If there’s one thing we know about the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two teachers dead, it is this: The police failed to stop it. This was not for an absence of well-funded, trained officers on the scene. They were there.

Rather than placing themselves potentially in harm’s way, however, the cops waited outside for over an hour and aggressively confronted desperate parents who begged for them to enter, including handcuffing one mother.

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This failure to save lives was not, as I wrote at the time, a failure of police work. It in fact exemplified what police critics and abolitionists have stressed for decades, with reams of evidence. Police do not save lives or prevent crime. Policing is not the “thin blue line” between social peace and chaotic violence. And the work of policing is a far cry from the heroic myth so stubbornly lodged in the American imagination.

This was not, of course, the lesson learned by Texas authorities after the shooting. Instead, the state’s response was as predictable as it was doomed to produce only more violence in Texas schools: They added more cops.

There were no well-researched, pragmatic policy changes around limiting assault rifles, regulating the hyper-destructive expanding bullets that ripped children’s bodies apart, and increasing mental health support — things that could actually stop shootings like in Uvalde, which was carried out by a troubled 18-year-old.

Texas school districts instead poured billions of dollars into stationing police at every public school campus in the state. The results, as a New York Times report published this week found, has been an horrific spate of violent police abuse against children in schools across the state.

There is no official use-of-force data on the over 11,000 cops stationed across Texas’s 400-plus school district police departments, the Times reported, and scant oversight. Despite the limited access to information, journalists were able to pinpoint “more than 2,600 use-of-force incidents” in a nearly four-year period using only the “small share of records” available.

There are horrific details. Kids are routinely slammed to the ground for minor misbehavior. Police punch children in the face. They shock students with Tasers for being in the wrong place. Or point guns at unarmed teens. Cops put handcuffs on a 6-year-old who later cried to his father, “The police wants me to die!” In some cases, low-level disciplinary infractions that should lead to no more than a trip to the principal’s office left children facing criminal charges; the well-documented school-to-prison pipeline in all its ignominy.

According to policing experts who spoke with the paper, Texas lawmakers “embraced school policing without establishing safeguards required for meaningful accountability.” A cop was mildly disciplined for having hogtied a 10-year-old boy with a behavioral disorder; apparently hogtying kids was a pattern for the officer. In response to the incident, the school district had to ban the practice of binding children by their hands and feet. The risks of bodily harm coming to kids across the state, however, remain tremendous: As in 16 other states, corporal punishment is legal in Texas schools.

And there is no mention in the Times investigation of the demographic profiles of the children abused by cops, but the videos in the report overwhelmingly show what appear to be nonwhite children enduring violent police abuse.

Filling school campuses with cops, meanwhile has not even worked to achieve the policy’s stated aim of stopping school shootings in Texas. In late March, a 15-year-old student in Bulverde, Texas, shot and injured a teacher and then took his own life.

Policing: A Twisted Civic Religion

After Uvalde, it was obvious to many of us that, despite widespread and high-profile criticisms of the police officers’ actions that day, we were unlikely to see a radical shift in mythic perceptions around the value of policing as a source of public safety.

The conflation of police presence and public safety maintains a powerful ideological hold, resistant to revision, regardless of recalcitrant evidence. Even the Supreme Court affirmed in 2005 that police departments are not in fact obligated to provide protection to the public.

In a gun-drenched, law-and-order conservative state like Texas, police lionization is a twisted civic religion. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law in 2016 to designate police officers a protected class, “making it a hate crime for anyone to commit a crime against a law enforcement officer out of bias against the police.”

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As I wrote in 2022, just after the Uvalde shooting, it would be too generous to those in power to grant that they have simply been misled by pro-police propaganda. By insisting that we double down on policing, leaders like Abbott make clear that they too uphold what the institution of policing defends: property, power, and racial hierarchy.

When it comes to the teachers and students whose lives are infused with greater violence and risk because of increased police presence, support for ever-present cops is more surprising. Even with ample evidence of police escalating confrontations and instigating violence against kids of all ages, sources who spoke to the Times reaffirmed the necessity of cops in schools.

“In interviews, dozens of parents, teachers, principals and students said that they believed police officers were needed to keep schools safe,” the Times reported.

Writer Patrick Blanchfield noted in 2020 that the police “are in our minds as a solution rather than as a problem.” There is a powerful false consciousness at play, violently reinforced when every social problem is met solely with a carceral, policing-based solution.

“We don’t know what our nation without police would look like,” the abolitionist scholar Mariame Kaba wrote. “But we know that our society with police is violent, racist, precarious, unequal, and unfree.”

As the response to Uvalde makes clear, this is not a knowledge problem. It is well established what flooding schools with police does and does not do. It does not promote safety; it does increase life-altering incidents of violence against children.

Texas is not alone in choosing violence.

The post After Uvalde, Texas Stuffed Schools Full of Cops. They Brutalized Students. appeared first on The Intercept.

Parscale was hired in part to influence major right-wing Christian media company Salem Media Group, where he is also an executive. His firm spent hundreds of thousands on ads with a Salem subsidiary. As part of the contract, Parscale’s firm also sent millions to other firms run by some of his closest political allies.

The new filing sheds light on a more detailed web of interconnected companies and political operatives capitalizing on Parscale’s contract with the Israeli government. Many of the companies getting work as part of Parscale’s Israel contract are being reported here for the first time.

Among those that received millions of dollars’ worth of payments related to the contract are ventures like SparkFire, an AI chatbot company leading a mass texting campaign, and a shadowy firm run by longtime mainstream Republican strategist Mike Shields. (None of the figures or firms in this story responded to requests for comment.)

Israel initially directly hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, last September with a contract worth $6 million. The new filing reveals that his firm has received over $15 million from Havas Media Network, an international media company, on behalf of the Israeli state.

The document shows that Parscale directed over $500,000 for ads to Salem Media Representatives, a subsidiary of Salem Media. Although Parscale was hired to integrate pro-Israel messaging into Salem Media shows — which feature conservative commentators such as Hugh Hewitt, Larry Elder, and Scott Jennings — these payments to the conservative media conglomerate on behalf of Israel were not previously known.

Parscale, who is the chief strategy officer for Salem Media, is not the only registered representative of Israel working for the media company. 

One of Parscale’s team members working on the Israel contract, Ashley Evdokimo, is Salem’s vice president for communications. According to her LinkedIn profile, Evdokimo, who works with Parscale at his digital strategy company Campaign Nucleus, took a position at Salem Media in September 2025, the same month that Parscale was hired to work for the Israeli government. A month later, Evdokimo registered as a foreign agent for Israel.

A Parscale Partnership

One of the largest recipients of the Israeli funds coming in through Parscale’s contract is a firm called Portman Road Strategies, which is run by longtime GOP strategist Mike Shields, according to Virginia state records. Shields’s firm received just under $5 million from Parscale as part of the contract in exchange for media placement, consulting, polling, and advertising work. 

Shields, a longtime Parscale ally, is also largely responsible for staffing the contract with the Israeli government. Of Parscale’s 18 team members at Clock Tower X, 14 are staffers at Convergence Media, a “campaign strategy, digital, public affairs & media firm” led by Shields.

During the first Trump administration, Shields and Parscale operated as a package deal, consistently recommending each other’s services as both became power brokers in Trump world. Parscale frequently convinced GOP campaigns — including that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — to hire Shields’s Convergence Media. The duo are now applying their digital influence campaign playbook to Israel. According to his bio, Shields was also a CNN commentator, a former chief of staff for the Republican National Committee, and a strategist for former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

Parscale directed another $6 million of the Israeli funds to SparkFire Technologies, an AI chatbot company. SparkFire’s role was previously unknown, but it was related to a campaign of text messages that was first reported by Responsible Statecraft. Under the contract, Parscale’s firm reaches out to Americans under the auspices of supposed “peace” organizations. 

SparkFire’s main service, called the flywheel, uses AI to reach out to people with personalized messages. The AI then performs an analysis on the conversation, with SparkFire storing the data and using it to target messages to the recipient.

Bot texts sent by SparkFire can appear compassionate, understanding, and referential, based on screenshots shared with the Intercept and Responsible Statecraft.

SparkFire claims these types of conversations are highly effective. The company boasts its messaging had a 45 percent conversion rate, suggesting almost half of the recipients were persuaded by the AI-powered conversation. While the scale of its text campaigns is unknown, SparkFire says it can reach millions of people.

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In text conversations with Americans about Israel, SparkFire’s bots frequently push links to pro-Israel websites and videos created by Parscale. One video, posted by a YouTube channel called Allies for Peace, claims that the narrative of suffering in Gaza was manufactured.

The pro-Israel websites and videos created for the initiative are also intended to influence artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT and Claude that scrape the internet for content.

Parscale’s websites include a legal disclaimer that they were created on behalf of the Israeli government. To identify the connection to paid pro-Israel advocacy, users of ChatGPT and Claude would have to ask the chatbot for sources, click the links to Parscale’s websites, and then scroll to the bottom of the pages to see that they are receiving information from a contractor for Israel.

Israel-Loving Oil Tycoon

Another company that appears to be involved with Parscale’s Israel contract is Jackson Parker, whose Florida chapter was founded by Parscale and billionaire oil tycoon Tim Dunn in early 2025. The company shares an Ohio office with several other Parscale companies working on the Israel project.

A recent job listing from Jackson Parker for a director of strategic communications says, “We are a mission-driven organization focused on combating anti-Semitism and strengthening public understanding of Israel as America’s closest ally in the Middle East.” One of the position’s requirements, the listing says, is to maintain compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA.

