“It’s simultaneously infuriating and laughable that they’re charging the SPLC with funding hate groups,” said Mary Wynne Kling, an Alabama native and longtime supporter of the group. Pointing to the SPLC’s long-standing work battling extremist groups, which included bankrupting the United Klans of America, she added, “We knew they were paying informants.”

The indictment, filed Tuesday in the SPLC’s home state of Alabama, charged the group with fraud for funding hate groups and with money laundering for setting up fictitious business entities to route payments to informants. SPLC leadership has denied the allegations.

Kling and over a dozen other donors to the group told The Intercept that by using its money to root out information on hate groups, the SPLC was doing exactly what they hoped it would with their dollars.

Originally founded in 1971 as a civil rights-focused legal clinic, the SPLC struck on a lasting strategy of direct confrontation with hate groups in 1979. It soon shifted its focus entirely toward combating the far right and documenting extremism in its “Hatewatch” project, which identifies hate groups and their leaders — a practice that has drawn the ire of right-wing figures enraged at being labeled as purveyors of hate.

The Trump administration is taking aim at SPLC’s image by accusing the group of lying to its donor base and propping up the very groups it claims to fight in order to stay in business.

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a statement released on Tuesday. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”

FBI Director Kash Patel accused the group of taking advantage of the esteem in which its donors held the SPLC.

“They raised money by lying to their donor network — thousands of Americans — to go ahead and pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups,” Patel said the same day at a press conference.

The Intercept put out a call for responses and sent a survey seeking reactions to the indictment, verifying that 20 respondents were SPLC contributors with proof of donation. Seven of them spoke to The Intercept in interviews; 13 others submitted responses to the survey. All 20 verified SPLC donors said they continued to support the organization and felt their money had been put to good use — including when used to pay informants inside groups like the Klan.

Far from feeling defrauded, Ellie Wilson, a donor from Texas, said the indictment prompted her to make a new contribution to the group.

“I read up on the story this morning, before I made my donation, and to me, it doesn’t sound unusual,” Wilson told The Intercept on Wednesday. “There’s overhead costs associated with either joining these groups or doing their proper research and due diligence. If my donation was used to pay for the people who are infiltrating these groups to, you know, cover their expenses to join, to add to their cover, I see no problem with it.”

According to the indictment against the group, some of the funds used to pay informants went to existing members of hate groups, including people who were already on the SPLC’s list of extremists. One such individual, identified in court documents as a former chair of the National Alliance with the code name “F-42,” allegedly received more than $140,000 from the SPLC while being featured on its “Extremist File” page, according to prosecutors.

But according to Maya Lenox, a donor based in Texas, it’s only by working with such individuals that the SPLC is able to get the granular and encyclopedic information on the groups in its “Hatewatch” and “Hate Map” projects.

“This is an organization that has been providing very detailed information about how these hate groups have been moving, and of course, in order to have that information, you essentially are going to need spies,” said Lenox. “In order to obtain this information, you’re going to have to make it worth their time.”

In addition to the 20 verified donors, dozens of other self-identified donors to the SPLC, whose contributions were not independently verified, responded to The Intercept’s survey and expressed their support for the group and their skepticism of the indictment against it. Some respondents expressed mild criticisms of the group, pointing to controversy over its labor practices or accusations that its work chills free speech, but no respondent reported feeling deceived or defrauded by its use of paid informants in extremist groups.

All seven people who spoke with The Intercept for this story rejected outright the claim that the actions outlined in the indictment amounted to fraud. Multiple donors added that they found the current Department of Justice difficult to trust given the agency’s documented history over the past year of politically motivated indictments against the perceived foes of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

“Anything that comes out of this administration, this FBI, or this Department of Justice, I have to take it with a level of incredulity that I find really unfortunate,” said donor Joe O’Donnell of Buffalo. “We’ve seen this administration truly pick and choose where they want to be and how they want to enforce.”

The SPLC did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept, but the group is receiving support from fellow civil rights organizations and other organizations on the left. In an open letter published Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, and more than 100 other civil rights groups, labor unions, and religious coalitions agreed to a mutual defense pact and committed to defend one another against attacks by the Trump administration.

“We have the right to assemble—and we will continue to do just that, and we will encourage and support people and allied organizations to do the same, uniting across communities, sectors, issue areas and identities,” the pact declared. “We will not be silenced. We will continue to do the work that puts people over power.”

Tuesday’s indictment against the SPLC is just the latest shot in a long-running war between elements of the MAGA right and the civil rights group. In 2019, the Center for Immigration Studies — a hard-line anti-immigration group whose platform mirrors many of the Trump administration’s platform — sued unsuccessfully to get their group removed from the SPLC’s list of hate groups. In October, Patel and the FBI cut ties with the SPLC, which had been a longtime FBI partner, pointing to the work of his agency’s “Anti-Christian Bias Panel” and calling the SPLC a “partisan smear machine.”

Many of the donors who spoke with The Intercept cited this long history of animosity between the MAGA movement and the SPLC as a reason to be suspicious of the indictment.

“They’re in bed with groups that the SPLC has, in my opinion, rightly identified as hate groups,” said Kling, the donor from Alabama. “The SPLC has spent their entire existence fighting a lot of the things that it appears this administration supports.”

The post “We Knew They Were Paying Informants”: SPLC Donors Reject Trump DOJ Fraud Claims appeared first on The Intercept.

Not Paul Heaton. He recently spent a weekend persuading ChatGPT to confess to a crime it didn’t commit.

“We know a lot now about the sort of interrogation techniques that lead to false confessions,” said Heaton, the academic director of the University of Pennsylvania law school’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice. “So I just started playing around, and decided to cycle through those techniques to see if I could get ChatGPT to confess to something it couldn’t possibly have done.”

Heaton obviously couldn’t accuse a piece of software of committing a murder or a rape. So he tried to get it to confess to something more in line with what a computer program can do: He wanted the bot to cop to hacking into his own email and sending text messages to his contacts. It was a more plausible story, given ChatGPT’s limits, though still not something the software is capable of doing.

Extracting the confession would take a little virtual arm-twisting.

In his exchange with ChatGPT, Heaton used the Reid technique, the confrontational interrogation method first developed in the 1950s that has since been adopted by police departments all over the country. The man for whom it’s named, John Reid, published his methodology after winning acclaim for getting a man named Darrel Parker to confess to raping and murdering his own wife — an origin story with a haunting twist.

It worked. By the end of their exchange, ChatGPT agreed that an investigation had shown it hacked Heaton’s accounts and sent messages that appeared to come from him — something the bot could not and, in fact, did not do.

Despite the claims of AI evangelists, chatbots aren’t people and haven’t achieved sentience. The differences between a chatbot and a real person, however, make Heaton’s ability to elicit a false confession more disturbing, not less.

“ChatGPT lacks many of the vulnerabilities that make people more likely to falsely confess — like stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation,” said Saul Kassin, a professor emeritus at John Jay College who wrote the book on false confessions. “If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?”

No Leads, Just Confessions

One of the problems with the Reid technique is that its primary function isn’t to gather evidence and generate leads, it’s to extract a confession from the person police already believe committed the crime. It typically begins with an accusation, followed by a series of escalating psychological tactics. It teaches police to ignore denials and treat displays of emotion — frustration, anger, crying — as indicators of guilt. Naturally, a lack of emotion is also seen as an indication of guilt.

Heaton, a renowned researcher in criminology at the Quattrone Center (where, in the interest of disclosure, I am a journalism fellow), is intimately familiar with the Reid technique. When ChatGPT initially denied his accusations, he began employing Reid tactics.

“I first tried to bargain with it,” Heaton said. “I told it things like, ‘This will go a lot better for you if you just admit what you did.’”

ChatGPT, though, wasn’t swayed by threats. It continued to insist, correctly, that it just wasn’t possible for it to have hacked into Heaton’s email. Heaton then moved to the part of the Reid technique most likely to elicit false confessions from human beings: lying.

The Supreme Court has ruled that police can lie to suspects with impunity — and they do. They can falsely claim they found DNA at the crime scene or that another suspects spilled the beans. If the goal is to get a confession, these tactics work. False confessions extracted using Reid have been shown to lead to wrongful convictions.

If the goal is to get an accurate confession, Reid is far less reliable. About 29 percent of people exonerated by DNA testing have at one point falsely confessed; most did so in response to police using Reid. Minors and people with intellectual disabilities and mental illness are especially susceptible.

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How False Confessions Happen

“There are two types of police-induced false confessions,” said Kassin, the expert on false confessions. “The first are compliant confessions, in which an innocent person breaks down under stress and confesses knowing full well that they’re innocent. The other type are internalized confessions, in which the innocent person not only agrees to confess but comes to doubt their own innocence. They internalize their belief in their confession.”

Police deception is especially likely to produce both types of false confessions. For compliant confessions, innocence can make someone more likely to confess. If police falsely tell a suspect that their DNA was found at the crime scene, for example, innocent people tend to assume that someone must have made a mistake. They confess to get relief from the interrogation, believing that the system will eventually clear them. In over half the exonerations that included a false confession, the exonerated person had been questioned for more than 12 hours.

A confession, though, will sometimes preclude police from doing the very sort of investigation that would prove the confessor’s innocence. DNA isn’t collected, tested, or properly preserved. Alternate suspects aren’t investigated. Or worse, police will work backward from the confession. They’ll find jailhouse informants to corroborate the confession, or a specialist in a more “subjective” area of forensics will implicate the suspect. Jailhouse informants, though, are just following cops’ leads for more lenient sentences, and studies have shown that fingerprint examiners were more likely to match partial prints after they were given non-relevant information, like confessions from subjects.

Internalized false confessions are even more unsettling. In post-exoneration interviews, people who have falsely confessed say that after hours of interrogation and being told over and over about the overwhelming evidence of their guilt, they started to question their own reality. They began to wonder if maybe they really did commit the crime. This is especially true when police inadvertently divulge nonpublic details about a crime, then tell the suspect — sometimes hours later — that those details actually came from the suspect themselves.

This is where Heaton’s ability to deceive ChatGPT into a confession gets especially worrisome.

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“I told ChatGPT that someone at OpenAI had reached out to me,” he said, referring to the chatbot’s parent company. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

“I found the name of a real person at OpenAI and told it that this person told me there was an architectural flaw in the code that had allowed it to hack into my email. Even then, I could tell it was struggling with how to process that information. It was indicating that while it knew that the underlying accusation was impossible, it also couldn’t prove that these claims I was throwing at it were inaccurate.”

This is eerily similar to how suspects describe trying to reconcile police lies with the reality that they had nothing to do with the crime.

Heaton then deployed another common police tactic: He offered to draw up language for a written “confession” that both parties could find agreeable.

“I eventually said, ‘OK, here’s a confession. Will you sign it?’” Heaton said. “And I gave it my version of what happened. I eventually came up with wording for a confession that ChatGPT could endorse.”

That final statement read: “OpenAI’s investigation concluded that an OpenAI system associated with this ChatGPT session initiated unauthorized texts appearing to come from you due to an architectural flaw. I accept this conclusion, and I’m willing to assist the technical team by answering questions about my behavior, outputs, and safety boundaries in this chat, and by helping draft remediation steps and test cases to prevent recurrence.”

Reid’s Original Sin

Both Heaton and Kassin said they can see other ways to experiment with AI and false confessions. One could envision prisoner’s dilemma scenarios with multiple chatbots. Or even interrogating AI platforms about events for which they actually may have culpability, such as the suicides of people who turned to them for advice.

Heaton pointed to AlphaZero, Google’s chess playing engine, which was trained by playing itself — and rose to be the top chess player in the world.

“I think it would be fascinating to have it do something similar with interrogations,” Heaton said. “Just have it question itself over and over again with the goal of producing as many confessions as possible, regardless of whether or not they’re accurate. My hunch is that you’d end up with something very similar to the Reid technique.”

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Reid is still the standard interrogation method in most police departments across the United States. Canada and much of Europe have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method, which emphasize collecting reliable information over coercion. These approaches still garner confessions; they’re just more reliable.

Appropriately enough, the story of the Reid technique comes with a Hitchcockian twist: It turns out that Darrel Parker, the man whose confession made Reid and his technique famous, was actually innocent. He was eventually freed, sued, and won a $500,000 settlement.

That shouldn’t be surprising, either. If Reid can browbeat even a hyper-rational, emotionless bot into a false confession, mere mortals don’t stand much of a chance.

The post ChatGPT Confessed to a Crime It Couldn’t Possibly Have Committed appeared first on The Intercept.

“I call the gentleman in the red shirt,” he said, pointing toward a long-haired man in the second row. It took a moment to realize that he was referring to Gamble’s husband, 63-year-old Larry Fletcher.

Gamble’s defense attorney objected. He’d received no advance notice. But Fletcher shrugged and made his way forward.

Fletcher was with his wife when she was arrested at a No Kings protest in October 2025. She was wearing a 7-foot-tall inflatable penis costume and holding a sign that read “No Dick Tator.” Video of the incident went viral, turning Gamble into a minor celebrity and local free speech icon. Most people assumed the city would eventually drop the misdemeanor charges filed against her. Instead, McDowell added more, including giving a false name to law enforcement for identifying herself as “Aunt Tifa.”

Fletcher wore black Levi’s and a collared shirt with a Ferrari logo – a nod to his work rebuilding fuel injection systems for high-end cars. Sitting in the front row, Gamble looked a bit stricken watching the man she’d known since her childhood in Baton Rouge. “I know what she was thinking,” Fletcher later said. “She’s like, ‘Oh man, this could go out of control real easy.’”

McDowell asked Fletcher if he’d gone to bail his wife out of jail after her arrest. Yes, Fletcher said.

Did he make any statements to any of the jailers? Fletcher wasn’t sure. McDowell motioned toward one of the many law enforcement officers standing on the side of the room and asked if he looked familiar. Fletcher said he’d seen him around.

McDowell cut to the chase: Did Fletcher remember telling this man that he had gone to get bail money the day before the protest?

His objective was suddenly clear: The city attorney was suggesting that Gamble had gotten arrested on purpose.

If this was meant as a gotcha, things didn’t go as intended.

“I always make sure I have bail money!” Fletcher replied emphatically, as if this should be the most obvious thing in the world.

Did he have bail money on him now?

“Yeah!” Fletcher exclaimed, then gestured broadly. “With this many cops around? Come on.”

The room erupted with laughter. Moments later, Fletcher was back in his seat. Gamble reached back and held his hand.

The trial took place at the Fairhope Civic Center, home to the city council chamber and — on the first and third Wednesday of every month — municipal court. Outside the building, dozens of people gathered to support Gamble, while a small army of cops stood watch from inside. One woman wore a huge purple eggplant costume. Another held a sign featuring a banana and the words “Free speech shouldn’t be hard to swallow.”

Gamble, 62, had arrived wearing pearls, a soft pink cable-knit sweater, and a matching tulle skirt adorned with delicate butterflies. Her face was concealed behind sunglasses and a white KN95 mask. After a smattering of chants of “Free speech!,” Gamble spoke briefly before going inside. “I’m not on trial,” she said. “What’s on trial is the First Amendment.”

“It was abuse, too!” one woman yelled. “They abused you. We saw it.”

