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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICE in Williston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No Real Precedent for It”

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

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

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

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

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

“Extremely Concerning”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Eve of Protests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Egregiously Managed Care”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preventable Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

Botched Emergency Responses

Botched emergency responses were noted in two other cases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revelatory Reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reopening as ICE Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Holy Shit, I’m Fucked”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Admission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prison With Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Left Out of Audit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICE Expanding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Song had been charged with attempted murder for allegedly firing a gun at the first police officer who arrived on the scene after a noise demonstration outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado on July 4, 2025.

The defense — more than a dozen attorneys representing clients with varying degrees of involvement in the protest — had rested their argument without calling a single expert witness, owing to what they thought was the weakness of the government’s case.

During closing arguments, however, Phillip Hayes, Song’s attorney, raised what he said was a major flaw in the government’s depiction of what happened: Song never aimed his weapon at the police officer. Relying on evidence introduced by the prosecution — a photograph of the bullet, witness testimony, and CCTV footage of the incident — Hayes said his client never intended to shoot Alvarado Police Department Lt. Thomas Gross.

Rather, Hayes said, Song fired his weapon at the ground and the bullet ricocheted off a hard surface before striking the officer just below the neck. That would explain the plumes of dust that were visible in the video. According to Hayes, the only photo of the bullet, which appears severely bent and with several missing fragments, backs up the theory.

“Attempted murder requires that you intend to kill,” Hayes, a lanky, soft-spoken criminal defense attorney, told the jury on March 11. “And if the government can’t prove that intent, that’s a not guilty — period.”

The jury didn’t bite. Instead of being acquitted, Song was convicted and sentenced to 100 years in prison.

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One reason the ricochet theory didn’t play a bigger role in the trial was that the federal government prevented it from being fully aired. Key details about the shooting, and the officer’s actions, were only revealed during the trial itself. Prosecution motions and favorable rulings by the judge, a Trump appointee, made it difficult for Song’s lawyers to fully vet the idea or argue that he had acted in self-defense.

And an independent ballistics expert hired by Song’s defense team before the trial was denied access to the defendant in federal prison. As a routine part of any case about a murder or a shooting involving a police officer, said Daryl Parker, the former Marine Corps officer and criminal defense investigator hired by Song’s team, a ballistics expert will meet with an alleged shooter to collect information. Nothing about the Prairieland case, however, was turning out to be routine.

In emails reviewed by The Intercept, Parker and Hayes repeatedly wrote to Federal Medical Center Fort Worth, the federal detention center where Song was held before and during the trial, asking to visit the defendant. All the requests went unanswered. (FMC Fort Worth declined to respond to a request for comment.)

Parker never got a response from the jail official in charge of Song’s detention, let alone visitation rights.

“We sent him everything he asked for,” Parker, speaking publicly for the first time about the case, told The Intercept. “But approval never came.”

It was the first time in his 25-year career that the forensics expert had been denied access to a client in a federal facility.

In the end, members of the jury never received a full airing of the argument nor the multiple pieces of evidence that support it.

The ricochet theory, though, may yet be part of Song’s appeal and the basis of a new trial, according to two lawyers on Song’s defense team in his state-level case. New evidence, including material revealed for the first time in this Intercept investigation, shows that Song, a former Marine reservist and expert marksman, may have never intended to shoot the police officer.

New Evidence

The Prairieland case was touted by the Trump administration as the government’s first prosecution of an “antifa cell,” moving from indictment to trial in the Northern District of Texas in just a few months. For such a complex high-profile case, there wasn’t much time to prepare. And key pieces of information were hidden within or even omitted from discovery.

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Buried within the tens of thousands of pages of evidence provided to the defense team was a grainy photograph: the government’s only image of the bullet that struck the police officer. According to two ballistics experts interviewed for this story, the photo is of such poor quality that it is difficult to conclude anything from the image alone.

Shaun Jaikissoon, a former firearms examiner with the New York City Police Department for 10 years who now has his own consulting firm, said the photo of the fragment provided by the prosecution tells us almost nothing and may even be deemed “unsuitable,” meaning it lacks value for a forensic analysis.

Parker, the independent ballistics expert hired by the defense team, said he agreed the photo was of little value.

“It is sparse,” he said. “You should have images of the end of the bullet — 360 degrees — so you can properly evaluate it.”

Despite the photograph’s limitations, it does reveal that the bullet was severely deformed, indicating a possible ricochet.

“It’s a copper banana,” said Parker. “It obviously struck something.”

The opinion is shared by one of the government’s own witnesses. During the trial, Philip Stout, a forensic scientist for the Texas Department of Public Safety, described the extreme curvature of the bullet as characteristic of a projectile fired into a water tank.

“When you’re dealing with higher velocity bullets, they slow down very quickly, so it gets that curved — I refer to it as a banana shape, but it’s more of a semicircle shape,” said Stout. “What that tells me is that bullet struck something and slowed down very quickly.”

Other questions arose from the shooting and investigation, Parker said. Perhaps most important is the fact that Gross’s bulletproof vest — level IIIA soft body armor — would not have been able to withstand the force of a bullet fired from an AR-15-style rifle at such close range. Even the label on the vest, introduced into evidence by the government, says: “This is NOT intended to protect against rifle fire.”

According to Parker, if the bullet had struck Gross directly — without first hitting another surface or object — it would have ripped through him “like Swiss cheese” and almost certainly killed him. Instead, the bullet came to rest inside Gross’s vest, with Gross sustaining minor injuries. He was released from the hospital a few hours later.

“The standard body armor that police officers wear is not rated for rifles,” Parker said. “It’s only rated for handguns. It’s not even rated for knives.”

Another clue that points to a ricochet, according to Parker, is Song’s skill as a marksman, especially given the short distance between the two shooters and Song’s previous training as a Marine.

“The fact that the officer is not dead, to me, is a big red flag that Song wasn’t aiming at him,” Parker told The Intercept.

Together, this new evidence of a ricochet matches the information that became apparent only during the trial when Gross testified that he drew his weapon first and aimed at a fleeing protester. Drawing on this testimony, along with video evidence, Song recounted the same version of events in a statement he read during sentencing.

“When I saw Lieutenant Thomas Gross stop pursuing and point his gun at the back of a running, unarmed protester, like he testified, I was terrified,” Song said. “As a firearms instructor and a United States Marine Corps veteran, I understood what I was seeing. As the evidence shows, I did not want to hurt anyone.”

Shots Fired

That Gross drew first and aimed at a protester’s back were among the facts that, according to Song’s lawyers, were not revealed to the defense until the trial itself. Also missing from the pre-trial discovery was evidence indicating that bullets fired at the scene struck the ground. The marks in the pavement were not documented as part of the investigation.

Given these late-breaking revelations, Song’s lawyers had to scramble in the middle of the trial to put together their argument. Song’s defense team, in a motion for a new trial filed in April, said that the failure to disclose evidence of the bullet strikes sooner deprived them of the ability to make their case that Song never intended to shoot officer Gross.  

The existence of bullet strikes was only revealed during the second week of the trial, when evidence from the investigation, headed up by the Texas Rangers, an elite unit within the state’s Department of Public Safety, was divulged in court. Texas Ranger Billy James Hill Jr., responsible for photographing the scene, admitted during cross-examination to finding “recent looking defects in the concrete surface.”

Tailim Song, Benjamin Song’s father and a civil attorney who was part of his son’s defense team, said the ricochet theory only began to take shape when they learned about the deformations in the road.

“In my mind,” Tailim Song said, “it really didn’t come home until the Rangers said there were fresh bullet strikes in the concrete.”

The photographs from the scene, however, didn’t include shots of the ground. When asked during the trial whether he had taken any photos of what he believed to be bullet strikes, Hill, the Texas Ranger, responded that it “wasn’t part of my responsibility.”

Hill had taken photographs using a high-tech camera system called a Leica RTC360 Digital Crime Scene Scanner, which creates reconstructions of the alleged events. The reconstruction, however, omitted photographs and chemical swabs of where the bullets had struck the pavement as well as the crucial trajectory analysis and shooter-position determinations. (The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Department of Justice did not respond to questions about the investigation or crime scene reconstruction.)

Ryan Rider, a former Texas police officer who teaches crime scene reconstruction at Tarleton State University, said the technology, if used properly, can provide precise measurements — down to the millimeter — that can be used with other evidence like testimony and physical evidence to track the bullet’s pathway in relation to the shooter.

“It does tell you a story,” said Rider, who is slated to train law enforcement agencies on the Leica system.

Rider — who spoke to The Intercept generally about investigations, since he has not examined the Prairieland evidence — also said shootings involving officers are potentially chaotic environments with multiple agencies involved in collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, and securing the crime scene.

In the Prairieland case, Alvarado Police Department; the Johnson County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office; the Department of Homeland Security; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the FBI; in addition to the Texas Rangers; were all present. Not documenting the bullet strikes — especially if the Rangers knew they were there, as Hill acknowledged in court — is hard to explain, Rider added.

“A trooper shouldn’t be up on the stand saying, ‘That wasn’t my responsibility,’” Rider said. “If they’re on the scene, people are going to expect them to be the ones to say, ‘Hey, get pictures of this.’”

With the gaps in the forensic evidence and crucial facts withheld until the middle of the three-week trial, defense attorneys couldn’t pull together a coherent, countervailing version of events quickly enough. Even when they tried, as evidence undermining the government’s claims trickled out, the lawyers faced new hurdles.

Gross gave his testimony early in the trial about drawing his gun first, information that was left off a police report and not included in discovery. Then the judge granted a prosecutors’ motion barring Song’s lawyers from using a self-defense argument, which became a frequent point of contention.

At one point, during his closing argument, Hayes, Song’s defense attorney, suggested that Gross may not have been justified in pulling his weapon so quickly. The judge, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, admonished Hayes for treading too close to a rationale for self-defense.

Appealing for His Life

The Prairieland trial unfolded as Trump escalated his crackdown on anti-ICE protests across the country. The verdicts were celebrated by the Trump administration as its first successful prosecution of a violent “antifa cell,” and the first eight defendants were sentenced to more than 450 years in prison altogether.

“These guilty verdicts and convictions rightly reflect the vicious, armed attack that these Antifa cell members planned and executed against law enforcement and detention center officers on the night of July 4 last year,” a top Department of Justice official said after the convictions were handed down.

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The government’s narrative rested on the premise that the noise demonstration was an organized ambush of law enforcement officers and that Song’s intent from the outset was to kill a police officer. But this version of events relies on an incomplete picture of what transpired that night.

Whether information that came to light during the trial is adjudicated as part of the appeals process will be decided by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative courts in the country and one that Trump’s Justice Department has used to secure favorable rulings.

Patrick McLain, an attorney representing another Prairieland defendant, said it would likely be several months before any appeals are filed; it is still unclear what the focus will be and if the defendants will mount a coordinated effort. 

“My hope is that we’re going to have nine solid briefs that are mutually supporting and not contradictory,” McLain said. 

The 5th Circuit has not issued a briefing notice. Once it does, defense teams will have 40 days to submit their documents, according to John Kuchera, Song’s court-appointed appellate lawyer. Kuchera, reached by phone, said he has not yet had time to review the record and has not met with Song. He declined to comment on whether the theory about the bullet would be included in the appeal.

“What my opinions are about anything will show up in my brief,” he said. “Whatever issues that I think need to be addressed will be in that.”

Ultimately, the 5th Circuit will decide if evidence in the Prairieland case, including the bullet that struck Gross, can be reexamined and if Song, who now faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, will be granted a new trial.

Correction: September 28, 2026
This story has been corrected to note that Ryan Rider, the crime scene reconstruction expert, has not yet begun training law enforcement agencies on the Leica crime scene scanner.

The post Exclusive: Feds Denied Ballistics Expert Access to Prairieland Defendant Who Got 100 Years in Prison appeared first on The Intercept.

This article and video are being co-published with Responsible Statecraft.

For the first time, the Pentagon budget topped $1 trillion, and private contractors now receive more than half of all the tax dollars flowing to the Pentagon.

Few have profited from this privatization of the U.S. military more than the CEOs of Pentagon contractors.

While these companies often advertise their work as supporting the troops, the fact is that many service members live in appalling housing conditions, while military–industrial contractors’ profits soar and their CEOs live in luxury.

The lavish lifestyles of these CEOs is laid bare in the new mockumentary “Lords of War,” co-produced by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, that lampoons an industry held aloft by hundreds of billions of public funds every year.

“Lords of War” connects exorbitant Pentagon spending to the luxury enjoyed by the CEOs of its top contractors. As the film notes, Lockheed Martin is regularly the largest recipient of Pentagon contracts, raking in $75 billion in revenue in 2025 — more than 72 percent of which came from the U.S. government.

As “Lords of War”’s faux real estate aficionado explains, Lockheed’s CEOs have used their $20-million-plus compensation packages to buy luxury real estate from the D.C. suburbs to the shores of Miami.

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Despite its care-free tone, the film highlights very real problems within the military–industrial complex. As research by William Hartung and Stephen Semler for Brown University’s Costs of War Project showed, 54 percent of the Pentagon’s annual spending now goes to private contractors — up from 41 percent in the 1990s.

The top Pentagon contractors’ revenues and stock prices also skyrocketed as they’ve begun to devour an ever-larger share of the military budget.

They converted their revenue from the military into line items on their own budgets that do nothing to improve U.S. national security: armies of lobbyists that now outnumber all members of Congress by a nearly 2-to-1 margin; billions of dollars in stock buybacks; and, of course, CEO compensation packages on par with those of NFL quarterbacks.

