The risks are real. Customs and Border Protection agents have the authority to examine travelers’ devices. In June, for instance, federal agents denied a Norwegian tourist entry to the U.S. after looking through his phone. (Authorities claim they turned him away for admitted drug use; he says it was over a meme depicting Vice President JD Vance as a bald baby.)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement have already started targeting travelers, with agents in plain clothes forcefully detaining a mother in front of her young daughter at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday after a tip from the Transportation Security Administration.

If you’re flying, take these steps to reduce the likelihood that your sensitive information is compromised at the airport.

Don’t Bring Your Usual Devices

The only surefire way to keep your devices from being searched and seized is to simply not bring them with you on your trip. If you can’t leave them at home, consider mailing them to and from your destination.

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Another option is to leave devices that contain sensitive information at home and instead bring throwaway travel devices you’re willing to have searched or confiscated. This doesn’t need to be an expensive proposition. You can reformat and repurpose an old phone or tablet, or purchase refurbished older models that are comparatively cheap. Then buy a temporary SIM card or eSIM so that you’re not using your usual number. Remember to let contacts know that for the duration of your trip you’ll be reachable at a different number.

Create a travel account for these devices. You can do so by starting a fresh account in the App Store or Google Play. This should ensure that if you’re forced to log into your device by authorities at the airport, the only information they’ll find is data you’ve put on this specific piece of hardware. CBP agents are supposed to only be able to look at data that’s local on the phone.

If you have anything sensitive in your accounts (say, emails from confidential sources) or anything you believe federal agents could consider damning (such as party pics or memes), be sure not to sync your apps, files, and settings onto your travel devices.

Disable Biometrics and Power Off

Regardless of whether you opt to bring your usual devices or specialized travel burners, take these steps to lock down your devices.

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First and foremost, disable any biometrics, like using your face or fingerprint, to unlock your phone. Instead, set up a unique and random alphanumeric passcode; eight characters consisting of random digits and numbers is a good start. Be cautious of entering your passcode in open view of surveillance cameras. Use one hand to shield your screen and the thumb of your other hand to put in your passcode. Consider using privacy screens on your devices to further diminish the chance of wandering eyes noticing things that are none of their business.

When going through security checkpoints, turn your devices completely off. Don’t just put them to sleep — fully shut them down. Though having a locked device is better than having it be unlocked, turning it off is best, as this makes it much harder for data to be forensically recovered from your devices.

That means you’ll need to obtain paper copies of boarding passes, rather than rely on digital versions stored in a device wallet or via your airline’s app.

If you’re asked to unlock your devices, you can say “no.” But doing so may result in being delayed and hassled, and your device could be confiscated. You should receive paperwork attesting to the confiscation and establishing chain of custody (this is called CBP Form 6051D, or a custody receipt for detained property). As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, it may be months before your devices are returned — or even for an indefinite period of time if agents believe there is evidence of a crime.

Delete Files and Log Out

To practice what’s known in security circles as “defense in depth,” it’s best to think of your digital security as an onion: If an outer layer is peeled off, you want there to be a good second layer to minimize the damage to the core. To that end, assume that even if you have a strong passphrase and have powered off your device, someone may still be able to find a way in. Your travel devices should, therefore, minimize the amount of sensitive information they store. In that case, even if someone manages to break through the outer layer, the information exposed would be trivial.

If you use a password manager — a specialized app that securely stores your passwords — put it into a “travel mode,” limiting the passwords it will reveal for the duration of your trip. Remove access to sensitive accounts that you very likely won’t have a reason to need to access during your travels; for example, removing your work email if you’re going on vacation, or leaving and deleting sensitive Signal chats, like local ICE watch groups.

Log out of or delete apps you won’t need while traveling. You can reinstall and log back in when you are safely away from the airport. Remember to remove them once again when you’re on your way back — and keep in mind that this may lead to some apps deleting your history.

Finally, be sure to prune your contacts to remove any that are sensitive, such as sources, if you’re a journalist. If you have sensitive materials on your devices that you’ll need to access during your travels, use a tool like Cryptomator to encrypt them and upload them to a cloud drive, then delete the files from your devices. You can download them when you reach your destination.

These extra steps are undoubtedly a bit of a pain, but any inconvenience would pale in comparison to the potential damage if sensitive information is disclosed during your time in the airport.

The post How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Phone at the Airport appeared first on The Intercept.

She screams out the name of one of them, Mohammed, when he almost wanders into the busy street.

Fatima, 45, fled the southern suburb of Bourj al-Barajneh with her family on March 2 when Israel bombarded the community as part of the broadening regional war.

She is a mother of two young boys and an older daughter who are sitting cross-legged around her on cardboard boxes. Thick comforters, a jug of water, and a half-eaten bag of Lebanese bread lean on the statue behind them. 

It’s not the first time they have been displaced. The family is originally from Syria but escaped the civil war for the relative peace of Bourj al-Barajneh. Fatima’s mother, Warde, 70, is there in her wheelchair; she sheltered in the exact same spot under the gigantic crescent moon statue in 2024 when Israel last struck their neighborhood. 

This time, they abandoned their home when the explosions brought her sons to tears. “Children are not like adults; there is fear and there is terror,” she says. “So we left Bourj al-Barajneh. Yesterday we slept near this statue.” 

“Our children have been hungry since yesterday. I mean there’s no food, no drink,” she explains. “And yesterday night the children were freezing.” 

