Goat meat goes down like big shards of glass when the symptoms set in. The local livestock, the main source of available nutrients, becomes nearly impossible to swallow. It feels, the sufferers say, like deep wounds have been sliced into their throats.

In Kargi, a remote desert village in the far north of Kenya, cancers of the digestive tract plague the population at unusually high rates. The disease most often attacks the esophagus, though stomach cancer is also common. Some patients think it’s a punishment from God.

The evidence on the ground suggests it’s more likely from a multinational oil company. In the 1980s, foreign work crews dressed like astronauts descended on the village of Kargi and the surrounding Chalbi Desert to drill for oil. They spent five unsuccessful years boring nearly a dozen wells thousands of feet into the ground. The men were from Amoco, an American oil company now owned by BP.

The crews then drove off their bulldozers, packed up their protective equipment, and vanished. One of the only traces to mark their presence was a dry white substance scattered on the ground, close to the water wells used by residents and their livestock.

An Intercept investigation drawn from on-the-ground interviews with dozens of Kargi residents, government and corporate reports spanning decades, court filings, and public hearings traces Amoco’s failure to clean up its waste to the ongoing pollution of Kargi. The substance the company left behind contained heavy metals and known carcinogens, but because of a lack of testing and thorough scientific study, it isn’t clear if the waste directly caused cancer in the community.

What is clear is that residents ate it.

Kargi has one of the highest poverty and malnutrition rates in Kenya, and when locals discovered the flaky substance around the wells, many believed it was natural salt and started using it to cook their food.

The water was contaminated. High levels of carcinogenic toxic chemicals, namely nitrates, had seeped into surrounding boreholes and wells — the only water supply in the desert. Animals began dying in the thousands. And people started getting cancer.

By the early 2000s, the cancer rate in the community was three times the national average. The area’s state representative asked the government to investigate the correlation between the disease plaguing his constituents and the drilling waste that had been left behind.

Now, across the manyattas — communities of traditional homes constructed from sticks and patchworks of old clothing — in Kargi and surrounding villages, everybody claims to know someone afflicted by the disease. The “salt” still remains scattered where Amoco, now part of British Petroleum, once searched for oil.

What’s clear now, from court records and environmental tests, is that the white clayey substance collected adjacent to Amoco’s wells was a tool the company used to help drill for oil, that it contained a variety of heavy metals, and that the wells were not properly sealed.

The pollution and disease inspired the first-ever lawsuit filed on the basis of Kenya’s constitutional right to a safe and healthy environment in 2020, when residents of Kargi and other communities in the Chalbi Desert sued the Kenyan national and county governments. They demanded a supply of clean water for people and animals, and they blamed Kenya for failing to police Amoco’s damage to the environment. Six years later, it’s still crawling through the court system.

The Amoco case was the start of a pattern of identifying environmental destruction across the East African country. In the last few years, similar cases have been popping up nationwide, accusing the local and national governments of failing to clean up the waste that other multinational oil companies have left behind, subjecting residents to drink contaminated water. 

A lack of adequate testing and general neglect of Kargi and its surrounding areas makes it difficult to directly correlate cancer to the waste Amoco left behind. But high levels of carcinogenic toxins, including nitrates and arsenic — both commonly used in drilling wells — have been found in the area’s drinking water over the years, in sporadic tests conducted by the Kenyan government and nonprofit organizations.

No official cleanup has ever been done. Neither BP nor the Kenyan government responded to repeated requests for comment.

In Kargi, residents told The Intercept that Amoco’s footprint has left them in a state of constant despair. 

Gumathi Galnahgalle, a village elder in his mid-40s, said the community began to notice people falling ill in the years after Amoco left. When his mother stopped being able to swallow food, he took her to the hospital multiple times.

“There was no treatment; we were just told to take her back home and wait for her time,” he said, standing in front of her grave. “There is no manyatta that has not been affected by this disease.”

Amoco’s African Expansion

Amoco’s arrival in the 1980s was met with intrigue and excitement. As helicopters flew over Kargi, foreign crews came into the community to join traditional dances at night.

The company employed locals to cook for their crews. In such a remote area, with few educational opportunities and literacy rates around 25 percent, the work was well-received. Lebeku Mirgichan, now in his early 70s, worked as a cook for Amoco for three years — earning 3,000 Kenyan shillings a month (equivalent to roughly $23 today). “At the time, that was a lot of money,” he told The Intercept.

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Oil exploration was a “welcome development for many communities because it came with a lot of promise and opportunity for development,” said Omolade Adunbi, director of the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan. And it wasn’t just Amoco — Chevron and Total had also explored for oil in other parts of Marsabit, the more than 40,000-square-mile county that contains Kargi.

Then-Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, who commissioned the Amoco project, reportedly visited Kargi to watch the drilling. Amoco’s managing director told Moi that “the rock formation made the prospects for striking oil very encouraging and exciting.” Moi said “he had hope that economically viable oil deposits would be found.”

Amoco, then a Midwest-based company, felt that it was on the cusp of becoming one of the world’s leading explorers and developers of oil — acquiring drilling rights in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Burundi. Alfred O. Munk, Amoco’s manager of foreign affairs, told The Chicago Tribune, “Heads of state and competitors alike are coming to the sudden, belated conclusion that Amoco is a major international player.”

With Moi’s blessing, Amoco drilled at least 10 oil wells that reached 10,000 feet deep. But in 1990, after five years and no real sign of oil, the project in Kargi was decommissioned. Amoco’s vehicles, guards, and land rovers abruptly left.

In court records and interviews with the community, dozens said they were never officially informed of the project’s end. And no one came to clean it up.

Mass Extinction

The failure didn’t seem to affect Amoco’s business. In 1998, British Petroleum bought it in a $48 billion deal, the largest takeover of an American company by a foreign firm at the time. It changed its name to BP Amoco, then just BP in 2001. Most Amoco stations in the U.S. were converted to BP’s brand.

But in Kargi and its surrounding villages, animals were dying. Across the Chalbi Desert — where over 90 percent of the population of 30,000 is considered impoverished — most people survive off their livestock, eating only the meat and milk of goats, sheep, and camels. Due to the area’s aridity, there is no piped water, and communities rely on groundwater from boreholes and shallow wells.

In the 1990s, after drinking water from a borehole next to an abandoned well that Amoco had drilled, a flock of sheep and goats died in the neighboring village of Balesa, court records allege.

Then, in the early 2000s, 7,000 sheep and goats died under similar circumstances, residents told The Intercept. According to court records, a water quality report conducted by the government immediately after the mass death confirmed that over 600 animals died within two hours of taking the water. The water was found to contain high levels of nitrates, a type of salt and chemical compound that gets dissolved into drilling material for a variety of purposes: as powerful explosives to locate oil, to stop bacteria from growing in wells, and as an additive to drilling mud to strengthen the walls of a well.

When consumed in high amounts, nitrates can be extremely toxic and stop mammals’ blood from carrying oxygen.

A government team was sent to the area on a fact-finding mission in 2003, according to court documents. They recommended that the community should not give the water to infants and that the veterinary department should carry out toxicology tests in Kargi. It also found that the wells had not been properly sealed. A 2004 government report concluded that “the claims of the presence of esophagus cancer in the region were everywhere the team visited and concern is overwhelmingly evident as reported by medical personnel and local community.”

Subsequent tests commissioned by a local nonprofit organization found that levels of nitrates and arsenic were high in Kargi waters.

Five years later, a prospective report by a Swedish oil company, Lundin, which was planning to look for oil and other mining materials, confirmed that a “white clayey substance used to cool drill bits by Amoco while drilling was collected adjacent to the well.” Lundin tested it and found extremely high alkaline levels — which can cause chemicals to be corrosive and destroy skin when spilled.

The former Amoco cook, Mirgichan, alongside two other community members who also worked for Amoco, told The Intercept that they remember watching workers’ skin start to peel off when they worked with drilling materials.

In its report, Lundin found the substance to be “extremely saline and sodic” and that it was related to “abundant” claims about related health issues by the local communities, including dying livestock and cancer cases.

Between 2007 and 2009, multiple tests on the water found that it was not meeting the World Health Organization recommended standards, according to court records. The Kenyan water resources authority declared that it was not safe for human consumption. A local nonprofit found that high levels of nitrates and arsenic were in the water, and they were the probable cause of the livestock deaths.

By then, people were dying.

In Search of Nutrients

In Kargi, where food is scarce, community members kept finding the white substance that Amoco left behind and decided to put it to use, packing it up and using it to cook. The area, littered with salt-like mounds, became so popular with residents that it was named kwa chuvmi, loosely translated to “where there is salt.”

There are conflicting reports over what exactly the “salt” was. According to Kenyan court documents, the salt-like substance was actually two heavy drilling chemicals: barite and bentonite. Barite is a mineral used in large quantities to increase the density of drilling fluids, and bentonite, a clay-like substance often referred to as drilling mud, helps in carrying cuttings to the surface and stabilizing boreholes. The chemicals can have “catastrophic effects,” on the environment and people, said James Njuguna, an engineering professor at Robert Gordon University.

According to tests undertaken by Lundin, Amoco used “a white material that could pass for salt like substance,” but was “essentially a special clay material used to cool the drill bits.” It contained high levels of calcium, magnesium, sodium, and electrical conductivity.

Between 2006 and 2009, records from the only health center in Kargi, a village area with only 10,000 residents, registered 65 cancer-related deaths — which health workers said was largely throat cancer — or a rate nearly three times higher than the national average, according to government reports.

In 2008, Safi Mirkalkona’s sister died from stomach cancer just after giving birth, leaving behind the baby and four other small children. There was no medicine or treatment available, and she was advised to stay at home. “There are many orphans here,” Mirkalkona told The Intercept. “And yet, we still do not understand this disease.”

The same year, Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton, who represented Kargi and the surrounding area in Kenya’s national assembly, brought the issue to the Parliament.

“Strange diseases started occurring in the specific areas where oil was drilled,” he said. “I do not know how we can possibly explain the sudden emergence of cancer cases.”

“It is really embarrassing that we sit here and … years later people are still dying,” Lekuton continued in his speech. “We have a survey that has revealed shocking statistics of men and women who are ailing from throat cancer and many have died.” 

But leaders, including in the energy ministry, were dismissive and said no connection had been found between oil exploration and cancer cases.

By 2009, a community member was dying of cancer every month, according to a local news report. The symptoms and deterioration of residents were similar. The first was an inability to swallow meat. The patients were then referred for a biopsy, “but the majority prefer to go back home and wait to die,” the report said. Some tested positive for esophageal cancer.

Desert of Death

Years went by with no answers. In 2013, a documentary titled “Desert of Death” aired on Kenyan national television on throat and stomach cancer patients in the county, suggesting that waste left behind after failed oil prospecting had a connection to the disease. The youngest cancer patient featured was 3 years old. The documentary drew countrywide attention, prompting further discussions in the government.

“I come from Kargi Village, and I have about 150 names of those who have died as a result of that disease,” Godana Hargura, senator of Marsabit, said in a government hearing in 2015. “The situation is so desperate.”

In Kargi, there is only one health center serving the 10,000 residents. There is no doctor — just a clinical officer, a nurse, and a nutritionist.

“People normally come too late. Most of the people are sick, but they don’t even know that they are sick,” said Abraham Situma, the clinical officer. “We really need more human resources.”

Situma often refers the cases to Marsabit county hospital, a two-hour drive from Kargi. Following that, many patients are then referred to a hospital in Meru, over 300 miles away. But, Situma said, most prefer to just stay in Kargi and pass away at home. So many people have died in their homes that they became labeled the “manyattas of death.”

In July 2024, separate from the court case, the community petitioned Kenya’s National Assembly to order a comprehensive and independent probe into cancer cases in the region. The community said they had documented close to 1,000 cancer-related fatalities in the last decade, all attributed to the consumption of contaminated water. The fatalities were reported in Kargi and other surrounding areas, but only 100 families had the victims’ health records, because their culture dictated that the dead be buried with documents.

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“I call it the social death of the environment,” said Adunbi, the University of Michigan professor. “The practice of extraction in many communities is literally sentencing people to a form of death, and there is no oversight on how many of these corporations have conducted their activities in these spaces.”

Meanwhile, the case filed in 2020 by the Kargi residents remains ongoing and continuously delayed.

The petition detailed accusations against nine Kenyan and county governments — including the attorney general; ministries of environment, water, and sanitation; as well as the National Oil Corporation of Kenya — of being accountable for failing to ensure that Amoco caused little damage to the environment; disposed of waste oil, salt water, and refuse; and did not cause fluids or substance to escape to the environment.

“The untold pain, suffering and hopelessness is exemplified by the rampant deaths that take place in the manyattas without the residents of Marsabit County having access to medical care, the long distance the resident have to travel seeking medical care and lack of financial capacity to carry the burden of the cancer scourge,” the petition reads.

There were also plans to sue BP, but it has proved to be too legally complex, according to John Mwariri, acting executive director of Kituo Cha Sheria, the Kenyan legal aid group leading the case. The company had also long diverted its interest away from the Marsabit region into more fruitful areas in countries like Angola, Egypt, and Algeria.

In Kargi, the community has lost hope in getting answers. In his manyatta, Galnahgalle, the village elder, awaits the same fate as his mother.

“I keep being told to go home as there is no treatment,” he said. “Amoco should come and explain what they did here.”

The post An American Company Drilled for Oil in Kenya — and Left Behind Soaring Cancer Rates appeared first on The Intercept.

KAMPALA, UGANDA — Ever since President Donald Trump was elected a year ago, sex workers in Kampala have suffered. The sex has suddenly become too painful.

For years, sex workers and public health workers in Uganda say condoms and sexual lubricant were plentiful. Usually paid for by American foreign aid programs such as USAID and PEPFAR, they were distributed “in bars, in hospitals, in hotels, anywhere people gathered,” said Turinawe Samson, founder of Universal Love Alliance Clinic in Kampala. In a country where about 5 percent of the population has HIV — the tenth highest prevalence rate in the world — easy access was key to slowing the spread of the disease and saving lives.

But immediately after Trump’s election in November 2024 — months before the Trump administration cut funding to USAID and PEPFAR — things began to change in Uganda.

Lube became stigmatized as “an immoral product used by sex workers and homosexuals,” according to Samson. Uganda’s Ministry of Health doesn’t group it among “essential health commodities,” meaning its import isn’t subsidized. Few health facilities in Uganda are able to procure it. Where it can be commercially purchased, the product is either prohibitively expensive due to diminishing supply, being dangerously sold past its expiration date, or both. 

This lack of lube and the broader shaming of sex in Uganda may well result in more vaginal and urinary tract infections, and more sexually transmitted infections — including HIV. 

People have started using “cooking oil, unhygienic products” or “nothing at all,” said Babu Ramahdan, an LGBTQ+ and human rights activist who is on his way to becoming an unlikely Ugandan lube manufacturer. “I’ve got all the ingredients,” he says with pride, and he’s already made some samples (including in different flavors). He even met with university researchers eager to help him produce it domestically. But for Ramahdan, getting his product through clinical trials may prove as difficult as finding funding: In Uganda, as in large swaths of the United States, gaining institutional approval to research anything seemingly related to LGBTQ+ health has become almost impossible.

Condoms, too, are harder to find. They are not being given away freely with the same frequency, so those who need them increasingly must buy them. But they are economically out of reach for those who need them most in a country where the average income is less than $100 a month. Interviews with 10 patients and practitioners at a clinic run for and by sex workers revealed the stark economics: Sex with a condom goes for as little as 2,000 shillings (less than 50 U.S. cents) and up to about 6,000 ($1.50). But a condom costs a sex worker 3,000 to 4,000 shillings (between 75 cents and $1) — meaning they might lose money having safe sex. Sex without a condom pays much more: up to 10,000 shillings (about $2.50).

The newfound scarcity of lube and condoms illustrates just one example of how Trump’s policies have disincentivized safe sex and encouraged the transmission of disease in Uganda — not just among sex workers and their clients, but also among men who have sex with men, transgender people, those who use injection drugs, and poor people. In Uganda, these people are euphemistically called “key populations,” or KPs, most at risk for HIV (terms that acknowledge or even hint at queerness have been long avoided, and since Trump was elected, that’s the case even for euphemisms like “minority”). 

“We need to not be judged,” one sex worker said, describing her health care needs. “We need to be asked by a doctor, ‘What are your needs?’ We need to feel safe answering about the kinds of sex we have. We need to be listened to, honestly.”

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But since the stop work order came on January 20, 2025, for projects funded by the United States, the kinds of clinics where KPs like her will not be judged have either closed with little or no notice or become overburdened by a lack of resources, an influx of clients, or both. This has pushed KPs toward Uganda’s public hospital system, where seeking care means putting themselves at risk of persecution from a homophobic government.

The sex worker who wished to not be judged is one of several who told The Intercept that women in Uganda who test positive for syphilis three times at a public hospital can be denied medication, accused of being a sex worker, or even turned over to the police. (The latter means she could be arrested, extorted, or raped.) People living with HIV report that if they seek antiretroviral medication at a public hospital, their privacy may not be respected and their HIV status may be exposed to their neighbors. Queer men, fearful of potentially being referred to the police for “aggravated homosexuality” and prosecuted under Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, often skip seeking health care at public hospitals altogether. 

These fears are not confined to so-called KPs: They are making patients who may be suffering from anal fissures, vaginal infections, or rectal cancer refrain from seeking care because they are too afraid. In a country where abortion is illegal and more than 1 million people are living with HIV, this campaign of anti-queerness will result in more people forced to have children they do not want, more people becoming infected with HIV, and without medication, more people eventually dying of AIDS.

In November 2025, almost a year after Trump’s global stop work order, it was nearly impossible to drive anywhere in Kampala and avoid the profile of a mustached man in a white shirt and Panama hat against a stark yellow background. 

It was the height of Uganda’s election season, and President Yoweri Museveni was running for a seventh term as Uganda’s president. His face — sometimes rendered several stories in height — was inescapable. At age 81 and already president for four decades, Museveni would soon secure another term after an election in which he shut down the internet and his opposition candidate claimed to have been abducted. Museveni will serve at least 45 years as president of Uganda, if he doesn’t die in office.

Accompanying his 50-foot-high face was the phrase “Protecting the Gains — as we make a qualitative leap into high middle income status.”

Seeing this propaganda spelled out over Uganda’s unpaved roads (and even a UNICEF school made out a fraying tent) led Ugandans who spoke with The Intercept to ask: What gains? 

Uganda is not without any resources. It is known as the “pearl of Africa,” a term perhaps first coined by Winston Churchill while on a safari to describe Uganda’s beautiful plants and animals. Today it applies to American, European, and Chinese interest in Uganda’s bounty of rare earth minerals. Uganda is also the birthplace of the River Nile, which not only feeds Northern Africa with fresh water but also the foundations of Western religion — like the story of Moses in the reeds in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

But Uganda has been subjected to what Guyanese historian Walter Rodney has called the deliberate European underdevelopment of Africa. Largely falling historically into five Bantu kingdoms, modern Uganda was colonized in the 19th century, with the Imperial British East Africa Company claiming control of the region in the 1880s. (Anti-queerness was part of the colonial playbook: Despite local ways of living that today might be described as queer or trans, when the British Empire named Uganda a colony in 1894, it criminalized queer sexuality by way of Penal Code Section 377, which punished “whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal.”)

Amid a wave of anti-colonial resistance in Africa, Uganda shook Britain off in 1962. But over the course of six decades of independence, Uganda’s presidency has been defined mostly by two men. 

Idi Amin, Uganda’s third president, often cast as a brutal dictator in the West, is remembered, among other things, for expelling all British and 80,000 members of Uganda’s Indian community. Locally, he is remembered as “Big Daddy.” (Among those calling for recasting Amin as a more sympathetic anti-colonial figure is one of those Ugandans whom Amin expelled: Mahmood Mamdani, author of “Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State” and father of the newly elected Uganda American New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani).

Museveni, Uganda’s ninth president, has ruled since 1985, coinciding with the AIDS era. He quickly became a major face of Uganda’s “ABC” approach to HIV: Abstain before marriage, be faithful in marriage and — if you fail at those two — use a condom. Ugandan HIV prevention workers who did not wish to be named for fear of persecution describe Museveni as indifferent to the crisis and having outsourced all responsibility to foreign funding. 

For instance, as one medical doctor put it, when PEPFAR began funding HIV medication in the early 2000s, “it was supposed to be an emergency plan. It’s right there in the name,” the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. “Why have we been relying on the United States for 20 years? Why hasn’t my government made this a priority for us?”

As he managed to retain power for decades, Museveni increasingly turned a tactic of social control favored by political leaders from Vladimir Putin in Russia to Keir Starmer in England to Trump in the United States alike: Whipping up a moral panic about LGBTQ+ people. 

All of this history made it so that when public health workers in Uganda encountered what they called the “three disasters” of their recent history, it was hard to recover.

The first occurred on March 21, 2020, when the first Covid-19 case was reported in Uganda, which led to strict lockdowns that made HIV care very difficult to provide.

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The second struck in the spring of 2023, with the passage of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act. It made “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by death and “promoting homosexuality” — which could include gatherings of LGBTQ+ people, discussions to plan HIV prevention, and every meeting attended by The Intercept in reporting this story — punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The standard penalty for consensual same-gender sexual acts is life imprisonment.

The Anti-Homosexuality Act passed after evangelical missionaries from the United States spent years, and tens of millions of dollars, spreading homophobia in Africa in general and in Uganda specifically. Of the $54 million spent by more than 20 U.S. evangelical groups in Africa’s 54 nations from 2007 to 2020 “to influence laws, policies, and public opinion against sexual and reproductive rights,” about a third went to Uganda, according to OpenDemocracy.

And the third disaster came on November 5, 2024, when Trump was reelected. Not only did PEPFAR and USAID funds quickly disappear, but strict restrictions were also placed on the little aid that survived. For example, PrEP — pre-exposure prophylaxis, which prevents HIV infection — could no longer officially be given to those most at risk, such as sex workers or gay men, but only to pregnant and nursing mothers. 

And yet, despite the “three disasters,” dedicated queer and trans Ugandans — many who could flee to exile to secure their own personal safety — refuse to give up trying to protect the health of their community, even as they’re being crushed.

Things are so bad under Trump, some Ugandan health care providers are pining for George W. Bush. 

“George Bush Jr., is my best friend,” Dr. Edith Namulema, chief of the HIV/AIDS Counseling and Home Care Department at Mengo Hospital in Uganda, told The Intercept. 

Over the sound of chirping tropical birds, Dr. Namulema spoke in a large, breezy part of her ward that is mostly used to treat patients with tuberculosis, who slept on the other side of thin blue curtains. Just outside was an adjacent clinic room with a roof but no walls for treating people with HIV, where patients were having their blood drawn by smiling young phlebotomists in dark blue scrubs.

Namulema never met Bush. But despite his global trail of destruction spurred by his war on terror — and his generally homophobic domestic agenda — such effusive praise for “Bush Jr.” is common among African AIDS researchers and doctors.

Namulema has worked with HIV since the 1990s, before there were medications that prevented an HIV diagnosis from becoming a guaranteed AIDS death sentence. For years, she buried one patient after another. 

But when Bush made antiretroviral medication available circa 2001 via PEPFAR, she saw the deaths begin to slow within a week.

A nurse at Universal Love Alliance described a startling shift in the first year of Trump’s second term. “I have seen people die with HIV before,” she said. “But I rarely saw someone die because they could not adhere to their medications.” Over the last decade, the nurse witnessed maybe one death per year due to a patient failing to take their medication. In 2025, she saw this happen 10 times.

Every nurse and HIV peer educator in a community clinic who spoke to The Intercept said they have seen an uptick in HIV-diagnoses and related deaths. Official statistics do not show this trend — sources say it’s because they are not able to record “KP data.” The Trump cuts have, predictably, caused a chaotic data scenario. The Uganda Ministry of Health predicts four Ugandans are becoming infected with HIV every hour. Meanwhile, the Uganda AIDS Commission reported a “sharp fall” in AIDS-related deaths of 64 percent to the Parliament in October. 

One doctor interviewed by The Intercept at a large hospital said they have not seen an increase in HIV positivity, but attributed it to the fact that “KPs are in hiding” and the hospital lost all funding to hire people to go where KPs dare to live. 

En route to a “KP clinic” in Kampala, The Intercept rode in a four-wheel-drive Toyota. The passengers included Samson, who fled his rural village town for Kampala when he realized the other boys were trying to burn him with acid because he was gay, and Kukunda Sharon, a former school instructor who goes by “Teacher” and “had to escape” her village when her lesbianism was met with an attempt to coerce her into a forced marriage; she is now associate director of Universal Love Alliance.

Even in Kampala’s center near the U.S. Embassy — an intimidating imperial outpost that takes 10 minutes to drive around — the roads are not great, but at least they are paved. But as the SUV sloped downhill, it traveled onto rough red clay roads lined by open gutters of untreated sewage. The buildings grew lower, then came single-story metal roofed shacks, where people live largely without electricity or plumbing.

Nearly 7 million people live in Kampala, and yet the city has no functional train or bus system. Kampalans move about in “taxis” (minivans that seat 14, which LGBTQ+ people consider too dangerous), or on the back of “boda boda” motorbikes. Such movement is difficult for people who are sick and, given the high price of petrol, it is economically prohibitive; gas is roughly the same price as in the United States, even though the average income in Uganda is just about 1 percent of America’s average income. People walk long distances on roads without sidewalks to get where they need to go — nearly impossible for sick people. 

Thus when it comes to treating HIV effectively, it is necessary to have many clinics spread throughout the city’s poorest areas so that people living with HIV can come for their medical care, or have their medicine delivered. A year ago, the Ugandan Health Ministry announced it would be shutting all HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis clinics in the country. According to Sky News, one official said the closure of HIV clinics was a necessary response because of the loss of funding from USAID. Also shuttered were standalone pharmacies supplying antiretroviral drugs. Millions in Uganda, especially the more than 1 million people living with the virus, depend on these facilities to provide HIV treatments and preventative therapies. According to an International Planned Parenthood Federation survey published in December 2025, some 1,175 affiliated IPPF health sites closed across Africa, affecting 396 staff positions and 5.9 million clients due to the funding changes. Thousands of health workers in Uganda — including doctors, nurses, and community experts — have lost their jobs.

The Intercept visited one of the few “KP clinics” still operating, despite a government raid and threats of arrest for its staff. It sits in a compound behind a wall, just off of a busy street. It is extremely hot, without air conditioners or fans in any of the simple examination and testing rooms. 

Staff members from three of the remaining KP clinics gathered here to speak with The Intercept in a room that usually hosts group therapy, whenever a trustworthy volunteer therapist can be found.

At first, the conversation was taciturn. The meeting is technically illegal, the gathered medical workers weren’t all familiar with each other there, and there are always worries in such get-togethers that someone might be a spy. But after sitting on the floor and eating samosas, “the boys” — as these young men refer to themselves and each other — begin to open up.

They talk about the cuts. At one clinic, salaries were reduced by 50 percent. At another, the staff was trimmed from 15 to just four — a medic there says he’s wracked with survivor’s guilt. He tells a common story: He was a preacher’s son who knew he was different. It wasn’t until he went to the clinic looking for sexual health information that he could even talk to anyone like himself. He fell into a global pattern in queer health — largely destroyed by Trump — in which someone goes to a clinic for services, then becomes a volunteer, then starts working there and helping others.

“It was the only place I could just be … me,” he said, with a heavy sigh, indicating he did not have to hide appearing gay. He loved working with “the boys” and was gutted that 11 co-workers lost their jobs. Most of them, he said, still show up at the clinic and work unpaid for three reasons: “They have nothing else to do,” “There is nowhere else to go for them to be themselves with other people,” and “for food” available at the facility.

Two suddenly gregarious medical assistants (also both preachers’ kids) talk with candor about their shared situation: Being gay meant both had to leave their families and their churches. One said he’s still happy to go to work despite seeing his wages cut in half, but is dismayed that the cuts mean he simply cannot offer the care that clients need. The number of people they treat has plummeted. This is in part because USAID cuts took away money for the clinic’s staff to make outreach tours to sex work and gay “hot spots.” It’s also because the clinic used to feed clients who came in for the treatment. The free food helped mitigate the cost to patients for traveling to the clinic and is necessary because HIV medications don’t work for people who aren’t consistently eating enough. (When people with little or no money have to choose between food and HIV medications, they will always choose food.)

“We used to give away bags of food two times a week,” he said. “Now, we have only given it out two times this whole year, which is basically nothing.”

The Trump-era cuts have pushed KPs out of other medical settings, he said, which makes them wary of trusting any medical care. When USAID money was flowing, he said, patients told him that they were tolerated when they sought care at a public hospital because the workers there knew they would be compensated. But since the cuts, “some of our patients tell us they’ve been told, ‘There’s no money in you now. Go away.’”

Referring people to get viral load tests — an important step in managing HIV care — has also become nearly impossible in Kampala. It’s not just that the U.S.-financed health care workers who did the tests were laid off; some of them took the equipment with them when they left. 

Then, there’s the issue of medication. The U.S. still pays for some antiretrovirals. But while The Intercept saw ample supplies of emtricitabine and tenofovir, the most common antiretrovirals, at most clinics visited, not everyone can take that treatment. When people fall out of treatment, they may grow resistant to specific medications and need a different combination should they survive long enough to restart medication in the future. But since the cuts, little aside from the common combo is available to treat HIV; doctors say it is almost impossible to get anything else. 

“When someone comes looking for something they need” and a clinic doesn’t have it — whether it’s food, medicine, or just a kind ear to listen to them — “they usually won’t come back,” one of the medical assistants said.

Then, they’ll become infectious and HIV will move throughout their networks. 

The boys were already seeing bad trends. They used to see a positive HIV diagnosis every two or three months. Now they said they are seeing one a week.

Asked by The Intercept if they, or their patients, are able to use geolocation hookup apps like Grindr, the boys laugh.

“Yes,” they answer.

“How?” 

“VPNs. People have needs.”

“But how do you know someone isn’t a cop?”

“You don’t!”

“What can you rely on to lessen the chances he’s a cop?”

“Luck!”

“Sometimes,” another health worker chimes in, “a guy will meet another guy on Grindr, have sex with him, and then arrest him.” In theory, this kind of undercover sting could lead to prosecution for “aggravated homosexuality,” but mostly, cops do this for extortion, which is rampant. By the end of 2025, Uganda’s Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum had “handled a total of 956 cases involving actions specifically targeting LGBTQ+ persons,” which have affected 1,276 individuals, since the implementation of the Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2023.

And that fear of prosecution and harassment keeps people who may have HIV or even signs of cancer from seeking medical treatment. 

“Here, we do not tolerate trans people,” said Gabbie, who is trans. “It is as simple as that.” 

Ramahdan, the LGBTQ+ activist, along with Samson and Sharon of Universal Love Alliance, have set up a meeting with a dozen trans and gender-nonconforming people in a conference room at a hotel near the Gaddafi Mosque. It is not a “gay hotel” — no such thing exists in Kampala. It was chosen because it is trusted by the community to be friendly enough and discreet. Security is a huge concern for everyone. The trans Ugandans span late teens to mid-50s, and their body language reveals nervousness: Any time a waiter comes into the room through a swinging door, everyone falls silent until they leave. 

Their fear is understandable. A show of hands reveals everyone has been arrested at least once. At the municipal jail, they said they have been tortured (forced to strip and humiliated in front of all the other detainees), sexually assaulted (sometimes under the pretense of checking their gender, sometimes not), and even raped. A Muslim trans woman (who wears both a hijab and also a mask to protect against Covid) was arrested on her first-ever date with a man. (People in the room chuckles knowingly when she shares that the date did not intervene when the police took her away, and she never saw him again.)

When arrested, trans women are often put into men’s holding area, at least initially; they are terrified of becoming infected with HIV from rape. Most everyone has been kicked out of their families of origin or lost jobs (usually when a relative has outed them).

Fear of being subjected to the “queer tax” — when a landlord charges more or an employer pays less under threat of outing — was universal in the group. One young trans man, not yet 20, cried when describing his fear to even leave his house. His landlord figured out he is trans and was trying to evict him, but he cannot move until he pays off the extortion money. (The group took a collection to pay off his debt.)

The extortion threat has only grown with the collapse of USAID. At a follow-up meeting at a Kentucky Fried Chicken a few days later, Gabbie arrived after an expensive two-hour journey on a trans-friendly boda boda. “You cannot afford for random drivers to know where you live,” she said. (Another trans person The Intercept interviewed in a homeless shelter said they would take three boda bodas from home to work, switching rides like a spy to keep anyone from being able to trace her.) 

Gabbie has been pushed from her family to a queer church shelter, which was raided and evicted, to another group situation, that was also raided and evicted. She now shares a studio apartment with four trans women at the outskirts of Kampala. Their water and electricity are periodically turned off for non-payment, and they open the windows when they cook on a coal stove to avoid breathing carbon monoxide.

Gabbie dropped out of college when her family saw a video of her preaching in a queer-affirming church, cut her off, and told her never to come back. Six months later they invited her back, then locked the gate behind her; she was trapped in an exorcism and had to escape over the wall.

It was never easy to be trans in Uganda. Surgeries — even those performed abroad — are almost unheard of, and long before Trump it was difficult to source hormones. Since Trump’s reelection, Gabbie has found that it’s theoretically possible, if prohibitively expensive, to source hormones on the black market. There is the physical danger: Injecting hormones with unsterilized syringes from unverified sources without a doctor’s supervision exposes trans people to HIV, hepatitis, and the possibility of dangerous, even lethal, side effects. But part of why Gabbie has stopped taking hormones and is now passing as a man in public is because sourcing hormones on the black market “opens you up to extortion” by anyone along the supply chain. She can’t afford that. (While in the West, most trans people use the terms “passing” to refer to being accepted as their true gender, in much of Africa, many trans people use it to refer to “passing” for the gender assigned to them at birth.)

The cuts hit Gabbie’s job at a trans-affirming nonprofit, where the staff was reduced from five people to just one: Gabbie. The office was abandoned, and she only works part-time, out of the studio she shares with four people. 

Gabbie is also a model, and hopes to feel free presenting as her true feminine self at least while at home with her roommates. But they’ve been raided doing that, too. On her phone, she showed The Intercept a series of photos. In the first few, she and her girlfriends are happy, decked out in high glam in their apartment. But in the last photo, in an image reminiscent of the 1969 Stonewall Riot arrest photos, she is crying in the back seat of a police car. Their house had been raided, presumably on a complaint from a neighbor. After six weeks in jail, she was released without charges. But the damage was done: She made the difficult decision to stop her transition — to “go stealth,” as she put it, in public as a man.

“It was very painful,” she said, “returning to this body, this body I do not want.” 

She hopes one day to transition again. “You can’t not be yourself 24 hours a day,” she said, sniffling slightly, her eyes darting around the KFC, hoping no one would notice her tears or hear us. 

Two weeks later after the meeting at the Kampala KFC, Gabbie texts pictures of herself in a graduation robe. Without her family’s help, it took her a few more years than she wanted. But she had graduated from university, with a degree in accounting — which she wants to use to secure more resources for LGBTQ+ work in Uganda.

Near a sex “hot spot,” there is a clinic for sex workers. Inside the open garage door of a modest house, a half dozen sex workers were waiting for treatment. A medic draws a patient’s blood. One patient bounced an infant gently to soothe its cries. Another laid her newborn gingerly on the floor on a blanket; he smiled up at all the faces smiling down at him.

Up until the Trump stop work order, this clinic was run by a team of 17, including medics, peer educators, and community health navigators. They went out and recruited patients, educated them on STIs, and followed up with people to keep them adherent on antiretrovirals. Ten people lost their jobs, and the number of medics dropped from 12 to five. Those who remain have seen steep pay cuts: Average earnings fell from 800,000 Uganda shillings a month (about $222 USD) to just 250,000 (about $70). 

As a “stud lesbian,” one sex worker tells The Intercept, this kind of clinic is the only place “where I can ask a doctor about my needs.” Most doctors assume she has sex with men, and until she sought out this clinic, she had no idea what was safe, or not, in her ways of having sex.

The situation for lesbian women in Uganda is dire. “You are forced into a marriage you do not want. You are forced into getting pregnant with a baby you do not want. In a body you don’t want. And you cannot get an abortion, and so you are forced into having a baby and raising a child you do not want,” said one queer sex worker. 

Sex work has grown more difficult since the cuts. Beyond health expenditures, USAID paid for construction projects and conferences. “When people are in town for a conference, they have money to spend on entertainment: on restaurants, on hotels, on us,” one sex worker put it. But USAID stopped most of that.

With laid-off people turning to sex work, more Ugandans are trying to sell sex to fewer customers. This is economically deleterious, making it harder for the workers to dictate the terms of their encounters. The result is that they have less power in the kinds of sex they are willing to have. It has become harder to insist their customers use condoms — if they can even afford them.

The clinic is struggling to keep up with their clients’ urgent needs. There’s a sudden lack of STI medication. HIV self-testing kits have become almost impossible to source, condoms are scarce, and lubricants “disappeared entirely,” said the clinic’s project manager.

“When you use too many men, you get dry,” the project manner noted, “and you can’t avoid the condom breaking.” 

Related

Trump Would Rather Let Birth Control Expire Than Give It to Africans as Aid

PrEP and birth control pills could theoretically help prevent HIV and pregnancy. Uganda adopted oral pre-exposure prophylaxis in 2016 and by the end of December 2023, over 550,000 clients had initiated the treatment. But since the cuts, PrEP is not officially available to most sex workers — only to pregnant women and nursing mothers. Birth control pills were paid for by USAID; now they are prohibitively expensive. 

Trump isn’t alone in his policy of foreign austerity. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands, along with some private funders, have followed Trump’s lead in cutting off any money to Uganda that might help trans people. (We document this funding crisis in our short film “A Visit to the Homeless Shelter for Trans Ugandans.”)

There is some hope on the horizon for more foreign aid, but questions remain about how much of it will reach the country’s so-called KPs. 

On December 10, the U.S. and Uganda signed “a five-year, nearly $2.3 billion bilateral health cooperation agreement that signifies the importance of the relationship between the two countries,” in which “the United States plans to invest up to $1.7 billion to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), malaria and other infectious diseases across Uganda while helping strengthen Uganda’s health system.”

No one who spoke with The Intercept spoke expected this money could undo the lost trust, unemployment, and damage of the last year — nor did they expect such efforts to make their way to KPs. One public health activist, who did not want to be named for fear of persecution, claimed that “that money is not for health, it was given a month before the elections. That money was for elections.” 

Dr. Peter Kyambadde, the senior program officer at the Ministry of Health, said, “Key populations still remain among the prioritized populations for epidemic control” but admitted that “how much of those resources will be committed to key populations” remains an open question. 

Samson, of the Universal Love Alliance, did not believe any government resources will flow their way. “What you see Trump doing in the United States aligns with Uganda’s goals. They consider us criminals.” 

The potential return of U.S. health funding comes as an injectable form of PrEP that lasts for six months called was just approved for use in Uganda. The medication is considered a breakthrough in HIV prevention that, if distributed widely enough, has the potential to eradicate the virus.

But only 1,000 doses of the shot have been delivered to Africa, and none to Uganda. 

It costs $28,000 a year. A $40 generic version won’t be ready until at least 2027. And the distribution channels in Uganda — namely the clinics where patients trust they could access such a drug without risk — have largely been undermined or destroyed. 

This essay is part of the series Global Stop Work Order, featuring reporting about how the Trump administration’s cuts are affecting LGBTQ+ health and HIV/AIDS around the world. The series is supported by a Pulitzer Center Global Reporting Grant and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post By Slashing Foreign Aid, Trump Is Fueling the Spread of HIV in Uganda appeared first on The Intercept.

One of Brown’s friends offered to stop by his townhouse before heading over. The door was unlocked. The lights were off. On speakerphone with the others, he searched the house, then stepped outside and looked through the window of Brown’s car. He found him sitting in the driver’s seat, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Everyone on the call heard the moment he realized what he was seeing. On the other end of the line, several friends fell to their knees sobbing.

Brown’s death was one of hundreds in the past decade that the Air Force has quietly logged and filed away as another isolated tragedy. While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth obsesses over the supposed “softening” and “weakening” of American troops, the Pentagon is concealing the scale of a real threat to the lives of his military’s active-duty members: a suicide crisis killing hundreds of members of the U.S. Air Force.

Data The Intercept obtained via the Freedom of Information Act shows that of the 2,278 active-duty Air Force deaths between 2010 and 2023, 926 — about 41 percent — were suicides, overdoses, or preventable deaths from high-risk behavior in a decade when combat deaths were minimal.

This is the first published detailed breakdown of Air Force suicide data. The dataset obtained by The Intercept, formatted in an Excel spreadsheet, lists airmen’s deaths by unique markers known as Air Force Specialty Code and cause, including medical conditions, accidents, overdoses, and violent incidents. Gunshot wounds to the head and hangings appear frequently.

While it’s long been known that members of the U.S. Armed Forces often struggle with their mental health during or after service, the Department of Defense has historically been obstinate in its refusal to supply detailed data on suicides. In 2022, the National Defense Authorization Act mandated the Defense Department to report suicides by year, career field, and duty status, but neither the department nor the Air Force complied. Congress has done little to enforce thorough reporting.

The dataset obtained by The Intercept contradicts many of the Air Force’s previously released statistics and statements about mental health, resilience, and deployment readiness. It shows a troubling pattern of preventable deaths that leaders at the senior officer level or above minimized or ignored, often claiming that releasing detailed suicide information would pose a risk to national security. Speaking to The Intercept, current and former service members described a fear of bullying, hazing, and professional retaliation for seeking mental health treatment.

“That was always the fear going to mental health: ‘I’m going to get pulled off the flight line. Everyone’s going to look down on me,’” said former Sgt. Kaylah Ford, who was Brown’s girlfriend before his death. “It always had that negative stigma.”

Brown and Ford were both Air Force maintainers, the aircraft mechanics who keep the Air Force’s planes flying. Of the 926 airmen who died by suicide and other preventable measures, 306 were maintainers, according to The Intercept’s analysis. These troops represent the largest single career field in the Air Force, according to the Government Accountability Office, but they account for only a quarter of Air Force personnel — and a third of suicides and preventable deaths.

The Intercept reviewed the dataset line by line, identifying deaths likely to be suicides or overdoses and cross-checking them with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classifications and medical classifications. Among maintainers, 250 were confirmed suicides, 45 were drug overdoses, and 11 were other preventable deaths with unclear intent, with causes including autoerotic asphyxiation. These causes of death — whether from outright suicide, drug use, or other life-risking behaviors — all point to deep psychological distress, according to Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas, a clinical psychologist with 20 years of experience in suicide prevention research,

“Addiction and suicide are deeply intertwined,” Spencer-Thomas said. “Many people use substances to cope with emotional pain or stress because it works in the short term, but over time, dependence sets in, and the fallout spreads through their health, relationships, and sense of hope.”

The Intercept reviewed more than two decades of government-funded studies and GAO reports and interviewed 16 Air Force maintainers from multiple major commands for this investigation. The reporter of this story is a former Air Force maintainer.

“Aircraft maintenance is a grinder,” said former Air Force Capt. Chuck Lee, who served as a maintenance officer for nine years before transferring to the Army and has since retired. While most maintainers rarely see combat, the field is known for an unsustainable work tempo, with airmen often working 10- to 16-hour shifts for years in high-risk environments. The constant exposure to toxic chemicals and the deafening sound of fighter jets can cause chronic health problems, inflaming the work’s psychological toll.

The evidence points to structural failures and systemic negligence across Pentagon and Air Force leadership. During two major periods of restructuring — known as the 2013–14 sequestration and the 2019 readiness plan — the Air Force consolidated jobs, leaving fewer troops to maintain the fleet while flight demands remained the same. Both times, suicides increased.