The contrast of these CEOs’ rock-star lifestyles — “Lords of War” reveals that one chief executive bought Lenny Kravitz’s Miami mansion — with those of the military service members they purport to serve is striking.

As the film notes, former Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson received $33.7 million in compensation in 2015, which is more than 150 times as much as the average compensation package for an enlisted service member. While Hewson and other Pentagon contractor CEOs have been buying up mansions, the basic pay of service members has been relatively stagnant for the past 20 years when controlling for inflation.

Worse, the conditions service members have been living in are deteriorating. A 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that two-thirds of service members think their housing is unaffordable. And service members often face “long commutes, leave families behind in other states, and work 2 jobs to afford housing,” according to the GAO report.

A July 2026 Senate investigation, meanwhile, revealed dangerous living conditions at military bases in Georgia, including “reports of lead exposure affecting newborn health, severe mold contamination leading to emergency room visits, flooding in living areas, and more.”

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Wartime environments have been no better, as evidenced by the deplorable conditions — including food shortages and inoperable plumbing — during the USS Abraham Lincoln’s extended deployment near Iran, which ultimately led multiple sailors to attempt to jump overboard.

Unfortunately, it’s your tax dollars that are paying for this gaping chasm between the lives of contractor CEOs and the troops.

“Lords of War” is one of the few films about military–industrial complex that you find hilarious, but its subject is no laughing matter. The private firms we’re entrusting with U.S. national security are doing more to defend their own share prices than they are to defend the nation. If we keep trusting this broken system to keep us safe, then, ultimately, the joke is on us.

The post Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous War Profiteers appeared first on The Intercept.

At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race — and faced criticism from other candidates in the race. The food delivery giant’s settlement agreement, the largest worker settlement in the city’s history, brings further scrutiny to those donations.

Through that election cycle, DoorDash spent around $1.4 million against Mamdani and in favor of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The company was one of the top donors to the biggest outside spender in the election, a virulently anti-Mamdani super PAC called Fix the City. 

While on the campaign trail, Mamdani had promised to regulate delivery apps and further protections for delivery workers, proposals that earned him the support of delivery worker groups.

At the time, DoorDash’s large spending raised eyebrows. Now, the company has to pay its workers around 100 times the amount it spent attempting to influence the election, owing to a mayoral administration that refused to overlook concerns with the company’s conduct.

“It’s not a contribution, it’s an investment, with the donor or investor expecting something in return,” said Greg Coleridge, a former co-director of Move to Amend, an advocacy group that seeks stringent regulations against corporate money in elections. “Here is an instance where organized money from a company that was trying to avoid being responsible and accountable, was unsuccessful.”

Announcing the new settlement, Mamdani said, “The size of this settlement shows the damage done to workers by wage theft. But it also shows that enforcement matters.”

In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)

The Smear Campaign Against Mamdani

DoorDash contributed $1 million to Fix the City, a super PAC that spent $31 million in the mayoral election, accounting for close to half of the total outside spending in the race, largely funded by big corporations and billionaires. DoorDash made the payment in May 2025, at a time Mamdani’s campaign was gaining significant momentum ahead of the mayoral primaries in June.

Fix the City ran a barrage of ads, phone calls, text messages, and other forms of political communication seeking to prevent a Mamdani victory and portraying him as a politician with “radically dangerous ideas” and “a risk New York can’t afford.”

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The group artificially altered Mamdani’s beard in a campaign mailer and made it appear longer and darker, an act that the Muslim mayoral candidate had called out as “blatant Islamophobia.”

At the end of video ads by Fix The City, a campaign finance disclosure in small text at the bottom of the screen read, “The top three donors to the organization responsible for this advertisement are Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, John Hess.”

DoorDash also gave $1.8 million to Local Economies Forward NY, a super PAC that contributed more than $360,000 to Cuomo’s campaign.

Aided by corporations like DoorDash and billionaires like Bloomberg, the overall independent spending by super PACs seeking to defeat Mamdani was more than eight times what was spent in his favor, according to The Intercept’s analysis of data published by the NYC Campaign Finance Board.

A Historic Settlement

DoorDash’s settlement followed an investigation by the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The Mamdani administration said that the investigation “found that DoorDash deliberately paid workers below the Minimum Pay Rate or not at all.” 

Under the settlement with the city, the food delivery giant will pay over $115 million in worker restitution and over $16 million in civil penalties and administrative fines.

Two weeks after assuming office, the Mamdani administration warned delivery apps to comply with worker protections, sending notices to DoorDash and others, and announcing a lawsuit against the delivery app Motoclick.

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The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection’s citywide investigation into DoorDash began after dozens of workers reported that the company had failed to pay them or had paid them late for work they had performed.

As part of the settlement, DoorDash must submit detailed compliance data reports to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection every month for three years, and the company’ activities will also be monitored through workers sharing data with the city.

The settlement announced by Mamdani is not the first run-in that DoorDash has had in recent years with restitution payments in New York. 

In May 2024, the company agreed to pay $75,000 in a settlement after New York Attorney General Letitia James found that the company routinely rejected applicants with criminal histories in violation of the New York City Fair Chance Act. In February 2025, the attorney general settled with DoorDash for $16.75 million after the company used tips to subsidize workers’ guaranteed pay.

“They knew that by having a mayor who’s willing to put resources [for workers], it’s gonna be detrimental to their corporate model,” said Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project, a group that organizes for low-wage immigrant workers and had helped several DoorDash workers file complaints with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. “DoorDash decided to invest money in trying to buy our city’s democracy.”

The post DoorDash Spent $1.4 Million Trying to Stop Mamdani From Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why. appeared first on The Intercept.

It has been an excellent 48 hours for Schadenfreude.

Unprincipled pop star Ed Sheeran dropped principled pop star Macklemore from his U.S. stadium tour, following pressure from rabidly pro-Israel billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft over Macklemore’s wholly anodyne on-stage calls to free Palestine.

Macklemore has been loudly calling for an end to the genocide for over two years; it was only when facing the loss of future revenue that Sheeran asked his longtime friend to leave the tour.

Now, Sheeran is in a well-deserved pickle.

Every single one of his other support acts, including his backing band Beoga, have quit the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. Finneas, Danish group Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe, and Beoga explicitly condemned the silencing of Palestine solidarity.

“I have decided to withdraw from my upcoming tour dates with Ed Sheeran. I stand with Palestine and its people,” Finneas said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Sheeran has been widely lambasted for his spinelessness.

“Imagine being a Palestinian kid and seeing he did a concert for Ukraine but when over 20,000 Palestinian children are killed he’s silent,” wrote beloved children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel on Instagram, referencing Sheeran’s 2022 performance raising funds for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.

The backlash facing Sheeran has been a pleasure to observe. Seeing unscrupulous claims to purported apolitical neutrality revealed as hypocrisy and cowardice is validating.

Something bigger, too, may be unfolding. The response to Sheeran could mark a long, long overdue sea change in popular culture around Palestinian solidarity.

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Under the current paradigm, speaking out against Israel’s genocide and occupation has been extremely costly for celebrities. The case of Macklemore and Sheeran should herald an era in which, instead, devaluing Palestinian lives is deemed a career liability.

“The reason most famous artists continue to stay silent on the genocide in Palestine is simple: they’re afraid speaking up will lose them money,” wrote comedian Sammy Obeid on X. “So the solution is simple: make their silence even more unprofitable.”

The logic of economic boycotts — from South Africa to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement — is to extract material costs for participation in oppressive regimes.

Sheeran is not a BDS target. The movement is explicit about only targeting select corporations and institutions that “play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.” But l’affaire Macklemore, as it has unfolded so far, may nonetheless affirm the logic of BDS.

The point is that Sheeran’s actions once again treated anti-Palestinian censorship as an uncontroversial norm, and the path of least resistance. The reaction to Sheeran suggests that, at the very least, after three years of livestreamed genocide, this norm is finally losing its hold in the cultural mainstream.

So far, Sheeran has not canceled his tour. He will likely be able to find scab artists to step in and replace his opening acts and supporting band.

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Given the public furor over his dropping Macklemore, however, musicians will be weary of backlash for stepping in. Indeed, it’s likely only explicitly pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian artists who would; Sheeran can’t help himself to the lie of neutrality anymore.

And now none of his chosen musicians will perform with him, despite describing him as a friend. It is his position that they have deemed unacceptable.

The Real Stakes

The backlash arrives as such a relief only because the so-called Palestinian exception to free speech has been so thoroughly normalized.

Yet even if this does mark a watershed moment for mainstream culture, it can hardly be called a victory as the genocide in Gaza continues and West Bank pogroms escalate.

Donald Trump this week approved a $2.8 billion arms sale to Israel, including 40,000 one-ton bombs renowned for mass civilian annihilation. The stakes of Ed Sheeran’s tour pale in comparison.

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That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Israel’s impunity-drenched eliminationist project has always relied on international disregard for Palestinian lives and mainstream accordance with pernicious and false pro-Israel narratives about Jewish safety. Every effort, in every sphere, to end that status quo should be celebrated and escalated.

“I am not complicit,” Sheeran wrote in a statement, which only seemed to confirm his complicity. “I have my personal views on this devastating conflict” — employing the verbiage of those who refuse to name a genocide. “There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics — my audience includes young people, often children, of all backgrounds.”

Recall, again, that he played a concert to raise funds for Ukraine in 2022.

It bears emphasizing that Macklemore said nothing remotely antisemitic. He called for a “free Palestine”; he also called for a “free Congo” and “free Sudan.” He condemned Israeli war crimes and added, “To all my Jewish brothers and sisters, criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you.”

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The reaction of Kraft and Zionist groups like the Israeli–American Council is, meanwhile, profoundly antisemitic, and generative of antisemitic violence: They suggest that we Jews should feel aligned with the genocide of Palestinians, and thus hurt by calls to end it.

A Fox News host said, of Macklemore’s performance, that “Free Palestine” is the new “Sieg Heil” — itself a vile act of Holocaust erasure.

And, as a friend of mine rightly noted, “The new Sieg Heil is the regular Sieg Heil.” Neo-Nazis abound.

Kanye West, who has spewed explicit anti-Jewish slurs and released a song called “Heil Hitler,” performed at stadiums that sought to ban Macklemore. Because, once again, this is not about Jewish safety; it’s about upholding the conflation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and crushing Israel-critical speech.

None of that is new. What feels new is that it isn’t working: Artists and supporters are rallying to Macklemore’s support, and Sheeran looks like a gutless idiot.

Being a “nice guy” can no longer sit comfortably alongside refusing to condemn a genocide that our home countries have backed and funded. That is a step in the right direction.

The post Ed Sheeran’s Craven “Neutrality” Is a Watershed Moment for Mainstreaming Palestine Solidarity appeared first on The Intercept.

In the last week, a raft of top tech executives — including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — joined a chorus of doomsaying voices from Silicon Valley urging a slowdown in artificial intelligence development.

The executives feared, they said, that the tools would become too powerful too soon and pose an existential risk to humanity.

Why would three multibillionaire tech CEOs all come together to agree that the technologies their companies are developing might be too dangerous?

Do the overlords of Silicon Valley really think frontier AI models are likely to “kill all humans,” as one senior employee at Anthropic warned last week? Is this just another example of hype propagated to draw in more investment?

The beneficiaries of the AI gold rush and the beneficiaries of investment in AI safety are, after all, likely to be the very same people, even if AI stocks have fallen in recent days amid the latest doom cycle.

We could waste a lot of time speculating about the apocalyptic or cynical worldviews of tech billionaires. Regardless of what these CEOs and their employees actually believe, however, one thing is clear: Talk of existential risk is a highly convenient way to not address the already known harms produced by AI technologies overseen by fascist billionaires like Musk and Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

It’s a suspicious time for Silicon Valley leaders to again offer up millenarian narratives about existential risks beyond our comprehension. The CEOs’ warnings, after all, came at the very moment a cross-political consensus is growing against the proliferation of actually existing harms of AI and its infrastructure. Consider, for example, mass opposition to data centers and classroom AI bans.

Silicon Valley talk about existential risk is hardly new. In 2023, hundreds of tech researchers, CEOs of the major AI companies, investors, and academics signed an open letter on AI risk just one sentence long: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Pitiful international commitments to preventing future pandemics and nuclear wars are hardly a reassuring baseline, but the sentiment of the open letter played into a now typical AI story, thick with theological overtones: A threshold is supposedly approaching, which could lead to the total destruction of life on Earth — or our salvation.

That threshold, according to the figureheads of technocapital, is the birth of AGI: “artificial general intelligence,” or systems of equal or superior intelligence to humans. From that point, these stories go, mighty super intelligent machines would emerge through recursive cycles of AI self-improvement.

Deliverance or Destruction

The destruction wrought by these AI systems could be total, so we are told, if they are not “aligned” with human interests. According to one particularly deranged thought experiment, our future robot overlords could turn everything on Earth into paperclips.

Alternatively, the utopian storyline goes, the magic of AI — and it is described with no more concreteness than gestures to magic — will solve every worldly problem and more, from climate devastation, to poverty, to illness, to mortality itself.

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Consider how tech multibillionaires Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt have brushed off the issue of AI processing’s already ruinous, gargantuan consumption of energy and water use. The New York Times reported that Schmidt believes AI has “too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.”

Advanced AI will bring such growth, such prosperity, such environment-saving technology, such holy deliverance, they say, that only a small-minded technophobe could want to hold back the learning machines in their dizzying progress.

How will super AI do this? I can’t tell you. Crucially, neither can the billionaires and technologists bringing this alleged magic — or terror — to the world. Nor can those directing unprecedented, economy-redefining amounts of capital and energy toward data centers and AI research articulate artificial intelligence’s path to redemption.