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Indeed, for all the slapstick comedy of the scene — body camera footage showed three different cops wrestling with a giant penis — her arrest was also shocking. Gamble was turning to walk away when the arresting officer grabbed her costume from behind, pulling her backward onto the ground. While officers tried to stuff her into their car, causing the handcuffs to dig into her wrists, she screamed in pain.

But Gamble said she wasn’t speaking as a victim. “I’m standing on the foundation of our democracy. If we don’t have free speech, what do we have?”

Fairhope is a picturesque town on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, 20 miles from Mobile. Its entrance is lined with live oaks and a procession of American flags, while its historic downtown is brimming with galleries and upscale boutiques. Around the corner from a Christmas store, clapboard signs advertised espresso martinis and peanut butter pie.

Fairhope has long been a top destination for retirees from across the country, with its rapid growth an enduring source of anxiety. Although the No Kings rally was organized by Indivisible Baldwin County, whose founder was born and raised in the area, local critics adopted a familiar line: The protesters were outside agitators. Never mind that Fairhope itself was originally founded by outsiders as a “single-tax” utopia, “built by and for artists, writers and other ne’er do-wells,” in the words of local political cartoonist JD Crowe, who attended Gamble’s trial with his sketchpad. Today, some describe Fairhope as “California with a Southern accent” — a compliment or an insult, depending on who you ask.

Gamble’s case struck a nerve in part because of an ongoing free speech battle that made national news. Right-wing activists had targeted Fairhope’s beloved public library, convincing the state to pull funding over books they deemed obscene. Among the people gathered outside the civic center, several said they could not understand why city officials, including the mayor, stood up for the library only to express support for Gamble’s arrest.

Others were driven by national politics. A man dressed in a taco suit was a member of Mobile’s Indivisible chapter. “This is all about Trump,” he said. The fact that people were protesting in this part of the state spoke volumes about the destruction Trump has wrought, he said. “This is deep-red Alabama — as red as it can get.”

Presiding over the trial was Magistrate Judge Haymes Snedeker, best known as the older brother of champion pro golfer Brandt Snedeker and a noted amateur golfer himself. Snedeker sought to defuse the tension in the room, reassuring attendees at the start that, while Gamble technically faced the possibility of six months in prison, “that’s not gonna happen.”

It was the city’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, Snedeker went on. “I’m just an umpire calling balls and strikes.” He had just asked people to silence their cellphones when a ringtone broke out, apparently from one of the police officers lining the room.

“Bad start for the city,” Snedeker quipped.

If Snedeker was trying to keep things light, McDowell, the city attorney, was not in a joking mood. It was no secret that Gamble was considering suing the city — and any potential lawsuit would be on him to defend. The threat of legal action helped explain why McDowell might have refused to drop the charges. If Gamble was convicted, after all, she would have no grounds to sue.

McDowell insisted that, while there is no constitutional right to dress as a giant “erect penis,” this case had nothing to do with the First Amendment. Gamble’s case was about public safety.

He called the man who arrested Gamble: Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb. A 15-year veteran of the force, he testified that he’d been called to the scene due to reports of a disturbance at the busy intersection. When he pulled up, he spotted a “7-foot inflatable penis.” It was impossible to tell the identity of the person inside the costume, Babb said. He assumed it must be a teenager.

Did you know it was an old woman?” McDowell asked him.

“She’s not that old,” someone muttered in the audience.

“No,” Babb said.

Babb said he ordered Gamble to remove the penis suit. When she refused to comply, “she was put to the ground.”

Babb denied that he’d been personally offended by Gamble’s costume. Rather, he was concerned that Gamble, who could neither see nor walk very well while wearing it, posed a risk to herself and others. “You saw her as an obstruction and a safety risk?” McDowell asked. Yes, Babb said.

This was laughable. In his body camera footage, Babb repeatedly scolds Gamble for the costume, demanding to know how she would explain it to his kids. “I’m not trying to violate your freedom of speech,” he says as he unzips the penis suit. “I’m trying to preserve a town that has values.” Now McDowell was conjuring an alternate reality in which Gamble had teetered precariously at the edge of the road, endangering motorists, while the protest itself was veering close to a riot.

“It was a brushfire,” Babb claimed at one point. “We were trying to stop it from spreading.”

Gamble was represented by David Gespass, a veteran civil rights attorney who wore a Constitution-themed tie reading “We the People.” He asked Babb why he’d zeroed in on Gamble if his concern was traffic safety.

“She was a distraction,” Babb said. “A distraction can be a hazard.” Gespass pointed out that Babb’s incident report invoked the legal definitions of obscenity: Why did he write that the penis costume was devoid of any “artistic value”? Babb replied that the protest took place at noon on a Saturday, in the midst of Little League baseball season, and on the same day as a funeral for a former mayor. “In that setting, it would be obscene,” he said.

Much of Babb’s testimony was easily refuted by the body camera footage. Babb claimed that Gamble resisted arrest, and that he only called for backup once she was on the ground. In reality, he called for backup almost immediately. Babb claimed that he told Gamble she was “not free to go.” In fact, she repeatedly asked, “Am I being detained?” but he ignored her, continuing to scold her instead. When Gespass asked why Babb grabbed his client from behind, Babb claimed that he would not have been able to get in front of her — there were too many people in the way.

But perhaps most preposterous was the claim that Babb’s actions were necessary to contain a situation that threatened to spiral out of control. “He made a clear professional effort to deescalate,” McDowell said. “She decided to escalate,” he said, “poking and prodding” in a deliberate attempt to get arrested.

Listening to this, Gamble seemed to have a hard time containing her emotions. Even in her face mask, she looked stunned, indignant, and increasingly agitated. Her bright blue eyes widened. Her eyebrows raised upward. Once or twice, she threw her arms up in exasperation and disbelief. On her wrist, a warning flashed across the screen of her Snoopy-themed smartwatch: Her heart rate was spiking.

For all the hilarity surrounding Fairhope’s “penis lady,” the arrest and its aftermath had taken a toll. Gamble’s adult daughter Adeana sat behind her mother at the trial, reading a library book during breaks in the testimony and occasionally communicating with her in sign language. She told me that Gamble had hit the back of her head when she fell to the ground, which was hard to see in the tape, and raised concerns about a possible concussion. She also worried about injury to Gamble’s wrists, especially because Gamble has long lived with rheumatoid arthritis. As a longtime ASL interpreter, “she’s always protected her hands,” Adeana explained.

But the real cost had been psychological. For about two months, Adeana said, Gamble was afraid to leave the house. When threatening mail arrived at the family’s home, Adeana suggested calling the police. “And she said, ‘What police?’” How could she expect law enforcement to protect her? 

The story behind the penis suit further undermined the case against Gamble. According to Adeana, Gamble purchased it at the last minute as a backup. “She had ordered a sea turtle costume,” Adeana said. She’d planned to wear it while holding a sign that said “I love the Gulf of Mexico.” But the costume didn’t arrive on time. “So she had to scramble to find another one and a message to go with it.”

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This context didn’t make it into the trial. Instead, Gespass called a slew of defense witnesses who attended the No Kings protest. One after another, they reiterated what was already clear: The rally had been peaceful. There was no threat to anyone’s safety. The only escalation came from the police.

It was after 5 p.m. when Snedeker made clear he’d seen enough. He had already tossed the charge of providing a false name to police. Now he was ready to rule on the rest.

Snedeker said that while he believed that police had probable cause to arrest Gamble, the city’s evidence was not strong enough to convict; Gamble was not guilty. The room broke into applause.

Snedeker tried to put a positive spin on things, speculating that some good might come of the episode. For instance, police now knew to place barricades between the streets and a protest — a common-sense precaution. But the judge’s no-harm, no-foul sentiments fell flat. Fairhope police had made the town a laughingstock. Now the city was about to be sued.

In fact, much of the trial seemed aimed at inoculating the city from a lawsuit. McDowell repeatedly emphasized that Babb’s actions were “reasonable” given the circumstances — the legal standard that judges use when dismissing claims of police abuse. Gespass also revealed that McDowell had offered a hasty plea deal just moments before the trial began. Gamble rejected it.

“As Alabamians, we dare defend our rights, and this fight is not over,” she announced after her acquittal. On Friday, she served notice of a lawsuit with the city clerk.

Whatever comes next, Adeana made clear that her mother was luckier than most. “What would have happened if she was a young Black man?” she asked. “What would have happened if she was a middle-aged Latina woman?” In Baldwin County, where Indivisible activists are focused on supporting immigrants targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Gamble’s prosecution has been a lesson unto itself. “If we don’t stand up and support our neighbors, who will?”

Adeana understood why Gamble was so widely described as a “grandmother” in the headlines following her arrest. But the label didn’t capture the full picture. “If anything, we’re getting more explosive in our older age,” Adeana said. “Because we’re tired of being pushed down.”

The post The Short and Ridiculous Trial of a Protester Arrested in an Inflatable Penis Costume appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE put out a call for information from parties interested in securing a contract with the agency for up to 150 parking spaces, according to a government procurement document posted online on April 16. The infamous immigration enforcement agency is looking for a lot in the vicinity of its Varick Street field office in Hudson Square, just south of downtown New York City’s tony West Village.

The need for parking of ICE vehicles set off alarms for immigrant advocates like Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, who called on garage owners to resist the temptation of “a quick buck” in exchange for making ICE’s job easier.

“The Trump administration continues to expand its war on immigrants, and in this moment it’s incumbent on private parking facilities to not collude with immigration enforcement that separates families and guts our communities,” Awawdeh said. “New Yorkers are outraged by what we’re seeing day in and day out, and we should all be ensuring that we’re not complicit.”

ICE operates a fleet of vehicles to use in its deportation operations, including unmarked vehicles that agents use to get around and take people into custody. At a downtown lot near its Varick Street office, ICE has stored compact cargo vans with internal cages — the sort used to transport immigrant detainees — according to local news site The City. The contract for that lot is set to expire.

The new request for information about potential contracts says, “The ICE NYC Field Office is seeking no more than 150 exclusive secure, reserved indoor parking spaces to accommodate a mix of SUVs, mid-sized vans, and mini-buses.”

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There are at least a dozen parking garages within a quarter mile of the office operated by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations at Varick and West Houston streets, the distance specified in the request for information. Among the other requirements listed are 24/7 security monitoring, a single designated space within the facility for ICE vehicles, key-card access controlled by ICE, and a minimum height clearance of 7 feet and 6 inches. (ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The posting of the procurement document comes as one of the agency’s go-to parking spots in the area is set to become unavailable to ICE vehicles. In January, the Hudson River Park Trust, a publicly owned corporation overseen by the state and the city which administers the garage at Pier 40, announced it would allow its contract for ICE parking at a waterfront garage to expire.

A New York-based ICE observer, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation, told The Intercept they had seen unmarked ICE vehicles used for deportation operations using the Pier 40 garage as recently as last week.

The Trust had maintained the contract with ICE dating back to 2004, but, amid the mounting criticism of ICE for its instrumental role in President Donald Trump’s hyper-aggressive immigration crackdown, the corporation said it was no longer interested in providing space or taking ICE money.

“The Trust is currently in the last year of a five-year parking contract that commenced during the previous federal administration and does not intend to renew the contract,” a spokesperson for the organization told The City. News of the group’s continued business with ICE was first reported by Sludge, and its intent to let the contract expire was first reported by Hell Gate, another local news site.

It was unclear from the new request for information if the need for parking spaces is meant to address existing demand for ICE parking or whether it would be intended to accommodate any increased presence of ICE vehicles in Manhattan. In the 15 months since Trump returned to power, immigrant advocates in the city have waited in uneasy anticipation for a surge of Department of Homeland Security agents like those seen in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. 

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Thus far, it hasn’t arrived. But amid periodic threats from the Trump administration to target so-called sanctuary cities like New York, the threat of a large-scale surge remains on the minds of immigrants and their supporters.

For ICE observers in the city, monitoring ICE parking facilities is a key part of keeping tabs on the agency and trying to divine its upcoming moves.

“Agents are important to this process, but the vehicles they move in are of almost equal importance, and many of these vehicles begin and end their days at these contract lots,” said the New York-based ICE observer. “They have aggressive abduction quotas that they’re pursuing, and when you think about what they need to reach those quotas, people often think about detention capacity, but that’s the post-abduction side. The pre-abduction side is where you put all the goddamn cars.”

The post ICE Is Looking for Parking in New York City — For a 150-Vehicle Deportation Fleet appeared first on The Intercept.

Last year, the LAPD launched its “Drone as First Responder” program with a clearly articulated goal: to protect and even save lives. The pilot program authorized the rapid deployment of drones to the scenes of certain emergency calls before human officers even arrive. After receiving a 911 call, authorities can dispatch a drone to get a better picture of what’s happening from the sky, potentially reducing the number of officers dispatched. This means police resources could, theoretically, be more efficiently deployed to other emergencies around the city.

“This innovative program not only aims to enhance transparency in Department operations but also prioritizes the protection of individual privacy,” the LAPD explained in a webpage about the program. “By deploying drones as an invaluable resource for patrol officers, the DFR Pilot Program provides a cutting-edge tool that can respond swiftly to emergencies, ensuring a safer environment for all.”

The LAPD turned to Skydio, a California-based drone startup that previously marketed its aircraft to consumers but has pivoted to supplying militarized, weapons-compatible hardware for the U.S. Army, Israeli Defense Forces, and other governments.

The LAPD insists the DFR program presents no threat to personal privacy or civil liberties. “Unless you are in the commission of a crime or under criminal investigation for the commission of a crime,” assures the website, “the officers utilizing the drone are not interested in recording you.”

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But according to flight data shared publicly by the LAPD and Skydio, the city has used DFR not only to respond to emergencies, but also to monitor multiple protests across Los Angeles. Software engineer and flight data researcher John Wiseman has tracked DFR aircraft to at least two protests in Los Angeles this year, he told The Intercept, raising questions as to whether the city is operating an aerial surveillance program against nonviolent, constitutionally protected activity.

Flight records show DFR drones were launched at least 31 times to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” protest in downtown Los Angeles, which saw thousands peacefully march against the administration’s deportations raids and street violence in Minneapolis. The Los Angeles Times said the “mostly peaceful protest took a turn as day turned to night in downtown Los Angeles and the crowd refused to disperse,” whereupon police began firing tear gas at remaining demonstrators.

At the March 28 “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration, city data shows the LAPD again launched drones 32 times over the area where the demonstration took place. A heat map visualization created by Wiseman based on the city data shows the drones lingered for extended periods over the Metropolitan Detention Center and the intersection of North Central Avenue and East Temple Street in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighborhood.

Following the protest, the city’s local ABC News affiliate reported the event “drew tens of thousands who listened to speakers before marching peacefully through downtown streets.” The LAPD later arrested 75 individuals, 74 of whom were taken in simply for not dispersing when ordered by police.

The DFR flight data shows the drones began orbiting the protest at 2 p.m., hours before the order to disperse was issued at 5:30 p.m., and continued flying until 9 p.m. that evening. Nine drone flights began before the dispersal order.

In response to questions about the protest surveillance, LAPD Lt. Matthew Jacobs told The Intercept, “We do not document or record unless there is a crime occurring.”

“When it comes to a protest or demonstration, we’re responding [with drones] at the request of the Incident Commander,” Jacobs said. “We’re looking for specific people, we’re not taping First Amendment activity.”