Experts like Spencer-Thomas say that instability and uncertainty during such transitions can heighten suicide risk.

Now, another round of consolidation is coming. The Air Force plans to consolidate more than 50 aircraft maintenance specialties into seven starting in 2027, according to an Air Force memo made public earlier this year. A senior compliance leader with nearly two decades in the Air Force who requested anonymity for fear of professional reprisal called the move “do more with less on steroids,” raising concerns that the next wave of reforms could contribute to a rise in suicides.

“You know the phrase ‘Mission first, but people always’?” said Lee, referring to a common military slogan. “To the Air Force, maintainers are just a crowd of nameless, faceless people. Their job is to scurry about and get the planes ready. Leadership doesn’t care as long as the aircraft can fly. It’s just mission first.”

In a statement to The Intercept, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson said the service “takes a comprehensive, integrated approach to increase protective factors and decrease suicide risk,” citing peer support programs such as Wingman Guardian Connect, unit-level resilience programs that encourage Airmen and Guardians to reach out for support, and new post-suicide guidance for commanders. The spokesperson noted the guides were recognized as best practices by the Defense Department’s Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee and recommended for use across all services.

But the 16 Air Force maintainers unanimously agreed that the current protections are insufficient, and in some cases actively harmful.

“Mental health in the military is a joke if you don’t take it into your own hands,” said former Senior Airman Azhmere Dudley. “If I had gone through the proper chain of command and hadn’t just signed myself up for treatment, I would be screwed right now.”

Every maintainer who spoke to The Intercept said they had lost a friend or unit member to suicide, overdose, or a tragic accident before their first enlistment ended, often before age 22.

The air in your lungs rattles as the plane takes off, as if the jet were trying to steal your breath. If you try to speak on the tarmac while the jet is at full throttle, your phlegm crackles, and your loudest yells may as well be silent. Your insides feel like a plastic grocery bag filled to the brim with scrap meat and fish heads being jostled.

This is the experience of working on a flight line, the heart of every Air Force base, where planes park for service and between missions. Often tucked away behind fences and danger signs, the troops on the flight line rarely face the enemy up close or carry rifles in combat. By Hollywood or Hegseth’s standards, they would seem to have one of the safest roles in any branch.

The common assumption that combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder is the primary driver of military suicides would seemingly put maintainers at a lower risk. But their disproportionately high share of suicides and overdoses tells a different story. Nearly 55 percent of maintainer deaths between 2010 and 2023 were the result of suicide or overdose, more than deaths from car accidents, medical conditions, and workplace mishaps combined.

Maintainers face constant exposure to chemicals, irregular schedules, and extreme noise. Fighter jets can reach 195 decibels during takeoff — far above the Air Force’s hearing conservation limits of 85 decibels over eight hours on shift and the 140-decibel threshold for impulsive noise, which are brief bursts of sound powerful enough to cause instant hearing damage. Even with double hearing protection, vibrations can shake internal organs.

“For maintainers, working 12-hour shifts was the norm. Shifts could extend up to 16 hours with approval from the group commander or the first general officer in the chain, which was almost always granted,” Lee said. Unit leaders would assign the extended shifts to meet maintenance and flight goals, and maintainers had little choice but to comply. All other maintainers interviewed for this story agreed with Lee’s account.

Although double ear protection is meant to guard against extreme sounds, some fighter jets, namely F-16s, produce a high-pitched whine so intense it pierces the double ear protection. Maintainers describe it as feeling like the sound is piercing their skull from the mouth up and ripping off the top of their head. Researchers have also raised concerns about infrasound: low-frequency jet engine vibrations that may resonate with human tissue and contribute to fatigue or stress. Mostly studied outside the military, infrasound’s effects have received little research under real flightline conditions.

Every maintainer interviewed reported chronic health problems, including insomnia, headaches, digestive issues such as irritable bowel syndrome or constipation, memory lapses, attention deficits, depression, anxiety and, in rare cases, psychosis. Many of these symptoms mirror those seen in traumatic brain injuries or blast exposure.

“I am going through my disability claims, and part of it is anxiety with panic attacks. I get severe anxiety now that I did not have before,” said former Staff Sgt. Dallas Sharrah. He described a recent experience at a grocery store, where he exploded in anger at a shopper who bumped into his shopping cart with his small child inside. He said his anger was extreme and shockingly out of character, leaving him confused and embarrassed.

“Some days,” Sharrah said, “I don’t want to get out of bed because I don’t know how the day will go.”

Combined with chemical exposure and long shifts, maintainers are also exposed to toxic substances, including JP-8 jet fuel and chaff, which involves releasing clouds of tiny metallic strips from an aircraft to confuse enemy radar and protect the aircraft from detection or missile targeting. Inhaling chaff can be fatal, as the tiny metallic or fiberglass fibers can shred lung tissue, causing severe respiratory distress or hemorrhaging.

The Occupational JP-8 Exposure Neuroepidemiology Study, released in 2011, found that JP-8 can slow reaction times, cause chronic neurological impairment, sleep disturbances, irritability, and depression-like symptoms. A 2005 study, “Dermal Exposure to Jet Fuel (JP-8) in U.S. Air Force Personnel,” confirmed that JP-8 can be absorbed through the skin and detected in the bloodstream. All the maintainers who worked on the active flightline said they experienced near-constant exposure, with fuel sometimes pouring into their ears, mouth, or onto their skin for entire shifts.

Air Force enlistment contracts typically last four years, with an option to extend to six. Maintainers interviewed painted a picture of such intense suffering and mental anguish that, for some, suicide seemed more bearable than serving four years in that environment.

“We had an airman who tried to take his own life multiple times,” said former staff Sgt. Michael Hudson. “In one instance, he was found unconscious in his dorm after swallowing an entire bottle of Tylenol. A few months later, he was found walking along train tracks, saying he wanted to lay down in front of a train.”

From 2010 to 2023, active-duty maintainers had a suicide rate of 27.4 per 100,000 personnel, nearly twice the 14.2 per 100,000 among U.S. civilians — a 1.93 times higher risk. FOIA records show the most common methods were self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head and hanging. Other methods included sodium nitrite ingestion, helium inhalation, and carbon monoxide poisoning.

In the days before his death, Brown had been breaking under the weight of exhaustion and expectation, Ford told The Intercept. His squadron had switched his schedule three times in as many weeks, bouncing him from day to nights with little sleep between. He asked for help, or even a short break, but his leadership brushed him off. He was the reliable one.

“He was a perfectionist. He never made a mistake,” Ford said, Then he did: During a routine engine run, he left a flashlight inside the intake of a fighter jet and shredded the engine. It was the kind of error that ends a career.

“He blamed himself completely,” Ford said. “We all knew that would eat him alive.”

after dudley, the former senior airman, spoke up by questioning leadership about how personnel dealing with mental health conditions were treated, he soon found himself struggling too. Dudley said he often fell asleep in his car outside his unit at Nellis Air Force Base or dozed off behind the wheel, citing extreme fatigue from overnight shifts — known in Air Force parlance as “mids” — that he believes leadership had assigned as punishment.

Maintainers in good standing with unit leadership can often choose shifts that suit their lifestyle. Troops who are vocal or opinionated, however, may be assigned night duty for months or even years, despite Air Force policy limiting night shifts to three months.

“The flight chief purposely kept me on mids. There were crews willing to swap with me, but leadership refused. My doctor was baffled — there’s no waiver for a work schedule, yet they ignored medical guidance,” Dudley said. “I felt powerless to change it, even though it was affecting my health.”

Car crashes are a common cause of death among maintainers, often linked to sleep deprivation or alcohol-related incidents. Beyond the suicides, overdoses, and preventable deaths discussed in this story, there were another 251 maintainer deaths — 40 percent of which were listed as “multiple blunt force injuries” or “blunt trauma,” with at least 35 explicitly coded as traffic collisions, confirming that this is how the Air Force tracks vehicle and motorcycle crashes.

Dudley said he spent a year on the night mid shift and was later diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea, which he attributes to prolonged disruption of his circadian rhythm.

Nine others interviewed for this article described a culture of retaliation for speaking up.

“You aren’t allowed to complain because others have it worse,” said Colby Abner, a former maintenance staff sergeant stationed at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. “So you learn to shove it down with either pure will or a vice. I’ve watched so many people lose themselves completely in addiction strictly because of the Air Force.”

In maintenance units, airmen are often pulled off duty when they seek care — a policy meant to prevent accidents but one that fuels stigma. It creates the perception that those who ask for help are trying to avoid work and are therefore lazy. Several maintainers said that after seeking care, they faced hazing, harassment, or other abuse from peers and supervisors, which only worsened their mental health. Ford said that, as the only Black female crew chief in her unit, she faced intense discrimination and isolation during her time in service.

Although Air Force policy imposes strict standards for confidentiality and what providers may disclose to commanders or supervisors, all maintainers interviewed by The Intercept said seeking care can unofficially ruin a career.

“It was widely understood that if you go to mental health, you are not going to advance. Your career is going to stagnate; you’re going to be ostracized,” said Micah Templin, a former Air Force weapons systems maintainer.

Spencer-Thomas, the psychologist, said it’s clear that environments like those described in this story could increase a person’s risk for suicide.

“The research on work environments is clear: long hours, lack of autonomy and toxic cultures of bullying or hazing all raise suicide risk,” Spencer-Thomas said. “Sleep deprivation is another major factor. The science is unequivocal. When people are denied rest, their brains cannot recover. Over time, that drives depression, cognitive decline and suicidal behavior.”

Ford recalled Brown’s extreme exhaustion in the week leading up to his suicide. She remembered him calling his mother, saying, “Mama, I’m tired. I’m just so tired.”

The Air Force does mandate mental health and suicide prevention trainings. But they’re widely seen as ineffective and performative, Abner said.

“They push out these mandated trainings that don’t do anything because no one takes them seriously,” Abner said. “They put resources in place but openly mock them when presenting them to people.”

Former Senior Airman Foy, who asked to have his first name withheld over the sensitivity of the subject, survived a suicide attempt in December 2019 while on leave with his family. He was rushed to the emergency room after taking pills and was hospitalized for seven days over the Christmas holiday. After treatment, he returned to work — where he said he faced intense ostracization and hazing, and the stigma followed him even after separating from the Air Force.

Foy said it seemed like people were avoiding him because he was seeking mental health treatment. When he needed support the most, “it seemed like people I was close with kept their distance.”

After 20 years on active duty, former maintainer Chris McGhee became an attorney focused on veteran advocacy. Among other misconduct, he said he’d witnessed two decades of hazing and abuse within the maintenance career field, he told The Intercept, and he has since dedicated his legal career to giving a voice to maintainers he said have had their “tongues snipped” to keep them silent.

“I was part of the abuse maintainers experience, and I share the blame for it,” McGhee said. “I’m speaking out now because silence only protects the system that’s hurting them.”

After years of frustration with ineffective military leadership and inspector general and GAO reports that, in his view, documented problems but didn’t provide solutions, McGhee turned to Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, and pushed for intervention via the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. King sponsored Section 599: a mandate requiring the Defense Department to release a report on military suicides, including a breakdown by year and service-specific job code, by December 31, 2023.

When the bill passed, McGhee received a copy of the NDAA personally signed by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Appropriations Chair Patrick Leahy, President Joe Biden, and King. King included a handwritten note: “To Chris — With thanks for the idea.”

The report came out on July 30, 2024. “Seven months late,” McGhee said, “it failed to comply with the law. It did not disaggregate suicides by year or by service-specific occupational codes, both explicit requirements of Section 599.”

King’s office took a victory lap anyway. “Requested by Senator King after working with a Maine constituent,” an office spokesperson wrote in a press release, the report “identifies key trends to help the Department of Defense (DoD) address suicide risk amongst higher risk job specialties and identify underlying cultural issues affecting the mental health of America’s service members.”

Emails, calls, and recorded meetings provided in full by McGhee and verified by The Intercept show King’s staff had not reviewed the report closely before issuing their praise.

“I think I got the report Friday night, just 24 hours before it went public,” Jeff Bennett II, a national security adviser and legislative aide to King, told McGhee in a phone call shared with The Intercept. “Sen. King read the report page by page, but he’s been focused not so much on the issue we raised.” King’s office knew the Defense Department did not follow the law as written, Bennett said in the recording, but considered it “a step in the right direction.”

The official who signed off on the report, Under Secretary Ashish Vazirani, had testified to Congress shortly before its release that negative news about military suicides could affect recruiting. In his testimony, Vazirani framed the findings within broader recruiting challenges, noting that many young Americans are unfamiliar with the military, distrust institutions, and face competing opportunities in a strong economy. He called for a “whole-of-government and whole-of-nation” effort to engage youth and promote service.

McGhee saw the report’s glowing reception as an example of Congress letting the military off the hook: celebrating the fact that it existed at all with little regard for its efficacy or compliance.

“If Congress will not enforce its own laws, if oversight is nothing but theater, then what exactly was I defending?” McGhee said. “This experience has left me feeling that two decades in uniform were wasted on a republic that no longer exists in practice.”

King’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Intercept.

A Pentagon spokesperson did not provide an explanation of why the Air Force violated the law and withheld the data from the public, despite repeated requests from The Intercept. They referred questions about the Defense Department’s report to congressional defense committees and added that “a FOIA request is the appropriate avenue for requesting historical suicide data.”

“The Air Force has a lot to hide because it’s embarrassing. The Air Force claimed they didn’t have that data and, you know, look how quickly The Intercept got it,” Lee said. “A lot of shady shit going on.”

A quarter-century of internal maintainer discussion, GAO reports, scientific studies, and death data shows that this mental health and preventable death crisis has been tracked by multiple government entities, including Congress, the Defense Department, the Department of the Air Force, and oversight committees. Senate Judiciary Committee investigators contacted McGhee and stated they were in the early stages of gathering data related to expert concerns about the Air Force maintenance community.

More than half of the maintainers interviewed for this article experienced suicidal thoughts while in service. Several were hospitalized for psychiatric care, and one former maintainer survived a suicide attempt. Many remain terrified of speaking out about their experiences, even years after leaving active duty, for fear of retaliation from former peers.

“These are people’s lives you’re dealing with. Just like in maintenance, where you’re a number to be traded and thrown away after use, I can see Congress viewing us the same way,” Dudley said.

As of publication, no lasting corrective measures have been implemented.

The Trump administration’s effort to shame military leaders over combat readiness and so-called “softness” within the ranks stands in sharp contrast to the reality many service members experience. And if historical trends are any indication, the planned consolidation of maintenance specialties could trigger another rise in suicides.

In Ford’s case, the weight of Brown’s death still haunts her. At one point, she recalled, he’d helped her when she was going through her own suicidal ideations.

“He saved my life once. I was on the side of the road, and he sat with me for two hours until I calmed down,” Ford said. “I just wish I could’ve saved his.”

As the administration informally reverts the Department of Defense’s name to the Department of War, officials have echoed an old saying often repeated in military circles: “We are in the business of killing.”

What they don’t advertise is how that slogan applies to their own members.

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

The post Newly Released Data Reveals Air Force Suicide Crisis After Years of Concealment appeared first on The Intercept.

Nearly the entire population of El Guayabo, approximately 400 to 500 dirt-poor lime pickers living on communal land in the west Mexican state of Michoacán, fled hastily in mid-July to escape combat between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as CJNG, and the Caballeros Templarios. When I went before dawn on July 30 with local human rights defenders to help displaced residents recover some of their belongings, the windows in every house were shattered by gunfire, roofs were blown open by bombs dropped from internet-bought drones, and everyone walked nervously, scanning the ground for landmines. Scattered everywhere were thousands of dull bronze shell-casings: .50 caliber rounds for sniper rifles and machine guns, 5.56 rounds for AR-15s and similar rifles, and 7.62×39 shells used for AK-47-style rifles.

Putting a stop “to every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States,” as President Donald Trump put it to the United Nations last week, has become his self-proclaimed mission. His administration designated CJNG and Carteles Unidos — an umbrella of armed groups that includes the Templarios — as foreign terrorist organizations in January, allowing the U.S. government to crack down on any individual or group who provides them with “material support” or “expert advice and assistance.” During the first weeks of Trump’s administration, as a Washington Post investigation recently revealed, DEA agents pushed for “targeted killings of cartel leadership and attacks on infrastructure” in Mexico but faced pushback from some administration insiders. And in late July, Trump secretly signed a directive authorizing the Pentagon to use unilateral military force against Latin American drug cartels.

Since then, Trump says the U.S. has launched airstrikes against at least three alleged drug boats in international waters near Venezuela, killing 17 people. On Thursday, The Intercept obtained a leaked document circulated to congressional committees in which Trump declares the U.S. engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with the cartels. While the administration’s public ire has focused on Venezuela, sources within the Pentagon’s Northern Command have said they would have plans for potential strikes against Mexican cartels, too, “ready by mid-September.” 

If the U.S. military does confront the cartels in Mexico, it will find itself facing battle with its own weapons. An investigation by The Intercept traced the bullets that littered the ground in El Guayabo to at least two U.S. firearms manufacturers, one of which operates a massive factory owned by the U.S. military. The Intercept gathered 123 shell casings, some of whose numbered headstamps corresponded to the now-defunct St. Louis Ammunition Plant and Lake City Ammunition — a commercial ammunition factory in Independence, Missouri, operated by Winchester and owned by the U.S. Army.

This investigation is the first of its kind to document the cartels’ use of ammunition from the U.S. Army-owned factory in enforcing mass displacement in Mexico. While past work has focused on the factory’s ties to mass shootings in the U.S. and the deaths of U.S. citizens, The Intercept’s investigation analyzes U.S.-made shells collected directly from the scene where some of Mexico’s poorest residents fled for their lives to escape ferocious gun battles between paramilitary groups — the same ones the Trump administration now classifies as terrorists.

“The United States is perfectly capable of breaking down criminal groups involved in the drug trade,” said Julio Franco, a human rights advocate at the Apatzingán Observatory for Human Security, “simply by closing off the pipeline of weaponry produced in the U.S. and used by Mexican criminal groups.”

Yet the Trump administration is doing the opposite. Trump plans to slash over two-thirds of the weapons investigators at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives charged with ensuring guns sold by U.S. suppliers don’t end up in the hands of Latin American cartels and gangs, incinerating the already understaffed bureaucratic safeguards designed to stop the cartel weaponry pipeline.

The ATF, the U.S. Army, and the White House did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. A representative for the Pentagon said they didn’t have responses to The Intercept’s questions, citing the government shutdown.

Experts estimate that around 200,000 military-grade assault weapons and machine guns are trafficked every year from U.S. gunshops to Mexican criminal groups, moving south across the border with little to no scrutiny. This unchecked flow of weapons, longtime weapons experts told The Intercept, represents a massive missed opportunity in the country’s stated mission to kneecap the cartels.

In villages like El Guayabo, this neglect fuels warfare while driving mass displacement. The Ibero-American University and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights registered 28,900 newly displaced people in at least 72 mass displacement events in Mexico last year, according to a report released in June. At least 392,000 people have been displaced since the U.S.-backed drug war was revamped in 2006, though experts estimate that to be a significant undercount. Franco estimated that several thousand have been displaced in El Guayabo since 2021, though the lack of recognition or authoritative studies means that figure too is likely an undercount.

Franco was in El Guayabo on July 30 with The Intercept and Carmen Zepeda, a teacher, humanitarian activist, and Apatzingán councilwoman for Morena, the dominant political party in Mexico. As one of the leading advocates for the victims of enforced displacement in Michoacán, Zepeda pointed to a growing list of villages where thousands have fled armed conflict: Acatlán, Loma de los Hoyos, el Mirador, el Manzo, Las Bateas, Llano Grande, El Tepetate, La Alberca, San José de Chila, El Alcalde, and El Guayabo — all in the municipality of Apatzingán.

“There’s a war in this municipality,” said Zepeda. “And this war is being carried out with bullets from the United States.”

The man taking the video growls at the bodies, two skinny young men, one with his mouth frozen open, sprawled out dead in the mud. “Just so you sons-of-bitches see, so you don’t keep coming to El Guayabo you motherfuckers, we warned you, you thought it was a game,” the man shouts in Spanish, out of breath, as he assesses the carnage under a soft, steady rain. Flanking the bodies are the steaming carcasses of two blown-up monstruos, the homemade armored vehicles used by cartels. “So you motherfuckers see how you’ll fucking end up, your mouth full of flies. Fucking Templas all the way.” A photo of the same monster under the same rainy sky shows five men in civilian and military clothing with bulletproof vests and assault weapons. Scattered on the ground alongside the bodies lay the dull bronze spent ammunition.

This was the aftermath of a brutal gunfight in El Guayabo on July 24, filmed by a sicario and uploaded to Telegram, six days before The Intercept made the trip to the village. When we walked along a dirt road at dawn, the bodies of the dead men, identified as 27-year-old Gustavo Javier Salazar and 24-year-old Victor Manuel de Jesús Pérez Ortíz, were gone. An official at the General State Prosecutor’s office in Apatzingán, who identified the men and requested anonymity to disclose the information, later said prosecutors seized 7.62×39 and .50 caliber ammunition, though they didn’t find the 5.56 rounds The Intercept later discovered.

The ammunition, according to residents as well as videos uploaded to social media and Telegram channels, was used by gunmen pertaining to the Caballeros Templarios, an armed wing of the Carteles Unidos, one of Trump’s designated FTOs. Fighting alongside the CJNG were sicarios for the Viagras, a paramilitary gang from Michoacán who, for years, were allied with the Templarios and Cárteles Unidos before switching sides to join the Jaliscos. 

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Journalists and researchers have long criticized the concept of “cartels” as a misleading term pushed by the U.S. Justice Department in the 1980s to build cases while justifying U.S.-sponsored militarization — overstating the power of violent but unstable gangs by painting them as unified hegemons who threaten governments, rather than parasitic power brokers operating parallel to them.

Yet no one doubts the violence committed by Carteles Unidos, sometimes referred to as “R5,” and the CJNG, two sprawling paramilitary coalitions benefiting from shifting and at times overlapping protection agreements from Mexican security forces. Earlier this year, a volunteer group dedicated to finding disappeared people discovered a CJNG-run “extermination site,” a training camp operating in clear view of authorities where hundreds of victims were incinerated in homemade “crematoriums.” Both armed groups have been implicated in widespread massacres, disappearances, enforced recruitment, and the use of landmines and child soldiers — acts that, if the Mexican government recognized the violence as armed conflict, would constitute war crimes.

When El Guayabo’s population fled at dawn, according to multiple residents, gunmen for the Jaliscos shot sporadic potshots at villagers escaping on motorcycles. And then, one displaced resident said, “the rancho was completely empty.”

Tierra Caliente, the muggy shear of mountains that encompasses western Guerrero, the southern end of Mexico State, and the southern lime plantations of Michoacán, has been known for decades as a refuge for organized crime networks. The “Hot Land,” as its name translates in English, is notorious for wars between shifting alliances of government forces, cartels, and “self-defense” groups — which have intensified since the first major operation of the U.S.-backed drug war was launched in Michoacán in 2006. El Guayabo is just one of a string of villages in the region’s expanse of lime plantations convulsed by years of warfare.

For the first half of 2025, the campesinos in El Guayabo and nearby El Alcalde barricaded themselves in their homes while listening to the devilish rattle of gunfire in the darkness outside. Some families fled one by one in a slow trickle, their nerves shot from suffering abuse at the hands of armed groups while waiting for the next gun battle; others, trying to hold on, escaped in mass displacement episodes. Some people fled from El Alcalde to El Guayabo. Sleeping was close to impossible, one resident said, as they listened to the firefights while “waiting for sunrise to see if the government would show up.”

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Government forces — well-equipped, well-trained, supported by U.S.-supplied Black Hawk helicopters, and frequently benefiting from close relationships to U.S. security agencies — have long exerted overwhelming military superiority over cartel gunmen when engaging them in direct clashes. But on most mornings, residents said, their hopes went unanswered. In February, the military installed an Inter-Institutional Operations Base, a multiagency outpost hosting soldiers for the military and National Guard known as a “BOI.” But firefights only intensified in the months after their arrival.

On July 16, as the gun battles reached a fever pitch, the entire population of El Guayabo fled.

One displaced resident, who, like all desplazados interviewed for this story, requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, remembers the helpless terror of waiting inside flimsy homes while listening to the cacophony of automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons less than a mile away. The houses — made from concrete, wooden walls, and thin metal roofs — were hardly reassuring shelters against a bomb or bullet.

“Imagine how we felt being in a house with sheet metal,” they said. “It was all so terrible, we were so afraid.”

No one went unscathed by the violence. The constant stress of listening for the devilish hornet’s whine of drones gave children anxiety. A woman heard a drone and dove under a mattress with her crying grandchildren seconds before a shrapnel-laden bomb exploded on a nearby roof. Over a dozen residents told me that soldiers who were stationed in El Alcalde, less than half a mile away, almost never intervened in a month of hourslong firefights. 

They had spent weeks listening to nearby gunbattles, but by mid-July, the proximity of the fighting became unbearable.

“They’ve made it down,” a man says in a video shared on Telegram from July 16, referring to the fact that armed groups had descended from the hills, fighting in the semi-forested lime plantations and homes surrounding the village.

“It got uglier then, so we all decided to get out at the same time,” an El Guayabo resident told The Intercept.

When they returned at the end of the month, a man in his 50s, whose wooden home was riddled with gunfire, broke down in tears after seeing several of his chickens had died because he was unable to return to feed them. Some had been able to go back during the dawn hours to feed their animals, though they couldn’t stay long. “No one sleeps here anymore,” a resident said.

A man walked me through his house to where his corrugated metal roof was blown up by a bomb dropped from a drone, his windows and the windshield of his truck shot out too. The ground, Zepeda recalled, was “carpeted with bullets manufactured in the United States.”

The sicarios never lacked for ways to replenish their ammunition. Armed groups now turn to “WhatsApp and Telegram groups dedicated to firearms transactions operate much like online marketplaces,” said Romain Le Cour, a gun violence investigator and senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “Similar to Amazon.”

Bullets for the same military-grade assault weapons lined up on the walls of gun stores in Texas, Missouri, or Illinois, could, within days, end up on the floor of a devastated living room in a rural, war-torn village like El Guayabo.

Pressed into the back of the dull bronze .50 caliber shell was a simple headstamp: LC19. The shell was one of hundreds scattered in the street before a devastated home, whose owner invited us inside as they examined the discarded military uniforms, the broken windows, and the cartridges scattered among stuffed animals and childhood school photos knocked off the wall.

“LC” is the marking for Lake City Ammunition in Independence, Missouri: built by Remington in 1941, run by Winchester, and owned by the U.S. Army. “19” is for the year it was manufactured. Thanks to the war on terror, according to its own government website, the factory’s modernization efforts brought its annual production capacity to 1.6 billion rounds a year, making one of the largest ammunition factories in the world.

The headstamps of the ammunition in El Guayabo corresponded to the photos of munitions from the Lake City factory available on the websites of gun brokers and enthusiasts, as well as a New York Times investigation from 2023. According to Bloomberg, the Pentagon has shipped hundreds of thousands of Lake City rounds to the Mexican military.

Jim Yurgealitis, a weapons expert and retired senior special agent with over two decades of experience conducting and participating in weapons trafficking investigations for the ATF, confirmed for The Intercept that the .50 bullets with the headstamps LC19, LC22, and LC23 were all produced at Lake City Ammunition. 

Yurgealitis said that the round labeled “FC 5.56 18” may have come from Federal Cartridge, an ammunition manufacturer that operated Lake City in 2018, though he couldn’t say whether it was produced at the Army plant or at Federal’s private facility in Minnesota. Yurgealitis also confirmed that a 5.56 shell with a NATO insignia above the headstamp “LC24” came from Lake City.

Though munitions from Serbia, Sweden, and possibly South Africa were scattered among the destruction in El Guayabo, Yurgealitis, who reviewed a full list of the ammunition The Intercept discovered, pointed out that “none of the ammunition on that list hasn’t been available on the U.S. commercial market at least at some point.” 

Lake City did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. Neither Winchester, the operator of Lake City; Olin, Winchester’s parent company; nor Federal Ammunition responded to The Intercept’s formal media requests. The Intercept was unable to contact a media representative for Federal through two customer support numbers.

Coveted by gun enthusiasts for their military quality and armor-piercing capacities, bullets from Lake City, whose operations are overseen by the U.S. Army’s Joint Munitions Command, have also been used by mass shooters. In 2015, the ATF sought to ban the production of “green-tip” armor-piercing rounds — the Times investigation pointed to Lake City’s production of 5.56 green-tip rounds for AR-15s — but immediate pushback from gun enthusiasts and Second Amendment hard-liners in Congress led the agency to abandon the effort. The factory has a colossal production capacity — churning out over a billion-and-a-half rounds a year — thanks to the post-9/11 symbiosis between the U.S. government and private ammunition manufacturers, who keep machines running, ready to meet wartime demands. Lake City’s government ownership means the company enjoys minimal transparency, while Winchester, valued at over $500 million last month, profits.

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In 2021, the Mexican government filed a historic lawsuit against seven U.S. firearms manufacturers and a wholesaler, seeking $10 billion in damages for allowing assault weapons to end up in the hands of cartels. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck the case down in June, on the basis that the companies can’t be held accountable if their weapons are misused. A second lawsuit filed against five Arizona gun stores in 2022 is still working its way through the courts.

For the lawyer David Pucino, an anti-gun violence advocate at the Giffords Center who helped write an amicus brief to support the lawsuit, the already weak regulatory framework will only be made worse by Trump’s planned ATF cuts. 

“It’s essentially catastrophic,” Pucino said. He added that changes could bring about “a massive rise in the vector of trafficked guns,” which will have ramifications for years to come.

The ATF is already a neglected institution whose budget allocations haven’t corresponded to the sheer scale of weapons trafficking, said Cecilia Farfán, the head of the North American Observatory for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime who has investigated weapons flows from the U.S. to Latin America. In 2023, for example, there were at least 78,000 gun dealers in the U.S. Before the cuts, the ATF only has 800 investigators charged with investigating reports of straw purchase buyers. 

“They don’t have a lot of resources,” Farfán said. “They haven’t seen themselves as an agency that can collaborate with other institutions; they work with very little.”

The ATF’s work has fallen short in the past. Between 2009 and 2011, for example, ATF agents in Arizona allowed cartel straw buyers to purchase nearly 2,000 assault weapons under the pretext of tracking them to their sources.

The ATF did not respond to The Intercept’s phone calls.

One former investigator for the ATF emphasized that the agency has a “very vital role in terms of their monitoring of the gun industry” but that “they’re already overwhelmingly understaffed compared to the amount of (gun brokers) out there. … Some gun stores get one inspection a year, some get an inspection every five years.”

Pucino agreed that the soon-to-be-slashed ATF inspectors are “essential” for tracing the flow of these kinds of munitions to criminal groups, helping educate gun brokers so they can better recognize — and report — straw-man buyers for trafficking networks. Without inspectors, he said, it’s close to impossible to recover guns once they make it out of shops.

“There are extremists who want no gun laws at all and an industry that wants to maximize profits,” Pucino said. “The suffering of Mexican people is not a consideration for those who are establishing policies.”

If you only follow Trump’s tweets, you could be forgiven for believing the U.S. has long been at the precipice of war with Mexico. “They are now designated as terrorist organizations,” he said of the cartels in January. “Mexico probably doesn’t want that.”

Yet the erratic saber-rattling has coincided with a quiet consolidation of security coordination between the two countries. Less than 24 hours after the Trump administration’s first controversial strike on a boat in the Caribbean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico City. “There’s no other government that’s cooperating as much with us in the fight against crime as Mexico,” he said. (Last month, a Reuters investigation revealed how the CIA for years secretly coordinated with elite Mexican military units.)

In September, Mexican and U.S. authorities unveiled “Mission Firewall: United Against Firearms Trafficking Initiative,” a “historic” plan to intensify crackdowns on southbound weapons trafficking. 

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The Trump administration promised to intensify inspections at the border, while the Mexican government will expand the usage of a surveillance tool called “eTrace,” a ballistic tracking technology that has been available to the Mexican government since at least 2008. “We’ve never achieved something like this,” Sheinbaum said. 

The official at the General State Prosecutor’s Office in Apatzingán told The Intercept before the announcement that questions regarding ongoing investigations into weapons trafficking networks and displacement are managed by federal investigators. 

“We work with the U.S., but we just do training and workshops with U.S. agencies in Morelia (the capital of Michoacán),” the official said. “The people who coordinate directly with U.S. agencies are the federal prosecutors.”

When I went to the office of the General Prosecutors for the Republic, a prosecutor declined to comment on the basis of “secrecy.” 

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In February, after Trump announced punishing tariffs, and again in August, after the directive regarding the use of unilateral military force in Mexico was revealed, Sheinbaum’s administration carried out two highly publicized, but legally contested, mass extraditions of 55 narcos to the United States. Targeting individual drug traffickers has long been discredited as a policy for reducing violence, one that runs the risk, instead, of exacerbating warfare. But it remains at the heart of the Bicentennial Framework, a tough-on-crime plan the two countries share. The framework’s implementation has coincided with the growth of enforced displacement and enforced disappearances — and the most violent period in the country’s history since the Mexican Revolution. 

In El Guayabo, soldiers arrived with an Ocelot armored vehicle and a Humvee on July 30 and installed a BOI, the same kind of outpost erected in El Alcalde in March. Residents said the soldiers did, on several occasions, engage the sicarios in early August, a period when the combat between armed groups receded into the mountains above the village. 

Despite the lull in fighting, residents couldn’t shake the fear that they would be abandoned to the whims of conflict yet again. They were well aware of the selective policing that’s typified the government’s response to war in Tierra Caliente: Security forces leave once media and political attention drifts away, opening the way for the return of criminal groups — who the government won’t confront in time, if at all, to prevent mass displacement episodes.

“It’s important to remember,” the official from the General State Prosecutor’s Office told me, “that what happened in El Guayabo is an isolated act.”

When I went on July 30, the residents who had returned were packed into family members’ homes or living week by week in overpriced hotels or rentals. Unable to tend to their lime fields, they’re out of work. “My parents can’t even get their medicine anymore,” one man complained. Though around half returned with the deployment of a contingent of soldiers to the village, the others stayed away. 

“The people are still afraid, because [the armed groups] are in the ranch just above us,” one resident from El Guayabo told me. In the weeks after they returned, every now and then, they could still hear gunfire in the hills.

Correction: October 2, 2025, 8:11 p.m. ET

An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified a rights group as the Observatory for Citizen Security of Apatzingán. It is the Observatory for Human Security of Apatzingán.

The post Trump Calls Cartel Members “Terrorists.” They’re Armed With Bullets From a U.S. Army Factory. appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel killed six journalists with an airstrike on a press tent in Gaza City last month. Among the dead in the August 10 attack were Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al-Sharif and his colleague, photojournalist Mohammad Nofal.

In the days leading up to the killing, I had been speaking with Mohamed’s brother and fellow photojournalist, Ibrahim Nofal, 27, about what it’s like to be a photojournalist in Gaza today, to witness horror and massacres. 

“This is the only thing I know how to do,” he said. “Every person here has a role in this war. Mine is to document. If I don’t photograph it, this moment will never exist.”

His job may be the most dangerous in the world. Israel killed five more journalists on August 25, in a “double-tap” missile strike on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis that appeared to be designed to kill the rescue workers and journalists who responded to the initial strike.

The day after Israel killed his brother, I asked Ibrahim what he misses most. He immediately responded: “My mother and my brothers Omar and Mohammad, who were killed in this genocide. I had a life in Turkey when I was traveling; I had plans. But none of it matters now. Only my mother and brothers do.”

I and my own brother, Ali Skaik, spoke with Ibrahim and five other photojournalists in Gaza about their daily lives and what the deadly task of documenting the genocide means to them. We also asked them to share one photo that is close to their hearts. I fear that any of them may join the ranks of the 221 other journalists that Israel has killed in Gaza in the past two years. I fear that I and my brother could be killed any day too, as the Israeli military advances closer to our home.

Ibrahim is still working, despite the risks. He’s come close to death before. “Once, a gas canister exploded beside me — I thought it was the end. Another time, a house we were documenting was hit, and everyone around me was injured,” he said. His home was bombed on October 30, 2023, and five of his cameras were destroyed. 

His photos have not only traveled far, they have changed lives: Some of those he photographed were able to leave Gaza for medical treatment because the world saw their suffering.

He keeps documenting. “The camera is my weapon,” he said. “It respects me because I respect it. Through it, I make the world see Gaza and its people.”

Documenting the genocide is not a choice — it is a responsibility, carried out with a sense of duty and love for our homeland and people. In Gaza, every image carries a cost, and every photographer bears both the burden of memory and the duty of witness.

“Realities That Cannot Be Hidden Behind Propaganda”

Abdul Hakim Abu Riash, 37, captured a searing photograph of starvation in Gaza: the image of 2-year-old Yazan Abu Foul in the Al-Shati refugee camp, suffering from severe malnutrition.

He said he was not surprised when American media outlets, biased in favor of Israel, tried to deny or discredit his work and the work of his fellow Palestinian journalists.

“The reality, however, is far harsher than what has been reported,” Abu Riash said. “During the most recent closure of the crossings, I myself lost 13 kilograms — my weight dropped from 67 to nearly 53” kilograms, or from 147 to 117 pounds. Food remains scarce, with prices 10 times higher than before the Israeli restriction of food. “If this is my condition as an adult, one can only imagine the plight of children, especially those with chronic illnesses who rely on specific nutritional needs,” he said. “Their suffering is far greater, and under this blockade and the denial of food entry, their situation is only worsening — leading already to the deaths of dozens of children.”

“I risk my life and everything I own to share realities that cannot be hidden behind propaganda,” he said. “We’ve had to learn new lessons on how to adapt in the field, to keep working under almost impossible conditions, and to find ways of ensuring our message still reaches the world.”C

He traces his love for photography back to his boyhood in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip. His first mobile phone with a camera, bought in 2005, felt like a miracle, he said. He was capturing photos of nature in Beit Lahia, sunsets, and daily life scenes. By 2011, after the first war on Gaza, he turned his passion into journalism, determined to document the truth.

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For Abu Riash, images touch emotions before they reach the mind. “A photograph speaks to everyone — even the blind can feel its weight through silence. It’s the world’s only common language,” he said.

One particular image left a mark on Abu Riash: a photograph of a young girl embracing the bodies of her family members, killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Deir al-Balah. The shock was etched on her face, her grief uncontainable. “Every photo I take is a witness for history. I want the world to see the truth: the suffering of my people and their resilience. Nothing less,” he said.

“The Truth Is Our Weapon” 

For Ayman Majed al-Hessi, 32, photojournalism was imposed on him. He studied electronics engineering and Islamic sciences before life pushed him into the media. Since 2018, he has worked with Al Jazeera Mubasher and captured beauty and wars, drawn by the belief that images have more power than words. “When I photograph, I’m not documenting strangers. I’m documenting my people, my father, my mother, my siblings, and my neighbors,” he said.

He has lived through multiple wars, but the current one has been different. He has been injured three times since October 2023, the first during the early days of the war while covering Al-Shati refugee camp. “I moved from being a reporter to a photojournalist overnight,” al-Hessi recalled, “but also to a survivor.”

His cameras and equipment were destroyed when his family home was bombed. With no tools, he resorted to a cheap Xiaomi phone, yet even from that device, he broadcast some of the most haunting images of Gaza’s devastation. One of al-Hessi’s widely circulated images is the targeting of journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul. After photographing a massacre, the images linger in al-Hessi’s mind, preventing restful sleep.

“The Israeli occupation tries to silence us. They accuse us of using artificial intelligence when we show famine,” al-Hessi added, “they close our social media accounts and keep threatening us. But our responsibility is to show the world what is happening. The truth is our weapon.”

“Images are stronger than texts,” al-Hessi said. “If I describe a flower, you’ll imagine one thing. But if I show it, the truth is undeniable. The occupation knows this. That’s why they fear our lenses.” 

There are many images that have stayed with al-Hessi, but the harshest of all was the moment his brother Akram was killed. “I was filming the aftermath of an airstrike on the Shati refugee camp. People around me were shouting his name: ‘Akram, Akram!’ When I reached the site, I found my brother Akram lying lifeless, and my father clutching his body, screaming in anguish,” remembered al-Hessi.

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The weight of loss bleeds into his words. He has lost his brother, his uncle, and 50 close friends. “I miss everything,” he admitted. “Our homes, our places, the people we lost.” Yet still he photographs, because if he doesn’t, no one will know. “Every photo is not just for history,” he said. “It’s for my family, my neighbors, my people.”

“Before, I Looked for Beauty and Daily Life”

Suhail Nassar, 30, is a photojournalist who used to capture Gaza’s hidden beauty: the laughter of children, sunsets over the Mediterranean, fleeting moments of joy. Photography began as a hobby for him, until he became a photojournalist to show the world how the people of Gaza live.

Since October 7, 2023, his lens has shifted. “Before, I looked for beauty and daily life. Now, everything I shoot is death, hunger, and ruins,” Nassar said. Direct bombardment, lack of supplies, and the absence of safety anywhere are great risks for photojournalists in Gaza. Yet the worst risk for them is becoming a target simply because of carrying their cameras. “There is no true protection here; you try to pick safe angles, move quickly, and keep your eyes on all directions.”

“You don’t really deal with the trauma,” Nassar said. “You carry it with you. The pictures stay in your head, stronger than any archive.”

But he feels compelled to document reality as it is. “If we do not document, no one will know what happens to us. Silence erases us. I photograph so that no one can ever say, ‘We didn’t know,’” Nassar said.

“These Moments Break You”

Anas Fteiha, 31, is a photojournalist from Gaza who works for the Turkish Anadolu Agency. Fteiha never imagined that his profession would demand such sacrifice. He moves constantly between hospitals, bomb sites, and displacement camps. 

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He recalls one haunting moment: a little girl who had lost both her arms. When another explosion thundered nearby, her instinct was to cover her ears — only to realize she no longer could. “These moments break you,” he admitted. “But they also remind you why you must keep going.”

“A photo invades your consciousness before you even ask. People may forget articles they read, but they will never forget an image,” Fteiha said. He is currently suing global publishing giant Axel Springer for an article in their German tabloid, BILD, that accused him of being a Hamas propagandist. Axel Springer also owns U.S. publications Politico and Business Insider.

The greatest challenges are the lack of safety, frequent electricity and internet outages, and the difficulty of reaching event sites amid continuous bombardment. “I try to separate work from emotions, but it is extremely difficult. Sometimes, after shooting, I feel an internal collapse. I console myself with the thought that what I do has value and meaning, and that my pain cannot be compared to the suffering of those I document,” recounted Fteiha.

There are no “neutral zones” in Gaza; every area is dangerous. “The greatest danger is being directly targeted. Many colleagues have been injured or killed while covering events,” Fteiha said. He doesn’t want the world to see Palestinians as just a political issue, but as fathers, mothers, and children who deserve dignity. 

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He described his mission as more than work — it is duty. “Every image I capture might become a voice for the voiceless and could help convey the suffering of people who would otherwise remain invisible or ignored,” he said. “If we stop documenting, who will show the world what’s happening here in Gaza?”

“Louder Than Words”

Motasem Abu Aser, 30, is a documentary filmmaker and short story creator. 

Photography began as an obsession for him. From childhood, he felt drawn to the camera. His heart always belonged to visual storytelling. After surviving a near-fatal head injury while covering the Great March of Return in 2018, he refused to stop. “People thought I would quit journalism after that, but the fear was erased. Nothing could scare me anymore,” he asserts.