Dunn, a major Trump donor, is an evangelical preacher and billionaire who has spent tens of millions of dollars to push Texas towards a Christian governance model. He’s staunchly pro-Israel and chairs the Christian Advisory Board of the Israel Allies Foundation. Dunn once told a Jewish Republican Texas House speaker, however, that only Christians should hold leadership positions in the statehouse. 

Dunn is also heavily involved in the recently announced purchase of Salem Media. Earlier this month, WaterStone, a Colorado-based nonprofit that already controlled a 49.5 percent voting interest in Salem Media, said it would acquire the remaining shares of the company at a 250 percent premium of its recent share price, taking the company private. Hexagon Foundation, a nonprofit led by Dunn, is the largest institutional donor to WaterStone. Dunn’s organization, which says its mission is to support WaterStone, gave $70 million to Salem’s new owners in 2025.

On LinkedIn, an employee of another company called Three Tech, which received close to half a million dollars from the Israel contract, wrote “come work with us” and then shared job listings from Jackson Parker. 

Three Tech, a software development company founded in 2024, is connected to a constellation of interwoven firms run by Parscale in Ohio and Texas that have been paid with Israeli government money. Three Tech is listed as a “certified partner” of a marketing firm that shares Clock Tower X’s Medina, Ohio, address (along with another Parscale company receiving Israeli money as part of this deal, AI company Eyesover). According to the CEO’s LinkedIn, Three Tech uses a team of “80 Serbian engineers.”

Parscale’s work, with the help of subcontractors, is part of a broader strategy by the Israeli government to win back support from young conservatives and evangelicals. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans aged 18 to 49 have an unfavorable opinion of Israel, according to a Pew poll from March.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government has ramped up spending on influence operations. Earlier this year, Israel more than quadrupled its public diplomacy budget from $150 million in 2025 to $730 million in 2026.

The post Ex-Trump Campaign Chief Funneled Millions of Israeli Government Money to His Longtime Allies’ Companies appeared first on The Intercept.

The sanction came shortly before a trial was slated to begin in January, but it never got underway. Instead, in March, the company reached an undisclosed settlement with the family of the detainee.

The judge ordered what is known as an adverse inference against the company in a December hearing. That means the jury could have presumed the missing evidence was unfavorable in an eventual trial and therefore effectively imposed a penalty against CoreCivic.

The previously unreported sanction is the first known incident of a private prison corporation being held responsible in a wrongful death lawsuit for destroying video or other evidence related to immigration detainees dying in custody — despite there being cases of such behavior stretching back nearly a decade, experts said. (Neither CoreCivic nor ICE responded to requests for comment.)

Rebecca Sheff, senior staff attorney of ACLU New Mexico and part of plaintiffs’ legal team, told The Intercept that the judge’s sanction was an important response to prison companies’ propensity for overwriting video evidence. In court, destroying evidence is considered “spoliation,” the legal term for destroying, altering or failing to preserve evidence.

“It’s a practice we documented and unearthed: CoreCivic routinely lets video evidence be overwritten,” Sheff said, “even in this case, where they’ve been put on notice.”

“CoreCivic is essentially used to getting away with it — to not getting called on it,” Sheff added.

Immigration attorney Laboni Hoq, who was not involved in the CoreCivic case but has pursued similar sanctions in a wrongful death case involving the prison corporation GEO Group, said, “There has to be accountability when there are knowable consequences and prison corporations flout their responsibilities to preserve evidence.”

14 of 15 Cameras

The CoreCivic case revolved around the detention of Kesley Vial, a 23-year-old Brazilian asylum-seeker who died in a hospital on August 24, 2022, seven days after attempting suicide at the CoreCivic-owned Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, New Mexico.

Attorneys for Vial’s family sent CoreCivic a letter on the day he died, demanding preservation of all records relevant to his suicide attempt, including video footage taken in Vial’s cell, adjacent areas, rooms, and anywhere relevant to the incident. (Vial’s family declined to comment for this story.)

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In the weeks that followed, a CoreCivic investigator produced a report featuring 49 stills taken from video footage, laying out a timeline supporting the company’s contention that it bore no responsibility for Vial’s death.

CoreCivic, however, never produced the actual video footage underlying 37 of the 49 photos, according to Sheff’s courtroom testimony. In fact, the company destroyed footage from 14 of 15 cameras in use that day, Sheff testified. The company claimed to have taped over the material.

“CoreCivic says that their staff had no way of knowing that Kesley Vial was on the verge of taking his own life on August 17th of 2022,” Sheff told Judge Francis J. Mathew during a December pre-trial hearing. “And when CoreCivic destroyed hours of video footage from that day, fully aware of the likelihood of litigation, they deprived the jury and all of us of the chance to see for ourselves.”

“More than three years later, we still have no convincing explanation for this destruction of evidence,” Sheff added.

The company pointed the judge to its 49-page timeline. 

“I know of no situation where opposing parties get to tell the opposed that what they have is the important information,” Mathew replied, according to an audio recording of the proceedings obtained by The Intercept.

The company’s attorney responded, “The jury will have all the evidence they need to determine whether or not CoreCivic fell below their duty.” 

The judge said, “That’s a question I’m not sure we can answer without that video.” 

In slightly less than an hour, Mathew made up his mind. 

“I do believe that the spoliation of this evidence merits a sanction,” he said, “an adverse inference instruction to the jury.”

Within weeks of the judge’s decision, CoreCivic began settlement discussions with Vial’s family for an undisclosed amount. ACLU New Mexico announced the settlement March 19.

The judge’s order may have factored into the company’s decision to forgo a trial, which was set to start in January, said Eunice Cho, an immigration attorney with expertise in detention conditions.

“The fact defendants settled in the 11th hour made it clear they potentially didn’t want relevant facts to be tried – including the adverse inference,” Cho told The Intercept. “An adverse finding could lead the court to instruct the jury that the evidence contained unfavorable information and may damage the witness’s credibility.”

Hours Before the Suicide

In Vial’s case, the missing footage would have shown key events in the hours before he attempted to take his own life — “including him crying so hard that he was having trouble walking, punching the wall and collapsing to the floor,” according to a September plaintiff’s motion seeking sanctions against CoreCivic.

“There’s no substitute for seeing how he was behaving, how medical staff and officers were behaving, at Mental Health, in the hallway, in the cell – all these consequential, pivotal moments – and what could’ve been done to protect him,” Sheff told The Intercept.

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Whereas Vial’s case came to a relatively quick end, lawsuits in which judges don’t intervene can become drawn out. Many families of loved ones who have died in immigration detention are stymied by the lack of video evidence and by the amount of time it can take to resolve a wrongful death lawsuit against an immigration detention corporation, said Jeremy Jong, immigration attorney for Al Otro Lado, a legal rights organization.

“They begin thinking, ‘We want justice,’” Jong said. “Years later, it’s more like, ‘We just want to give up.’”

Even when private prison firms are forced to pay out, the sums pale in comparison with the companies’ government contracts. Jong said the disparity creates “perverse incentives” to let poor detention conditions persist, with the settlements acting as “just part of their operating expenses.”

CoreCivic — which, alongside GEO Group, is one of the two largest prison corporations in the U.S. — received $2.2 billion in revenue last year, up from $2 billion the year before.

The issue will only become more important as the Trump administration pursues its mass deportation push, leading to more deaths in detention: 18 this year as of May 1, on track to reach a record high.

With the rising number of deaths, Hoq finds herself advising attorneys and families who contact her regarding wrongful death claims. 

“The first piece of advice I give them is to send a letter to the corporation requesting them to immediately stop overwriting video,” she said. “The issue is more important than ever — to scrutinize whether ICE and prison corporations are following through on their obligation to preserve evidence.”

The post Judge Sanctioned Private Prison Giant for Destroying Evidence in ICE Death Suit appeared first on The Intercept.

The bombshell New York Times report that the U.S. and Israel hoped to install former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the leader of Iran puts the lie to so much of what hawks in the West have been trying to sell their publics about the Iran war.

Despite claims by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Iran war was never about freedom for the Iranian people.

That much is obvious thanks to Ahmadinejad’s role in recent Iranian history: In 2009, Iranians rose up against a stolen election in what was known as the Green Movement, which was violently crushed by Iran’s security forces to keep Ahmadinejad in power.

Though a populist, Ahmadinejad at the time dismissed the protests as nothing more than the result of “emotions after a soccer match” or, in another instance, “dirt and dust.” These are not the bona fides of a leader who will lead Iran into democracy.

Instead of a campaign for Iranian freedom, this war — like much of the U.S. and Israel’s last 20 years of going after Iran — has been about catastrophically weakening Iran. Here, reading between the lines of history, Ahmadinejad’s position as an Israeli–U.S.-backed coup leader starts to make sense.

Ahmadinejad had been largely quiet until he suddenly reemerged into headlines on Tuesday with the Times report. After killing Iran’s supreme leader in the opening hour of the war, according to the Times, Israel targeted a building on Ahmadinejad’s street, ostensibly to “free” him from what was effectively either house arrest or the strict monitoring of his movements. According to some reports, the guards keeping watch on Ahmadinejad were indeed killed, but Ahmadinejad himself was injured, too.

How, if the plot had been successful, was Ahmadinejad supposed to take over? Was the assumption that by assassinating the top leadership, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals, Ahmadinejad would be able to gain the support of the rest of the top echelon of the security forces? That would be a far-fetched notion.