The whole point is that those of us at the bottom of the food chain — the consumers, or maybe all of humanity — cannot possibly understand the forces at work here.

We should be skeptical of these propagandistic narratives. This is not to say that the AI industries are not world-changing. AI can already do extraordinary things, many far beyond human capacities; these technologies have already had profound effects on the world of work, on global infrastructure, on the applications of state violence, on the vast flows of capital and energy.

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AI isn’t, after all, one thing: It’s collection of methods based in what’s known as machine learning, which is basically algorithms using statistics to find patterns in massive amounts of data, including in extraordinarily complex ways.

AI products and services abound, from text and image generative content to recommendation engines, like those used by Spotify and Netflix; fraud detection systems; and navigation systems such as Google Maps.

Yes, we’re swimming in AI slop, enshittified search engines, stolen content, deepfakes, embarrassing mistakes, and hallucinations. But there are also scientists using machine learning to revolutionize the detection and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

Meanwhile, AI systems are used to generate — and justify — kill lists in a genocide, or generate revenge porn, or populate predictive-policing databases along racist lines.

AI Fairytales

The problem with AI fairytales, which take the development of “artificial general intelligence” as a teleological endpoint, is that the array of machine learning’s current and potential applications are collapsed together as part of a singular unstoppable force.

Instead of a serious reckoning with existing harms and possibilities of technological development, technocapital’s mouthpieces prefer a story of an inevitable Judgment Day: The great thinking machines are coming and will destroy or deliver us.

Pesky questions about the actual capacities and potentials of machine learning are cast away. So, too, are difficult discussions about the dark history of “intelligence” as a calculable quality and a messy, contested concept.

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Genuine uncertainties and unknowns about how best or not to develop and deploy advanced machine learning technologies are obviated — considerations being reserved for the Great Men of Silicon Valley.

As the cognitive scientist Hagen Blix and machine learning researcher Ingeborg Glimmer wrote in their 2025 book “Why We Fear AI”: “If the stakes are as high as the very survival of humanity, then concerns about the effects that really existing artificial intelligence technology has right now—from excessive energy usage, to undermining the livelihood of artists and dock workers, to introducing cybersecurity vulnerabilities, to perpetuating and worsening discrimination, to disinformation and deep fakes, to supercharging mass surveillance, etc., are easily brushed aside.”

The post Tech CEOs’ Doomsaying Is a Distraction from Real, Existing Harms of AI appeared first on The Intercept.

Though the university gave in smaller amounts to pro-Israel groups before the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, the spending ramped up in that fiscal year as the genocide in Gaza unfolded and Columbia led the way in a national campus protest movement against it.

In contrast to its pro-Israel giving, according to an analysis of documents which track some of the money given by tax-exempt nonprofits, the school gave little or no such funds to pro-Palestine, Arab, or Muslim groups over the same period.

“It confirms our worst suspicions since fall of 2023 that pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian politics are the official policy of this institution,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia and a Jewish member of the university’s faculty, told The Intercept. “You could have surmised that from the institution’s actions and speech, but it appears to also be revealed in its resource allocation.”

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A Columbia spokesperson said the grants went through a university-administered donor-advised fund, an arrangement where a nonprofit organization pools tax-deductible donations and lets the donors request to make specific distributions to other charities.  

“These grants did not come from Columbia’s operating funds and were payments distributed from a donor-advised fund established at Columbia in accordance with IRS rules,” the Columbia spokesperson said. 

Donor-advised funds have become increasingly common ways for contributors to hide their identities when making gifts.

“It’s just so opaque,” Mark De Fusco, an expert on financial transactions in higher educational institutions and former researcher at the Pullias Center for Higher Education, told The Intercept. “So, you can essentially make donations and not be identified.”

“Deeply Invested in the Genocide”

In the fiscal year ending in June 2024, Columbia paid $100,000 to the Israel on Campus Coalition and another $75,000 to AIPAC affiliate American Israel Education Foundation.

In the same period, the Columbia administration summarily suspended the pro-Palestine student groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, quashed the encampments in solidarity with Gaza, and called on the New York City Police Department to arrest pro-Palestine protesters on campus on two separate occasions.

The protesters had been demanding that Columbia disclose its financial ties to Israel and pro-Israel organizations and divest from them.

“The whole reason why we were protesting in the first place is because we knew that they were deeply invested in the genocide in Gaza,” said Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian American activist who participated in the campus protests in solidarity with Gaza before graduating from Columbia in 2025. “These findings confirm what we’ve been saying all along.”

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While grants to American universities and medical research centers dominate past tax filings by Columbia, the pro-Israel organizations stand out as a rare few that prioritize relations with a specific foreign country. In 2024, over 170 of the 440 payments in this category were toward higher education and over 120 went to healthcare initiatives.

The payments by Columbia to the pro-Israel organizations were listed by the university as being for “program services,” though the term is not publicly defined by the university.

The Pro-Israel Beneficiaries

In fiscal year ending in June 2025, Columbia paid $7,200 to the Anti-Defamation League for “program services.” In the same period, the ADL welcomed the arrest of a lead Columbia protest negotiator Mahmoud Khalil by federal immigration officials. (None of the pro-Israel organizations that received Columbia cash responded to requests for comment.)

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Details about any services offered by the ADL to Columbia in that period were not mentioned or publicized by the university. In July 2025, Columbia announced it was partnering with the ADL to conduct “programming and training” on antisemitism. A month before the announcement of the partnership, ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to Islamist terrorists.

“Columbia should be investing in its students, not bankrolling organizations that intimidate them,” Khalil told The Intercept. “This is what happens when a university is controlled by ideologues on its Board of Trustees whose commitment to Israel appears to matter more than their fiduciary duty, academic freedom, or the students they are supposed to serve.”

The pro-Israel organizations that received payments from Columbia stand out from the rest of the university’s beneficiaries in its filings. While a small number of ethnic community organizations such as the Dominican Women’s Development Center and the Caribbean Women’s Health Association are listed as having received funding from the school in its disclosures, these groups largely operate in the diaspora and are not advocating for U.S. relations with a foreign nation.

The choice to fund organizations that specifically advocate for Israel struck several students, alumni, and faculty members with whom The Intercept discussed the findings as odd.

“At this point, Columbia cares about one thing and one thing only, which is the money of its donors and the ideological interests that those donors espouse,” said Aharon Dardik, an Israeli student who graduated from Columbia earlier this year and who had previously been court-martialed for refusing to serve in the Israeli military.

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One of the beneficiary organizations receiving money from Columbia, the American Israel Education Foundation, describes itself on its website as “the charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC, America’s pro-Israel lobby.” The group is best known for funding trips for members of Congress to visit Israel. Over the past decade, Columbia has paid AIPAC’s charity arm $250,000, with a $75,000 payment in the fiscal year ending in June 2023 and a $100,000 payment in the one ending in June 2017.

Another beneficiary organization, the Israel on Campus Coalition, says its role is to put pro-Israel campus activism under one umbrella and work toward a future “where the anti-Israel movement is marginalized.” The group offered a fellowship at Columbia; the school’s website lists one student as having received the fellowship from 2022 to 2024.

Columbia also paid $450,000 to the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York in the fiscal year ending in June 2024. UJA says on its website that, since October 7, 2023, the organization spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Israel, including tens of millions to support Israeli soldiers and their families.

A review of these financial contributions, adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past three years, have brought Columbia’s process for donating to beneficiary organizations into sharp focus.

“People talking about institutional neutrality; there’s no institutional neutrality,” said a Columbia student who did not wish to be identified due to concerns over retaliation. “Columbia has always been very pro-Israel, and this just goes to show that that’s where their real commitments are.”

The post Columbia Gives Big Money to Pro-Israel Groups — But Not to Pro-Palestine Ones appeared first on The Intercept.

On August 26, the State Department announced far-reaching sanctions against the Italian collective, which provides web-hosting services to a swath of the international far left. The U.S. government categorized A/I, as it’s also known, as a “specially designated global terrorist” and accused it of being an “extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells.”

A/I maintains digital infrastructure utilized by thousands of leftists and left-wing organizations across the globe, including anonymous email accounts and servers powering its NoBlogs.org hosting platform. The designation could force many of the sites offline — threatening much of what the A/I Collective has built.

Two days later, the site came under a different kind of attack. Hackers took aim at the NoBlogs site itself. A cyberattacker gained access to the platform, vandalizing its homepage and potentially accessing internal user data.

For far-right hackers and internet trolls, this was a moment for celebration. Just two minutes after the vandalized homepage was captured by an internet archive, the attack was publicized on X by someone using the handle “AstraRCE” and soon promoted by prominent far-right accounts, including “DataRepublican,” the online moniker of Jennica Pounds.

Until June, Pounds was a member of the Pentagon press corps — famous mostly for trolling the left — but allowed her credentials to expire at the end of the month. In late August, it was revealed that Pounds had been employed by the Pentagon since July, as part of a larger operation launched by the federal government to recruit right-wing influencers into jobs at President Donald Trump’s Department of War.

The relationship between DataRepublican and AstraRCE goes back through several prominent hacks of the left. The pair have a long and involved history of posting to each other about hackers’ exploits online, raising questions about the relationship between a Trump administration employee and an anonymous online personality posting real-time updates on hacks against the left.

DataRepublican and AstraRCE are part of a wider circle with huge followings that are often the first to mention hacks against left-wing digital infrastructure. They publish screenshots, share each other’s posts, offer snide commentary, and congratulate their associates — messages that frequently verge into bestowing credit for the hacks.

The federal government’s support for an influencer who praises domestic hacking efforts would mark a major escalation in the Trump administration’s crackdown on dissent, said Harlo Holmes, the chief security programs officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation.

“It’s the difference between open-source intelligence, that is often used in surveillance, and ever increasingly used in surveillance, and actually jumping into people’s machines,” Holmes said. “That is a line that is always worth noting and ringing the alarm bell when crossed.”

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Though members of the A/I Collective weren’t able to attribute the hack to anyone, the cyberattack would eventually achieve its apparent aim. Beset by the pressure of terrorism sanctions, a hostile cyberattack, and continued scrutiny from the U.S. government, the group announced on September 6 that, after 25 years, it would disband.

“We cannot engage in a fight or expose ourselves to manipulations that threaten the lives of these people and their loved ones, leaving them at the mercy of autocrats, fascists, and agencies that take extra-legal courses of action,” the group wrote in a statement. “The Autistici/Inventati collective is shutting down and will soon discontinue all of the services we provide.”

Publicizing NoBlogs Hack

DataRepublican frequently publishes reports, visualizations, and data leaks that target leftist groups involved in protests and activism across the country.

Before Pounds’s assignment at the Department of War, DataRepublican regularly posted inside information about hacks, nodding to the involvement of other far-right social media personalities, among them AstraRCE.

DataRepublican and AstraRCE were the first people to publicize the NoBlogs hack online. Taking a celebratory tone, they linked to and replied to one another’s post. In one instance, AstraRCE claimed apparent inside knowledge about the federal government’s possession of internal user data from NoBlogs. DataRepublican confirmed the claim.

AstraRCE’s initial X post about the hack showed a screenshot of the vandalized NoBlogs homepage, which now displayed a message that said, “All user data has been saved and given to the United States government” — alongside an altered banner that read “TRUMPBLOGS.” AstraRCE later offered a mocking congratulations to NoBlogs for its “rebrand.”

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Just four minutes after AstraRCE pointed to the screenshot of the hack, DataRepublican’s X account reposted the image, alongside a caption characterizing NoBlogs as a “platform shared by Antifa and far-left Marxists.”

“The State Department designed them as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group yesterday,” DataRepublican wrote. “And now … they’re TrumpBlogs.”

Later, DataRepublican’s website published a visualization tool that allows users to view thousands of NoBlogs sites dispersed across a map, naming the tool Trumpblogs, in what appears to be a reference to the hack. Shortly after the tool went online, AstraRCE posted on X to say that the trumpblogs.org domain would now be redirecting to DataRepublican’s site.

The Pentagon has thus far declined to reveal what assignment Pounds or other right-wing media influencers have been given, and it’s unknown if activities like producing the visualization tool would be part of these duties. (The Department of War did not reply to a request for comment.)

“They’re hiring people who have a history of sort of dirt digging,” said David Greene, who serves as legal counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And they’re digging for information about their enemies, and both trying to identify their enemies and build dossiers on them.”

Holmes, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that determining responsibility for cyberattacks like the one that targeted NoBlogs can be incredibly difficult, especially for smaller organizations.

“Attribution is really hard to prove definitively,” Holmes said. “But, also, there are a lot of imbalances there because the folks at Autistici don’t necessarily have the ability to perform the type of forensics and response that normally leads to successful attribution, or at least not quickly.”

Partners in Posting

DataRepublican and AstraRCE steer clear in their posts of explicitly claiming responsibility for hacks. They frequently, however, offer kudos to fellow travelers. Sometimes they post claims of insider access to information about the hacks or, in a few cases, show information that reveals access to the hacked systems themselves.

In at least one instance, a post by DataRepublican appeared to take direct responsibility for a cyber operation. Writing on X in July, the DataRepublican account claimed credit for a honey-pot scheme against a Nigerian hacker, which DataRepublican said had gone after right-wing media personality Hugh Hewitt.

“It’s true,” DataRepublican wrote, attaching a screenshot of the hackers’ location and IP address. “@astrarce and I honeypotted the Hugh Hewitt hacker.”

Even though DataRepublican and AstraRCE don’t take credit for cyberattacks, the far-right web heaps praise on them for the exploits.

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Seeking to disrupt a database collecting information on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles, a January hack overrode images of license plates with a meme saying, “ALL YOUR LOGINS, LOCATIONS, PASSWORDS, AND PHONE NUMBERS HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO FBI AND ICE.”