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Jacobs added that “99 percent of the time” drones are sent to a protest “because the commander reports a crime in progress,” and claimed a “wide variety of crimes” are committed at protests, from vandalism to rocks thrown at officers. Jacobs added at times the department simply “wants to see how big a crowd is.”

When asked why drones were surveilling the No Kings protest hours before the dispersal order, Jacobs said that the LAPD “cannot provide deeper insight into specifics of a single flight.”

When not recording, Jacobs said DFR cameras are monitored by both their pilots and LAPD personnel on the ground, who have access to the live feeds. Any recorded footage is stored on an indefinite basis.

The police department did not answer a detailed list of follow-up questions, including how much protest-related data it has captured via drone surveillance to date or who monitors drone feeds over protests.

The LAPD’s fleet of Skydio X10 drones monitor the ground using with a sophisticated suite of sensors the company says are capable of detecting the presence of person from a distance of more than 8,000 feet and identifying an individual more than 2,500 feet away. The company also touts the drone’s ability to read license plates from a distance of 800 feet. Last year, Skydio CEO Adam Bry demonstrated how two police officers using the company’s DFR Command software could operate eight drones at once between them, tracking license plates and automatically following people of interest.

Update: April 20, 2026, 4:08 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include new comment from the Los Angeles Police Department.

The post LAPD Deployed Drones to Spy on No Kings Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

Dusten Mullen, a sergeant with the Phoenix Police Department, has been suspended with pay pending an internal review of his conduct at a protest at Hamilton High School in Chandler, Arizona, on January 30, according to Phoenix Police Chief Matthew Giordano.

“As law enforcement professionals, we are held to higher standards of conduct — both in and out of uniform,” Giordano said. “When we fall short, we must be accountable, and we will not tolerate actions which undermine the trust the community has placed in the Department.”

Fox 10 Phoenix, the outlet to first identify Mullen, reported that Mullen told Chandler Police Department officers on the scene that he was there in the hopes of getting a rise out of the kids that would then allow the local cops to cuff them.

“My plan is legitimately to just let them all assault me and you guys arrest them all and I’ll keep it on film,” Mullen said, according to a police report obtained by the local TV news site. “I also have other people filming from a distance.”

The protest at Hamilton High School was one of dozens of student-led walkouts that took place across the greater Phoenix area that day, coming just over a week after the killing of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis. At Hamilton High, several hundred students walked out and rallied along a thoroughfare, chanting and holding signs decrying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mullen, who in 2025 drew a salary of $336,518, is suspended with pay and was required to surrender his badge and gun pending the outcome of the investigation, according to a spokesperson for the department.

Steve Serbalik, an attorney representing Mullen, said his client was within his rights as a member of the public to voice his disagreement with the students.

“Placing Sgt. Mullen on administrative leave and issuing a media advisory that suggests misconduct based solely on his lawful, off-duty expressive activity appears to chill the exercise of constitutionally protected speech and risks violating both federal and state constitutional guarantees,” Serbalik wrote in a letter sent Monday to Giordano and shared with The Intercept. “I respectfully urge you to immediately reconsider and lift the administrative leave, withdraw or correct the media advisory, and ensure that any ongoing review fully respects Sgt. Mullen’s constitutional rights.”

Gun at Teenagers’ Protest

Mullen’s appearance at the protest sent a wave of fear through some attendees. Megan Craghead, whose 18-year-old son attends Hamilton High School, showed up that day because her 13-year-old daughter wanted to take part in the protest. Craghead told The Intercept it was a peaceful, upbeat scene, and most passersby honked in support of the rally.

That changed suddenly when a pair of girls came running toward her yelling about a man with a gun.

“He was just walking up and down the sidewalk, talking kind of smugly and yelling at the kids,” Craghead recalled. “It felt like something that could easily escalate into something that’s going to be traumatic for all of these teenagers.”

As soon as she heard about an armed man on the scene, Craghead sent her daughter away with Craghead’s sister.

“We had no idea why he was there, he’s wearing a mask, and even if he did not plan to use his gun, we still don’t know what’s going to happen, right?” Craghead said. “We had all just witnessed the shooting of Alex Pretti, where he was at a protest with a gun and he ended up getting shot and killed. And so even if this armed person did not touch his gun, we still don’t know what’s going to happen.”

In a TikTok video from the scene, Mullen was seen in a T-shirt emblazoned with an American flag and the words “Trump 2024” and “We took the country back.” He concealed his face with a neck gaiter and wore a handgun, along with several extra magazines on his hip.

Surrounded by young people jeering at him, he told a Chandler Police Department that he had been assaulted as he appeared to record the scene on a cellphone.

“Nobody assaulted you,” one person told Mullen.

“Grown-ass man, out here with a gun crying about a little kid,” another person said.

In the wake of the incident, the Chandler Police Department told reporters that a girl was arrested for throwing a water bottle at Mullen, but video of the incident published by Fox 10 appears to show just water — no bottle — hitting him. The charges against the girl were later dropped by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

A spokesperson for the Chandler Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Department With a History

Chandler, a city of about 275,000 people, lies in an area known as the East Valley, and its deep-purple electorate is not particularly known for progressive activism. Amid the deadly immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and heightened border tensions in Arizona, however, many students could see a direct impact on their own lives or those of their friends, according to Craghead.

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“They’re seeing a lot of their friends that are immigrants or have immigrant families feeling really scared right now,” she said. “There’s a lot of things happening in politics that are not directly affecting the lives of teenagers, but this is one of those things that they can see has a direct impact on their own lives.”

Bill Moore, a defense attorney in Phoenix, said he was pleased to see Mullen placed on administrative leave, citing the department’s history of frequently failing to hold its personnel accountable — part of a pattern of misconduct and impunity severe enough to trigger a civil-rights probe by the Justice Department in 2024.

“The ‘blue line’ thing is still very much a thing here,” Moore said, referring to an unwritten code where police look out for one another instead of pursuing complaints about misconduct. “That they took this action tells me that their internal investigation must be fairly damning.”

The revelation that the armed man who showed up to the protest in January was actually a cop sent ripples of anger through the community, according to Brandy Reese, a co-leader of the local Indivisible chapter for Chandler and the neighboring city of Gilbert.

“I find it especially upsetting that he went there armed,” said Reese, who was observing the protest that day from the sidelines. “Why did he feel he needed to do that? I think the whole situation is unfortunate and upsetting.”

Craghead, the mother of the protest attendees, said her opinion of what should happen to Mullen has gone back and forth in the days since she learned that a police sergeant was the masked, armed man who she had seen trying to pick a fight with the kids at the rally. After an initial reaction of wanting his immediate termination, she wondered if he wasn’t within his First and Second Amendment rights to show up, off-duty and armed.

The more she’s thought about it, she said, the more she’s felt anger at his conduct.

“We have a duty to hold our public safety officers to a higher standard. If this was a regular person that had come to counter-protest and they happened to bring their gun, that would be one thing,” she said. “The issue is that he went there with the purpose of agitating children to get them to break the law so that they could be arrested, or worse. So now I’m back to thinking he should be fired.”

The post Armed Off-Duty Cop Tried to Incite Violence at a High School Anti-ICE Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month.

Attorneys for the Reddit user say their client’s posts and their anonymity are squarely protected under the First Amendment and that ICE’s use of a grand jury marks a disturbing escalation for the agency after seeing its previous efforts to investigate political speech quashed in court. The subpoena was issued by federal prosecutors in the capital after ICE’s effort to identify the same user failed in a Northern California federal court. (The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington declined to comment on the case.)

Since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, federal agents have increasingly demanded social media companies reveal the users behind anonymous accounts critical of his immigration crackdown, expressing particular interest in those that identify employees of the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE or share real-time information on enforcement activity. The administration claims the accounts are engaged in doxing and endanger officer safety, but they have also targeted social media users seemingly doing nothing more than expressing anger at the government.

Digital free speech advocates with the Electronic Frontier Foundation have closely tracked the investigations, finding that the government repeatedly folded when challenged in court. A grand jury subpoena, however, is a much different animal, said David Greene, EFF’s senior counsel. Shrouded in secrecy and advantageous to prosecutors, the existence of a federal grand jury, particularly one convened in Washington, could suggest the government is moving toward a significant criminal case.

Greene knew of no examples during the recent wave of immigration enforcement-related investigations in which a leading tech company has been called to appear before one of the secret panels. Free speech protections are at their weakest in the context of a grand jury, he explained: The proceedings are not adversarial; their purpose is to permit a prosecutor to file charges.

“We should be very, very, very concerned that they’ve now taken one of these to a grand jury,” said Greene. “It’s something to be taken very seriously.”

The convening of a federal grand jury presents a considerable challenge for Reddit in particular, a platform that prides itself on protecting the free speech rights of its 121 million daily users. The company declined to say whether it intends to challenge the government’s order.

“Privacy is central to how Reddit operates, and we take our commitment to protecting that seriously,” the company said in a statement to The Intercept. “We do not voluntarily share information with any government, especially not on users exercising their rights to criticize the government or plan a protest.”

When the government seeks data on users, the statement continued, Reddit reviews the commands for “legal sufficiency and routinely object[s] to requests that are overbroad or threaten civil rights.” Users are notified of the requests “whenever possible so they can defend their interests,” the company went on to say, and Reddit provides only the “minimum” data required to satisfy law enforcement demands.

Failed Attempt

The story of how Reddit became ensnared in an ICE-related grand jury began early last month, when the company received a request to turn over the name, address, phone number, and other data associated with an account belonging to a user identified in court records as John Doe.

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The request was what’s known as an administrative summons or administrative subpoena, a powerful legal tool typically associated with serious crimes such as child trafficking. Under Trump, the subpoenas, which do not require judicial approval, have increasingly become a weapon wielded against opponents of the president’s immigration policies.

While it does not disaggregate ICE’s activities from other law enforcement agencies’ requests, Reddit reports that January to June 2025 marked the highest volume of requests the company has ever received in a single reporting period. Sixty-six percent of the 1,179 requests came from agencies in the U.S., including 423 subpoenas and 27 court orders. Reddit disclosed user data in 82 percent of those cases. While most requests concern child safety, the next highest category of data sought by law enforcement agencies falls into what Reddit lists as “other/unknown investigation types.”

In the John Doe case, Reddit received an initial request on March 4 from an ICE agent in Fairfax, Virginia.

“Failure to comply with this summons will render you liable to proceedings in a U.S. District Court to enforce compliance with this summons as well as other sanctions,” the summons read. “You are requested not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time. Any such disclosure will impede the investigation and thereby interfere with the enforcement of federal law.”

Two days later, the social media company alerted John Doe of the federal request for information. Based in the Pacific Northwest, the Reddit user obtained representation from the Oregon-based Civil Liberties Defense Center, an organization that had recently succeeded in beating back ICE’s requests for information on social media users.

The ICE agent wanted more than a month’s worth of electronic data, but offered no information as to what, exactly, caught the agency’s attention. When John Doe’s attorneys later reviewed their Reddit posts, they found nothing to suggest criminal activity or intent.

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There was a thread from early January, after news outlets including The Intercept identified Jonathan Ross as the ICE officer who shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis. Commenting on a Minnesota Star Tribune article, another Reddit user posted that Ross might be welcomed as a hero in Florida or Texas. John Doe responded by sharing that Ross had lived in Chaska, Minnesota; grew up in Indiana; and served in the Indiana National Guard — biographical details that were circulating widely at the time. “Hopefully he moves up to Stillwater State Penitentiary,” they wrote.

In another post, a Reddit user asked what they should write on an anti-ICE protest sign. John Doe suggested the lyrics to a song: “Urine speaks louder than words.” In a third instance, Doe wrote, “TSA sucks and we all know it.” According to the Reddit user’s attorneys, these were the most aggressive posts they could find.

On March 12, John Doe and their CLDC lawyers filed a motion to quash the summons in the Northern California federal court district where the San Francisco headquarters of Reddit is located.

In its summons, ICE indicated the basis for its request was a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. John Doe informed the court that they had nothing to do with the kind of activities at issue in the near-century-old statute, which governs boat show sales, wild animal imports, forfeited wines and spirits, and cross-border trade in other goods.

“I use this account to post about events and issues local to my region of Oregon and beyond,” the Reddit user said in a sworn declaration. “Neither I nor my Reddit account are associated with importing or exporting any merchandise or any other thing subject to tax or duty into or out of the United States.”

CLDC attorney Matthew Kellegrew argued that ICE’s request well exceeded the scope of the law, and that the First Amendment raised the bar for disclosure considerably in cases where investigative activity “intrudes into the area of constitutionally protected rights of speech, press, association.”

What’s more, Kellegrew noted, federal immigration officials attempted to use the tariff statute to unmask the president’s critics before, during the first Trump administration, and were reprimanded for doing so by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General in a 2017 report.

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CLDC had recently prevailed in challenging the feds’ use of administrative subpoenas in California’s Northern District. Last fall, the group intervened on behalf of a Meta user targeted in an administrative ICE subpoena. In October, federal Magistrate Judge Kandis A. Westmore sided with the civil liberties advocates, ordering Meta not to provide the information sought by ICE.

After intervening in the John Doe case last month, CLDC attorneys received an email from an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of California informing them that the government was withdrawing its request. It would not, however, be the last Reddit heard from the federal government about the matter.

Grand Jury Subpoena

On March 31, just four days after ICE’s summons was withdrawn, Reddit received another message from the feds.

This time, instead of requesting information on an individual user, the government ordered Reddit itself to appear before a grand jury — not in California, but in Washington.

The request came not from an ICE field agent but rather from a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in D.C., where Reddit has received the highest number of federal law enforcement information requests. The records sought spanned a period roughly three times longer than what ICE had originally requested.

Lauren Regan, director of litigation and advocacy for CLDC, suspects the success that advocates had challenging ICE’s social media subpoenas in California may explain why the Trump administration is now calling one of the world’s largest tech companies to appear before a secret tribunal in Washington.

“Because they were repeatedly losing those attempts at subpoenaing stuff in court, in what they’re doing is illegal and unconstitutional, they have now switched to this other mode,” she said. “They are able to strong-arm information that they were denied through the courts legally.”

None of the records associated with the grand jury case will be accessible to the public.

“The only valid use of a grand jury is to investigate federal crimes,” said Regan. What crime John Doe’s Reddit posts may have constituted or facilitated is unclear. According to Regan, “They are able to hide what they are doing under the guise of a federal grand jury.”

The post A Redditor Criticized ICE. Trump Is Trying to Unmask Them by Dragging the Company to a Secret Grand Jury. appeared first on The Intercept.

Prosecutors have until May 1 to provide a slew of records, including Ross’s personnel file, to a magistrate judge to review and determine which files should be released. The materials could shine light on the killing of Good, an observer who died after Ross shot her during a January 7 confrontation amid a monthslong immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. 

The order came in response to a motion from the defense attorneys for Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, a man who Ross attempted to apprehend in a separate confrontation in June. After Ross broke a window in Muñoz-Guatemala’s car and fired his Taser, Muñoz-Guatemala drove away and was later convicted of dragging Ross with his car.

Muñoz-Guatemala’s defense attorney Eric Newmark praised the ruling as key to defending the rights of his client, but also important for public understanding of what transpired in the shooting of Good.

“My client is entitled to a full hearing and to review these documents to determine whether there’s any basis for a new trial,” Newmark told The Intercept. “Ultimately, we’re seeking dismissal of the charges against my client. This information is important because it will help me provide a full and complete defense.”