His work on “The Night Won’t End,” an Al Jazeera documentary that included the story of 6-year-old Hind Rajab, trapped under bombardment, became one of his most powerful works. “When you film in the moment, you capture history as it burns. That is why our work has meaning,” he highlights.

Since October 7, his days have blurred into endless hours of work. He rarely sleeps, sometimes only half an hour at a time; he feels as if he works 24 hours a day. “As a filmmaker, I don’t just hold a camera — I carry images in my mind constantly. Sleep is fleeting; even with eyes closed, my mind remains alert,” he recounts.

At the Anan family massacre near Saraya Street in December 2023, Abu Aser was the first to document the atrocity. Soldiers lined women and girls on a billiard table, bound them, and shot at them randomly. Men were trapped under stairs and exposed to explosives, killed slowly. “Images always speak louder than words. Often, a photo alone suffices; a caption may not even be needed,” said Abu Aser.

The post “They Fear Our Lenses”: Gaza Photojournalists Speak Out appeared first on The Intercept.

With his brothers and a friend, Khalil set off on foot. On the walk over, the 26-year-old could hear intermittent shelling, but the promise of food, he felt, was worth the risk. “Hunger has become stronger than fear,” said Khalil, who agreed to speak on the condition that his last name not be published. 

When they arrived around 6:30 a.m., a huge crowd was gathering at the aid point in Netzarim. “People start heading there before sunrise because the lines get impossibly long,” Khalil said. Thousands had clearly gotten the same tip. The sheer amount of desperate, hungry people was overwhelming. Khalil said, “I hadn’t eaten properly in days. I was dizzy and weak.”

The distribution site was run by a new aid provider active in Gaza for only a few weeks. Khalil quickly noticed military presence. “We saw the Israeli soldiers in full military uniform standing next to their armored vehicles. We arrived knowing the place was dangerous. But, there was no clash, no threat to them,” Khalil said. (The Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories bureau did not respond to written requests for comment for this article.) 

He stood in line with hundreds of others. There were children, women, and elderly men. “Some were barefoot, some had been waiting since the night before,” he recalled.

As his group inched closer to the point where they hoped they would be able to grab a parcel of items, gunshots rang out. Khalil ran for his life.

“They began shooting directly at unarmed civilians,” he said. “The bullets were chasing us as if we were targets on a shooting range, and not just hungry people. We scattered under a hail of bullets. I got closer to death that day than a piece of bread.”

Khalil survived that quest for food — alive to starve another day instead. But at least 36 Palestinians did not, and 207 more were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Since Israel broke its ceasefire with Hamas in mid-March, more than 875 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food.

Reporting from inside Gaza over the last few months, The Intercept observed a famine that is manufactured and an aid distribution system seemingly designed to cause more suffering and death. Amid the war, Israel has rendered Gaza inaccessible to the foreign press; American journalist Afeef Nessouli accessed the Strip by volunteering as an aid worker for a medical nonprofit and reporting in his off-hours.

Usually during war, the distribution of medical care and food to a besieged population would not be administered by any party waging war against it, much less by an illegally occupying military. And in most situations, aid operations would closely involve established organizations already active in the area.

But that’s not the case in Gaza. Israel has effectively banned the biggest and longest-running aid group in the region: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. And by gutting the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, a critical funding vehicle for aid groups including UNRWA, U.S. President Donald Trump has strangled international aid in Gaza.

Israel and the U.S. have instead rolled out a new scheme centered around a fledgling U.S.-based nonprofit that operates alongside the same Israeli military responsible for killing more than 230 journalists, 1,400 health care workers, and 17,000 Palestinian children in the last two years. 

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With a few small exceptions, all aid reaching Gaza since May has moved through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was established in Delaware in February. The organization has received tens of millions from the U.S. to distribute aid in Gaza — and, reportedly, some $100 million from an unnamed country. GHF did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story.

Since it started operations, the number of locations in Gaza where residents could receive aid has plummeted from around 400 to four sites.

“Sometimes only one hub is actually operating,” said Hanya Aljamal, the senior project coordinator at the aid group Action for Humanity, who is based in Deir al Balah. Sometimes, Aljamal said, the sites are closed for security reasons, other times for maintenance. Khalil corroborates this: “I went a few days ago and it wasn’t open.” He says now he checks the GHF’s Facebook page, which informs people of the schedule. Aljamal says she believes “they operate semi-daily for only two hours a day.”

Arriving in Gaza in late March just as Israel broke the ceasefire, The Intercept witnessed firsthand what happened to Gaza’s most vulnerable after the U.S. defunded USAID and UNRWA and turned those agencies’ work over to the Israeli military and GHF.

Famine has been a problem in Gaza since the early days of the war. But when Israel and Hamas announced a ceasefire on January 19, 2025, access to goods became easier. “Meat, vegetables and chicken — and even snacks — were reachable, albeit at a slightly expensive price,” Aljamal said. “But we had options.” 

When the holy month of Ramadan began on February 28, it wasn’t hard to find a simple meal of rice or lentils for dinner, or labneh and za’atar for suhoor before fasting for the day. 

But on March 2, Israel cut off food imports to Gaza when it imposed a blockade. On March 18, Israel shattered the ceasefire when it restarted its campaign of airstrikes. Even after Eid, which marked the end of the Holy Month, one meal a day remained standard practice — if not a luxury. 

At the time, community kitchens like Shabab Gaza were running low on food. But they were still delivering what they could to areas the Israeli military referred to as “red zones”— swaths of land Israel has evacuated and banned aid from entering, such as Khan Yunis. By spring, 70 percent of Gaza was considered a “red zone.”

Shabab Gaza, “the youth of Gaza” in Arabic, was making meals of rice so people could break their fast at sundown. Inside a makeshift kitchen housed in a tent, the men, fasting themselves, worked in groups to cook the rice in vats. They packaged it quickly to deliver to the surrounding area, but neighbors also showed up with pots and pans, ready to grab the food for their families, or ready to eat themselves.

There were about 170 operational community kitchens before the crossings closed in early March. Just two months later, dozens had ceased operating.

The blockade halted the entry of vital goods for months, resulting in scarcity and price hikes. It was made worse by the resumption of fighting between Israel and Hamas, which restricted access to domestic produce “because of new evacuation orders from the north, Rafah, and areas in Khan Yunis where new crops were cultivated,” Aljamal said.

At the market, produce was fresh but limited. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions, and sometimes potatoes were for sale, grown on the shards of Gazan farmland remaining. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported that Israel has destroyed 83 percent of Gaza’s agricultural cropland and restricted access to some of what remains, rendering less than 5 percent of cropland “available for cultivation.”

“It used to be that three kilos of these onions were just $3,” an older woman said in her makeshift kitchen in eastern Khan Yunis. By April, an onion cost a dollar apiece. Flour became incredibly expensive, with a single bag selling for hundreds of dollars. Because nearly every bank branch and ATM remain inoperable in Gaza, people cannot find cash to pay for even a single bag of flour. They are reliant on an unregulated network of cash brokers to get money for daily life with commissions hovering around 40 percent.

Even domesticated chickens have been laying fewer eggs than usual, one international aid worker said. “Food isn’t available for them, neither are supplements or animal feed that provide stuff like calcium, which is essential to egg production,” the worker said. And like humans, chickens also experience stress. The Israeli military’s bombs and quadcopters are loud. 

As of July, OCHA reports that 100 percent of the population in Gaza was projected to face high levels of acute food insecurity. That includes 1 million people facing “emergency” levels of food insecurity, and 470,000 facing “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity. 

“I have lost nearly 37 kilos,” said Basel, one of the men at Shabab Gaza’s community kitchen. He showed pictures of himself from 2023, back when he used to weigh 247 pounds. Basel is bald with blue eyes, with a 6-foot, 2-inch frame. Now 165 pounds, he looks thin, his face gaunt. Several men showed pictures of this kind of transformation. They described the indignity of going hungry every day and how weakened they feel. 

“Look at what they are doing to us. We are so tired,” Basel explained. “By God, it has been almost two years, really we are so hungry,” he said.

Nessouli, the Intercept reporter, volunteered in Gaza with Glia, a medical nonprofit, from late March to early June. With other medical workers, he ate once per day — usually rice or lentils. Sometimes there would be tomatoes or peppers, occasionally canned tuna. During that time, he lost 12 pounds.

People begging for food at the market, rushing international aid workers’ cars on the seaside road, or even knocking on doors looking for flour became commonplace.

“Now we are reduced to one meal per day,” Aljamal, the aid worker, explained, which usually consists of “a variation of the same thing: lentils.” Lentils can take the form of soup or falafel, be steamed, or cooked into a gravy. But sometimes, Aljamal said, the sole meal of the day consists of “bread, plain bread.”

UNRWA was set up in 1949 to provide humanitarian relief to Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Originally, it was intended to provide jobs on public works projects and direct relief. It grew to offer education, health care, and social services to wide swaths of Palestinian society, even serving more than 5 million registered Palestinian refugees and their descendants in the diaspora. 

The Palestinian Authority has been a recipient of UNRWA’s services and support as it has governed the West Bank since 1993 and Gaza until the U.S.-monitored election of 2006, in which Hamas gained power.  

At its height, UNRWA employed over 30,000 staff, 99 percent of whom were Palestinian. Most of UNRWA’s funding came from European countries and the United States, but this largely disappeared after Israel accused UNRWA employees of participating in the October 7 attacks. (A U.N. investigation cleared most of the accused UNRWA workers but found that nine of the 13,000 people who worked for the organization in Gaza may have participated in the attacks.) 

USAID also once provided financial support to the Palestinian people for various development and humanitarian projects. Since 1994, the United States has steered more than $5.2 billion in aid to Palestinians. This funding dried up after Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised in March to cut USAID’s foreign grants by 83 percent before shuttering it entirely on July 1. 

Ending USAID, a Cold War tool of soft power founded in 1961 as “an independent executive branch agency responsible for administering foreign aid and economic development assistance outside the US,” has been a signature policy of Trump’s second administration. For decades, the agency has played a key role in treating HIV/AIDS and in providing lifesaving care to LGBTQ+ people, including in Gaza. One study estimates the USAID cuts will result in the deaths of 14 million people by 2030.

Over the decades, most international aid to Gaza has been run through either UNRWA or USAID partners, though Qatar too has been a key funder, providing over $1 billion in reconstruction funds and stipends for poor Palestinians between 2014 and 2019. 

Much of the Strip’s economic activity has been reliant on aid infrastructure, with UNRWA specifically playing a critical role in the distribution of food even before the war began.

“UNRWA has been the backbone that held Gazan society together,” Aljamal said. “As a child I went to UNRWA schools and was offered the best possible education available with the smallest of resources. When me or any of my siblings got sick or needed medical attention, we rushed into subsidized UNRWA clinics that even provided us with the needed meds, too. When it comes to food, lots of refugee families relied on their three-month dry ration distributions,” which consisted of “flour, cooking oil, sugar, rice, lentils, chickpeas per family member for three months.”

For years, this program helped ensure food security in the region. “We often held great pride in the fact that wherever you went and however bad it had gotten, you wouldn’t possibly sleep without food,” she said.

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Community kitchens also played a critical role in aid distribution in Gaza. Glia’s head of mission, Moureen Kaki, a Palestinian American, moved from Texas to Gaza more than a year ago to help; she never left. She also volunteers at Shabab Gaza in Khan Yunis. 

Kaki, who switches breezily throughout her day between Palestinian Arabic and English with a slight Texas lilt in her voice, notes that when she arrived, community kitchens across Gaza were producing 250,000 meals a day, feeding about 800,000 people — about 45 percent of the Strip’s population. Back then, community kitchens were able to reliably source food via donations and USAID. But now, it is extremely difficult to operate.

Today, community kitchens still exist, but their capacity has dropped from 250,000 meals a day to about 25,000, Kaki says, because they simply cannot source supplies.

The current famine, she says, is “the worst I have seen, hands down.” 

World Central Kitchen — founded by chef José Andrés and one of the most recognized food distributors in Gaza, and whose workers were killed in a 2024 Israeli airstrike — ceased operations in May after it ran out of supplies; it resumed operations recently. Smaller mutual aid organizations like the Sameer Project have continued to churn out as many meals as they can, even after their camp coordinator Mosab Ali was killed. 

Shabab Gaza’s capacity dropped from 15,000 meals a day to 3,000 in June — and by July had to stop operations because rice became too expensive. The group hopes to resume as soon as possible.

As long-standing aid providers languish in Gaza, Israel and the United States have embraced a new approach: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 

According to the New York Times, Israeli officials, military leaders, and businesspeople began discussing the concept of an Israeli-backed food distribution system in December 2023, and had brought a former CIA agent-turned-private security contractor on board by the summer of 2024. The new program was announced on May 19, 2025, as a U.S.-led initiative, with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee saying it was “wholly inaccurate” to characterize it as an Israeli plan. By June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the initiative had in fact originated in Israel. 

Unlike prior aid distribution systems, GHF planned to use a small number of distribution hubs in southern Gaza that would be secured by private U.S.-backed contractors, with the Israeli military keeping watch “at a distance.” The aid would be prepackaged, filled with a hygiene kit, medical supplies, and food rations. Each meal was budgeted to cost only around $1.30 each.

Soon after it launched, officials said the GHF system would attempt to screen people for involvement with Hamas by using facial recognition or biometric technology, violating a core tenet of addressing hunger: that no political litmus test can be imposed for access to human rights like food and water. 

The United Nations rejected the new U.S.-backed distribution plan and sayings that it did not meet its long-held principles of “impartiality, neutrality and independence.” The U.N. aid chief said the new system would force further displacement, expose people to harm, and restrict aid to one part of Gaza. Oxfam and 240 other nongovernmental organizations called for immediate action to end the Israeli distribution scheme.

In late June, Israeli soldiers corroborated what Palestinians had been claiming about the GHF aid distribution sites: Commanders explicitly ordered soldiers to shoot unarmed civilians. Massacres were a result of soldiers doing what they were told to do.

Video obtained by Afeef Nessouli

One video shows thousands of people crowded all around at GHF distribution site in Rafah, according to Al Jazeera. The phone camera pans to the left, and the sound of gunshots hitting a mound of earth about 200 meters in front of the crowd is piercing. The video shows sand kicking up in a whirl upward from the bullets as people crawl on their knees trying to dodge the gunfire. 

“Imagine if Toronto was starving,” Dorotea Gucciardo hypothesized at a press conference at the Canadian Parliament in June. Gucciardo is the director of Glia, the NGO Nessouli volunteered with in Gaza, and with whom he and reporter Steven Thrasher have also worked to deliver antiretroviral medication into Gaza since reporting on AIDS in the Strip in January. 

In this Canadian analogy, Gucciardo said, “The U.N. system would deploy over 1,300 distribution sites. The GHF model? Ten. In Montreal, the U.N. would open 850 sites, while GHF’s version? Six.”

“And in Gaza, the U.N. had a well-maintained system of 400 aid sites,” she said. “GHF has replaced those with only three.” 

Glia was founded in 2015 with a focus on providing low-cost medical supplies using 3D printing technology, beginning with a stethoscope design. Over the years, its services have expanded. Since 2017, the group has rotated doctors, nurses, and other personnel into Gaza to support local health care workers. 

Glia doctors operating in Gaza’s incredibly damaged health care system have been treating malnourished patients throughout the war. Since GHF began operating on May 26, “20 to 50 Palestinians have been killed per day at the aid distribution sites,” Gucciardo explains. They are treating an ever-rising number of malnourished patients injured waiting for food. “Everybody my medical team treats is skin and bones,” Gucciardo said. 

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Gucciardo called the switch to the GHF program an engineered starvation. “Aid is distributed by gunpoint by American mercenaries. It is inhumane, degrading, dangerous, and it violates every principle of humanitarian law,” she says.

The AP has reported that GHF contractors have shot live ammo at aid sites, allegations that GHF denies. GHF has also denied that multiple violent incidents have even occurred near their aid distribution sites, regularly blames outside agitators for the incidents it does acknowledge, and stated that “GHF remains focused on its mission: to safely, quickly and effectively feed as many people as possible, every day.”

When GHF’s original executive director, American veteran and entrepreneur Jake Wood, announced he was stepping down after just a couple of months, one reason he cited was because it was impossible to fulfill GHF’s “plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”

“From the outset, they were placed in active red zones — especially in southern Gaza, in Rafah,” said Majed Jaber, a Palestinian volunteer emergency room doctor who has worked at several hospitals in the southern part of Gaza. 

“At Nasser and the Red Crescent hospitals, where I worked during those distributions, we regularly received 50 to 100 wounded people in a single day. Dozens arrived already dead or died shortly after,” he said. “Every other day, the number would spike. The injuries were horrific. Limbs blown off by high-caliber bullets. Vital organs pierced — hearts, aortas, lungs. We saw far too many headshots to ever call it random.” 

Tarek Loubani, a Canadian doctor in Gaza and the medical director of Glia, observed a similar pattern of wounds in those killed or injured at GHF distribution sites. “Today, I saw patients with gunshots to the head, gunshots to the neck … the gunshots to the head and neck are almost always targeted. Usually shot by snipers,” he said. 

When there are shots to other parts of the body, Loubani explained, it’s usually from “a machine gun being used to shoot on the crowd.” For its part, GHF acknowledges the dangerous proximity of the Israeli military to its distribution centers, writing on Facebook, “Our dear precious residents of Gaza, We ask you not to be near our centers between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m., for your safety, due to the possibility of the IDF conducting military operations in the area.”

Amal, a trans woman who lives in Gaza City, sent The Intercept a picture of her bandaged arm on WhatsApp in early June. Amal gave The Intercept a pseudonym for safety. 

“Do you see what happened to me?” Amal said in her voice note. Her voice was trembling and angry, but still soft. 

“Yesterday, I went to the GHF distribution point to pick up some aid to get a bag of flour,” she said. “I finally got a bag after a really hard time, I was exhausted. And then after all of that, thieves stole my bag and stabbed me with a knife.” 

Hunger is painful, Amal said. She complained of joint pain, stomach pain, and a lack of concentration. “I faint and fall,” said Amal, who stands 6 feet tall and weighs just 119 pounds. “I do not want anything, I only want to eat.” 

Despite the Trump administration axing thousands of USAID awards (and firing the accompanying officers who managed these funds), GHF does not seem to lack for funds. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the State Department is considering giving GHF an additional $500 million. Zeteo reported that GHF requested $30 million dollars from USAID.

The group’s social media accounts regularly publish accusations against international aid groups and journalists. GHF has denounced the U.N. and Oxfam for standing “by helplessly while their aid is looted,” and allege that The Associated Press’s “Middle East bureau has sadly devolved into a propaganda vehicle — amplifying unverified claims, omitting critical context, and publishing narratives that serve a designated terrorist group.” Its belligerent posts have a Trumpian quality, down to the use of all caps (“let’s go through the history of how we got here in the first place. … HAMAS IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION WITH AN ACTIVE PROPAGANDA ARM”) and are marked with denial of any problems with their approach (“Scenes like this prove the GHF model is working”).

On June 17, reports emerged that Israeli tanks had killed over 50 Palestinians as they were waiting for aid trucks in Khan Yunis in the southern part of the Strip. On July 16, over 20 Palestinians were killed at a GHF distribution site in southern Gaza. Most of the victims were reported to have died in a stampede. Many Palestinians in Gaza who have limited supplies refuse to go to the new aid sites. 

“We don’t go to GHF aid points because they’re death traps,” says E.S, a 28-year-old restrained to a walker because of complications due to his HIV status. “I can’t fight through the crowds because of my disability plus we all know the whole situation is messy,” he continues. “There is no line and there is no distribution method at all, they offload everything into a big arena, in fact, people have been comparing it to ‘Squid Game’ or ‘Hunger Games,’” E.S explains. “It becomes a battle because everyone is desperate for food.”

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The number of people reportedly killed by Israeli gunfire at GHF aid distribution sites continues to climb, as the people of Gaza face starvation. The Gaza Health Ministry has counted 1,021 people killed and another 6,511 wounded at GHF sites since the program was put in place, including at least 38 killed by Israeli fire this past weekend. A newborn baby died of malnutrition at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Saturday, and Palestinian journalists have been posting image after image of people dying of starvation.

More than 20 countries, including the U.K., France and Canada, released a statement Monday saying that “the suffering of civilians has reached new depths,” and calling for the war in Gaza to end now. “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” the statement continued. “We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.” 

On Monday morning, Israel also began a new military invasion of Deir al Balah, where Nessouli was based in June. As Israeli tanks moved into the dense area, packed with many thousands of displaced people, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a water desalination plant, killing five more people in the blast.

This story was supported with funding from the Pulitzer Center and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post Our Reporter Got Into Gaza. He Witnessed a Famine of Israel’s Making. appeared first on The Intercept.

SInce June 6, federal agents have embarked on a militarized rampage and terror campaign across the greater Los Angeles area.

Pursuing the Trump administration’s daily quota of 3,000 arrests, federal agents have ripped through predominantly Latino cities and neighborhoods. In “roving patrols,” as the government has described them in court filings, agents without warrants have abducted day laborers, street vendors, car wash workers, and others swept up in the government’s dragnet. 

Despite the Trump administration’s pledge to target “violent criminals,” the vast majority of those detained do not have criminal records. That has not stopped the government from deploying violence against those in its path.

Throughout the first month of its focused operation in and around Los Angeles, federal agents regularly used force against unarmed individuals, many of them U.S. citizens. 

The Intercept analyzed more than a dozen immigration operations since June 6 involving federal agents from a hodgepodge of agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Marshals Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By reviewing footage and interviewing people who the authorities detained and those who witnessed raids, The Intercept identified several violent patterns.

Agents have aimed firearms and sprayed chemical irritants at onlookers and protesters. They have launched tear gas and flash bang grenades into crowds. They have beaten the people they detain, struck them with batons, and restrained them face down in a prone position, pressing them into the pavement and restricting their abilities to breathe.

Agents often deployed these violent tactics against the targets of immigration raids — people they presumed to be undocumented immigrants. In the majority of cases reviewed for this story, federal agents used force against U.S. citizens who were attempting to document raids or intervene by putting their bodies between the agents and their neighbors. 

Legal experts said video evidence shows the government response is disproportionate and a violation of constitutional rights, particularly in cases where bystanders were filming or yelling at agents without intervening.

“There’s a pattern of reacting violently and excessively against people that aren’t interfering or otherwise causing harm to law enforcement,” said attorney Matthew Borden.

“If I say, ‘I don’t like the fact that you’re in my community and you’re kidnapping people or breaking apart families,’ I got a right to say that, and the government can’t suppress that right,” said Borden, who is representing journalists, legal observers, and protesters injured by federal agents in Paramount and across Southern California, in a lawsuit. “Once you do, it’s like Tiananmen Square.”

The Trump administration defends its practices in the Los Angeles area, claiming that federal agents are under attack and that videos analyzed by The Intercept fail to capture key moments. Federal prosecutors are also filing criminal charges against a growing number of protesters who have confronted agents. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said those who attempt to slow ICE operations would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Violent Arrests

Adrian Martinez sat in his car during his lunch break at Walmart. It was June 17, and videos of ICE raids snatching immigrants off the street flooded his social media feeds. On his way to the bank to get some cash for lunch, Martinez saw a janitor from his work sprinting across the parking lot.

The janitor looked terrified. Behind him was a masked man carrying an AR-15-style assault rifle. 

The armed man caught up to the janitor, grabbed him, and started “manhandling him like very aggressively for no reason,” Martinez told The Intercept.

Martinez drove up to the altercation. By the time he hopped out of the car, more armed agents had emerged from trucks, including some wearing CBP uniforms. He remembered agents cocking their rifles, which Martinez interpreted as an attempt to intimidate him and the growing group of bystanders who had gathered in the parking lot, filming, yelling, and honking their horns.

“What is he doing? He’s a fucking hard worker,” Martinez yelled at agents, according to video recorded by a bystander. Security footage from a nearby business shows Martinez slowly pulling a cart containing a trash can and cleaning supplies, which the janitor had abandoned, in front of a government vehicle. Moments later, an agent approached Martinez, knocked down the trash can, and pushed him to the asphalt.  

The bystander video captures a second moment when three armed agents slammed Martinez to the ground. During that scuffle, another agent knocked the bystander’s phone out of his hands. The bystander, Oscar Preciado, said the agent also tried to detain him, but he was able to escape.

According to Preciado, as well as security and bystander video, federal agents initiated physical contact with Martinez. 

During the arrest, the group of agents wrestled Martinez to the ground, twisting his arm and grabbing him by the neck. At one point, an agent drove his hand into Martinez’s neck to force him into a CBP truck. 

“I was just confused,” Martinez said. “They don’t give me no explanation, they just started attacking me — for sticking up for a poor man, just using my words.”

He was dragged into custody at around 9 a.m., with his car still running in the parking lot. Martinez, who was born in Huntington Park, insisted to agents that he was a U.S. citizen as they brought him to the basement of a federal building in downtown LA along with detained immigrants.  

Martinez’s attorneys and relatives didn’t know where he was for more than 12 hours. His mother said officials at a federal detention facility initially turned her away, saying her son wasn’t there. 

“So many things were going through my head, like, is he OK? What did they do to him?” Martinez’s mother, Myra Martinez, told The Intercept. “Like, if they’re doing that to him in broad daylight, what are they going to do behind closed doors?”

Martinez was released after four days in detention on $5,000 bond. While detained, he did not receive medical care for his injuries. He was later diagnosed with a knee contusion and placed in a leg brace. He had bruises and scrapes across his body. 

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Newly appointed U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California Bill Essayli initially accused Martinez in a statement of “punching a Border Patrol agent in the face.” In a statement to The Intercept, a DHS spokesperson said one agent was also punched in the arm. But in court filings, prosecutors seemed to walk back those allegations. Martinez was charged with the lesser felony of “conspiracy to impede” a federal officer, but not of assault.

Attorneys for Martinez with the Miller Law Group called the charge “trumped up” and said it was used “to justify the federal agents’ violent treatment of Adrian.” 

“He did nothing to justify being grabbed by the throat by heavily-armed and masked agents and thrown into a Border Patrol vehicle,” the attorneys said.

Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, helped Martinez’s attorneys and relatives locate him. Salas acknowledged that community members have responded to the raids with impassioned resistance, but she said their pushback has been justified. It has often been federal agents who initiate violence, she pointed out, roughing up their targets — at times tackling people to the ground or shattering car windows to yank them out. 

CHIRLA helped file a July 2 class-action lawsuit against DHS on behalf of individuals detained by immigration authorities. The lawsuit challenges the legality of southern California’s recent immigration sweeps, which, according to the complaint, “look less like lawful arrests and more like brazen, midday kidnappings.”

The complaint lists numerous examples of people being “chased and pushed to the ground, sometimes even beaten, and then taken away” after they try to avoid agents. Such violence, Salas said, is what community members are fighting. 

“They’re using their bodies, their words to try to stop something, and that’s what they have,” Salas said of protesters objecting to the raids. “They don’t have the guns — let’s keep in mind who actually has the ability to deny a person their liberty or their life.”

On Juneteenth, two days after Martinez’s arrest, federal agents fanned out across LA for an especially aggressive day of raids targeting department store parking lots. Nearly 40 people were detained. 

Among them was electrician Arturo Hermosillo, 36, who is a U.S. citizen. He was driving his company van that morning in the Pacoima neighborhood when he saw masked federal agents surrounding a woman lying on the ground near a Lowe’s and Costco, he told The Intercept.

Agents were attempting to detain the woman, a 57-year-old street vendor, when she suffered a heart attack. She was later hospitalized.

Hermosillo recognized her as a fixture in the neighborhood who sells tamales in the same spot every day. He parked his van and began recording. “I wanted to have video of what was happening to this older lady,” Hermosillo said. “She’s a member of the community.” 

Within seconds, two agents tapped on his window, ordering him to move his van and leave. 

Hermosillo said he was trying to comply with the order but accidentally backed into a white unmarked car behind him. Agents in tactical gear suddenly swarmed his van. Hermosillo opened his door, trying to explain that he wasn’t able to leave and was blocked in. He insisted he wasn’t doing anything illegal. 

That’s when three agents tried to rip Hermosillo out of his van. By this point, bystanders began to record the altercation. One woman streamed it live on TikTok. “Let him go, he’s not doing nothing wrong!” she shouted at the agents. “Why do you guys act like animals?” 

As Hermosillo clung to his steering wheel, agents pulled on his hair, forcefully yanked his arm, grabbed him by the neck, and punched his arms, the livestream footage shows. He recalled one of the agents pulling him by the necklace and shared photos with The Intercept of a red wound encircling his neck.

“I was holding on because I was scared and they were going to pull me out and just throw me straight on the ground,” Hermosillo said.

Eventually overpowering him, the agents slammed Hermosillo onto the pavement, the video shows. As they placed him in handcuffs, one agent knelt on his back. 

He was detained for hours before being released without charges. The squabble left him with bruises along his arms and neck. 

That same day, Job Garcia, a 37-year-old graduate student and part-time delivery worker, was picking up an item at a Home Depot in Hollywood when he spotted immigration agents and started filming.

He followed them as they chased workers around the store’s parking lot. According to a video Garcia posted on his Instagram, he called out “Don’t tell them anything” in Spanish to two workers being detained. He filmed five agents surrounding a day laborer sitting inside his van and caught one of the agents shattering the van’s window on video.

Seconds later, several agents wrestled him to the ground and placed him in cuffs. 

“You want it, you got it sir, you fucking got it,” one agent yelled as Garcia lay face down on the floor, according to his own recording, obtained and reviewed by The Intercept. “You want to go to jail, fine, you got it.”

Acknowledging that its agents went after Garcia in part for his speech, DHS told The Intercept he was arrested after he “verbally harassed and assaulted a Border Patrol agent.” He was released the following day without charges. On July 2, with representation from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he filed a claim against DHS seeking $1 million in damages, alleging he was unlawfully arrested and assaulted. 

Garcia said agents had pressed their hands against his neck and their knees against his back while lying on the floor. “I thought, ‘This is probably what George Floyd felt,’” he wrote in a post on Instagram following his release, “and I wondered if this was the end for me because I started to notice a disruption in my breathing.”  

Attorney Andrew G. Celli Jr., who reviewed the footage for The Intercept, expressed concern about the violent tactics shown in the videos, including the use of the prone position. Celli said the technique killed one of his clients in an earlier case. 

“It can be deadly,” said Celli, a founding partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel who has represented victims in law enforcement brutality cases in New York. “Ordinary police are trained that it’s an extremely dangerous thing to do — it does happen in some circumstances, but it’s a massive red flag.” 

Even so, federal agents have commonly used the technique when detaining individuals during immigration operations throughout the Los Angeles area. They used the arrest tactic on June 24, when four federal agents piled on top of another U.S. citizen, Luis Hipolito, after he confronted them while they apprehended a street vendor in downtown L.A.

One bystander video shows Hipolito yelling at an agent, then suddenly turning his head away and swinging his arm. His family told the Los Angeles Times that he had been sprayed by a chemical agent and raised his arm in reaction. 

Other bystander videos capture subsequent moments. One shows an agent kneeling on Hipolito’s back, while another grabbed his neck, and a third agent restrained his arms. A fourth agent pinned his lower body, later punching one of Hipolito’s legs. Agents forced Hipolito into a prone position for more than two and a half minutes.

After they cuffed him and sat him upright, one agent could be seen wiping the sweat from his eyes when Hipolito appeared to have a seizure. While he convulsed, agents once again placed him face down on his stomach. First aid guidance advises a seizing person should be placed on their side.  

Hipolito was detained and released on $10,000 bond and was charged with assaulting a federal officer.

Agents arrested another U.S. citizen, Andrea Guadalupe Velez, during the incident, accusing her of impeding an agent. Velez, her attorneys, and witnesses dispute the claim. After her release several days later, she said she was targeted for being brown and Latina.   

DHS said that the incident involving Hipolito and Velez “kept ICE law enforcement from arresting the target illegal alien of their operation.”

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Days later, on June 29 in the Orange County city of Santa Ana, bystanders recorded Border Patrol agents violently detaining two men. A small crowd gathered at an intersection to demand medical treatment for a detainee who was being led by agents into an unmarked sedan. “Why would you have to make him bleed?” one man asked them.

The government identified the target of the raid as Apoloniol Arreola-Solario, who officials said had run a quarter-mile before agents apprehended him. DHS told The Intercept “a mob” had thrown rocks at agents and that one individual tried to prevent Arreola-Solario’s capture and another kicked the doors of an agent’s vehicle.

Bystander video shows a different scene, in which observers can be seen objecting to the raid but not initiating contact with agents. Rather, several agents are shown charging toward one of the protesters, grabbing him by the neck and slamming him headfirst into the pavement. “He’s a U.S. citizen,” an onlooker said.

Another agent struck a separate victim with a baton several times in the legs while a third agent tackled him to the ground. The baton-wielding agent struck the man once more while he lay on the ground. “Why are you hitting him?” screamed a woman. “He’s already down.”

Brandishing Firearms

Though federal agents involved in the Los Angeles campaign seldom wear uniforms or badges, most carry service weapons. The Intercept documented four instances in a three-day span, from June 18 to June 21, in which agents appeared to aim their firearms at unarmed civilians — in some cases at point-blank range. An additional case arose the following week. 

This tally is likely an undercount, as it only includes incidents made public in bystander recordings. An earlier instance on June 11 that was not caught on video took place at a church in Downey, where a pastor reported that a masked agent pointed an assault rifle at her when she approached a federal vehicle. The previous day, a day laborer and green-card holder at a Home Depot in Santa Ana said an agent had held him at gunpoint while asking for his ID.  

While there have been no known cases of agents firing live ammunition during the ongoing operations in Southern California, legal experts and advocates for immigrants fear it’s only a matter of time. 

The use-of-force policy for immigration officers says an officer “shall always use the minimum non-deadly force necessary to accomplish the officer’s mission” and should only escalate to greater uses of force if “such higher level of force is warranted by the actions, apparent intentions, and apparent capabilities of the suspect, prisoner, or assailant.”

In the videos showing federal agents pointing guns at civilians, Celli and Borden said the individuals or crowds there presented no legitimate threats to necessitate such an escalation.

“The idea of pointing a firearm at somebody for taking down a license plate number, or refusing to back up in a crowd situation — that’s just not appropriate,” Celli said. “Pulling a weapon on an unarmed civilian in a crowded situation is just extremely dangerous.”

“If you’re already amped up on adrenaline,” Borden added, “it doesn’t take very much to pull the trigger.”

DHS did not comment specifically on cases in which agents brandished firearms on unarmed individuals.

On June 17, hours after agents grabbed six workers who were waiting at a bus stop in front of a Winchell’s donut shop in Pasadena, a crowd of concerned community members gathered at the site of the abduction. Video of the raid from the donut shop had been circulating online.

Among those who heard of the June 17 raid was Yoselyne Chicas, who was born and raised in Pasadena. While out running errands, she drove by the donut shop to scout whether agents were still in the area. She figured her friends and family, many of whom are in the U.S. without documentation, could use some peace of mind.

She saw a black Dodge Challenger with tinted windows exiting a nearby parking lot, pursued by a small group of people yelling, “You’re a coward — how dare you!” The Challenger pulled in front of Chicas’s car. She grabbed her phone and hit record.

At a red light, a member of the crowd ran into the street to snap a photo of the Challenger’s license plate number, which had been obscured by a plastic covering — a possible violation of California traffic law. That’s when the driver emerged from the Challenger, dressed in a gray shirt, brown pants, green hat, and a black tactical vest that read “Police.” 

He quickly pulled out what appeared to be a handgun and aimed it at the man, who retreated toward the sidewalk, a video Chicas recorded shows. Unseen in the video was the crowd of protesters — a group of local pastors, attorneys, immigrant rights advocates, and concerned neighbors — gathered down-range from the agent.  

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“I thought for that moment that the young man was going to get killed,” said Salas, who was among the crowd. She and others had been there as a part of the Los Angeles Raids Rapid Response Network, a coalition of volunteers to protect immigrants and document raids. “We all saw it — in that instant it just felt like the time froze.” 

Chicas said she feared for the man’s life but also for her own. A mother of young children, she began to anticipate the worst-case scenario if she were shot. Still she kept filming.

“I was like, regardless, it’s going to be on my phone as evidence, when my husband gets my phone he’ll see it — they’ll be able to send it out and there would be proof that there was no probable cause for him to react in such a dramatic way,” Chicas told The Intercept. “I was scared.”

After several seconds, the agent holstered his weapon, got back into his car, and drove off into oncoming traffic, running a red light at the busy intersection with his emergency lights on.

Two days later, in Santa Ana, a bystander driving past a market saw four masked federal agents detaining a group of men. 

When the onlooker rolled down their window and began to record video, one of the masked agents raised a handgun and pointed it at them, footage shared with The Intercept shows. “You better get out of here,” another agent yelled. The bystander yelled back, “Why?” continuing to record, later saying to themself, “¿Qué están llorando?” – “What are they crying about?”

Also in Santa Ana, on June 21, federal agents chased a landscaper, Narciso Barranco, across traffic at an intersection with guns drawn, according to video of the incident. As the agents made chase, one pointed his handgun, holding it sideways, at a bystander’s vehicle to halt it from turning into the intersection. 

A separate video reviewed by The Intercept showed seven agents surrounding Barranco as he lay face down in a prone position on the asphalt. One agent repeatedly punched Barranco as two others held him down. After they stood him up, another agent pressed a baton against Barranco’s throat to force him into a gray SUV. 

The video spread widely, drawing widespread condemnation after his children — reportedly current and former U.S. Marines — spoke out against their father’s detention.

ICE officials claimed Barranco had assaulted agents with a weed whacker, which contradicts bystander video of the incident. Footage shows Barranco tilting the weed whacker to shield himself from an agent spraying him with a chemical irritant. 

DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that agents used “the minimum amount of force necessary” during this arrest.

That same day, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westlake, federal agents raided a Home Depot. The store had been the target of the larger June 6 raid in which federal agents abducted dozens of day laborers. Since then, organizers with the LA Tenants Union–Koreatown worked shifts outside the shop to deter raids and spread awareness of immigrants’ rights.

When they saw federal agents return on June 21, volunteers and concerned neighbors sprung to action: recording the raid, getting names of two workers who were being detained, and attempting to block the federal vehicles from leaving the area.

A federal agent wearing a tactical vest, with a black neck gaiter pulled over his mouth and nose, aimed his handgun at point-blank range at two teenage girls who agents were attempting to detain, according to video shared with The Intercept. 

The girls managed to escape when one of the agents’ SUVs began rolling forward, according to witnesses. Video from the scene suggests the driver had forgotten to place the vehicle in park.

Agents continued the practice of brandishing firearms on June 27 in nearby Historic Filipinotown, where one pointed a firearm at a motorist in a red pickup truck, threatening, “Don’t fucking move — I’ll fucking shoot you,” before lowering his gun and letting the motorist drive away. 

Gas, Grenades, and Explosives

After community members protested a raid at a car wash in the southeast LA County cities of Bell and Maywood on June 20, the Trump administration claimed its agents “were violently targeted during lawful operations,” posting photos of trucks with broken windows on X. 

Missing from the post was any acknowledgment that federal agents had deployed tear gas in Bell and flash bang grenades in Maywood on crowds that had gathered to protest or film immigration operations. Over the last month, such tactics have become a common method to clear the way for immigration operations.

Agents fired tear gas at about half a dozen people in Pico Rivera, in the same shopping plaza where Martinez was detained; at bystanders in Ladera Heights on June 22, after detaining a vendor who clung to a tree to try and avoid arrest; and at bystanders in downtown LA after nabbing a fruit seller on June 27.

On June 27, in perhaps the greatest show of force by federal agents in the present terror campaign, federal agents used an explosive device to blow open the front door of a home in Huntington Park while a mother and her baby slept inside. Ring camera footage published by NBC LA showed the explosion and at least eight Border Patrol agents in tactical gear storming the house with rifles pointed forward. Agents also reportedly used a drone to clear the house. 

They were attempting to arrest a man suspected of rear-ending a federal vehicle during an immigration operation in Bell the previous week. The man wasn’t home during the raid but later turned himself in. He faces a charge of destroying government property. 

During a separate arrest tied to an immigration raid on June 11, Homeland Security agents in unmarked trucks rammed into a white BMW at an intersection in the LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights, according to security camera footage from a nearby business. Christian Damian Cerno-Camacho, his wife, and their young child were in the car. 

Cerno-Camacho was arrested on suspicion of punching a federal agent at a June 7 protest in Paramount against Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents who were preparing to conduct an immigration raid. 

After the agents hit his car, Cerno-Camacho surrendered as agents drew their guns on the family. With guns aimed at the car, they also deployed tear gas. 

“Hunting Us Like Animals”

These militarized attacks have left residents of predominantly Latino cities and county areas in south and southeast LA County — such as Huntington Park, Pico Rivera, Bellflower, or Pico Union — feeling like their communities are being invaded by an occupying force, said Salas, the head of CHIRLA. She described the raids as “adrenaline-filled” and “war-like” operations.

Salas said the agents “have a mindset, a kind of war mentality, where we’re the enemy and they’re bringing this on at all costs.” 

Many Latino immigrants in Los Angeles fled armed conflict, whether the Guatemalan government’s U.S.-backed genocide of its Indigenous population, the civil war in El Salvador of the 1980s and 1990s, or cartel and state violence in Mexico. The recent military-style raids, Salas said, have proved re-traumatizing for many. 

She often hears the phrase “Nos están cazando como animales,” or “They are hunting us like animals.”

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Trump has described anti-ICE protesters in LA who wave flags of other countries at protests as “animals” and has also referred to them as “a foreign enemy,” vowing a crackdown against dissent.

Borden said such rhetoric from Trump, along with his government’s deportation quotas, are emboldening agents to act with less regard for the safety of those who object to their operations.  

Both Borden and Celli said the violence deployed by federal agents against those who oppose the immigration raids are signs of agents’ lack of training and experience.

Former Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Gil Kerlikowske, who served in the Obama administration, came to similar conclusions in a recent court filing. He said that Department of Homeland Security agents should be able to protect the public without violating the rights of those recording or observing an incident, “even in the heat of a volatile protest.” 

“Any difficulties to federal authorities arise from lack of training and experience working in dense urban environments,” Kerlikowske wrote in a declaration to support the journalists and protesters’ lawsuit against DHS, “and lack of leadership that is experienced in urban civil disturbances/unrest.”

The consequences could prove deadly.

Even as the mainstream news cycle has moved on from daily coverage of LA’s immigration raids, the government’s tactics of warrantless arrests, racial profiling, and violence remain a daily occurrence throughout the region.

Still, sustained resistance from a coalition of groups and grassroots activists continues. They keep responding to raids, documenting what they see, and protesting the deportation operations. 

Legal advocates are also continuing to defend immigrants in the July 2 class-action lawsuit against DHS. The lawsuit requests an injunction that would halt warrantless arrests throughout much of Southern California, require agents to identify themselves while making arrests, ensure due process rights, and guarantee those detained have access to attorneys.

A federal judge in California’s Central Valley granted a similar injunction in April after farmworkers sued the government. Legal advocates in Southern California hope for a similar remedy.

Mentioned within the complaint was the raid at the Pico Rivera Walmart, during which agents detained Martinez. Many of the conditions alleged by plaintiffs — including Jason Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen forcefully detained in Montebello by Border Patrol agents during an immigration sweep — closely mirror Martinez’s case.  

In the days since his release, Martinez has been waking up in the middle of the night, he told The Intercept. He said he is still struggling to process the arrest and the conditions he faced afterward.

On their drive downtown inside a Border Patrol van, Martinez heard agents taunting the janitor they targeted. “We wouldn’t have got this man if he wouldn’t have ran — it was his dumb-ass fault,” the agents said, as Martinez recalled.