After sharing the image and tagging AstraRCE, DataRepublican was asked by an online fan how it happened. The account replied, “I don’t know, but an unrelated tip is that it’s a bad idea to make your encryption/decryption script readable to the world.”

Several X accounts in the right-wing milieu responded to DataRepublican’s initial post with congratulations. A spokesperson for Turning Point USA said, “Well done, patriots.”

In another case, a Fox News article purported to expose the network of organizers behind protests at ICE’s Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Summarizing its report, Fox News credited, among others, DataRepublican and AstraRCE with infiltrating the group: “The activities of this network have motivated a group of tech sleuths on the X — @DataRepublican, @Astrarce, @bitchuneedsoap and @gunshymartyr — to penetrate these groups, their Signal chats and their operations like a digital Avengers squad.”

In February, following a cyberattack on Siembra NC, a North Carolina-based immigrant rights organization, DataRepublican claimed the group operated two active websites responsible for “doxxing ICE.” Citing AstraRCE, DataRepublican suggested hackers had taken over the nonprofit’s notification system.

“Per @astrarce,” DataRepublican wrote, “the 1000+ users signed up to both sites have received a text alert with the meme attached” — a photo of FBI Director Kash Patel with meme text that says, “FEDS HAVE ALL YOUR DATA.”

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DataRepublican then posted what appeared to be a screenshot of the organization’s internal notification dashboard, claiming that more than 2,000 users had received push notifications. The notification text visible on the dashboard suggested users received a message urging self-deportation and claimed their personal information had been sent to federal authorities.

During a similar hack of StopICE.net, an ICE tracking website, DataRepublican claimed to have insider knowledge of data from a hack being sent to the authorities.

“I can personally testify,” DataRepublican posted, “that the names, logins, passwords, locations (down to coordinates), and phone numbers of 100K+ users were all sent to FBI, ICE, HSI” — ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division — “and more.”

Like the cyberattack targeting NoBlogs, in other cases DataRepublican and AstraRCE were also quick to celebrate cyberattacks against leftist groups and post screenshots of the incursions. In many of the cases, the webpages of the sites were vandalized and a message was left behind claiming to have accessed and sent internal data to the federal government.

Claiming Inside Info

The NoBlogs hack became one of the instances where DataRepublican and AstraRCE alluded to both having insider information about the provenance of materials from the hack and their transmittal into the hands of the authorities — all while Pounds was firmly ensconced at the Pentagon.

The episode, in the immediate wake of the NoBlogs hack, was telling. AstraRCE echoed the claim made on the vandalized NoBlog homepage: that the federal government was in possession of the site’s internal user data.

The episode was set off when the A/I collective issued a statement acknowledging the hack and that the “attacker may have had access to the users database.” The collective warned that the hackers could have accessed the “list of email addresses of the people who manage the blogs and their passwords.”

The password information for the user accounts, however, was stored “hashed,” A/I said, rather than in plain text, making it substantially harder to access.

Shortly after A/I published its statement about hashed passwords, AstraRCE posted an image of the statement alongside a caption suggesting that they had direct knowledge of the data that was breached.

“Yep,” AstraRCE wrote. “The government has their emails and dehashed results.”

One minute later, DataRepublican verified AstraRCE’s statement: “Can confirm the authorities have everything that was on the NoBlogs servers.”

The post Pentagon Employee DataRepublican Posts Inside Info About Hacks Against the Far Left appeared first on The Intercept.

Created by tech giant Palantir, a CIA-backed firm known for data mining and using artificial intelligence for everything from warfighting to “predictive policing,” the ELITE app helps ICE target immigrants and issues a “confidence score” for how accurate the information on a target is. The app analyzes data from government agencies and other sources, producing dossiers on targets, compiling them into lists, and mapping their locations.

The debut of ELITE — Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting — came just as ICE added over 12,000 employees through an expedited hiring surge, placing a badge and a gun in the hands of new recruits in record time, thanks to cuts to ICE’s training curriculum.

Thousands of the new ICE hires, then, were able to hit the streets without cleared background checks, according to reporting by Reuters in early 2026.

The hiring spree at ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, coupled with the powerful new handheld technology of the ELITE app, created potential civil liberties nightmares and threats to national security, according to ICE whistleblowers, former Department of Homeland Security officials, and legal experts who spoke to The Intercept.

“No one should have been hired by DHS before background reviews were completed. This never happened in previous administrations,” said Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Homeland Security. “Furthermore, giving the newly hired ICE ERO staff access to sensitive databases such as ELITE threatens public safety by allowing non-vetted teams to access and potentially misuse data.”

The ELITE app, Callahan said, did not go through the usual process government tools undergo to prevent abuses and ensure privacy rights.

“It’s one of the first applications they give new officers so they can start working,” said one ICE deportation officer who came through the hiring surge. “You can access it without full background clearance.”

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“Some of these guys should’ve never been hired, let alone have access to the information on ELITE,” the officer, who asked for anonymity to protect their livelihood, told The Intercept.

Every ICE deportation officer is issued a phone, where the ELITE app comes standard, according to five ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept. (Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Palantir responded to requests for comment.)

The five ICE officials, who each work in different regions across the country, said deportation officers without completed background checks continue to work in all their jurisdictions, some of whom were hired nearly a year ago.

No Privacy Assessment

ELITE’s user guide identifies a dozen distinct sources that the app draws from. The databases include sensitive data sets like addresses, criminal histories, immigration records, court rulings, and other personal information about both immigrants and U.S. citizens.

Much of that information would constitute what the government calls PII, or personally identifiable information. According to a Department of Homeland Security document that catalogs the agency’s use of artificial intelligence, the ELITE app does involve PII.

A 2002 law, however, says that government agencies must conduct and publish the findings of a “privacy impact assessment” for “all new or substantially changed technology that collects, maintains, or disseminates personally identifiable information (PII),” according to a Justice Department summary of the statute.

The processes are designed to assess how technology affects personal privacy and outline what safeguards are in place to ensure accountability if systems are misused.

Yet the Department of Homeland Security privacy office hasn’t published an assessment for ELITE, according to Callahan, the former Homeland Security official, who also served as the department’s chief privacy officer.

“The DHS privacy office should have worked with ICE to publish a privacy impact assessment,” said Callahan, noting a general lack of productivity by the privacy office. “In fact, the DHS privacy office has only published one PIA all year. In comparison, I published 228 PIAs in my three-and-a-half years as privacy officer.”

The failure to conduct a privacy impact assessment has a profound impact on transparency and accountability, the very aspects of privacy policy the E-Government Act of 2002 was intended to regulate.

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“This is not a technicality,” said Clare Garvie, a privacy lawyer and deputy director of technology policy at the New York University Law School’s Policing Project. “PIAs are an essential component of transparency and privacy governance, they are how the public understands what information is collected about us, how long it is kept, who can use it, and what remedies exist if it is wrong or subject to misuse.”

“If ICE can’t fulfill this prerequisite,” Garvie said, “I lack confidence in its ability to use the tool in a lawful, privacy-protective manner in the field.”

The Department of Homeland Security site for cataloging its uses of AI does list a privacy impact assessment on its page for ELITE, but the assessment is not actually for the ELITE app. Instead, the link goes to a 2019 privacy assessment for ICE’s Enforcement Integrated Database.

The Enforcement Integrated Database is just one of the systems ELITE incorporates into its searches, meaning the PIA only scratches the surface of what personally identifying information appears in ELITE and how the app organizes the data.

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“The document DHS points to as fulfilling this obligation was updated in 2019, years before it acquired ELITE,” said Garvie. “This PIA completely fails to describe the app’s data sources, its AI analysis, or the inferences it produces that are used to focus immigration investigations and removal operations.”

Public concerns surrounding the incorporation of AI surveillance in law enforcement — including ICE’s new AI initiative to combat doxing of its staff — are reaching a boiling point in the U.S. today, leaving some ICE officials concerned.

“I know I sound crazy, but this is 1984 shit,” said another ICE official familiar with ELITE who requested anonymity to protect their job. “ELITE is used on illegal immigrants right now but can easily be used on Americans.”

The post ICE Gave New Hires Access to Restricted Info on Palantir App Before They Passed Background Checks appeared first on The Intercept.

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey comfortably defeated Rep. Seth Moulton in his Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, in what the media — and Moulton himself — had described as a “generational” challenge.

The framing is understandable: In a country suffering under gerontocratic rule, Markey is 80 and Moulton is 47.

Age, however, was the least of what was at stake in Moulton’s run from the decaying center of the Democratic Party. Moulton ran on a conservative line, recycling right-wing talking points and echoing Donald Trump to suggest, erroneously, that Democrats have been failing because they have not been conservative enough.

Markey may be 80 years old, but his campaign did precisely what Democrats must if they want to appeal to progressives and bring in a broad working-class voter base: He ran on issues of economic inequality, taxing billionaires, green energy, and universal health care — all while refusing to jettison support for vulnerable minorities, especially trans people.

Meanwhile Moulton, claiming to represent a break in the status quo, repeated precisely the tired centrist playbook that has both failed America’s multiracial working class and failed to win elections. He punched left and, as Markey himself highlighted, threw trans kids “under the bus.”

In a risible misreading of the Democrats’ 2024 presidential election loss, Moulton suggested that his party had shown too much care for trans rights. (It had not.)

“I have two little girls,” Moulton told the New York Times just after the November 2024 election. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”

It was only last month that Moulton offered a tempered apology for the anti-trans remarks — and only because Markey had lambasted him during a debate.

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“He just took the whole playbook of MAGA and Trump, and he blamed those kids for the loss,” said Markey, who has been consistent in his advocacy for trans rights. “We should have been loving those kids. There’s only 12 trans athletes in the whole of the NCAA. We should have been embracing them.”

Indeed, we should question the validity of this so-called “debate” entirely: Why did the moderator of a Senate primary debate even feel the need to ask a question about trans girls in sports at all?

This is not, after all, a political problem in need of addressing in Massachusetts, or anywhere else. It is a ghoulish far-right panic that has been baselessly elevated into a hot-button issue, with the help of Democratic cowardice.

Fox News, of all places, noted that Markey is “one of the few Democrats running this midterm cycle who is continuing to push for transgender rights, particularly in sports” — as if that were a bad thing.

“There is good evidence that transgender issues were a major part of Markey’s victory, too,” wrote reporter and trans advocate Erin Reed. “In the final days of the campaign, a UMass/Amherst poll asked primary voters how a candidate who embraces anti-trans positions or policies would impact their vote. In that poll, a whopping 67% stated it would make their vote less likely for that candidate.”

Markey, the longtime incumbent, was already at an advantage. And no doubt proselytizers for Democratic Party conservatism will stress that Markey’s victory in deep-blue Massachusetts cannot offer lessons for Democrats running in less progressive territory. This again would be to selectively learn the wrong lessons from Kamala Harris’s spectacular 2024 failure.

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It should not need repeating that Democrats in 2024 campaigned on Republican talking points, with Harris donning khaki for photo ops at the Arizona border. If Donald Trump’s campaign attacking trans people gained purchase, it is because Democrats roundly failed to answer it by demystifying right-wing anti-trans fearmongering. They also failed to offer a robust, class-focused platform to vote for.

Being nearly half someone’s age does not constitute a generational challenge; contesting the staid ways of a generational establishment does. Moulton did nothing of the sort.

Markey said it best on Tuesday: “Generational change isn’t about compromising.”

The post Seth Moulton Sold Out Trans Kids — and Lost His Senate Race appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawsuit that led to the settlement was in reaction to EEOC guidance issued under the Biden administration and after a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that Title VII protects against gender identity discrimination.

In the settlement, reached on August 18, the EEOC pledged to not pursue any claims of gender identity-based discrimination against the Christian Employers Alliance — and made the pledge in perpetuity.

The EEOC provides free investigation into complaints of discrimination and, in some cases, will bring lawsuits on behalf of employees at no cost to the plaintiffs.

Now, however, anyone who works for a company with membership in the Christian Employers Alliance who believes they suffered gender identity-based discrimination won’t be able to avail themselves of the EEOC’s process.

The settlement also contains an unusual provision: It applies not just to the more than 20,000 employers that are already members in the Christian Employers Alliance, but also to any future members, so long as they are members at the time that any claimed discrimination occurred.

That means that any employer that decides to sign up for Christian Employers Alliance membership will get the benefit of blanket protection from the EEOC against all claims of gender identity discrimination, such as harassing someone for being nonbinary or firing them for coming out as trans.

“I am not aware of any settlement that just creates in perpetuity a freedom from investigation,” said Karla Gilbride, a former EEOC general counsel under President Joe Biden who is now at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I’ve never seen an organization get a settlement that allows protection to future members in this way.”

The settlement will stay in place even if Andrea Lucas, the current Republican chair of the EEOC, is replaced with a Democratic chair under a future Democratic president. (The Christian Employers Alliance declined to comment, and the EEOC did not respond to an inquiry.)

In Perpetuity

The CEA notes the blanket protection on its webpage for signing up new members.

“Join CEA and stop being exposed,” the site says, under a banner that reads “Protected the Moment You’re In.”

“It’s like they’re selling an insurance policy against EEOC investigations,” said Gilbride. “I’m concerned about the incentive that that creates for employers, especially when the organization is explicitly marketing itself in that way.”

The settlement also has no expiration date. Nearly all settlements, Gilbride said, have an end point; they will remain in force for a certain number of years, during which a court will monitor to make sure the terms are met.

“What makes this settlement unusual,” she said, “is that, in exchange for agreeing to dismiss certain claims in this case, the EEOC is committing to these terms for what seems to be an indefinite amount of time.”

