in the U.K. provides a telling point of comparison. After all, the very same Justice Johnson who sentenced the Palestine Action defendants as terrorists and foreclosed their potential for a fair trial moved last year to release the U.K.’s leading far-right provocateur, Tommy Robinson, early from prison. Robinson had been convicted for contempt of court after continuously violating injunctions on spreading false allegations against a Syrian refugee. A High Court had rejected his appeal for early release, which Johnson nonetheless granted. Robinson has gone on to aggressively and continuously stoke more anti-immigrant, racist violence like the recent pogroms in Belfast.

“If sentenced with a ‘terrorist connection’, the Filton 4 will not be afforded the same opportunity as Robinson, a repeat criminal, for early release,” noted jury conscience advocacy group Defend Our Juries.

To explain his “terrorism connection” sentencing of the pro-Palestine activists, the judge said, “I am sure that each defendant’s offence of criminal damage involved serious damage to property, was designed to intimidate the U.K. government and a section of the public and was for the purpose of advancing a political or ideological cause.”

There’s a certain irony here, in that the actions taken to disable Elbit equipment were specifically not acts of political persuasion. They were not petitions, or rallies, or economic pressure campaigns. The very point of direct action is that it aims to interfere with a given site of production and circulation of materials; a broken quadcopter drone can’t rain fire down on the bodies of Palestinian civilians, can’t flay the flesh of Palestinian toddlers (as quadcopter fire has been shown to do).

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It’s a grim irony indeed that activists feel called to take direct action precisely when efforts to pressure our governments to end support for genocide fail and are themselves treated as potentially criminal acts.

If “terrorism,” per Johnson, refers to criminal acts with the aim of ideological, political persuasion, we might consider this: Following escalations in Britain’s white riots against immigrants, the government has moved to further harden its border regime and shutter many asylum hotels that had become focal points for racist protests. By the lights of the British government, this does not constitute yielding to white supremacist terror, though. The label “terrorism” is reserved for other targets.

The post They Weren’t Convicted of Terrorism, But These Palestine Activists Got Sentenced as Terrorists Anyway appeared first on The Intercept.

A few days before my best friend’s execution date in 2006, prison administrators granted me one last chance to see him in a legal visit. We discussed his concerns about the humaneness of the lethal injection that would kill him. I will never forget his terrified look.

The day of his execution, I paced my cell hoping for the best. Without access to a telephone, my only method to monitor if or how my friend had died was through radio reports from members of the media who were allowed to witness his final breath.

News reports have historically allowed us as a society to monitor our government when it exercises its greatest power: ending a person’s life. But the state of Indiana has decided to inhibit that public access by banning members of the media from attending executions — unless the condemned person chooses to give a reporter a spot that could instead have gone to their relatives or friends. An appellate court upheld the ban this week. 

Prison officials in Indiana claim the media ban is mainly about respecting the dignity of the condemned person. But the idea that there could ever be dignity in state-sanctioned killing of a perfectly healthy human is ludicrous within itself. That would be the case even if executioners eschewed cruel and unusual methods. But they don’t, even when the media is watching. 

Angel Nieves Diaz continued moving for half an hour after receiving an injection of a drug that was supposed to paralyze him during a Florida execution. It took Arizona officials two hours to kill Joseph R. Wood. He had to be injected with 14 doses beyond the dose that was supposed to cause his death. 

Byron Black yelled, “It’s hurting so bad,” five minutes into a botched execution in Tennessee. John Marion Grant began convulsing and vomiting during his execution in Oklahoma. Prison officials had to enter the death chamber multiple times to wipe away and remove the vomit. The entire time, Grant was still breathing. Just last month, Tony Carruthers lay on a Tennessee gurney for more than hour moaning and bleeding as executioners struggled to find a vein. The execution was eventually called off by government officials.

These are only a few of the botched executions that lack “dignity.” This week, a federal appellate court upheld a decision blocking Alabama from using nitrogen gas to kill Jeffery Lee. Suffocating and asphyxiating on one’s own vomit seemed like a bridge too far. 

As a result of the barbarity of these events, it’s not far-fetched to wonder if Indiana officials have an ulterior motive. Perhaps the media ban has nothing to do with preserving the dignity of the condemned and is instead about obstructing government accountability and public oversight. 

Executions in this country were once highly public affairs. Often held in town squares, any member of the public could attend. In the 1830s, government officials began to enact laws that made executions private events. 

This was not because 19th century executioners were moved to protect the dignity of the condemned (who were disproportionately Black). It was an effort to halt a growing capital punishment abolitionist movement. A significant number of Americans found the public spectacle disgusting.