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While he retained his populist credentials over the years, Ahmadinejad’s clashes with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and with the “nezam,” or regime, over social and political issues lost him whatever support he still had among the military wings and the Basij militia. Those forces — though they had helped crush the 2009 protests on Ahmadinejad’s behalf — remained fiercely loyal to Khamenei and the political system of “Guardianship of the Jurist.”

For now, Ahmadinejad is nowhere to be found, raising suspicions that he is in the custody of the IRGC or dead.

Good for Israel

It’s hard to imagine the Iranian president who declared in his first few months in office that “Israel must vanish from the pages of time” and subsequently questioned the Holocaust being a good choice for Israel. History shows, though, how Ahmadinejad’s eclectic positioning has previously coincided with Israeli interests.

Coming to power after President Mohammad Khatami’s reform movement and his call for “dialog among civilizations,” Ahmadinejad’s stances damaged Iran’s reputation almost beyond repair.

And this was, somewhat ironically, a boon to Israel, whose leaders could point to the malevolent nature of the Islamic Republic. Ahmadinejad was the perfect figurehead for a bogeyman Iran that needed to be taken down a notch.

Israel and its allies in Washington made hay of Ahmadinejad’s every word — for instance, his sponsorship of a Holocaust denial cartoon contest — and succeeded in turning his remarks into the justifications for an unprecedented and devastating sanctions program. Ahmadinejad’s rule was, in so many ways, bad for Iran.

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Which is why, even at the time and certainly later, there were suspicions privately aired in Tehran that he could actually be a Mossad asset — with the caveat, of course, that no hard proof ever emerged. Still, at a time when gaining the trust of the west in nuclear negotiations was paramount, Ahmadinejad was building Israeli hard-liners’ case against talks for them.

Now, of course, the allegation that Ahmadinejad was primed as a coup leader — the first report from an even remotely reliable outlet of a real link to Israel — has only added to the rumors, as have his most recent trips abroad, to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and to Guatemala, both allies and supporters of Israel.

Trump himself admitted before this latest revelation that Israel bombed some of the people who were candidates to be an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez — the Venezuelan figure who seamlessly took control from kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and reportedly is cooperating with the U.S. The most solid hint Trump gave was that he had someone “inside” Iran in mind, dashing the hopes of Iranian royalists.

Don’t Listen to Israel

Whether or not it is true that Ahmadinejad was an Israeli asset — whenever he may have been recruited or even just unwittingly manipulated — he would have fit Trump’s bill. What he never would have been was a beacon of freedom for the Iranian people. Insofar as the broad contours of the Times report are accurate, we can now be assured that the well-being of the Iranian people has not really ever been at the top of either Trump or Netanyahu’s minds.

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The U.S. and Israel may have some commonality in what they’d like to see with Iran, but not entirely. Israel’s interests lie mostly in defanging Iran, even seeing it descend into a failed state that can neither threaten Israel nor challenge its hegemony in the region. The U.S., on the other hand, has consistently focused on Iran’s nuclear potential.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have indicated that if the nuclear issue was resolved to the satisfaction of the U.S., Iran could potentially be rehabilitated and rejoin the international community. That would have left Iran with the potential to grow into a regional powerhouse and global force — something Israel has long opposed, which is why it tried so hard to derail the 2015 nuclear agreement.

Whatever happens, Ahmadinejad will never be a factor in Iranian politics, even if in the unlikely event that he one day resurfaces alive and free. The Venezuela option for Iran now seems silly, a chimera that should have never been considered.

If the White House had listened to a handful of Iranians or those who know Iran well, rather than Netanyahu and war hawks in Congress, perhaps 175 school children and their teachers would be alive today. The Strait of Hormuz might be open and free. And a nuclear deal could have already been signed.

Instead, there has been war and destruction, wasted lives and wasted treasure, chaos in the region, and the global economy wobbling. Ahmadinejad has once again been bad for Iranians — and now everyone else, too.

The post Ahmadinejad Is Still Bad for Iranians — and Still Great for Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

In yet another staggeringly corrupt and unprecedented move, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department on Monday announced a $1.776 billion slush fund, drawn from public coffers, to funnel payouts to Trump loyalists.

The fund is part of a deal decided by the Trump administration to drop its weak $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over a leak of the president’s tax returns. The entire lawsuit had itself become an egregious example of self-dealing: Trump’s Justice Department suing Trump’s IRS on behalf of Trump.

Over 90 House Democrats recently signed an amicus brief to the presiding judge asking that she dismiss the suit. A settlement, the Democrats wrote, would create a “specter of corruption unparalleled in American history.”

Before the judge could respond, however, Trump withdrew the lawsuit and moved to set up something even worse than that specter: a slush fund beholden entirely to Trump, with little in the way of judicial or congressional oversight.  

According to the Justice Department announcement, the so-called “anti-weaponization” fund — to remedy the purported weaponization of the U.S. government — will be paid out to Trump allies who claim they were targeted by President Joe Biden’s administration. The irony that the fund itself is just one of Trump’s countless weaponizations of the government should be lost on no one.

The fund amount — $1.776 billion — is, of course, an on-the-nose reference to American independence and tells us everything we need to know about this deal. For most of the country, there is little of substance in this too-cute-by-half dollar amount. Instead, the material benefit will go to the largely to the white ruling classes with some crumbs for Trumpian militia members convicted under Biden.

Trump’s reckless and brutal presidency is materially harming the American working classes — even the white working class. With his popularity at historic lows, Trump can only turn to payouts like this, pardons, and the spectacle of white supremacist violence; these are all he has to offer his allies and dwindling base.

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That’s what this slush fund does: nod to Trump’s allegiance to his supporters, the vast majority of whom will get little other than the mood elevation that comes with having their resentments recognized — what W.E.B. DuBois once called the “psychological wages” of whiteness, a benefit that is only felt by virtue of the greater oppression of others.

Trump’s authoritarian capitalism will not, after all, uplift the white working class; there aren’t enough U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement signing bonuses or slush-fund payouts to go around.

January 6 Loyalists

The slush fund money would come directly from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which is typically used to pay legally reached settlements and court judgments. But in this case, a commission picked by Trump’s attorney general will apparently hand out payments as it pleases.

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No specific recipients have been named yet, but beneficiaries could reportedly include Proud Boys and other January 6 Capitol rioters, many of whom have since pardoned by Trump.

The fact that any payouts will be funded by taxpayer dollars is not mentioned in the Justice Department’s fund announcements.

“This is a theft far worse than Watergate,” wrote civil rights attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnik on social media. “There is no other word for it. They are stealing $1.78 BILLION dollars to pay Trump’s allies, despite knowing that these people are not legally entitled to any money.”

The Trump regime hopes programs like this “anti-weaponization” fund can appease just enough of an active base to hold power under minority rule, while enriching all those in Trump’s inner circles who in turn stick by his side regardless of what happens in elections.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told the New Republic that he sees the fund as Trump and his lawyers “figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”

Raskin added that, should the Democrats retake the House and Senate in the midterms, they would shut down the fund and demand transparency about any payments made. According to the Congress member, any payouts to January 6 participants would violate the Fourteenth Amendment by aiding in an insurrection against the U.S. It is, however, no easy task to claw back money once doled out.

“It is my personal opinion that this is a criminal act and people should respond accordingly,” noted Reichlin-Melnik.

The problem is that for Trump’s regime and its loyal Supreme Court, the distinction between presidential criminal corruption and permissible executive action has all but evaporated.

The challenge, then, is to show that Trump’s meager offerings are not worth accepting.

The post Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” Fund Is a Handout to His Hardcore Supporters appeared first on The Intercept.

The ink had barely dried on the Supreme Court’s ruling to gut the Voting Rights Act when Republican lawmakers raced to deliver on the barely veiled promises of the court’s decision: the decimation of Black political power and a revival of Jim Crow-era racist voter suppression.

In Tennessee on Thursday, Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a half-century-old law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and then the overwhelmingly Republican legislature passed new redistricting maps that eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district. The 9th Congressional District, also Tennessee’s only reliable Democratic seat, will be carved into three — purposefully redrawn for each piece to have a white-majority and Republican-leaning electorate. The votes of Memphis’s 63 percent Black population will be diluted to near irrelevance; the entire state will be handed to Republicans.

No one can act surprised. This was the predicted outcome of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which decimated Section 2 of the embattled Voting Rights Act, a provision that had protected minority voters from redistricting. With the right-wing justices’ blessing, Republican lawmakers can now enact segregationist gerrymandering and reestablish the pre-civil-rights-era status quo ante.

It stands to reason that Republicans are not representing the interests of Black Tennesseans, some 17 percent of the population, overwhelmingly Democrats. These residents only have one representative in Washington, Rep. Steve Cohen — the lone Democrat among the state’s nine congressional seats. That is the seat being eliminated by the new maps passed by Tennessee’s largely white legislature.

The situation is already one in which Black working-class interests are hardly represented — and nor would greater Black representation in the state necessarily ensure the delivery of racial justice and the economic justice it requires.

The point is that Black disenfranchisement both reflects and produces conditions of white supremacist rule, wherein greater anti-Black oppression is assured.

“These maps are racist tools of white supremacy, at the behest of the most powerful white supremacist in the United States of America, Donald J. Trump,” said Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson at the Tennessee statehouse on Thursday. Pearson, a progressive activist and one of the state’s few Black representatives, is running for a seat in Congress and was neck and neck in polling for his August primary against Cohen, the 76-year-old incumbent. The redrawn maps would likely foreclose his chance to represent South Memphis in Washington.

Pearson called the gerrymandered maps a “political lynching” that “set our state back over 150 years.”