The settlement is of a piece with the EEOC’s recent turn toward policies aligned with the aims of the Christian right in the United States. Lucas, the commission chair, has already pursued a broad agenda of eliminating trans rights.

The Christian Employers Alliance has been at the forefront of pushing conservative religious views into policy. The alliance was represented in its EEOC lawsuit by Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal group behind the overthrow of Roe v. Wade.

The Christian employers’ group also boasted in its promotional materials for new members that, like the protection from gender discrimination complaints, a court injunction it secured against the government that allows members to refuse to cover contraception will “cover you the moment you join.”

Blanket Carveout

The blanket carveout for members of the Christian Employers Alliance is also out of the ordinary for giving across-the-board protections from complaints. The EEOC already has ways to consider the rights of religious employers, but they require going through established processes. These employers, for instance, can raise a religious defense against a complaint of discrimination, and the agency will then consider it.

The new settlement, however, blocks EEOC investigators from even looking into a complaint of discrimination and evaluating the merits; instead, it stops all gender identity discrimination complaints against these employers dead in their tracks. All the agency can do is tell workers to sue their employers on their own in the courts.

“That categorical exclusion from investigation based on being a member of a group is unprecedented,” Gilbride said.

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These victories for the Christian Employers Alliance closely mirror much of what the organization had originally sought when it filed for an injunction as part of its lawsuit. In its request, the group sought a permanent ban on the EEOC enforcing gender identity rights against its “present and future members.”

And there are close relationships between the Christian Employers Alliance and the EEOC.

In early 2025, Lucas, the current commission chair, hired Shannon Royce to be her chief of staff. Royce’s job immediately prior to accepting her role at the EEOC was president of the Christian Employers Alliance, which she led in 2021 at the time of the lawsuit over gender identity discrimination.

“Normally a settlement happens because the parties don’t want to keep litigating,” Gilbride noted. “But it seems like there might be a lot of alignment between the two sides in this particular situation, and that raises questions about whether the settlement is in the broader public interest or whether it’s just in the interest of these particular individuals and organizations.”

The Anti-Trans Agenda

The settlement fits with the anti-trans agenda pursued by Lucas, the EEOC chair.

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One of her first actions was to announce that a priority for the agency is “to defend the biological and binary reality of sex.” She instructed agency staff to focus on pursuing such cases, such as complaints from cis women of trans women sharing bathrooms with them. Harassment guidance that included protection from gender identity-based harassment and federal workers’ ability to pursue complaints of gender identity discrimination were both eliminated under Lucas’s leadership.

Lucas also withdrew the EEOC from lawsuits that it had brought on behalf of transgender and nonbinary workers, and she halted the processing of all worker claims of gender identity discrimination.

With Lucas at the helm, the Christian Employers Alliance already didn’t have to worry about gender identity complaints. Now, tens of thousands of employers with membership in the group won’t have to worry about complaints under the commission’s future leadership either.

Gilbride said, “I am not aware of a settlement that looks exactly like this.”

The post Christian Employers Can Now Discriminate Against Trans People appeared first on The Intercept.

“This reporting is absolutely FALSE,” said Tricia McLaughlin, then a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, in a statement. “Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus had FULL medical, prenatal care.”

The statement, labeled as a “Fact Check,” said the Guatemalan-born Monterroso Lemus had “received prenatal care, including an ultrasound and OB-GYN visit.”

Neither side of the disputed account provided evidence to back up their claims.

Now, federal government documents obtained by The Intercept appear to undermine the Trump administration’s version of events. The documents show a lack of basic care needed for a healthy pregnancy, according to expert analysis. One document from an outside healthcare center made after the stillbirth describes a “pregnancy complicated by lack of PNC” — meaning prenatal care.

“The administration was engaged in CYA — cover your ass,” said Dr. Andrea Schecter, an OB-GYN physician with a decade’s experience working with high-risk pregnancies, including those of immigrants. “They know that what they provided is probably not sufficient care.”

“Flouting the Directive”

The new records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, include documents from Monterroso Lemus’s visit to Ochsner LSU Center, a healthcare facility in Shreveport, Louisiana, after she complained for days about not feeling fetal movement. It was the only recorded instance of her leaving Richwood Correctional Center, an ICE detention facility run by the family-owned private prison giant LaSalle Corrections.

The Ochsner LSU documents, produced after the stillbirth, say that Monterroso Lemus had told medical staff at Richwood that “this pregnancy didn’t feel right a couple days ago but nothing was done.”

Other new records include timelines produced by ICE that show a referral for an OB-GYN appointment but don’t indicate that any visit was scheduled or took place, or that Monterroso Lemus ever received an ultrasound.

Asked about the new documents, a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security simply repeated the previous claims that Monterroso Lemus received regular, timely prenatal care without responding to queries.

On May 9, ten days after losing her son, Monterroso Lemus was shackled, put on a plane, and deported to Guatemala, causing her postpartum visit to be canceled.

“Everyone knows that ICE and DHS lie on a daily basis — and Americans have witnessed the deadly consequences of this administration’s reckless actions for nearly two years,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., when asked about the case. “The Trump administration’s barbaric treatment of pregnant women in immigration custody is unconscionable.”

In fact, the Trump administration is detaining many more pregnant women than before. During the Biden administration, for example, ICE would detain about a dozen pregnant women nationally during a year, said Eunice Cho, an immigration attorney with expertise in detention conditions. During a congressional visit to Louisiana’s Basile detention center last April, however, there were 14 in that one facility.

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According to a 2021 ICE directive, “Generally, ICE should not detain, arrest, or take into custody for an administrative violation of the immigration laws individuals known to be pregnant, postpartum, or nursing unless release is prohibited by law or exceptional circumstances exist.”

Cho said, “The Trump administration is flouting the directive.”

Murray introduced legislation last year to codify in federal law the notion that pregnant women should not be detained, as well as other standards. The bill remains in committee.

“This case stands out as an example of the enormity of the tragedy pregnant women and families are facing because of the Trump administration,” Cho said, of Monterroso Lemus’s experience. “The bottom line is: No one deserves to be treated like this.”

The Timeline

Monterroso Lemus, now 38 years old, met her neighbor Gary Bivens in Lenoir City, Tennessee, about six years ago. The pair began to grow close about four years ago, after Bivens lost his wife to a heart condition.

Monterroso Lemus became pregnant, and the couple had an OB-GYN visit in February. They had plans to get married when ICE detained her in mid-March.

After ICE transferred Monterroso Lemus multiple times, on April 2, she arrived at Richwood Correctional Center, in Monroe, Louisiana.

Most of the documents obtained by The Intercept are emails between officials with ICE and at its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, where officials sought to rebut Monterroso Lemus’s statements to the media by compiling information on her medical care while detained.

The timeline included in the documents, annotated and labeled as a “[f]ull overview of her care,” begins on April 2. Versions of the timeline are included in several other places in the documents.

The timeline has nine entries under what is called a “List of medical visits.” Four of them are visits to a nurse. Two others are labeled “Mental Health Visit.”

On April 17, according to the timeline, she visited the on-site medical provider for what is labeled “prenatal care non–compliance.”

Monterroso Lemus told The Intercept that visit was due to her unwillingness to continue taking 12 pills daily, including what she said may have been vitamins and others for constipation and headaches. She had been taking them for three days.

“I felt that they made me sick,” she said. Also, “other people told me to watch out for the medicine they give you.”

On April 29, after several days of not feeling any fetal movement, Monterroso Lemus was transferred to Ochsner LSU. In the presence of several federal guards, she delivered a stillborn fetus at about 23 weeks of pregnancy.

Monterroso Lemus said she had tried to get medical attention during the days before the tragedy.

“The worst part is, I told them I felt bad — and they didn’t pay attention to me,” she said.

What’s missing from the timeline — any indication of having an OB-GYN visit before she stopped feeling fetal movement or of receiving any ultrasound — makes it difficult to understand what caused the stillbirth.

“There are some reasons this could’ve happened that would have been identified by comprehensive prenatal care,” Schecter, the OB-GYN expert, said. “At some level, they know this.”

No Ultrasound?

A separate timeline in the documents refers to medical care Monterroso Lemus received during the several days in late March that she was detained at Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama. There, it says, she got a “fetal doppler,” which measures fetal heartbeat, but is not the same as an ultrasound.

Nonetheless, the “Fact Check” DHS published months later read, “she received prenatal care including a fetal doppler ultrasound.”

Schecter told the Intercept, “A fetal doppler is just audio, but it is not the same as an ultrasound, which is visual.”

“That is not an adequate assessment of the health and well-being of the pregnancy. It absolutely is not full prenatal care,” she said.

Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who researches health care in immigration detention, said, “Full prenatal care would include an ultrasound and an anatomy scan.”

“We already know that doesn’t generally happen in immigration detention,” said Zeidan.

Of the DHS “Fact Check,” Zeidan said, “They’re not being truthful about what happened.”

The experience Monterroso Lemus faced in ICE detention is not unique, according to several experts consulted by the Intercept.

“Unfortunately, this story is consistent with reports made by pregnant women in ICE detention,” said Cho, the immigration attorney. “There’s a lack of prenatal care, indifference to very serious symptoms, and a lack of treatment.”

“Waiting for My Baby”

By the end of May, the Nashville Banner had published an article in which Monterroso Lemus said, “They didn’t give me medical attention.”

The remark touched off a flurry of activity within ICE and DHS.

On June 25, at 4:41 p.m., McLaughlin, then a DHS spokesperson, wrote to another official whose name is redacted: “Wow so this is all garbage claims. This is FALSE. She had FULL medical, prenatal care. We have documentation to show it.”

The following day, DHS published its “Fact Check” — the same document the agency sent The Intercept when confronted with discrepancies.

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Meanwhile, Monterroso Lemus and Bevins haven’t seen each other for 15 months. They communicate by WhatsApp regularly, using a translation app. On separate calls with The Intercept, both described suffering depression.

Bivens drives 100 miles every day to and from his $26-an-hour job as an iron worker. He regularly sends part of his paycheck to Monterroso Lemus. He says he’s bought a plane ticket to Guatemala for December and has created a GoFundMe to help pay for the cost of moving his tools and other things needed for the couple to start a new life in the Central American country.

The GoFundMe includes a photo of her holding her baby, taken in Ochsner.

He has also engaged attorneys and sued the federal government.

“I don’t consider the way they treated her the American way,” he said. “My family goes back a long way in Tennessee. I have a great-grandfather who fought for the Confederates.”

He added, “I just want someone to be held accountable.”

Monterroso Lemus said she doesn’t think much about the officials who set in motion the events leading to the loss of her son and deportation.

“God will take care of all of them,” she said.

Bivens said he keeps the ashes of his son on a table by his bed in Lenoir City. It took him a while to figure out, but he’s obtained the paperwork needed to take the ashes with him to Guatemala in December.

“I’m waiting for my baby,” said Monterroso Lemus. “That would give me some peace.”

The post Trump Admin Said She Was Lying About Stillbirth in ICE Custody. New Evidence Points to Lack of Prenatal Care. appeared first on The Intercept.

Of the more than $170 billion that President Donald Trump secured for his border regime in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” nearly $50 billion is allocated to border wall construction. Even with these enormous resources, however, the administration continues to face challenges constructing its monument to violent exclusion along the southern border through tribal, private, and state lands.

For nearly a month, the key force standing in the way of Trump’s border wall project in southeast Arizona has been a person sitting in a 200-year-old tree.

More precisely, at every moment since late July, one person — although not always the same person — has been on a platform in the branches of a giant cottonwood tree in Lochiel, Arizona, with an expanding encampment of primarily local activists 50 feet below.

The protesters’ aim is to stop the ongoing construction of two parallel, 30-foot-high border walls ripping through the remote San Rafael Valley.

Miles of the double wall structure have already been built in the area. This part of the valley is sparsely populated and hardly ever used as a border-crossing site by humans, but is renowned as a unique wildlife migration corridor. According to the Sierra Club’s borderlands coordinator, Erick Meza, the region is “a biodiversity hotspot and the most important jaguar corridor that we have left in the U.S.”

Residents from Lochiel and the surrounding area, including from Sonora, Mexico, had been coming together regularly for over a year for binational gatherings to organize against wall construction. They shared music, art, food, and ceremonies across the border, which is demarcated there by only a rancher’s wire fence.

The planned double wall structure, with a 60-foot no man’s land in between, would not only devastate the land and its ecosystems — it would also sever the binational life worlds of the area.

The “happenings,” as organizers called the gatherings, escalated into a continuous protest and tree sit when construction workers with government contractors Fisher Sand & Gravel crushed three giant cottonwood trees, known locally as “grandmother” trees, in one day on July 27.

Local activists moved in swiftly to save the last cottonwood standing on the U.S. side of the border, and the tree sit began.

“Momentum had been growing locally in the region to try to make more of an intervention,” said an Arizona-based participant in the tree sit, who asked for anonymity out of concern for government repression. “People got together that night and decided to go down and set up a tree sit in that final tree on the U.S. side, which was planned to be cleared.”

Ever since, a tree sitter has been in the cottonwood at all times, numerous participants told The Intercept.

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“U.S. Customs and Border Protection identified four cottonwood trees on federal land in Lochiel, Arizona, that needed removal for planned border wall construction,” said a spokesperson from CBP. “Preconstruction surveys found no active migratory bird nests, and environmental monitors were present at the start of clearing activities to ensure work was limited to the identified trees. Three trees have been removed, and the remaining tree is scheduled for removal.”

Meza, of the Sierra Club, told The Intercept that the government’s environmental survey was out of date and that the day before the cottonwoods were felled, he had taken video of an active nest in one of the trees.