The same is occurring today. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, support for capital punishment in America has decreased from 80 percent in 1994 to 52 percent in 2026. This division necessitates transparency — otherwise, the only nongovernment actors able to tell the public the truth are dead.

The “dignity” playbook is a well-worn one that I know well as an incarcerated journalist. As a result of restrictions placed on media access to prisons, prisons have become unjustifiably cruel, less humane and more difficult to monitor. Restricting press freedom erodes human rights and constitutional safeguards and blinds the public to the kinds of cruelty and abuse depicted in HBO’s Oscar-nominated documentary “The Alabama Solution.” 

The film was made possible not because officials granted access to outside journalists, but because incarcerated people risked (and endured) severe punishment to document their reality with contraband phones. 

It’s not the first time surreptitious reporting methods revealed the real motives behind media restrictions. In 1906, a reporter in Minnesota ignored a ban on media executions and sneaked in to watch a condemned man spend 14 minutes gasping for air before he strangled to death because the rope used to hang him was too long – he hit the floor when dropped and needed to be raised back up. 

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As appellate judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi wrote in a dissenting opinion in the Indiana case, “A government exercises its greatest power when it ends a person’s life. As I see it, such severe and irreversible punishment on behalf of ‘the people’ must be observable to comply with the Constitution.”

Lifting the media ban is the only dignified thing Indiana can do, not only for the condemned but also for the people being asked to fund irreversible punishments.

The post Indiana Banned Press From Executions for “Dignity.” It Actually Serves Repression. appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., pointed to a March bulletin from Colorado law enforcement analysts that was unearthed by The Intercept last month. It warned that DHS posts using language popular with neo-Nazis could inspire acts of far-right violence within the U.S. as well as prompt white supremacists to join the agency.

The bulletin by the Colorado Information Analysis Center cited repeated instances of DHS recruitment posts spurring discussion among neo-Nazis about enlisting in ICE with the hope of spurring a race war. It noted at least one instance of white supremacists claiming online that someone in their organization “had already been a captain at an ICE-contracted detention facility.”

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The DHS posts, which sometimes appeared to borrow material verbatim from racist memes, songs, and tropes, were made as part of a recruiting push under then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Noem and former U.S. Border Patrol official Greg Bovino, who became the public face of Trump’s draconian mass deportation agenda, were pushed out of their positions by the White House this year.

Whitehouse said that Mullin should disavow his predecessor’s “dangerous recruitment campaign.”

“I cannot believe that you support the messages associated with these recruitment campaigns, or want anyone under your supervision to use the imprimatur of the United States Government to promote those messages,” Whitehouse said in a letter dated Wednesday.

In response to a request for comment, a DHS spokesperson criticized Whitehouse and the Colorado law enforcement analysts. The analysts’ report came from a fusion center, part of a network of information clearinghouses for local, state and federal police that spread across the U.S. following 9/11.

“It is gross that Senator Whitehouse and the state of Colorado are actively weaponizing official law enforcement bulletins to promote dangerous anti-ICE conspiracy theories,” the agency wrote in a statement. “Comparing recruitment efforts aimed at filling critical public safety roles to extremist rhetoric is not only absurd, but it also dangerously undermines the mission and sacrifices of federal officers.”

Mullin also rejected criticism of the department’s social media accounts when he was questioned by Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., about the Colorado fusion center’s report at a June 3 hearing.

“I’m very concerned that your department is promoting white nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiments on official social media accounts,” Thanedar said.

Mullin brushed off Thanedar’s assertion that this concern was backed by the facts.

“There is no facts,” Mullin said. “You throw out ‘nationalism,’ ‘Naziism,’ and that is exactly what causes the hatred and the violence that happens to our officers every single day.”

Whitehouse initially wrote to Noem on Feb. 23 with a detailed list of questions about the origin of the ICE recruiting posts. Noem never responded, according to Whitehouse’s more recent letter.

Since Trump installed Mullin atop DHS, the former U.S. senator from Oklahoma has taken small steps to distance the department from some of Noem’s most controversial moves, including a decision to lower training standards for newly hired ICE officers. DHS also appears to be posting fewer of the most provocative posts since Mullin took office.

In his latest letter to Mullin, Whitehouse said he was still trying to get to the bottom of who authorized and crafted the posts. He’d also previously asked whether there were sufficient checks in place to prevent the hiring of individuals with connections to “violent extremist or terrorist organizations.”