Trump’s Larger Project

Trump, who is historically unpopular, has every reason to push his GOP to use newly unconstrained gerrymandering capacities in advance of the midterms. Right-wing redistricting efforts go beyond a scramble for November, though, and sit within a larger project of white supremacist backlash.

Like in Tennessee, Republicans in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina all called special legislative sessions — as explicitly ordered by Trump — to push new redistricting maps that will decimate majority-Black districts and deliver congressional seats to Republicans.

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The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It 

According to the cynical rationale of the Supreme Court conservatives, such maps would not violate what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, because the GOP is not openly describing their gerrymander as targeting Black voters.

“The more racist you are as a party, the more insulated you are from Voting Rights Act liability under this decision,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, told Bolts Magazine about the Callais ruling. “If there were a party called the Klan party, right now, it would trigger an awful lot of nonwhite opposition based on the party’s platform. But this opinion says, you have to set the party’s platform entirely aside to figure out if there’s been any damage based on race. So the more you can tie the two together, the more insulated you are.”

In short, as Levitt put it, “the most racist partisan gerrymandering is going to be the most immune from a VRA challenge.”

Tennessee Republicans proved precisely this point on Thursday. Striding into the statehouse to disenfranchise Black voters, Republican state Rep. Todd Warner wore a giant Trump 2024 flag as a cape.

As other states follow Tennessee’s example, the consequences of Callais could see the largest-ever drop in the number of Black lawmakers in Congress. The previous record was set, NPR reported, in the post-Reconstruction backlash, by the Congress that began in 1877 with four fewer House districts represented by Black lawmakers than the previous session.

In response to racist Republican gerrymandering, Democrats can play their own game of redistricting — but there’s a reason the Callais decision is understood as a gift to Republicans.

“The states controlled by Republicans where there are majority-minority districts have no internal constraint on how much they can screw over Black voters, because Black voters are not voting for that party,” Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, told Slate.

Democrats could expand a small number of safe seats in New York and California, for example, by eliminating minority voter districts. As Karlan noted, however, this would be politically unpalatable because “the politics of the state are not going to look favorably on that, and the Democrats in those states depend on Black and Latino voters in statewide races.”

According to Karlan, in this race to the bottom, Republican-led election fixing will not be addressed without a different Congress, a different president, and a powerful political movement to hold politicians accountable.

“Voters have to first build a political movement around this that makes elected officials afraid to do this,” she said.

Meanwhile, Democratic redistricting efforts in Virginia were dealt a blow on Friday, when they were struck down by the state’s Supreme Court. Voters had approved in a referendum to redraw the state’s congressional map, but the court’s ruling hands Republicans a fierce electoral advantage.

After Thursday’s vote, Tennessee Democratic state Rep. Justin Jones burned a paper Confederate flag in the statehouse rotunda, surrounded by protesters who had gathered to decry the racist gerrymandering.

“We saw a time like this, in this building before,” Jones told his fellow lawmakers earlier this week during the unprecedented redistricting special session. “If you study Reconstruction. We had Black lawmakers after the Civil War, then from the end of the 1800s to the 1960s, we had no Black folks here” — meaning the statehouse.

On Thursday afternoon, the NAACP’s Tennessee chapter filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the new congressional map, which is likely to be the first of several legal efforts against the rushed, conniving, and unrepentantly racist gerrymander.

The post Tennessee GOP Moves to Decimate Black Voting Power After Supreme Court’s Blessing of Jim Crow appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawsuit is signed not just by the agency’s acting general counsel and deputy general counsel, but also Benjamin North, who The Intercept reported was hired earlier this year as assistant general counsel.

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EEOC Quietly Hired Lawyer Who Crusaded for Cases of Discrimination Against Men — Including His Own

North was suspended as a college student over a rape allegation in a case that he claimed violated his civil rights; he has consistently denied the charges. North went on to do work arguing that Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination at federally funded institutions, has been used to discriminate against the rights of men.

North’s signature on the new lawsuit against the New York Times could mean he wrote it, said Chai Feldblum, a former EEOC commissioner.

Asked about North’s role, EEOC spokesperson Victor Chen referred The Intercept to the complaint.

The suit comes as part of President Donald Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies across the country, including his administration’s efforts to use the EEOC to these ends.

The new EEOC suit, filed Tuesday on behalf of an unnamed man whose identity New York Magazine speculated about, alleges that the employee was passed over for a position because he is a white man.

The claimant applied for a job as a deputy real estate editor in January 2025 but, the lawsuit claims, despite meeting all the requirements for the position, he didn’t get it because he “did not match the race and/or sex characteristics NYT sought to increase in its leadership.” Instead, the job went to a multiracial female candidate who the lawsuit alleges was not qualified.

Feldblum, the former EEOC commissioner, was skeptical of the agency’s legal argument.

“There is no actual evidence that he was more qualified than her,” Feldblum said. Of the EEOC, she said, “They’re putting out their best facts in this complaint, and the facts are pathetic.”

Particularly for leadership positions, she pointed out, there are many aspects that go into deciding who is the most qualified candidate.

“Their assertion that she was less qualified than him is based on their view of the facts,” she said. “We’ll see what the facts actually say.”

In a statement, the New York Times said it has merit-based employment practices.

“The New York Times categorically rejects the politically motivated allegations brought by the Trump administration’s EEOC,” said Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha. “Throughout this process, the EEOC deviated from standard practices in highly unusual ways. The allegation centers on a single personnel decision for one of over 100 deputy positions across the newsroom, yet the EEOC’s filing makes sweeping claims that ignore the facts to fit a predetermined narrative.”

Diversity Without Discrimination

The EEOC’s lawsuit claims that the company has “engaged in unlawful employment practices” since at least October 2024 through its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. It cites the company’s self-published diversity goals, including a 2021 document setting a goal for increasing Black and Latino leadership by 50 percent within four years.

The Times was making “employment decisions on the basis of race and sex to achieve its desired demographic goals,” the lawsuit alleges. “A necessary consequence of NYT’s intent to increase the percentage of non-White leaders would be a decrease in the percentage of White leaders.”

The assertion that the company has engaged in illegal racial and sex discrimination and is making employment decisions solely on those bases “is simply not borne out by the evidence,” Feldblum argued. The EEOC would instead have to have found evidence that hiring decisions were made expressly and intentionally based on such characteristics.

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Instead, the actions the New York Times took are “the most basic, acceptable, legal ways to try to increase diversity in a workplace,” Feldblum said. “There is literally nothing illegal in anything that the EEOC has detailed.”

The only place where the Times could have potentially run into legal trouble, she said, was when it was requiring diverse candidate pools for jobs. But if done carefully, she said, that can follow the law as well — for example, by expanding a pool of candidates without removing any qualified white or male ones.

“One can include diversity as an employer without discriminating against white people,” Feldblum said. 

Kalpana Kotagal, the sole Democratic commissioner on the EEOC after Trump fired the others contra statute, said she voted against authorizing the lawsuit against the New York Times “because I disagree with the substance of the case and don’t believe it’s a good use of scarce agency resources.”

She added that “a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), without more, is not evidence of discrimination.”

As a reporter at the Times told New York Magazine, “I’m sorry, there are plenty of white guys at the top of the New York Times. Not really something that’s holding you back.”

The complaint comes after EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas directly solicited complaints from white men alleging that they were discriminated against based on their race and/or sex. She has also instructed agency officials to focus on cases that are in line with her personal priorities, which include “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” and cases claiming reverse racism have been “accelerated through the process,” the New York Times recently reported, even though staff are struggling to find complaints with merit.

Feldblum argued that the lawsuit is “quite an inappropriate use of EEOC resources.” The agency’s staffing is currently at its lowest level in decades, so any focus on a particular issue comes at the expense of others.

She said, “It is truly a sad day for anyone who cares about civil rights to see what the EEOC is spending its resources on today.”

Correction: May 6, 2026, 9:24 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct a reference to Chai Feldblum’s past position at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She is a former commissioner. An errant reference to the law that established the EEOC has also been corrected; it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The post Lawyer on EEOC’s New York Times Lawsuit Has History Battling Discrimination Against Men appeared first on The Intercept.

The area, in a remote corner of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, is a roughly 280-by-50-foot etching in the desert sand known as an intaglio.

Last Thursday, without any notice, a contractor working for DHS cut a roughly 60-foot swath across the middle of the intaglio, doing irreparable damage to the 1,000-year-old artifact.

Cabeza Prieta, one of the largest wilderness areas outside of Alaska, also encompasses lands sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation, which borders the refuge to the east. The O’odham have fought to prevent border wall construction across their reservation and during Trump’s first term largely prevailed; they also managed to protect the intaglio and a nearby burial site that they consider to be part of their ancestral lands.

“I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines — something that culturally we should have been relishing and promoting. Not destroying,” Rick Martynec, an archaeologist, said in a phone interview, referring to the hundreds of figures drawn into the deserts of southern Peru.

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed the destruction in a statement to The Intercept and said the agency was coordinating with tribal authorities to figure out its next steps.

“On April 23, 2026, a border wall contractor inadvertently disturbed a cultural site known as Las Playas Intaglio, located west of Ajo, Arizona along the border,” said the spokesperson, John Mennell, who is working on the construction of the second barrier in Arizona. “The remaining portion of the site has been secured and will be protected in place.”

Well known to government officials, including the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, the intaglio lies just 10 or 15 feet from the massive steel wall that now runs along the U.S.–Mexico border. The destruction to the ancient site was first reported by the Washington Post.