Authorities in Beirut have done nothing to help them, Fatima says. They are among a wide swath of the Lebanese populace that has been uprooted and one of tens of families who have found shelter near the gigantic crescent moon statue. A few men brought them blankets when they saw that the family was cold. The problem is that they have nowhere to go now. “Now we’re afraid to go back. They’re saying there’s bombing. So, we’re forced to be sitting here on the ground. What can we do? There’s no solution. There’s nothing,” she says. 

The next day, they are gone.

Israel’s wave of attacks on Lebanon are the deadliest conflict in the country since the 1975–1990 civil war. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 1,000 people, 118 of them children, and displaced 1 million others. Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah but has consistently struck residential buildings in the south and east of the country, the southern suburbs of Beirut, and, recently, parts of central Beirut as well. 

Nowhere seems safe, especially for those whose apartments are in evacuation zones that encompass nearly 600 square miles, according to the United Nations. As of mid-March, as many as 1 in 5 people in Lebanon have been displaced by Israeli military operations. The Intercept walked the streets of Beirut to learn their stories.

Across the street from the statue where Fatima’s family sheltered, two teenage boys lay on a thin mattress pushed up against a wall covered with purple and yellow graffiti. One is awake and scrolling his phone with one hand behind his head. Behind him, his brother sleeps. 

Karim is 16, with dark brown hair and an inviting face. A few days ago, he was in Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut, trying to pick up odd jobs to make money. He lived with his family in an apartment and shared a room with his brother. 

On February 28, the night the U.S. and Israel killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Karim heard “problems would soon be coming to Lebanon.” He wasn’t convinced at first. When Israel started hitting the southern suburbs, Karim narrowly avoided an air attack as his parents and brother tried to escape by car on the street known as Airport Road, which connects downtown Beirut to the Rafic Hariri International Airport. “They were striking in front of us, cutting off the road.”

When they made it to downtown Beirut, his family tried to find a place to stay in schools that were being converted into makeshift shelters, but they were mostly full. “My mom has a mental health condition,” he explains. “The schools are overcrowded, and it bothers her too much.”

That’s why he’s sleeping on the street and using cafes to charge his phone. Karim runs into dukkan, or corner stores, for food, water, or whatever else he needs.

He wants to return to his house, but the strikes have only gotten worse in Dahieh since they arrived. “We have to be patient. What can we do? If we find a house we’ll go, and if we find a school we’ll go. And if we don’t find anything we’ll stay here. We have to have patience,” he says. 

“Right now, everything is exhausting. I am just so tired.”

It’s hard to grasp the scale of displacement inside Lebanon. Already, according to the U.N., 667,831 people have registered themselves as displaced with Lebanon’s government. Lebanon’s National Disaster Risk Management Unit reports that “119,700 displaced individuals [are] currently accommodated in 567 collective shelters.” However, reports suggest that more than 1 million people — of a population of just about five and a half million — are displaced, including many who have not yet registered. According to Al Jazeera, about 99,000 homes were already damaged or destroyed in the previous 14 months before this escalation started.

The Lebanese government, with the U.N. and local NGOs, says it is responding to the emergency by opening public schools, the city’s stadiums, and universities as temporary shelters. With support from the U.N. Development Programme, they also created a disaster management unit to coordinate aid, such as essential supplies and cash transfers, and direct people to safer regions like the North and Bekaa. 

Despite these efforts, the scale of displacement has far exceeded the government’s capacity to provide aid. Every one of the 36 displaced people in Beirut who spoke with The Intercept said the response has been inadequate.

“Where is the government? What are they doing?” one humanitarian aid worker asks frustratedly. 

The man who raises this question over and over again is Mohammed, who shares his frustration while sitting on his motorcycle and smoking a cigarette in front of Ras Beirut’s Public Secondary School, which has been converted into a shelter. He describes himself as part of the “resistance against Israel,” and as “a son of Ras Beirut,” known in the capital city as an upper-scale and religiously mixed neighborhood. 

“I am here to help the displaced people in that school behind me,” he points. 

He doesn’t think the Lebanese government is doing enough for its displaced citizens. “Children, boys, women, girls, are just sitting in the street with no one to feed them, no medicine at all, so we are trying, as the sons of this area, to serve them best we can.” 

Mohammed says that there are around 450 displaced people in the school with few resources. “They have no mattresses or pillows to put their heads on right now,” he begins to speak louder and get more agitated. “Inside the school, women and children are sleeping on the floor barefoot covering themselves with their clothes instead of blankets,” he says.

Throughout March, schools in Lebanon have faced a near-total disruption due to the sharp escalation in conflict. Since October 2023, Lebanon’s schools have faced repeated widespread interruption.

The atmosphere inside the school is tense as families bunch together in classrooms trying to find room. One couple has set up a nargileh, and the woman, who is in a black hijab, takes a long, deep pull from the hose and lets out a plume of smoke. “No pictures here,” one of the gentlemen running the displacement shelter tells a European journalist with a camera around her neck. “It is a very sensitive time for all of these people.” 

The facade of the school has one blue balcony on the upper left-hand side that overlooks Hamra in Ras Beirut. On it, a pair of red children’s pajama pants, along with several other pieces of clothing, are hung out to dry. “These are the children of the southern suburbs, and where are they? They are on the streets,” Mohammed says.

Hundreds of tents have sprung up along the highway that passes Horsh Beirut, a park that butts up against the southern suburbs of the city. Yara Sayegh has taken it upon herself to help their inhabitants. 

Sayegh runs an organization called Truth Be Told, which usually focuses on transitional justice and human rights in Lebanon. Now it is serving as an emergency response initiative, cooking and distributing meals and medicine to families in tents across the area. She has experience after responding the same way in during a period of intense Israeli strikes in 2024.