The janitor felt guilty that Martinez was also detained. Martinez said he tried to reassure the man in broken Spanish. The janitor started to cry, sharing that he has an 18-month-old daughter and that he is her main source of financial support. 

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While inside the federal holding facility downtown, Martinez said he and others stood in line for hours waiting to be processed. Martinez was barefoot, having lost his shoes while detained. He struggled to walk with his bloodied and injured knee. 

A pile of detainees’ personal belongings sat out of reach of the shackled men; cellphones rang nonstop. Martinez assumed it was likely their families trying in vain to reach them.

Martinez, a U.S. citizen, said he was placed in a cell by himself. The other men were crammed into what he described as a cage, with two skinny benches, a single bathroom, and wet floors. As agents continued to fill the cell, it became cramped to the point where some were forced to stand, he said.

Many still wore their work clothes. Some wore Crocs or sandals and seemed like they had been taken from their homes. Everyone’s hands and ankles were shackled; several individuals were held in upper-body restraints with their arms crossed over their chests. 

“They had these people in conditions that was worse than animals,” Martinez said. 

At the June 20 hearing for Martinez’s release, his mother, other family members, friends, and his girlfriend packed the downtown LA federal courtroom. U.S. Marshals led nine people, shackled at the hands and feet, into the courtroom. With his head held high but his face sullen, Martinez entered last. He appeared to wear the same black T-shirt and dark jeans he had on when he was detained. His face lit up when he noticed his family, and he gave a smile and slight wave from the defendant’s table. After the judge ordered his release, his relative commented on how it was hard to see him shackled.

While Martinez is confident his physical injuries will heal and that he will receive the support he’ll need to process the trauma, he worries about how his case is hurting his family. 

Martinez lives with his mother, father, aunt, and four sisters in Huntington Park. He said the case has been causing a lot of stress at home. After he got out, Walmart sent him a letter announcing his termination for apparent workplace violence. Martinez had hoped the job would help support his family as they saved to buy a home. Keeping a job is also among the terms of his release. 

“I just want everything to go back to normal,” Martinez said.

Correction: July 7, 2025, 3:00 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Yoselyne Chicas’s first name.

The post Documenting ICE Agents’ Brutal Use of Force in LA Immigration Raids appeared first on The Intercept.

There is no longer as much fighting in the streets in this refugee camp outside Damascus, but it doesn’t feel like a new Syria here, where a diaspora community of Palestinians displaced over decades struggles to survive.

On paper, the prospects for Syria have vastly improved over the last six months. The country seems poised for an economic recovery after years of war and a half-century of rule by the Assad dynasty. On December 8, 2024 — “Day Zero,” as many call it in Syria — Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, forces chased Bashar al-Assad out of the country, ending an era of brutal dictatorship. In February, the European Union began easing sanctions against Syria, then lifted them entirely. Last month, in a surprise move prior to meeting in Saudi Arabia with Syrian Interim President Ahmed al-Shara, President Donald Trump announced his plan to lift U.S. sanctions that have been leveled against Syria since Jimmy Carter was president. Trump praised al-Shara — who fought against the United States in Iraq and was once imprisoned in Abu Ghraib — as a “young, attractive guy,” and a “tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”

News of the end of Syrian sanctions have been welcomed across the aisle in Washington and from Brussels to Ankara to Damascus. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani thanked the EU for its decision. Former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss said Trump’s decision was “the right move, which will aid desperately needed humanitarian and reconstruction efforts in Syria.” The Economist’s article about the “euphoria” of the news is titled “One happy Damascus.”

People in Syria are certainly hopeful. A banker in Syria who spoke to Reuters described the lifting of sanctions as “too good to be true,” and a soap factory owner in Aleppo rushed to the square as soon as she heard the news. “These sanctions were imposed on Assad, but … now that Syria has been liberated, there will be a positive impact on industry, it’ll boost the economy and encourage people to return” she told AFP.

But what are the odds that what benefits investors will benefit the average person living in Syria?

After all, as United Nations Development recently warned, “nine out of 10 Syrians are living in poverty, and one in four is jobless.” The report ominously added that “40 to 50 per cent of children aged six to 15 are not attending school, and 5.4 million people have lost their jobs,” and $800 billion was lost during the war.

And then, there’s the issue of the people among Syria’s most marginalized residents: Palestinian refugees whose families have been impoverished for decades.

To understand what this period of enormous transition means for them, The Intercept spent a week in the Yarmouk refugee camp and observed the lives of three residents who lived or hailed from there in a loose, informal family: Salwa, a single young woman, barely out of adolescence herself, who is responsible for a brood of children she didn’t birth; Bilal, a young man who wants to build houses but can only find work dealing hash inconsistently; and Abu Tarek, an HTS soldier positioned to thrive in post-Assad Syria. All of their names have been altered to protect them from retaliation.

Salwa, 22, has lived in Syria her entire life. Her family is originally from Haifa, where she declares, “I will return the moment it is possible.” But she’s actually never been to Palestine. Home, for now, is a bombed-out building in Yarmouk, where she is sit al beit, or “lady of the house.”

It is her house, she explains, because she is the person supporting her family financially. After her parents left their daughters, Salwa found herself responsible for two younger sisters, ages 13 and 18. She also cares for a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old whose mom dropped them off a few months ago when she could no longer take care of them. (Why did their mother leave them? Maybe it is drugs, trauma, a man, or all three, Salwa says.)

Salwa wears a hijab, but only outside of her home. The only male guests who come over are related to her anyways, and they always ask, “Is everyone decent?” before entering. This evening, Salwa has sparked up a heater meant to be powered by gas. But now it’s fueled by burning plastic, with coals burning precariously on top for shai (tea). She has also set up a perilous bank of power strips, so everyone can charge their devices during the few hours of nightly state-supplied electricity. She then winds down with a nargileh (hookah) to her lips, as visitors come over to pass the time. They include her 25-year-old “uncle” Bilal, more like her big brother, and two friends including Heba, who has Down syndrome.

Heba immediately starts asking the men in the room questions about what what they like and dislike, sometimes teasing them. She flirts unabashedly. She enjoys listening to Shami Arabic music, and tonight she plays it loudly while showing off her dance moves. She says she loves to dance and makes everyone clap for her. The younger children jump up and down by her legs as she twirls with a sash around her waist.

A woman dancing in a room of men, related or not, wouldn’t have been appropriate during the more intense skirmishes in years past when groups of men in Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS might be too close to hear the music playing. The combat is done, but signs of those days of fighting are never far away. On one of the few walls still left standing of a partly destroyed building a few hundred feet away, graffiti reads la ilaha illAllah: “There is no God but God.” It’s a foundational Islamic declaration and common Arabic phrase said often in Syria. But these words are spray-painted in black and drawn inside a black circle —conveying that fighters and supporters of the Islamic State group are in the neighborhood. A few doors down is another ominous tag. It belongs to another Islamist militia, Jabhat al-Nusra, whose roots are from Al Qaeda. Over the last decade, Nusra rebranded to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the main rebel force that opposed and then pushed Assad’s regime out and took over the country.

The graffiti doesn’t faze Salwa. ISIS, she says, was an enemy to most people anywhere, but she “doesn’t mind an Islamist regime in theory.” That said, she thinks it is going to be tough to get Syrian women to stop wearing skirts.

It’s a welcome change from the Assad regime. “No group has suffered as badly during the war as we have in Yarmouk,” Salwa says. “Life is hell.” Women especially were not safe under Assad. She says she knows many girls who were harassed, raped, and even murdered. “If a soldier wanted you, even if you were married or he was married, he could do whatever he wanted … but,” she adds pointedly, “I am a girl who screams and fights.”

Until Assad was gone, she was afraid to speak of that violence — and prohibited even from posting pictures of the dilapidation she lived in, for fear of being disappeared.

Now, she says, it is fine to take pictures in Yarmouk. “I don’t feel afraid like I did before, 3adi [it’s OK].”

On another night, Salwa and a friend are cooking dinner in her makeshift kitchen, the kind of chore they enjoy doing together, like going to the market to find deals on baby formula. Salwa says she worked at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East for two months straight recently, where she cleaned, made coffee, and helped with odd jobs. She made the equivalent of about $500 in total, which was good money: about 10 times the average wage. But she hasn’t been able to get more work there, and with UNRWA’s future in doubt, she is trying to ration the money.

Sometimes her parents send her and her sisters some cash, but not much. And sometimes their cousins or aunties help them out, too. But day in and day out, it is Salwa who must feed at least six mouths, often more.

On this windy night in late January, when the cold air whips inside through the porous walls, Salwa decides to make waraq al anab, or stuffed grape leaves, and invite some family over. Her aunt is visiting from Lebanon with her cousin, and of course, her two sisters, two wards, and two friends from down the road are helping cook and enjoy the meal.

There is also supposed to be a guest of honor: Salwa’s cousin Abu Tarek, an HTS fighter — though he never showed up because he was working late.

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Salwa uses a plastic UNRWA sign as a tablecloth on the floor of the living room and starts piling plates and pita bread on top of the spread. Electricity and water are unstable, but fresh food is usually available. Her situation, she acknowledges, is much better than what is happening in Gaza. “Blockades are hell, those were the worst times,” she explains, thinking back to her childhood when food was harder to get. When conversation turns to Gaza, a visiting cousin says, “Thank God for this food.”

Though she’s happy Assad is gone, Salwa said they are still struggling to survive. She’s not feeling the optimism that others feel for Syria.

“I don’t actually have hope this country will be free,” Salwa explains. She says she lost hope in any leaders doing right by them — certainly not Donald Trump — and that she and the girls will probably remain scraping by. “Palestinians are always forgotten,” she said.

Yarmouk was founded in 1957, about a decade after the Nakba first pushed Palestinians off their land. At just 2.1 kilometers, Yarmouk was once home to approximately 160,000 people in 2011, according to UNWRA, “making it the largest Palestine Refugee community in Syria and an important commercial hub.” Long before it became a central site of the Syrian civil war with its refugee population held hostage as a pawn in battles between Syrian and foreign adversaries, it was a thriving place, sometimes referred to as a suburb of Damascus.

Before it was rubble, the camp was teeming with buildings, business, and schools inhabited by Palestinian families in exile. Unlike in Egypt, Lebanon, and occupied Palestine, a Syrian law “passed in 1956 that granted Palestinian refugees almost the same rights as Syrian nationals, particularly in the areas of employment, trade and military service.”

In 1963, the Ba’ath Party grabbed power in a military coup. “Palestinians in Yarmouk launched organisations to ‘resist’ the Israeli occupation of their homeland,” the BBC reported. “Thousands of youths joined newly established groups like Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” Over the decades, young members of these groups died fighting, including when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982.

In the 1980s, Yarmouk was the home of many Palestinian movements, including branches of the Yasser Arafat-led Fatah party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. “Hamas’s political leader Khaled Meshaal” also lived in Yarmouk, the BBC reported, “until he refused to endorse President Bashar al-Assad’s handling of the uprising against his rule.”

From the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Yarmouk was a hotly contested battle site within and beyond Syria. In July 2013, Yarmouk was cut off from United Nations aid, and its population dwindled to around 18,000 people. The blockade, The Guardian recounted in 2014, led to “acute shortages of food, medicines and other essentials.”

The Free Syrian Army, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have all fought in and around Yarmouk, thinning out its population, leveling most of its buildings, causing outbreaks of polio, and at times driving people to eat animal feed.

Meanwhile, the Assad regime and its proxy force, Hezbollah, also went to war against Yarmouk. In a 2014 report “Yarmouk under siege — a horror story of war crimes, starvation and death,” Amnesty International director of the Middle East and North Africa program Philip Luther wrote, “Civilians of Yarmouk are being treated like pawns in a deadly game in which they have no control.”

“Syrian forces are committing war crimes by using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. The harrowing accounts of families having to resort to eating cats and dogs, and civilians attacked by snipers as they forage for food, have become all too familiar details of the horror story that has materialized in Yarmouk,” Luther wrote, with Amnesty accusing the Assad government of withholding food and electricity as war crimes.

A decade later, images of demolished Gaza are starting to look like Yarmouk — except Yarmouk has fewer people and life left in it. Even more of its structures are destroyed than in Gaza. In February 2025, the number of people in Yarmouk was approximately 15,300, with 80 percent being Palestinian refugees, according to UNRWA.

“Brother, I am thinking of going back to the dark side and selling hashish,” Bilal says out loud to his cousin.

Bilal is a 25-year-old Palestinian Syrian. His teeth protrude when he smiles — and he smiles a lot. He is usually covered in dust and always wearing a baseball hat. His main line of work is repairing houses. Given the destruction of most of them in Yarmouk, there should be no shortage of work.

Yet even when he does work on houses, money is hard to come by. Sometimes he works a job and doesn’t get paid at all. 

And so Bilal sometimes sells hash. It doesn’t pay well, and it’s dangerous. But it’s easy work, and his friends had sources who could hook him up. The problem is that selling hashish is not lucrative or risk-free now that a theocratic group runs the government.

Bilal sleeps at his niece Salwa’s house as a means of protection for the girls. Just a few months before the fall of Assad, he explains, he and a Syrian friend, Oussama, had been imprisoned. It wasn’t for hash. “They accused us of killing Assef Shawkat,” Bilal says. At the time of his death, Shakwat was the Syrian intelligence chief and deputy defense minister; he also happened to be Assad’s brother-in-law. Shawkat was killed in July 2012 in a Damascus bomb attack allegedly organized by the Free Syrian Army coalition.

Incredibly, Bilal points out, he and Oussama were taken into custody and accused of having been 13-year-old assassins nearly 12 years later.

Then again, he notes, innocent boys and men from Sunni communities were routinely accused of terrorism under Assad on absurd charges. He and his friend say they were held in the notorious Mazzeh Jaweya prison, a military airport with Air Force intelligence barracks in Damascus. They remained in custody for several months before the revolution toppled the regime with shocking speed on December 8, 2024.

The night before Assad fled the country, Bilal says, he and his friend were among a group of prisoners moved to an execution room.

Military officers, he recalls, seemed panicked and were rushing to get rid of them that night for some reason. At the time, he didn’t know why. “I remember they moved us around 10 p.m. into the new room and we waited and waited,” he tells The Intercept.

Oussama, who stands around 6 feet tall with a heavy build, explains that as they were led to the chamber, he was “just preparing myself to die, really.” But by 4 a.m., both men were free. The Assad regime had fallen.

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As frightening as their experiences were at Mazzeh Jaweya, Bilal and Oussama say that there was a kind of incarceration which Syrians feared even more: the secret prisons hidden everywhere.

Even by the standards of their abduction, these black-site prisons made the young men feel like the regime and its army would justify a man’s abduction for any reason they drummed up — and no one would ever know where they had been disappeared.

One of those secret prisons, Bilal and Oussama believe, was in the basement of a house that a friend bought after the regime fell. Bilal has been helping on the repairs just a few kilometers from Yarmouk. The new owner said that the house’s basement had been used to detain people who passed through a military checkpoint up the road. He’d heard stories that it was cramped and that people could be held without charge — sometimes for months.

The Intercept accompanied Bilal and Oussama to the multi-level house, then down the stairs into the basement.

The heavy metal door, orange with rust, screeches when opened. At eye level, a small, rectangular slot with a sliding cover could allow a guard on the outside to peer in and bark orders.

Behind it, a corridor leads to several square rooms. The fetid air is thick with the smells of burned plastic, trash, and human waste. The floors are stained from an unknown liquid but had recently been cleaned. In one corner, a hole in the floor had served as a toilet. In three of the rooms, the walls are high; near the ceiling, ground-level windows are covered with wavy bars, preventing anyone from getting in or out. One dark room in the middle has no windows at all.

Bilal and Oussama leave the basement prison in silence and lock the door behind them.

“Yes, thank God the bastard fell,” Bilal exclaims, clearly shaken.

Still, he admits, he is also afraid of HTS. Shortly after he and Oussama exit the house, a hash dealer meets up with them to show them some product. The three boys roll up a few joints, sipped tea, and talk through the afternoon about money and how they could earn some. “This is harder than it used to be,” Bilal explains, pointing to the hashish. It wasn’t legal to be a dealer under Assad, but it is quite a different thing to be a dealer under a new Islamist regime. Despite any rosy outlooks from Western economists, Bilal says that “now the economy is worse than it used to be, and there is no work, no nothing. It is so frustrating.”

“It will be more dangerous to sell or even smoke hash now than it was before,” one of his friends agrees.

“The new regime is very strict, even though you can smoke with many of the guys who claim to be religious,” the other chimes in, laughing. “It isn’t forbidden in Islam, just looked down upon,” he clarifies.

A night later, a group of Alawites — a minority group of Syrians from which the Assads hailed — were raided in a neighborhood not too far away from where they’d been smoking. They were allegedly dealing hash.

Several were killed as HTS soldiers ambushed them; others were allegedly arrested.

In Yarmouk, the graffiti announcing the presence of groups like ISIS or Nusra were expressions of violent resistance to the Assad regime. But it’s a different piece of graffiti Syrians cite as the beginning of the revolution-turned-civil war. It’s known as the “Dara’a graffiti” incident. 

Dara’a is a small, largely agricultural community in southwestern Syria, near the borders of Jordan and Israel. In 2011, as Ahmed Masri, a Syrian man now living in the United States, told CNN, graffiti appeared in the town while he was a teenager: “At a school in town, someone had written on the wall: ‘It’s your turn now Doctor,’ referring to Assad, the ophthalmologist,” Masri said.

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“They needed to arrest someone,” Masri told CNN. “So they started to gather the names written on the walls, names students wrote years ago, and arrested those who were under 20 years old.” The boys were “held, beaten, had fingernails removed” and were “tortured for weeks.” Although eventually released, community support for them increased resistance — which in turn increased Assad’s punishment of Dara’a. 

Eventually, some of the boys joined the Free Syrian Army, which fought the Assadists.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported last year that there were “617,910 people whose death has been verified” over the 13 years since the Dara’a graffiti incident, an event often considered to have triggered the Syrian civil war.

The report was able to verify 507,567 of those “people since the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution” by name and included more than “55,000 civilians who were killed under torture in the detention centers and prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.”

During this same time, as Assad monopolized industry (and cut off aid and commerce to places like Yarmouk), dissidents were purged from official employment and pushed into the informal economy. This especially affected Palestinians, perceived to be at the margins of society anyway and aligned with resistance movements Assad found threatening. For people who had relied upon steady jobs in government or industry, the only available work was often only selling drugs, making crude weapons, or peddling to source black-market necessities, like food.

Climate change-fueled drought, which resulted in 80 or 90 percent reductions in water supply in different regions of Syria, led to more chaos and desperation — and allowed another weapon at Assad’s disposal in controlling the scarce water resources available to a thirsty, war-torn population.

By “Day Zero” last December, the relief from the House of Assad falling was palpable across Syria, after so many years of torture. And yet, for so many who lost so much, apart from the freedom from being tortured or disappeared, there has been little material change.

“When we would go out, it would be with hunting rifles, seizing weapons from Assad’s soldiers,” Abu Tarek recalls, between alternate sips from a cigarette and a cup of mint tea.

Abu Tarek is a 35-year-old Palestinian HTS fighter who grew up in Yarmouk. He wears HTS fatigues and a HTS cap backward; he has a thick beard and only one tooth. He smiles often, inserts the appreciation for God into nearly every sentence he speaks, and is never without a cigarette. He is both Bilal’s and Salwa’s cousin, and is visiting from Idlib, a city in northwestern Syria where he has been a rebel for years. Now he’s working with the new government.

The dinner Salwa was cooking in Yarmouk was supposed to be because Abu Tarek was in town and in his honor. But instead of coming over to eat with everyone, he was stuck at work planning the logistics of a forthcoming military camp.

“The operation” of taking down the Assad regime, he explains, “was planned by HTS for a long time but we were waiting for Day Zero to move.”

Abu Tarek had finished his mandatory service in Assad’s military around 13 years ago when the civil war began. “Seeing what happened in Dara’a, particularly the torture of children” led him to take up arms against the regime, he says. He and some of his Palestinian-Syrian friends in Yarmouk joined rebel groups that eventually fed into the Free Syrian Army. They would take the rifles and weapons they already had at home from their conscription to secretly ambush and kill Assad’s men, then steal their weapons to beef up their arsenal.

Eventually, Abu Tarek explains, the fighters he was working alongside with agreed that the Islamist militia called Jabhat al-Nusra seemed “cleaner and more organized” than the FSA. It has been important to Abu Tarek, a devout Muslim, that he fight for a Syria that would be governed by Sharia law because he believes that system would guarantee justice.

“It is the most important thing,” he says, “that Syria is guided by the law of God.”

When Abu Tarek’s son was just 18 days old, he took him to get vaccinated when a shell hit the clinic. His baby was pulled out of rubble but remained unresponsive. Abu Tarek was distraught and sure that his son had been killed. In grief, he found a shoebox that fit his tiny body, then read aloud prayers. He remembered looking down when his son miraculously took a breath. Abu Tarek bowed his head and immediately recited scriptures from the Quran to give thanks to the almighty who, to him, had just saved his baby’s life.

He lives with his wife and three children in a small apartment in Idlib, in Killi, a refugee camp built from the donations of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. The buildings in his neighborhood sit atop a hill overlooking the city center and are a striking turquoise — as colorful as Yarmouk is gray.

Back when he lived in Yarmouk, the camp had been nearly destroyed by skirmishes between various rebel groups like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, as well by huge battles against the Assad regime. By 2017, an agreement was reached between rebels and Assad’s regime to evacuate fighters like him from Yarmouk to the rebel-held Idlib province in the northwest of Syria.

“We had to surrender and take buses up to the north,” he recalls. At the time, HTS controlled Idlib with around 30,000 fighters. He was drawn to the group because “HTS never treated Syrian-Palestinians differently.” HTS controlled border crossings with Turkey, along with swaths of land rich in petroleum, providing the group with significant income.

Since 2018, Abu Tarek and his family have stayed in Idlib, which is ruled as an Islamic caliphate. The roads are barely paved, and there are HTS soldiers everywhere. He has been lucky to rise the ranks, he says, because it has lifted him out of extremely dire conditions.

Areas within the Idlib province are still being developed, Abu Tarek explains, and, unlike under the Assad regime, it’s happening under a Sharia society. A new mall he frequents in Al-Dana has separate entrances for women and men, and restaurants with private areas where women in niqabs can eat without covering their face.

After Assad fled to Russia, Abu Tarek and other internally displaced people suddenly had new freedom to move about the country. He had been restricted to an area of about 50 kilometers during the latter part of the civil war, and it had been eight years since he had seen his parents.

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Abu Tarek believes, even as a Palestinian Syrian, that the most important thing right now to deal with is Syria. “One day God will open a path to liberate Palestine just like he did for us in Syria,” he said. Even as Israel illegally occupies large parts of Syria, Abu Tarek believes the new Syrian army could not engage Israel in a fresh war after coming out of a 13-year revolution. “It would be pure foolishness.” Al-Shara, the interim Syrian president who was also the leader of HTS, has “previously said that he does not want conflict with Israel.”

Now, Abu Tarek says, the biggest focus is building a country from scratch: “Bashar al-Assad’s regime drained the country of its wealth. Restoring it will not be a small task.

Having taken up arms on the winning side might work out well financially for Abu Tarek; so far, it has certainly worked out better for him than for Salwa or Bilal. Recently, he and his family have moved to an apartment in Damascus subsidized by the new government. He is being paid around $200 a month for directing logistics at a military training camp in the capital — about 10 times the average wage.

“The hope is for one united Syria,” he says, “governed by Islamic law, no more, no less, whatever Islam prescribes should apply to all of us on the same level. As for the economy,” he explains, “I know that our new leaders, God bless them, are working hard to solve the problems everyday people have right now.”

Is post-Assad Syria ascendant? Even as war spreads in the region — with Israeli and Iranian missiles crossing its skies — the consensus amongst western leaders seems to be that Syria’s future is prosperous and bright. But what about for its 25 million residents?

Things are certainly not very bright right now for the 2 million Alawites, the religious minority from which the Assads hailed. An ongoing series of mass killings of Alawites has occurred in Syria since December at the hands of the new government’s fighters. More than 1,300 people were killed in a spate of massacres in March alone. Many Alawites have fled to neighboring Lebanon. 

One Alawite man told The Intercept that al-Shara and “his terrorists want us dead, and they have now completely destroyed access to the economy for Alawites.” He believed there was no work for his people, and was sheltering in a mosque on the Lebanese border town of Massoudiyeh. Alawites need help so badly, he said, “We would take it from Israel even.”

For the more than 400,000 thousand Palestinians in Syria, the forecast is mixed. For those who joined HTS to take up arms against Assad, like Abu Tarek, they may stand a chance of enjoying the spoils of war and key roles in forging the nation’s new government. For those like Bilal and Oussama, who have few work prospects except for dealing hash and day laboring, their odds seem dim. For many of the 160,000 Palestinians of Yarmouk, now scattered across Syria, who depended on UNRWA as an economic engine, prospects seem precarious at best, especially as U.S. funding for UNRWA has been frozen since the Biden administration.

In Yarmouk, life goes on much as it has. People pass between bombed-out walls to share what little they have. Salwa cooks for her ragtag brood.

“Lifting the sanctions on Syria is a very good thing of course,” Salwa says in a voice memo. “But for Syria to raise Trump’s voice and so on, I do not like this at all,” she adds, because Trump had “imposed sanctions on us during his term, he is the one who imposed the wars on us, and to raise his picture in Arab countries as if this didn’t happen, I do not like this at all.”

“Even if they rebuild all of Syria,” she says, “Yarmouk will remain destroyed.”

The post Palestinian Refugees in Syria See Little Hope — Even After Assad appeared first on The Intercept.

The suspended students included students who happened to be studying in Butler Library at the time the occupation began, as well as journalists. The suspensions came amid final exams at the university. Some of the students who were not protesting have had their suspensions rescinded.

Barnard College informed suspended students that they would have to vacate their college housing within 48 hours and that their meal cards would be voided. The housing deadline was set to pass on Saturday, but Barnard said in a statement that no one had been evicted yet.

The Intercept spoke to several people who were put under interim suspensions, including a Barnard student who said that she and another student were suspended and given eviction notices before they had the chance to prove to the college that they had not been involved in the protest.

“Hasty punishments and violations of due process are exactly what we would expect.”

The stark and immediate punishments were meted out before the students were given a chance to respond, in what faculty members call a clear violation of due process related to the sensitivities over protests against the university’s ties to Israel amid its war on Gaza.

“Hasty punishments and violations of due process are exactly what we would expect when we allow our disciplinary and public safety policies to be dictated by political forces that value repression more than our community’s well-being,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia University, told The Intercept.

​Yannik Thiem, an associate professor of religion at Columbia who taught some of the suspended students, told The Intercept, “The blanket move to interim suspend, without a process to establish that the students actually violated the rules in a way that warrants this kind of punishment, and to evict them, seem to be punitive measures that indicate that the students are presumed guilty until proven innocent.”

At least six students from Columbia and Barnard — including four journalists and, according to a student and faculty members, two who were merely studying at Butler Library — have had their suspensions and eviction notices lifted since the punishments were handed down Thursday. 

Asked about its suspensions, punishments, and allegations that due process was falling by the wayside, a spokesperson for Barnard said, “Barnard respects and supports a robust student press. As students present in Butler Library during the disruption have been confirmed to be working as journalists, we have notified them that their interim suspensions have been lifted. As our review continues, we will issue additional notifications as necessary.”

“Initial interim suspensions were based solely on the time students exited Butler Library,” the spokesperson said. “Students who were able to demonstrate that they were not participants, despite remaining in the library after being directed to leave, have had their suspensions promptly lifted. No student has been required to leave campus housing as a result of an interim suspension.”

“Intense and Intimidating”

Among the students who had their suspensions reversed was Samra Moosa, a 20-year-old Barnard College student. Moosa spent the morning of May 7 working on her assignments in Butler Library’s reading room. 

Around 3:15 p.m., just after Moosa had returned from a lunch break, around 100 protesters began a pro-Palestine protest in the library. Shortly after, Columbia-employed campus security officers arrived.

Moosa tried to leave when the protesters came in, but said the main exits were blocked by both protesters and campus security. 

“The environment quickly became very intense and intimidating,” Moosa said. “We clearly witnessed Public Safety pushing and being very aggressive towards student protesters and obviously, in my mind, there’s no way I’m leaving through the front doors with Public Safety literally pushing at anyone.”

Moosa said she was also worried that, as a brown woman, Columbia’s Public Safety might assume she was a protester. 

Some students, Moosa said, kept studying around the reading room as the protest continued. Others attempted to leave through the exits but were required to show their IDs first.

“I complied because I literally was a student just studying.”

Shortly after 4 p.m., as the protest continued, Moosa attempted to leave through a side exit of the reading room. Along with other students trying to leave, she was told by a security officer that she would have to show her ID in order to leave. 

“So I complied because I literally was a student just studying and I showed her my ID,” Moosa said.

On her way out, Moosa said, the Public Safety officer snapped a photo of her ID.

Moosa said she left the library of her own accord, never receiving any order, verbal or written, to evacuate the library while she was in the building. 

At 6:02 p.m., about two hours after leaving the library, a university-wide email alert came from Columbia Public Safety: “Alert: Butler Library is closed and the area must be cleared.”

“No Evidence”

On May 8, the day after the protest, Moosa received an email from Barnard Dean Leslie Grinage that she had been suspended “effective immediately.” The decision, said the email, which was reviewed by The Intercept, stemmed from “information received from Columbia University Public Safety” that Moosa was “involved in a disruption” at the library the day before.

Within 48 hours, Moosa would have to evacuate her on-campus housing. “We understand that losing access to the residence hall you are assigned to,” the email continued, “is inconvenient and may pose a hardship.” Barnard added that if complying with the 48-hour deadline “presents a hardship,” they might provide “additional flexibility and support in leaving the residence hall.”

A well-placed source with knowledge of the mediation proceedings between the university and those present inside Butler Library told The Intercept that the working assumption that day was that the students who presented their IDs and identified themselves while leaving the library would get due process if disciplinary proceedings were initiated. The source requested anonymity over concerns of retaliation.

The suspension, according to Grinage’s email, was instituted because of alleged violations of Barnard’s Student Code of Conduct, which governs typical disciplinary proceedings. The email went on, however, to suggest that the punishments were separate from the normal processes. 

“This interim suspension does not replace the Barnard Student Code of Conduct process, which will begin as soon as possible,” it said. “The College has not yet made a determination about your responsibility for any alleged violations of the Code at this time or the resulting sanctions if you are found responsible.”

Moosa, who is Muslim, replied to Grinage in short order, requesting that her suspension be lifted. 

“I am deeply concerned that I have been mistakenly and unfairly identified as a protest participant,” she wrote. “I believe this may be due to assumptions based on my appearance, ethnic background, and religion. To be clear, I did not participate in the protest, nor did I engage in any disruption.”

She added that, on the contrary, she had “acted responsibly” to remove herself from the situation “as soon as it was safe to do so.”

Moosa met on Friday afternoon with Grinage, less than 24 hours after she’d received the initial suspension notice — and just 24 hours before her scheduled eviction.

“It’s as if she has no evidence, she has nothing on me, but they’re actively trying to find something.”

At the meeting, Moosa said, she read to Grinage from a prepared statement: “This accusation has caused me significant emotional distress and disrupted my ability to complete my final assignments. As a Muslim woman, I feel that Barnard has repeatedly failed to create a safe and supportive environment for students like myself. It is unacceptable for the College to claim inclusivity while subjecting students of color to racial profiling and false accusations.”

By the time evening fell, Moosa had still not received a judgment on her case. She had begun packing up her dorm room. At 9:32 p.m., Moosa received an email from Grinage that her suspension had been withdrawn. Moosa, however, was not in the clear: “Barnard reserves the right to reimpose interim sanctions and/or initiate charges regarding this matter at any point in the future,” wrote Grinage.

For Moosa, the email read like a threat. 

“It’s as if she has no evidence, she has nothing on me,” Moosa said, “but they’re actively trying to find something to pin me to the protests.”

Trump Crackdown

The Butler Library protest and sweeping responses came amid an all-out assault against universities — particularly Columbia, which has been flashpoints of campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza — by the Trump administration. Decrying virtually any pro-Palestine position as anti-Jewish animus, the administration formed a Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to lead its crackdown.

Among other controversial measures — such as demands on its Middle East studies department that faculty members said flew in the face of academic independence — the administration withdrew hundreds of millions in funding from Columbia. 

On the same day that Columbia and Barnard announced the suspensions, including those targeting non-protesters and student journalists, the Trump administration’s task force heaped praise on the university administration and Claire Shipman, its new acting president, for their response to the protest.

The task force said it was “encouraged by Acting President Shipman’s strong and resolute statement regarding the unlawful, violent and disgraceful takeover of Butler library” and that she had “met the moment with fortitude and conviction.”

The task force added that it was “confident that Columbia will take the appropriate disciplinary actions for those involved in this act.”

Howley, the classics professor, linked the school’s heavy-handed response to the protests to the threats over its funding. 

“It turns out a university might not be able to uphold its own values when authoritarians hold a billion-dollar gun to its head,” he said.

“It turns out a university might not be able to uphold its own values when authoritarians hold a billion-dollar gun to its head.”

In a video released Wednesday evening, Shipman said she had “confidence the disciplinary proceedings will reflect the severity of the actions.”

The Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors said in a statement on Thursday that there is a “countervailing and urgent need” to “ensure due process for all parties.”

Barnard “treats students guilty before they have a chance to prove themselves innocent,” a professor at the school who asked to not be named due to concerns over retaliation told The Intercept. “It is the most cynical interpretation of due process under their own ‘more likely than not’ standard that they insist is educational and not punitive.”

The hasty suspensions and evictions, with lapses in due process, are not new to Barnard. Following the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia last April, Barnard suspended at least 53 students and evicted them from their dorms, barred them from campus, and revoked their access to campus dining. Some suspended students were given a mere 15 minutes to pack up and leave their housing. Their suspension notices had said that a campus security official “will escort you to your room, and you will have 15 minutes to gather what you might need.”

Such precedents at Columbia and Barnard have left students especially uneasy.

Moosa said that, given the manner in which Barnard acted, she feels that the college is still holding the threat of suspension over her head. 

“I don’t feel relieved,” she said, of having her suspension revoked. “I haven’t done anything to prove to this college that I am a danger to this campus.”

The post Students Studying at Columbia Library Were Suspended for Protest They Took No Part In appeared first on The Intercept.

America lost its war, but Vietnam was devastated. “Sideshow” wars in Cambodia and Laos left those countries equally ravaged. The United States unleashed an estimated 30 billion pounds of munitions in Southeast Asia. At least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths, an estimated 11.7 million South Vietnamese were forced from their homes, and up to 4.8 million were sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange.

April 30, 1975, was also, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell observed at the time, “the first day since September 1, 1939, when the Second World War began, that something like peace reigned throughout the world.” 

Peace on paper, perhaps, but the violence never really ended.

The U.S. did whatever it could to cripple the reunited Vietnam. Instead of delivering billions in promised reconstruction aid, it pressured international lenders like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to reject Vietnamese requests for assistance. The newly unified nation of farmers had no choice but to till rice fields filled with unexploded American bombs, artillery shells, rockets, cluster munitions, landmines, grenades, and more.

The war’s toll continued to rise, with 100,000 more casualties in Vietnam in the 50 years since the conflict technically came to a close and many more in the neighboring nations of Southeast Asia.

After all that, America could have learned something.

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At the cost of over 58,000 American lives and $1 trillion, at current value, America’s shocking defeat at the hands of South Vietnamese guerrillas and soldiers from what then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a “little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam” could have led to lasting change. The U.S. might have grappled with the suffering it inflicted across Southeast Asia and pledged not to turn another region of the world into a charnel house and a munitions scrapyard. The people who led the U.S. to war and those who have assumed power since then could have absorbed how dangerous hubris can be; the inability of military might to achieve political aims; and the terrible costs of unleashing devastating firepower on a tiny nation. They could have grasped the merits of restrained foreign policy.

For a very brief moment, Congress did attempt to require human rights concerns to factor into American foreign policy. That urge soon evaporated.

Instead, America turned a blind eye to continued deaths in Vietnam and backed a genocidal regime in neighboring Cambodia to further injure the country with whom it had just made peace. Then the U.S. quickly doubled down, setting in motion a means to turn its humiliating defeat in Southeast Asia into a 20-year war in Southwest Asia, against even weaker opponents, that ended in another mortifying loss.

“We were taught that our armies were always invincible, and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam,” President Jimmy Carter observed in his famous “malaise speech” on July 15, 1979, while paradoxically claiming that the “outward strength of America” was unequaled. The United States was, he said, “a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.”

But even as he mouthed those words to the American people, Carter was setting in motion secret operations that sowed the seeds for a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 9/11 attacks, and more than two decades of forever wars. America would trade one agony for another, making rash choices that would inflict pain on its own people and devastation across another entire region.

On July 3, 1979, Carter authorized the CIA to provide covert aid to insurgents, the nascent mujahideen, fighting the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. “On that day,” Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recalled, “I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.” When his prediction came true later that year, Brzezinski gloated: “We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War.”

Stoking war for the purpose of revenge by proxy had dire costs. For the Soviet Union, the conflict became a “bleeding wound,” in the words of that country’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Over nine years, the USSR lost 14,500 soldiers. The people of Afghanistan endured far worse, suffering an estimated 1 million civilian deaths. The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 paved the way for a brutal civil war followed by the Taliban takeover of the country. 

The covert conflict by America and its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia also empowered Islamic extremists — including Osama bin Laden — and set the stage for the rise of his terror group, Al Qaeda. The Soviet Union quickly passed from existence, collapsing in 1991. Bin Laden soon turned his attention to American targets.

In 2001, 19 Al Qaeda operatives with box cutters used airliners to kill almost 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. They were able to goad the world’s sole superpower into eschewing a measured law enforcement response to the 9/11 attacks for a ruinous “global war on terror.” The forever wars, which began in Afghanistan, spread to Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, the African Sahel, Syria, Yemen, and beyond.

It took the United States until 2011 to finally kill bin Laden, but the conflict he ignited has raged on without him. The U.S. would suffer wheel-spinning stalemates across multiple war zones and another embarrassing defeat, this time in Afghanistan.

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But just as with Vietnam, other people suffered far worse than Americans. More than 905,000 people have died due to direct violence in the forever wars, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Around 3.8 million more have died indirectly from economic collapse, the destruction of medical and public health infrastructure, and other causes. As many as 60 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines. All that death and suffering has been purchased by the U.S. government for a butcher’s bill of about $8 trillion and climbing.

President Donald Trump, despite his “peacemaker” rhetoric, has kept the forever wars burning with attacks in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Trump has also been threatening war with Iran, a throwback to the first flush of the war on terror, when the popular quip among neoconservatives was: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” Such a conflict could result in tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths. If it spiraled into Israeli nuclear strikes on Iran, many millions could die.

 

The Trump administration has even found a way to add more casualties to the toll of the Vietnam War.

Trump’s 90-day freeze on foreign aid ground U.S.-funded programs in Southeast Asia, including demining initiatives, to a halt. In February, an unexploded U.S. bomb in Laos killed two teenaged girls. That same day, two toddlers in Cambodia were killed by another piece of unexploded ordnance.

Aid has since resumed, but it remains unclear for how long and in what amounts. What isn’t in doubt is how much it is desperately needed. Millions of acres in Vietnam — almost one-fifth of the country — were still contaminated by U.S. munitions as of 2023. There might be as much as 800,000 tons of unexploded ordinance, or UXO, littering the nation. Experts say it could take a century or more to remediate Southeast Asia — and that was with full, uninterrupted U.S. assistance.

“In the long run, the abrupt withdrawal or decrease of U.S. support could permanently undermine UXO programs in the region if alternative funding and programs fail to fill the void. The landmines and UXO problem in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam are one of the most persistent and complex in the world, requiring consistent funding and a multifaceted approach over many decades,” Sera Koulabdara, the chief executive of Legacies of War, a U.S.-based advocacy and educational group focused on demining, told The Intercept. “Without this support, efforts to resolve the problem will be significantly hindered.”

More than 15 years ago, I traveled around Vietnam meeting survivors of the long, lethal tail of the American war and covering the work of a local demining team. I spoke with parents whose children had been maimed and killed by American munitions and youngsters orphaned by decaying American ordnance, including a girl named Pham Thi Hoa.

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Pham’s family suffered immensely from the American war. One set of great-grandparents were killed, in 1969, when their hamlet was bombed. That same year, a great-aunt and three of her children died the same way. Sometime after the war ended in 1975, Pham’s other great-grandfather was killed by a landmine. A great-uncle died from an unexploded ordnance blast in 1996. And in 2007, Pham’s father, mother, and 3-year-old brother were all killed by a 105 mm U.S. artillery shell.

Pham made an indelible impression on me. I arrived in her village one afternoon expecting to interview a young woman of 18. When my car pulled up, an 8-year-old sprite of a girl with large brown eyes and a bright smile came bounding toward it. It tore my heart out. Somehow, I knew that I had been misinformed and that this was the survivor. I also knew there was no way I could ask this child what happened to her family. When she was out of earshot, her grandmother offered up a spare but gruesome account of bodies ripped in two and a toddler reduced to a basketful of viscera.

I haven’t kept in touch with her, but Pham should be about 25 years old. There’s a good chance she’s married and may even have children of her own. They are going to grow up in a Vietnam contaminated by the deadly detritus of an American war that ended 50 years ago. Their children will too. Just how many generations of this family will live in such peril remains to be seen. The same can be said of people in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Laos, Syria, and beyond.

Wars aren’t over when they’re over. America’s conflicts keep killing people long after the guns fall silent. Just how many more people die may depend, in part, on the Trump administration’s decisions in the weeks and months ahead.

“No one knows how many years it would take to clear all the UXO in Southeast Asia. This will all depend on resources available. The most important thing we should prioritize is how many lives we can save from these explosive remnants of war,” said Koulabdara. “We have seen the number of accidents decline and this is a direct result of funding the clearance efforts and explosive ordnance risk education. These are vital programs that we must preserve until Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam are impact-free from the dangers of 50-year-old war trash.”

The post The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People, 50 Years Later appeared first on The Intercept.

Standing in his yard on a hill overlooking the city of Kobane, al-Hamid, a veteran ambulance medic, takes a drag and looks out across his hometown. Turkish jets can be heard roaring overhead, followed by the distant whump of bombs dropping in the countryside.

War is closer every day. And as a medic, al-Hamid has been at the center of the fray.

“We like freedom and peace — we don’t want to fight,” he says. “But when war came again to our doors, I said ‘I will go.’”

Kobane, a city of more than 100,000 people nestled on Syria’s northern border with Turkey, is best known as the site of a ferocious siege by the self-proclaimed Islamic State in 2014 and 2015, when the fundamentalist group sent waves of car bombs and kamikaze fighters to try and take the city from the left-wing Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG. Al-Hamid sprung into action again in 2019 amid rounds of fighting between a coalition of Turkish-backed Syrian factions and the Syrian Democratic Forces — the alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias that grew around the YPG and that controls the region.

Now, Kobane faces the gravest threat in years.

In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 8, Turkish-backed militias launched a ferocious ground offensive against the SDF, pushing them back to the Euphrates River, which now acts as a dividing line between the two forces. Turkish airstrikes against both military targets and civilians have been relentless: In the past week alone, Turkish drones hit a produce market in the nearby town of Sarrin, killing eight and injuring more than 20; in Kobane, another drone strike killed a young couple in their home.

In the span of six weeks, half of al-Hamid’s six-person crew was killed.

“As ambulance drivers we really love our work and doing something humane,” he says, coughing intermittently. “We heal our injured and bring back the fallen ones.”