Rick and Sandy Martynec, his wife, also an archaeologist who has studied the site for more than two decades, said the refuge was in talks with DHS and the contractor to make sure the site was protected as the Trump administration moves forward with a second set of barriers in the ecologically sensitive region.

The Martynecs even visited the intaglio in mid-April and observed stakes that had been put in place by an engineer to mark its boundaries.

The Martynecs were first notified by FWS staff on Monday when they called the refuge to see about visiting the site and to check on its status. According to the archaeologists, Rijk Morawe, the refuge manager, had already been out to survey the damage and told them what had happened.

The news took the Martynecs and others by surprise, since the agency had been in dialogue with DHS and the contractor to come up with an alternative route that would avoid the intaglio, similar to the negotiations that had taken place during Trump’s first term. (DHS’s Customs and Border Protection in Arizona did not comment by press time. FWS declined to comment, referring all border inquiries to CBP.)

“The refuge was pushing as hard as they possibly could to come to a resolution,” Martynec said.

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Members of the O’odham Nation had also been keeping a close eye on border wall development. On the day before the site was bulldozed, a group of O’odham runners observed construction getting dangerously close to the protected area. That morning they called Lorraine Eiler, an O’odham elder and co-founder of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, who lives in the town of Ajo where the Cabeza Prieta Refuge office is located.

According to Eiler, the runners told her that the contractor was indiscriminately clearing the area.

The runners told her, “They’re coming with their bulldozers and they’re knocking down trees and cactus and everything that’s along the border. They’re just bulldozing everything down and they are getting near the intaglio.” 

Eiler made a round of phone calls to tribal officials and environmental groups, but the next day, the contractor moved in and destroyed the site.

“I alerted people, but all I got was, ‘We’re going to have meetings, we’re going to discuss it,’” Eiler said.

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The Border Patrol Invited the Press to Watch It Blow Up a National Monument

During Trump’s first term, border wall construction had widespread impacts on protected landscapes and sacred sites. In one case, DHS blasted through several hills that were too steep to build on directly, including one in Organ Pipe National Monument, east of Cabeza, that was a well-known burial ground. A contractor also bulldozed a road through an archaic Hohokam burial site on the border in Coronado National Forest, even though they’d been briefed by the tribe beforehand.

Border security continues to be a priority for the Trump administration, which has allocated more than $11 billion for new barriers and surveillance technology. The path that was cleared through the intaglio is part of an effort to build a so-called “smart wall” that CBP says will allow it to monitor activity in the desert day and night.

To do so, according to the Martynecs, the agency will have to clear a wide swath of land between the original wall and the secondary barrier.

“There won’t be any vegetation on it at all,” Martynec said. “This doesn’t bode well for the desert.”

Correction: May 1, 2026
This story has been updated to correct an errant reference to the day the intaglio was damaged. It was bulldozed on April 23, 2026. The story has also been updated to include a statement from U.S. Customs and Border Protection that was received after publication.

The post Trump Bulldozed a 1,000-Year-Old Archaeological Site to Make Room for a Second Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

The letter obtained by The Intercept was part of Patel’s personnel file at the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office, where he once worked. The document, written “per instructions of my employer,” describes incidents of alcohol-related indiscretions not uncommon for those in their teens and twenties.

Two decades later, as Patel pushes back against allegations that drinking is impairing his leadership of the nation’s top law enforcement agency, these arrests show how Patel’s alcohol use has been subjected to scrutiny before in his professional life.

One incident recounted by Patel occurred in 2005, about four months before he wrote the letter. At the time, he was a law student at Pace University in New York celebrating with friends.

“We went to a few of the local bars and consumed some alcoholic drinks,” he wrote.

When they walked home, they made a bad decision.

“In a gross deviation from appropriate conduct, we attempted to relieve our bladders while walking home,” Patel said in the letter. “Before we could even do so, a police cruiser stopped the group. We were then arrested for public urination.”

Patel paid a fine after the incident, he wrote in the letter.

“Kash’s entire background was thoroughly examined and vetted prior to him assuming this role,” said Erica Knight, a spokesperson for Patel. “These attacks are nothing more than an attempt to undermine a process that has already deemed him suitable to serve and a distraction to the record-breaking success of the FBI under Director Patel.”

During an earlier incident in 2001, Patel wrote that he was arrested for public intoxication for drinking underage as a college student at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Patel helped run the Richmond Rowdies, a student fan group, and attended a home basketball game to help lead cheers. In his letter, Patel wrote that he was escorted out of the arena by a school officer due to excessive cheering.

“Upon exiting the arena,” he wrote, “the officer placed me under arrest for public intoxication, as I was not yet of 21 years of age.”

Patel said in his letter that he’d had two drinks and paid a fine following the arrest. According to NBC News, which previously reported his 2001 public intoxication arrest, Patel was found guilty on a misdemeanor charge days after the incident.

Patel’s letter about the Florida Bar disclosures has not previously been reported. The Intercept obtained Patel’s personnel file through a public records request to the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office, where Patel was hired on a $40,000 salary after being admitted to the Florida Bar.

“Both of these incidents are not representative of my usual conduct of behavior,” he wrote to conclude the letter, “and it is my hope that the Board views them as an anomaly. I dually apologize for my improper behavior both to the Board and the community at large.”

Patel Drinking Allegations

Twenty years after writing the letter, Patel became the ninth director of the FBI. His tenure has been marked by controversies, including over the firing of agents who worked on investigations of President Donald Trump, the use of his government jet, and lawsuits filed by his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, over false claims that she is a former Mossad agent.

More recent concerns about Patel’s drinking followed the release of a viral video in February of the FBI director chugging a beer with the U.S. Olympic hockey team in Italy.

Pressure mounted with a report in The Atlantic alleging, through anonymous sources, that Patel has been intoxicated at the social club Ned’s in Washington and the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, another private club. The Atlantic reported that Patel’s drinking has been “a recurring source of concern across the government.”

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Patel denied The Atlantic’s claims and filed a defamation lawsuit. “These claims about erratic behavior and excessive drinking are fabricated,” Patel’s lawyer, Jesse R. Binnall, wrote in the complaint.

“I have never been intoxicated on the job, and that is why we filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit,” Patel said at a press conference on Tuesday. “And any one of you who wants to participate, bring it on. I’ll see you in court.”

The post Kash Patel Got Arrested for Public Urination After a Night of Drinking appeared first on The Intercept.

“The hospital has become my home,” Annan said, exhausted.

Last week, an Israeli strike leveled the building where Annan’s family lived in Kayfoun, a town in the Mount Lebanon governorate, west of the Lebanese capital.

“I buried my father,” he said, “but my mother is still missing.”

Since then, his days have become a single-minded search for any sign of his mother, Fatima, who is 56. Like several others searching for missing family members, Annan gave a sample of his blood to the hospital, hoping he can get some closure with a DNA match to unidentified remains.

“I walk through hospitals in the Mount Lebanon region. I stare at injured faces. I go to the morgues. I look for a mole, a mark,” Annan said. “Then I come back here. Waiting for the sample results.”

The cold-storage units at the Hariri hospital have been fashioned into ad hoc laboratories to identify a relentless influx of dead bodies.

The unprecedented scales of DNA identification of corpses is born of a macabre need. Last week, after Iran and the U.S. agreed to a ceasefire, Israel pressed on in its Lebanese front with a ferocious blitz of airstrikes. The toll was staggering, leaving demolished buildings and infrastructure, along with the attendant skyrocketing casualties — the violence rending people into unrecognizable forms.

“The bodies arrive completely disfigured,” said Hisham Fawwaz, director of the hospitals and dispensaries department at the Lebanese Ministry of Health, which operates the hospital. “The remains are scattered and the features obliterated. We are often not dealing with whole bodies. We are dealing with human fragments that the force of the explosions has turned into medical puzzles.”

After the Iran–U.S. truce, Israel launched more than 100 strikes on Lebanon in just 10 minutes, with the Israeli government taking to social media to brag about its assault. The latest round of hostilities between with Israel had already brought weeks of ravages to Lebanon, but last week’s onslaught, dubbed “Black Wednesday” by the Lebanese, razed densely populated neighborhoods in the capital. At least 357 were killed and more than 1,000 were injured, according to the health ministry.

A week later, dozens of people are still missing. The ceasefire in Lebanon announced by President Donald Trump on Thursday will hopefully lead to fewer bombings, but it won’t slow families’ attempts to find their loved ones and, if worse comes to worst, identify their remains.

The families remain on a desperate quest to track them down, whether they’re pinned under the wreckage or hidden among the dismembered bodies at the morgues like the one at Hariri Hospital.

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At one point, more than 90 unidentified bodies were held there, some stretching back to the initial days of Israeli bombardment. Each body has been assigned a temporary number, waiting for someone to claim it.

The Health Ministry established a central triage center to absorb the uninterrupted flow of bodies, along with a protocol: document tattoos, distinguishing marks, and remnants of burned clothing that a family member might remember. Hospital workers also cross-reference physical descriptions from families with what is recorded of unidentified remains.

If that proves too difficult, doctors draw blood from living relatives to match the DNA against the unclaimed fragments of victims.

“Suspended Loss”

Zahraa Aboud had just recently fled her hometown of Anqoun in southern Lebanon. Israeli ground troops had invaded the town in March, razing entire villages and displacing hundreds of thousands as they set up a buffer zone intended to stop Hezbollah from lobbing rockets into northern Israel.

When the Israeli airstrikes grew relentless, Aboud, 29, and her sister traveled to Beirut, to their aunts’ apartment in the Ain Al-Mrayseh neighborhood. In the capital, she thought, they would be out of reach of the violence.