Recently, she decided to build a makeshift kitchen at Riwaq Cafe near Mar Mikhael in Beirut. “I decided, given how much transparency is needed and the importance and the attention to detail, and the amount of corruption I have witnessed during crises, I would just open up my own [kitchen].” 

Every day, volunteers show up to the cafe around 10 a.m. to help cook and pack meals for those fasting in Horsh Beirut. Her chef, Omar Khaled, directs volunteers on how to dice onions, squeeze lemons, and cook mujadara. He counts and recounts the boxed meals before they go out to the houseless people on the streets. Sayegh passes out as many as 1,000 meals a day in the park and surrounding areas.

“Whatever I do right now, whatever a lot of us are doing, isn’t enough,” Sayegh says “There are too many families who are displaced.”

On a rainy night in mid-March, Sayegh drives the meals to Horsh Beirut. Along the perimeter of the park, tents lining the streets are sopping wet. Tarps hang over four or five of them at a time. As she backs up her car, a line forms of people who need her help. 

“Is my medicine ready?” one woman calls out. 

“No, ma’am not yet, but inshallah I will try to bring it to you tomorrow,” Sayegh responds as she jots down another young woman’s information onto an Excel spreadsheet on her laptop. 

“I am committed to them, there aren’t enough people helping, and they have nowhere to go,” Sayegh says.

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon extend far beyond Beirut and its suburbs. The most devastating strikes have been across the south of the country.

Evacuation orders took effect both south and north of the Litani River, a crucial and agriculturally rich landscape powered by the river itself, in the last week. But problems for southerners started much before that. 

At the height of its war on Gaza in 2024, Israel began a series of strikes in southern Lebanon, aimed at what it said were militant groups, including Hezbollah, that had been launching retaliatory salvos across the border. This included a campaign of deadly Israeli ground raids in the border region and the expansion of what it says is a “buffer zone.”

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According to the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, between November 2024 and the end of 2025, Israeli forces have committed over 10,000 air and ground violations of a November 2024 ceasefire agreement. This included daily airstrikes and ground incursions that killed hundreds in Lebanon, including civilians. Israel never withdrew troops from southern Lebanon and has pushed further into the country as its right wing parties call to settle Lebanon and make the Litani River Israel’s northern border.

Buildings in that area have been leveled to the ground, and the Israeli military has paved roads over Lebanese homes, making sure displaced people can never return. The reality on the ground is “undeniable erasure” says Hanan, a queer Lebanese American art history student at the American University of Beirut. She is among those dealing directly with Israel’s aggression in southern Lebanon. 

Hanan grew up in Arizona about 30 minutes from the Mexican border. She came to Lebanon in August to pursue a master’s degree in art history and curation. Ever since Israel’s so-called ceasefire with Hamas, she felt a pull to Lebanon and her family there. She was drawn by bucolic memories of past visits. 

“I romanticize the shit out of that time now,” she says. “We literally ate mulberries off the trees on the mosque grounds and chopped vegetables all morning listening to Arabic music.” 

Last week, her family’s house in Chehabiye, near the southern border, was destroyed. Hanan is now housing 12 relatives in her two-bedroom apartment in Beirut’s Achrafieh neighborhood, an upper-class Francophile, predominantly Christian community.

“Some were more prepared than others when they came. They all mostly left in a hurry,” she explains. Because of the chaos and the traffic, it took her family two days to get to her apartment in Beirut. On the journey, they slept in their cars. 

They had jobs at shoe stores and grocery stores, Hanan says. Kids were just beginning school. One relative had finally purchased a motorcycle after saving his money; it was destroyed in the strikes. “All of their lives have become completely upended,” she says.

She thinks her relatives’ building was targeted because a Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Qard Al-Hassan bank occupied the first floor. Founded in 1982, Al-Qard Al-Hassan operates more than 30 branches across Lebanon and is registered as an NGO with the Lebanese Ministry of Interior. But it is not licensed by Banque du Libam, the central bank of Lebanon, to operate as a bank. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Al-Qard Al-Hassan in 2007, stating Hezbollah uses it as a cover to manage financial activities and access the international financial system. This month, the Israeli military conducted a systematic campaign of airstrikes against numerous branches across Lebanon, identifying them as legitimate military targets because they fund Hezbollah’s military activities.

Even in Beirut, Hanan’s family is treated with suspicion. Soon after their arrival, a neighbor threatened to inform authorities that 12 relatives were crammed into Hanan’s two-bedroom apartment.

“It is just because they are southern and could be supporters of Hezbollah, and so my neighbors are afraid we are targets for Israel,” Hanan explains. “What they don’t understand is that the people of the south are helping each other, even when others leave them hanging.” 

The tensions got worse on March 13, when Israeli aircraft dropped thousands of leaflets over several neighborhoods in Beirut. They called on the Lebanese citizens to “disarm Hezbollah” and said “Lebanon is your decision, not someone else’s.” Another flier, designed to look like a newspaper, warned that the current situation in Lebanon would turn into something similar to Gaza. The leaflets asked Lebanese people to inform Israel of Hezbollah’s whereabouts using a QR code. 

The point, many believe, is to stoke civil tension and sectarian fractures that will destabilize the country. Sayegh, for instance, says her family and friends don’t support her humanitarian aid work. She comes from a Christian background and is often criticized for helping supporters of Hezbollah. “We are one people and that is the only way forward, and that is why I help. I believe in one Lebanon for all,” Sayegh says. 