“DHS and ICE have deployed recruitment ads featuring white nationalist slogans, songs, and imagery while lowering recruitment standards—facilitating the hiring of agents with histories of violent extremism. I renew my request about what DHS has done to ensure it has not been infiltrated by violent extremists, and who is responsible for this dangerous recruitment campaign,” Whitehouse said in this week’s letter.

Noem has stayed out of the public eye since her March ouster, taking a role as special envoy for Trump’s so-called Shield of the Americas program. Bovino has been more outspoken. He attended a “remigration” conference with white nationalists in Portugal. In an interview before the conference’s start, the now-retired Border Patrol commander-at-large compared himself approvingly to Nazi general Erwin Rommel, describing the Third Reich strategist as someone who captured the imagination of the public.

The post ICE Should Show It Hasn’t Been “Infiltrated by Violent Extremists,” Senator Urges appeared first on The Intercept.

The battle over “60 Minutes” can teach us a lot about how someone like CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss can wreak havoc on our media ecosystem. What has gotten a lot less attention, however, is the way the fight shows us how ill-equipped our media institutions already were when it comes to covering the Trump administration and MAGA-era politics.

The strife at the famous magazine television news program reached a fever pitch last week, when, during a staff meeting, longtime correspondent Scott Pelley unloaded on Nick Bilton, Weiss’s pick to run the show. Pelley was fired and took to the media to defend himself.

In a long interview with the New York Times over the weekend, Pelley talked about how Weiss had injected herself into the show’s editorial process.

The most revealing part of the discussion centered on Pelley’s own “60 Minutes” coverage of President Donald Trump’s surge of immigration enforcement officers into Minneapolis, the uprising against the invasion, and the subsequent crackdown that led to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents.

Weiss’s role in the story was clearly toxic, but Pelley’s description of his own editorial process before Weiss got involved should also raise eyebrows.

“I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively,” Pelley said. “I thought we’d done a really good job with this.”

Pelley said they found evidence of protesters chest-bumping officers and hitting them with snowballs. The Minnesotans screamed at federal agents, Pelley said, and Pretti himself could be seen in one picture kicking out a police car taillight.

Striving for “Balance”

It’s a striking passage because it shows a revered journalist searching for a balanced narrative where there simply wasn’t one. If, after scouring hours and hours video to find evidence of “aggressive” protesters, all you can find is a chest bump and a thrown snowball, perhaps that’s a sign that your narrative that both sides were aggressive isn’t all that accurate.

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The truth is that the Minneapolis protesters were remarkably restrained in the face of egregious state violence and brutality. Yes, they were angry, loud, persistent, and rude. Demonstrators yelled insults at officers, blew whistles, and recorded with their cellphones. Yet that is all First Amendment-protected activity, no matter how many times Stephen Miller or Kristi Noem try to call it “terrorism.”

There’s a reason why the criminal charges against protesters have rarely held up in court: There was never any merit to them. Over and over, when it came time to present actual evidence, the government backed down, was reprimanded by a judge, or was rejected by a grand jury.

Likewise, Pretti’s confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement days before he was killed has nothing to do with whether immigration officers were justified in killing him. Videos of the killing show that Pretti did nothing to justify being confronted, beaten, and shot 10 times.

Pelley’s remarks, by themselves, offer a lesson in the pitfalls of striving for “balance” under an administration that lies by default, lies when it doesn’t need to, and lies as a demonstration of its power.

Enter Weiss

Weiss, her billionaire Paramount bosses David and Larry Ellison, and the other tech billionaires who fund her publication the Free Press are all of the belief that the legacy media is overwhelmingly left of center.

They’re correct in a very broad sense. Generally, journalists who work for legacy outlets have personal politics that skew liberal, but it’s more complicated than that. Legacy media journalists also tend to be institutionalists and deferential to authority. That can make them defensive of power and often skeptical of those who challenge it.

As Pelley’s Minneapolis story shows, these journalists also want to be seen as fair, which can drive them to seek balance even when there is no credible “other side.” Contrary to Weiss and the MAGA world’s claims that legacy media is hopelessly blinkered, the more urgent problem right now is that even the most revered journalistic institutions aren’t equipped to sort through the firehose of lies and propaganda pouring out of Trump’s far-right movement.

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Weiss’s role at both the Free Press and now at CBS News has been to make that task even more even more difficult. Her editorial feedback for Pelley, for instance, only served to muddy the waters.

“About four hours after our deadline,” Pelley told the New York Times, “Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include — can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing: Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

Weiss’s editorial advice to Pelley wasn’t about clearer or fairer or more contextual journalism. She was asking for propaganda.

If Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Good, reasonably feared for his life, he was legally justified in killing Good. And if Good was driving toward him, that bolsters his claim to have reasonably feared for his life.

The problem is that there’s no evidence that she was. In fact, CBS News did its own analysis of the video footage, which clearly demonstrated that Good’s wheels were pointed away from Ross — as did several other outlets. As television producer Tim Carvell pointed out, however, CBS’s analysis never aired on the network; it was relegated to YouTube.

Weiss’s alleged directive also glosses over how Ross and his fellow agents also created the very volatility they claimed justified his use of lethal force. And it ignores how the agents violated multiple Department of Homeland Security policies during the encounter — for example, by putting themselves in front of Good’s car, and by rushing toward her door.

At the time of Good’s death, the administration and its supporters had also been pushing a much more destructive and conspiratorial narrative: that a cabal of far-left donors had been training protesters and ICE watchers to weaponize their cars against immigration officers. Not only was there zero evidence for this, it provided cover for what the agents themselves were doing. Video and witness accounts repeatedly showed agents ramming and boxing people in with their vehicles, then falsely claiming they were the victims who had been rammed. Slandering Good just reinforced the narrative.

If Weiss had really wanted to provide relevant context for Good’s death, there were plenty of places to look. Perhaps Good feared for her safety because immigration officers surging into liberal cities were pulling people out of their cars and beating them. Or maybe it was relevant that Border Patrol officers have a long history of improperly placing themselves in front of moving vehicles, then using that as justification to fire at those vehicles.

Weiss didn’t demand any of that. For her, balance and nuance meant telling Pelley to make his story more palatable to MAGA.

Crisis of Disinformation

We now live in an era in which one of the two major parties has given itself over to wild conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and the whims and biases of a disturbed billionaire.

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The mere fact that Trump leads that party means the airwaves are already polluted with nonsense like whether windmills cause cancer, whether immigrants are eating neighborhood pets, and whether developing countries are “emptying their insane asylums” into the U.S.

The fact that half the Congress, about 40 percent of the public, and the entire executive branch now subscribe to anti-vaccine bullshit, election denialism, and “great replacement theory” doesn’t make any of those claims legitimate. So long as a good portion of the country is in the throes of MAGA, however, there will be ongoing pressure to platform even the looniest claims out of a sense of fairness and representation. Weiss isn’t the cause of all of this, but she is an accelerant.

Pelley told the New York Times that he refused to make Weiss’s changes, and that his piece aired without them. That may be encouraging, except that not everyone has the institutional stature of Scott Pelley to insulate themselves from reprisals — not even Scott Pelley, it turns out.

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The request itself, however, testifies to a disinformation crisis that’s only going to get worse, particularly as Weiss starts replacing departed staff with her own people and Trump keeps leaning on media outlets.

Another way it could get worse is if media honchos like those who own CBS keep gaining clout. Weiss’s own bosses, for example, have now set their sights on CNN — with Weiss reportedly expected to lead editorial at both news operations.

The post Scott Pelley Shows How Legacy Media Got It Wrong — Before Bari Weiss Made It Worse appeared first on The Intercept.

The man, Akram Mahmoud Omar, 77, lived in the U.S. for 50 years until ICE abruptly seized him during a routine check-in last October and soon sent him to “Camp 57,” the ICE detention camp within the notorious Angola, Louisiana, state prison.

The stress of the poor conditions there contributed to Omar’s heart attack, according to the habeas petition he filed in April. On May 29, a federal judge found ICE had violated Omar’s constitutional rights and ordered his immediate release. 

Then on Monday, just 10 days after his release, ICE seized Omar again and tried to whisk the still-recovering man onto a deportation flight the next morning, according to his lawyer Ken Mayeaux. 

Following an emergency motion from Mayeaux, the same judge again ordered ICE to release Omar and cautioned the agency not to make another deportation attempt.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (‘ICE’) shall IMMEDIATELY RELEASE Omar from ICE custody,” said the Monday order from Judge Brian Jackson in Louisiana’s Middle District. “ICE shall not RE-DETAIN or REMOVE Omar from the United States during the pendency of Omar’s Emergency Motion to Enforce the Court’s May 29 Order.”

In the May order, the judge found that ICE had violated Omar’s constitutional rights by unlawfully detaining him and denying him the chance to prepare for an orderly departure.

ICE directly defied that order by seizing him without warning for immediate deportation, the emergency motion alleges, blocking him from arranging his affairs or even saying goodbye.