Israel’s missiles would soon come down on her.

According to Aboud’s father, Qassem, when an airstrike hit the upper floors of the aunts’ building, everyone in the apartment upstairs — including six children — was instantly killed. A floor below, Aboud’s aunts were killed in the same strike, and her sister was taken to Clemenceau Medical Center with serious wounds.

Zahraa Aboud, though, hasn’t been seen since.

“We are not looking for rubble,” said Qassem, 56. “We are looking for life. Or at least for the certainty that will put out the fire in our hearts.”

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Rescue teams gave up after a few days of searching, but families of those missing in the rubble refused to leave the scene and pressured them to keep going.

Qassem Aboud, meanwhile, hasn’t stopped circling Beirut for traces of his daughter. Back and forth, he checks private hospitals, government hospitals, and lists of unidentified patients. In ICU wards across the city, he peers at any face behind an oxygen mask that might be hers.

The Aboud family calls the tragic situation “suspended loss”: They can’t find a sign of life to suggest they may get Zahraa back, but they’ve also been denied a final farewell and the chance to see their daughter off.

Like the others, Qassem submitted a blood sample to the hospital in hopes of later finding a DNA match — and closure.

After days of searching, Qassem came to suspect that the force of the explosion may have thrown his daughter’s body into a neighboring building. When he checked, he found the apartments were either locked or abandoned by departed residents. So far, he can’t find anyone to let him in.

“I feel very helpless every day, but will keep searching until I bury her,” he said.

The rubble itself has become a legal obstacle.

Buildings destroyed by Israeli strikes are classified, under Lebanese law, as private property. Civil defense teams and relief organizations cannot fully clear or demolish them without prior judicial authorization. The red tape is meant to protect property rights, to preserve the legal record, and to avoid tampering with what the law considers a crime scene, according to a source at the public prosecutor’s office who asked to stay anonymous as he’s not authorized to talk to the media.

Some of the legal restrictions have slowed rescues. Families that want to utilize specialized search dogs, which can move through the wreckage faster than people, must file formal requests at the public prosecutor’s office.

“We submitted the requests. We begged the relevant authorities to expedite the judicial procedures,” said a relative of a missing woman who asked not to be identified. “But the Lebanese judiciary has not moved. Every minute that passes is a nail in the coffin of our loved ones, while the judiciary is still reviewing paperwork.”

When families sought exceptional permissions to allow rescue teams to remove the rubble, judicial authorities did not respond to their requests, families of missing people said. (Judicial authorities did not respond to a request for comment.)

Back at Hariri Hospital, families continued filing into a makeshift office opened by the Health Ministry designed to help families identify their lost loved ones. Inside, they recalled the tiniest details of their missing relative, from birthmarks to unique articles of clothing — anything that may lead to closing a case. Then they give their blood. And they wait.

“The goal is not accounting,” said Fawwaz, the Lebanese Ministry of Health official. “It is to return to each victim their name, and to give their families the right to a farewell that ends the spiral of doubt.”

This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

The post Israel’s “Black Wednesday” Massacre Leaves Lebanese Families Giving DNA to ID Loved Ones’ Remains appeared first on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that a temporary ceasefire agreement had been reached between Israel and Lebanon. The 10-day ceasefire, set to begin at 5 p.m. ET, will reportedly see a pause to Israel’s relentless assault on southern Lebanon, which has displaced over 1.2 million people and killed at least 2,000 since early March.

Any news of reduced annihilation by Israeli and U.S. forces in the region is, of course, to be welcomed. Just a week ago, Trump was threatening to wipe out the whole civilization of Iran. In Lebanon, Israel has targeted civilian infrastructure like hospitals and demolished villages and homes with ferocity.

In the Israeli context, however, the very meaning of “ceasefire” has been irreparably degraded. This is the lesson of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Under the conditions of an alleged ceasefire in Gaza since October, Israel has killed over 765 Palestinians in the Strip and injured over 2,000 — while maintaining a ground occupation of at least half the territory.

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Those concerned about Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, too, have little reason to believe a ceasefire will see an end to Israel’s expansionist violence.

None of this is a secret. “Israel has no plans to withdraw its military from southern Lebanon during the announced 10 day ceasefire,” an Israeli security official confirmed to Reuters.

Israeli officials frame unambiguous expansion into Lebanon’s territory as the creation of a security “buffer zone.” The plan to maintain control of southern Lebanon is an open one, with a long history, imbued with renewed fervor by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has said that, even after the current war ends, Israel intends to maintain control over the territory up to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, and that all villages near Israel’s ever-moving border would be destroyed.

“[T]he policy of occupying and annexing south Lebanon up to the Litani River has long held influence among parts of the Israeli government,” wrote Mireille Rebeiz, chair of Middle East Studies at Dickinson College.  She noted that it “dates back to influential Zionist leaders — secular and religious alike — before Israeli independence in 1948.”

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Israel has invaded Lebanon seven times in the last half century. Between 1978 and 2000, Israel maintained an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon — the occupation Hezbollah was formed to fight.

It’s worth stressing, too, that while Israel and the U.S. describe the war as one against Hezbollah, it is being waged against the Lebanese people. Much like it is an unacceptable euphemism to describe Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a war with Hamas.

Lebanese journalist Lylla Younes told “Democracy Now!” that in southern Lebanon, as in Gaza, Israel is carrying out a “scorched-earth campaign,” destroying whole villages, mosques, and cultural sites. Her family’s village in the southern border region was bombed earlier this week.

“What the world should know is that we will return to these villages, and when we do, we’ll return to rubble, and it will be an immense process of rebuilding,” she said. That is, if return is possible at all.

Hezbollah, for its part, will not be fighting through the ceasefire, the group’s representatives had said.

“We will be respecting the ceasefire and we will deal with it cautiously,” said Ibrahim Moussawi, a member of the Lebanese Parliament and a Hezbollah spokesperson. He added that “it should hopefully be a beginning of a course of the Israeli withdrawal from our occupied territories.”

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Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam wrote on X on Thursday that he has “full hope” that the Lebanese civilians displaced from the south will be able to return to their homes.

It is an optimism at direct odds with Israel’s open commitment to annexation — and it is a hollow hope in the face of what we’re seeing in Gaza.

“Israeli forces continue their violent attacks and expand their military control of the Strip,” noted Médecins Sans Frontières in a report last week. “Living conditions of Palestinians remain dire, while Israel continues to deliberately obstruct aid, which is translating into entirely preventable deaths.” The humanitarian medical aid group put it plainly: “This is not a ceasefire.”

This cannot be what “ceasefire” gets to mean.

The post Israel Will Keep Occupying Lebanon Despite Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

The ceasefire announced Tuesday night by President Donald Trump and confirmed by Iranian officials is on life support. If Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu gets his way, it may soon be dead. 

Over the first 36 hours of the supposed ceasefire, hundreds have been killed and thousands injured in Israeli strikes on Lebanon. The attacks extended beyond Israeli’s traditional targets in southern Lebanon and Beirut’s outskirts into the central parts of the capital — and may mark the heaviest bombardment of the country since Israel’s 1982 invasion.

Trump suggested the ceasefire remains intact because Israel’s attacks are “a separate skirmish,” but the official announcement of the agreement described “an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon.” The language was put forward by Pakistan’s prime minister, who had brokered the deal and, according to the New York Times, the U.S. had seen the text before it was publicly released.

The words “including Lebanon,” however, lasted no longer than it took for Netanyahu to talk to Trump immediately before the ceasefire announcement. Trump confirmed Thursday that he told Netanyahu to “low-key it,” appearing to give Israel a green light to immediately violate the ceasefire and put it at risk of collapse.

In response, Iran says it will not open the Strait of Hormuz so long as Israel is violating the ceasefire. And planned talks in Islamabad for the U.S. and Iran to hammer out a longer-term agreement during the two-week ceasefire window have been thrown into doubt.

For his part, Netanyahu sought to dispel any notion that the Iran war was ending, emphasizing that the ceasefire is temporary and “a way station on the way to achieving all of our goals.”

When it comes exerting Israeli influence on the U.S., Netanyahu once infamously said, “America is a thing you can move very easily.” Indeed, according to reports, it was Netanyahu who convinced Trump to launch this war in the first place.

Now, potentially upending U.S. efforts to disentangle itself from conflict with Iran, the Israeli prime minister finds himself on familiar footing: playing the role of spoiler against any form of U.S.–Iran détente.

Decades of Détente-Busting

America’s supposed junior partner has worked ceaselessly to prevent any off-ramp from confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. In 1995, when Iran and the U.S. flirted with economic rapprochement by opening the Iran oil industry to American investment and development, Israel and AIPAC lobbied Congress and President Bill Clinton to block it.

In 2002, as Iran worked directly with the U.S. on Afghanistan in the aftermath of September 11, seeking a grand bargain, Israel interdicted a weapons shipment it said was bound for Palestinian forces, making questionable claims about the shipment’s Iranian provenance. The seizure helped tank the exploratory talks on Afghanistan and convinced President George W. Bush instead to infamously cast Iran as part of the “axis of evil.”

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Over the course of President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear talks from 2013 to 2015, Israel worked to block a deal — with Netanyahu engaging in unprecedented efforts to sabotage diplomacy. He even addressed a joint session of Congress against a nuclear deal over the White House’s objections. Ultimately, Netanyahu succeeded with Trump’s ascension: Under intense lobbying, Trump tore up the deal and nearly brought the countries to war before his first term ended.