Reporters with The Intercept recently spent 12 days in Kobane and found it effectively under siege. The city has been without electricity or reliable running water for nearly two months after Turkish airstrikes damaged the Tishreen Dam, a hydroelectric plant on the Euphrates River. Water is delivered by trucks, but it is impossible to meet demand, and the daily supply is barely enough to wash clothes or shower. The lack of heating and hygiene is a public health threat, and illness is rampant.

Aside from those families able to afford solar panels, most of the electricity in Kobane is coming from gas and diesel generators, whose fumes hang in a smoggy haze in the open-air market, or souk, at the city center. In the souk, hundreds of businesses are crowded into a small area, with entire streets shielded from aerial view by aluminum sheeting, blankets, and tarps in a defensive measure against Turkish reconnaissance and armed drones. Kurdish and Arab vendors alike are struggling to make ends meet, but business carries on: falafel shops, cellphone stands, beauty salons, and bakeries remain open.

Life is curtailed by sunset. After dark, residents mostly stay inside; when they do venture out, they use flashlights to get around. Barbers can be seen cutting hair with the help of handheld lights, or occasionally in complete darkness.

“We used to work until 10 or 11 p.m.,” says Mahmoud, 40, who runs a falafel restaurant in the city center. “Now, with the electricity cut, it starts to become dark around 4 or 5 p.m. Everyone brings their kids home, and we also close our shop. It is very difficult.”

In the weeks after airstrikes cut off power and water from Tishreen, Kobane has relied on an emergency water supply, pumped to the city by diesel-run generators from another location on the upper Euphrates, north of the dam. Only one of the four pumps was operational — but on February 2, an airstrike destroyed the last pump, destroying the backup water system entirely.

That has left residents to tap into a limited supply of groundwater underneath Kobane, a last-ditch effort that still leaves many residents without adequate access to water, according to Mexrad Bosî, co-chair of the Euphrates Region Department of Drinking Water.

“At least 10 unofficial wells in the city have come to our attention by now,” Bosî told The Intercept. “Many don’t have money to dig wells or buy bottled water. Humans always look for solutions, even if it means drinking dirty water.”

The only road linking Kobane to friendly locales runs a circuitous route whose twists and turns add hours to any trip, leaving travelers and supply convoys exposed at all times to Turkish airstrikes, or to raids by the lingering remnants of the Islamic State who still haunt the desert to the south and east.

If the Turkish-backed forces were to cross the Euphrates, they could surround the city completely.

In January, civilian protesters began gathering at Tishreen Dam to call for an end to the attacks — and to support their relatives and friends in the ranks of the Syrian Democratic Forces against Turkish-backed factions just across the river. Turkish jets and drones attacked the protesters repeatedly on the roads leading to and from the dam and on the dam itself. In one video released on a pro-Turkish Telegram channel, a drone can be seen dropping a grenade onto a group of civilians performing a traditional Kurdish dance.

“The people know it is dangerous to go,” says al-Hamid. “But people go because their children are at the front, they go to show support to their children.”

Al-Hamid, too, knows the danger intimately. As the protests continued at the dam, members of al-Hamid’s crew had been traveling as part of a civilian convoy in support of a demonstration against the fighting. On January 15, Turkish jets struck one of the convoys, killing al-Hamid’s friend Omer Hesen. Another colleague, Mahir Muhammed, was hit and died of his wounds the next day. (The first friend to fall, Kurdo Bozan Khalil, 22, died in an airstrike on December 11.)

In the wake of the January 15 strike, a chaotic scene unfolded at Kobane’s main hospital as the wounded began to trickle in. Hundreds of locals turned up to see if their relatives were among the wounded or to donate blood. Multiple witnesses said the strikes seemed to specifically target the ambulances.

“It is immoral, but Kurds are hit everywhere they are, even in ambulances,” al-Hamid told The Intercept that day, shortly after delivering his mortally wounded friend to the hospital in Kobane. “We cannot protect ourselves anyhow. We mark our ambulances clearly, and there are international laws that state that ambulances should not be hit.”

Days later, reporters with The Intercept met up with al-Hamid again at his home. At 53, al-Hamid was something of an elder on the team, and the deaths of his younger colleagues appeared to weigh on him. Omer, 47, left behind several young children. Mahir, 29, left behind a widow. Mahir was the only man left in his family, having already lost his father and brother to an attack by ISIS in 2015.

It was al-Hamid who had brought Mahir onto the crew in the first place.

“We wanted to support him, because his family had a lot of martyrs and was struggling financially,” he recalls. “I insisted we should provide work for him.”

Standing in his yard, he clutches a photo of Mahir and pauses several times to show it to reporters.

“We told them not to go. … We wanted to protect them, but they did not accept,” he says, his eyes welling with tears. “They were ambulance drivers so they insisted on serving their people.”

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With international attention focused on the nascent, post-Assad state-building process in Damascus, the fighting along the Euphrates has largely flown under the radar. But the attacks by Turkey and its proxies in the former rebel coalition known as the Syrian National Army this week drew a strong rebuke from Human Rights Watch, which specifically singled out attacks on medics like al-Hamid’s crew.

“Striking an ambulance carrying wounded civilians on an open road is unlikely to be an accident,” Hiba Zayadin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Thursday. “It looks like a war crime, and the Türkiye-SNA coalition should be held accountable.”

After the deaths of Mahir and Omer, al-Hamid and his remaining crew began making aid runs to the dam in unmarked cars. It felt safer.

Like the majority of Kobane’s residents, al-Hamid is Kurdish: part of an ethnic group linked by language and cultural tradition but scattered across enclaves in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran after the geographic homeland was divided by international borders that date back to the lines drawn by colonial powers divvying up spheres of influence amid the remains of the Ottoman Empire. Without a state of their own, the Kurds have long faced discrimination in the countries in which they reside. In Turkey, the Kurdish language was suppressed, while in Syria, including the area in and around Kobane, the government of Hafez al-Assad — Bashar’s father — pursued alternating cycles of neglect and repression.

Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, Kobane — along with a patchwork of Kurdish-majority areas across northeastern Syria — has been under the de facto control of the YPG, which later merged with a handful of other militias to form the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.

The autonomous region became known as Rojava — a word meaning “the west,” in reference to its geographic position within the Kurdish-speaking world. However, with the fall of ISIS territorial rule between 2017 and 2019, the regional autonomy expanded to the governorates of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, both of which have majority-Arab populations suspicious of being ruled by a Kurdish-led administration. Amid efforts to overcome friction between Kurds and Arabs, the territory and the civilian administration of the region has been referred to with a more inclusive, albeit cumbersome, name: the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or DAANES.

Throughout the Syrian civil war, Turkey has approached Kurdish autonomy in northern Syria with suspicion and hostility, largely due to the ideological and organization links between the SDF and the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has been waging an insurgency against the Turkish state for nearly half a century.

The PKK emerged in 1978 as a Marxist-Leninist group fighting for Kurdish self-determination in Turkey. Over time the group and its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, have moved away from the orthodox Communism of the Cold War era and embraced an ideology of radical ecology, women’s freedom, and federal democracy inspired by the libertarian socialist philosopher Murray Bookchin. When the YPG rose up to declare Rojava as an autonomous region, they did so under the banner of Ocalan’s ideas — while denying any direct links with the PKK.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan considered the YPG to be little more than a Syrian branch of the PKK, and viewed the autonomous territory under its control as a safe haven for his enemies and a potential staging area for PKK attacks inside Turkey. At times, Erdoğan seemed to take a harder line against the YPG than against ISIS.

To Kobane residents who survived the devastation of war and worked hard to rebuild their city, the current crisis — now nearing the two-month mark — feels eerily familiar.

“We defeated ISIS in Kobane, but at the same time they burned down everything; our homes, houses, places, everything,” says Mahmoud, the restaurant owner. “We went to Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, or Europe and came back to build everything from scratch.”

“Now Turkey is doing the same,” he continued. “They want to annihilate the Kurds here.”

Kobane is a city that remembers its past.

On the outskirts of Kobane lies the Martyrs Cemetery, where residents hold a monthly celebration to honor their fellow townspeople who have given their lives over the years.

To walk through the memorial grounds is to embark on a tour of recent history, illustrating the painful phases of expansion and loss that have buffeted Kobane and the rest of the region.

At the heart of the burial ground, now more than a decade old, are the graves of those who fell early in the war: civilians killed by an Al Qaeda suicide bombing, and row after row of men and women who died defending the city from ISIS in 2014 and 2015 when, led by the YPG, the defenders of Kobane held their ground against all odds through months of grueling, house-to-house fighting. The U.S. helped turn the tide by conducting airstrikes against ISIS targets identified by YPG fighters on the ground, but it was the YPG who held their ground.

At the time, ISIS had seemed unstoppable. Kobane proved that wrong. Kobane became a symbol of resistance across Kurdistan and beyond, and the dogged efforts of the YPG attracted worldwide sympathy, along with a wave of foreign volunteers.

The competence of the YPG fighters in holding off ISIS also caught the attention of the Pentagon, which had been looking — and failing spectacularly — to find a reliable partner on the ground in Syria. That need became especially critical as U.S. interest in the broader war shifted away from the Assad regime and came to center almost entirely on defeating ISIS. The coordination that helped turn the tide of the battle for Kobane — YPG fighting on the ground and calling in coordinates for airstrikes on ISIS positions by coalition jets — became a model for the fight to retake cities and towns held by ISIS over the next three years.

In its need for a local teammate against ISIS, the Obama administration chose to overlook the group’s not-so-subtle links to the PKK, a proscribed terrorist group. This put U.S. policy at odds with its NATO ally, Turkey and its president, Erdogan.

Amid Erdoğan’s bid to carve out a role as a powerbroker in Syria, the Turkish military had for years been forging links with various rebel groups. And as the YPG, and later the SDF, gained power and stability from its partnership with the United States, Erdoğan used these Turkish-backed rebel groups as a cudgel to pursue Turkish interests. In 2017, dozens of factions united under the umbrella of the Syrian National Army and eagerly joined in the Turkish war on the SDF. The most severe phase of this conflict came in 2019, when Turkish-backed groups invaded a strip of land to the east of Kobane, capturing several key towns along the border that they continue to control.

As a condition of a 2019 ceasefire deal, the YPG agreed to pull its troops and heavy weapons out of Kobane. To this day, the security presence in the city is remarkably low-profile, consisting mainly of lightly armed police.

In Kobane, the Martyrs Cemetery continued to swell with SDF fighters and Kurdish civilians picked off in the wave of drone strikes and targeted assassinations that have marked Erdoğan’s ongoing low-level campaign against the autonomous region in recent years, but on the ground, the conflict between Turkey and the SDF was largely frozen.

The stalemate broke in December, amid the lightning rebel offensive that brought down the Assad regime and installed a transitional government led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — a former Al Qaeda affiliate — and its leader, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.

As HTS fighters raced toward Damascus, the SNA turned their attention toward SDF and made rapid territorial gains with the support of Turkish air power. As the SNA advanced, it displaced an estimated 100,000 Syrian Kurds, many of them already displaced in earlier invasions by Turkey and its proxies.

By mid-December, the fighting was largely focused on the area around the dam and hydroelectric plant in Tishreen. Since then, fighting has continued on the ground just east of the river, and Turkish airstrikes have repeatedly targeted the dam, according to the DAANES civil administration.

Requests for comment to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs went unanswered. But in reports by the state-owned outlet Anadolu, unnamed Turkish officials accused the SDF of using civilians as human shields at the dam.

“The terrorist organization will not be allowed to use humanitarian infrastructure facilities, disaster prevention efforts, or innocent civilians as bargaining chips,” the officials told Anadolu, which identified them only as “ministry sources.”

SDF officials, meanwhile, deny the allegations that they have been using human shields.

“There is no presence of the Syrian Democratic Forces on the dam,” SDF spokesperson Farhad Shami told The Intercept. “Civilians gathered at the dam to protest against the ongoing Turkish air and ground attacks, which target the dam and threaten its structure.”

In the first weeks of fighting in December, U.S. officials were working behind the scenes to bring an end to the fighting, and on December 24, U.S. troops arrived in Kobane and set up a small base close to the city center, raising the U.S. flag next to the main administrative compound in the city in an apparent signal of deterrence to Turkey. The troops departed a short time later, however, and by mid-January, the base sat empty, the flag lowered.

In a statement to The Intercept days before the inauguration of Donald Trump, a State Department spokesperson urged both sides to deescalate. Marco Rubio, Trump’s new secretary of state, has recently spoken in support of the SDF. But Trump has been known to overrule the opinions of his Cabinet, and in his first term, Trump’s position on the Syrian Kurds was characteristically scattershot. His administration initially followed the Obama-era policy of close coordination with the SDF, leading some in Kobane to view Trump with such fondness that one businessman named a restaurant after him.

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But the love didn’t last: Despite the critical role the SDF played in the war against ISIS, and the more than 10,000 of its troops who fell in battle over those years, Trump left the Kurds in limbo in 2019 when — immediately following a phone call with Erdoğan — he abruptly decided to withdraw all U.S. troops from northeastern Syria, paving the way for the Turkish invasion of the region that year.

Syrian Kurds felt deeply betrayed. The restaurant named for the 45th president removed any mention of him.

But it’s now unclear what stance, if any, the Trump administration will take. The Intercept reached out to the State Department last week to clarify the administration’s position on Turkish aggression against the Kurds. No one responded.

Now, in Kobane, the cemetery is growing at the fastest clip in years. Since the SNA launched its eastward offensive in December, more than 120 people have been buried in the newest section of the graveyard — among them Mahir Muhammed, the colleague of Menzeer al-Hamid killed on January 16.

In another corner of the city across town from the Martyrs Cemetery, a few feet from the border, lies another monument to past conflict. While most of the city has been rebuilt since 2015, residents of Kobane have kept a few blocks of the city in the condition it was left after the siege, referring to this area as “The Museum.”

Away from the sound of generators in the living city of Kobane, flocks of birds fly in eerie silence over the rubble, which is still strewn with the signs of battle, including the bones of ISIS suicide bombers who died in the failed invasion. Across the border wall, the Turkish flag flaps in the wind, looming over the destroyed areas and the rebuilt city alike.

The Kurds fought off the Islamic State, and despite repeated attacks by the armed forces of Turkey and its proxies in Syria, they carved out a statelet for themselves, pursuing a radical social revolution that saw the empowerment of women and a relative stability that eluded much of the rest of the country.

Al-Hamid’s home is a testament to this. In the years since the siege left most of Kobane in ruins, his family has rebuilt their house, added solar panels, and planted olive, fig, and apricot trees. In one corner of the yard sits a pile of metal rods under a tarp, the structure of a large tent that Hamid says he is ready to erect to support any refugees who might need shelter in the coming months.

And back in the souk, at the center of Kobane, life goes on.

“For us it doesn’t matter if we are full or hungry, without water or electricity,” said Brader, a 60-year-old restaurant owner.

“We are very resilient people,” he said.

Additional reporting by Maryam Ashrafi. Hilsman, Sulku, and Ashrafi reported from Kobane, Syria; Hurowitz reported from New York.

The post Twelve Days in Kobane, Where Syrian Kurds Are Under Attack by Turkey appeared first on The Intercept.

And then there’s the issue of medication. 

“My doctor told me that the antiretrovirals have been consumed completely and there is nothing left in store,” said E.S., who is HIV-positive and agreed to speak with The Intercept using a pseudonym to avoid community stigma and targeting by the Israeli authorities. 

He needs tenofovir, a common HIV medication, and lopinavir/ritonavir, a much more rarely prescribed one. At times, E.S. has had so little left that he dangerously began rationing his pills by skipping morning doses. “There are no more supplies coming in or there hasn’t been any supplies at all coming in to the south or to the north,” he typed in a direct message. While Israel has denied blocking medication, international aid groups like Glia have told The Intercept that HIV medication specifically has been blocked from entering the Gaza strip. 

Without these medications, E.S. — who already uses a walker for mobility — would see his health deteriorate rapidly. Within a short span of time, he would begin to move even more slowly, and he might lose the ability to walk altogether. With soldiers mandating mass displacement and sniping Palestinians as they try to evacuate, this could mean a death sentence. 

As Israel’s war on Gaza rages around him, E.S. has spent most of his time at home with his two cats. While many of his neighbors moved south to Rafah, he stayed put with his brother and mother, who is a cancer survivor. His limited mobility, the result of a viral infection exacerbated by HIV, made leaving more dangerous than staying. 

So they chose to stay north — despite warnings from the occupation military to evacuate. His home, while offering more protection than a tent, hasn’t exactly been safe: “I saw people get sniped right across the street from me. It was a family of five trying to cross the road after they were ordered to evacuate their building before it was bombed.” He said the parents died and the children survived.

E.S. used to get his medication from Al Rimal Martyrs Clinic, but it was evacuated and then reinhabited by displaced Palestinians. 

“Now, with the genocide happening, I fear not only my health deteriorating, but also how my family will respond,” he wrote. For years, his family didn’t acknowledge his HIV status; now he worries that his condition will be a liability for them.

There is an added terror for Palestinians in Gaza who must hunt down vital medications. It’s especially hard for those few dozen looking for stigmatized HIV meds.

According to “HIV/AIDS in Palestine: A growing concern,” a 2020 article in the International Journal of Infectious Disease, there have only ever been about 100 cases of HIV officially documented by the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Still, the report found, “the Middle East and North Africa region is considered an area of increasing concern for HIV infection due to high mortality associated with AIDS” in general, and “Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) is part of this concern.” 

This is because HIV incidence is slowly increasing, and untreated HIV-positive Palestinians are progressing toward cases of AIDS. Similar to HIV dynamics among Black queer men in the Mississippi Delta, in Palestine, “within a short time patients become susceptible to opportunistic infections, probably due to the late diagnosis and presentation of the cases.”

And as outbreaks in America and Greece have shown, without adequate testing and screening, even a few cases of HIV can rapidly increase. 

As recently documented in Ukraine and Russia, wars have long exacerbated HIV transmission. In Gaza, the universal protocols needed to prevent blood-borne infections simply cannot be followed. 

The Gaza Ministry of Health told The Intercept that it contacted HIV patients at the beginning of the war, urged them to visit specific health facilities, “and their treatments were dispensed for a period of 3 months.” 

“Now, unfortunately, their treatments are not available,” the ministry added.

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Bombings routinely cause Palestinians with no training (let alone latex gloves) to desperately try to save their wounded neighbors, hospitals lack water for washing hands or surfaces, and patients with gaping wounds are treated on blood-soaked floors. 

With Gaza’s few hospitals targeted and largely destroyed — and with more than 1,000 of its health care workers killed and others detained — this is not an environment where any virus can be contained.

E.S. was born and raised in Gaza. He grew up Muslim but doesn’t practice the religion anymore. He describes himself in many ways: as someone who is very spiritual, with a deep connection to the divine. As an artist, with a focus on mixed-media work related to gender expression and Gaza. As someone who is HIV-positive. As Palestinian. As queer. 

“I like ‘queerness,’ it kind of represents my wanting to be free and, like, fluid,” he wrote.

E.S. grew up exploring sexuality with his classmates and neighbors. Many of them are married to women now, he explained. He also had unfortunate experiences that he didn’t consent to with some men. 

E.S. spent a year in the United States as an exchange student in high school. He applied to colleges there afterward but, while waitlisted, began his studies in Turkey in early 2014 as a scholarship student. It was then that he first felt symptoms which he worried might mean he had HIV. In the same year, he got a scholarship to study at an American college, and by the end of 2016, he moved to the Midwest, where he was first diagnosed with HIV and syphilis and treated with antiretroviral medication. Feeling he could no longer deal with his illness alone, he left the United States in 2019 and returned home to Gaza.

Gaza has been the love of his life, the beach most of all. “It’s the only place where I feel at peace with myself.” 

But when he returned, E.S. didn’t know a single other queer person, let alone anyone else with HIV. When his parents found out about his HIV status, they told him it was his fault and they were worried it would bring shame to the family.

E.S. found it easier to avoid the subject, which meant he ran out of the medication he had been getting in the U.S. He didn’t know he could talk to the Ministry of Health to get more. His physical health deteriorated. “It was very complicated, because my mom was dealing with cancer,” he said. “She always justifies it by how there was so much happening. Because she was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through the treatment at around the same time.” 

People newly infected with HIV might not feel anything, and they may appear asymptomatic for many years. But E.S. also had syphilis. The delayed treatment for that and for his HIV (which suppressed his immune system) allowed the syphilis to progress into neurosyphilis, which damaged his nervous system, left him with chronic pain, impeded his ability to walk, and thrust him into severe depression and anxiety.

He felt like he wasn’t in a position to advocate for himself to his parents to help him, because the subject of his sexuality and his HIV status and viral infection were already so taboo.

“For them it is just like, no, like the natural way to go about it is dick and pussy. And like, if it’s dick and dick, you will go to hell. And before you go to hell, you’re gonna destroy the reputation of our family.” His parents had gotten divorced a few years earlier. “‘If anyone knows about your HIV status, there’s gonna be an apocalypse that’s gonna just destroy the entire world.’ This is what they made me feel like.” 

For years, E.S. suffered painfully without support. “I was complaining about pain in my legs. My dad would take me every month or so to the beach to lecture me and remind me to change my life.” When his father saw the infection was impeding his ability to walk, he took him to see a neurologist — but, according to E.S., told his son to lie about his condition. The neurologist couldn’t help E.S. without knowing the truth.

Eventually, in 2022, his father consulted with a close friend who was a doctor. This time, he confessed that his son was potentially dealing with a sexually transmitted disease. 

“To my dad’s shock,” E.S. said, “the doctor friend sympathized with my case in complete understanding and advised my dad to urgently rush me to the infectious disease department to get me registered (anonymously) and have me put on antiretrovirals and other needed treatment.” E.S. believes that his dad’s friend saved his life.

His parents’ response to his condition strained their relationship. “I kind of blame my parents for my disability,” E.S. said “I should not blame them, because this is from God and I respect it. I accepted surrender to it.”

But he still carries so much love for them. “What you would expect is like a supportive family — that would be the most important thing for you. Or like a solid group of friends, chosen family. But I had no one.”

Still, he has seen signs of other seemingly queer people. In one voice note, E.S. described getting food at the market in Gaza City. He was with his mom, and there was “this guy that had short hair, and his outfit was fully coordinated. And he had, you know, these mini purses in the way the bags that would hang from your shoulder, like no man wears that in Gaza, at least. And the walk was a bit flamboyant.”

A few weeks later, he said he saw another two guys, who were “straight looking or dressed in a straight way, wearing caps. Arab guys in Gaza, they like to wear tight jeans. But these two guys, when I was walking, we locked eyes and I just felt it. These motherfuckers sleep together.” 

E.S. says that there is an excitement to “clocking” other people in Gaza who might be queer. But it also brings with it other emotions. “I am just presuming their sexuality. I am presuming from how they walk fast or what they are wearing, but the biggest feeling I get is insecurity. What if that person perceives me? I’ve noticed them, so does that mean they are perceiving the queerness in me? So then, I feel this sense of shame and judgment or disapproval almost immediately.” 

E.S. likes to express himself by bleaching his eyebrows. “When I was a baby I had blonde hair. It is pretty much a ritual at this point. I usually get shy and ask my mom to buy the products for me. It’s weird when I buy them myself.”

Any identity, aside from being a Palestinian surviving, is hard for him to prioritize right now. 

By the time doctors began properly treating E.S.’s HIV, “it was super late.” The disease had progressed to AIDS at that point, since the level of his T cells — a type of white blood cells necessary to ward off infections — were dangerously low. An MRI suggested an opportunistic infection might have already gotten to his brain. 

By restarting HIV medication, E.S. eventually improved and got out of his deep depression. “I just started to figure out how to get back into life. One of the first things I did was start to wear colorful clothes instead of all black. I would also record Instagram stories, mostly for myself to be saved in the archive. But my dad didn’t like that and sensed I was ‘going down that path again’ and assumed I was communicating with some guy online.” 

By early 2023, E.S. said his father would continue having intimidating “pep talks” with him. He threatened to kill him if he kept “acting like a faggot.” Another pressure was the cost of his treatment — something E.S. said his father would not let him forget. Instead of prioritizing rehabilitation, E.S. threw himself into work as an English tutor, working seven days a week. The grueling schedule hindered his recovery. When he was diagnosed with neurosyphilis, his doctor said the physical complications would be temporary if he received proper physical therapy and rehabilitation. But since such facilities didn’t exist in Gaza, he planned to work hard for a year and save money to travel for treatment.

Months later, with a rare Saturday off work, E.S. agreed to go swimming at a local pool with his brother, father, and little half-brother. He was excited — he hadn’t gone swimming in a long time. The night before, he talked to his dad about where they could get one of those “round, tire-like floaties” because, with his disability, he said he “wouldn’t stand a chance in the water without one.” His dad reassured him they could buy one on the way.

But as he made coffee the next morning at around 6 a.m., he began to see and hear a “whopping number of rockets being launched across the horizon. I instantly knew something was off. I had never seen anything like that before. I rushed inside to wake up my mom and brother, then called my dad. We didn’t even need to call off our plans for the day — it was clear they were already off.” 

It was October 7, 2023. E.S. turned on the TV and quickly realized that people had managed to break the siege and enter the occupied territories. Before fully processing the implications, he said “it felt like breaking out of prison — quite literally.” 

But then, reality set in. What at first seemed like a jailbreak for Gaza, eventually transformed into a more intense prison sentence.

Months of Israeli military violence occurring outside of his house and inadequate food exacerbated his disability. The longer E.S. went without proper rehabilitation or food, the more his mobility deteriorated. 

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And if the syphilis came back, “I don’t think there will be any doctors left to help.” E.S. has been running out of his HIV medication and knows it could be his death sentence. He understands he eventually must begin prioritizing his health over the fear of being outed. In one written message, he typed, “silence equals death remains painfully true,” evoking a phrase coined by the activist group ACT UP in the 1980s. 

So he started reaching out to people online who he believed could help. Around the same time, a controversial story was getting attention on Instagram about someone going off HIV medications under very different circumstances.

On December 1, 2023, playwright Victor I. Cazares had to hastily leave for the airport to travel to their birth state of Texas when their grandmother became ill. Their “artistic home” at the time was the New York Theatre Workshop, where they’d completed a two-year fellowship and taught a class. 

“I forgot my HIV pills. The cab was here, and I forgot them,” Cazares recalled. But as they sat on the plane, a vivid scene played out in their head. “I got the image of Palestinians fleeing their homes, and realizing, or forgetting, or not having access to their medicine. And it was World AIDS Day.”

An idea formed: “I am not going to take my medicine until the New York Theater Workshop calls for a ceasefire.” The company is well known for work about AIDS, like the hit musical “Rent,” but like many nonprofit organizations in the arts and other fields, it had stayed silent about the mounting death toll in Gaza. 

Cazares’s pill strike, documented on their Instagram account and the subject of a widely read Vulture story, recalls a history of HIV medication refusal as a form of activism. In post-apartheid South Africa in 2002, Treatment Action Campaign co-founder and activist Zackie Achmat infamously refused to take antiretrovirals until such medications were widely available to everyone.

Cazares told Vulture they were prepared to refuse their meds until New York Theatre Workshop called for a ceasefire, there was a ceasefire, or they became hospitalized.

Then, “the night sweats began. I could feel the PH level in my skin changing. It took about two months for me to become detectable.” 

“I started having these neurological symptoms. I got scared,” they recalled to The Intercept. Cazares had moments where they lost clarity in their thinking and became alarmed at the “faulty” thoughts and “pathways that my mind would go” down. As a playwright, Cazares became worried about what would happen if these symptoms grew worse and if they suffered from permanent neurological damage.

Told about E.S. and his trials to obtain the kinds of medication he’d voluntarily refused, Cazares began to cry — then weep. 

“It’s not that I couldn’t imagine a person like E.S”; they just hadn’t known exactly who they were. In Cazares’s 14 years with HIV, “I had nights where I was really scared, and I had access to meds, and I can’t imagine on top of everything else, what that must be like for E.S.” Cazares noted how the “propaganda, the pinkwashing” and stigma “vanishes” people living with HIV. 

Ultimately, what made Cazares end the strike after 125 days and resume taking their medication was when they gave up believing the New York Theatre Workshop would speak out. They came to this realization as the company mounted a production of the World War II Nazi-era play “Here There Are Blueberries,” which Cazares described as “a play about people who do nothing during a genocide” — and New York Theatre Workshop still did not speak out against the violence in Gaza.

When an HIV-positive patient stops antiretrovirals, “the virus can replicate in their body very rapidly,” said Dr. Oni Blackstock, an HIV primary care physician and former assistant commissioner at the Bureau of HIV for the New York City Department of Health. The biggest barrier to managing an otherwise treatable virus, she said, is when access to care is disrupted by racism, homelessness, or war. The next greatest challenge is when the stigma of seeking treatment keeps patients away. 

“While how long it takes to feel the effects of” antiretroviral discontinuation varies, Blackstock said, it can happen in “weeks or days” and has a lot to do with a patient’s “baseline” of health.

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Given that E.S. has had neurosyphilis, is usually eating just one meal a day, and is trying to survive a genocide, he doesn’t have much of a baseline to begin with. Even a brief interruption to his HIV medication could make his neurological symptoms and mobility deteriorate.

“HIV destroys CD4+ T-cells that protect us from infection. Without medication, the virus increases, makes more copies of itself, and the immune system gets weaker — and then the person becomes vulnerable to different types of infections and cancers,” Blackstock warned. “Even minor infections can become threatening.” The risks in Gaza extend far beyond minor infections. Wounds from debris and bombings are common, Hepatitis A and cholera are rampant, and war zones breed antibiotic resistance.

Even polio, once eradicated, is back.

Compared to people living with HIV around the world, what E.S. is experiencing is both universal — stigma has been a huge barrier to his health — and geographically specific to the yearlong genocide in Gaza and the decadeslong occupation of Palestine. 

Around November 2023, E.S.’s doctor’s brother got access to the infectious disease health department’s storage in northern Gaza, and moved the medication E.S. needed to his own home. “They feared they would be destroyed had they left them at the health clinic,” E.S. said. He received a three-month supply — enough to buy him a bit of time. 

For months, E.S. had avoided asking for help publicly because he didn’t want to acknowledge his dwindling supply while the Israeli military killed his neighbors. It felt awkward to ask for help when others were starving or becoming orphaned. He also surmised that there was an outside chance the stock could get replenished somehow.

But in March 2024, he began to reach out. (He contacted Afeef, one of the co-writers on this story, because of his reporting on queer Arab stories on his Instagram page.) E.S. wrote, “I have about two months of HIV — medication. And I’m definitely on the lookout for possible ways to access my meds.” 

By June, the situation where E.S. was living had gotten drastically worse. Borders had been closed for over a month. In his correspondence, he said that the Northern Gaza Strip was being starved: “We are lacking any humanitarian aid,” he wrote. “We haven’t had any fresh produce/poultry/meat/dairy products for as long as I could remember. Whatever canned processed food that is left is being sold at much higher prices.” People were running out of cash, and no banking services remained operational. “It feels like a forever loophole,” he typed into the chat box. 

On top of all of this, he saw Israeli forces using quadcopters to attack civilians. “We were once at the market where a group of people were fired at, killing at least three people. It’s very terrifying to say the least.”

In July, E.S. asked his brother to make a trip to pick up more medication from the cache at the home of his doctor’s sibling. Although it was a big risk, he returned with enough to last E.S. until October. It was a relief that there were more pills left, but he wrote “after this runs out, I WILL ABSOLUTELY need to figure out another way to access them because there isn’t any left here up north as far as I know. And I don’t know if they will even be able to send more up north.”

E.S. decided the best course of action was to begin rationing his medication and skipping doses. “I did that for a couple of days. But my doctor told me that I can’t under any circumstances do that. It’s better to be cut off than to ration/split or mess around with the doses.”

As the months passed, the stress was becoming too much to bear for E.S. “I’m trying to hold on, relying on my faith and doing my best to figure a way out, even though working under pressure has never been easy for me. I’ve reached out to organizations to try and get medication into Gaza, but every door I knock on gets shut. The only door that never closes is God’s, and maybe by sharing my story, I can finally get the help I need.” 

On July 10, E.S. wrote, “it’s been crazy here. Violent clashing has been super close. It’s been going insane the past couple of days .” The raging conflict made it impossible to imagine when his dwindling pill supply could be replenished. 

By August, E.S.’s original doctor stopped answering him. “Hope nothing bad happened to him,” he wrote. On September 15, E.S. wrote, “For the past ten months, I was lucky. I had access to my HIV medication because I stayed in the north of Gaza. But now, I’m running out. I took the last doses in the north,” and he’d been told “there are no more supplies coming in. No more meds for me.” 

By then, Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Palestinian Canadian emergency physician representing a medical organization called Glia, had seen E.S.’s story on Instagram and reached out to help. Loubani has been on more than 20 medical rotations to Gaza since 2011, and continues to go, even though he was shot in 2018, a fact he downplays (“it was the cleanest shot possible”).

On its first scheduled mission after the October 7 attack, Loubani’s group brought various medications in anticipation of shortages, including 100,000 units of insulin. But when it came to HIV medication, Loubani said that the first problem he ran into was that E.S. uses “a very, very, very special medication, such that most people with HIV don’t use this medication.”

Still, Glia did everything it could to procure the medications, only to be stymied in multiple countries. “I thought we could just buy it in Jordan, but in Jordan the medication was absolutely forbidden to access for anyone who wasn’t Jordanian.”

“Some not so great news,” Loubani wrote to E.S in early October, along with a photo of three bottles of the desperately needed lopinavar/ritonavir pills procured in Canada. “Everything is ready to enter in Jordan, but the entire team was denied entry on Tuesday. They’ve been rescheduled for 22 October. If you know anybody else entering, happy to give it to them.”

But when Glia transported a three-month supply of meds to the Gaza border, the shipment was confiscated. Then, Glia was banned from entering Gaza, along with several of its medical volunteers. The organization believes it was in retaliation for their participation in a New York Times essay published on October 9 called “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza.”

Asked for a response, the Israeli agency for the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories replied that “Israel neither blocks nor limits the entry of medications, including those for HIV, which can be brought in without quantitative restrictions.” COGAT did not directly address a question about whether Glia had been retaliated against for the Times essay, merely describing an article about its suspension as “outdated” and saying “the organization’s activities have been approved.”

Loubani said Israel has treated the medical caches “basically like weapons depots,” and alleged that the military “burned many of the medication warehouses that they found.” Loubani said the Israeli military “would station a sniper outside some of the depots.” One pharmacist “made a run for it, tried to get the medication and got shot in the neck, and miraculously survived,” Loubani said.

Then in mid-October, E.S.’s home was struck with a missile. He, his brother, and mother barely survived. On his Instagram stories, he shared a picture of a blown-out wall. His brother had been sleeping against it, E.S. said. But his constant feline companions were found dead under rubble. In one video that E.S. shared, a female emergency worker says “Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah” as she guides him out of his destroyed house as he wipes his teary eyes with his walker in front of him. 

E.S. moved with his family from his damaged home to a friend’s place they are renting in another part of Gaza City. “I haven’t had any rest lately. It’s been 4 days but all my psyche needs is to go back home and rest but I can’t do that,” E.S. explained. 

On October 26, E.S. finally reconnected with his original doctor from the Ministry of Health in the south, who had good news: He had secured more of his medication. One of the medications is made for children, “So I have to take 2.5 pills instead of the one pill I used to take.”

On December 3, Loubani messaged: “Good news, 3 months of Lopinavir/Ritonavir finally entered on Tuesday. Now we have to get it to Gaza City.” Many people around the world worked to make this happen because, as he put it: “Everybody cares about HIV medication. It occupies a special place in people’s hearts.” 

For now, E.S. has a few months before having to worry again, and he says that his mental health has vastly improved but still desperately hopes he can evacuate Gaza before running out of medication again. 

“No matter how tirelessly Israel works to ensure that nothing works for us who are suffering in Palestine, the magic and power of God defy those efforts,” E.S. said. “It’s in the small mercies — the kindness of strangers who expressed concern and offered help, and the miraculous arrival of my medication through a plan I could never have foreseen. These acts of grace are what keep us steadfast in Gaza.”

The post Queer, HIV-Positive, and Running Out of Medication in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

In the decade he worked at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, Dr. Patrick Gariety carried a notebook almost everywhere he went. “I was a compulsive scribbler,” he said, a psychiatrist and then-aspiring writer working in an environment that, in many ways, had to be seen to be believed.

Gariety had always felt drawn to public sector psychology, treating people who were marginalized and seriously mentally ill. His notebook became a way to process what he saw. “It was emotionally so fraught in different ways, that really the writing became therapeutic, a way of coping,” he told me in a phone call. So when there was a murder at the mental health wing of the prison on January 26, 2010, Gariety spent the next several weeks putting it all on paper. 

It was a Wednesday morning when he got the news. Gariety was entering the reception area, joining the crowded line of day shift workers at security as they took off their shoes, belts, and winter coats, when he heard a guard at the scanner say, “If you haven’t already heard, folks, an inmate was killed last night.” Gariety felt a surge of anxiety. He hoped and prayed that none of his patients were involved. Then his heart sank.

The victim was 51-year-old Victor Castro-Rodriguez, a skinny Cuban immigrant with bipolar disorder. He’d been found in his own cell, bound, gagged, and apparently beaten to death. Although he was not one of Gariety’s patients, Gariety knew Castro-Rodriguez. Just about everyone did. He was a talented graphic artist, Gariety wrote in his journal; some of his drawings hung in the psychiatrist’s office. “He merrily handed out his artwork to everyone.”

There were two killers, one of whom was Gariety’s patient: 38-year-old Charles Hall, who everyone called Chuck. Despite a tough-guy exterior — shaved head, tattoos — Gariety had never thought of Hall as dangerous. His violence was mainly directed at himself.

For practically his whole adult life, Hall had been afflicted by a severe case of Crohn’s disease that had ravaged his intestinal system — and which made life in prison a living hell. Hall expelled waste through an ostomy bag attached to his abdomen, which often failed to work properly, and he was often in pain or discomfort. In the weeks before the murder, he’d had his seventh corrective surgery. The sights and smells of Hall’s disability had made him a target among his neighbors; after arriving in Springfield, Hall had repeatedly asked to be placed in isolation. More than once, Hall had tried to take his own life, usually when he was having a flare-up of his symptoms. It was a suicide attempt that had landed him in Gariety’s unit in the first place.

In the weeks following the murder, Gariety’s own feelings of rage and revulsion gave way to a desire to make sense of it all. He reread his first psychiatric evaluation of Hall. “Certain things jump off the page,” he wrote. Hall had problems controlling his temper and acted out in ways that seemed irrational and self-defeating. The crimes that sent him to federal prison were a good example. While incarcerated in Maine, Hall had made a series of audacious threats to federal authorities by phone and by mail. He made no effort to hide what he was doing. “He even signed his name to one of the mailed threats,” Gariety wrote.

Hall showed similar behavior after Castro-Rodriguez’s murder. He insisted that he would kill again if he wasn’t put in isolation. “I want you to take me seriously,” Gariety recorded him saying.

There was something else in Hall’s file that captured Gariety’s attention. Hall had told him that his father had molested his sister when they were children — and that Hall once retaliated by trying to poison his dad with Drano capsules. Gariety wondered whether Hall himself had been abused. “It’s easy for me to imagine this only being the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote in his journal.

Gariety sensed an undercurrent of deep fear beneath Hall’s behavior. Perhaps his violent actions were partly a response to feeling threatened — and “a way to imagine himself now strong enough to stand up to” his abuser. Whatever his unprocessed trauma, it was compounded by his physical suffering, he wrote. This did not justify his actions. But it was a way to understand them.

Gariety left his job at the medical prison not long afterward and moved out of state. Earlier this year, a lawyer named Angela Elleman got in touch with Gariety out of the blue. It was then that he learned that Hall had been sentenced to death.

Gariety also learned that his previous speculation about Hall had proved prescient. Though it had been revealed at Hall’s trial that the story about his sister and their father was untrue, Hall’s post-conviction team had uncovered broader allegations of sexual abuse at a school he attended as a child. According to Hall and additional witnesses who gave sworn declarations as part of a legal filing in his case, Hall was one of numerous students molested by the school’s founder. “It would be unsurprising for a male inmate to have deep shame about any history of sexual abuse and to substitute his own story with a fictional one for someone like a sister,” Gariety wrote in a declaration for Hall’s attorneys.

“I’m opposed to the death penalty,” Gariety told me. “I didn’t experience Mr. Hall as a particularly sympathetic character, but I did not want to see him executed.” He remains circumspect about his observations back in 2010. He’d had no way of knowing the truth of Hall’s life and had clawed for an explanation. “Him committing murder was just so unexpected and so extreme,” Gariety said. “Where the hell did that come from? Why didn’t anyone see that?”

State of Emergency

Today, Hall is 53 years old and lives in the Special Confinement Unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. He spends most of his waking hours in solitary confinement, living in a cell the size of a bathroom. In his decade on death row, Hall has had no disciplinary infractions; according to a former case worker at the prison, who wrote a letter to the White House earlier this year saying that it would be best for Hall and for the staff in Terre Haute if his sentence would be reduced to life without parole. Hall “was not a management problem” during the seven years that he knew him, the case worker wrote. “He did, though, have intense medical issues that our prison was not set up to handle.”

As President Joe Biden prepares to leave office, Hall is among the dozens of people on federal death row who have asked him to commute their death sentence. His clemency petition makes a powerful case for mercy. It is supported by the family of his victim, Castro-Rodriguez, who say that executing Hall would only add to their pain. It also contains declarations from jurors who served at Hall’s 2014 trial, who say that the new claim of sexual abuse — along with abnormalities in Hall’s brain recently revealed by neurological testing — now cast him in a different light. “If I had known this information at the time of Mr. Hall’s trial, I would not have voted for the death penalty,” one juror said.

The new information is also at the heart of a lengthy legal challenge to Hall’s death sentence filed in federal court earlier this year. The record contains hundreds of pages of declarations and expert reports shedding light on critical aspects of Hall’s early life that his defense attorneys never investigated. “As a result,” it reads, “the jurors never heard a wealth of evidence, readily available at the time of Chuck’s trial, that would have led at least one juror to vote for a sentence less than death.” (The Department of Justice has not yet filed a response to Hall’s motion.)

His attorneys’ failure to present such evidence is emblematic of the kind of lawyering that has too often paved the way for executions at both the state and federal levels. Hall was represented at trial by veteran death penalty attorney Frederick Duchardt, who has become known for his refusal to do mitigation investigations, the painstaking process of digging into a client’s history for any evidence that might be used to spare their life.

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Of the 13 people executed during the killing spree carried out during Donald Trump’s first term, two were represented by Duchardt. Wesley Purkey, the second person killed in 2020, was sent to death row despite a history of sexual abuse by his own mother. Lisa Montgomery, the only woman executed by Trump, endured a lifetime of harrowing sexual abuse from the time she was a child. In both cases, Duchardt refused to hire a mitigation specialist, arguably one of the most important parts of a death penalty trial. Then, rather than concede any errors in support of his former clients’ post-conviction litigation (as trial lawyers often do), Duchardt filed lengthy affidavits defending his work.

Duchardt has been more cooperative in Hall’s case. Earlier this year, he sat down with Elleman to give a sworn statement explaining his decision-making in Hall’s case. The transcript was filed as part of Hall’s legal challenge. “There was a deep and rich story about what happened to Chuck Hall that Fred Duchardt didn’t understand, didn’t uncover, and didn’t tell the jury,” Ellemen told me. Duchardt declined to speak to me about the case.

While Hall still has a ways to go before exhausting his available legal challenges, there is no guarantee that his litigation will outlast a second Trump term. The looming return of federal executions has created a state of emergency for death penalty lawyers and their clients.