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Many in Lebanon understand that its diverse religious makeup leaves it vulnerable to outside forces pitting the people of the country against each other. But in the current chaos and terror of Israeli missile strikes, many who supported Hezbollah’s retaliation on behalf of Gaza just a year ago are now changing their minds. “Where were they when Israel was breaking the ceasefire in the south thousands upon thousands of times in the last year?” a young woman whose family hails from the south asks. “It seems like they came alive only for Khamenei’s death, and I don’t fully believe their leaders are doing this for Lebanon anymore,” she says.

Hanan knows the current situation is untenable in the long run. “Their loose plan is to return to the south, but I can’t realistically see that happening anytime soon,” she says.

She and her father are looking at renting an apartment in an area that will be more forgiving to her family’s circumstances and backgrounds, but with 1 million people pushed from their homes, it won’t be easy to find lodging.

An uncle works at a soup kitchen attached to a mosque that has some underutilized office space. “There’s two rooms there that they use as offices,” Hanan says. “So he’s thinking that he can turn them into rooms temporarily before they return south, which is actually crazy, because the building right next door got bombed the other day.” 

The post More Than 1 Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced. These Are Their Stories. appeared first on The Intercept.

In August 2024, the Biden administration hosted hundreds of influencers at the White House for the first-ever Creator Economy Conference. Neera Tanden, a senior Biden adviser, took to the stage and bemoaned anonymity online. The influencers alongside her agreed, pushing the idea that anonymous speech on the internet is harmful, and regulation is needed to force the use of real names on social media. The audience whispered excitedly as those on stage spoke about how proposed laws like the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, could unmask every troll. 

This narrative of online safety, particularly in relation to children, has become central to the bipartisan effort to censor and deanonymize the internet for everyone. Today, a package of a dozen “child online safety” bills is moving forward in the House of Representatives with bipartisan support. The laws, framed as a way to crack down on harmful content and make the internet safer, would force social media companies to enact invasive identity verification measures in order to keep children from accessing online spaces.

The problem is that there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are. A platform cannot magically discern that a user is 16 without collecting identifying information, whether through government documents such as a passport, payment information like a credit card, or other identity-disclosing data. Whether that data is stored by the platform itself or outsourced to a vendor, the result is always the same: A user’s offline identity is forever linked with their online behavior.

Stripping anonymity from the internet would constitute one of the most sweeping rollbacks of civil rights in recent history. It would allow for unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship, endangering the most marginalized members of society. Whistleblowers exposing corporate wrongdoing could be tracked and fired, government employees speaking out about illegal behavior or bad policies could face prosecution, and activists organizing protests could be identified and surveilled before ever setting foot on the street.

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Already, the U.S. government is flooding social media platforms with subpoenas seeking to unmask hundreds of anonymously run anti-ICE social media accounts. These laws would make it all the more easier for the government to target and prosecute those who dissent. 

Vulnerable members of society will suffer most. Trans people under attack from the government could be identified and outed without their consent. Undocumented immigrants could be cut off from the ability to communicate and connect with advocates. Young people seeking abortions in states with restrictive laws might no longer have the ability to access information safely and anonymously.

Not only will a de-anonymized internet be valuable to the government as it seeks to tighten control, it will also make it easier for any corporation or bad actor to intimidate, blackmail, or exploit people by leveraging their own data against them.

The quest to remove anonymous speech from the web is not new. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly known as Morality in Media, have long pursued these laws, arguing that online anonymity fuels pornography, exploitation, and general moral decay. In recent years, Democrats have become integral to advancing these proposals, falsely claiming that surveillance laws will crack down on Big Tech or curb social media addiction.

None of these surveillance laws do any of that. In fact, the laws will lead to more data being collected on kids, which predatory companies can then use to target them in more invasive ways. Already, these bills are standing in the way of protecting kids online: Last week, the FTC said it would decline to enforce COPPA, a landmark law that mandates the protection of children’s data, in order to incentivize ID verification.

The laws would create a massive new market for third-party identification vendors, many funded by the same tech investors who backed social media giants, such as Peter Thiel, who funded ID verification platform Persona via his investment group Founders Fund. Smaller apps will be forced to shoulder the enormous cost of enacting identity verification measures, hindering their ability to operate, and making it harder to compete with Big Tech companies that are leveraging these laws to consolidate power.

It’s no surprise then that Big Tech companies are also heavily involved in lobbying for various versions of these laws. Elon Musk has endorsed KOSA. The Digital Childhood Alliance, a group that frequently posts about the dangers of “Big Tech,” is secretly funded by Meta, and has played a role in pushing the App Store Accountability Act. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told a court that Apple and Google should verify the identity of every smartphone user at the operating system level, which would permanently end anonymous internet access for everyone.

This exact invasive scheme is being boosted by Democratic lawmakers like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who recently signed an ID verification law for all operating systems, including Linux, and has mused about banning all social media for users under the age of 16.

These efforts have “been brewing for or for a few years now, but just in the last few months, we’ve seen a lot of momentum,” said David Greene, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While it’s tempting to take a paternalistic attitude toward young people, Greene said that it’s crucial to recognize young people have rights too, and often use the internet when taking part in social justice movements.

“Young people still have human rights,” he said, “and that includes the right to access information and to associate with other people and to speak to the world. These laws are designed to diminish those rights.”

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Young people have led campuswide protests against the genocide in Gaza and against ICE across the country. Laws that restrict and surveil online access would severely limit their speech and ability to organize. And as the U.S. escalates attacks in the Middle East and immigration agents exert more power at home, activists are becoming concerned by the assault on anonymous speech.

“Whenever imperialist governments go to war, they become more authoritarian at home,” Evan Greer, director of digital rights group Fight for the Future, posted to Bluesky.