“Petitioner’s re-detention and planned removal are in direct contempt of this Court’s prior order,” reads the June 8 emergency motion. The government “lied to Mr. Omar, telling him and his family that he did not need to report to ICE/ERO” — ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division — “until December, but now, Respondent is racing to remove petitioner within hours.”

In a statement to The Lens and The Intercept, ICE spokesperson Angelina Vicknair said, “ICE complies with all court orders, and any allegation that a judge’s orders were not followed are categorically false.”

Federal courts are now constantly dealing with flagrant violations of judicial orders by ICE, said Bridget Pranzatelli, an attorney with the National Immigration Project.

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“This level of cruelty and disrespect for federal courts is the rule, not the exception,” said Pranzatelli, who is familiar with the case. “The Court looked at the entire record before it and issued a well-reasoned decision, which specifically mandated certain protections for this very elderly, very sick man, and ICE ignored it.”

ICE’s actions in Omar’s case are also in line with the way that the government is using extreme measures to target Palestinians, Pranzatelli said. Omar was born in Palestine before the formation of the state of Israel; in 1975, he moved to the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident.

“If In Fact He Survives the Flight”

After his release last month, Omar attended his regular ICE check-in on the first Wednesday in June; his next check-in would be in December, he was told. But last Friday, he received a letter telling him to report to an ICE office on Monday morning, June 8.

After Omar received the letter, Mayeaux emailed the ICE office in Bossier City, Louisiana, where Omar lives, warning immigration officials that “any attempted removal of Mr. Omar in June would be in direct contempt of the Court Order,” according to a copy of the email included with the motion. “I am instructing my client not to report as requested.”

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Instead, on Monday, ICE came to Omar’s home and arrested him again. Omar’s wife immediately called Mayeaux. Only hours later did ICE tell Omar’s family he was being taken nearly two hours away, to an ICE staging area for deportation flights, and would be put on a plane the next morning to Israel.

By early afternoon, Mayeux had filed the emergency motion. 

His client’s health, Mayeux wrote in the emergency motion, was his main concern. Omar is still recovering from his April heart attack and open-heart surgery. His wife told the arresting ICE officer that she was planning to take Omar to a cardiologist later that day, and that he could not move well. 

According to the filing, a doctor was prepared to testify that the roughly 14-hour flight without medical clearance raised serious concerns about Omar’s health, “if in fact he survives the flight.” 

“Heartless and Cruel”

Omar had been in the U.S. for half a century when ICE picked him up in Mississippi during a routine check-in last fall. There was no readily apparent cause: ICE had long known about two minor, nonviolent convictions, one in 2005 and one in 2022, but Omar had lived in the U.S. for years under ICE supervision and had complied with required immigration check-ins. 

“Incredibly, despite these undisputed facts, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (‘ICE’) considers Omar to be both a ‘flight risk’ and a ‘priority for removal,” said the May release order from Jackson, a federal judge in Baton Rouge. “Omar has been held in ICE detention since October 28, 2025 — 7 full months — with no end in sight.” 

Jackson ruled that ICE had to abide by its own regulations: If ICE were to deport him, the agency needed to give him advance notice, a reason, an opportunity for an orderly departure, and an informal interview to respond to ICE’s deportation efforts.

ICE did not serve Omar’s counsel with notice until he was already back in ICE custody. 

“The Notice also makes a mockery of the Court’s Order,” says Mayeaux’s June 8 emergency motion. “It was only after he was taken back into custody — in contravention of the Court’s Order — that he was informed of the existence of the travel document and of his imminent removal.” 

But even at that point, the motion alleged, ICE didn’t give Omar the chance to speak directly with counsel.

The court had also directed ICE to facilitate communication with Omar’s doctors and family “to ensure the most efficient and effective continuation of his required medical treatment upon his release.”

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ICE appears to have violated most of Jackson’s orders when its agents re-detained Omar. Even when ICE SUVs showed up at his door to bring him to the Bossier City field office, the agents continued to say that it was only a routine check-in. Not until less than 24 hours before the flight was scheduled to depart were family members told he was being deported.

Again, an order from Jackson mandated Omar’s immediate release. ICE agents returned him to his home around 7 p.m. Monday evening — leaving his family relieved, but shaken.

“They’re all completely traumatized,” Mayeaux said of his client’s family.

While ICE’s letter last week had made him suspicious, he said, “I couldn’t believe they would be so heartless and cruel as to do this to a 77-year-old man who’s ill. I just didn’t.”

The post ICE Defied Direct Order From Federal Judge and Re-Detained Elderly Palestinian appeared first on The Intercept.