Joe Biden campaigned on reentering the deal, but that aim was prematurely dispatched during Biden’s transition when Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist in 2020, prompting Iranian hard-liners to pass legislation that blew up talks. When negotiations finally began in earnest in 2021, Israel launched an attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Iran responded by announcing it would, for the first time, enrich uranium to nearly weapons-grade. The talks, predictably, failed.

Trump’s Second Term

Though Trump has proved to be a willing partner in Netanyahu’s push to increase tensions with Iran, Israel nonetheless now found ways to play the spoiler — much in the same manner it did with Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden.

The Israelis successfully turned two round of nuclear talks during Trump’s second term into cover for surprise attacks. Both the war on Iran in June 2025 and the current one were initiated not amid great diplomatic impasses, but when Iran put forward workable proposals. In both cases, U.S. officials said Israel was going to act regardless of the American position — and so the U.S. had to join the wars.

These were not wars to defeat Iran, but rather wars to defeat U.S. diplomatic efforts. They are the kinetic manifestation of Israel’s long efforts to keep the U.S. in a permanent state of war with Iran, sometimes cold, sometimes hot.

If U.S.–Iran talks do move forward and there actually is progress toward hammering out a sustainable cessation of hostilities, Israel will remain a wildcard. Any long-term ceasefire will require Israel’s acquiescence.

If Netanyahu tanks the ceasefire and the U.S. and global economy continues to suffer, Israel’s already plunging support among Americans is likely to falter even further. At this point, however, Netanyahu seems more concerned with his domestic political welfare than his credibility with American voters.

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Netanyahu is widely thought to benefit from wars — from Gaza to Iran and now, most critically, in Lebanon — to shore up his political fortunes. He faces an election in October and losing could lead to the revival of corruption charges that might land him in prison.

The question now may unfortunately not be whether Iran and the U.S. can find a compromise. Instead, the fate of the global economy and, not least, Iranians themselves, could rest between Netanyahu and Trump, who faces his own political challenges in midterm elections this year.

It may once again be a question of whether it is America or Israel who blinks first.

The post The Forever Spoiler: Netanyahu Has Been Blowing Up Diplomacy With Iran for Decades appeared first on The Intercept.

The war in Iran has entered its first ceasefire — a two-week break from hostilities brokered largely by Pakistan that all sides have agreed to, with negotiations on a permanent end to the war to follow starting in a few days.

It’s hard to say who has emerged a “winner” in the war so far, but certainly when one examines what has been accomplished and what has not, the U.S. cannot claim a resounding victory, even as it demonstrated formidable military prowess.

Iran may, in fact, be the country that can claim the victory. It’s not just that the Islamic Republic of Iran survived, it’s also that the country demonstrated its control over the Strait of Hormuz — an outcome that establishes Iran’s position as both an influential regional force and a player able to exert sway over the entire world economy.

After the ceasefire announcement, Iran’s first vice president posted on social media: “Today, a page of history has been turned; the world has welcomed a new pole of power, and the era of Iran has begun.”

It sounds like Trumpian hubris, but it can’t immediately be dismissed as a far-fetched fantasy.

Survival — and More

First, the regime had to survive. And it did: Despite President Donald Trump’s self-serving claim, the regime in Iran hasn’t changed. In fact, the Iranian government may have become even more hard-line and less accommodating than before.

Iran took a beating. Despite the depletion of some of its strategic assets, however, the country has maintained many of its strategic capabilities.

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The war hasn’t, for instance, eliminated the uranium stockpile Iran still possesses, though it is buried deep underground — leaving unmet another of the demands that the Trump administration. It is unclear if any of Iran’s thousands of advanced centrifuges survived the bombings in June of last year, but Iran’s ability to manufacture new ones has not been eradicated, despite the loss of some of its nuclear scientists over the past year.

Neither have Israel and the U.S. eliminated all of Iran’s missile launchers or its production lines, as evidenced by the ongoing attacks against Israel and neighboring Persian Gulf states with direct hits up to the ceasefire taking effect. Iran’s drone supply and production line also don’t appear to have been eliminated.

The war, in other words, hasn’t prevented Iran from being a threat to U.S. allies in the region — a threat that has shaken the Arab Persian Gulf states’ faith in U.S. security guarantees, to say nothing of investors’ confidence in the Emirates as a financial capital.

The Gulf is not the only region where the U.S. will suffer international consequences. The war also stoked tensions between Iran and Western nations — some of which assailed the U.S., while even staunch allies in Europe refused to cave to Trump’s admonishments to join the war.

Iran may remain one of the most geopolitically isolated states in the world, but U.S. isolation is rapidly on the rise as well.

The Clincher

Scoring the war and the previous attack on Iran’s nuclear sites like a boxing match, one might argue that Iran has “won” the second round, despite being bruised and bloodied in the fight.

Surviving intact after more than five weeks of intensive day and night bombing by two nuclear powers, the assassination of its supreme leader and some of its top leadership, and the destruction of infrastructure will itself be viewed by the regime and its supporters as victory.

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The regime’s ability to keep fighting against arguably the greatest military power the world has ever seen will be viewed in Tehran and abroad as a remarkable show of strength, potentially establishing a deterrent against future rounds of fighting.

Ultimately, though, it is Iran’s demonstration of its ability to control the flow of oil, gas, and goods through the Strait of Hormuz that would clinch the match. It became evident that Iran’s sway over the strait, creating a toll booth of sorts, was virtually impossible to undo, short of a major ground invasion — something Trump and even his most reckless advisers were loath to authorize.

Leaving aside the bonus Iran received from the jump in prices as it continued to sell oil during the conflict, the toll it began charging — which amounts to about $2 million per ship — will fill its almost empty coffers in short order.

In his remarks to the press, Trump did not seem to be especially concerned with the toll, even suggesting that he, like any mafia boss, would like a piece of it. Iran may, in the event a permanent peace deal is achieved, even agree to pay the protection money if it guarantees the safety of the regime.

Stronger Position in Talks

From the perspective of many in the West and certainly in Iran, the claim that Iran “won” the second round of the match rings truer than the U.S. claim of having accomplished its goals.

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The U.S. and Israel’s assassinations and destruction of military and civilian infrastructure were never contestable; Iran was never a match for the two countries’ conventional forces. To what end, though, was the question.

Whether there is a final peace deal or not, the ends of the war can hardly justify the U.S. and Israel’s means. It may be enough to dissuade military action even absent a deal.

And looking forward, in terms of a longer peace deal and nuclear agreement, Iran is arguably in a stronger position than the days before the war.

At the announcement of the ceasefire, Trump said the Iranian 10-point plan was a workable start to negotiations. Though there are some disputes about whether the proposal Iran presented publicly matched what was transmitted privately, many of the new plan’s pillars matched those presented and what Omani mediators had described as a workable proposal for a diplomatic solution.

By surviving a war and inflicting real pain — physical and financial — on both the aggressors and their enablers, Iran can probably extract more concessions from Trump than it could before.

With his eye on the markets, the price of gasoline, the unpopularity of the war, and the realization in the wake of his apocalyptic threats that there is universal opposition to actually taking Iran back to the Stone Age, it should be obvious by now that Trump wants to put the Iran issue behind him as soon as possible.

In this way, too, the Iranians have shown that they have the upper hand. While Trump and Israel have demonstrated that they don’t understand the Iranian political system, the Iranians have a solid grasp of U.S. politics. They know about the upcoming midterm elections. Perhaps now they think the survival of the Trump regime is actually what’s at stake.

The post How the War Strengthened Iran’s Hand Against the U.S. and Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speech as Medicine

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

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

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

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

It is precisely professional conduct that the law regulates.

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

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

Other Liberal Justices?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skyrocketing Arrests

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Renee Good Killing

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

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

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

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

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

Few Somalis Arrested

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cynical Justification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Systematic” Targeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Training Us to Terror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The U.S.–Israel war on Iran was supposed to end quickly in either an “unconditional surrender” or regime change. Weeks into the conflict, none of it has happened. There appears to be little cause for celebration in Washington, notwithstanding Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s daily jingoistic proclamations.

There is, of course, even less cause for celebration among the population living under nightly aerial assault in Iran. Pro-war Iranians in the diaspora, too, seem to have tamped down their initial exhilaration over the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

It appears that neither the U.S. nor Israel had any plan if the Iranian nezam, or regime, decided to punch back after being subjected to a massive surprise attack on February 28. Those counterpunches have led to the deaths of U.S. service members, Israeli civilians, and migrant workers living in the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf.

Then there is the economic cost. Oil and gas production and transit are frozen in the Gulf, thanks to Iran’s missile strikes that hit regional energy infrastructure and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The markets, accordingly, are in disarray.

“Everyone,” Mike Tyson once said, “has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Iran’s leaders seem to think they have the upper hand right now — they have rejected a ceasefire offer from the U.S. outright — but Donald Trump might have more tricks up his sleeve.

The U.S. is moving troops into the Persian Gulf, potentially with a limited ground invasion looming. Trump, reports suggest, is most likely to go after a small island where Iran keeps an oil terminal for its tankers, or one of the islands closer to the actual Strait, which he would like to see open to all sea traffic.

For now, talks might not be in the offing, despite Trump’s proclamations — most recently that, despite the “fake news,” talks are ongoing and going well. Even by seizing Kharg Island or any other Iranian territory, however, Trump will not make the Iranians buckle. Short of a full-fledged regime change invasion, taking an Iranian outpost in the Persian Gulf may shift the balance of power, but not topple the government. Talks will still be necessary to end the war.

So, the assumption at this point is that the regime will survive — and the ones who really pay for that will be the Iranian people.