The Kids Online Safety Act, co-sponsored by members of both parties, is one of the most dangerous proposals currently making its way through Congress. The law would empower state attorneys general to mass censor any content online deemed “harmful to minors.” The Heritage Foundation has already come out publicly and said it plans to leverage KOSA and similar “online safety” laws to remove LGBTQ+ content and abortion content from the internet. 

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., the lead co-sponsor of KOSA, said that it was essential to pass the law to protect “minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture.” Jonathan Haidt, the author of the bestselling book “The Anxious Generation,” who has played a major role in rallying political and public support for these laws globally, has promoted the fringe theory that some young people become trans because of the social media they consume.

As KOSA has encountered growing backlash, more lawmakers have started pushing proposed ID verification at the operating system or app store level. On Wednesday, the X account for the House Energy and Commerce Committee boosted a dubious poll from far right think tank the American Principles Project, a group that has opposed abortion and same-sex marriage, declaring, “The OVERWHELMING majority of voters agree—app stores should have to verify users’ age to prevent minors from downloading apps without parental consent.” 

But enacting identity verification at the app store level does nothing to address the privacy issues at play. Privacy activists and those fighting the law have sounded the alarm about how the App Store Accountability Act creates a sprawling, insecure data-sharing pipeline that mandates divulging highly sensitive user age data with millions of general-audience apps. This is why users in some states are being forced to provide their government IDs to download things like a weather app or calculator app. The way the law equates the entire internet and treats every app in the app store as inherently pornographic will also inevitably chill speech.

Rising reactionary sentiment and right-wing extremism under Trump has accelerated the push for online age verification, Greer said. “Online protest, documenting war crimes, even news articles could be suppressed [if these laws pass].” Already, similar versions of these laws are playing out abroad. Soon after the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act took effect last summer, the law was used to restrict content, including videos documenting police violence, posts challenging the government’s narratives on Palestine, and a subreddit dedicated to documenting Israel’s war crimes.

China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia have used their vast online surveillance systems to crack down on speech challenging the government, imprisoning activists who leverage social media to challenge power. Dozens more countries are seeking to replicate authoritarian-style internet surveillance within their own borders. Indonesia, Malaysia, France, and Australia are among those that have embraced identity verification systems that would eliminate anonymous speech online under the guise of protecting children. 

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“The through-line couldn’t be clearer: destroying online anonymity is a way for government to be able to identify ­— and ultimately punish — dissenters,” said Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group. “In the United States, the federal government’s recent demands that online services identify critics of DHS and ICE serves as a chilling example of the types of attacks on lawful speech that such laws will only enable further.” 

The harms of widespread government censorship, he said, are only compounded by the “massive privacy and security threats posed by collecting personally identifiable information en masse.” Systems built to remove anonymity in the name of “child safety” will be used to identify whistleblowers, protest organizers, and critics of federal agencies, Cohn said. “At this point, not seeing the planet-sized red flags is more a result of willful blindness than anything else,” he said. 

For journalists, dissidents, and vulnerable communities, the ability to gather and share information anonymously online is critical. Just this week, The Atlantic reported that the Pentagon is seeking to use powerful AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to mass surveil U.S. citizens by harvesting broad swaths of commercially available data. Age verification laws would dramatically expand the collection of identity-linked browsing and speech data, endangering users and creating new troves of data for commercial and government exploitation.

LGBTQ+ youth frequently rely on anonymous online spaces to explore identity and seek support, particularly in hostile states. Kansas recently invalidated hundreds of trans residents’ driver’s licenses. As harmful laws that target LGBTQ+ people spread, openly identifying as LGBTQ+ online could put people in danger. Tying online access to government-issued IDs will also deter vulnerable young people from seeking help or gaining information about crucial topics like abuse or sexual health. Reproductive justice activists have been sounding the alarm about state efforts to de-anonymize organizations providing abortion and reproductive health information online.

Whistleblowers especially rely on anonymous accounts to call out corporate or government wrongdoing. During Trump’s first administration, dozens of employees and scientists within the government set up “rogue” Twitter accounts, revealing firsthand information about the administration’s efforts to gut federal agencies and censor scientific information. The “rebel” accounts mirroring those of NASA, the U.S. National Park Service, and other agencies revealed crucial research on topics like climate change to the public. 

The push to eliminate online anonymity is ultimately a fight over whether the internet remains a space for dissent and free expression or further becomes a dystopian digital panopticon that operates as an arm of the surveillance state. A free society depends on the right to publish and consume information anonymously and to organize and speak privately. Age verification policies only bolster the power of Big Tech and give the government complete authority to surveil and censor online speech.

The post Congress Is Considering Abolishing Your Right to Be Anonymous Online appeared first on The Intercept.

As he followed their vehicles, they led him down a rural road that grew increasingly familiar during the 20-minute drive. Soon, Little told The Intercept, he realized where the federal agents were headed: his house.

When he approached his driveway, two SUVs were already waiting, Little said. Agents moved to block his car, claiming he had impeded their investigation and that local law enforcement would be called. No other officers came to his house, and Little was not cited or charged.

“The intent was clearly to intimidate us. It’s stressful. It’s a little bit scary. But at the same time,” Little said, “I just think it’s really important to be out there and monitoring what they’re doing.”

Interviews, sworn declarations, and video reviewed by The Intercept indicate that Little is not the only person subjected to this kind of intimidation. Across the Twin Cities, immigration agents have identified legal observers by name and address, and, in some cases, led them back to their homes after they engaged in lawful monitoring of immigration activity. Legal observers say this pattern of behavior sends a clear and chilling message: The federal government knows who they are and where they live.