Many who watched in horror as Trump carried out an unprecedented execution spree during his final months in office have called upon Biden to intervene. Throughout November, Democratic lawmakers and hundreds of advocacy organizations called on the president to grant mass commutations to people on federal death row. On Sunday, Pope Francis urged Biden, a Catholic, to do the same. On Monday a new round of calls came from a wide range of groups, from retired prison officials to business leaders, current and former prosecutors, and judges. On Tuesday on Capitol Hill, the mother of Christopher Vialva, who was executed in 2020, spoke alongside other advocates at a congressional briefing organized by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.

Thus far, there is no indication as to whether Biden will heed these calls. Until this week, he had been stingy in exercising his commutation power. After angering people across the political spectrum by pardoning his son, on Thursday Biden pardoned 39 more people — and granted nearly 1,500 commutations to individuals released to home confinement due to the Covid pandemic. While activists lauded his actions, they also urged Biden to go bigger by granting clemency to all 40 people on federal death row.

If there’s at least one reason for hope among the men in Terre Haute, it’s that Biden recognized the problems with the federal death penalty enough to campaign on ending it in 2020. The promise did not hurt him with voters then — and now he has nothing to lose.

What Happened to This Person?

The Indiana Federal Community Defenders office is on the 32nd floor of an office tower in downtown Indianapolis. On a Tuesday morning in late November, a makeshift display of Hall’s artwork sat alongside office supplies in a quiet corner of the office. There were pencil portraits drawn of Hall’s legal team, a blue crocheted blanket, and dangly earrings made of pink and gold beads.

Angela Elleman, Hall’s lead attorney, had come to the office that day for a scheduled hearing in his case, which had since been canceled. She usually works in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, where, after years doing post-conviction litigation, she turned to trial work for 10 years. She came back to post-conviction work shortly after the end of Trump’s execution spree. In March 2021, she was appointed to represent Hall.

Reading the case files, Elleman saw things that Hall’s jury should have heard. In the run-up to the murder, Hall had reported thoughts of hurting others; despite his requests to be placed in isolation, he remained in an open unit at the prison. Due to his recent surgery, Hall had been taking prednisone on the day of the murder, a steroid that can cause mania and rage.

But there were also unanswered questions. As Elleman recalls, she began to suspect early on that Hall may have been sexually abused as a child, although she struggled to explain why. “I just felt like I knew in my bones that this was a possibility,” she said. Elleman’s hunch was so strong she spent time researching the Catholic priests in the parishes where Hall was raised, to see if any of them had been accused of abuse. But she came up empty.

Elleman’s intuition was at least partly informed by her 20 years representing people facing execution. Like all death penalty lawyers, her clients’ histories have been frequently marked by some form of trauma, abuse, or neglect, which is why investigating their early life is so critical. “People who have healthy and well-adjusted childhoods don’t just wake up one day and decide to kill someone,” she said. “The question for me becomes … what happened to this person?” As she read through the records and trial transcript in Hall’s case, Elleman realized that this fundamental question had gone unanswered.

It was not hard to see why Hall had been swiftly convicted. There was no question of his guilt; surveillance tape from the prison showed Hall and his co-defendant, Wesley Coonce, entering and exiting Castro-Rodriguez’s cell on the day of the murder. After Castro-Rodriguez’s body was found, Coonce and Hall quickly took responsibility for the crime. Hall went on to talk about it to seemingly anyone who would listen, from the FBI to his family to men he later met at another federal medical facility in North Carolina.

These statements formed much of the government’s evidence against Hall at trial. Especially damaging were letters Hall sent to his own federal prosecutors, in which he insisted that he should be given the death penalty. “The only thing that will stop me from killing again is putting me to death,” he wrote. He even laid out the reasons he met the statutory requirements for capital punishment, pointing out that the murder could be considered a hate crime because Castro-Rodriguez was Cuban.

If Hall’s acts of self-sabotage were a reflection of his suicidal impulses and instability, they were also aided by the attorney who represented him in the two years after the crime. The first lawyer assigned to Hall, Darryl Johnson Jr., had almost no experience with death penalty cases. When Johnson’s co-counsel was forced to withdraw due to a conflict of interest, Johnson replaced him with his own wife, who had never done criminal defense of any kind. Neither Johnson nor his then-wife responded to requests for interviews.

The couple represented Hall at a critical stage. In the federal system, attorneys for people accused of death-eligible crimes have the chance to meet with members of the Department of Justice’s Capital Review Committee, which advises the Attorney General’s Office on whether to seek the death penalty in a given case. In the summer of 2011, Johnson traveled to Washington, D.C., where rather than seek a plea deal or explain why his client should be spared, he told the committee that Hall wanted the death penalty. That July, the Obama administration gave formal notice that it would seek death against both Hall and his co-defendant.

Johnson and his wife eventually withdrew from the case amid allegations of professional misconduct by Johnson, as well as criminal sexual assault charges brought against him by a former client. He was later suspended from practicing law, although he has since been reinstated, and he was acquitted in the criminal case. In 2012, Johnson was replaced by Kansas City-based death penalty lawyer Frederick Duchardt.

Nature vs. Nurture

If mitigation investigations are a hallmark of modern death penalty defense, Duchardt has long had a reputation among many death penalty lawyers as being proudly behind the times. “I do not follow orthodoxy,” he told a Guardian reporter who profiled him in 2016, dismissing mitigation as “social work issues” that do not sway juries.

In fact, the evolution of mitigation work has been a game-changer for capital defense, and almost certainly a contributing factor to the dwindling number of new death sentences in the United States year after year. It was mitigation that led a Florida jury to spare the life of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz when he faced the death penalty in 2022. The more jurors are able to see a defendant as a human being rather than a monster, the harder it is to vote for them to die.

Hall was raised in Maine by a couple who adopted him and an older sister when they were babies. Although Hall and his sister have said that they received love and care, records in his case file also show that both children struggled with feelings of abandonment and identity, which manifested in behavioral problems their parents were ill-equipped to handle. The family participated in counseling programs that raised concerns about the couple’s drinking, which spurred conflicts at home. As Hall got older, he began stealing, including from his parents. By his early 20s, he had cycled in and out of jail and prison.

Duchardt had a lot to work with upon taking over the case. Although Johnson had done little to investigate Hall’s early life, he obtained voluminous records from Hall’s parents, which contained some glaring red flags. One was an undated handwritten note from Hall to his parents in which he threatened to kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning. “This is one problem you can’t solve with cops,” he wrote.

Records show that while Duchardt took some steps to investigate Hall’s background, he stopped short at critical points. Although he secured funds for an investigator, the investigator did not start his work until two months before Hall’s trial — and spent the bulk of that time tracking down Hall’s birth mother. This was an important piece of the puzzle: She had given Hall up after she was gang raped and impregnated as a teenager. But Duchardt did not send the investigator to speak to teachers and others who knew Hall as a child.

Duchardt also consulted with a neuroscientist immediately after taking the case. Despite being told that it was likely neuroimaging would “show some abnormalities in Mr. Hall’s brain structure,” Duchardt did not seek funding for such testing until the trial was less than a month away. By that point, it was too late. In a phone conference in April 2014, the presiding judge told Duchardt that “we’re three weeks from trial; and if we were to go forward with this, there’s an awful lot to be done.” He denied the motion.

Hall was tried in 2014 alongside his co-defendant, Coonce. Prosecutors argued that the men had targeted Casto-Rodriguez because he had intervened “in a fight or an argument” between one of his neighbors and a prison employee and was branded a “snitch.” Jurors found them guilty in about an hour.

The penalty phase of the trial would have been the place to draw a sharp contrast between Hall’s record and that of his co-defendant. Hall had gone to federal prison for a series of threats that, while perhaps terrifying, did not physically harm his targets. Coonce, meanwhile, was serving a life sentence for kidnapping and rape. One juror later told Hall’s attorneys that being tried alongside Coonce was “the thing that hurt Chuck Hall the most.” While the juror felt it was only fair to sentence them both to die, Coonce’s previous crimes “were in a completely different league.”

Although Duchardt called 15 people to the stand at the penalty phase, 10 of them testified via video — and two of them could not identify Hall when asked to do so. Some witnesses would later tell Hall’s attorneys that they had felt unprepared — and that rather than digging into any hardship Hall might have endured in his youth, Duchardt had elicited testimony to portray his upbringing as happy and filled with love and support. One man who had spent time with Hall at a punishing juvenile boot camp was cut off by Duchardt when he started to say that the camp had been shut down after revelations of abuse. “There’s so much more I could have said,” he said in a declaration.

Duchardt seemed especially adamant about showing the jury that Hall’s adoptive parents had done their best with a difficult child. “They weren’t perfect but they were sure darn good and they showed him every bit of love and care,” he said in his opening statement. He insinuated that Hall might have simply contained some intrinsic evil given how he was conceived. It came down to the “classic” question, he said: “Is it nature or is it nurture? And we don’t know for Chuck because, [his birth mother’s] rapist, we don’t know what his background was. We don’t know what his makeup was. We can’t tell you about any of that.”

Several witnesses addressed Hall’s tendency to exaggerate or invent elaborate lies about himself. An ex-girlfriend said, “he didn’t like the person he was … so he tried to make himself out to be somebody different.” The jury heard about Hall’s false claims of having tried to poison his father as retribution for molesting Hall’s sister — which his family testified was untrue — along with another convoluted lie. A psychologist who had once provided therapy to Hall said he’d falsely claimed to have had plans to attend the University of California, Berkeley, but that those plans had been derailed when he was arrested for assaulting two men who molested his friend’s 4-year-old daughter.

With no testimony to provide possible context for such invented revenge scenarios, the lies seemed to come out of nowhere. A different psychologist testified that Hall had “Antisocial Personality Disorder,” stating on cross-examination that he could be considered a “psychopath.”

Nonetheless, jurors remained split on whether to send Hall to death row. On the second day of deliberations, jurors sent a note to the judge saying that they had decided on Coonce’s sentence but “we are unable to reach a unanimous decision” about Hall. After the judge ordered them to keep deliberating, the jury decided on death.

A Shocking Discovery

Not long after Elleman was appointed to Hall’s case, she and her team started taking a closer look at the schools where Hall had spent time as a child. One of them was an alternative school in Burlington, Vermont, where Hall spent the 1984–1985 school year, when he was 13 years old. Although Duchardt went to Vermont at one point seeking records, he concluded that it would be impossible to learn much more about the school, which had shut down in 1986. As he told the jury at trial, “Frankly, we don’t know what happened there.”

In fact, there was a lot to learn about Shaker Mountain School. Newspaper articles throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s portrayed it as an innovative model for nontraditional education. Founded in 1968 by a man named Jerry Mintz, a “likeable, burly individual,” as the Burlington Free Press described him in 1970, the school once operated in an old grocery store and eventually expanded to multiple properties across Burlington. Teachers cobbled together classwork, vocational training, and arts instruction for students who did not thrive at public schools.

Like Hall, many of the students had problems at home and had spent time in juvenile facilities. There was no set cost of admission to attend. As the school entered its 10th year, Mintz wrote to the Free Press that the goal was “to provide an educational alternative for any student who wants one.”  

Mintz went on to become an author, consultant, and leader in alternative education. Meanwhile, Hall’s time at Shaker Mountain School seemed to derail him further. Although Hall had struggled at home and in school from the time he was in elementary school, records show that he was depressed and withdrawn upon his return. Sessions with a school psychologist in 1987 described Hall as “increasingly in crisis,” with “temper outbursts” and attempts to run away.

As Elleman and her team researched the school, it did not take long for a disturbing picture to emerge. Her mitigation specialist, Rebecca Cohen, found a Facebook page for alumni of Shaker Mountain School. When she contacted the administrator, he told her that he’d always hoped someone would look into what happened there. As Hall’s legal team later described in their motion, “the school had a freewheeling and sexually permissive atmosphere,” which gave rise to wildly inappropriate relationships and behavior by staff. “A teacher once played the piano with his penis in front of everyone,” they wrote.

Most shocking, the Facebook administrator revealed a dark, open secret that Cohen would hear about again and again as she tracked down more people connected to the school: allegations of systemic sexual abuse by Mintz of boys in his care.

Mintz directed questions to his attorney, Cory Morris, who noted that Mintz has never been arrested, let alone faced “felonious allegations,” in his life. “My client denies any and all wrongdoing,” Morris wrote in an email to The Intercept.

The accounts from the former Shaker Mountain students, which Hall’s lawyers memorialized in their motion to vacate his conviction, were strikingly consistent. Mintz would take boys from the school to go bowling or to the movies, often followed by sleepovers at the loft where he stayed. According to the declarations, the boys slept on mattresses placed on the floor. Mintz slept in his underwear and encouraged them to do the same. “At first, Jerry would offer us backrubs,” one former student recounted in a 2023 declaration. “I never wanted one, but he kind of pushed himself on you. And then, after awhile, when I’d be trying to sleep, I’d feel his hands on me.”

Cohen also collected declarations from former staff, who admitted sensing that something was not quite right about the sleepovers but mostly looked the other way. Although some students tried to report the abuse, their complaints went nowhere. According to Hall’s legal filings, Vermont’s Department of Rehabilitative and Social Services, which today is the Department for Children and Families, opened at least one inquiry based on a child’s complaint but “was told by child welfare personnel that his account alone was insufficient to substantiate charges.” The department did not respond to a message left by The Intercept.

Several former teachers and students remembered Hall, whom they knew as Chuckie. One woman remembered seeing him hanging out in the school’s “smoking area,” where Hall often seemed vigilant about where Mintz might be, according to her declaration. “His eyes were red-rimmed. ‘Where’s Jerry?’ he’d ask us.” Another man, whose declaration described Hall as his “best friend at SMS,” said that he remembered Hall going to the loft without him. “I remember telling him to stay away, but we never talked specifically about what Jerry had done to either one of us. It just wasn’t something you said out loud, even if everyone knew what was going on.”

Eventually Cohen met with Hall. Sitting across from him at a steel table at the Terre Haute prison, she told him that they had not talked much about his time at Shaker Mountain School. Without disclosing what she had learned, she asked him if he would tell her more about Mintz. As Elleman described it, Hall hung his head and began shaking. “Do I have to?” he asked.

During their visit that day, and in subsequent conversations with mental health experts, Hall spoke for the first time about what had happened at Shaker Mountain School. His accounts were incorporated into expert reports filed by Hall’s attorneys, including in one by Dr. Howard Fradkin, a leading expert on male survivors of sexual abuse. Fradkin concluded that it was a “clinical mistake to diagnose Chuck with Anti-Social Personality Disorder,” and that his primary diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder and Complex PTSD. In his opinion, “the impact of the untreated trauma is the best explanation for the many dysfunctional behaviors he engaged in throughout his life, culminating in the murder of a fellow inmate.”

The psychologist who testified at trial that Hall had Antisocial Personality Disorder also gave a declaration to Hall’s attorneys. “I based my ASPD diagnosis on the available information given to me by Fred,” he said, referring to Duchardt. Although the psychologist had suggested to the lawyer that brain imaging should be done prior to trial, this did not happen. Subsequent testing by Hall’s post-conviction attorneys “are remarkable,” he wrote, “in that they support that Mr. Hall has abnormalities to his brain.” Given this information and the alleged sexual abuse, he said, “I believe Mr. Hall’s brain dysfunction and history of trauma may better explain his history of lying/confabulation and failure to conform with the law.”

Duchardt learned for the first time about the accounts of sexual abuse at Shaker Mountain School during his interview with Elleman. Although he conceded that it would have been valuable information, he said he would not have necessarily presented it to a jury. “That would have been up to Chuck,” Duchardt said, according to the transcript. Regardless, his client never shared it. “And that’s where you have got an advantage on me, because I think that is something, believe it or not, that a man would share with a woman before he would share with another man.”

“I Felt a Lot of Peace”

A couple weeks before he went on trial for his life in 2014, Hall sent a letter to Olga Castro, the older sister of Victor Castro-Rodriguez. “I wanted to write to you earlier, but was advised to wait,” he began. “My lawyers and I agree that the time is appropriate. So I hope this letter doesn’t offend or upset you.”

“I know that Victor was someone you all loved and now miss dearly,” Hall went on. “Please know that I am deeply sorry for everything you’ve gone through in your loss of a loved one.”

The letter was read aloud by Duchardt’s co-counsel at trial. Taking the stand for the defense, Olga testified through an interpreter that the letter had been a source of comfort: “I felt a lot of peace.”

In fact, the family had made clear to the U.S. government years earlier that they did not support a death sentence for either Hall or Coonce. During a meeting between the family and a Department of Justice prosecutor in September 2010, Olga and her brother Eulogio had “advised that they opposed the death penalty,” according to a report by the FBI special agent who investigated the crime. Carrying out an execution “would not solve anything,” he wrote. “They noted that their decision was based on religious grounds and their belief that the prison was at fault in the death of their brother.”

Last year, Hall wrote another letter to Castro-Rodriguez’s family. “I wanted you to know that there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t live with regrets for my actions,” he wrote. “I do wish there were a way to change the past and bring Victor back to your family.”

In a video accompanying his clemency application, Olga and Eulogio reiterated what they told federal prosecutors more than 14 years ago: They do not want to see Hall executed. He and Coonce, like Victor, “were young men who were also sick,” Olga said. “I don’t believe in giving them the death penalty.” She said that she will pray for them: “Because only God delivers justice. Thank you very much.”

The post Charles Hall Insisted He Wanted the Death Penalty. Now He’s Asking Biden for Mercy. appeared first on The Intercept.

Qasem peered out the window to see what was going on. His family worried that Israeli troops would enter their town of Jabalia that night. Trying to calm them down, he countered, “There’s nothing left for them to enter.” 

Since Israel had launched its assault on Gaza a year earlier, the army had twice invaded Jabalia. “What’s left for them to destroy?” he recounted in a recent interview, an Israeli quadcopter’s strikes audible in the background. 

Qasem’s family, it turns out, was right. That night marked the start of Israel’s scorched-earth assault on northern Gaza — the so-called General’s Plan to purportedly combat Hamas while clearing the area of its residents.

Tens of families immediately fled Jabalia. “People were running barefoot, with clear horrors on their faces,” Qasem, who is 28 years old, told The Intercept.

His family stayed put at first, but as the days passed and the bombing grew stronger, his disabled brother, mother, and sisters went to a relative’s house in Gaza City, nearly 3 miles to the south of their hometown. They had already lost one family member, Qasem’s twin brother, back in April. Yet Qasem chose to remain.

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Since October 6, the Israeli army has paired its ground offensive with a nearly impenetrable siege and constant airstrikes — effectively starving the population while making it impossible for rescue teams and health care workers to do their jobs. While more than half of the area’s 200,000 remaining residents have fled since October, 65,000 to 75,000 people remain in the north, according to UNRWA. 

“The implementation of the so-called General’s Plan, and all the Israeli army’s actions in northern Gaza, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity,” said Yehya Muharab, an international law attorney. “These include grave violations of legal and humanitarian protections for civilians, hospitals, shelters, and vulnerable populations such as women and children.”

The Israeli military has killed at least 1,800 Palestinians in its ongoing assault on the north, said Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defense. On October 23, Basal said, an Israeli army drone played an audio message ordering rescue teams to evacuate the area — leaving an untold number of people trapped under the rubble or on streets that civil defense crews cannot reach. 

“We were instructed to stop responding to appeals from residents, cease practicing our profession, and even refrain from driving our vehicles,” Basal said. The military directed the rescue workers to evacuate through the Indonesian Hospital, where soldiers arrested nine workers. After halting its rescue operations, the civil defense has “received a lot of appeals from residents blockaded in the north to send them food and water. It’s a very miserable disaster.” 

The area’s two remaining hospitals — Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda — have meanwhile struggled amid Israeli bombings and the military’s refusal to allow the delivery of medical supplies and fuel. 

“We don’t even have a single ambulance to transport the injured from disaster sites,” Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, told The Intercept. He recounted getting distress calls from people trapped under the rubble and being unable to dispatch emergency workers to help them. “The next day, their voices were gone, and they were counted among the dead, with their homes becoming their graves. This scene is repeated daily.”

The hospital’s patients — children and adults alike — are suffering from malnutrition and dehydration, the doctor added, due to Israel’s siege. “Every hour, we lose patients due to these severe conditions.”

Abu Safiya himself was injured in an Israeli bombing on Kamal Adwan Hospital on November 24. This past weekend, Abu Safiya reported that the Israeli military had once again struck the hospital. He refuses to leave his post, determined to continue caring for those who remain.

Whether they fled or stayed behind, the survivors of Israel’s ongoing assault in the north have seen their lives indelibly shaped by fresh traumas compounding a full year of horrors. 

Family Separation

Amal Almasri’s entire pregnancy was defined by Israel’s assault on Gaza. Even after her house in Beit Hanoun was bombed in the first week of the war, and as relatives started moving to the south, her family defied Israel’s evacuation orders, moving between temporary shelters instead. When she found out she was three months pregnant in March, they had already spent several months sheltering at various schools in the north, life in a house of their own a distant memory.

The war raging around them made it almost impossible for Almasri to seek regular prenatal care, let alone to get the nutrients she needed to care for herself and the child growing inside of her. “I only met a doctor once every four months,” the 30-year-old mother of five told The Intercept. “It was severe starvation, no hygiene, and sewage flooding the streets. We relied on food aid. Sometimes we only ate every other day.”

After multiple false starts, she went into labor on October 3 — amid a period of intensified Israeli bombing that was a a precursor to the General’s Plan.

“My face was pale due to malnutrition,” she recalled. She was accompanied at the hospital by a friend, while her husband, Yousef Almasri, stayed behind at the school shelter to be with their other children. The morning after giving birth, Amal Almasri returned to the school herself. 

Their newborn baby was healthy, but the mother was physically drained. The couple had been expecting a son, and when they were surprised with a baby girl, they were unsure what to name her.

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The next day, the Israeli army began heavily bombing the area once again, as soldiers launched a ground invasion and besieged four schools housing displaced people. This continued for three days; on the fourth, the army rounded all the Palestinians up in a single school — the one the Almasris were at — before ordering them to leave the area.

The troops separated the men and women. Almasri moved slowly, hoping to be able to leave with Yousef, but the army threw a stun grenade into the building, then forced the women and children to evacuate.

“I went out and I saw about 30 men tied up,” Almasri said. “There was a large hole where [the Israeli army] had tied the men’s arms behind their backs and blindfolded them. [My daughter] shouted, ‘Mama, there’s Baba.’ I saw him, but I couldn’t wave to him. A soldier yelled at me to lower my hand, so I lowered my hand.”

Her 10-year-old daughter tried to get near her dad. “My daughter Handa left the checkpoint,” Almasri said. “She wanted to go to her dad but the soldier raised his gun and said, “Go back!”

The girl came back crying.

The soldiers instructed the women and children to evacuate south. Exhausted from childbirth, Almasri had no choice but to leave without her husband.

“I was so fatigued, as I had just given birth four days ago. I lost hope and had to evacuate without Yousef,” Almasri said. Her children were distraught, too. “Handa was carrying her 4-year-old brother, crying and saying, ‘We left Baba behind us.’ I tried to reassure her, promising she would see him soon. Handa suddenly collapsed under a tree, saying, ‘Mama, I’m tired. I can’t bear it. The road is so long. I want to wait for Baba.’ But we had to keep going.”

After a few hours, they arrived at another school in Gaza City, where they spent the night in freezing weather without blankets. Over the next few days, Almasri repeatedly tried to contact men who had been with her husband, but to no avail. On the fourth day, she received a call telling her that Yousef had been injured and was in Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City.

“I didn’t believe he was alive until Yousef called me. Most of the arrested men were killed by Israel,” Almasri said.

Later, they reunited in the school.

“They used my husband as a human shield,” she said, referring to the Israeli military. After shooting him in the leg, the soldiers forced him to walk in front of them during their invasion of schools and other places. “The army gave him some evacuation orders to deliver to Kalam Adwan Hospital. He did and escaped with people.”

After his release, the couple decided on a name for their daughter: Somod, which means resilience.

The Final Prayer

During the first year of the war and despite five bouts of displacement, Ramez Abu Nasser and his family stood their ground in northern Gaza. But as Israel’s attacks intensified this fall, they decided on October 5 that it had become too dangerous to stay.

They were lucky to find an apartment in a relative’s four-story building in Gaza City.

A week later, they prayed together before going to bed, as they always did. It was the last time they would do so.

“I woke up at 2 a.m., covered by rubble. I opened my eyes and saw fire everywhere, so I closed them again,” Abu Nasser told The Intercept. In that moment, he conjured the Muslim declaration of faith. “I started reciting the shahada.”

An Israeli airstrike had hit their building without warning. The family was trapped under the rubble.

“I managed to pull out myself and my 11-year-old brother, Adam, from the rubble. My younger brother, 15-year-old Rajab, was immediately killed and trapped beneath rubble,” he recounted. “My other brother, 20-year-old Hatem, was also trapped. I was digging with my hands, begging him to hold on. His muffled cries and screams shattered my heart.”

Abu Nasser was also looking for his parents.

“I remembered my mom and dad were in another room. I exited the house through a small opening in the wall, and entered through a window into my parents’ room,” he recalled. “I heard them yelling, ‘Get us out, we’re suffocating.’ I couldn’t do anything. They were under at least a meter of rubble.”

His 28-year-old brother Fady, who hadn’t been at the apartment, rushed back to help them. The civil defense crews arrived, but they had almost no equipment. Suddenly, some parts of the roof fell on them again. For two hours, they worked to pull the family members out from under the rubble. In that one night, Abu Nasser’s parents and two of his brothers were killed, while he and another two brothers were injured. 

“We buried them in a park, temporarily,” Abu Nasser said. “All the graveyards were full. We’re still looking for a graveyard to bury them in together.”

As Hatem recovers from his critical injuries, Abu Nasser hasn’t broken the news of the deaths in the family. 

“I told Hatem, our parents can’t visit you because our mother’s leg is broken and our father’s back hurts him.”

Abu Nasser himself was haunted by the loss. His face was pale, and he struggled with basic functions.

“I can’t sleep, eat, or do anything. I’m constantly zoning out,” he said. “When I enter the house, I unconsciously call out for my mother. I’m shocked every time I remember she’s gone. She was an amazing mother and a close friend.”

His parents were optimistic about rebuilding their lives once the war ended. He can’t fathom that, when the day comes, he “would return without my mom and the others.”

A few weeks after the attack, Israel struck Abu Nasser’s extended family’s house, killing 117 people. Only one man survived, and Abu Nasser helped him bury the casualties.

“I can’t guarantee my life for a minute,” he said, his voice filled with desperation. “There are no hospitals, no rescue equipment, and no one cares about us. I appeal to the world to stop the war.”

Scared and Starving

One reason so many families stayed in northern Gaza was that, quite simply, they had nowhere else to go. Such was the case of Hamza, a young man from Jabalia who asked The Intercept not to publish his last name out of fear for his safety. The war had taken its toll, with his 88-year-old grandfather, Atiyya, severely ill, suffering from malnutrition caused by starvation for over a year.

“He had hypertension, lost his appetite, and was unable to move,” Hamza told The Intercept. “We couldn’t even evacuate him because the sound of tanks was so close, and the Israeli drones (known as quadcopters) were constantly firing on our street.”

On October 7, the bombing in their neighborhood intensified, and Atiyya suddenly passed away.

“It was a night of relentless insane bombing. My grandfather used to say, ‘I am so afraid of the bombing,’” Hamza said. “We cried a lot. We called the ambulance, but they told us the area was too dangerous, and the Israeli army doesn’t allow them to operate in the area.”

It was too risky for Hamza’s family to leave the house to bury Atiyya in a graveyard.

“The only option was to bury him under the stairs of the house,” he recounted. “My brother and I dug a hole in our house and buried him there.”

The next day, the family decided to make the journey to Gaza City. They traveled separately “so that if some of us were killed, others might survive,” Hamza said. He was the first to leave, armed with a bag of canned food his mom packed for him. Hamza navigated narrow streets and eventually reached his relative’s house in Gaza City. A few hours later, he received a gutting phone call.

“They told me it was getting too dangerous,” he recalled. “I cried and wished I hadn’t taken any of the canned food, knowing there was so little.”

During the following days, his family remained besieged, drinking contaminated water and suffering from pangs of hunger. An Israeli shell hit their house, and his nephew was slightly injured by the shrapnel.

The family eventually managed to escape, traversing an Israeli military checkpoint separating Gaza City and the north. Though they’ve been reunited, the memory of grandpa’s final days still looms overhead. 

“My grandfather died scared and starving,” Hamza said. “He was older than Israel itself. He witnessed the Nakba. He told us this war was worse and more brutal than the Nakba.”

The post Trauma and Terror in the North of Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The arrests are part of the long arm of the crackdowns on campus protests that started in the spring and kept pace this fall. School officials had described the spray paint as “antisemitic.”

A local news clip shows a wall spray-painted with the names of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and Haiti. A building entrance was also splashed with red paint, including handprints, with posted signs that say, “Your school funds genocide.”

The protest and its aftermath came as Case Western was facing a federal civil rights complaint alleging bias against protesters and Palestinian students. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education opened a Title VI investigation at Case Western.

The latest arrests were part of an expansive crackdown: The school spent more than $250,000 on public safety staffing, equipment, and remediation after tearing down protest encampments, including removing signs and painting over murals on a campus “spirit wall,” according to documents reviewed by The Intercept.  (The school said it could not comment on the criminal investigation.)

Case Western issued notices of interim suspension or other warnings to students after protests in the spring and barred some graduating students from campus. Only one student, however, was suspended for the fall semester: Yousef Khalaf, president of the school’s undergraduate chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Among seven violations referenced in the notices, Khalaf faces school disciplinary allegations for engaging in intimidating behavior, including using the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” He is barred from campus until the spring of 2025.

Khalaf said he was treated differently than other protesters. His was the only case for which the school hired an outside firm, BakerHostetler, he said. He said SJP students have been contacted by school administrators for posting flyers or attending group events. (BakerHostetler and Case Western did not respond to a request for comment.)

“They don’t treat any other club this way,” Khalaf said. “We see very clearly the ‘Palestine exception’ being applied here.”

With Israel’s war on Gaza entering its second year, Khalaf is among thousands of students and faculty members still being targeted in universities’ battles over harsh protest crackdowns, free speech, academic independence, and discrimination.

The fights are playing out online, in campus quads, internal disciplinary proceedings, and in the courts. Organizers among the students and faculty say universities are retaliating against them for their activism and restricting their civil liberties and freedom of expression while claiming to uphold both.

“The university is threatening us with sanctions that could jeopardize our academic careers if we choose to speak out again.”

As campus protests reached their height in May, Dahlia Saba, a second-year Palestinian American graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote an op-ed supporting the demonstrators’ demands. She called on the school to address calls to divest from industries that profit from Israel’s war. She and her co-author Vignesh Ramachandran, another graduate student, were met with student nonacademic disciplinary investigations that relied solely on the op-ed for evidence.

“The university is threatening us with sanctions that could jeopardize our academic careers if we choose to speak out again,” Saba said. “They’re low-level sanctions to begin with, but the university is pursuing sanctions against many people on very little evidence.”

The issue is not so much the severity of the sanctions, Saba said, but using punishments to chill students’ speech. The disciplinary actions become a tool, she said, to help universities keep track of people involved in protests for Palestine.

“They are basically trying to get any sort of sanction on people’s records,” Saba said, “so that if they speak up again, if they do anything that criticizes the university’s investment policy, or if they in any way speak out in support of Palestine or in solidarity with Palestine, that students could be scared that the university could bring further charges against them that could then enact harsher consequences.”

Last month, 13 police officers stormed the home of student organizers at the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a raid on suspicion of a month-old incident of vandalism in connection to Gaza protests. Pomona College unilaterally suspended 10 students for the remainder of the academic year for allegedly participating in protests for divestment.

Schools across the country spent this summer preparing to preempt pro-Palestinian activism come fall. At a campus safety conference, more than 450 people working on the issue discussed, among other topics, “preparing for, responding to, and recovering from on-campus protests.”  

That preparation was evident as schools readied themselves last month for protests planned around the October 7 anniversary. Ahead of planned walkouts and protests across New York City, administrators at Columbia University warned the community to prepare for potential violence. The night before the walkout, Columbia University Law School told professors to call campus police on protesters.

Meanwhile, students and advocacy groups are pushing back on university administrators for their responses to protests and battling new policies governing protests and freedom of expression that they say show an anti-Palestinian bias.

The crackdown on student protests has led to a raft of court cases and federal complaints. Students at the University of California, Irvine sued the school chancellor and regents in July, saying the school had suspended protesters without due process. The school is arguing that an upcoming December court date is unnecessary because the suspensions have ended, said attorney Thomas Harvey, who is representing students. 

“The university and the state are using whatever tools they have to stop people from protesting war crimes and genocide paid for by tax dollars and invested in by their university,” Harvey said. “Their argument is effectively about the required decorum while protesting mass death and human suffering.”

Last month, prosecutors charged at least 49 people, including Irvine students and faculty, with misdemeanors for failing to vacate encampments this spring. Arraignments will continue through mid-December, and cases that go to trial won’t do so until January or February.

The San Diego City Attorney’s Office dismissed all charges against student protesters at University of California, San Diego earlier this month. Prosecutors in Irvine, however, have shown no indication that they’ll dismiss their charges, even amid pleas from Irvine Mayor Farrah N. Khan.

Harvey, the students’ attorney, said the school is fearful of losing donors.

“It’s to their benefit financially to publicly show that they are, in quotes, cracking down,” he said. Students and faculty are facing criminal charges and disciplinary conduct hearings from the school, including suspensions and probation, he said. “It’s just a climate of real crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices.” 

Similar complaints alleging discrimination against protesters and Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students were filed against Case Western and Rutgers University in New Jersey, which is under a federal civil rights investigation. (I co-teach a class at Rutgers’s New Brunswick campus.)

In September, the University of Maryland moved to cancel a protest organized by SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace after receiving complaints about the event. The group Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations then filed suit over the protest cancellation. (The school declined to comment and pointed to a statement from the university president.)

Last month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to allow the demonstration to go ahead. The suit, which claims that the university violated students’ First Amendment rights by canceling the protest, is still pending in court.

Shatha Shahin, a third-year law student at Case Western and the president of the law school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, said the university tried to make an example of Khalaf, the undergraduate SJP president.

“There is definitely a hostility in the way they’ve treated and used Yousef as this mastermind for everything that went on behind the scenes for all the Palestine advocacy,” Shahin said.

In August, Case Western began enforcing new rules governing speech and protest activity. Administrators prohibited encampments and the use of projected images, microphones, or bullhorns. Protests larger than 20 people now require approval from a committee.

“They speak with Hillel, they talk to Hillel, but they won’t even talk to these kids.”

“It’s very deliberate, and it’s very calculated,” said Maryam Assar, an Ohio attorney working with student protesters who is herself an alumnus of the School of Law at Case Western. “That’s why it’s really problematic that they’re going through all of these steps to silence them.”

Assar said the contrast between the treatment of pro-Palestinian organizers and other groups was stark.

“They speak with Hillel, they talk to Hillel,” she said, referring to the avowedly pro-Israel campus Jewish organization, “but they won’t even talk to these kids.”

While some student protesters face retaliation from administrators, others say they’ve also faced discrimination on campus. A New Jersey man was charged in April with vandalizing the Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University–New Brunswick on Eid al-Fitr. That same month, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the New Jersey chapter of CAIR filed a federal Title VI complaint against Rutgers alleging that the school had demonstrated a pattern of bias against Muslim and Arab students.

In a statement to The Intercept, Megan Schumann, the head of public relations at Rutgers, said the school was fully cooperating with the civil rights investigation and that the university takes seriously every claim of bias.

At the school’s protest encampment in May, a counterprotester was filmed hitting a pro-Palestine student. Schumann said Rutgers University Police Department charged the man with bias intimidation, harassment, and simple assault and that the case was pending in court.

The school negotiated with students to disband campus encampments later that month. In December 2023, Rutgers–New Brunswick had suspended its chapter of SJP for a year. The club was reinstated in January, but in August, the school slapped SJP with another suspension that is expected to last until July 2025.

“The professor clearly targeted students who were evidently Muslim and violated our personal space.”

Rutgers students have also filed dozens of complaints of bias toward Arab and Muslim students from professors and other faculty. In November, student protesters disrupted a Rutgers event with Bruce Hoffman, a self-described Zionist who works as a counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. A group of four Muslim students wearing hijabs who were not part of the disruption said that, after they left the event, a professor approached them. According to the student and her friends, who confirmed the story, the professor filmed them, telling them to “smile” for the camera, and accused them of ruining the event.

“She was pointing her finger in my face,” said the student, who, like her friends, asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation by the school. At least two of the students filed bias reports against the professor; a copy of one was provided to The Intercept. “The professor clearly targeted students who were evidently Muslim and violated our personal space while instigating this incident outside of the classroom which we had already left from,” she wrote. (Schumann, the Rutgers spokesperson, declined to comment on questions about specific allegations against faculty or staff.)

“This is a falsified account of the events that occurred and printing these comments about me would not only be considered defamation, but also likely rise to the level of slander,” the professor said in a statement to The Intercept. They declined to comment further.

The professor also filed a bias complaint against the students. While none of the students were found guilty of conduct violations as a result of the complaint, one was told that they were no longer eligible for a resident assistant position because of an outstanding complaint against them.

Universities have demonstrated a willingness to cave to the demands of donors to try to control free speech among students. At Case Western, Assar, the Ohio attorney, suggested such pressure was brought to bear.

“They’re really freaked out because donors are upset that this is happening,” Assar said of school administrators, “and they imagine that they can control these kids.”

When pro-Palestine students at the University of Maryland began planning their October 7 anniversary protest, the school president and other administrators initially said they would protect the group’s right to hold the protest, said Abel Amene, a fourth-year student and a board member of the school’s SJP chapter who helped organize the protest. (He is also a member of the University of Maryland student government and an elected volunteer member of D.C’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission, but did not speak in either capacity.)

“Then they began indicating that they were getting pressure through emails, through various Zionist organizations on campus and off campus, pressuring them to cancel our event,” he said.

Shortly after expressing their support for free speech, administrators proceeded to cancel the event. They said there had been “overwhelming outreach” about the protest, even while acknowledging that it posed no threat.

After the federal court order forced the school to allow the protest to proceed, Abel said, the school still took actions that restricted the demonstration. The grounds were staffed with police and non-police security, metal detectors installed, and a drone deployed over the event all day. Fencing put up by the university virtually cut the protest space in half. (In response to questions about the protest, Hafsa Siddiqi, the media relations manager for the university, pointed to an October 1 statement from school President Darryll Pines after the court ruled to let the protest proceed.)

The debacle over the protest showed the school’s bias against activists for Palestine, Abel said, and for pro-war forces, noting that University of Maryland touts its strategic partnerships with weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

“This is just part of a pattern we’ve seen,” he said, “where we are treated as threats and presumed to be a danger to students and a danger to the university.”

The repression of pro-Palestine activism on campus started well before October 7, Assar pointed out — including at her own alma mater. When Assar was a law student in 2022, Case Western President Eric Kaler denounced a student government vote to divest from companies that harm Palestinians as “naive” and antisemitic.

“He really created this atmosphere,” Assar said, “where speaking up in support of Palestinians and their right to be free from occupation or not have their homes stolen — he made that basically into, ‘You’re a problem if you speak up.’”

Years earlier, in 2017, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison condemned a vote by the student government to pass legislation calling on the school to divest from corporations involved in human rights violations, including in Israel.

“We have seen the universities respond to these demands for more democratic institutions by reacting in exactly the opposite way.”

“We have seen the universities respond to these demands for more democratic institutions by reacting in exactly the opposite way,” said Saba, the Madison graduate student, “by restricting the rights that students have on campus and by increasing how much they can punish students.”

Saba said she’s felt alienated on campus as a Palestinian American student. The school used her membership in the school’s SJP chapter as a piece of evidence in the charges against her.

“There’s been a sense on this campus for a long time that Palestinian voices are not supposed to be heard,” Saba said. “These disciplinary investigations, by punishing or penalizing students for having any affiliation with student groups that speak in solidarity with Palestinians, they’re essentially telling Palestinian students that they can’t find community on this campus.”

“Because when the environment is so oppressive, when our institutions are invested in genocide, and when our taxpayer dollars are invested in genocide, the only rational response would be to try to organize against that. But these schools are criminalizing that organizing.”

The post From Campus to the Courts, the “Palestine Exception” Rules University Crackdowns appeared first on The Intercept.

Hours later, Ed Steed, a police officer from the small city of Richland, just south of Jackson, walked into a back room at the post office where one of the envelopes had been set aside. Steed, a K-9 handler, arrived with Rip, his narcotics sniffer dog. Rip strode around and, when he got to the pink envelope, sat down. According to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Steed said this meant the dog had smelled narcotics. That claim became evidence to get a warrant to open the envelope.

This, though, was no ordinary drug bust. As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect. The envelope contained five pills labeled “AntiPreg Kit.” They were made in India, and their medical purpose is to induce abortion. Dwayne Martin, at the time the head of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Jackson, told me this was exactly what the initial tipster had suspected.

As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect.

About two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. in 2023 were done with mifepristone and misoprostol, the two-pill combination found in AntiPreg and similar products. Most were prescribed by clinicians at brick-and-mortar offices or through telehealth appointments. The World Health Organization advises that the pills are so safe in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy that supervision by a medical clinician is not needed. Taking the pills without clinician oversight is called “self-managed abortion.”

The practice has become so widespread that the New York Times estimated last year that it comprised 10 percent of all abortions being done in America. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, has not approved the importation of foreign-made misoprostol or mifepristone pills, much less their distribution without a prescription. 

The non-approved pills tend to enter the U.S. in bulk, most passing surreptitiously through customs at land borders and international airports. Many are delivered to feminist-oriented mutual aid groups who distribute them at low cost or for free. Others go to people who are just trying to turn a profit. Both groups repackage their international bulk shipments as single doses and mail them domestically — typically from post offices.

Today, you can order AntiPreg and similar brands by clicking links at websites including that of Plan C, an online clearinghouse for information about how to get abortion pills through the mail. One dose costs as little as $38, including shipping, and can be cheaper if the patient seeks financial assistance. The pills can be delivered in as quickly as four days.

In large part thanks to such easy availability, more people in the U.S. today are having abortions than before the fall of Roe.

What will happen to abortion-pills-by-mail and the people who use them if Donald Trump is elected in November? As the accounts of the regional USPIS head and FOIA documents show, a piecemeal crackdown is already underway during a Democratic administration. Under a Trump regime, things might go much further.

Whoever is in power, the incident in Jackson provides a potential window into the future — one in which freelancing local Postal Service employees and officials can call on local cops to halt women from accessing reproductive care and potentially charge and arrest those providing or using abortion medication.

My FOIA request asked for records from past years of investigations of people who’d used the mail to send pills. The documents I got back show how a willing administration might go after distributors. The feds could even lend support to police in states that have criminalized abortion care as they pursue cases under local laws. Pregnant people who order the medications could get caught in the dragnet.

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The documents I received after my FOIA request are highly redacted but still reveal many details about a federal investigation that began less than two years ago in Mississippi. Dozens of envelopes with abortion pills were seized. The bust followed on the heels of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and came after a group of anti-abortion doctors filed a federal lawsuit in Texas, arguing that abortion pills should be banned from the mail.

The Jackson investigation apparently also employed what’s called a mail cover: a little-known Postal Service method for collecting data about people suspected of committing crimes. Using an enormous database of images of the outside of envelopes and packages, postal inspectors can digitally compare names, addresses, and other information on one item to others. And the findings can be freely shared with almost any law enforcement agency that requests them. The return address for the hot pink envelope in Jackson included an unused post office box number, the sort of information postal inspectors can use to correlate parcels to each other.