“The next day, they had sent the contractors to take down the trees,” he said. “Their environmental monitor was not present.” Meza added that “when people saw what happened, the community in general got outraged.”

For participants in the Lochiel encampment, protecting the remaining “grandmother” is an anchoring point for the protest, but stopping the border wall and all it represents is the organizing principle.

“Some people are tree sitting and supporting the tree sit. Some people are more focused on getting into the roads, and intervening in construction work that’s happening,” the tree-sit participant said. “Now there’s a whole zone of a few miles where they’re having trouble building. And as camp grows, the ability to affect construction also grows.”

The remaining cottonwood itself is on federal land, but the encampment, just feet away, is technically on private land. It’s a unique setup, organizers told The Intercept, in which local ranchers and authorities oppose the border wall construction, and construction workers cannot risk forging forward in the path of the tree as a person remains perched in its branches. The small standoff is becoming a growing site of border resistance, and the construction of Trump’s wall in the area has been disrupted for a month.

“Living Things on the Land”

At a time when jack-booted agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are terrorizing communities nationwide and over 73,000 people are held in ICE detention, the defense of a remote stretch of borderlands may seem a minor struggle.

The binational protest around the cottonwood, however, exemplifies what it looks like to take strategic action to disrupt the infrastructure of the border regime.

“Something happens along these borderlands,” said another participant in the tree sit and encampment, Uni Yuchi Trejo, a first-generation Mexican American. “You still feel the way the land moves here, how the living things on the land migrate and move with it.”

Trejo highlighted other sites of resistance along the Arizona border, like fights waged by the Tohono O’odham Nation to block the wall on its sovereign and sacred lands — fights that are heating up just this week.

Compared to other struggles against border enforcement, the Lochiel encampment has seen remarkably little law enforcement repression, despite creating disruptions to a major border infrastructure project.

One protester was arrested in late July by local sheriffs for blocking construction workers on a roadway but was released the same day without charge; the sheriff himself is on the record as opposing the border wall construction. And with the encampment on private property, it remains relatively protected from federal law enforcement sweeps.

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According to activists on the ground, a second tree sit on the Mexico side of the border was initiated last week but ended after a few days, following reported interventions from Mexican law enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

The relative peace the Arizona-based activists have enjoyed stands in stark contrast to the brutal persecution others opposing border regime enforcement have faced in places like Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas; Spokane, Washington; and Minneapolis. The Arizona demonstration also sits in the legacy of site-based struggles not tied directly to the border, like Stop Copy City in Atlanta, or the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock — movements that have also faced ruthless repression.

This might speak to the place of the border wall in the Trump administration’s current priorities. Even for an anti-immigrant fascist like Stephen Miller, swift border wall construction in the San Rafael Valley is not an urgent matter, owing to the minuscule number of border-crossing attempts there. Those that do attempt to cross are already facing long odds against a system designed to push them into death’s grips.

Though the environmental destruction of border wall construction is well established, a spokesperson from Customs and Border Protection absurdly pointed to people who might attempt to cross as the real environmental threat.

“While concerns exist about impacts to sensitive areas, it is important to note that illegal immigration itself poses significant environmental challenges,” the spokesperson said. “High volumes of unauthorized crossings often result in substantial amounts of trash, pollution, and damage to natural resources, including sensitive habitats and agriculture.”

Suffice it to say, the people crossing borders do not tear down ancient trees, plow over tribal burial grounds, or cut off wildlife corridors. Not to mention that no “high volumes” of crossings occur in the San Rafael Valley.

As Arizona-based reporter and author of “How to Close a Camp,” John Washington, told Democracy Now!, “People, I think, are right to point out that this very much smells of a boondoggle — that no one is crossing here, and yet they are spending maybe a half a billion dollars on just this about 27-mile segment of wall to devastate the local ecosystem.”

“The Border Is Everywhere”

“We’re taking the proactive stance of: ‘No, we don’t want the wall and we’re going to make sure you’re not doing it through Lochiel,’” said Kate Scott, a local resident and co-founder of the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center, who was among the original organizers against border construction in the region. “And we will hopefully have inspired people all across the world, wherever their horrible border walls are, and to question them in a way that’s most defiant.”

Activists on the ground are aware that reaching remote Lochiel is no easy task, so organizers are encouraging action wherever people can undertake it.

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One target of activists’ campaigns is Fisher Sand & Gravel, the contractor working on the wall, which has received around $1.5 billion in government contracts in Arizona alone. (Fisher Sand & Gravel and its parent company, Fisher Industries, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Subcontractors working on the project are falling under scrutiny, too.

“The border is everywhere,” said Trejo, the Mexican-American land defender, “which means that there are subcontractors and there are power players maybe in your backyard, maybe in your city, maybe an hour drive from where you’re living.”

“Right now we’re at a really crucial point, where those of us that have been holding space and ground are seizing more of it each day. And so imagine if the 30, 40 holding that space becomes a 1,000 or becomes 5,000. What kind of opening will that then create?”

Correction: August 27, 2026, 2:30 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct an errant spelling of Kate Scott’s name.

The post A New Tree-Sit Movement to Block Trump’s Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

By then, settlers had already been attacking the house for months. The Abu Ridi family had hired contractors to install an additional fence around their property, and when the settlers drove up to the home on an ATV on August 4, workers were busy erecting the fence.

“We called the Israeli police so they would protect us from them,” Qusai Abu Ridi, Loui’s brother, told The Intercept. “The army came after half an hour.” 

About two and a half hours after the settlers’ arrival, the Israeli military did take action — but not against the settlers. 

The workers installing the fence would end up arrested and taken away by Israeli soldiers while the settlers who were trespassing roamed around the property freely, according to security camera footage reviewed by The Intercept.

The Israeli military’s actions that night against the workers stand as an example of the Israeli government’s broader role in and response to settler violence in the occupied West Bank — emboldening the settlers’ lawless behavior as they forcibly displace Palestinians from their homes and land. 

Just a few days later on August 9, settlers began a siege on three homes in Qusra, including the Abu Ridi’s, blocking the main road and trapping families inside their houses with limited water and food.

Despite claims by the Israeli military that it has removed Israeli citizens since the siege began in Qusra and that they are minimizing the impact of operations on Palestinian civil life, the videos from before and during the siege show a village that remains under threat from settlers — with Israeli soldiers doing little to stop them.

“We are still under siege. There’s military all around the house,” said Abu Ridi, after traveling from Ohio last week to protect his home in Qusra. “The IDF” — Israel Defense Forces — “presence is not helping the situation. It’s not giving us the freedom to go in and out.”

The siege has led to international condemnation of the impunity afforded to settlers — including rare, harshly worded remarks from the far-right U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. 

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In statements to The Intercept, the Israeli military referred to the settlers as “rioters” but did not answer questions about the incident on August 4.

“IDF soldiers are currently permanently stationed in the area until further notice, in order to protect its residents and prevent friction,” an Israeli military spokesperson said. “The IDF is operating with the tools at its disposal and will continue to work to restore order in the area, prevent disturbances, and ensure the security of all residents of the area, both Palestinians and Israelis.”

“Complicit With the Settlers”

On August 4, Qusai Abu Ridi said he called the police for help when the settlers arrived.

In a security video just a few minutes before midnight, Israeli soldiers can be seen approaching the gate before some of the settlers walk up to them and talk. About two minutes later, the soldiers and settlers walk together through the gate and up to the house.

“The settlers entered with them and were talking to each other and praising each other,” Qusai Abu Ridi said. Video from around 12:12 a.m. shows the Israeli settlers moving around the property freely and unescorted as they exit through the gate.

Abu Ridi and the workers were eventually taken to one side of  the house where security video shows them facing the wall with their hands up to be searched. Just after 2 a.m., video shows two workers being taken by Israeli soldiers. Both men are blindfolded with their arms tied behind their backs. 

Qusai Abu Ridi said that they tried to tell the soldiers that they had called because they wanted protection from the soldiers. 

“One of the soldiers replied, ‘Shut up, not a word, do not say a word,’” he recalled of the incident. “The army was complicit with the settlers. They were the ones who attacked us, and we were the ones who were mistreated.” 

From the U.S., Loui Abu Ridi had watched the incident unfold live through the security camera feed until it cut out. 

“It truly was a terrifying moment,” he said. “Imagine you’re watching your brother for two hours, and then they cut off the camera.” He added, “Then you start imagining what they’re doing.” 

The workers were held for a few hours before being released without charge, according to Loui Abu Ridi.

He said, “Their crime was trying to protect my house from the settlers.”

Months of Attacks

The attack on Qusra is the latest in an escalation of violence by Israeli settlers this year across the occupied West Bank. According to the United Nations, there were about 190 attacks in each of the first four months of this year. This has been coupled with the Israeli government increasing money for and approvals of settlements, which are illegal under international law.

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Human rights groups have documented both the rise of settler violence and criticized the Israeli government for its lack of action and even complicity in the attacks. According to a recent U.N. report on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, “the increasing participation of Israeli security forces in settler attacks amounts to a de facto collapse of the distinction between settlers and soldiers.” 

Before the current siege on Qusra, attacks by Israeli settlers on the village had been ramping up for months. Loui Abu Ridi told The Intercept that the first attack on his home was in January of this year.

“When they first came, they were about half a mile away from my house,” Abu Ridi recounted. “They started coming down every night to check the area, and they started trespassing and vandalizing the house until they managed to break in and made a lot of damage. Anything that can make this house livable, they destroy — water, electricity.”

Abu Ridi hoped that, by traveling to Qusra earlier last week, his American citizenship could provide some kind of help or protection, but he said that little has changed. Instead, soldiers took over the home of one of his neighbors, who then moved in with him.

On Thursday, Abu Ridi recorded a video of Israeli soldiers in the house next door, tossing the clothes of women and children out the window. “I am the owner,” a soldier shouts to Abu Ridi after being told the clothing belonged to his neighbor. 

By Sunday, the soldiers appeared to have left the home, leaving trash thrown around and damage to the property, according to photos of the scene released by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din.

An Israeli military spokesperson said that after an initial occupation of Palestinian homes, soldiers had been instructed that villagers could remain in their residences.

The spokesperson said, “The conduct of the soldiers and the statement heard in the video are inconsistent with the standards expected of IDF soldiers.”

U.S. Condemnation

U.S. officials have condemned the settlers, with the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee offering a rare rebuke, calling them “terrorists” last week. He repeated the characterization this week in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 and said that, because what was happening involved an American citizen, likely referring to Loui Abu Ridi, it “invoked our involvement.” 

For Abu Ridi, that involvement has not led to him feeling safer or an assurance that his home and land won’t be stolen.

“My neighbors, they’re not American citizens. We are in the same boat here,” he said. “I heard U.S. officials talk about it, but it’s not helping on the ground. I’m under siege, I’m speaking with you inside my house, I’m unable to leave.” 

The State Department did not answer specific questions from The Intercept about the siege in Qusra, but in a statement said, “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank.”

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It’s unclear when the military will end their operation and reopen the area. The day after Loui Abu Ridi arrived in Qusra, he said a settler approached him.

“He claimed the area is his,” Abu Ridi said. “If a settler was able to walk toward me and actually made it to stand in front of my face, trespass on my property and in front of the IDF and tell me I need to leave, that’s his area — that’s terrifying.”

The post Palestinians Asked for Help Against Settlers. Israelis Detained Palestinian Workers Instead. appeared first on The Intercept.

Then 11 years ago, he married his partner, a U.S. citizen. Together, they had two children, who are also citizens. The couple filed a petition to grant him legal status through their marriage, but then Daniel was issued a deportation order, which presented a barrier in his case.

It’s hard to comprehend how it can be so difficult to legally stay with one’s family, but Daniel, for whom The Intercept is using a pseudonym, would soon face an even more mystifying hurdle: He recently received a letter from the government saying he owes about $368,000, according to his attorney, who recounted his tale.

Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order using a never-before-touched law to levy fines on an immigrant for each day he “willfully fails or refuses” to leave after receiving a removal order. Trump’s order also increased the fine from $500 to $998 per day to, supposedly, update it for inflation.

The Trump administration quickly started issuing fines as high as $1.8 million — the maximum penalty for the maximum five-year period, although unpaid fines can also accrue interest — to immigrants last year. As of July, more than 100,000 immigrants had received notices of fines, totaling more than $84 million, according to the government.

The administration says it will forgive the debts if immigrants leave the country.

Daniel is eager to pay as much as he can, fearing the financial and immigration repercussions of not responding to the notice he received. But there’s a big problem: He can’t.

And it’s not for a lack of funds. Instead, Daniel simply doesn’t have the information necessary to make a payment; the government never provided it to him. The letter he received informing him of the fines he owed had a blank field where there should have been an identification number for the online payments system. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)

Daniel and his wife tried putting his Social Security number and the alien number that tracks him in the immigration system into the website. Neither worked. His wife even tried calling to find out how to pay, only to sit on hold for over an hour and a half and then have the call disconnect.

“It’s ‘Hurry and pay — oh, by the way, we’re not going to give you any appropriate information,’” said Melanie Zamenhof, a senior attorney on the New York Legal Response Team at Neighbors Link, who has been helping Daniel.

Daniel’s experience is not unique. Zamenhof hasn’t had a single immigrant client who was able to successfully pay the fine the administration levied against them. No one at her organization has, either.

No Way to Pay

The letters immigrants are receiving about the fines are typically brief.

They include the date an immigrant was issued an order of removal and a checked box saying, “You willfully failed or refused to depart from the United States pursuant to the order.” Based on that, the letters say, “you are subject to a civil monetary penalty.”

The letters don’t explain how the figures have been calculated, whether interest has been applied and at what rate, or even when the fines started being tolled or when they might stop.