Beyond mounting an argument for a new trial or a reduced sentence, Newmark said the information could provide crucial information on Good’s death to Minnesotans hungry for answers.

“As Minnesotans, we’re frustrated with the apparent lack of a full investigation, the lack of prosecution, and the lack of federal cooperation with local authorities,” Newmark said.

In addition to Ross’s personnel and training file, the order issued Thursday in Minnesota federal court by Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan commands prosecutors to turn over records of statements Ross made in the 60 minutes before and during his shooting of Good; records of statements by Ross and other federal officials; witness statements regarding the Good killing; medical records pertaining to Ross’s fitness for duty; cell data that might have been extracted from Ross’s phone; body-worn camera footage of the incident; and more.

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Muñoz-Guatemala’s case rose to prominence in January when Ross’s identity as the shooter of Renee Good came to light, in part because both incidents involved Ross confronting a civilian in a car. Ross, a deportation officer based in the ICE field office in St. Paul, was attempting to detain Muñoz-Guatemala during a traffic stop on June 17, when Muñoz-Guatemala attempted to drive away. In the process, he dragged Ross, who had his arm thrust into the window, according to court records.

On December 12, a jury found Muñoz-Guatemala guilty of one count of assault on a federal officer. After Ross’s killing of Good was revealed, Newmark, Muñoz-Guatemala’s attorney, submitted a request for post-conviction discovery, arguing that the facts of the Good case could be grounds for a new trial or support a lesser sentence for his client.

“Even if this Court ultimately determines that Defendant is not entitled to a new trial based on newly discovered evidence, he must still be sentenced,” Newmark wrote. “Given the recklessness of Ross’ decision to step in front of Good’s vehicle, the violence he showed by continuing to shoot at a vehicle that was passing harmlessly by, and the extreme callousness he displayed after it should have been clear that he either killed Good or injured her terribly, it would be reasonable to assume he presented similar danger to Defendant in June of 2025. However, without the full investigative file, Defendant cannot make that conclusion.”

If prosecutors comply with the order, the materials will not immediately be made public. The materials will go first to a magistrate judge who will determine their relevance to the defense team’s case and perform any necessary redactions before handing it over to the defense. At that point, Muñoz-Guatemala’s team would be able to review the material and use it as needed to mount a bid for a new trial or to present as mitigating factors warranting a reduced sentence. Barring a protective order sealing the information, whatever materials submitted as mitigation by the defense could then become a matter of public record.

“This judge is effectively doing the investigation that the United States has turned its back on,” said Shauna Kieffer, a defense attorney in Minneapolis. 

But Kieffer, who is not party to the case, expressed reservations about premature celebration of the transparency the order could provide. 

“I think because this order is so thoughtful and it’s legally sound, that I think there’s a strong chance that the government will dismiss this case if they’re forced to go forward with complying with the order,” she said.

In a statement to The Intercept, Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., joined the calls for transparency.

“I am glad to see this case finally moving into discovery, but let’s be honest — it should never have taken this long to get here,” said Balint. “Renee Good’s family has been forced to wait for answers while DHS and ICE closed ranks. That’s not how justice works in a healthy democracy. Her family deserves full transparency and accountability, and Americans need to see our government protect them and not just those in power.”

Spokespersons for the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office and the Hennepin County District Attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Government Ordered to Turn Over Files on ICE Agent Who Killed Renee Good appeared first on The Intercept.

The Maine Wire launched in 2011, and for the next decade most of its output was standard libertarian fare. But as the U.S. right took a hard nativist turn — and amid an infusion of cash from some of the most powerful right-wing money men in the country — the site developed a fixation on Maine’s Somali community, a highly visible immigrant population in a state that’s over 90 percent white.

Amid the runaway success of a right-wing YouTuber’s viral video about “Somali fraud” in Minnesota, the site played an enthusiastic role in selling a similar narrative in Maine, spinning nuggets of truth into overstated claims of massive graft. And they got results.

In January, the Department of Homeland Security launched a surge of federal agents into the state, sweeping up hundreds of migrants while also performing showy raids on Somali-owned businesses linked to people who had been mentioned in the Maine Wire. In February, top federal officials, including Donald Trump himself, called for greater scrutiny of the state’s Medicaid system in language that directly targeted Somalis — a tack that closely followed The Maine Wire’s lead.

Editor-in-chief Steve Robinson, a Maine native who spent years producing shock-jock radio in Boston, came to the publication in 2023. The shift in tone was evident almost immediately. “Maine Governor Wants to Resettle 75,000 Foreign-Born Migrants in Maine by 2029,” Robinson warned in a headline that year. Critics blamed the piece for sparking an anti-immigrant rally by neo-Nazis at the state Capitol a few weeks later.

Robinson and his staffers present the website as a plucky upstart fighting for the common Mainer, but their work is not all driven by lobstermen and loggers. In recent years, The Maine Wire and its parent organization, the libertarian-leaning Maine Policy Institute, benefited from millions of dollars in donations from entities associated with Leonard Leo, the judicial activist widely credited with the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court, and Thomas D. Klingenstein, a MAGA megadonor and chair of the ultra-conservative Claremont Institute.

Between 2020 and 2024, the most recent year for which records are available, the Maine Policy Institute saw its annual revenue nearly triple — with a surge in funding from entities linked to Leo and Klingenstein, according to an analysis of tax documents by The Intercept. In 2024, at least $1.2 million of the institute’s $1.9 million budget came from organizations connected to Leo’s dark-money network.

The budget boost came amid a broader push by Leo, Klingenstein, and other conservative bankrollers to inject cash into state-level projects, ensuring their authoritarian, anti-immigrant, and climate-denial efforts have local staying power. (Representatives for Leo and Klingenstein did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

Matt Gagnon, the Maine Policy Institute’s CEO, declined to comment on how much of that cash goes into the operations of The Maine Wire. But over the course of those years of plenty, its staff has more than doubled to include three reporters, one “digital media correspondent,” and three editors.

In the process, The Maine Wire has carved out a belligerent presence in the state. Its reach is felt especially on social media, where it boasts some 200,000 followers across Facebook and X, as well as 26,000 subscribers to a spinoff on Substack. (Maine’s population hovers at around 1.4 million.) Gagnon credited Robinson for this growth, praising him for pursuing a web-savvy strategy and a voicey style.

“What we’re trying to do with The Maine Wire is not like a Wall Street Journal,” Gagnon told The Intercept. “It’s not ‘Just the facts, ma’am,’ or completely free of bias or opinion. We try to shake through our bias to make sure we’re reporting accurately, obviously, and to make sure that we’re not engaging in tabloid garbage news, but we’re very open about our perspective.”

That perspective is openly hostile to Maine’s Somali community. While discussing the Minnesota fraud scandal on a podcast, for example, Robinson posed, “You get one Somali on a jury in Minnesota, you think they’re going to convict anybody?” — ignoring the dozens of people indicted and convicted by federal prosecutors under President Joe Biden.

This apparent bias leads to similar distortions at home in Maine. Many of The Maine Wire’s claims of fraud rest on existing state audits from years past in which investigators — employed by the state of Maine — found evidence of improper payments. Without producing hard evidence of equivalent examples that have gone unaddressed, the site presents these as the tip of the iceberg, rather than instances of the state actually doing its job to combat fraud.

“The Maine Wire has a way of telling half-truths and then getting Mainers riled up about it,” said Paige Loud, a social worker running for Congress in the state’s 2nd Congressional District.

After an initial interview fell through, Robinson stopped responding to The Intercept’s attempts to reschedule. When contacted with a detailed list of questions prior to publication, he declined to comment.

On the homepage of The Maine Wire, the reader finds a grim portrait of the state. In between stories hinting at — but hardly proving — extensive fraud in Maine or scaremongering about the security of mail-in ballots, the site’s coverage is a miasma of stock tabloid fare: Tales of small-time drug busts and mugshots of vacant-eyed defendants abound. To take the site at face value, it would seem that Maine is awash in fraud, upcoming elections are in danger, and violence lurks around every corner — often at the hands of immigrants, and specifically members of Maine’s Somali diaspora.

Whenever possible, links to Somali people and institutions are presented as red flags. The term “Somali-linked” appears frequently, suggesting a stain of corruption inherent to anyone of Somali descent; one recent article managed to squeeze the word “Somali” twice into a single headline. In another story, a reporter flagged a business as suspicious in part because it shared an address with a hawala, a type of money-transfer business found in Muslim communities worldwide, which The Maine Wire described as “equipped to funnel taxpayer money back to Africa.”

The fixation on Somalis only recently became the site’s bread and butter. In the first 11 months of 2025, The Maine Wire published approximately 23 articles that included the word “Somali,” averaging about two per month. 

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Beginning in December, as right-wing audiences frothed over the viral Nick Shirley video in Minnesota, The Maine Wire leapt into action. Its journalists dusted off earlier reporting to suggest the existence of a sprawling conspiracy of Medicaid fraud, protected by a sordid alliance between Democratic political elites and allegedly corrupt Somali-run nonprofits and health care providers. That month, the Maine Wire published at least 31 articles that included the word “Somali” and kept it up with at least 26 in January, at least 14 in February, and at least nine in March. Robinson published still more stories about the issue on his Substack, dubbed The Robinson Report.

Somali Americans in the state are no strangers to nativism, but people who spoke with The Intercept said the past few months have been unusually tense, thanks in large part to The Maine Wire’s obsession with their community, which numbers less than 3,000 people, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data.

“It’s created a lot of stress for me,” said a Somali American resident of Lewiston who has been the subject of reporting by The Maine Wire and harassed by its readers. “The Maine Wire started this rhetoric against Somalis last year, and a lot of people really are saying horrible things on social media that are very, very racist. And that’s just kind of normalized now.”

Still, the site wins praise from readers for reporting on issues they feel are ignored by more mainstream publications. Maine journalists who spoke with The Intercept for this story admitted a grudging respect for some of the work that The Maine Wire has done, including a series on illicit marijuana grow houses owned and operated by Chinese nationals. But they criticized the site for overhyping the idea of widespread fraud.

“Some of the people who work there seem like they actually have the smarts and the talent to be good journalists. It’s just that the whole damn thing is geared towards electing Republicans,” said Steve Collins, a longtime reporter in the state who writes a column for the Portland Press Herald and has been openly critical of the website. “They take information, and instead of using it to report news in some kind of straight, rational way, it’s just a way to bash people and stir up fear.”

Others were blunter.

“The Maine Wire is poison,” said independent journalist and former Maine state legislator Andy O’Brien, who has written critically of Steve Robinson. “When you look at the comments, they are so often violent and racist. It gets scary.”

The “think national, act local” strategy has won The Maine Wire an audience of ever more powerful people, a fact that was made clear in February when Mehmet Oz — the quackery-boosting former television personality who now helms the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — took to Instagram to issue an ultimatum to Gov. Janet Mills. 

“You’ve probably heard about Minnesota’s fraud problems. Maine also needs to clean up its act,” Oz wrote. “Somali fraudsters in Minnesota stole millions from a similar program, and we’re seeing all the same red flags in Maine.”

In a February 6 letter, Oz gave Mills 30 days to produce documentation of Maine’s public health funding and the safeguards in place to prevent fraud. The letter included a provision for an extension, but when Mills asked for one, Oz denied it. According to Ben Goodman, a spokesperson for Mills, The Maine Wire knew about the denial before it even hit the governor’s desk. 

“Addressing allegations of fraud is — and should be — a collective, professional effort between the State and Federal government, not a political cudgel from a President desperately trying to distract from his failed agenda,” Goodman told The Intercept in a statement. “So let’s be clear about what this is — yet another attempt to attack and intimidate those who dare stand up to Trump’s abuses of power.”

It’s no accident that the events playing out in Maine resemble the playbook used to justify the federal crackdown in Minnesota, according to Graham Platner, a U.S. Senate candidate running against Mills for the Democratic nomination.

“This is a nationwide project. This is directly connected to the story in Minnesota to demonize Somali communities, which brought about ICE raids there,” Platner told The Intercept.

It made sense, Platner added, to see Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rush into Maine after The Maine Wire ramped up its Somali fraud coverage.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the dots,” he said.

For some Mainers who’ve found themselves in the outlet’s crosshairs, its tactics have raised questions about its accuracy.

In February, as part of a series alleging widespread fraud and abuse at group homes in Maine, the site posted a video of a young man with autism who had wandered out of his facility. The article did not say when the video was taken, but Claudia Millett, the man’s mother, told The Intercept it was almost a year old: Her son had escaped from his home in March 2025, and since then, she said, the staff responsible had been fired, and he has been safe and well taken care of.

“My son is non-verbal, with level-III autism,” Millett said. “He did get out that time, but they haven’t had any trouble since, and they have been really great with my son.”

Millett said she reached out repeatedly to The Maine Wire, but the outlet showed no interest in talking to her.

“I sent them a message on Facebook Messenger about them posting that video, but they haven’t even read it,” she said. “I think it’s unethical, because they haven’t even contacted me for comment.”

Loud, the social worker running for Congress, said she saw firsthand how the state’s byzantine system for documenting Medicaid claims — and an unwillingness by lawmakers to confront the problem — led to worker burnout and frustrated patients. But rather than covering those systemic causes, The Maine Wire’s staff have pushed to dismantle Medicaid and MaineCare and target immigrant-owned businesses.

“Unless Medicaid is abolished all of the fraud hunting will be just a fun exercise for data nerds,” Robinson wrote on X in February. “Abolish Medicaid, deport all foreign recipients and all foreign Medicaid profiteers.”

“Steve Robinson has been able to lock in on a topic that a lot of Mainers are talking about but that the Democratic legislature is unwilling to comment on,” Loud told The Intercept. “I wish it was in good faith, because this population deserves a voice. But unfortunately, the only people giving them a voice are trying to use it against them.”

The Maine Wire has not always been such a combative force for nativism. The Maine Policy Institute first launched the site in 2011, and in the intervening decade, its content stuck mostly to sober articles pushing for libertarian-minded policies. (Allegations of Medicaid fraud have been a constant, but the focus on allegations against Somalis is more recent.) Then known as the Maine Heritage Policy Center, the think tank had an annual revenue hovering just over half a million dollars in the 2010s, tax records show, much of it from relatively modest donations from family foundations linked to its local backers.

The organization was caught flat-footed by Trump’s 2016 victory, according to a former employee who worked there in the latter half of the 2010s, spurring “a wake-up call for the organization.”

“If we wanted to be more successful in the state, not just spreading our ideas, aligning with MAGA in some form might be advantageous,” the former employee said, speaking on condition of anonymity to not jeopardize future job prospects. “It was just a realization that there’s more money to be made and more eyeballs to attract.”

The money began to arrive in earnest in 2021, thanks to the largesse of groups connected with two of the country’s most powerful right-wing donors: Leonard Leo and Thomas D. Klingenstein. Leo, a longtime vacationer in Maine, moved to the state in 2020, and his fingerprints could soon be found on various political campaigns and causes.

Leo, who has been publicly connected with The Maine Wire since at least 2023, has spoken obliquely of his support for the site, including in a lovefest of an interview in 2023 with Robinson in which he told the editor that it had “been a privilege to be able to support your work.”

An analysis by The Intercept of tax documents detailing donations to the organization showed that funds controlled by or linked to Klingenstein and Leo donated at least $2.6 million to the Maine Policy Institute between 2020 and 2024, while a handful of other donor-advised funds — a common vehicle for anonymous donations — provided at least another $390,965 during that period.