These encounters are unfolding amid a rapid expansion of federal surveillance capabilities.

Immigration authorities have significantly expanded their use of mobile biometric and surveillance tools in recent years. Officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Customs and Border Protection, for example, can use the smartphone app Mobile Fortify to photograph a person’s face or capture fingerprints in the field and compare them against federal biometric databases, according to a Department of Homeland Security inventory of artificial intelligence technologies.

Those tools operate within a broader surveillance infrastructure that includes automated license plate readers, commercial data brokers, and face recognition systems. A 2022 report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology found ICE can access driver’s license data covering roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults, including state photo databases that can be searched using face recognition technology.

Civil liberties advocates say the growing web of identification tools has enabled federal agents to quickly identify anyone who monitors or protests their actions — chilling protected First Amendment activity and deterring the legal observation of law enforcement.

“We make sure to lock the door now,” said Little. “It’s definitely heightened our awareness. I’m scared when I’m out there. But for me, it’s a lot scarier to just sit at my house.”

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Attorneys and community observers say similar fears are emerging across the Twin Cities even as Operation Metro Surge is said to be winding down.

Beth Jackson, a longtime St. Paul resident and grandmother who participates in a local network of volunteer observers, described one frightening encounter that escalated quickly. According to Jackson and a heavily redacted police report reviewed by The Intercept, local officers surrounded her vehicle with guns drawn after a federal agent alleged that she made violent threats. Jackson denies the allegation, and her attorney said no criminal charges were filed.

Jackson said agents never explained how they identified her. In prior encounters, she said, federal officers told her they had been to her home and knew where she lived, which she interpreted as an attempt at intimidation.

Days later, Jackson said she received notice that her Transportation Security Administration PreCheck status, for moving more quickly through airport security, would be revoked based on the same incident.

Jackson was among four sources active in legal observation in Minnesota who described the panic they experienced after federal agents revealed knowledge of their identities.

“I live here. I commute on these streets every day. I am a grandmother of six, a mother of three. We should be just living our simple little life, and we can’t,” Jackson said.

Court filings reviewed by The Intercept describe encounters strikingly similar to those reported by Twin Cities legal observers.

The accounts appear in Tincher v. Noem, a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Twin Cities residents who say they were unlawfully targeted while monitoring immigration enforcement.

In a sworn declaration, Edina resident Emily Beltz said she was lawfully following an unmarked federal vehicle in January when a woman in the passenger seat leaned out of the SUV window and began shouting her name.

“Emily, Emily, we’re going to take you home,” the masked agent yelled, according to Beltz’s declaration, before repeating her name and home address in what Beltz described as a mocking tone.

Beltz said the message alarmed her. “I was freaked out,” she wrote. “The agents had told me, in effect, that they knew where I lived and could come and get me and my family at any time.”

Beltz said the encounter left her fearful about continuing her work as a legal observer.

In a separate declaration, Minneapolis resident Katherine Henly described following suspected ICE vehicles when agents suddenly stopped on her block and began photographing her home.

“This seemed like a clear attempt to intimidate me and my family,” Henly wrote. She said masked agents later exited their vehicles, with one officer carrying what she described as a large firearm and accused observers of impeding enforcement. Henly said the observers had maintained a safe distance.

She said she feared the images of her home and vehicle could be stored in a government database, and that the encounter left her “extremely shaken and scared” and worried about the safety of her young children.

Civil liberties advocates say the reported conduct raises broader constitutional concerns.

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“We are seeing immigration and law enforcement officers take photos of observers, call them by name, follow observers home, and tell observers that they are being tracked in a database. This practice of intimidation is chilling communities across the country, even though documenting and protesting law enforcement operations are protected by the First Amendment,” said Byul Yoon, a Skadden Fellow with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

While many encounters described by observers involve surveillance and intimidation, some have escalated into far more dangerous confrontations.

Ed Higgins, a longtime legal observer and Marine Corps veteran in Columbia Heights, Minnesota — the city where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was detained earlier this year — said he has witnessed encounters that turned violent. In some cases, he feared for his life.

On February 5, Higgins said a group of federal agents pursued him through the city and repeatedly tried to force him off the road. As the pursuit unfolded, Higgins called 911, telling the dispatcher that the vehicles following him appeared to be immigration agents and that they were “trying to run into me right now,” according to video obtained by The Intercept.

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Dispatchers directed Higgins to drive toward the Columbia Heights Police Department for safety. Surveillance video later obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune showed Higgins’s van entering the parking lot at speed, followed closely by multiple SUVs that boxed him in.

Video obtained by The Intercept shows agents surrounding Higgins’s vehicle, shouting at him and striking his car windows with their firearms, before a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension official who happened to be in the parking lot intervened to de-escalate the confrontation.

“I was panicking the whole way. I thought they were going to kill me,” Higgins said. “I kept telling the 911 operator they were going to kill me.”

Higgins said the encounter unfolded in seconds.

“I had my hands up. I was yelling for help,” he said in an interview with The Intercept. “Everything was happening so fast.”

Higgins was ultimately taken to the Whipple Federal Building, where he said he watched authorities enter his Social Security number and other personal information into a Microsoft Teams chat.

“They called it ‘agitator chat,’ and they would just put information in there. I have no idea who was in there, but it looked like 500 people,” he said.

Higgins was released the same day without any charges related to the incident.

He later reiterated his account in testimony to Minnesota state lawmakers, saying the confrontation left him believing the encounter could have turned deadly if the state official had not intervened.