Who to Talk To

There is a generous view about Trump’s intentions: that there actually was a realistic plan, one that wasn’t about forcing capitulation or actual regime change. Though some Iranians, especially the former crown prince Reza Pahlavi and his supporters, had certainly hoped for a war of regime change, it’s plausible that Trump was merely seeking a regime adjustment, as he secured in Venezuela.

Even that plan, though, has fallen apart more than once. As Trump himself has said, when Khamenei and his family were targeted for assassination by Israel in the opening salvo of the war, some of the people that the U.S. had identified as potential Delcy Rodríguez types were also killed.

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It all makes one wonder whether the close coordination between Israel and the U.S. didn’t extend to letting the Israelis know that Trump would be satisfied with a Venezuela outcome. Or, if the Israelis did know, then whether they intentionally undermined those plans.

If that’s what happened, it would also explain the later Israeli assassination of Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, who appeared to be Iran’s top official in the physical absence of the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.

Killing Larijani would have helped to forestall any deal that Trump might make with the regime. Larijani, a conservative but known as a pragmatist who, as parliament speaker, had supported the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the U.S., could be someone that Trump may have been able to leverage as a partner in a peace deal. Like the other potential interlocutors Trump had in mind, however, he ended up very dead.

Now the person being openly talked about in Washington as someone to talk to is perhaps the last pragmatic conservative in the top leadership, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, a former commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps like Larijani. Trump has hinted this is who he is speaking to but hasn’t name-checked him, for fear, he said, that Qalibaf too would end up somehow targeted by the Israelis. (This perplexing mouse-and-cat game recalls Bill Clinton’s quip after a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996: “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”)

It’s unclear at this stage if Qalibaf has the mandate to negotiate a deal with Trump — or whether the Iranian leadership even wants a deal yet. Instead, the Iranians may prefer to continue bleeding the enemy — and the world economy — while creating chaos in the region, all to establish a deterrence against future attacks.

That possibility is only made more likely because ultra-hardliners in Iran are ascendant — no thanks to Israeli assassinations of anyone who might be likely to deal or want a deal.

Larijani, after all, was replaced as Iran’s top security official not by a fellow pragmatist, but by an arch-conservative hardliner and former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr. And the former head of the IRGC, Mohammad Pakpour, who was killed in the strike on Khamenei’s compound on February 28, has been replaced Ahmad Vahidi, arguably more hardline as compared to his two immediate (and assassinated) predecessors.

Bad to Worse for Iranians

With reformers, moderates, and proponents of engagement with the West sidelined and irrelevant to decision-making, it seems pretty obvious that whatever plan B the Trump administration is cooking up, the options range from bad to worse, both for America and the Iranian people.

Iran’s leadership believes it’s in the driver’s seat at this stage in the war. Its most powerful tool has been economic: the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is driving Trump and others in the administration mad. Hegseth said the Strait would be open if Iran hadn’t closed it, and Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio said the Strait will be open if Iran opens it. Indeed.

Short of complete regime change, however, opening the Strait by force will be an extremely difficult challenge.

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Trump’s bad-to-worse choices are to make a deal that will be viewed by many as a loss for American credibility and a win for Iran — or to double down with a ground invasion that not only will result in American casualties, but also might fail to even secure leverage to open the Strait. An Iraq-style invasion with tens of thousands of troops and a prolonged war might result in the U.S. being able to impose a supplicant leader, but it is hard to imagine that Trump would make the decision to make such a move.

As for the Iranian people, the Islamic Republic will be more repressive than even before and will mercilessly put down any revolt by its citizens. Iranians will suffer first in the aftermath of a war that has killed innocent civilians and destroyed infrastructure and cultural heritage sites. Then they will have to live under a system that will be suspicious of any dissenter or opposition activist as an agent of Israel or the CIA.

Iran’s Islamic system post-war will be more radical and more militarized in a less centralized form; Khamenei’s death will become a cold comfort to Iranians inside and outside the country.

Trump’s own misunderstanding of Iran, Iranians, and especially the leadership in Iran has brought him to this bad-to-worse choice. If he chooses his least bad option, however, the elephant in the room will be Netanyahu. What he will decide to do if a ceasefire and a deal leaves the Iranian regime in place able to project power?

Israel’s attempts to block an early end to the war and its continued campaign to destroy as much Iranian civilian infrastructure as possible has shown that Netanyahu cares as little for the Iranian people as Trump and his supporters do, including Iranians who celebrate the war as bombs fall on their compatriots.

Maybe Trump will decide to go completely rogue and continue his war of total destruction, irrespective of what the end game is. That, sadly, would be yet another way the Iranian people will be paying the bill.

The post The Regime Survives, Trump Has to Deal, and Iranians Are the Biggest Losers appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

Again and again, though, they failed.

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

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

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

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

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

Grim Precedents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep Up the Fight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a Saturday in February, and I was checking my email inbox on my phone for no particular reason, during a conference. A Mother Jones reporter had written a note, so I opened it.

It’s not so unusual for me to receive press inquiries ­— I am a feminist writer who touches on hot-button issues — but this particular email I never could have predicted. It was about an infamous federal case against people arrested in connection to a protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Last July 4, a group of people had gathered for a demonstration against ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas. It was a noise demo during which a police officer was shot. Some 18 people were arrested and charged for the protest.

The government’s indictment against the Prairieland protesters stood as a chilling development in President Donald Trump’s war on dissent: It was the first time that terrorism-related charges had been brought against people for allegedly being part of an “antifa cell.”

Did I have any thoughts, the Mother Jones reporter wanted to know, on the prosecution using an essay by me in a terrorism trial?

Excuse me?

The essay in question: a film review I wrote in 2019 about the horror movies “Hereditary” and “Midsommar.”

I blinked twice, rubbed my eyes, and then began digging around on the internet to understand.

To my astonishment, prosecutors had introduced my seven-year-old analysis of feminism’s relationship to horror cinema as “evidence of ideologically driven intent” the previous day.

Although I published the piece in “Commune” magazine, the review had been printed in zine format — and that was what authorities seized from the Dallas home of one of the defendants, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, last summer.

“Guilt by Literature”

The appearance of my review in the trial is a brazen attempt at conjuring “guilt by literature” — just one of the tactics prosecutors have used to criminalize speech and use First Amendment-protected speech as a legal weapon against the Trump administration’s political enemies.

Nobody, by the way, is suggesting that Estrada shot or conspired to shoot the officer. He stands accused of two crimes: attempting to conceal documents “by transporting a box containing numerous Antifa materials” and conspiracy to conceal those zines. He faces up to 20 years in prison.

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Estrada isn’t himself facing terror charges, but he being tarred with the label by his association with this so-called “antifa cell.” What Estrada’s case most acutely represents is the way the President Donald Trump conflates antifa and terrorism to do things like criminalize the transportation of zines — in other words, simple First Amendment protected activity.

Trump pulled this off by deeming antifa a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t even exist for domestic groups — ignoring the fact that antifa is an orientation, not a group.

The feds, as Natasha Lennard notes, tend to try to evidence such charges by collecting circumstantial evidence of individual crimes alleged to have taken place “in the context of” legal protest activity — even when there is no direct link between those charged and the alleged crimes.

The charge may or may not stick — often they don’t — but the lawfare from above serves a terrorizing end in itself, she explains, since “the lengthy prosecutions hamper protest movements and chill dissent.”

Why My Review?

I need to ask: Why my review? And the truth is I don’t really have a great answer.

There is a rich irony here: My little horror movie review was introduced to prove a conception of antifa that — like many of the monsters we scream at in horror flicks — isn’t quite real.

The title of my essay — which is to say, of the zine seized from the accused’s house in Dallas — is “The Satanic Death-Cult Is Real.” It refers to the fictional demon-worshipping ceremony in the final scene of “Hereditary” as well as, at the same time, to the all-too-real, madness-inducing logic of the private nuclear household.

From my ego’s standpoint, it’s painful to assume that anyone is refusing to read beyond my titles before reacting. (It’s a tragically common occurrence: I’m the author, after all, of books about the communization of care with titles like “Full Surrogacy Now” and “Abolish the Family.”)

It seems, though, that the FBI didn’t read beyond the cover of what it calls my “booklet.” That was the description of my review-in-zine-form when it appeared in an itemized receipt for seized property, alongside cellphones, computers, weapons, and other bits of technology — for the sole reason that it is willing to throw anything, no matter how absurd, at anti-ICE activists to paint them as vile terrorists.

When the Mother Jones reporter messaged, I replied immediately, from my phone, in a state of agitation. It ought to be surprising, I pointed out, that possession of a printout of some film criticism could be brandished as evidence of a treasonous conspiracy against the United States government, yet — in 2026 — it is not.

“Perhaps,” indeed, I wrote, “there is an element of truth in the state’s preposterous linking of the mere implication of having read antifascist culture writing about the private nuclear family in [director] Ari Aster’s oeuvre with the alleged crime of belonging to a cell of an organization — antifa — that, as we all know, doesn’t even exist.”

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Thankfully, however, organized antifascism does exist. I proudly accept the notion that any of my writings have helped in any small way to stoke the desire to practice antifascism, courageously and practically, as those blocking and protesting the brutality of American stormtroopers are doing all over the world.

If nothing else, I’m grateful that the FBI seized my book review and that prosecutors hauled it out in this ridiculous trial, because it gave me the opportunity to express my full solidarity with the Prairieland defendants.

The post I Wrote a Movie Review. Cops Took It From a Protester’s Home to Make the Case That He’s a Terrorist. appeared first on The Intercept.