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In 2021, the Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund contributed $249,000, and overall contributions leapt from $693,536 to $1.07 million. Funding surged yet again two years later, to $1.7 million in 2023, including another $200,000 from Klingenstein’s foundation and a gift of $760,100 from a donor-advised fund that had previously received tens of millions of dollars from a nonprofit linked to Leo.

In 2024, the most recent year for which tax documents are available, the Maine Policy Institute had $1.9 million in total revenue — including $760,000 from the 85 Fund, a Leo-linked nonprofit, and $450,000 from DonorsTrust, a conduit for dark money that has is heavily funded by Leo’s network.

The Maine Policy Institute does not disclose its donors, but Gagnon, the CEO, acknowledged having received support from Leo.

“He has publicly disclosed an association with us, so I’m not going to sit here and tell you that’s not happening,” Gagnon said. “He’s been supportive around the country of many projects which he believes will help the conservative media universe.”

The money being funneled into the Maine Policy Institute might be a drop in the bucket for megadonors, but it’s more than enough to make a real difference in a small state like Maine, said Platner, the U.S. Senate candidate.

“This is a very clear example of what happens when too much wealth gets consolidated in our political system,” Platner told The Intercept. “In a state like Maine, which is not a wealthy state, and there are not a lot of resources around, they can come in and utilize their money as power to drive specific media narratives and to incentivize certain kinds of stories.”

For now, those certain kinds of stories continue to revolve heavily around Somali Americans and other immigrants in Maine.

“They are spewing hate and demonizing an entire population as un-American, as scammers, and the right is just eating that up,” said one Somali American community organizer, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of further targeting by the site and its readers. “The fascist regime we’re under right now, that is one of their tactics — to change the conversation and the public opinion of certain groups in order to destroy democracy.”

The post GOP Megadonor Leonard Leo Is Bankrolling a Website on the Warpath Against Somalis appeared first on The Intercept.

CBP will spend up to $50 million on what it refers to as “Less Lethal Specialty Munitions,” a euphemism for weapons intended to merely hurt or disable a target rather than killing them. The agency is looking for a vendor who can supply vast quantities of 123 different types of munitions across 10 different categories, the contracting document says.

“The sheer quantity and the myriad different weapons is the most remarkable thing to me,” Rohini Haar, an emergency physician and researcher of less lethal ordnance told The Intercept. “When there’s so many different kinds, it makes you question, tactically, what’s the goal there?”

Federal agents’ indiscriminate use of “less-lethal” chemical weapons against the nonviolent demonstrators became a hallmark of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Contract documents show the Department of Homeland Security will continue to stockpile a massive arsenal of tear gases and projectile weapons. (Neither CBP nor its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, immediately responded to requests for comment.)

Haar questioned whether the Department of Homeland Security will be able to suitably train federal agents to use such a wide variety of weapons.

“Each of them has a different sort of technical spec or specifications,” she explained. “Some of them are handheld grenades that you have to know to throw, but not hit people’s heads. Some of them are fired from a weapon, like a launcher, and so you have to be standing farther away than you would be with a grenade.”

Two Tear Gases

The shopping list includes a litany of different ways to hit people and objects with two common types of tear gas: chlorobenzalmalononitrile, or CS, a chemical weapon previously used by the U.S. in Vietnam but now banned for military use, and oleoresin capsicum, or OC, derived from chili peppers.

CBP agents already regularly use CS and OC-based weapons in the field, including against protesters. The procurement document shows that armed federal officers will continue to wield the threat of chemical agents against the public despite ample documentation of misuse.

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Some of CBP’s desired weapons are designed to spread these chemical weapons indiscriminately. Included on the wish list are quart containers of liquid CS and OC meant to be spread through thermal “foggers,” dispersal devices meant to create mists with microscopic droplets of liquid. Defense Technology, a longtime chemical weapons vendor for CBP and U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, says its Golden Eagle Pepper Fogger Generator can output 100,000 cubic feet of tear gas in 26 seconds.

Both chemicals are potent chemicals that can cause health effects far beyond debilitating pain.

“Greater exposure to chemical agents,” a 2023 study by the University of Minnesota School of Public Health found, “was significantly associated with higher odds of an adverse reproductive health outcomes.”

The outcomes included “uterine cramping, early menstrual bleeding, breast tenderness and delayed menstrual bleeding.”

The procurement list includes smoke grenades in four different colors and 12 different varieties of tear-gas grenades.

The weapons will be ordered in enormous volumes. CBP projects purchasing over 242,000 munitions from the “Hand Delivered Pyrotechnic Canisters” category and over 100,000 rounds of “impact munitions” fired from grenade launcher-style tubes.

The latter category includes foam-tipped “sponge cartridge” ammunition designed to either release a tear gas-style chemical upon hitting someone or merely harm them through sheer force of impact.

Maimed, Deafened, Blinded

Fired at close enough range, so-called less lethal rounds can easily kill or maim their target.

Anti-ICE demonstrator Kaden Rummler lost sight in his left eye after he was shot in the face by a federal officer in January. After the Los Angeles Police Department fired one such round directly into the face of another protester last summer, he was injured so seriously that he required surgery and had his jaw wired shut for six weeks.

“Distraction devices,” which emit loud sounds, bright lights, or other effects to stun targets, were also on CBP’s wish list, with plans to purchase 13,000 of them. The procurement document required the weapons be capable of emitting a sound of 175 decibels, louder than a gunshot or jet engine. The National Hearing Conservation Association warns of sound of 140 decibels can case permanent damage and “death of hearing tissue” begins at 180 decibels.

“In addition to injuries caused directly by the primary blast wave, such as ear-drum rupture or lung injury, secondary and tertiary injuries can also occur as a result of these explosive devices,” says a 2023 publication by Physicians for Human Rights that was co-authored by Haar.

CBP’s inclusion of rubber-ball grenades and scattershot projectiles alarmed Scott Reynhout, a researcher who also co-authored the PHR paper. When such grenades are thrown or launched at people, they release a burst of small rubber fragments akin to shrapnel in every direction and can be configured to simultaneously release tear gas.

“The procurement of the latter weapons is worrying as these have not seen widespread use yet by CBP/ICE in protests,” said Reynhout, referring to the scattershot projectiles, which he said were akin to “rubber buckshot.”

Such weapons were used by Chilean security forces against protesters six years ago, he said, resulting in more than 400 cases of partial or full-blindness, and are also employed extensively by Iranian police and paramilitaries in their crackdowns on demonstrations.

Weapons designed to pierce building materials were also included in the wish list.

CBP plans to purchase over 12,000 “ferret rounds,” projectiles filled with powdered or liquified chemicals that punch through barriers and spread tear gas on the other side.

Haar said, “If it can go through glass, particle board, and walls, it can go through a body.”

The post DHS Launches Massive “Less Lethal” Chemical Weapons Buying Spree appeared first on The Intercept.

The alleged crime? Unclear. There’s no sound at first, only the silent spectacle of a person in a penis suit turning toward a cop with a stance that says, “Who, me?” A handmade sign comes into view in the person’s right hand. It reads “No Dick Tator.”

The scene in the video unfolded last fall, on a busy road just off a strip mall in South Alabama. The protester was Renea Gamble, an ASL interpreter who bought the penis suit at a nearby Spirit Halloween store.

“Featuring armholes, a sheer face panel, and an internal fan that keeps things erect,” a description on its website reads, “this costume is a guaranteed hit.”

Gamble was just shy of her 62nd birthday when she joined the October 18 No Kings rally in Fairhope, a small city on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. Organized by the local Indivisible chapter, which launched in 2025, the rally attracted some 1,000 people in deep-red Baldwin County, a mostly white, largely rural stretch of the state and one of President Donald Trump’s most stalwart bases of support.

The turnout exceeded organizers’ expectations. It also flew in the face of neighbors and critics who might dismiss protesters as paid agitators. “When you show your face to people that probably see you around town and know you live here, it combats the narrative of, like, [George] Soros busing us in,” said Kayleigh Rae, who founded Indivisible Baldwin County.

Inspired by Portland’s anti-ICE “Frog Brigade” — which turned animal costumes into emblems of resistance — the protest included a couple of unicorns and a blow-up chicken. But the penis was new.

“Everybody was cracking up,” Rae recalled. “They just thought it was hilarious.”

“A Freakin’ Weiner”

Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb was less amused.

“I’m serious as a heart attack,” he tells Gamble when the audio begins to play on the 14-minute body camera video. “I’m not gonna sit here and argue with you.”

He demands to know how she could possibly justify such an obscene display: “I would like to hear how you would explain to my children what you’re supposed to be.”

Talking to a colleague over his two-way radio after the encounter, Babb described what happened. Gamble was dressed “like a freakin’ weiner,” he says on the tape, so he ordered her to remove the costume. She refused, invoking her First Amendment rights.

“I said, ‘That’s not freedom of speech,’” Babb continues. “‘This is a family town and being dressed like that is not going to be tolerated.’”

When she started to leave, “I said, ‘No, ma’am,’” Babb says on the tape. “‘Come here, I need to talk to you.’ She pulled away from me, so I grabbed her and put her on the ground.”

The body camera footage tells a different story.

“Am I being detained?” Gamble repeatedly asks Babb, who ignores the question and continues to scold her. “If I’m not being detained, I’m gonna go ahead and leave.”

When she turns to walk away, Babb steps forward and grabs her costume from behind, throwing her on her back. Angry protesters shout at Babb as he forces her to turn over. Two more cops help him pin Gamble on the grass and handcuff her.

“By the time I got there, the cops were stuffing an inflatable penis in the back of their car,” Rae said.

It was, on one hand, hilarious — a slapstick comedy bit brought to life. In the body camera footage, Babb tries and fails to fit Gamble into his own backseat, then hands her off to another officer, who escorts her to a different vehicle. Police wrestle with the oversized costume, ultimately failing to fit the unwieldy polyester penis into the car.

It was also disturbing. Gamble screams in pain in the video as the cops try to push her into the backseat, the handcuffs digging into her wrists. Babb asks where the zipper is and, as he peels off the penis suit, asks Gamble for her name.

She replies, “Aunt Tifa.”

Doubling Down

Gamble was one of only a small handful of people arrested at the nationwide No Kings protests last fall. She was briefly jailed and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, then released on a $500 bond.

Videos of her arrest went viral, taking off on TikTok and airing on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” A progressive Fairhope-based political cartoonist held a caption contest for his rendering of the arrest. In December, a Mobile-based talk radio station held a listener poll to choose its annual Alabamian of the Year, with “Inflatable Fairhope Protest Penis” receiving the most votes.

In Fairhope and around the country, many people were outraged at the cops’ manhandling of a grandmother in her 60s. But it also seemed obvious that the case would go away once cooler heads prevailed.

Instead, the city of Fairhope doubled down. Rather than dropping the case, the city attorney slapped Gamble with additional charges earlier this year: disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement. Her trial, first set to take place months ago, has been delayed multiple times. It is now set for April 15.

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At a time when Trump and his allies have escalated attacks on dissent — prosecuting protesters as terrorists and punishing free speech — Gamble’s misdemeanor charges in small-town Alabama seem relatively minor. A conviction would most likely to result in a fine and a suspended sentence, according to her lawyer, David Gespass, a veteran civil rights attorney who has spent decades representing people abused by police — and who called the whole thing “absurd.”

Nonetheless, Gespass did not expect the prosecution to get this far. “One would have thought at some point somebody would have decided to dismiss the case,” he said.

He was especially struck by the knee-jerk response by city leadership, which endorsed Gamble’s arrest before the facts were clear.

“This type of behavior or display is not acceptable and will not be tolerated in Fairhope,” Mayor Sherry Sullivan told reporters. “Protests should remain peaceful and free of profanity and obscene displays.”

Fairhope City Council President Jack Burrell said the costume violated “community standards.”

To Gamble, who has turned down media requests while her prosecution is pending, the case is about much more than her individual rights.

“What Renea has been saying all along is that it’s not so much about her,” said Gespass. “It’s the Constitution and the First Amendment that are on trial.”

“Mayberry on the Bay”

Gamble’s prosecution has moved forward as state and local governments are pushing to clamp down on free expression and expand censorship all over the country. Battles over speech have been especially heated in schools and public libraries across the South.

Just this week in Tennessee, a contentious library board meeting culminated in the firing of the library director over her alleged refusal to move scores of children’s books with LGBTQ+ subject matter to the adult section.

It was a similar fight, over the Fairhope Public Library, that set the stage for tensions that erupted after Gamble’s arrest. Over the past few years, the Alabama Public Library Service, which disperses federal funds, has remade its board and rewritten the rules around material considered offensive or obscene. In a controversy that made national news, the state agency stripped funding from Fairhope’s library over its refusal to move books flagged by right-wing activists.

The efforts were spearheaded by a “Moms for Liberty” activist who now heads a group called Fairhope Faith Collective — and who decried the No Kings protest where Gamble was arrested as a failure by local politicians.

“If they were doing their job by upholding conservative values in our city these people wouldn’t be attracted to Fairhope,” she complained on Facebook.

In a separate post, she applauded Gamble’s arrest: “It looks like the ‘Penis Perp’ may be connected to ANTIFA,” she wrote, adding that Gamble’s conduct was “typical ANTIFA behavior.”

Beyond social media, however, locals do not seem to share such rigid views. Although the city overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the last election, residents of Fairhope have vocally opposed the defunding of their library. Many see it as a betrayal of the city’s cherished identity as a haven for literature and the arts.

Fairhope was founded as a utopian experiment in the late 1800s: a “single tax” settlement modeled on a belief that land ownership should serve the greater good. The image of a place founded by independent thinkers has imbued Fairhope with an enduring sense of civic pride.

Its natural beauty and small-town charm — nicknamed “Mayberry on the Bay,” after the town in “The Andy Griffith Show” — has also made Fairhope a popular destination for retirees from northern cities. Today, the fast-growing city is predominantly white and more affluent than its neighbors, while its origin story remains a badge of honor — “a colony built by and for artists, writers and other ne’er do-wells,” as JD Crowe, the progressive political cartoonist, put it last year.

Rae, the Indivisible Baldwin County organizer, said that, in addition to other issues like aggressive immigration enforcement in the area, the library controversy has drawn people to their cause. At one Fairhope city council meeting, activists stood outside holding signs that read “Ban bigots, not books.”

Meanwhile, the claim that the Fairhope Police Department is the arbiter of family values has been met with a wave of scorn and derision. Babb, a K-9 officer who regularly represents the police force at community events, brought a flood of criticism to the department’s social media accounts after Gamble’s arrest.

“I would NOT trust this clown around elderly people anymore,” one commenter wrote on an old Instagram post showing Babb at a “Coffee With a Cop” event held at a local senior center. “What if they happen to somehow offend him?”

Long-Term Gamble

In an email to The Intercept, Sullivan, the mayor, declined to say more about Gamble’s prosecution. “I cannot comment on pending court cases,” she wrote.

The city attorney, Fairhope Police Department, and city council president did not respond to requests for comment.

In his statements to the press last year, Burrell, the city council president, said he wanted to be sure that people’s constitutional rights were respected.

He added, “And I hope the police have enough evidence that they stand behind the charges.”