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The letters say recipients only have 15 business days after issuance to formally contest the fines, though many received them after the period had expired.

“Like any bill that anyone receives,” Zamenhof said, “you always want an explanation of benefits, some breakdown.”

This year, the helpline at Neighbors Link started getting calls from about a dozen immigrants saying they’d received letters. The callers asked the attorneys where they should go to pay what they were told they owe.

“All the attorneys are like, ‘What a great question. Where do you pay it?’” Zamenhof said.

Finding a working website to pay the fines leads to dead ends. Typically, immigration-related fees are paid to other agencies, such as the Department of Justice or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, but none of those avenues work for the failure-to-leave fines.

Instead, a sheet included with the government letters offers “payment options.” Those include a QR code that points to pay.gov and instructions to search for “DHS Civil Penalty and Fee” in a box on the website.

The pay.gov website is frequently down, Zamenhof said, and when it’s working, the option to pay the civil penalty is sometimes not on the dropdown menu.

The government also no longer accepts cashier’s checks or money orders, Zamenhof said, which means the fines can only be paid with a debit or credit card — a hurdle on its own for any immigrant who can’t qualify for a U.S. bank account yet.

Meanwhile, to get through the payment system an immigrant must have a payor number; the information sheet says they need a “penalty tracking number.” That’s supposed to be on the letters they receive about their fines, but Zamenhof has seen multiple letters like Daniel’s, where the field for the number is left blank.

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Even if someone were able to get through to a payment page, most don’t have these vast sums of money at hand. Attorneys at Neighbors Link have seen amounts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; the fines go as high as $1,820,352.

A recent report from the New York University Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic found that none of the immigrant advocates they spoke to had clients who were able to pay.

“They’re always going for the maximum amount that they think they can charge based on just the passage of time,” said Hasan Shafiqullah, the supervising attorney for immigration at the Legal Aid Society. “Nobody has that money laying around.”

A Willful Failure?

There doesn’t appear to be any way to make a partial payment or set up a payment plan. All the while, the fines and interest keep accruing as people are unable to pay any of it off. Even if someone pays the entire amount, it’s not clear that will stop more fines from accruing.

The Legal Aid Society is among a coalition that sued the Department of Homeland Security over the fines, arguing that they have not been legally assessed nor that recipients have a meaningful opportunity to contest them.

“They’re not making an individualized determination about: ‘Am I unwillful?’” Shafiqullah argued. “The fact that I have a removal order and I’m physically present isn’t enough to show that I willfully failed to depart. Y’all didn’t make an individual determination, there’s no space on the form to do that.”

According to the New York University report, 71 percent of survey respondents had legal immigration status or protection against removal or were in the process of pursuing remedies.

The immigrants who come to the Legal Aid Society often have or are seeking permission to stay in the country. Some have an order of supervision from ICE that allows them to stay and work; others are seeking legal status through visas for victims of crime or through their family members.

Some of the people facing the fines have even successfully reopened their immigration cases and no longer have an order of removal.

“They’re not willfully failing to depart, they’re doing all the things they’re entitled to do under the law,” he said.

Even when immigrants in these situations have appealed their fines, Shafiqullah said, they’ve been denied.

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Failure to pay could result in the government seizing assets, including people’s homes, or wage or tax refund garnishment. As of May, the administration had initiated over 50 lawsuits against immigrants to get them to pay, in some cases seeking their tax refunds. One immigrant woman says the Treasury Department seized her and her U.S. citizen’s joint tax refund and reported her to credit bureaus.

The administration is also sending the debts to collections agencies, which are adding hundreds of thousands on to the original amounts in administrative fees.

Not paying could also harm potential pathways to legal immigration status: Judges can deem unpaid debt to the government a negative factor — potentially leading green card applicants to be labeled as “public charges,” blocking them.

Zamenhof, the lawyer from Neighbors Link, has been urging clients to document their attempts to pay their fines — recording how many phone calls they made and taking screenshots of the faulty website portal being down or broken — in case their debt is brought before a judge.

Daniel and his wife are ready to pay a quarter of what the government says he owes and find a way to pay down the rest, though they would still like to understand a breakdown of how the charges and interest were calculated.

“They’re very eager to comply with this, even though they dispute and don’t agree with the total amount,” Zamenhof said.

Constant Fear

For now, Daniel lives in constant fear because he can’t pay. He worries that his wages, tax refund, and children’s college fund could all be at risk of government seizure. Will debt collectors show up at the couple’s door and shake them down? Worse, will ICE show up and detain Daniel?

Even if none of this comes to pass, there’s still an open question: Will owing outstanding fines to the government harm his attempt to reopen and terminate the removal order against him and become a green card holder through his wife? What will a judge say?

“Is it now going to be seen as a negative factor,” Zamenhof said, “despite all of our best efforts to comply?”

The post Immigrant Wants to Pay $368,000 in Fines, but Broken Payment System Won’t Let Him appeared first on The Intercept.

In July 2020, Aluf Benn, the editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, interviewed a 92-year-old retired Hebrew University professor named Yehezkel Dror. Benn described him as the “doyen of public policy experts in Israel.” For his part, Dror fashioned himself after Herman Kahn, the American defense intellectual who made his name by “thinking the unthinkable” — how to fight a thermonuclear war. In 2005, Dror’s work on policy planning and strategic thinking won him the coveted Israel Prize.

Dror responded to Benn’s questions as a futurologist with knowledge of what is to come, gained by thinking rationally and ruthlessly about a world too complex for all but an elite class of geniuses. Complimenting Israeli leaders for expelling as many Palestinians from the country as they did in 1948, Dror insisted on the correctness of his plan for an Israeli attack on Iran and praised President Donald Trump’s 2020 Israeli-Palestinian peace plan — the so-called Deal of the Century. He also called for a world government run by modern philosopher kings, and in his 2020 book, “Steering Human Evolution,” he advocated settling a thousand fertile couples on Mars to ensure the human race would not become extinct.

Dror explained the tension in his thinking between rationalist universalism and a tribalist commitment to his own group, the Jews. Citing Zionism as the “core meaning of his life,” Dror emphasized the contribution he had made to “a total revolution in the history of the Jewish people, on the path from Holocaust to resurgence.” The primacy of this latter commitment is clearly apparent in his book “Crazy States: A Counterconventional Strategic Problem,” published in 1971.

The topic of “craziness” as a descriptor of states was a familiar one in the 1960s when discussing nuclear deterrence. Academics Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn both explored how a state with a reputation for craziness could increase the credibility of otherwise unconvincing threats.

The thrust of Dror’s book was different. Dror imagined how states with powerful modern weapons might act in ways radically contrary to accepted norms or expected calculations. Normal states would need to act differently toward adversaries deemed “crazy” by shifting strategies from deterrence and self-defense to destruction and preemptive attack. The not-so-hidden subtext of the argument was to brand all of Israel’s adversaries as “crazy,” thereby establishing justification for using any and all means, including subversion, preventive war, and even annihilation, against them.

Dror went on to lay out the criterion for labeling states — Israel’s enemies — as “crazy.” Fifty years later, however, Dror’s account of craziness and the warning signs he suggested looking for apply more readily to Israel than to its Arab enemies.

“Crazy” Characteristics

Dror never defined precisely what he meant by “crazy,” preferring to list behaviors, practices, and beliefs associated with his image of craziness. His prototypical case, used repeatedly for illustration of his argument, was Nazi Germany. Dror began his book by offering the Third Reich to skeptical readers “as a striking and radical demonstration of the possibility of crazy states and their implications for the international order and the security of various countries.” The case study also made the point that nonstate movements or organizations, such as Hitler’s National Socialist Party, could be treated as crazy as well as states. This justified Dror’s inclusion of various Palestinian movements and groups affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization as “crazy” even though they weren’t states.

At the end of 1973, an Israeli military publishing house issued a Hebrew edition of Dror’s book with a new chapter, “The Question of ‘Crazy’ States and the State of Israel.” Written against the backdrop of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War, Dror described virtually all Arab states and movements, whether Muslim or Palestinian, as either crazy, partially crazy, or liable to become crazy. According to Dror, the purpose of this chapter — which never appeared in English — was to shape Israeli military doctrine and strategies to deal with the craziness and potential for “extreme craziness” of Israel’s adversaries.

Dror emphasized that the kind of craziness he had in mind — so dangerous to the world community that no measures to disrupt or destroy it should be ruled out — requires an ability to think clearly, plan systematically, and act effectively. In doing so, he was carefully distinguishing irrationality from craziness. To be classified as crazy, a state or movement must not only have the means to project its power with devastating effect; it must also demonstrate a capacity for calculated action so that it can learn from mistakes and devise better and more successful techniques for achieving its (crazy) purposes.

A useful list of the features Dror set forth to identify a crazy state appeared in a positive review of his book: aggressive pursuit of far-reaching goals harmful to others; radical and intense commitments to achieve those goals; and adoption of a morally superior posture even while grossly contradicting international norms, both ethical and legal.

Using these measures — goals, means, and public posture — we can ask whether Israel itself is crazy. If it is, then for Israel’s Lobby to be successful, U.S. policies toward Israel and the Middle East must themselves be crazy and therefore dangerous to American interests and to the world.

Hard-Right Turn

Israeli politics revolve around its party system. That system has undergone two fundamental transformations: from one-party dominance to an even rivalry between two parties and then a return to dominance by the former opposition party. For almost three decades, the social democratic Labor Party dominated Israeli elections, with the right-wing parties in opposition. While never securing a majority of seats, in the 1960s and 1970s, Labor’s parliamentary dominance was enough to relegate Menachem Begin’s right-wing Herut (Freedom) Party to the political wilderness.

As David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first and until Netanyahu longest-serving prime minister, frequently declared, Labor would accept any party as a coalition partner except those occupying the extremes of the political spectrum: the communists and Herut. Begin, he once wrote, was “a Hitlerist type: a racist, willing to destroy all the Arabs for the sake of Greater Israel.”

After the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, known as the Six Day War, the Labor Party favored withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories in return for peace, though it avoided specifying what territories could be relinquished or under what circumstances. The party that Begin led in 1967 was Gahal, a combination of Herut and the Liberal Party. In 1973, it became the cornerstone of the Likud. Like Herut, Gahal and then Likud opposed territorial withdrawal from any part of the West Bank and Gaza. The right wingers rejected the principle of trading land for peace, favored settlement of Jews throughout the territories, and looked forward to their permanent absorption into the State of Israel.

The “earthquake,” Likud’s victory in the 1977 elections, temporarily ended single-party dominance in Israel. Subsequently, two rival blocs — one led by the Likud and the other by one or another version of the Labor Party — battled each other in seesaw fashion. But since the 2013 elections, the right-wing bloc, with the Likud forming the core of governing coalitions, has dominated Israeli politics.

The sharpness of Israel’s shift to the right is evident in the changing ideological complexion of members of its 120-seat parliament, the Knesset. Israeli parties have always differed on a variety of social and economic questions. But by far the two most important markers of a party’s location on the spectrum of Israeli politics are its position on Israel’s borders and the intensity of its commitment to an exclusivist Jewish mission for the state.

Border Wars

Before the 1967 war, the issue of the country’s borders was not particularly salient in Israeli politics. Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip reopened the question of expanding the state’s boundaries, polarizing the political system, and triggering a sharp rise in both hawkish and dovish positions on these questions. After the Six-Day War, average left-wing representation in the Knesset increased by approximately two-thirds compared to what it was before 1967. Right-wing representation in the Knesset, however, tripled.

In the 2000s, the right-wing bloc’s representation has grown rapidly, while the left-wing bloc has shrunk drastically. Since the 2003 election, the first following the second Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, average representation of right-wing views has been twice that associated with the left. In the most recent elections, actual majorities of Knesset members have been affiliated with political programs advanced before 1967 only by a small and extreme minority. Meanwhile, the number of Knesset members espousing concessions capable of attracting even minimal Palestinian interest has dwindled.

Following the 2022 election, 63 members of the Knesset identified with what were originally seen as extreme far-right views on the nation’s borders, while only 14 supported a two-state solution. Of the latter, 10 were Arabs and only four were Jews.

Israeli public opinion has also shifted strongly toward the extreme right. Intensive polling done between 2022 and 2024 showed that four to five times as many Jewish Israelis identified themselves as “right-wing” than as “left-wing.” The rightward shift is more extreme than it seems from this data because what it means to be yemini, or right wing, has itself changed. Much more than in the past, it is associated with commitments to overt discrimination against Palestinian citizens, annexation measures that would exclude Palestinians from citizenship, use of extrajudicial punishment against Arabs, and preference for military action over negotiation for advancing Israeli interests in the region.

Along with the rightward extremization of the Jewish public has been an escalating propensity for Israeli leaders to aggressively pursue expansive goals. This hawkishness manifested as military actions, assassinations, and spectacular acts of sabotage — from the West Bank and Gaza to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Qatar, and Iran — that have stunned the world.

Rise of a Madman

In the 1990s, Benjamin Netanyahu began his rise to power, not as a right-wing firebrand but as a silver-tongued defender of Israel against international criticism. He coupled strong right-wing views with opportunism and an aversion to making risky decisions. Having climbed the greasy pole to take control of the Likud Party in 1996, Netanyahu went on to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

Following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, however, Netanyahu’s modus operandi changed. Two of his most crucial judgments — that the Gaza Strip could be kept indefinitely in a state of economic immiseration and that Hamas would not mount a large-scale attack — pushed Israelis into one of the most severe shocks they ever experienced.

Fearing investigation of his failure to protect the country, Netanyahu transformed himself into the epitome of Israeli craziness.