Reproductive justice activist Laurie Bertram Roberts worries about an anti-abortion regime taking power. They direct the Jackson-based Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, which assists fellow Mississippians with any reproductive decision they make, from having a baby, to leaving the state to go to an abortion clinic, to using pills at home.

In a state where abortion is strictly banned post-Roe, Bertram Roberts is also a doula. Along with other doulas, they have organized help for people at the end of their pregnancies, including those which do not come to term. Whether that end is due miscarriage or to abortion is immaterial. “We don’t ask,” they said.

The pink-envelope investigation came out of a sort of collaboration between the feds’ regional offices and a local official: U.S postal workers and a city K-9 cop. Though no one in Mississippi has yet been arrested for helping carry out an abortion, Bertram Roberts fears that synergy. They leaned forward and tensed their lips as I opened my computer and pulled up images I’d obtained from the FOIA request: photos the USPIS had taken, in a post office parking lot, of vehicles suspected of belonging to the person who mailed the pills. 

Bertram Roberts peered anxiously at the screen. “I don’t recognize them!” they said. Their face relaxed, but they shook their head. “The thing I worry about most is people getting criminalized.”

The USPIS is the investigative arm of the nation’s Postal Service. The agency has known for at least the past decade, according to FOIA documents, that foreign-made abortion pills are entering the U.S. and being distributed in quantity without prescription. FDA regulations hold that this is illegal; the senders can be punished with criminal penalties.

Days after Roe was overturned in June 2022, the USPIS announced that it would not proactively pursue pill mailers, even in states where abortion was being banned.

“We enforce federal law,” USPIS spokesperson Michael Martel told me. “We have no interest in enforcing state laws.”

He said, however, that the USPIS does go after people who import nonapproved pharmaceuticals and those without medical credentials who mail prescription drugs.

The investigations can rely on outside help. USPIS doesn’t have its own sniffer K-9s, so it employs local police dogs and their handlers to check the mail for contraband and provide the probable cause needed to get warrants. The arrangement occurs even in jurisdictions like Mississippi, where abortion is now banned under state law and local cops enforce state law. Steed, the dog handler from a nearby Rankin County police department who responded to the pink envelope in Jackson, was recently deputized as a USPIS investigator, and he uses office space in the agency’s regional headquarters at the Jackson postal center.

Using local dogs creates risk for abortion-seekers. With the post office inviting local law enforcement to assist with federal investigations, local police could theoretically do their own investigations, by copying names and addresses from the mail. And they could pass that information to anti-abortion district attorneys. 

Police dogs, however, are trained to smell only the illegal drugs heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, fentanyl, and cocaine, not the ingredients in abortion pills, which currently remain legal. And the K-9s’ forensic reliability is suspect.

Why would a police dog alert on abortion pills in the first place, when they’re not narcotics?

Martel, the USPIS national spokesperson, speculated that the pills found in Jackson were contaminated in the manufacturing process by trace amounts of a drug such as marijuana, or perhaps someone was handling narcotics when they did the packing and left molecules behind that only canines’ super-sensitive noses can detect.

Theories along these lines are widespread among police, and they’re inherently impossible to disprove. Elisa Wells, a co-founder and co-director of Plan C, is skeptical. She said her group has conducted laboratory analyses of various brands of foreign-made abortion pills. They’ve all been pure, she said, and no one has ever complained about their containing narcotics.

There is another reason why a K-9 can zero in on a package that’s devoid of illicit drugs. Animal researchers call it “cueing.” Canines are exquisitely sensitive to the minutiae of a human’s posture, eye movements, and other subtle behaviors. Handlers wishing to develop probable cause to do intrusive searches for narcotics can coax their dogs into drug-alerting behavior. To get a reward, the dog will alert, even if nothing illegal is present. (Steed, the K-9 handler, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Cueing can be deliberate, but it’s more often unconscious. In 2011, Lisa Lit, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, published a now-famous study in which she told the handlers of several police dogs that their K-9s would be searching for “target scents” hidden randomly in several containers. She put red tape on some containers and said it marked the targets. In reality, none of the containers had scents. Even so, most of the dogs alerted on containers, especially those with red tape.

Some policing agencies now require K-9 handlers to wear body cameras to check if they’re cueing their dogs. USPIS, though, doesn’t use body cameras, according to Martin, the former head of the office in Jackson. Chris Picou, a supervising deputy for Rankin County’s drug interdiction units who oversees many Central Mississippi police K-9s, including Steed’s dog Rip, told me in June that he had never heard of the Lit study about cueing.

Lawrence Myers, a retired professor of veterinary medicine at Auburn University with extensive experience researching the reliability of law enforcement dogs and their human handlers, said unacknowledged handler errors in the service of law enforcement can turn K-9s into mere “warrants on a leash.”

Once a warrant is issued and the parcel has been opened, a mail cover can help an investigation barrel forward.

Mail covers have been offered for generations by the U.S. Postal Service. They require neither a warrant nor any other Fourth Amendment control. Even so, they allow law enforcement agencies, from the FBI to local police to the USPIS itself, to collect information from the outside of an envelope or package. Annually, the post office photographs every one of the billions of pieces of mail that it processes. And every year, it approves thousands of requests from law enforcement for mail covers of individuals.

“We tend to think of first-class mail as relatively inviolable. But the outside of the envelope is the equivalent of social media,” said Frederick Lane, an attorney and writer who specializes in tensions between the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of privacy and cybertechnology’s growing ability to snoop.

Lane, who is writing a book called “The Cybertraps of Choice: Pregnancy and Privacy in a Post-Roe World,” has investigated mail covers. He examined the abortion materials from the Mississippi FOIA request and said they constitute strong evidence that the USPIS got a mail cover from the Postal Service to enlarge its abortion pill investigation. (Martel, the USPIS spokesperson, declined to comment, saying only that the agency routinely withholds information from the public in order to protect its investigations.)

Lane said that using K-9s to alert for narcotics is one of the most common ways that the USPIS obtains warrants to search inside of mailed items, even when investigators don’t really believe they’re looking for narcotics.

Once the inspector got inside of the pink envelope in Jackson, he said, it appears that the USPIS collected data from outside the envelope — likely the unused post office box number in the return address — to locate additional envelopes with pills. The tactic would allow authorities to centralize the search by tracking related materials from disparate post offices as they come together at the Jackson distribution center.

Lane noted the Postal Service started photographing mail and digitizing it years ago to reduce the cost of sorting. After 9/11, and with the development of ever more sophisticated digital photography, the data recovered from one item could be compared with myriad other items and stored on ever-growing databases. These days, the ability to do this work “is growing by leaps and bounds,” Lane said.

“If you start involving local law enforcement in a state that is trying to ban access to abortion, including abortion medication, you are putting patients at risk.”

The information a mail cover extracts is handed over to law enforcement, with virtually no questions asked.

“Mechanisms for the post office helping local cops are in place without any supervision,” Lane said. He called the cooperation between policing agencies and the postal service “a candy store for law enforcement.”

That teamwork potentially threatens abortion rights, according to Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

“If you start involving local law enforcement in a state that is trying to ban access to abortion, including abortion medication, you are putting patients at risk,” he told me. “Individuals who are trying to access medical care should not have to fear the federal government coming after them. The specter of harm to people once local law enforcement gets wind of it in a hostile state could be really serious.”

The other potential federal threat to abortion rights is what’s colloquially called the Comstock Act. Passed by Congress in 1873, it has been dormant for decades but remains on the books as 18 U.S. Codes 1461 and 1462. Comstock criminalizes importing and mailing materials which, according to the language of the law, are “intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.”

Among hard-line anti-abortion activists who have Trump’s ear, plans are already afoot to revive the Comstock Act if he wins. Lately, Trump and his vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, have been trying to distance themselves from unpopular calls to further restrict abortion. Vance recently said he supports abortion pills being legal, but before entering the race, he was publicly in favor of banning them from the mail.

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Vance and other Republican lawmakers last year sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking for the Comstock Act to be enforced and for the department to “shut down all mail-order abortion operations.” In addition, Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for turning the country sharply right, calls for using the Comstock Act to ban abortion pills from the mail. Trump and his campaign have also been trying to distance themselves from Project 2025, but Vance complicates matters; he wrote the foreword to a now-delayed book by Heritage chief and project architect Kevin Roberts.

Because the Comstock Act is federal law and the U.S. Postal Service is part of the executive branch, Trump, if he won the upcoming election, could issue an executive order reviving Comstock as early as the first day of his second term. Separately, his attorney general could authorize going after pills in the mail.

“I have absolutely no doubt that under a Trump administration the Postal Service would be required to enforce the Comstock laws against misoprostol and mifepristone.”

“I have absolutely no doubt that under a Trump administration the Postal Service would be required to enforce the Comstock laws against misoprostol and mifepristone,” said Lane, the cyber-privacy expert. 

And if Comstock is revived, anyone caught sending abortion pills, even domestically produced brands not currently banned by the FDA, could be charged with a felony. With the pills officially defined as contraband, sniffer dogs could be trained to smell them on their own. Cueing by a handler would no longer be necessary. 

And the government might not stop with banning pills. Andrew Beck, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, told me that, under Comstock, even clinicians doing surgical abortions in states where they are legal could be cut off from receiving the items they need: “gloves, surgical instruments, and everything else that’s used.”

Comstock could ban them all from being mailed.

Rip, the local police department dog, sniffed the pink envelope in Jackson on December 7, 2022. That same day, even before the USPIS got its warrant to look inside the envelope, the agency impounded 11 more nearly identical packages with the same address that the Postal Service had determined was bogus. The fact that they were impounded so early is evidence, Lane said, that the USPIS was using a mail cover.

December progressed and additional envelopes were seized every few days. They were addressed to recipients throughout the country. The USPIS claimed they were being flagged by employees at a smaller postal service branch in Jackson called LaFleur, but more likely they were identified through a mail cover, according to Lane, then seized when they reached the downtown distribution and processing center.

USPIS said that workers at LaFleur had acted as tipsters. LaFleur branch manager Fenton Stevens, however, told me that he had no recollection of workers reporting envelopes suspected of containing abortion pills.

“How could somebody know if abortion pills are in a package?” he asked, incredulously. “That’s not something we do. We don’t indulge in things like that.”

The USPIS also photographed vehicles presumably driven by the person doing the mailing — the photos Laurie Bertram Roberts later checked out. The case was eventually sent to the federal prosecutor’s office for the Southern District of Mississippi, in downtown Jackson. An assistant U.S. attorney was assigned to handle it.

By December 20, over seven dozen envelopes had been seized. Then, two days before Christmas, the Office of Legal Counsel for the Department of Justice issued an opinion implying physicians and other clinicians who mail prescription abortion pills into states where abortion is illegal could not be prosecuted under the Comstock Act.

The Justice Department’s reasoning was that the pills are used for several medical purposes besides abortion, to manage miscarriages, for instance. Thus, the government cannot know in any given case whether a mailer’s intention is to break the law. (The opinion still leaves mutual aid activists and other non-clinicians susceptible to being charged with crimes.)

In Jackson, a few more envelopes, the final seven, were impounded on January 6. That date marked one month since Rip had sniffed the first pink envelope and the USPIS initiated its investigation. A mail cover is permitted to last for one month before it must either be renewed or ended. After that final day, seizures of pills in Jackson ceased.

No one has since been indicted, and Martel, the USPIS spokesperson, declined to say if the case is still open.

Martin, the retired inspector, said it’s closed.

“The U.S. attorney’s office in Jackson is a very good office,” he said, “very aggressive.” But he guessed that “the political climate,” as he put it, made a prosecution for abortion pills “a hot topic nobody wanted to touch.” 

Nobody, that is, under the pro-abortion-rights Biden administration. In the meantime, thanks to a Jackson-based postal worker, Rip the dog, and a federal agency that says it has no desire to police abortion, nearly 100 pregnant people did not receive little pink packages containing the medicine they requested.

The post Drug-Sniffing Police Dogs Are Intercepting Abortion Pills in the Mail appeared first on The Intercept.

Marvin Risen, my father’s brother, died long before I was born. He was an FBI agent in Nashville and was killed in a plane crash in 1943.

But decades later, when I was growing up, something about Marvin’s death still troubled my family.

My parents often talked about how they had never been given any answers about Marvin’s death, and that led them to speculate wildly, trying to connect the dots. They openly questioned whether he had been the victim of wartime sabotage. His plane crashed in the middle of World War II, and his Nashville FBI office was not far from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then home to a critical part of the Manhattan Project: America’s top-secret program to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. They sometimes wondered whether spies had blown up Marvin’s plane because he had uncovered an atomic espionage ring.

It wasn’t until this year — more than 80 years after my uncle’s death — that the full story of Marvin Risen and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would finally be resolved. But even then, the FBI’s painful treatment of our family would leave an open, unhealed wound.

In hindsight, I see that my parents long, failed struggle to grasp the truth about Marvin’s death wasn’t their fault. It was the result of the FBI’s callous handling of Marvin’s case — and many others like it. When my uncle was killed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was at the height of his power, and he ran the FBI like a dictatorship. The bureau was a cult of personality built around Hoover; he served a total of 48 years in his post, first as director of the FBI’s predecessor, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigations, and then as director of the FBI from its renaming in 1935 until his death in 1972.

Hoover accumulated power in part through his legendary ability to manipulate the press to propagandize and glorify the FBI. He created a mythic origin story for the FBI built around its manhunts and gun battles with Depression-era gangsters like John Dillinger; FBI agents killed in shootouts with gangsters became Hoover’s martyrs. But that meant that FBI agents like Marvin, who died in accidents or from illnesses, were largely ignored by Hoover’s FBI — even if their deaths were work-related.

On October 15, 1943, American Airlines Flight 63 crashed in rural Tennessee, killing all 11 people on board, including Marvin. The aircraft crashed soon after taking off from Nashville for a short flight to Memphis. Records show that, not long after leaving Nashville, the pilot radioed to air traffic control asking for permission to climb to 8,000 feet, possibly in an effort to find a band of warmer air to get rid of ice clinging to the wings and propellers, according to a later federal investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board, which then regulated commercial aviation. But as the plane gained altitude, ice continued to build, making it impossible to control.

The plane rapidly lost altitude and crashed into a wooded hill near Centerville, about 60 miles from Nashville. The area was so remote that the crash site wasn’t discovered until the next morning by a farmer, who then drove 3 miles to the town of Wrigley, where he could get a phone to call officials in Nashville. In its 1945 final report on the crash, the Civil Aeronautics Board was critical of American Airlines for allowing the plane to fly without deicing equipment; American had removed the equipment in the summer and had not yet reinstalled the gear for the fall and winter. The crash was caused by the “inability of the aircraft to gain or maintain altitude due to carburetor ice or propeller ice or wing ice or some combination of those icing conditions while over terrain and in weather unsuitable for an emergency landing,” the report stated. The agency’s report said that if the weather conditions on the route were known by the airline, that “should have precluded the dispatch of the flight in an aircraft not equipped with wing or propeller deicing equipment.” 

The plane nosedived into the ground, leaving a crash scene so horrific that none of the bodies could be easily identified. It was so terrible that Ernest Gann, an American Airlines pilot and author, wrote about the crash in his acclaimed 1961 memoir on the dangerous early days of aviation, “Fate is the Hunter,” which was turned into a movie in 1964.

Marvin Risen could only be identified by his official FBI briefcase. He was just 27 when he died. He had been with the FBI since 1939.

After I grew up and became a reporter, my family’s questions about what had happened to my uncle remained unanswered. As a journalist covering intelligence and national security issues, I frequently reported on stories involving the FBI, and that experience taught me that it was not surprising that the bureau had failed my family. The FBI was insular and slow to change, and many aspects of the FBI’s culture still bore the imprint of J. Edgar Hoover long after his death. 

So in the 1990s, I decided to take the initiative and find out what I could about Marvin Risen and the FBI. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI for Marvin’s personnel file. After a three-year wait, a huge package from the FBI arrived at my home, filled with hundreds of pages of ancient letters and memos documenting my uncle’s life and death. The files taught me things I didn’t know about my family; they revealed that my father was interviewed by the FBI when the bureau was considering hiring his brother. The files also showed that before he was promoted to special agent, Marvin started out working in the FBI’s fingerprinting unit, and later served as a tour guide at FBI headquarters in Washington.

But the most significant discovery in the files came from internal FBI memos that described the way in which the FBI handled Marvin’s death. 

The files showed that immediately after the plane crash, Hoover took a personal interest in Marvin’s case. Phone calls, telegrams, and internal FBI communications flew back and forth between Hoover and the FBI agents in Nashville and on the scene of the crash; it was clear Hoover had some of the same suspicions about the cause of the crash that later bedeviled my parents. Hoover wanted to know whether the crash was an act of sabotage, designed to kill an FBI agent. Adding to the intrigue was the fact that Blan Maxwell, the speaker of the Tennessee state Senate, was one of the other passengers who died. At the time, Maxwell was widely considered the leading candidate to become the next governor of Tennessee. Prentice Cooper, the governor at the time, was one of the first officials on the crash scene, mingling with the FBI agents who were scouring the site.  

But the FBI quickly determined that the crash was just an accident. Once the FBI concluded that the plane was not downed by sabotage, Hoover lost interest. There was no drama in Marvin Risen’s death that Hoover could use to glorify the FBI. The files show that the FBI’s interest quickly shifted to finding Marvin’s FBI badge and gun amid the wreckage. When his gun was found, it was badly damaged from the crash.  

The files also revealed that Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his right-hand man and possibly his lover, personally decided not to include Marvin Risen on the FBI Wall of Honor, which listed the FBI’s valiant dead, the agents killed in the line of duty.   

The files reveal that Tolson was named by Hoover to be the chair of the committee set up to decide who was — and who wasn’t — included on the Wall of Honor. Hoover and Tolson wanted to reserve the Wall of Honor for agents killed in gun battles with gangsters and spies. The files included memos and messages between Hoover and Tolson showing that the pair decided that an accidental plane crash didn’t qualify as dying in the line of duty. They rejected Marvin Risen from consideration for the Wall of Honor, even though he was traveling in the line of duty when he died. He had been on his way to Memphis to meet with federal prosecutors about a bank robbery case. He wasn’t hot on the trail of an atomic spy ring or some other glamorous case. Yet he was involved in the kind of criminal investigation that made up much of the FBI’s day-to-day work.

At the time of his death in October 1943, Marvin Risen had one son, Daniel, and his wife, Mary Emily, was pregnant with their second son. In April 1944, she gave birth to Marvin Patrick Risen, who became known as Pat. 

Marvin’s wife, suddenly a widow in her mid-20s with two small children, was left to pick up the pieces after the shattering death of her husband. Yet the most that Hoover did to help was to offer her a secretarial job at the FBI’s headquarters, which would have required her to move from Nashville to Washington. She rejected the offer.

Later, two of Marvin’s sisters went to FBI headquarters in Washington to try to talk to Hoover about Marvin’s case. Hoover refused to come out of his office to meet with them, leaving them waiting — and insulted.

Marvin’s wife later remarried another agent in the FBI’s Nashville office, but both her sons kept Risen as their last name.

Daniel died by suicide when he was a young man. Pat Risen lived until 2022 and had two sons, Clay Risen and Michael Risen. Clay and I both worked at the New York Times together for many years; he continues to write for the Times and is the author of several books. His brother Michael is the associate head of school at the Norwood School, a private school in the Washington area.  

Out of the blue this spring, the FBI contacted Michael Risen: The bureau wanted to talk about his grandfather.

Decades after Marvin Risen’s death, the FBI had finally changed the Hoover-era standards for determining who should be included on the Wall of Honor. A review of old files on agents who had died in the line of duty but had been rejected by Hoover and Tolson had turned up Marvin’s case.

More than 80 years after his death, Marvin Risen was finally going up on the FBI’s Wall of Honor. 

Thomas Cottone, a retired FBI agent, said in an interview that he discovered Marvin’s case while going through old issues of an internal FBI newsletter, which contained an article about the plane crash. Cottone was already pushing the bureau to include the names of several other agents who had died in accidents while on duty, and so he began to advocate for Marvin as well.

One reason the FBI may have finally changed the qualifications for the Wall of Honor is that a number of FBI employees have died in recent years from cancer and other health complications resulting from exposure to toxins while serving at Ground Zero in New York and at the Pentagon after 9/11. Several employees who died after working at Ground Zero and the Pentagon in what were clearly work-related deaths have now been added to the wall; they would almost certainly not have been included under the old Hoover-era standards. 

In May, the FBI held a ceremony at its headquarters — which is named for J. Edgar Hoover — honoring Marvin Risen and seven others whose names have just been added to the wall. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke at the event, and several members of my family attended. I was not one of them.

I couldn’t bring myself to attend the ceremony. I have my own personal history with the FBI, and that experience has been painful and complicated.

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During my time as a national security journalist, the FBI has over the years spied on me, sought to discredit me and my reporting, and even tried to help the Justice Department put me in prison as part of a long government campaign to silence me through the use of draconian leak investigations into my stories. At one time, there were FBI agents assigned to two separate federal grand jury investigations into my work. They pulled my life apart, sifting through my private data while subpoenaing and forcing testimony from many of my sources. They even spied on my children; they thought they had uncovered a big secret about me when they discovered that I had sent a wire transfer to Europe. It was actually money for my son, who was then on a study abroad program. 

Even as the FBI was investigating me, I had to continue to deal with the bureau as a reporter. I frequently went to FBI headquarters for interviews for new stories while I was still the subject of leak investigations related to earlier coverage. But I was always suspicious that the FBI was using the interviews at the Hoover building to try to get me to say something incriminating in connection with one of their leak investigations — or simply to intimidate me. 

For one story about the government’s counterterrorism operations, I went to FBI headquarters for an interview and was ushered into a windowless conference room where seven FBI agents were waiting for me. None of them would give me their names or talk to me at all. After I explained to them what I knew about the story I was working on, they all just sat and stared at me, not saying a word, refusing to comment or answer any questions. 

The FBI’s campaign of intimidation against me reached its peak when the bureau sent a team of agents to Europe to try to ambush a meeting I had scheduled with a source. The FBI found out about the meeting in advance from an informant who the FBI used to gather information about me. At the last minute, the ambush was averted when the FBI’s informant had a change of heart and tipped me off.

I haven’t forgotten.

I am prepared to go to FBI headquarters when it is required for my work as a journalist. But I didn’t want to go for a celebration, no matter how long overdue.

I believe that Marvin Risen would understand. 

The post My Family’s Long and Painful Relationship With the FBI appeared first on The Intercept.

Where children played, the ground bubbled. Birds swarmed, feeding on trash. At one point, a pile of 20 dead dogs and cats were dropped in the yard of the elementary school, just 100 feet away from classrooms. This was no ordinary playground.

A horrific stench of dead rats and decomposing garbage was impossible to escape, recalled Wayne Fields, who still lives in his childhood home opposite the site. “The smell was so bad, during school, after school,” said Fields, a 69-year-old businessman. “It was ridiculous.”

Both of Fields’s parents were teachers at the school. “We used to say that when we turn off the light we can all see each other because we are glowing from the chemicals,” he said.

Despite violating multiple health statutes, the local government was unbothered. “This is a necessary evil. I think we’re doing a very fine job,” then-City Manager William Green said in 1963. Besides, he said, the city poured “glorified perfume” on the garbage every so often.

This “necessary evil” has haunted this Florida community for decades. Sixty years later, the site is overgrown grassland, but contamination at the school still poses a large risk to students’ health. In the last few years, community members have called on the Alachua County school district and state agencies to assess the connection between the contaminated land and health issues in the area.

It is often difficult to show a direct link between a contaminant and adverse health impacts, and no such investigation has yet been done at the school. But for years soil and air testing have consistently revealed evidence of substantial environmental toxins on the property. Levels of the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene peaked in 2020 at a concentration up to 218 times higher than what is considered safe for direct exposure in residential settings. Researchers, meanwhile, have pinpointed East Gainesville as an asthma hot spot.

For decades, a rotating cast of city, county, and state officials have been aware of the contaminants in the school yard — and have taken little action to address the problem, The Intercept found in an investigation based on hundreds of public and archival documents, government emails obtained through records requests, and interviews with dozens of Gainesville residents.

Alachua County officials have proposed renovations to the school and overseen the removal of some contaminated soil from the property in the last decade, while a local nurse’s advocacy prompted the state health and environmental protection departments to order additional soil testing in recent years. Their primary focus has not been the former landfill but another contaminant discovered decades ago: abandoned oil tanks. Yet what’s needed, former school district employees and community members say, is nothing short of the removal of the school in its entirety, a full cleanup of the site itself, and a comprehensive assessment of the impact of soil toxins on students’ health. Neither the school district nor the Florida Department of Environmental Protection seem willing to go that far.

“Williams Elementary is safe,” said Jackie Johnson, a spokesperson for Alachua County Public Schools, in an email to The Intercept. She added that the school board hasn’t received a formal recommendation to demolish or majorly reconstruct the school and that the district has no current plans to do so. 

District representatives met with the Department of Environmental Protection in January, Johnson said, and “it was made clear that there is currently no health threat to students or staff at the school.”

But just last month, the school board and the environmental protection department approved another round of soil and air testing at Williams.

The state Department of Health “has responded to many community concerns regarding Williams Elementary School,” Paul D. Myers, the department’s administrator in Alachua County, told The Intercept in an email. The state environmental protection department “continues to monitor the successful remediation at Williams Elementary” and will keep working with the school district and city “on any contaminated or potentially contaminated properties,” wrote Kathryn Craver, an external affairs director at the department’s northeast district.

This situation in Gainesville is not an anomaly. Dozens of schools across 35 states sit on or adjacent to former, or currently open, landfills, according to The Intercept’s analysis of news articles, state databases, and public records from across the country. From New York to Ohio, there have been many reported cases of illness, predominantly cancer, from both teachers and students who have attended schools next to hazardous waste. These occurrences tend to be in lower-income communities of color, The Intercept found.

No federal agency prohibits new schools being placed on, or next to, dump sites, or requires schools near landfills to conduct cleanups. In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency was authorized by Congress to create voluntary school siting guidelines, but these remain discretionary and don’t apply to existing schools.

Florida state law makes it illegal to build a new K-12 school on or adjacent to a known contaminated site unless steps are taken to ensure that children will not be exposed to threatening levels of contaminants. But at Williams Elementary, like other schools in Florida, the contamination surfaced years after it was built.

The lack of regulation to address decades-old problems deepens an enduring crisis of environmental racism.

“We see a really strong pattern where white affluent students are facing significantly less risk at school,” said Sara Grineski, a sociology professor at the University of Utah who studies environmental health disparities. “It’s this long-standing pattern of the devaluing of people of color, pushing them into less desirable spaces.”

Second-Class Citizens

Williams Elementary is named after the Black businessman who built it in the 1930s, seeing a need for a school on the east side of Gainesville. A middle school was built across the field in 1955 — a few years before the landfill was placed in the backyard of Williams.

“We were Black and seen as second-class citizens,” said Gussy Butler, aged 95, one of East Gainesville’s oldest residents. “They weren’t concerned; it was a Black area.”

The dump site was 150 feet away from students sitting in classrooms, and the pollution was made worse by the area’s impractical geography. The east side of Gainesville is lower and has more sensitive wetlands than the west, where economic development has generally been focused.

Local media began covering the dire consequences several years after the landfill was built. “The ditch is filled with black, stagnant water pumped from holes dug to hold the garbage,” the Gainesville Sun reported in June 1963. “The area being filled with garbage is wetter than normal so the odor problems are compounded. The health department conceded that the area is ‘a little too wet for an ideal landfill.’”

Still, the city stood firm. “Many of us and our children have spent many happy hours on top of a landfill,” wrote City-County Health Officer Edward G. Byrne in an op-ed at the time. “I do not believe this will be a major problem for Alachua County for some time to come.”

Yet by the end of that summer, following petitions to the city for relief, the dump was moved to airport land. It was already clear that the implications would be long-lasting. “Building on the filled land is out of the question for 10 to 15 years. As the garbage slowly decays the earth will gradually settle,” a Gainesville Sun article said. “Any building constructed on it probably would be ruined within a short period by the sinking.”

At the end of the decade, the Nixon administration founded the EPA, a pivotal moment in the monitoring of toxic sites. “Some of the reasons we have these situations occurring today is that prior to the foundation of the EPA, there were few, if any, environmental laws that protected human health,” said Claudia Persico, a professor at American University who researches environmental policy.

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Yet, the EPA’s process for identifying so-called Superfund sites — referring to polluted and hazardous locations — has often failed to capture the most deprived communities. The EPA’s national priorities list is “a little bit ad hoc,” said Steph Tai, an environmental law professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “It’s sort of advocacy based, like people have to advocate for something to rise to that level.”

In a chronically underfunded area such as East Gainesville, the landfill’s potential for long-term contamination was quickly forgotten after it was closed. With a lack of resources, people had other concerns. “It just went away,” Fields, who lives across the site, said. “Nobody discussed it.”

Sinking Buildings

At Williams Elementary, the prediction that buildings would sink proved prophetic, even a quarter of a century later. In 1989, the district began constructing a half-million-dollar music and art suite at the school.

“They put Williams at the top of the list because it had been deprived for so long,” said Jennifer Lindquist, a former art teacher at the school for 22 years.

Almost as soon as the new facilities were built, the building began to fall apart. “The crack became straight through the building and through the foundation and everything,” Lindquist said. “It was not sound ground. When they pulled up the borings you could still see decomposing trash.”

In April of that year, city planners — members of a citizen board that reviews land use — found records of the landfill while working on a report. Gainesville city commissioners told the Alachua County School Board to take soil samples. The school board was going to “run a plug down there and test the soil,” Norm Bowman, then planning board clerk, said at the time. “It’s no big deal.”

But the problems extended beyond the remnants of the former landfill. Around the same time, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection found “excessively contaminated soil” on the property that was polluting the groundwater. The contamination was attributed to four underground storage tanks containing heating oil. From the 1960s to 1980s, these were common in rural locations without main gas lines. The school board registered the tanks in 1987 but didn’t know when they had been installed, Craver, from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, told The Intercept in an email.

In 1988, the school district applied for the environmental department’s Early Detection Incentive, which provided state-contracted cleanup to owners of underground petroleum tanks with suspected contamination. The site was assigned a ranking score of 9 out of 10. According to the department, “the higher the score, the greater the potential threat.”

But state officials ultimately decided that excavating the soil was “considered to be inappropriate … because of the high cost due to the depth of contamination.”

There are multiple conflicting narratives on the dates the tanks were removed. State records reviewed by The Intercept state that, as of 1991, three of the four tanks had been abandoned in place. Craver, meanwhile, said that three tanks were removed in 1988, with the other in 1991, but “oil can remain in soil for decades until remediated.”

What’s undisputed is that the tanks had corroded, leaving oil to seep out across the site. Still, the state went quiet for another two decades. This time, both the landfill and the oil tanks were forgotten.

Asthma Hot Spot

DeVante Moody, who started attending Williams in the late 1990s, remembers being teased about his “trash school.” At first he thought it was just typical school rivalry, or because the students sucked at sports.

“The running joke came from the community: ‘Oh, y’all go to the trash school,’” said Moody, now 31 years old and a support technician at the University of Florida hospital network. Like Wayne Fields, whose son also attended Williams, multiple generations of Moody’s family attended the school. His 11-year-old son now attends the neighboring Lincoln Middle School.

Moody recalls “the forbidden area,” a closed-off field the size of a large swimming pool, where students were not allowed to venture. They were never told why. Classrooms sat in trailers beside it, and children ran around the adjacent field at lunchtime.

It wasn’t until years later that Moody discovered it had been a landfill. “They literally meant ‘Y’all go to the trash school’ because it used to be a trash dump,” Moody realized. “So this is not a joke. This is serious.”

Throughout his childhood, Moody, like many of his classmates, had trouble breathing. “We were all just asthmatic children. We just thought it was normal,” he said.

Moody’s respiratory issues were particularly serious, and he was hospitalized twice with collapsed lungs. He distinctly remembers being in the intensive care unit at age 7, turning to his father and asking: “Am I going to die?”

Researchers recently identified East Gainesville as a pediatric asthma hot spot and linked poor health outcomes to racial and economic segregation. Across Alachua County, asthma-related hospitalization rates were nearly three times higher and emergency department visits were six times higher for Black residents than for white residents in 2018. Other research has shown that the hospitalization rate due to pediatric asthma in Williams Elementary’s ZIP code ranks among the worst 25 percent of ZIP codes in the state. The group most deeply affected are Black children aged 5 to 9. 

It’s part of a nationwide trend: A study published by The Associated Press last year found that Black children are more likely to have asthma than kids of any other race in America, mostly due to the influence of past racist housing laws and proximity to pollution.

In 2008, a few years after Moody left Williams Elementary, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection mobilized contractors to test contamination at schools across the county. “The state asked us to quickly go run out to all multiple schools and take soil samples around just to try and make sure that everything’s OK,” said Jesse Brown, senior engineer at Golder Associates, who visited Williams and 20 other schools at the time. “They just wanted a quick snapshot to see what risk each of these sites had.”

At Williams, Brown’s team identified two of the former underground petroleum tanks and took half a dozen soil samples. They didn’t find anything concerning, according to a report the firm submitted to the state environmental agency.

Yet that finding did not appear to sufficiently assuage the agency. Seven years later, the agency reached back out to the Alachua County School Board about Williams Elementary to offer more state funding for research into petroleum contamination. Another contractor was sent out to the school in 2015. Over the next two years, engineers who analyzed soil samples found high concentrations of multiple carcinogenic chemicals and benzo(a)pyrene equivalents, a way of evaluating the overall carcinogenicity of multiple compounds. BaP — which is commonly found in cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, and asphalt — and BaP equivalents are generally considered safe at concentrations of 0.1 mg/kg. At Williams, analysts detected a level of 7.2 mg/kg. Prolonged exposure to the chemical increases the risk of cancer, as well as asthma, according to scientific studies. 

In general, communities of color suffer disproportionately from environmental toxins. Grineski, the University of Utah sociology professor, said that her research shows that “a district with more foreign born kids and more Black kids has greater concentrations of cancer-causing air toxins than other school districts.”

The state’s health department, which investigates cancer clusters, does not consider East Gainesville to have a higher than normal incidence of cancer. The agency “does not have any data that is indicative of a cancer cluster in the community,” Myers, the department’s administrator in Alachua County, told The Intercept in an email.

Still, Fields, who struggles with various health issues — including trouble breathing since he had a heart attack a couple years ago — strongly believes it to be so.

On a drive around East Gainesville, Fields gave a biography of the generations of homeowners. As he pointed out house after house, he explained how each family had in some way been affected by the disease.

“This neighborhood is mostly made up of widows,” he said.

A Community’s Outrage 

In 2017, two years after the state funded a new round of testing at Williams Elementary, the Alachua County school district issued a press release notifying parents that elevated levels of BaP had been found in the soil, due to contamination from petroleum products.

The district said it would be removing and replacing soil from parts of the school courtyard. Still, school officials assured parents that “the levels found at Williams would not pose a health risk unless there is a lifetime of exposure, which would mean eating or touching the soil every day for thirty years.”

For Moody and Fields’s families, who had lived in East Gainesville all their lives, being in such close proximity daily is not that much of a reach. Yet, Moody, whose cousins attended Williams that year, said that, to his knowledge, his relatives didn’t hear about the contamination at the time. “My family had not one clue,” he said.

The state removed over 2,500 tons of petroleum-contaminated soil from the courtyard and transported it to a waste site in Georgia before the start of the school year in September. A concrete cap was placed over the remaining contaminated soil until it could be excavated in school breaks over the following year. Another 1,000 tons were removed between December 2017 and June 2018.

“Due to this excavation and removal, the accessible soils are no longer an exposure risk,” Craver said.

Meanwhile, the school district held a public forum, titled “Schools of the Future,” where community members could submit anonymous feedback. Many of the comments mentioned the Williams and Lincoln schools — and some referenced the former dump site. “Can Williams Elementary use the surrounding land to increase/renovate since the school was built on a dump site!! This should be a priority!!!” one comment said. “Remove Lincoln and Williams off the dump site,” another person wrote.

With no further action from local officials, community members continued to press the issue. In June 2019, Fields and other residents expressed their frustrations on the area’s history in a public county meeting on plans to expand another dump site in the area.

“What you’re talking about doing, it’s preposterous,” Fields said.

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As Covid-19 hit, others started asking questions. Alexandria Owens, a pediatric critical-care nurse scientist working in East Gainesville, began to look into why so many kids ended up in the intensive care unit with asthma issues.

Poking around online, Owens found the state records about the eroded oil tanks at Williams. She spent hundreds of hours reading documents and compiling data. She wondered if there was a correlation between the toxic soil and the state of children’s health in the area. “Kids end up on life support,” Owens said. “It’s alarming knowing that these types of chemicals can exacerbate asthma.”

Owens had no idea about the former dump site, which is not mentioned in state environmental or health department records. But she started reaching out to the school district in March 2020 about the high asthma rates in the neighborhood and the leaked oil tanks. “I felt like my argument was even stronger because these kids are at a higher risk, let’s actually sound the alarm because Covid-19 is happening,” Owens said. “But that did not happen.”

At every turn, Owens was being stalled. “You don’t need to be calling all these people,” a manager of the Petroleum Restoration Program at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection told her in a phone call in June 2020, according to notes Owens took at the time. “Pediatric asthma wasn’t in our top priority list,” a community programs administrator at the Alachua County Health Department told Owens the following month. (The employee was referencing priorities from a county-level assessment that happens every few years, according to Myers, the health department’s administrator in Alachua County.)

It was Owen’s outreach that ultimately triggered the Florida Department of Health to conduct an assessment at the school. In July 2020, the department published a report stating that it “does not expect the occurrence of health risks associated with exposure to groundwater and soil.” But the report was not comprehensive; the department could not evaluate indoor air quality or assess the impact on students prior to 2016 due to insufficient or unavailable data.

The department said the concentrations of BaP that had previously been found in the soil could create additional health risks if it vaporized into the air. The report recommended that the department continue to assess indoor and outdoor air quality for the presence of the chemical. Owens was relieved an assessment had been done but continued to press state and local officials on the issue.

At times, she grew frustrated with the process. In a July 2021 email outlining an apparent miscommunication between the school district and the state environmental agency about the state’s plans for the school, she wrote that such communication breakdowns “will continue to delay the timely remediation of a problem that could absolutely exacerbate health issues in the children from my community.”

She also felt that, in addition to testing, there needed to be more excavation — and that the school building should be moved.

Stalled Reconstruction

Carlee Simon, who became interim superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools in December 2020, shared Owens’s assessment. Simon had attended Williams as a child, and her parents were teachers in the district, but she knew nothing of the site’s toxicity before starting the job.

Based on the information she got from colleagues and the environmental department and the aged state of the building, Simon soon concluded that the only solution was to rebuild the entire school. “We needed to have the entire building demolished,” Simon said. “Our discussions were how long would it take between us tearing down the building and the soil actually being addressed and ready for us to build on. That was like a massive unknown.”

It was likely going to take years, and the school board was divided. “It was pretty clear that budget priorities of the past shaped that community,” she said. She noted that a new school was built in a wealthier part of Gainesville just a few years earlier. “The first completed school they built was in a highly affluent and influential community, not a dilapidated building on the east side,” she said.

Gainesville’s east side is also still haunted by the decision back in the 1950s to put a dump in a residential neighborhood near two schools. Archival records show that city officials placed the landfill near the schools with the hopes that burying trash in the swampy land would make the land usable in the future. Jennifer Smart, the communications director for the city of Gainesville, told The Intercept the current government couldn’t speak to the school’s environmental problems. “With so much of this timeline reaching back many decades, it’s a historical record in which current City of Gainesville leadership did not participate and have no specific knowledge,” Smart wrote in an email.

Experts told the Intercept that cost-pressed governments often build schools on cheap land. “The tension is often between like there’s concern for student’s health, but also there’s the concern about using public monies for more expensive lands,” said Tai, the UW–Madison environmental law professor. “So a lot of times economic concerns sort of pressure states into still siting schools in toxic areas.”

After multiple disagreements with the board, including on other topics such as how to handle Covid-19, Simon was fired from the job after 15 months — the seventh superintendent to leave the job in the last 10 years. She is now interim dean for the School of Education at the University of Alaska Southeast.

While internal school district emails indicate there were plans to renovate the school in 2021, that has still not happened. A list of reconstruction projects on the school district website dating back to November 2019 describes design plans for four other schools in the district. Williams Elementary, however, is stuck in limbo. According to the website, “the district is drafting the required state application for permission to demolish buildings on the campus.”

Johnson, the school district spokesperson, told The Intercept that the Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed the district’s reconstruction plans: “Facilities projects that have been completed have cost much more than originally expected, affecting the timeline for other proposed projects.” Williams is among the projects that fell by the wayside.

More Testing, More Toxins

Soil and air testing have been a constant at Williams Elementary over the last several years. Since July 2020, state contractors have been deployed to the school at least a dozen times. 

The most alarming results came in November 2020, when soil testing revealed BaP equivalent levels of 21.8 mg/kg in one part of the property: 218 times over the recommended residential limit. (State records show that BaP equivalent levels fluctuated over the next year and a half, dropping down to 7.8 mg/kg in that same area by July 2022 and to 2.6 mg/kg on a different part of the property.)

In a letter to Williams Elementary in December 2020, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection alerted the school that two chemicals, naphthalene and acenaphthene, had been found in the soil. The latter was present at three times the standard level. Exposure to naphthalene by inhalation is associated with hemolytic anemia, damage to the liver, and neurological damage, according to the EPA. In late 2021, the environmental department installed a venting system underneath one of the school’s buildings to mitigate soil concentrations of naphthalene.

Air quality has also been a persistent issue at Williams, and on at least one occasion in 2020, a teacher reportedly complained about it to the principal, according to an email obtained by The Intercept. State contractors, meanwhile, have repeatedly found elevated levels of chemicals in the air at Williams, including chloroform, a possible carcinogen that is often used in industrial processes. 

In February 2021, after Owens’s urging, the state Department of Health released a report sampling six indoor air and four outdoor locations at the elementary school. The department found that it was possible there would be vapor intrusion, which is the migration of chemicals from the soil into the air. The report found that some concentrations of chemicals, including benzene, carbon tetrachloride — which can produce kidney and liver damage — and chloroform were at a level where they could cause considerable health risk through exposure. The health department recommended continued air monitoring.

That same month, a firm contracted by the environmental department reported excess levels of naphthalene in the air, as well as BaP in the soil.

Despite the findings in Gainesville, the state health department touted Williams Elementary as one of its “Success Stories.” Though students and workers at the school had been “exposed to contaminated soil and air,” the post said, they were not expected to develop adverse health effects.

Experts studying air pollution in schools have revealed it has extremely damaging effects on children. “Air pollution can cause what’s called externalizing behaviors, aggressive behaviors in kids,” said Persico, the American University public policy professor. “That causes them to get into fights or to misbehave, and then they’re more likely to be suspended in school.”

An Ongoing Issue 

Despite years of appeals from within the school and the broader community, Williams Elementary is still trying to find a way to get rid of the polluted soil. The school district’s maintenance manager asked the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in an email last May “about the possibility of having some assistance with the removal of the contaminated soil, if and when the Board decides to demo Buildings 1 and 2 at Williams.”

An environmental consultant at the department responded that the agency could investigate and cover the cost of needed remediation if the school board approved renovations or demolition.

The environmental department recently contracted Leah D. Stuchal, a research professor at the University of Florida, to review air testing results from November that revealed excessive levels of chloroform. In February, Stuchal concluded that the excess levels “were not believed to be a result of petroleum contamination” and that monitoring for petroleum contaminants in indoor air was no longer needed. Still, Stuchal recommended continued monitoring for chloroform, of which the source remains unclear.