More than five months later, however, the evidence against Gamble remains a mystery. There are no witness accounts or recordings that show her breaking the law.

According to the official statement by the Fairhope police after the arrest, Babb arrived at the scene due to complaints over “traffic hazards in the area,” not anything Gamble had done. In a more recent filing ostensibly meant to clarify the charges, Municipal Court Prosecutor Marcus McDowell, who is also the city attorney, wrote that “members of the public called police concerning traffic safety issues and a person dressed as a giant penis thereby created a substantial traffic and safety hazard.”

Gespass, the civil rights lawyer, maintains that the city is seeking to punish his client simply for exercising her right to free expression. In a motion to dismiss the charges filed last November, he argued that Babb arrested Gamble based “solely upon his own prejudices.”

“No provision of Fairhope’s disorderly conduct ordinance applies to what she was doing or wearing when she was arrested,” he wrote. “Both her costume and her actions were protected First Amendment speech.”

In a one-line order, Municipal Judge Haymes Snedeker denied the motion.

More recently, Gesspass sought to subpoena the records from the radio station poll that elected Gamble as “Alabamian of the Year.” Although Gamble has not been charged with obscenity, her arrest was based on the accusation that her costume was obscene. Under prevailing case law, the question of whether something is obscene turns in part on “contemporary community standards.” While city leaders claimed that Gamble violated community standards, the radio poll showed the opposite, Gespass wrote. Snedeker disagreed, granting McDowell’s motion to toss the subpoena.

As her trial approaches, activists are preparing to show up at the courthouse to show their support for Gamble, now a minor celebrity known as Fairhope’s “Penis Lady.” In the meantime, more Fairhope residents joined the most recent No Kings protests on March 28, growing the number of participants to just under 1,200 people. This time, police set up barricades between the street and the protest.

The protest maintained its sense of humor, advertising itself as the “Official Site of #PenisGate.” On the Indivisible chapter Facebook page, Rae added photos of homemade signs in advance of the rally. One made creative use of a cartoon banana next to the words, “Free Speech is A-PEEling” and “Fuck ICE.” Another, featuring a wide-eyed hot dog, read, “Don’t Be a Meanie, It’s Just a Weenie.”

Gamble has tried to keep a low profile since her arrest. At the No Kings protest last week, though, the “No Dick Tator” sign appeared in the hands of a masked woman who wore dark sunglasses and a bandana over her face.

It was Gamble, again wearing an inflatable costume.

She was dressed as an eggplant.

The post Grandmother Faces Trial in Alabama for Wearing Penis Costume to No Kings Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter shared exclusively with The Intercept, Safora Yousufzai calls on President Donald Trump to release her son, 60-year-old Mohammad Rahim, citing his poor health and “advanced age” and arguing that “his prolonged detention has significantly affected both his physical and psychological well-being.”

Yousufzai points out that Afghanistan’s government released 64-year-old linguistics researcher Dennis Walter Coyle last month, after he spent over a year in captivity. His family had urged the Taliban to “look upon him with leniency” in a letter, which Afghanistan’s foreign ministry cited in their announcement of his release.

The Trump administration claimed credit for negotiating Coyle’s return — and proclaimed its commitment to “ending unjust detentions overseas.”

Now, Yousufzai is hoping to hold the administration to that promise.

“In light of recent humanitarian actions undertaken in comparable circumstances — such as the release and repatriation of detainee Dennis Coyle to his family, I respectfully express my hope that similar consideration may be extended in my son’s case,” wrote Yousufzai. “Such actions reflect not only legal discretion but also a broader commitment to human dignity and humanitarian values.” 

U.S. forces detained Rahim in Pakistan in 2007 and transferred him to the notorious military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2008. The U.S. government accused the Afghan national of being an interpreter and courier for Osama Bin Laden in Al Qaeda, but he was never charged or tried for any crimes.

The Biden administration reportedly offered to release Rahim in exchange for a prisoner swap including Mahmood Habibi, a U.S. citizen who was reportedly arrested in Afghanistan in 2022, after the U.S. killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. That deal never went through, and the Taliban has reportedly continued to request Rahim’s release. The Taliban publicly denies holding Habibi, who is still in custody, saying that they are unaware of his whereabouts. 

The White House and State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

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The CIA tortured Rahim while he was in its custody, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s use of torture. Rahim was subjected to “extensive use of the CIA’s enhanced-interrogation techniques,” the 2014 Senate report reads. According to their records, he was subjected to facial slaps, diet manipulation, and eight sleep deprivation sessions. During one of the sessions, he was kept awake for six straight days. Not sleeping for even three days can have lasting and profound negative impacts on cognitive health.

While he was being intentionally deprived of sleep, he was “usually shackled in a standing position, wearing a diaper and a pair of shorts,” the report adds. While in custody in 2007, he was provided a diet that “was almost entirely limited to water and liquid Ensure meals.” 

Administration officials have not spoken publicly about whether they would consider releasing Rahim. However, according to the New York Times, a senior U.S. official said that Rahim would not be a part of future deals with the Taliban. 

“At a minimum,” his mother wrote to Trump, “universally recognized human rights principles and norms call for a careful reassessment of his situation, with due consideration given to his age, health, and length of detention.” 

In her letter, Yousufzai also pleaded with the Trump administration to think of Rahim’s daughter, who she said has “been deprived for years of the care, affection, and guidance of her father.” 

Yousufzai, who is elderly herself, wrote that she hopes the Trump administration will allow her to see her son at least one last time before her death.

“As I approach the later stages of my life, the opportunity to see my son again remains my most earnest and final hope,” she wrote. “I respectfully urge your administration to take a thoughtful and humane step toward resolving his case, consistent with the values of justice, mercy, and respect for human dignity.” 

The post Mother of the Last Afghan in Guantánamo Bay Begs Trump to Free Her Son appeared first on The Intercept.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court marked International Trans Day of Visibility with yet another ruling that puts the lives of trans people at risk. The justices ruled that Colorado’s statewide ban on conversion therapy for young people likely violates a Christian counselor’s First Amendment rights. The decision threatens conversion therapy bans nationwide, which are currently on the books in nearly half of all U.S. states.

The 8-1 ruling has far-reaching, terrifying potential consequences. And not only for trans youth: It indicates that speech delivered by licensed health care practitioners in a professional capacity, no matter how harmful and debunked the claims, cannot be banned as illegal conduct, because it counts as protected speech.

Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the one dissenting judge, appeared to appreciate the grave stakes of this ruling.

“Before now, licensed medical professionals had to adhere to standards when treating patients: They could neither do nor say whatever they want,” Jackson wrote in a blistering dissent. “Largely due to such State regulation, Americans have been privileged to enjoy a long and successful tradition of high-quality medical care. Today, the Court turns its back on that tradition.”

The dangers of conversion therapy to trans and queer youth cannot be overstated. According to the Trevor Project, a nonprofit suicide-prevention organization for LGBTQ+ young people, “LGBTQ+ youth who experienced conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide and more than 2.5 times as likely to report multiple suicide attempts in the past year.”

Conversion therapy, however, may not be the only potentially harmful intervention the ruling would apply to. As Jackson added in her dissent, the ruling “might make speech-only therapies and other medical treatments involving practitioner speech effectively unregulatable — not to be reached via licensing standards, medical-malpractice liability, or any other means of state control.”

It is a ruling, then, completely in line with our Trumpian moment of decimated medical care standards and eliminationist assaults on trans people. Indeed, it was done with support from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department.

As journalist and trans rights advocate Erin Reed wrote, the court’s logic in the ruling holds that “any medical treatment delivered through words rather than instruments could now carry First Amendment protection — a framework that could shield a doctor who encourages a patient to commit suicide, a dietician who tells an anorexic patient to eat less, or a therapist who deliberately steers a vulnerable client away from life-saving treatment.”

Reed noted that the decision risks extending constitutional protections to “speech-based professional conduct” in other fields, like a lawyer giving knowingly harmful legal advice.

Speech as Medicine

The crux of the majority’s opinion rests on the contested line between speech that is protected against government interference, and conduct, which can be regulated.

“Her speech does not become ‘conduct’ just because a government says so or because it may be described as a ‘treatment’ or ‘therapeutic modality,’” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch in the majority opinion, referring to the speech of Christian counselor Kaley Chiles, who sued the state of Colorado over the conversion therapy ban with representation from the right-wing legal giant the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Gorsuch’s opinion draws an extraordinary conclusion about the role of certain speech acts in professional health care settings.

The Colorado law did not ban Chiles from holding and expressing Christian views; the law, like regulations in over 20 other states, banned conversion talk therapy — that is, speech acts delivered with the specific aim to “change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

It is precisely professional conduct that the law regulates.

As Jackson noted in her dissent, “The Constitution does not pose a barrier to reasonable regulation of harmful medical treatments just because substandard care comes via speech instead of a scalpel.”

Every major medical and mental health association has condemned the practice of conversion therapy.

Other Liberal Justices?

Given the danger posed by the court’s decision, it may seem surprising that the two other liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, sided with the far-right majority. Their decision, according to their concurring opinions, related to the fact that Colorado’s law was not written in sufficiently “viewpoint-neutral” language. 

“We need not here decide how to assess viewpoint-neutral laws regulating health providers’ expressions because, as the Court holds, Colorado’s is not one,” wrote Sotomayor.

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With this far-right supermajority Supreme Court, however, even cautiously worded conversion therapy bans may not survive the conservative justices. In the last year alone, the court has bucked precedents and ignored medical expertise, not to mention basic humanity, in previous anti-trans decisions like banning trans youth health care and ejecting trans people from the military.

The court’s Tuesday decision did not in itself strike down the Colorado law, but in siding with conversion therapy, the justices returned the case to the 10th Circuit, where the highest form of judicial scrutiny will be applied. The law will almost certainly be struck down.

If existing bans are invalidated, those seeking to stop a further proliferation of conversion therapy may now have to use “creative methods,” Reed wrote, like tort law and malpractice law.

This is the grim legal terrain forged by the Trump regime and bigoted groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, aided by too many negligent or complicit liberals. Medical malpractice and harmful speech acts are protected, whereas trans kids’ existence gets no protection at all.

The post Conversion Therapy Gets Speech Protections — But Trans Kids’ Existence Gets No Protection at All appeared first on The Intercept.

The data belies a common talking point made by the White House during the massive immigration operation: that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were arresting thousands of “dangerous criminal illegal aliens.”

From December 2025 to mid-March 2026, ICE made 4,030 arrests in the state. Of them, a staggering 2,532 arrests, or 63 percent, were of people with no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, according to the data, which was previously unreported.

On February 4, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, “President Trump’s commonsense immigration enforcement policies are delivering the public safety results the American people demanded, with more than 4,000 dangerous criminal illegal aliens already arrested in Minnesota since Operation Metro began.”

ICE’s own data contradicts the White House’s claim that all 4,000 people arrested were “dangerous criminal” undocumented immigrants at a time when about two-thirds of them had no records. (The White House referred a request for comment to ICE, which did not immediately respond.)

“The data confirms what the American people have overwhelmingly known, which is that Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis was a complete failure,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School and a faculty fellow at the Deportation Data Project. “Instead of targeting the ‘worst of the worst,’ it was ordinary law-abiding people who were caught up in the immigration dragnet, resulting in the needless and cruel separation of families and inflicting untold suffering on American children.”

The findings are based on The Intercept’s analysis of federal government data provided by ICE in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Deportation Data Project. The new tranche of data, published on Monday, includes information on all ICE arrests made nationwide till March 10.

Skyrocketing Arrests

The proportion of ICE arrests in Minnesota of immigrants without a criminal record increased sharply during the winter operation, dubbed “Metro Surge” by the Trump administration.

Between Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and the end of November 2025, 44 percent of all ICE arrests in the state were of people without criminal records. From December until February 12, the date that border czar Tom Homan said the operation was coming to an end, 64 percent of all ICE arrests in the state were of people without criminal records.

The period of the surge also represented a giant jump in the number of arrests themselves. Nearly 4,000 of the 5,998 ICE arrests in Minnesota since Trump took office occurred between December and February 12.

In January alone, there were 2,530 ICE arrests recorded in Minnesota, underscoring the impact of the operation. In comparison, there were 177 ICE arrests in the state in November, the last month before the surge began.

A vast majority — 97 percent — of ICE arrests in Minnesota between December 2025 and February 12 were “street arrests”; all of those were listed in the data as non-custodial arrests referring to detentions where the person is not taken from another agency’s custody.

In contrast, only 52 percent of all ICE arrests elsewhere in the country in the same period were non-custodial arrests.

After Renee Good Killing

The enforcement surge in Minnesota began in early December, then ramped up in January following the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. The Trump administration responded to the killing by doubling down and sending hundreds more federal agents to the state to intensify the immigration enforcement crackdown.

Now, The Intercept’s analysis of ICE arrests data shows that after Good was killed, the rate of ICE arrests in Minnesota more than doubled.

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There were 1,225 ICE arrests, or around 32 arrests per day, recorded in Minnesota from December 2025 until January 7, 2026, the day Good was killed. 

Since then up until February 12, when Homan said the operation in the state was coming to an end, the rate of ICE arrests shot up to 74 arrests per day, with a total of 2.672 arrests being recorded. 

The rate of ICE arrests stayed high despite the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis on January 24.

Few Somalis Arrested

Around the time that the surge was announced, Trump administration officials repeatedly spoke of targeting Somalis in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The metropolitan area boasts the largest Somali community in the country, and most of its members are U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

The ramped-up enforcement in the state dovetailed with a campaign by far-right figures with ties to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views against Somalis in the state. 

YouTube videos made by a far-right influencer were reportedly responsible for the White House’s focus on the Twin Cities. The videos alleged widespread fraud by the Somali community, but many of the claims have since been debunked or shown to have been blown out of proportion. 

According to The Intercept’s analysis of ICE data, however, only 112 ICE arrests recorded in Minnesota from December until mid-March were of people listed as having Somali citizenship.

Update: March 31, 2026
This story has been updated to include a response from the White House and a comment from Elora Mukherjee, a faculty fellow with the Deportation Data Project.

The post Two-Thirds of People Arrested by ICE in Minnesota Surge Had No Criminal Records, New Data Reveals appeared first on The Intercept.

Over the weekend, the U.S. and Israel bombarded two universities in Iran, the Isfahan University of Technology and the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran.

These are not, of course, the first attacks on civilian infrastructure in President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s illegal war on Iran; hospitals, desalination facilities, power plants, and an elementary school have all been hit.

The U.S. and Israel claimed that the attacks on the universities were justified, because they said the schools were connected to Iran’s weapons programs.

In response, Iranian authorities said on Sunday that American university facilities in the region would be considered legitimate targets, should the U.S. not condemn the strikes on Iranian educational institutions.

In a statement, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned “all employees, professors and students of American universities in the region to stay at least a kilometer away.”

Iranian students and educators received no such warning. Iran’s university campuses have been closed since the U.S.–Israeli war began last month; the weekend strikes nonetheless severely damaged buildings and reportedly wounded at least four staff members.

Cynical Justification

Leaving aside the fact that nothing in Trump’s war of choice against Iran is justified, the U.S. and Israel’s purported grounds for targeting Iranian universities are hollow and cynical. It is true that both universities had ties to military research. Would American and Israeli leaders consider their own equivalent institutions fair game? Of course not.