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The levels of violence he authorized against Palestinians in Gaza shocked the world. Netanyahu’s endorsement of transferring the entire population of Gaza out of Palestine; the bloody attacks he unleashed against Hezbollah and civilian neighborhoods in Lebanon; the wars he launched against Iran; and his attempt to assassinate Hamas negotiators in Qatar all reflect much more far-reaching goals for Israel than those of recognition, peace, and security, as one nation among others in a stable Middle East.

In this way, Netanyahu is not just following in the footsteps of predecessors, who were prepared to take risks for ambitious gains; instead, he has made the craziness that has occasionally marked Israeli policies into a dominant trait.

A 21st Century Sparta

Efraim Inbar is among Israel’s most influential national security analysts. The founder and director of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, Inbar has reliably indexed the policy preferences of Likud governments, in general, and those led by Netanyahu in particular.

From year to year, problem to problem, threat to threat, Inbar’s recommendation has almost always been the same: reject available compromises, accept international isolation, and use preemptive war to inflict more pain and damage on adversaries than they are willing to tolerate.

“Fortunately,” he wrote in response to questions about Israel’s long-term goals, “Jewish history presents the Zionist movement another alternative: the Davidic option of building a Jewish commonwealth in the midst of an idolatrous world. The House of David ruled the Land of Israel for over four hundred years, playing a balance of power politics in our region.”

As if channeling Inbar’s thinking, Netanyahu gave a speech in September 2025 calling for Israel to expect and accept international isolation, adapt its economy toward autarchy, and see itself as a 21st century Sparta.

Israelis are familiar with the Jerusalem syndrome, a tendency for susceptible people visiting the country to experience delusional psychoses with religious or apocalyptic themes. It is also true that spectacular visions — of an unfolding, divinely guided, and Israel-centric redemption process; of the settlement in the West Bank as a crucial step in the bringing of the Messiah; and of Jewish rule over virtually the entire Fertile Crescent — have long animated the private thinking of the architects behind the vast settlement project in the occupied territories.

The Israeli Mainstream

What is striking is that such thinking has moved from the private worlds of dedicated activists, from the margins of respectable political discourse toward the center of Israeli politics. Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich both advocate for the rebuilding of the ancient Jewish Temple in the Old City of Jerusalem. Daniella Weiss, Ben-Gvir, and many others have called for the entire Gaza Strip to be emptied of Palestinians and resettled by Jews. What were, in the 1960s and 1970s, the outlandish ambitions of some marginal intellectuals, extreme rabbis, and retired generals are now the goals pursued by leading government ministers, senior security service officials, and settlement leaders.

Such grandiose ideas provide no guidelines for practical strategic thinking about Israel’s future or rationales for creative diplomacy. The result is that Israeli leaders focus on imminent security threats and diplomatic challenges, but neither entertain nor pursue longterm goals. That is to say: Those who govern Israel imagine no stable future that is both satisfying and possible enough to shape policy decisions and actions. The goal of Israel’s foreign and security policies therefore becomes simple if outlandish: to establish itself as the regional hegemon, possessing the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, equipped with sufficient conventional military power to operate throughout the region at minimal risk, and poised to crush any combination of opponents.

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This region-shaping ambition was evident in Israel’s June 2025 attack on Iran. An Israeli military poster, in Farsi, of what Israel dubbed “Operation Rising Lion” featured a majestic lion on his hind legs next to a brightly shining sun, symbols of ancient Persia.

The idea of transforming the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Muslim-majority country of 93 million, into an ally and returning it to a non-Islamic imperial past was advanced in an Instagram post two weeks into the war by Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s influential wife. It depicted two lions leaning against each other and gazing into the future, one wrapped in the flag of Israel, the other in the flag of the Pahlavis, the last shahs of Iran.

Amid Israel’s bombardment of Iran in July 2025, before the U.S. joined the war, the grand scale of such ambitions — consistent with the unattainability of the goals crazy states set for themselves — became apparent during remarks Netanyahu made to an Israeli interviewer. “We are changing — and I said this on the second day of the [Gaza] war — I said that we’re changing the face of the Middle East,” Netanyahu said calmly. “And now I say to you and also to our viewers: We’re changing the face of the world. I have determined that we will achieve all our goals.”

Adapted from “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power” by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick. Copyright 2026 by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick. Reprinted by permission of One Signal Publishers, a division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

The post Israel Justified Its Wars by Calling Enemies “Crazy.” Now, the Warning Signs All Apply to Israel. appeared first on The Intercept.

Among the partners for the State Department’s new “Freedom Tech Excellence Program” is Palantir, the AI and data integration firm started by right-wing powerbroker Peter Thiel. Under the program, company employees will go on temporary assignments to advise the government on “digital freedom and freedom of expression,” including counter-surveillance and dealing with First Amendment issues.

“FTEP brings private sector talent to the Department for limited-term assignments to advance diplomatic efforts on key issues including online freedom of expression, privacy-enhancing technologies, countering digital surveillance, and responsible AI governance,” according to the State Department’s website.

Palantir is best known for building large-scale data analysis platforms. In addition to corporate contracts, the company’s massive government tenders include database, surveillance, and tracking tools for police and federal authorities. Among its government clients are the military, the State Department itself, and U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Palantir and its key personnel have also been involved in multiple lawsuits against journalistic outlets.

The firm’s history has raised criticisms of its role in the new State Department initiative, especially given the Trump administration own’s dubious track record on First Amendment issues.

“To some extent, this announcement and this program sound like doublespeak,” said Carrie DeCell, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “Certainly neither this State Department, nor the partners they have announced so far, are trustworthy leaders in what they identify as online freedom of expression or countering digital surveillance.”

The new initiative is planned to run through the beginning of 2029, according to the State Department’s press office. While participants could be placed anywhere in the agency and may require security clearances, the Freedom Tech Excellent Program “is not geared towards bolstering the Department’s internal application or operational use of AI technologies,” the department said in a statement to The Intercept.

Anduril, a military tech firm with links to Palantir and Thiel, was also listed as a partner in the State Department initiative. Anduril’s executive chair Trae Stephens is a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund, which has invested about $2.6 billion in Anduril. Besides a mutual appreciation of “The Lord of the Rings,” Thiel shares similar politics with Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and has backed Luckey’s new bank, Erebor.

Neither Anduril nor Palantir responded to requests for comment.

Palantir and the Feds

Palantir’s work has brought it notoriety across the globe, though at times defining what it does can be complex. It has repeatedly eschewed its label as a surveillance firm. Palantir CEO Alex Karp denied on a podcast last year that the company engages in unconstitutional surveillance work.

And, in an unsigned blog post last year, Palantir wrote, “Contrary to some media reports, we are not a surveillance company.”

Palantir, though, enabled U.S. mass surveillance by bolstering the National Security Agency’s global data collection efforts, according to documents provided to The Intercept by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Palantir helped the NSA expand a program that became notorious for its ability to hoover up Americans’ communications along with those from abroad.

More recently, the firm has become a focal point for protests in the U.K. over its massive contract with the National Health Service and its ties to the Israeli military. Just this week, the NHS apologized after admitting it had falsely stated that Palantir did not have access to identifiable patient data.

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Stateside, the company had a contract with New York City public hospitals that gave it access to patient information. The contract was allowed to expire after it came under scrutiny in an Intercept report. The Intercept also reported this year that Palantir has access to sensitive federal databases for its contract to aid in Internal Revenue Service investigations.

Palantir’s IRS work led to a letter last year from 10 members of Congress to Karp requesting information about the “mega-database” built off IRS data. In response, the firm again denied that it was engaging in widespread surveillance of Americans and that it was building any such database.

Palantir also has a 15-year relationship with ICE. The Intercept found that its contracts with the agency have aided immigration raids, including ones that led to family separations. And Palantir built bespoke software for ICE that helps track self-deportations and visa overstays.

In April, Reps. Dan Goldman and Nydia Velázquez, both Democrats from New York, sent a list of questions directed to ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, demanding information about how they were leveraging Palantir’s technology to create “a mass surveillance ecosystem.”

Attacks on Free Press

Along with eccentric far-right views and donations to MAGA Republicans, one of Thiel’s most well-known acts was his involvement in the lawsuit that drove the news outlet Gawker into bankruptcy.

Thiel had become upset with Gawker over the media company’s reporting about his personal life. He went on to spend $10 million secretly bankrolling lawsuits against the company, finally scoring with a major judgment in favor of the wrestler Hulk Hogan that caused Gawker to close and sell off its assets.

Journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said that Thiel constituted a “serious threat” to the group’s principles of “freedom of press and independence of media,” particularly in light of the secrecy around his role in the case. His actions were, RSF said, “nothing different to governments using legal or economic leverage to shut down a media that happens to displease them.”

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Palantir also recently filed a suit against Swiss online news magazine Republik for reporting on how Palantir repeatedly failed to land contracts with the Swiss government. Palantir claimed that Republik had an obligation to run a list of rebuttals from the firm.

A Swiss court, however, handed Palantir a defeat by siding with the outlet on all but one of the 23 charges and forcing Palantir to pay most of Republik’s legal fees. (In a since-deleted post on Medium responding to the Republik lawsuit, Palantir once again denied that it is a surveillance company.)

David Greene, senior counsel for anti-surveillance nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that positioning Palantir as a bulwark for civil rights undermined the government’s own free speech initiative.

“There’s a big problem right now with the U.S. government and the people outside government who exercise power, in terms of trying to claim free speech as a value when they clearly don’t sincerely hold that value,” Greene said. “It really lowers the esteem of the U.S. in terms of having any moral authority on freedom of expression grounds.”

The post State Department Wants Palantir’s Advice on Free Speech and “Countering Digital Surveillance” appeared first on The Intercept.

Over 50,000 people last week risked their lives to cross the border between Morocco and Ceuta, the tiny Spanish enclave in north Africa, in the hope of making it to mainland Europe.

The vast majority have already been returned to Morocco; fewer than 2,000 refugees remain on Ceuta and are, according to on-the-ground reports, in urgent need of food and shelter. Over 80 people reportedly died during the crossings, most from drowning.

The crisis for those seeking to enter Europe through Ceuta last week, including those who have been sent back, has already been framed according to a putrid, far-right political fulcrum. As a wide array of responses to the situation on Ceuta make clear, a commitment to harsh border regimes is not the sole preserve of the far right.

Once again, liberals and centrists who claim to decry the right’s anti-immigrant stances are themselves treating immigrants as a threat to be secured against.

For the international far right, images of thousands of desperate young African men entering European Union territory — little matter that Ceuta is, in fact, not on mainland Europe — has been fodder for predictable racist fearmongering and calls for extremist border rule. Far-right leaders blamed the crossings of the left-wing Spanish government’s extremely reasonable plans to regularize over 1 million undocumented immigrants who have already been living and working in Spain for at least five months.

“It’s terrible. Remember that picture. That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” President Donald Trump told Fox News, in a groundless attempt to use the suffering on Ceuta to his advantage. A spokesperson for the White House decried Spain’s new immigration regularization proposal as “far-left, globalist policies.”

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Meanwhile, conservative and right-wing leaders across Europe and the U.K. echoed similar sentiments, conjuring the old lie of an “invasion” confronting the West. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni proposed Spain be suspended from the Schengen Area. A total of 22 EU leaders, including Meloni and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, wrote a joint letter to the European Commission expressing “serious concerns” about how Spain’s decision to grant legal status to immigrants served as a “pull factor.”

In response to these attacks and criticisms, several liberal and centrist politicians, institutions, and media organs have pushed back. Analyses in the New York Times and The Atlantic have stressed, for example, that not one of the people who crossed into Ceuta managed to make it to mainland Europe. These responses are framed as a counterpoint to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s right-wing critics.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also defended Sánchez against right-wing attacks, by praising the Spanish authorities’ “swift handling” in “successfully preventing illegal movement onwards to mainland Spain and Europe.”

Sanchez himself took a similar line.

“In less than 48 hours, my government has succeeded in fully restoring control over the border,” he wrote on Saturday in a response to criticism from other European leaders.

The mainstream defense against far-right fearmongering, then, was merely a regurgitation of the right’s anti-immigrant premise. Stopping immigrants who have been forced to take irregular routes, according to this logic, is a good thing. What the far right got wrong, by the lights of these centrists and liberals, was not their virulent racism, but rather that the claims of an “invasion” of Europe are not factually accurate.

“Spain and Germany’s centrist responses have been to ‘assure’ the E.U. that borders are fortified,” wrote migrant justice organizer and scholar Harsha Walia on Instagram. “This rebuttal simply buttresses the premise of border securitization.”

The reasons for the surge in crossings are not yet fully known; speculation abounds about the role of Moroccan and other state forces. A few things are, however, clear: Misinformation had spread in the preceding days on social media suggesting, falsely, that a recent Supreme Court ruling in Spain would prevent the Spanish authorities returning immigrants.

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In a world of increasing and inevitable mass migration, it is a moral failure to treat the swift removal of immigrants as a victory. Such a framing is also a gift to the far right, who will continue to benefit within a political consensus that treats immigration as a bad thing.

Only a few voices on the European left have placed focus where it belongs: with supporting immigrants who remain on Ceuta.

“What is happening in Ceuta is not a natural disaster, but the result of political decisions,” said Clara Bünger, a member of Germany’s The Left Party. “Germany and the EU have a duty to help with providing for refugees and to take in those seeking protection.”

“People are fleeing war, poverty, and the climate crisis,” she noted. “Higher walls won’t stop them; they will only make the escape more deadly. The most important thing now is that no one else dies.”

The post Liberals Are Ceding Ground to the Far Right on Ceuta Border Crossings appeared first on The Intercept.