Responding to questions about Higgins’s account, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said: “No policies have been violated.”

“Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime,” the spokesperson said. “Secretary Noem has been clear: anyone who assaults law enforcement will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Legal observers fear they will continue to be monitored by federal authorities.

The day after her detention, Jackson, the grandmother of six, said that agents returned to her neighborhood and parked directly in front of her home.

“Family members don’t want me to come up there because they’re fucking afraid I’m going to bring ICE up there,” Jackson said. “I deliver Meals on Wheels every Tuesday to the elderly and infirm. I can’t deliver Meals on Wheels now.”

Courts evaluating potential First Amendment retaliation typically examine whether government conduct would deter an ordinary person from continuing protected activity, said the ACLU’s Yoon.

The lawsuit alleges that federal immigration agents violated the First and Fourth Amendments by retaliating against individuals engaged in lawful observation and protest. The plaintiffs are seeking court orders barring such conduct and mandating policy changes.

The case is pending in federal court in Minnesota. The plaintiffs are seeking preliminary and permanent injunctive relief that would bar the challenged tactics while the litigation proceeds.

Jackson said the disruption to ordinary routines has been one of the most lasting consequences.

“It’s the ripple effects of what they’re doing to us,” Jackson added. “All these intangible ways they’ve damaged us. I have a lot of time to give to my community. I don’t want to give it in this way.”

The post Federal Agents Are Intimidating Legal Observers at Their Homes: “They Know Where You Live” appeared first on The Intercept.

“Not only does this violate international law in numerous respects, it clearly violates the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution,” said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, who previously served as chief of international law at U.S. Central Command.

The United Nations Charter generally restricts the use of force to cases of self-defense or with approval from the U.N. Security Council. The Constitution separately gives Congress the power to authorize offensive war.

The War Powers Resolution also requires presidents to notify Congress within 48 hours of introducing U.S. forces into hostilities and limits how long those forces can operate without congressional approval. Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed members of Congress’s bipartisan “Gang of Eight” in calls Friday night ahead of the strikes, according to administration officials and news reports.

Legal experts say advance briefings to the Gang of Eight do not necessarily satisfy the War Powers Resolution, which contemplates a formal written report to Congress as an institution, not just a small group of leaders.

“This is an introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities,” said VanLandingham, who now teaches national security law at Southwestern Law School. “It absolutely triggers the 48-hour notice requirement,” she said.

The fact American service members died in the operation raises further legal concerns, she said, as Congress is intended to decide when American lives are placed at risk in offensive wars.

Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., called the operation “dangerous” and “illegal,” saying Trump launched the attack “without authorization from Congress.”

“Speaker Johnson must immediately reconvene the House so we can pass a War Powers Resolution to rein in this unauthorized use of our military and taxpayer dollars,” Balint said.

Democratic leaders had already been moving toward a vote on a bipartisan war powers resolution in the days before the strikes, though the measure was widely expected to fail amid scattered Democratic opposition and near-unified Republican resistance.

From a legal perspective, VanLandingham said the attacks, dubbed Operation Epic Fury, present fewer ambiguities than prior U.S. strikes on Iran, including Operation Midnight Hammer on June 22, 2025, which the U.S. said targeted Iranian nuclear facilities.

Over time, administrations of both parties have steadily expanded unilateral war powers, VanLandingham said, effectively redefining what counts as war in constitutional terms and expanding the circumstances in which presidents can use force without congressional approval. She pointed to air campaigns under Presidents Barack Obama in Libya and Donald Trump in Syria as examples of operations the executive branch treated as falling short of war requiring congressional authorization.

Questions of International Law

The death toll for Operation Epic Fury is mounting, both among civilians and combatants. A strike on a girls’ primary school resulted in nearly 100 reported civilian casualties, and U.S. Central Command said three U.S. service members were killed in action and five seriously wounded. Several others service members sustained minor injuries, the command said, as combat operations continued across the region.

Video circulating on social media appeared to show large explosions near U.S. military installations in Bahrain, including the headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, though the extent of any damage was not immediately clear. The U.S. Navy did not respond to questions from The Intercept about whether any service members were killed or injured in Iran’s retaliatory strikes.

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U.S. casualties heighten the constitutional stakes, VanLandingham said, because the decision to place American troops in harm’s way has traditionally rested with Congress, which she described as the government’s closest representation of the American public.

“To say there’s no risk to U.S. troops … I wouldn’t call it naive. I’d call it a pure lie,” said Wes Bryant, a former Air Force special operations member who previously served as chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

Bryant said the scope of the strikes suggested major combat operations that could quickly tip toward large-scale conflict in a densely populated country, with predictable risks to both U.S. troops and civilians.

Bryant said the early casualty figures may not reflect the full risk if hostilities continue. “I’m surprised it’s only been three deaths,” he said. “It will be more if this continues and we lose the initial shock value.”

U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces successfully defended against hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks targeting American installations and reported minimal damage that did not disrupt base operations.

Early reports of successful Iranian strikes, if confirmed, could signal vulnerabilities in U.S. regional defenses, said analysts with the Eisenhower Media Network.

“If these reports are accurate, this should be very concerning to U.S. forces,” said Matt Hoh, a former Marine Corps captain and State Department official who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Iranian missiles and drones were able to breach U.S. defenses very early in the conflict.”

Hoh said early breaches of U.S. defenses, if confirmed, could reflect gaps in regional air defenses, evolving Iranian missile capabilities, or lessons Tehran has drawn from observing U.S. operations.

The Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain serves as the centerpiece of U.S. naval operations in the Persian Gulf, and any sustained threat to installations in the region could complicate American force posture and maritime security operations.