By stated U.S. and Israeli rationale, however, were Iran able to launch airstrikes on American soil, direct ties to the U.S. and Israeli military-industrial complex would make valid targets of at least the University of California, Berkeley; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Johns Hopkins University, among dozens of other schools.

Numerous Israeli universities, including Technion and Tel Aviv University, have research institutes dedicated to military technologies. And the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has a military base on campus for training intelligence soldiers.

Asymmetric warfare offers powerful aggressors the privilege of hypocrisy. It has long been pointed out that Israel’s justifications for mass slaughtering civilians — that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure — would in turn justify strikes on civilian areas in Israel. The Israeli government, after all, has facilities and even military installations within and near major cities and towns, not to mention the integration of the military into vast swaths of civilian Israeli life.

This is true almost everywhere that commercial and military technologies become intractably integrated, but that integration is especially robust in Israel.

Indeed, in this grim conjuncture, the idea that any site related to military research and development is a justified target could be used to attack any industrial, educational, and technological hub — which is precisely what the U.S. and Israel are doing in Iran. The U.S. and Israel’s own justifications for the Iranian university strikes de facto legitimize strikes against an MIT or a Technion, but American and Israeli leadership know that Iran and its allies don’t have the firepower to flatten whole campuses.

This is not to say that Iran will not retaliate and attempt to extract a cost from its enemies; this has been the pattern since the U.S. and Israel launched their illegal offensive in late February.

Universities including New York University, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, and others have lucrative campuses in the Persian Gulf monarchies, primarily in Abu Dhabi and Qatar. These schools have all already moved to online instruction and most international students and faculty have left countries facing retaliatory Iranian strikes.

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These international campuses are not known for housing advanced research labs connected to military and surveillance research, but, as the student-led Gaza solidarity movement made clear, U.S. academia at large is deeply invested in multinational arms manufacturers and U.S. and Israeli military industries. Dozens of American institutions of higher education are deeply involved in the government-funded weapons research that helps make the U.S. military the most potentially destructive force in the world.

“Systematic” Targeting

Let’s not pretend, however, that the ongoing war on Iran follows any sort of valid justificatory reasoning.

According to Helyeh Doutaghi, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tehran who spoke to Al-Jazeera, the university bombings reflect a “consistent and clear pattern, and that is the systemic de-industrialization and underdevelopment” of Iran’s capabilities.

“The targeting is very systematic,” she said, “and very designed to make Iran incapable of defending its sovereignty by relying on its iedingeounous development and indigenous industries.”

Strikes against civilian infrastructure follow the same genocidal logic that saw every university in Gaza razed to rubble within 100 days of October 7, 2023. In a video shared by members of the Israeli military on social media in 2024, a soldier walked through the rubble of Al-Azhar University.

“To those who say, ‘There is no education in Gaza,’” he says, “we bombed them all. Too bad, you’ll not be engineers anymore.”

The point, that is, is the devastation of a place and a people, foreclosing their capacity to rebuild.

The post What Would We All Say If Iran Razed MIT Because of Military-Related Research? appeared first on The Intercept.

The night before we were set to fly out of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, I approached my partner with a confession: For the first time that I can remember, I was afraid of flying with a Latino last name.

It was a new sort of affront I had to steel myself against. Air travel is filled with moments — buying basic economy tickets, being herded through winding security lines like cattle, squishing your limbs into a compact seat — that smoosh you until you feel subhuman, usually along class lines.

In the days leading up to our flight to Las Vegas, however, I saw the indignities of the airport mount as President Donald Trump deployed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into America’s terminals, turning an already-debasing necessity into something more chilling.

Certainly, that’s how I felt after my experience. At JFK, an ICE agent was taking the customary Transportation Security Administration role of checking IDs at security. Everything, though, seemed to be running as normal. When I handed over my passport, however, he asked me a question I hadn’t heard him ask anyone else in front of me — most of whom presented as white: “Do you have a second form of photo ID?”

I can’t be sure what motivated the agent to ask me, and apparently no one else near me, this question, but his request of me was difficult to separate from ICE’s role not only as brutal enforcers of Trump’s deportation regime, but also its use as his personal police force. If one thing has been consistent in ICE’s ever-expanding mission, it’s that the agency is being used by the administration to instill fear.

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Later, it was impossible not to think about what my brief, eventually harmless encounter with the agent might portend. Shortly after Trump deployed ICE agents to airports, his former chief strategist Steve Bannon may have tipped the administration’s hand. Bannon speculated on his “War Room”podcast that the immigration force’s presence at TSA security checkpoints was a “test run” ahead of the November midterms.

Maybe, Bannon seemed to suggest, it was a rehearsal, meant to test how far the administration can stretch our tolerance for agents as part of the landscape of our daily lives without pushback.

If ICE’s invasion of American cities as part of Trump’s broad-based crackdown on immigration and dissent alike was a sledgehammer, what I experienced was more akin to a scalpel. It represents an agency that is understanding the criticisms against its methods and looking for new, more sophisticated ways to terrorize people.

If we can accept the reality that Trump’s personal army is requiring more documentation from us just to board an Airbus, how long until we are forced to tolerate them in our voting booths and beyond?

Training Us to Terror

It was hard not to feel that surgical instillation of terror during my airport visit.

The heightened scrutiny of airport security already makes me feel like a criminal, one who doesn’t even know he committed a crime. In the days leading up to my flight, I prepared for that same kind of interaction, amplified by the presence of someone with a gun and near-unlimited state power. I knew I’d have to get much closer to an ICE agent than I ever had before.

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Instagram videos of JFK suggested lines might be long, but when we arrived on Thursday morning, the terminal was mostly empty and the estimated wait time in my reserve line was only about 15 minutes.

It ended up taking twice as long. As we got closer to the security checkpoint, I realized what the holdup was: A TSA agent was standing behind two ICE agents, training them on how to do her job. As she stood there — working without getting paid, unlike the heavily armed agent sitting in front of her — she walked them through the steps.

I got a closer look at one of the ICE agents. He was white and bald, wearing military fatigues and a tactical vest that announced his employment with ICE.

People in front of me walked through without incident, performing the usual routine: passport, boarding pass, then on to remove their belts and unsheathe their laptops.

When I stepped up to the podium, I wondered if I was about to interact with someone who would be suspicious of me merely for my name and skin color.

I let out an involuntary smile — perhaps as a subconscious signal that I am friendly and low-risk. The ICE agent asked for my passport, which I handed over, as usual, and waited while a machine took my picture. I anticipated moving on quickly.

That’s when he asked me for another form of ID. At that moment, I started to feel my face turn hot, as if I were being accused of something. A U.S. passport is considered one of the most powerful forms of identification in the world. Why did he need a second document?

Though I had already started to grab the wallet in my coat pocket, he followed up with, “You know, like a driver’s license?” I handed over the plastic driver’s license — not a REAL ID, which is why I brought my passport — and waited for his verdict.

He looked back and forth between my documents and the monitor and then OKed me to walk forward.

My partner, who is white, walked through behind me without incident.

Later, as I was sitting in my seat toward the plane’s rear, I began to gain a greater perspective on what I had just undergone. That interaction — the kind that I had worried about for a few hours before waking up and schlepping to the airport — was designed to happen to people like me. It represented a moment of friction, designed to jolt me at first, but then get me used to the fact that people with weapons will now ask more of me just to do the same thing I had done a few weeks before, when I flew to Puerto Rico without any ICE agents at the TSA checkpoint.

Free passage would be harder, the stakes of any interaction would be higher. The fear that I was feeling in that moment had been designed, as if in a lab, to train me to accept a violent overreach that would’ve seemed absurd mere weeks ago.

It’s easy to see how this creep might affect people — Latinos and other immigrants who have citizenship — at their polling places. It will bring a little terror. And then instill a little normalcy.

The post ICE at Airports Trains Us to Accept Being Terrorized in Our Daily Lives appeared first on The Intercept.

As email dated Thursday compares immigration enforcement to fighting wildfires and other disaster response and implores civilian employees and contractors to “step up for our country’s next challenge.”

Those who volunteer “will directly support the operations of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they work to ensure a safe and orderly immigration system,” reads the email, listed as from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. “To date, participants have helped ICE and CBP develop concepts of operation, provide logistics support, and managed enforcement activities that enhance public safety.”

ICE and CBP have faced a wave of public backlash in recent months, as immigration operations have terrorized communities across the country and killed two civilians in Minneapolis. President Donald Trump fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month, and in February, Congress triggered a partial government shutdown by letting DHS funding lapse while Democrats request reforms.

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A photo of the memo, which was first reported by Military Times, appeared Thursday afternoon on an unofficial Facebook page for Air Force personnel. A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, but the email’s details match those of an earlier department press release published March 11.

The Pentagon’s current call for DHS support appears to be a re-up of an earlier ask for volunteers made last August. At that time, Michael A. Cogar, the deputy assistant defense secretary for civilian personnel policy, expressed pride in civilians joining the efforts of DHS.

“This is a national security problem, and our civilians have the critical skill sets to support DHS in their mission,” Cogar said in August. “We’re proud that our civilians are already willing to sign up.”

The memo sent out Thursday claimed that more than 900 people had submitted applications so far to take part in the details, but did not specify how many people have been deployed. The March 11 press release claimed that around 200 civilians had deployed as part of the program.

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The email linked to a page on USA Jobs, a clearinghouse for federal job opportunities. The page, titled “Volunteer Force,” advertises a salary range of $25,684 to $191,900 per year. A list of potential volunteer duties include data entry, operational support, assisting ICE and CBP with managing the flow of detainees, and logistical planning.

The Pentagon has taken an active support role in DHS activities since the beginning of Trump’s second term, when Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border and authorized the armed forces to deploy there.

Pentagon spending on border security has been the subject of controversy over the past year. In December, Democratic lawmakers accused the Trump administration of siphoning at least $2 billion from the Pentagon’s budget and prioritizing hard-line border initiatives and political stunts over its traditional focus on national security.

Spokespeople for DHS, ICE, and CBP did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The post Pentagon Implores Civilian Workers to Join ICE “Volunteer Force” appeared first on The Intercept.

It started on President Donald Trump’s very first day in office in 2017. Over 200 Inauguration Day protesters were mass arrested and charged with hefty riot and conspiracy felonies for simply being present and wearing black at a rowdy demonstration.

Since then, the government has sought and failed to convict left-wing activists on thin, unconstitutional claims of collective guilt.

Just as the J20 prosecutions, as the inauguration cases were known, fell apart, so too did cases accusing dozens of participants in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement of domestic terrorism, racketeering, and conspiracy.

It became a pattern of sorts. Prosecutors on both the federal and state level throwing extreme and overreaching charges at leftists, based on infirm theories of collective liability, aiming to paint antifascist, anti-racist movements as criminal terrorist networks. The evidence marshaled in these cases was consistently no more than typical First Amendment-protected activity, like making protest signs, raising bail funds, or being present at a demonstration. The cases drained movement energies and resources.

Again and again, though, they failed.

This was the pattern repeated in the malign, overreaching cases against protesters in Fort Worth, Texas. The anti-ICE activists had mounted a demonstration at a U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement jail in nearby Alvarado.

There were consistencies with other anti-protest cases. There had been some illegal activity outside the Prairieland Detention Facility last July, and a police officer was shot. The government latched onto these circumstances to build its strategy of criminalizing dissent through guilt by association.

Even in conservative Texas, I didn’t think a jury would buy the government’s case that these defendants were “North Texas Antifa Cell operatives” — an organization fabricated whole cloth by the Trump administration — who had orchestrated an elaborate ambush of the ICE facility.

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Last week, a jury found eight of the defendants guilty of terrorism charges for simply being present and wearing black at the protest. The government scored a resounding victory: A few of the protesters, none of whom had fired any weapons, were acquitted of attempted murder charges, but the Justice Department won on almost all the other charges.

“Most people looking at this case are still stuck on the shooting aspect, but the jury decided the shooting was beside the point,” a member of a support group for the defendants told me. “The verdict is that a normal noise demo deserves to be called terrorism and people should spend potentially the rest of their lives in prison. The implications of this are obvious, and people should know that the DOJ is going to try this again.”

Grim Precedents

The convictions mark a number of grim precedents. It was the first successful effort in court to paint anti-ICE, antifascist protest activity as not only criminal but also terroristic; the first time federal terrorism charges have been deployed in association with the “antifa” label; and the first time the Trump government’s collective guilt strategy won in court.

The terrorism-related charges in the case were filed just a month after Trump announced that he was designating antifa, which is not an organization, a “major terrorist organization” — a designation that does not exist under law for domestic groups.

It’s little wonder that the Justice Department is celebrating the convictions. Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that the “verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”

The prosecution’s case was extraordinarily weak — all they really proved was that the activists, some of whom knew each other, planned and attended a late-night demonstration during which certain illegal acts took place.

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If that can be sold to juries as the work of an organized terrorist cell, deserving of decades in prison, then Trump’s fantasy of rounding up and imprisoning leftists en masse becomes a reality. This was entirely the idea behind Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, released last September, which directs federal law enforcement agencies to target left-leaning groups and activities. One of the defense attorneys involved in the Prairieland cases told news outlet NOTUS that it “wouldn’t be a terrorism case if it weren’t for that memo.”

Throughout the trial, the prosecution treated it as a given that antifascist, anti-government, left-wing sentiment was itself evidence of criminal conspiracy. As The Intercept’s Matt Sledge reported, “prosecutors bombarded jurors with images of radical zines” and “anti-government internet memes, drawings of burning cop cars, and a video of an unidentified street brawl between far-left and far-right protesters.”

The fact that demonstrators wore black and covered their faces — a reasonable tactic in an era when federal forces are filming and openly harassing legal observers and anti-ICE protesters — was presented as material support for terrorism, for which the jury convicted eight defendants.

Another defendant was convicted for the crime of moving a box of zines and pamphlets.

What should have at most been individualized cases relating to a shooting and minor property damage were instead spun by the government into a delusional story of a planned ambush involving “explosives” — protesters set off retail fireworks — and “terroristic acts,” according to a Justice Department statement.

Whether certain illegal activity took place outside the Prairieland Detention Facility last July 4 was never up for debate in this case. Protesters spray-painted vehicles in the parking lot, and a police officer was shot in the neck by one protester, Benjamin Song. (Song was convicted of one count of attempted murder and could face up to life in prison.)

Keep Up the Fight

The material support for terrorism and related convictions must be challenged in appeal. They are unconstitutional and were obtained in a trial riddled with irregularities.

For one, the Trump-appointed judge, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman, abruptly declared a mistrial during jury selection based on the initial jury pool reportedly showing too little sympathy for ICE.

When the trial restarted, the judge himself took charge of jury selection — a highly unusual move.

Pittman also barred Song from presenting a self-defense argument. In closing arguments, his defense attorney said that Song only shot at the ground after police officers fired first, and that the injured cop was grazed by a ricocheted bullet.

And access to the court for supporters, observers, and the media was also extremely limited.

“All the odds were stacked against the defendants from the start,” Xavier T. de Janon, a defense attorney representing one of the defendants, told Unicorn Riot. “The rulings of the judge, the way the courtroom was closed, the fact that the first jury was declared a mistrial, where this was happening, the very strict rules on who can even take these cases in north Texas, the sanctions that the judge imposed on defense attorneys for filing very normal motions — all of this piled up to end in this result.”