“The recommendation for continued monitoring of chloroform is because the source is unknown and the population exposed involves children,” Stuchal told The Intercept in an email.

Craver, of the environmental department, said that “out of an abundance of caution,” the agency “continues to maintain a passive venting system and conduct indoor air monitoring.”

The school recently concluded another round of testing, but there are no public records of testing at Lincoln Middle School across the field. And the long-forgotten landfill remains part of the land’s history.

Meanwhile, community members in East Gainesville have been waging a fight against the expansion of a different landfill. Just 2 miles from the schools, it was meant to close in January but has applied to continue operating until 2028. As a local news outlet reported last year, “It’s history repeating.”

“The people in our neighborhoods … I can guarantee you they have experienced enough tragedies,” Fields said in a county meeting on the proposed landfill plans. “It used to be an ongoing joke in our neighborhood, we are all gonna die from cancer because the dump site was right there between Lincoln and Williams Elementary. Well, guess what happened?”

The reporting for this article was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post For Decades, Officials Knew a School Sat on a Former Dump — and Did Little to Clean Up the Toxins appeared first on The Intercept.

The alleged plot coincided with growing concern about far-right political violence in America. But the FBI quickly realized it had a problem: A key informant in the case, a career snitch with a long rap sheet, had helped to orchestrate the kidnapping plot. During the undercover sting, the FBI ignored crimes that the informant, Stephen Robeson, appeared to have committed, including fraud and illegal possession of a sniper rifle.

The Whitmer kidnapping case followed a pattern familiar from hundreds of previous FBI counterterrorism stings that have targeted Muslims in the post-9/11 era. Those cases too raised questions about whether the crimes could have happened at all without the prodding of undercover agents and informants.

For the FBI, the stakes in the Whitmer case were high. If defense lawyers learned of Robeson’s role in the kidnapping plot, the FBI agents feared, they’d be accused of entrapment. The collapse of the case, built over nearly a year using as many as a dozen informants, two undercover agents, and bureau field offices in at least four states, would have been a public relations coup for right-wing politicians and news media. Both groups have used the problematic investigation as evidence that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against conservatives — despite a decadeslong public record proving the opposite — and as fuel for conspiracy theories that the January 6 Capitol riot was engineered by the FBI.

But the truth about the Whitmer kidnapping case is far more complicated. This story is based on thousands of pages of internal FBI reports and more than 250 hours of undercover recordings obtained by The Intercept. The secret files offer an extraordinary view inside a high-profile domestic terrorism investigation, revealing in stark relief how federal agents have turned the war on terror inward, using informant-led stings to chase after potential domestic extremists just as the bureau spent the previous two decades setting up entrapment stings that targeted Muslims in supposed Islamist extremist plots. The files also suggest that federal agents have become reckless, turning a blind eye to public safety risks that, if addressed, could disrupt the government’s cases.

The FBI documents and recordings reveal that federal agents at times put Americans in danger as the Whitmer plot metastasized. In one instance, the FBI knew that Wolverine Watchmen militia members would enter the Michigan Capitol with firearms — and agents suspected that one man might even have had a live grenade — but did not stop them. (The grenade turned out to be nonfunctional.) Another time, federal agents intervened when local police officers in Michigan were about to confiscate firearms from two of the FBI’s targets, who were on a terrorist watchlist. Local law enforcement had received reports from concerned citizens who saw the men loading their guns before entering a hardware store.

The files also raise questions about whether the FBI pursued a larger, secret effort to encourage political violence in the run-up to the 2020 election. At least one undercover FBI agent and two informants in the Michigan case were also involved in stings centering on plots to assassinate the governor of Virginia and the attorney general of Colorado.

The FBI refused to answer a list of questions. “Unfortunately, due to ongoing litigation, we are unable to comment,” said Gabrielle Szlenkier, a spokesperson for the FBI in Michigan. Robeson, through his lawyer, also declined to comment.

Federal agents paid Robeson nearly $20,000 to participate in a conspiracy that evolved into a loose plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, according to the documents. But FBI agents knew that two other informants and some of the defendants in the Whitmer case believed that Robeson was the plot’s true architect.

So on December 10, 2020, agents called Robeson into the FBI’s office in Milwaukee in an apparent attempt to silence him. In an extraordinary five-hour conversation, which FBI agents recorded, one of Robeson’s handlers told him: “A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,’ right?” Despite federal and state trials involving the kidnapping plot, this recording — which goes to the heart of questions about whether the FBI entrapped the would-be kidnappers — was never allowed into evidence. The Intercept exclusively obtained the full recording and is publishing key portions for the first time.

The FBI agents asked Robeson to sign a nondisclosure agreement and proceeded to coach and threaten him to shape his story and ensure that he would never testify before a jury. Their coercion of Robeson undermines the Justice Department’s claim, in court records, that Robeson was a “double agent” whose actions weren’t under the government’s control. The agents also made it clear that they had leverage: They knew Robeson had committed crimes while working for the FBI.

“We know we have power, right?” an FBI agent told Robeson during this meeting. “We know we have leverage. We’re not going to bullshit you.”

Robeson’s role as an informant in the Whitmer kidnapping plot was supposed to be a tightly held secret. FBI agents had written the charging documents to conceal his identity.

But the FBI’s paperwork was sloppy. Supporters of the 14 defendants began to piece together clues from details like the FBI’s descriptions of passengers in a car that had been driven near Whitmer’s vacation home in Antrim County, Michigan. The clues appeared to point to Robeson as a snitch — or, in the FBI’s terminology, a confidential human source. After the October 2020 arrests, a panicked Robeson started calling targets of the FBI investigation and denying that he was an informant.

“So when you call, your intentions are to keep some of the heat off of you, right?” an FBI agent asked Robeson during the December 2020 meeting. “To point people in the other direction?”

“Anywhere but me,” Robeson answered. “Not at anyone specific, just away from me.”

Robeson was talking to Henrik “Hank” Impola and Jayson Chambers, two of the lead FBI agents in the Michigan case. Chambers, who previously played in a rock band that “bases all of its music on the fact that Christians are in a spiritual war,” was the registered owner of a private intelligence company whose purported CEO ran a Twitter account known for right-wing trolling and that appeared to tweet about the Michigan case before it was announced.

The two agents started up a good-cop, bad-cop routine with Robeson. Chambers assured him they had done all they could to conceal his role as an informant. Impola, meanwhile, said they needed to come up with a plausible cover story.

“Robey’s Idea From Day One”

From the start of the investigation, the FBI knew that Robeson, like many paid informants, had credibility problems. Robeson has been in and out of the criminal justice system since the early ’80s, charged with having sex with a minor, writing bad checks, bail jumping, and many other offenses. Robeson also acknowledged to the agents that he was previously a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang. “I can’t blame what I did on anybody else,” Robeson told FBI agents of his criminal record. “I’m doing what I hope is better now.”

Sexual misconduct is a repeated claim in allegations involving Robeson, and his handlers at the FBI knew this. A local police report in the FBI’s files describes how a 17-year-old claimed Robeson coerced her to have sex in return for a promise to put her pictures in a calendar. He pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge.

More recently, according to an internal FBI report, a woman who lived in Robeson’s garage in Wisconsin told federal agents that Robeson pressured her for sex because he said she wasn’t contributing enough to the household. “I would not call it rape,” the woman said, though she acknowledged to federal agents that she did not believe she had a choice. The woman also told FBI agents that Robeson sold marijuana and prescription drugs out of his house, according to internal bureau documents. She reported that she suspected he was selling firearms as well. (The Intercept is not publishing these reports because they contain identifying information about alleged sex crime victims.)

Robeson’s career as a government cooperator appears to have coincided with his career as a criminal. In 1985, he testified that a member of a violent motorcycle gang with whom he had shared a jail cell confessed to him that he had “hit a girl on top of the head” before her body was found in a burned-out bar, which was allegedly set ablaze for insurance money. More recently, in the mid-2000s, Robeson helped police set up a Wisconsin farmer, who wanted to harm a romantic rival, in a murder-for-hire scheme.

Defense lawyers say the FBI used a nondisclosure agreement with Robeson — which they claim was never turned over as evidence in the Whitmer cases — to prevent Robeson from talking publicly about his work as an informant. As Special Agent Chambers reminded Robeson in their recorded meeting: “So when you get asked, ‘Why did you have to go to the FBI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?’ You don’t have to talk about what we’re talking about here.”

Federal agents were particularly troubled by messages Robeson had sent to Barry Croft Jr., a primary target in the investigation, that alluded to using violence against elected officials. Croft’s lawyer could use those messages to suggest that the kidnapping plot had been Robeson’s idea, not Croft’s, the agents feared.

“This is something that we’re all going to have to overcome,” Impola told Robeson, adding a few minutes later: “It quickly becomes, from a defense strategy, ‘Well, this was Robey’s idea from day one.’”

“I Let the FBI Know”

In the spring of 2020, as the United States grappled with a deadly coronavirus pandemic, Whitmer, a Democrat, issued a “stay home, stay safe” order in Michigan that barred “in-person work that is not necessary to sustain or protect life.” Covid-19 skeptics, along with many Republicans, were enraged. On April 17, Trump weighed in with a tweet: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

Two weeks later, as many as 1,000 protesters attended a rally at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing in what a state senator later described as a “dress rehearsal” for January 6. The so-called American Patriot Rally was organized by Ryan Kelly, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan who was later sentenced to 60 days in prison for taking part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Many of the protesters inside the Michigan Capitol were armed, including an FBI informant and former Army sergeant named Dan Chappel. The FBI had hired Chappel to infiltrate a ragtag group of gun enthusiasts he’d met through Facebook who called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen. “I let the FBI know that there was talks of storming the Capitol,” Chappel, known to the militia group as “Big Dan,” later testified.

About 10 members of the Wolverine Watchmen were with Chappel at the state Capitol, unaware that he was working for the FBI. Although he informed the FBI in advance that the Wolverine Watchmen planned to storm the Capitol that day, federal agents did not try to stop them, Chappel later testified. FBI agents knew the militia members had discussed the locations of police officers at the Capitol and how to start “the boogaloo,” code for a civil war. (A year after arrests were made in the Whitmer kidnapping plot, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel confirmed in a podcast interview that law enforcement perceived violence at the Capitol as a real threat. “There was a plan for mass execution that day,” Nessel said.)

The April rally in Lansing was so successful that the same organizers held another, on June 18, 2020. The protesters, including Chappel and other members of the Wolverine Watchmen, milled about outside the Capitol that day, showing off their firearms and military cosplay for the news cameras.

That’s where Chappel first met Adam Fox, who lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop and liked to work out, smoke marijuana, and rant on social media. A stout man with a beard, Fox had already met Robeson, who was the Wisconsin chapter president of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had started working for the FBI as an informant in October 2019, according to the bureau.

Robeson had come to the FBI’s attention in part through a secret program known as Operation Bronze Griffon — first revealed publicly in 2022 to Republican House investigators by a whistleblower who misspelled it as Bronze Griffin — through which Facebook provides user activity information to federal agents without a search warrant or subpoena. According to an FBI report obtained by The Intercept, agents received a Bronze Griffon lead on Robeson for posting “possibly violent rhetoric in support of the militia movement and the Boogaloo concept.” The FBI recruited Robeson to be an informant, and he told agents that he knew of fellow militia members who had spoken about attacking law enforcement officials.

Once on the FBI payroll, Robeson organized and led several militia planning meetings, including one in Dublin, Ohio, that Fox and Croft attended on June 6, 2020.

Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox at the Michigan Capitol would bridge two federal investigations, known internally as Operation Cold Snap and Operation Kessel Run, and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.

Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox would bridge two federal investigation and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.

The informants went to great lengths to position Fox as a leader. Robeson suggested that Fox launch a Michigan chapter of the Patriot Three Percenters. On June 21, 2020, just three days after Fox met Chappel, a third FBI informant, Jenny Plunk, created a private Facebook group called “Michigan Patriot III%ers.” (The FBI classifies Three Percenters as a domestic terrorism threat.)

The Facebook group’s first members were Plunk and Robeson, both on the FBI’s payroll, and Fox and his girlfriend, Amanda Keller. Plunk lived in Tennessee, where, according to her FBI cover story, she led a small militia. While Plunk and Robeson administered the Facebook group, Fox invited several Wolverine Watchmen and other gun enthusiasts to join, bringing the group’s membership roster to 28. Although the FBI’s informants had created the Facebook group for Fox, Robeson announced in a welcome message that Fox was the “C.O.” — a military acronym for “commanding officer.”

Robeson often spoke in the vernacular of a soldier. He never served in the military, but he was so gung-ho that he had obtained forged paperwork that made it appear he’d been a Marine, according to FBI reports. Using military lingo, Robeson posted an invitation to the new Facebook group for a weekend tactical training session in Cambria, Wisconsin, about 40 miles north of Madison.

More than 30 people attended that weekend event in July 2020, including Fox, his girlfriend, and a few members of the Wolverine Watchmen. At the time, Robeson was running scams related to a fake charity he called Race to Unite Races, whose mission was “to bridge the racial divide.” Internal FBI reports indicate that Robeson used proceeds from the fake charity to buy supplies to build a shooting range to train in close-quarters combat, known as a “kill house.”

Videos from the FBI files show the attendees shooting at targets in the kill house. Robeson, a firearm holstered at his side, can be seen giving directions. Chappel, who had combat experience in Iraq, also appears in several videos demonstrating tactics. FBI agents gave Chappel permission in advance to share combat tactics with the militia members, telling him: “You can do what’s on YouTube.”

In a group photo from the event, many attendees hold up rifles, offering the reluctant half-smiles of an awkward family picture. Robeson is off to the left, wearing flip-flops, American-flag swimming trunks, and a sleeveless T-shirt that hangs over his large belly. He’s holding up three fingers, the sign of the Three Percenters.

The events of that weekend were critical to the Justice Department’s case, as they appeared to show the men training for scenarios they’d encounter in their supposed attempt to kidnap Michigan’s governor. But by the time the FBI spoke to Robeson in December 2020, federal agents were deeply concerned that the fine details of that weekend might suggest entrapment.

“You’ve got a Wisconsin Patriot Three Percenter role-playing the kidnapping with Wolverine Watchman at the training you’ve set up, right?” Impola, the FBI agent, said to Robeson.

“It wasn’t just me,” Robeson said. “I set it up and —”

“These are things we need to discuss,” Chambers interrupted.

Impola told Robeson that the FBI’s case notes show that a Wisconsin agent was aware of the training, but that federal agents did not know that Robeson was the one who had organized it.

“I don’t want to put these words in your mouth, but the question is —” Impola said.

“Did I do it under FBI directive?” Robeson interrupted.

“Right,” Impola answered.

“No, it wasn’t just — What I’m saying is, it wasn’t me. It was Adam [Fox] that asked if they could do that —”

“Yup,” the two FBI agents said in unison.

“It was Barry [Croft] who asked if we could get a joint one together. It was Illinois. And I asked before I said yes.”

“The question becomes: Did a bunch of terrorists Shanghai your training for their purposes, or did you set up a training for terrorists?” Impola asked. “That’s the question, right? There’s a training that happened in which a terrorist operation was planned and played out, and you’re involved in setting it up.”

“I Need to Come Play With Y’all”

Robeson’s organizing and financing of the weekend training in Wisconsin wasn’t the FBI’s only problem.

In multiple videos from the training, Robeson can be seen using firearms. As a felon, he wasn’t allowed to have guns. But FBI agents apparently believed that handling firearms would be critical to his credibility among the militia members, so they had asked the Justice Department for a waiver to let Robeson handle “nonfunctional” weapons in his undercover capacity, according to internal emails.

The Justice Department said no, reminding Robeson’s handlers that he was prohibited from handling even an inoperable firearm. “Just the receiver satisfies the federal definition of a firearm,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Rita Rumbelow told the FBI in a May 21, 2020, email, referring to the tube that houses the firearm’s bolt.

Internal FBI records show that Robeson and his handlers found creative ways to get around the Justice Department’s directive. One month after the Wisconsin training event, the FBI assigned Robeson a new handler, Corey Baumgardner, an agent in Wisconsin. Baumgardner later testified that he collected a firearm from Robeson: an AR-15-style rifle with an illegal suppressor and a launcher attachment. Instead of handing the firearm to the agent, Robeson left it on the ground in front of his truck. Baumgardner collected the gun, without having to see Robeson handle it.

The gambit appeared to allow Robeson and the FBI to have it both ways: Robeson could have access to guns, maintaining his credibility with the militia members, and FBI agents wouldn’t directly see him handle firearms.

Federal agents went to great lengths to maintain this sleight of hand. As part of the sting, the FBI in early August 2020 went to Delaware, where Robeson and Plunk met with a group that included Croft, a truck driver Robeson started messaging online in 2019 about targeting politicians for violence, and Frank Butler, a Navy veteran from Virginia.

Butler had been in contact online and in person with both Robeson and Chappel, and Chappel had discussed with him a fantastical plan to fly an explosives-laden drone into the Virginia governor’s North Carolina vacation home, though the plot went nowhere. Butler, who was never charged with a crime, later told investigators that Robeson and Chappel “were literally brainwashing me” and “weaponizing me.” (Prosecutors acknowledged in a court filing that Robeson had offered to provide money to “purchase weapons for attacks” and “the use of a drone, to aid in acts of domestic terrorism.”)

After their meeting in Delaware, Robeson had something for Croft. Baumgardner, the FBI agent in Wisconsin, had driven the AR-15-style rifle he’d collected next to Robeson’s truck more than 900 miles to Delaware. The rifle had originally belonged to Croft, and Robeson tried to give the weapon back to him. According to internal FBI reports, Croft refused to accept it, saying he couldn’t keep it at that moment. Plunk, the other FBI informant, took the illegal gun instead.

The following month, two undercover FBI agents and three FBI informants — Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk — gathered for another training event in Luther, Michigan, with around 26 others, including Croft from Delaware and Fox from Michigan. Plunk secretly recorded audio and video during the training event. In one recording, Robeson proclaimed that he was now the national leader of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had appointed someone else to run his chapter in Wisconsin. “I’m no longer the state C.O.,” Robeson said. “I’m the national C.O.”

Also during this training event, on the afternoon of September 13, 2020, Plunk gave the rifle to Croft, who, in turn, handed it over to Chappel, according to FBI reports.

The story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation.

FBI agents appeared to view the rifle with an illegal suppressor and attached launcher as a critical piece of evidence in their conspiracy case. But the story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation. The illegal rifle made a full circle, from the FBI and back, through the hands of three paid informants, never staying long with any targets of the investigation.

The gun anecdote is emblematic of the larger sting: The FBI’s informants were ham-fistedly encouraging their targets to discuss plots to harm elected officials. Those efforts reached farcical levels on September 12, 2020, during a meeting and training exercises in Luther.

For that meeting, Chappel brought a friend nicknamed “Red,” a slender man with a 187th Airborne sleeve tattoo on his right arm. “Red” was in fact Timothy Bates, an undercover FBI agent who identifies himself in government recordings as “UCE 7775,” referring to his FBI undercover employee number. Just three weeks earlier, Bates had been in Denver, where he encouraged political violence. In Colorado, an FBI informant named Mickey Windecker introduced Bates to a racial justice activist who expressed interest in assassinating the state’s attorney general — a plot that, like the one targeting Virginia’s governor, ultimately fizzled.

Bates and Chappel, both Army veterans, led a close-quarters combat training for the Wolverine Watchmen. Bates also told the group gathered in Michigan that he could supply explosives. The group’s rough plan to kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home involved possibly blowing up a nearby bridge to slow rescue efforts.

“So my guy up in Minnesota, he can pretty much get whatever. He has access to whatever one would want,” Bates said in an undercover recording. Bates had brought along several videos showing men assembling and detonating homemade bombs. These videos were all stage-managed by the FBI, with agents pretending to be rogue bomb-makers.

One showed an SUV obliterated by a pipe bomb. “It’s a short video,” Bates told the group.

“Oh, yeah!” Robeson said, laughing approvingly at the explosion.

Bates explained that some of the bombs used C-4 inside pipes, with timing devices. Others used liquid explosives, he said.

“I need to come play with y’all,” Plunk said excitedly.

As he watched the video, Fox asked Bates: “What kind of price tag we looking at?”

“Depending on how big you want it,” Bates answered. “For that right there? That’s pretty cheap — 1,600 bucks, maybe. Maybe a thousand bucks.”

It wasn’t the first time Bates had offered bargain prices. In Colorado, Bates suggested he could hire a hitman for $500 to kill the state’s attorney general. In Michigan, he was offering explosives for pennies on the dollar.

That evening, Robeson, Chappel, Bates, and a few militia members drove near Whitmer’s vacation home. They inspected the bridge they’d bomb, tried to view Whitmer’s home from across the lake, and drove down her road. This apparent reconnaissance trip was central to the government’s case.

But true to form, Robeson mucked up the evidence. Fellow Wisconsinite Brian Higgins was the one who drove past Whitmer’s home — a seemingly incriminating act — but Higgins later told federal agents that Robeson had said they were hunting for sexual predators. In his December meeting with FBI agents, Robeson confirmed that Higgins was not initially aware of the kidnapping plot and instead believed they were out “hunting pedophiles.” But once he was in Michigan, Higgins learned that some of the attendees had a rough plan to kidnap Whitmer. Higgins drove down Whitmer’s road using a dash camera and provided the video to Chappel. After he returned to Wisconsin, Higgins claims he told Robeson he didn’t want to be involved in the plot.

The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.

Feeling guilty for tricking him, Robeson tried to protect Higgins from criminal exposure — a fact federal prosecutors admitted to in a court filing. Robeson called Chappel, still unaware that he was also an FBI informant, and told him to destroy his copy of Higgins’s dash-cam video. The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.

During the December 10, 2020, recorded interview with Robeson, Impola tried to coerce the informant into changing his story about what Higgins knew before the drive: “If you’re sticking with the story that [Higgins] was out there on a pedophile ring,” the FBI special agent said, “you’ll be his star witness in the defense. There’s zero options for that.”

“We Have One Chief”

When arrests and charges were announced in the Whitmer plot, the Justice Department portrayed Adam Fox as the leader. But FBI recordings suggest the informants were the ones in charge.

On October 7, 2020, as the government was making arrests in the case, Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk were on a recorded phone line talking about who should make future calls to action — in other words, who should be the leader.

“I mean, I’m good with Robey, because you’re the national guy, the president,” Chappel said, adding a minute later: “We have one chief.”

“We can definitely roll,” Robeson said. “That’s fine.”

The FBI arrested 13 people that day, and the foiled kidnapping plot made national news. (Higgins, the 14th defendant, was arrested a week later.) After the initial arrests, Robeson made a series of calls to Chappel; the girlfriend of one of the militia members; and others who orbited the supposed kidnapping plot. Robeson offered several outlandish claims, including that he believed Croft, a primary target of the investigation, had leaked information that caused the arrests. FBI reports indicate that Robeson again called Chappel, still unaware that he was also working for the FBI, and told him to throw the rifle with the illegal suppressor and attached launcher into a lake. Chappel, however, had already returned the gun to his bureau handlers.

During these calls, Robeson told fellow informant Plunk that he believed Chappel was an informant. Robeson appeared to be flailing after the arrests, pointing fingers to avoid being revealed as a government snitch.

His behavior in the immediate aftermath of the arrests was so concerning to FBI agents that federal and state prosecutors discussed charging him with witness tampering, according to emails that circulated among more than a dozen FBI agents the day after the kidnapping plot was announced. The bureau then began to investigate Robeson, internal records show. Agents reinterviewed the woman living in his garage, who claimed he had coerced her into having sex with him. That woman told the FBI that during the undercover sting, Robeson had an arsenal of weapons in his bedroom; that he was bringing in drugs from out of state; and that he had proposed taking her to rallies and training events in other parts of the country so she could make money, which she described to the FBI as “sex trafficking.”

For his part, Robeson appeared to realize that he had crossed the line from informant to participant in the kidnapping plot, putting himself in legal jeopardy. An internal FBI report said Robeson told another informant that he was worried he could be linked to “product,” by which he meant explosives.

“I Did This Trying to Keep My Undercover Position”

The Whitmer kidnapping plot has yielded five acquittals, five convictions, and four guilty pleas in federal and state courts. Robeson didn’t testify in any of the trials. When defense lawyers tried to compel him, he told the federal court that he would assert his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. The Justice Department claimed that Robeson was a “double agent” whose statements would not be “binding admissions of the government itself.”

The recording of Robeson’s December 2020 meeting with the FBI reveals that the “double agent” ploy was a carefully planned strategy. When Robeson was called into that Wisconsin FBI office, agents described three possible scenarios for him.

The first was that all the defendants would take plea deals, in which case “your name is not on the witness list,” Impola said. The second was that Robeson could be a government witness or, in the third option, a witness for the defendants whose testimony could support their claims of entrapment.

At the time, the agents errantly assumed that option one was the likeliest. “I am fairly confident that when anybody looks at that witness list, they’re not going to trial now because they know the ramifications,” said Impola.

But what he didn’t say was that the second and third options — involving Robeson testifying in court — weren’t real options at all, at least not in the view of the FBI. There was also a fourth option that the agents didn’t mention: The Justice Department could jam Robeson, a felon, with firearms charges for crimes he committed while working undercover for the FBI.

And that’s what happened. On March 3, 2021, the Justice Department indicted Robeson in Wisconsin on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Prosecutors alleged that Robeson bought a .50-caliber sniper rifle, among the most powerful firearms available to civilians in the United States, and later sold it on Facebook — all while working for the FBI.

At his plea hearing, Robeson claimed he’d bought the gun to bolster his FBI cover. “I did this trying to keep my undercover position where I was at and kind of make me look a little more aggressive in the organization,” Robeson said in court.

Robeson was sentenced to probation on a federal felony charge that could have carried a 10-year sentence. He and his handlers knew he had illegally possessed, purchased, and sold multiple firearms in the course of the sting; the single gun charge represented a threat of more to come if he were to testify in any of the state or federal prosecutions.

With that threat, FBI agents stopped the facts from getting in the way of their “good story” about the Whitmer kidnapping plot. In their zeal to protect a career-making case, those federal agents also poured jet fuel on conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and the January 6 Capitol riot that will be central to this year’s presidential election.

The post The Informant at the Heart of the Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Plot Was a Liability. So Federal Agents Shut Him Up. appeared first on The Intercept.

In 82 percent of the 719 January 6-related cases that have been resolved, and in which the defendants have either pleaded guilty or been convicted, judges have issued lighter sentences than federal prosecutors requested, the analysis of Justice Department data through December 4, 2023, shows. They imposed the same sentences sought by prosecutors in just 95 cases and harsher sentences in only 37.

Nearly every one of the 24 federal judges handling the massive docket of January 6 cases has shown leniency toward the defendants, regardless of whether the judges were appointed by Democratic or Republican presidents, the data shows. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that the judges appointed by President Joe Biden have been slightly more lenient than those appointed by former President Donald Trump. Biden appointees issued lighter sentences than prosecutors sought for January 6 defendants in 24 of the 26 cases they handled, or 92 percent, effectively tying with George W. Bush appointees as the most lenient. Judges appointed by Trump, meanwhile, have issued more lenient sentences in 90 percent of their cases.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed that the federal judicial system has been unnecessarily punitive in its treatment of January 6 defendants, complaining that they are “political prisoners” who have been unfairly persecuted for trying to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s 2020 election. One leading January 6 defendant compared himself to a Jew living in Nazi Germany and said that his “only crime is opposing those who are destroying our country.”

The Intercept’s analysis sharply contradicts that right-wing narrative. In many cases, judges have rejected prosecutors’ requests for prison time, often reducing defendants’ sentences to home detention or probation. Defendants have been sentenced to standard prison terms in only 429 out of 719 cases, or 60 percent. Another 31 defendants were sentenced to intermittent incarceration, meaning they only had to serve time on nights or weekends. Home detention was given instead of prison in 101 cases, while defendants in 135 cases got probation.

“There is no evidence that the judges in these cases are handing out sentences that are excessive,” said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush administration. “I think this shows that the system is working.”

The Intercept’s analysis is the most comprehensive examination so far of how federal judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents ruled in January 6 cases that have reached a final resolution in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which is handling all the criminal cases stemming from the insurrection. Hundreds more cases are still in progress and will likely be assigned to the same group of judges. A total of 1,233 individuals have so far been charged in connection with the January 6 mob, according to a running tally compiled by the Associated Press.

The January 6 defendants have been charged with a wide range of crimes, including low-level violations like disorderly conduct and unlawful entry that would be forgettable if they were not committed with the aim of derailing the peaceful transfer of power. But the charges also include far more serious offenses, such as assaulting law enforcement officers and members of the media; theft; entering restricted areas with deadly weapons; disrupting Congress; and seditious conspiracy. About 140 police officers were assaulted as they tried to protect the Capitol and members of Congress, according to the Justice Department.

Judges have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors recommended across the board. The Justice Department is now appealing some of them.

“This dispels the idea that [the January 6 defendants] are victims,” said William Banks, a law professor at Syracuse University, when The Intercept told him about the analysis.

Lisa Klem, a spokesperson for the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., declined to comment on the statistics.

The pro-Trump revisionist history surrounding the January 6 defendants is part of a larger effort to downplay the significance of the insurrection while perpetuating the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The campaign to anoint the January 6 defendants as martyrs began soon after the uprising at the Capitol and quickly gained momentum. The following year, a former defendant sat in a phony jail cell in what amounted to a performance art installation created for attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and last spring, a group of January 6 defendants singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” over a prison phone line became a hit on iTunes. Many January 6 defendants have sought to cash in on their fame and have raised millions of dollars from right-wing supporters, particularly through the Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo. Prosecutors have asked judges to impose fines to counter the flood of donations.

The right-wing support for January 6 defendants has continued even as many have apologized in court for their actions and blamed Trump for lying about the election results and inciting them to storm the Capitol. One recent study by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that 174 January 6 defendants have said they believed they were doing Trump’s bidding.

Lawyers for Peter Schwartz, who threw a chair at police officers and attacked them with pepper spray, told the court that he was only following Trump’s directions. “There remain many grifters out there who remain free to continue propagating the ‘great lie’ that Trump won the election, Donald Trump being the most prominent,” they wrote in an April 2023 court filing. “Mr. Schwartz is not one of these individuals; he knows he was wrong.”

Trump and the MAGA right have ignored these statements of remorse and continue to treat the defendants as heroic figures. At a campaign event in Texas in November, the Republican front-runner described incarcerated January 6 offenders as “hostages, not prisoners.” Last June, Trump attended a fundraiser for January 6 defendants, calling them “great people” who have “been made to pay a price.” 

J. Michael Luttig, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, said that the pro-Trump attacks on the judicial process in the January 6 cases are deeply damaging to the nation. “The American people, as well as the courts, must understand that the former president will continue these disgraceful, condemnable attacks on our institutions of law and democracy until he has succeeded in delegitimizing them in the eyes of a sufficient number of Americans that not only will they not accept the justice system’s verdicts against him, but they will return him to The White House in 2024 precisely because of those verdicts.”

Federal sentencing guidelines establish a range for each crime, but the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that sentencing guidelines are not mandatory. Federal judges must consider the guidelines, but they are not required to follow them. Prosecutors usually make recommendations in criminal cases, often reflecting the guidelines, while defense attorneys tend to propose lower sentences. But judges can ignore both recommendations.

The judges handling the January 6 cases have taken advantage of the leeway they are granted under the law to largely ignore prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations. Luttig, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush, said he always had confidence that judges handling the January 6 cases were not persecuting the defendants as Trump and his supporters had alleged, and were instead following normal and consistent sentencing patterns. He said he was not surprised “by the fact that the judges appear to have sentenced this group of defendants to lesser terms of imprisonment than was generally recommended by the prosecutors,” nor that “the party affiliation of the president appointing the judges” was not “a variable” in their sentencing patterns.

“This is as it should be,” Luttig said.

Obama appointees have handled the most January 6 cases, and they, too, have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in the vast majority. They have presided over 337 cases that have been resolved and have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in 281 of them, or just over 83 percent.

Judge Tanya Chutkan — who is presiding over Trump’s own federal trial on charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and who Trump and his supporters have accused of being out to get the former president — has actually been lenient in many of the other January 6 cases she has handled. She has issued sentences lighter than prosecutors sought in almost exactly half — 19 out of 39 — of her January 6 cases. Those statistics contradict a media narrative promoted by the MAGA right that Chutkan, an Obama appointee, has meted out unusually harsh sentences in cases related to the Capitol riot and that she may be exceptionally tough on Trump as well.

Judges appointed by Trump have issued lesser sentences than prosecutors wanted at only a slightly higher rate than Obama appointees. Out of 173 cases, Trump appointees gave lighter sentences than the government requested in 156. Trump appointees agreed to the sentences recommended by prosecutors in 16 cases, while issuing a harsher sentence in one.

By contrast, judges appointed by President Bill Clinton have meted out the harshest sentences, yet they have still been more lenient than prosecutors recommended slightly more than half the time. George W. Bush appointed judges have issued lesser sentences than prosecutors sought in 50 out of 54 cases, or 92 percent, while judges appointed by Ronald Reagan issued more lenient sentences in 42 out of 68 cases, or 61 percent. 

Judges handling the January 6 cases have been relatively lenient even when sentencing the most prominent defendants charged with the most serious crimes. Some leaders of militant groups were convicted of seditious conspiracy — plotting to use force to keep Trump in power — and received long sentences, but those penalties were still significantly lighter than what prosecutors had recommended.

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in prison by Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee. That struck many as a long sentence for the 58-year-old graduate of Yale Law School, but it was seven years less than prosecutors recommended for a man the government says was one of the insurrection’s key leaders. Mehta imposed the lesser sentence despite finding that Rhodes’s actions constituted terrorism, which calls for longer sentences under federal guidelines. The Justice Department has appealed the sentence, along with those of other Oath Keepers who received much lighter sentences than prosecutors recommended.

When it came time to mete out punishment for Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Oath Keepers Florida chapter who joined other members of the group to march up the steps of the U.S. Capitol in a “stack” formation to storm the building, Mehta issued a sentence of 188 months in prison; prosecutors had sought a 252-month sentence. Prosecutors asked that Oath Keepers member Roberto Minuta — a tattoo shop owner in Newburgh, New York, who was also convicted of seditious conspiracy — serve 204 months in prison, but Mehta sentenced him to just 54 months. On his way to Washington, Minuta filmed a video of himself warning that “millions will die” in a looming civil war; just before the Capitol riot began, he and Meggs were part of a security detail for Trump adviser Roger Stone.

Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy, was sentenced to 22 years in prison by Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee. Tarrio’s is the longest sentence given to any January 6 defendant so far, but it was still much shorter than the 33 years that prosecutors had recommended. The Justice Department has indicated that it plans to appeal the sentences of Tarrio and four other Proud Boys.

Jacob Chansley stormed the U.S. Capitol shirtless, covered in face paint, and wearing a horned headdress. He became known as the “QAnon Shaman” and got all the way up to the Senate rostrum, where he wrote a threatening note to Vice President Mike Pence, who was due to preside over the congressional certification of the presidential vote. “It’s only a matter of time,” the note read. “Justice is coming!”

Prosecutors described Chansley as “the public face of the Capitol riot” and asked that he be sentenced to 51 months in prison after he was convicted in 2021 of obstructing an official proceeding. Senior Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, sentenced him to 41 months, but Chansley was released after just 27 months. In July, Lamberth dismissed an effort by Chansley to get his conviction overturned, noting that new information obtained by prosecutors showed that Chansley may have been aware that a gallows had been erected outside the Capitol when he wrote his threatening note to Pence — evidence that Lamberth said might have convinced him to issue a longer sentence.

Chansley is now gearing up to run for Congress, the institution he helped invade on January 6. As he launches his bid for a House seat in Arizona’s 8^th District, the 36-year-old says he may rebrand himself as “America’s shaman.” Just before Christmas, Chansley attended a conference of Turning Point USA, a major conservative group, in Phoenix and had his photo taken with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing House member from Georgia. Chansley wore the same costume he’d had on at the Capitol; Greene said she was honored to meet him.

The most lenient individual judge handling January 6 cases was not appointed by Trump or Biden, but by George W. Bush. Judge John Bates, now on “senior” or semi-retired status, issued sentences more lenient than prosecutors sought in all 28 of the January 6 cases he handled, often turning down requests for prison time and letting defendants walk free. 

Take the case of Abram Markofski, an active member of the Wisconsin National Guard when he stormed the Capitol. After Markofski agreed to plead guilty to one of four charges against him — parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building — prosecutors asked for him to spend 14 days in jail; Bates gave him two years’ probation instead. Prosecutors sought a sentence of 30 days in jail for Thomas Fee, a retired New York firefighter who pleaded guilty to a parading charge that carried a sentence of up to six months in prison, but again Bates sentenced him to probation. Prosecutors sought seven months in jail for right-wing Florida pastor James Cusick; nine months for his son Casey Cusick; and seven months for David Lesperance, a member of Cusick’s congregation. Bates reduced their sentences to just 10 days each.

Bates has shown leniency toward even the most violent January 6 defendants on his docket. He sentenced Joseph Padilla, a former corrections officer from Tennessee who threw a flagpole that hit a police officer in the head, to 78 months in prison, less than half the 171-month sentence sought by prosecutors. Bates gave Padilla the lower sentence even after describing him as “one of the most aggressive rioters” on January 6.

“The judge was fair, I have to admit,” Padilla’s wife wrote in September on GiveSendGo, the Christian fundraising website.

Bates was also lenient in the wild case of Nathan Pelham. The same day Pelham agreed to surrender on charges related to the Capitol riot, the Texas man was arrested for shooting a gun in the direction of law enforcement officers. The shooting happened in April, after an FBI agent called Pelham to inform him of the January 6 charges. Later that day, when a local sheriff’s deputy was sent to his home for a welfare check, Pelham fired in the deputy’s direction. Prosecutors wanted Pelham to spend six months in prison for his role in the insurrection, but Bates sentenced Pelham to just a $500 fine in the January 6 case. Separately, Pelham pleaded guilty to a charge of illegal possession of a firearm in connection with the shooting and was sentenced to two years in prison.

One Obama appointee has been nearly as lenient as Bates. Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., has issued sentences more lenient than prosecutors sought in 34 of the 37 cases he has handled.

William Cotton of Rhode Island was a low-level member of the mob that breached the U.S. Capitol, and he quickly cut a plea deal with the government. But prosecutors contended that he should still spend some time in jail because they said he showed no remorse for his actions. “Cotton does not view this case or his participation in the Jan. 6 riot as serious,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “Put differently, Cotton does not take this case seriously because he does not expect this Court to take it seriously.” It appears that Cotton was right; while prosecutors sought a 21-day prison sentence, Boasberg gave him probation instead.

Boasberg also issued a lighter sentence than prosecutors sought in the case of a defendant involved in one of the riot’s most violent incidents. On January 6, Jonathan Munafo of Albany, New York, stole a police officer’s shield and repeatedly punched him, causing “the officer’s head to snap back,” prosecutors wrote in a statement. The government sought 37 months in prison, but Boasberg reduced the sentence to 33 months, despite the fact that Munafo had been arrested in another election-related case for making death threats to a Michigan 911 dispatcher in a series of deranged calls on January 5, 2021. Munafo, who reportedly spent much of 2020 following Trump around to campaign events, was separately sentenced to 24 months in prison on charges related to the death threats.

Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, has also been extraordinarily lenient, issuing lighter sentences than prosecutors sought in 48 of the 50 January 6 cases he has handled, including cases involving some of the day’s most infamous incidents. Kevin Seefried of Delaware was photographed carrying a Confederate flag through the Capitol building, an image that went viral and captured the extremist, racist aspect of January 6. Seefried also confronted U.S. Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, a Black man, and threatened him with the flagpole. Seefried, the first rioter to encounter Goodman, cursed at the officer and chased him up a flight of stairs in a scene famously captured on video. Goodman testified that Seefried told him, “You can shoot me, man, but we’re coming in.” The flagpole with a Confederate flag on it, prosecutors noted, “was brandished by a man standing at the front of a volatile, growing mob towards a solitary, Black police officer.”

Goodman said that Seefried jabbed the flagpole in his direction several times while demanding to know “where are the members at, where are they counting votes?” Prosecutors recommended 70 months in prison for Seefried, but McFadden sentenced him to 36 months.

In the case of Geoffrey Sills, a Virginia man who stole a baton from a police officer and beat him with it, prosecutors sought 108 months in prison, but McFadden determined that he should only serve 52 months.

Chutkan, the judge handling Trump’s federal trial, has also issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in cases involving January 6 defendants convicted of violent crimes. Matthew Capsel of Ottawa, Illinois, fought National Guard soldiers protecting the Capitol, charging a line of troops and ramming into their shields. Capsel — who filmed himself fighting the soldiers on TikTok and whose Facebook profile name was “Mateo Q Capsel,” suggesting he was an adherent of QAnon conspiracy theories — only stopped fighting after he was pepper-sprayed, prosecutors wrote in a statement. Capsel kept posting about January 6 afterward, writing that “on the 6^th good men had to do a bad thing.”

Capsel was charged with civil disorder and reached a plea deal with prosecutors, who recommended that he be sentenced to 31 months in prison. But Chutkan reduced that to 18 months, well below the 27 to 33-month sentencing guideline range for his offense, according to prosecutors, and not much more than the sentence proposed by Capsel’s defense lawyers.

Perhaps the toughest January 6 judge has only presided over a small handful of cases and thus has not had much impact on the overall figures. Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton appointee now on senior status, has handled nine cases and issued sentences harsher than prosecutors sought in five, the same as prosecutors sought in two others, and more lenient sentences in only two. 

During the sentencing hearing in the cases of John Getsinger Jr. and Stacie Hargis-Getsinger, a married couple from South Carolina who joined the mob storming the Capitol, John sought to influence Sullivan by expressing regret and acknowledging that “we brought this on ourselves.”

Sullivan wasn’t buying it. Although prosecutors recommended just 45 days in jail for each, Sullivan gave them 60 days apiece.

Some January 6 defendants may soon find their sentences reduced or completely thrown out thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court agreed in December to consider an appeal of one of the charges brought by the government in a large number of January 6 cases: obstruction of an official proceeding. A lower court judge ruled that federal prosecutors inappropriately used the law against January 6 defendants. That ruling was overturned by an appeals court, and now the Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case.

Obstruction of an official proceeding is the sole charge in 24 out of the 719 January 6 cases in which defendants have been convicted and sentenced, according to the Intercept’s analysis; in many other cases, it is one of several offenses of which defendants were found guilty. If the Supreme Court determines that the obstruction law was misused, the defendants who have only been convicted of obstruction could presumably have their records cleared.

As the cases of hundreds of January 6 defendants continue to work their way through the legal system, Trump’s own trial on charges stemming from January 6 and his efforts to overturn the election is looming in the same federal courthouse, an imposing white stone building on Constitution Avenue just a few blocks from the Capitol. Trump is facing a charge of obstructing an official proceeding, along with other charges, so a Supreme Court verdict could affect him as well.

But while Trump has repeatedly spoken out in support of the January 6 defendants, he’s trying to block special counsel Jack Smith from even mentioning the Capitol mob during his trial, which is scheduled to begin in March. In a recent court filing, Smith made clear that he plans to highlight the insurrection as the culmination of Trump’s illegal post-election efforts to remain in power. But Trump is now trying to distance himself from it. His lawyer has argued that any mention of the Capitol riot is “not relevant” to Trump’s case and would be “prejudicial and inflammatory.” 

The post Federal Judges Have Shown Leniency in Nearly All Jan. 6 Cases appeared first on The Intercept.