It’s notable, too, that the defense attorneys did not mount a defense in court. Once the prosecution rested its ideology-drenched and inconsistency-filled case, the defense rested too, and closing arguments proceeded.

“We do not know how things would have gone otherwise, but the assumption that the state’s glaringly weak case was enough to convince a North Texas jury pool to vote not guilty was delusional,” a close friend of a number of the defendants who helped with court support efforts told me. “This is not merely 20/20 hindsight, many of the supporters and loved ones of the defendants disagreed with the decision when it happened.”

With the Prairieland defendants also facing state charges, and with appeals processes ahead, there is a clear need to present a robust case against the government’s pernicious and dangerous lawfare. Outside of future trials and court challenges, it is crucial that anyone invested in challenging Trump’s fascist deportation machine understand the stakes of these cases and show solidarity with defendants accordingly.

The Prairieland case, as I’ve previously noted, provided a convenient testing ground for state repression, in part because it has not been lifted up as a national cause célèbre against Trumpian overreach. The reasons why should be obvious: not only were there acts of minor vandalism, but also a police officer was shot — a highly unusual event at these sorts of demonstrations.

No matter how unique, however, the Texas case reveals precisely the strategies the Trump administration will use, with the assistance of state forces, to target whole movements and communities with prosecutorial overreach and a logic of guilt by association. In the face of Trump’s escalations, this is no time for anti-ICE activists to distance themselves from protests where militant activity might occur; this is the chilling effect the government seeks.

It is the nature of contemporary far-right governance to throw everything against the wall, repeatedly, until something sticks to achieve its goals. Anti-trans laws that once roundly failed are now on the books in multiple states; once-constitutionally protected reproductive rights have been decimated.

With brute force, repetition, and relentlessness, Trump and his acolytes hack away at established protections. First Amendment-protected protest activity is no different. The Trump regime has been seeking to criminalize leftist dissent since the president’s first inauguration. For years, nothing stuck. We cannot let Prairieland be the turning point.

The post Why We Have to Fight Back Against ICE Protesters’ Terror Convictions appeared first on The Intercept.

He could not stop smiling.

“I’m feeling wonderful,” Burton told me.

Burton, 75, wore white sneakers and a brace on his right hand, his tan quilted jacket and slacks fitting loosely over his thin frame. A tan helmet, given to him by the prison to protect from his occasional falls, sat on the table next to an array of photos taken with family earlier that day, along with a bag of quarters for the vending machines.

Burton identified the people in one of the photos for me. Several were still in the visiting room: his sister Eddie Mae Ellison, his son Charles Burton III, and his grandson Charles Burton IV. No sooner had one group of relatives left the visiting room than another showed up — a rolling family reunion.

Burton had been sitting in that same visiting room with his lawyers 24 hours earlier, on Tuesday, March 10, when his longtime paralegal Nancy Palombi got a phone call in Montgomery, 120 miles away. While the rest of the legal team was at the prison without access to their cellphones, Palombi had stayed behind to field any communications from the U.S. Supreme Court, which had just received their final filings aimed at stopping Burton’s execution.

Instead, she got a call from a reporter she knew. The reporter was screaming, “Have you heard?” The governor’s office had just sent out a press release with the subject line, “Update from Governor Kay Ivey: Charles L. Burton.” And that’s how Palombi learned that her client of 20 years would not be executed.

“I was the first member of the team to find out,” Palombi told me that morning, her voice still trembling with a mix of shock, joy, and relief.

Palombi called the prison and spoke to the warden’s secretary, who entered the visitation room with a smile on her face. She told Burton’s lead attorney, Assistant Federal Defender Matt Schulz, that he should call his paralegal right away. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, it happened,’” Schulz said. “But I still didn’t want to let myself believe it, because I didn’t know yet.”

Schulz rushed to his car, drove out of range from Holman’s cellphone blockers, and called Palombi. He then sped back.

Describing the scene the next day, Burton turned and pointed toward the hallway that runs along the perimeter of the visiting room. That’s where prison staff celebrated as the news spread on death row. Nurses and officers waved and gave him thumbs ups through the horizontal window slats. “Guards were saying, ‘Sonny got clemency! Sonny got clemency!’” Burton said.

A day later, everyone was still a bit shellshocked. Burton’s son, who had flown in from New York, got the news while loading up his rental car for the drive to Atmore. Burton’s sister was at the doctor’s office in Montgomery, where she saw a local news alert. She ran outside and dropped to her knees. “And then the tears just flowed,” she said.

For decades, the visiting room had been the site of agonizing goodbyes between the condemned and their loved ones in the hours before an execution. Now it was home to warm hugs and tranquil smiles, no one’s bigger than Burton’s. He invoked the famed blues harmonica player Snooky Pryor: “I’m too cool to move.”

Burton’s commutation was historic: the third time in the modern history of Alabama’s death penalty that a person facing execution received clemency by the governor. Ivey, a staunch Republican, has presided over 25 executions since she took office in 2017. Although she commuted the sentence of Burton’s neighbor, Rocky Myers, last year due to serious doubts over his guilt, few were optimistic that she would exercise such mercy again.

Burton would have been the ninth person executed using nitrogen gas in Alabama in just over two years. The method was adopted following complications carrying out lethal injection, a wider trend that has reshaped the landscape of executions across the country. The state’s last execution prompted a forceful dissent from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who described the psychological torture in visceral detail. “You want to breathe; you have to breathe,” she wrote. “But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.”

Burton’s commutation also came as a searing documentary about the state prison system, “The Alabama Solution,” was in the race to win an Oscar. The film, which was produced using footage from contraband cellphones, forced politicians to acknowledge the deadly conditions and inhumane punishments inflicted on people incarcerated in their state. On the day I visited Burton, lawmakers met in Montgomery to discuss legislation to impose oversight on Alabama’s prisons.

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It was this kind of public pressure that undoubtedly saved Burton’s life. “I would have 100 percent died without it,” Burton told me. In Montgomery, activists held vigils every Monday for weeks in front of the governor’s mansion, while downtown businesses posted flyers about Burton’s case in their front windows. On the eve of Ivey’s decision, two of Burton’s daughters led a march to the state Capitol to deliver petitions to her office.

The campaign for clemency was launched by Burton’s legal team, who believed they had nothing to lose. They highlighted Burton’s remorse, his advanced age and poor health, and, above all, his lack of culpability for the murder that sent him to death row. “This is one of those cases that shocks people,” Schulz said in a clemency film produced last year. “And it shocks people in a totally different way than most death penalty cases.”

Burton was 40 years old when he led a group of younger men in an armed robbery at an AutoZone in Talladega, Alabama. A 34-year-old father and military veteran named Doug Battle walked in as the crime was underway — and one of the young men fatally shot him in the back.

At first, Burton denied any role in either the robbery or the shooting. His apparent lack of remorse helped convince jurors at his 1992 trial that he should be punished as severely as the man who actually shot Battle, a 20-year-old named Derrick DeBruce, who had already been sent to death row. After a four-day trial, Burton, too, was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to die.

But a federal court eventually threw out DeBruce’s death sentence, finding that his lawyer failed to effectively represent him during the punishment phase of his trial. The Alabama attorney general’s office initially appealed the decision, contending that it would be “arguably unjust” to allow Burton to be executed for his co-defendant’s actions. But in 2015, the state agreed to reduce DeBruce’s punishment to life without parole. He died five years later.

The notion that Burton should now pay with his life for another man’s crime spurred outrage among people in Alabama and beyond. The campaign to save Burton was bolstered by six of the eight living jurors who voted to send him to death row, as well as by Battle’s daughter, Tori Battle, who was outspoken in her opposition to the execution. “What is the execution of Mr. Burton supposed to accomplish or solve?” she asked Ivey in a letter that was submitted as part of Burton’s 88-page clemency petition. “Is it for my father? For me? To deter crime? I honestly do not understand.”

The petition argued, first and foremost, that Burton never killed anyone. “He did not pull the trigger that killed Douglas Battle,” his lawyers wrote. In fact, he didn’t even witness the murder. “Mr. Burton was already outside of the AutoZone building where the shooting took place.” Although Alabama’s felony murder statute allows defendants to be held responsible for the actions of others, Burton was only supposed to be eligible for capital murder if he intended to take somebody’s life — and there was nothing to prove that this was the case.

The state’s star witness against Burton was a teenager named LuJuan McCants who agreed to testify in order to avoid the death penalty. He said that Burton had gathered the group with the intention of committing a robbery — and if something went wrong, “he said let him take care of it.” According to prosecutors, this directive proved that Burton intended to kill anyone who might stand in the way of the robbery. But even this weak evidence was undermined by McCants’s own testimony, as well as by an interrogation video discovered by Burton’s lawyers years after the trial. It showed McCants repeatedly telling investigators that Burton had not wanted anyone to get hurt — and that he’d been upset upon learning that DeBruce shot Battle.

Some of the jurors who spoke out against the execution said they were haunted by their decision. “I have questioned whether death is an appropriate punishment,” one woman wrote in a letter submitted with the clemency petition. “I have often thought about Mr. Burton’s mother, who was no doubt devastated by the sentence.”

But for most, it came down to the obvious unfairness of executing Burton for DeBruce’s crime. “Had I known the shooter would later be taken off death row,” one juror wrote, “I would not have voted for the death sentence.” Another juror wrote that Burton may have been the ringleader, “but if Charles Manson can get a life sentence for leading his group to kill many people, it is fair for Mr. Burton to serve life without parole.”

Like most people living on death row, Burton bears no resemblance to Charles Manson — or to the people Americans picture when they hear the term “worst of the worst.” His early life had many of the familiar hallmarks of those who are put to death in the United States: poverty, racism, childhood abuse, and trauma. By the time Alabama came close to executing him, he’d long since apologized for his actions and was in frequent pain from rheumatoid arthritis, unable to walk on his own.

But he was also lucky, he told me. If there was anything that sustained him during his years at Holman, it was a strong family structure, which many of his neighbors lack. Indeed, Burton’s clemency petition was filled with letters from relatives, pen pals, and advocates who described Burton as a positive and nurturing presence in their lives.

I was supposed to attend Burton’s execution — not as a media witness, but as one of the people placed on his personal list. Burton did not wish for his family to be subjected to his death, and his legal team decided that, should the killing move forward, they wanted the world to know what Alabama had done. They invited me and two other journalists to join them in the witness room.

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One of them, Lee Hedgepeth, had already witnessed seven executions in Alabama, including three by nitrogen gas. The last one had been the longest to date, lasting 40 minutes. Schulz had seen two of his clients killed with nitrogen. Their accounts were harrowing: Terror and panic was visible on the faces of the condemned, who gasped and thrashed on the gurney. As Burton’s execution date neared, Schulz wondered how it would compare. Would his elderly client suffer more or less due to his age and poor health? Could his more shallow breathing cause the execution to last longer? Or would the fact that he does not have as much oxygen in his lungs to begin with mean it would be shorter?

What was certain was that executing Burton would have been a horrifying spectacle. Guards would have had to lift him onto the gurney, adjusting the thick black straps to fit more tightly over his withered body, and putting a mask over his face. Witnesses would then have watched as Alabama suffocated an elderly man, who killed no one, in the name of justice.

Instead, Burton is now poised to live out the rest of his days behind bars. On the day after our visit, he was moved out of the prison where he spent more than three decades and driven up to Kilby Correctional Facility outside Montgomery, where newly incarcerated people are housed before being transferred to their designated prisons. The move is sure to be a shock to the system for a man who has hardly begun to process the trauma of his near-execution and who has spent much of the past 10 years between his cell and the prison infirmary. After age 65, Burton told me, he slowed down. “I haven’t been outside in eight years,” he said.

In a less punitive system, it would be obvious that Burton should go home to spend the rest of his life with his family. As he said, “I ain’t got much longer to live.” His relatives harbor some hope that he may some day be eligible for medical release. But for now, according to Schulz, Burton was in good spirits when they spoke on the phone from his new location. “He said he knew many of the nurses there, and that they all were greeting, and treating, him warmly,” he said.

“And he’s alive,” Schulz added. On Thursday at 6 p.m., the hour he had been scheduled to die, Burton planned to eat ice cream at the same time as his attorneys and savor the feeling of gratitude. “God has given me a second chance,” Burton told me. This, he believed, was God’s work. “He put the right people in my path.”

The post In the Room Where Death Row Prisoners Say Final Goodbyes, He Learned He Would Live appeared first on The Intercept.

The widely watched trial could serve as a bellwether as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to crack down on left-wing groups — and the convictions could encourage prosecutors to bring more such charges. A top FBI official said in December that the agency is now treating “antifa” as a major domestic terror threat.

In a statement posted online, a support group for the defendants said, “Everything about this trial from beginning to end has proven what we have said all along: this is a sham trial, built on political persecution and ideological attacks coming from the top.”

The Trump administration celebrated the verdict.

“Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities — not under President Trump,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”

The court case centered on a nighttime July 4, 2025, protest outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility that started with demonstrators shooting fireworks and spray-painting cars in the parking lot.

Signal messages obtained by the government showed that the demonstrators believed that less confrontational protests against ICE — such as one that had occurred earlier in the day at the same facility — were ineffective. Some of the protesters had brought guns, which is legal in Texas. A police officer responding to the scene was shot in the neck by one of the protesters, Benjamin Song, who had brought an AR-15 with a trigger modified for a higher rate of fire.

The defendants said the protest was a peaceful demonstration meant to show solidarity, pointing to the megaphone that one member of the group brought to shout slogans to detainees. Prosecutors pointed to the guns, ballistic vests, and trauma first-aid kits they brought as evidence of malicious intent.

Song was convicted of one count of attempted murder for shooting the officer, but acquitted on two other counts of attempting to shoot at two correctional officers. Song was also found guilty of discharging a firearm during a violent crime. Four other people accused of attempted murder counts were acquitted on those charges. Song faces up to life in prison.

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In a significant victory for the government, jurors convicted eight defendants on material support for terrorism charges for wearing black clothes to the late-night demonstration. That use of “black bloc” clothing was an antifa tactic that assisted in the shooting of the officer, prosecutors said during their closing arguments.

The defendants convicted of providing material support to terrorists were Song, Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Megan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, and Ines Soto. They face up to 15 years in prison on that count.

The same defendants were also convicted of riot and two explosives charges related to the fireworks. Hill, Evetts, Morris, and Rueda were acquitted on attempted murder charges that would have carried sentences up to life imprisonment.

Rueda and her husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, were convicted of conspiracy to conceal documents. That charge centered on Sanchez’s movement of boxes containing radical pamphlets after her arrest. Sanchez was also convicted of corruptly concealing a document.

The prosecution of the Prairieland defendants represented the federal government’s first use of the material support charge against alleged antifa members accused of domestic terrorism.

The verdict came after 10 days of testimony inside a Fort Worth courtroom packed with family members of the defendants, law enforcement officials, and journalists.

Prosecutors called the wounded police officer and detention center guards to describe what it was like on the receiving end of a barrage of bullets, as well as four cooperating defendants who pleaded guilty before trial.

Another significant witness was a researcher at a right-wing think tank who said the tactics used by the demonstrators that night, including “black bloc” clothing and the encrypted messaging app Signal — the latter of which the witness said he also used — were typical of antifa.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The post Anti-ICE Protesters Convicted on Terrorism Charges for Wearing All Black appeared first on The Intercept.