Also within range of Iran’s missile arsenal is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, one of the largest U.S.-operated airfields outside the United States and home to thousands of American personnel.

Iran had repeatedly warned it would target U.S. bases if attacked, said Karen U. Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and former Pentagon officer. The retaliation reflects “the behavior of a near-peer adversary” and marks a sharp contrast with the kinds of conflicts the United States has fought over the past three decades.

Iran is conventionally weaker than the United States but remains regionally dangerous through its large missile and drone arsenal and its ability to apply asymmetric pressure on U.S. forces. Recent reporting has also raised concerns about strain on U.S. naval interceptor stockpiles after heavy use in Middle East operations.

The risks extend beyond military escalation. Bryant said the opening strikes raise significant concerns about civilian harm and the risk of a broader regional conflict, particularly given the coordinated nature of the U.S.–Israel campaign.

“I really worry about the civilian harm that’s going to result if this becomes a prolonged conflict,” Bryant said. “Whatever happens … we own that.”

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Some national security analysts sharply questioned the administration’s humanitarian rationale for the strikes, noting that the threshold for unilateral presidential force is typically tied to imminent threats to the United States. Critics also argue that the administration’s broader domestic record — including policies affecting women’s bodily autonomy, aggressive immigration enforcement, and the detention of some government protesters — undercuts its stated moral justification for military action against Iran.

Bryant warned the risks could escalate quickly if the conflict expands beyond the opening air campaign, particularly given Iran’s military capabilities and regional proxy network.

“If we thought the insurgency was bad in Iraq or even Syria, wait until we enter Iran,” Bryant said.

U.S. officials have not announced any plans for ground operations in Iran, and analysts say the administration’s next steps remain uncertain.

Domestic Political Implications

Shortly after the strikes, Trump and his allies framed the operation through a domestic political lens, amplifying without evidence unsubstantiated claims that Iran interfered in the 2020 election.

For VanLandingham, the rhetoric stood out not just for its substance but also its timing ahead of midterm elections.

“What’s chilling is that he’s tying this attack against another country to domestic politics as a way to further consolidate power over his base and potentially link the use of force to domestic use of force this fall,” she said.

Viewed in that light, she said, the seemingly ridiculous claim appears more strategic.

“It’s mind-boggling. But when you look at it, it makes rational sense for him to say, ‘I’m doing this because I’m taking out everyone who stood in my way in 2020,’” VanLandingham said. “He is linking it to his own domestic grievances because he is laying the groundwork, I strongly believe, to use the U.S. military improperly.”

Bryant, who previously led civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, said the administration’s framing echoes familiar patterns in which when governments blur external threats with internal political messaging. He pointed to recent violence against protesters and legal observers in Minnesota as a parallel, albeit on a smaller scale, to Iran’s brutal crackdowns on dissent.

“Everything that Trump is accusing the Iranian regime of doing, he has done,” Bryant said.

Other national security analysts warned the messaging could have concrete domestic consequences if wartime authorities are invoked inside the United States. Trump has previously threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to protests over ICE operations in Minneapolis.

“This is the kind of messaging that will allow the administration to cite national security if they attempt to nationalize elections, have federal law enforcement, like ICE, patrol polling places, and enact executive orders or push legislation to strip Americans of voting rights and other civil liberties,” Hoh said.

Federal law enforcement has already signaled an elevated posture. FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X that counterterrorism teams are operating at heightened readiness.

“Our Joint Terrorism Task Forces throughout the country are working 24/7 to address and disrupt any potential threats to the homeland,” Patel wrote.

The post Trump’s Iran Attack Was Illegal, Former U.S. Military Officials Allege appeared first on The Intercept.

The scale of the Trump administration’s plans to warehouse human beings is hard to fathom. Here’s one way to put it in perspective: On a given day, New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex holds approximately 7,000 detainees. President Donald Trump’s regime, which is currently holding a record 70,000 people in immigration detention, now plans to develop a network of Rikers-sized concentration camps for immigrants nationwide.

The Department of Homeland Security is racing to buy up and convert two-dozen-plus warehouses into mass detention centers for immigrants, some capable of holding up to 10,000 people. According to documents released last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expects to spend $38.3 billion acquiring warehouses across the country and retrofitting them to collectively hold nearly 100,000 beds.

“If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they’ll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight,” noted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “The federal government hasn’t operated a prison camp inside the United States that large since Japanese Internment.”

When Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, last week announced that ICE’s “surge” in Minnesota would wind down, it marked a significant victory for the thousands of Minnesotans who have fought back against the federal forces terrorizing their state; resistance forced the Trump regime to change its plans. But nothing is ramping down when it comes to the deportation machine at large. When billions of dollars are spent to turn industrial spaces into detention camps, authoritarian desires meet market logic: The warehouses must be filled.

Local communities are nonetheless pushing back, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable federal forces with unlimited funding, abetted by powerful private interests who stand to gain from this carceral build-out.

As The Appeal reported last week, investors on a recent quarterly earnings call for private prison giant CoreCivic were worried that ICE’s unprecedented detention numbers were still not high enough. “I think people thought we’d be at that 100,000 level,” one caller reportedly said of the number of people currently held by ICE. “We’re at a little over 70,000.”

The company’s CEO stressed the major financial gains made though Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign and assured callers that the drawdown in Minnesota did not, in his view, portend “meaningful changes in enforcement style or approach.” That is to say, the racial profiling, cruelty, and mass roundups will continue, and private prison corporations like CoreCivic and Geo Group, alongside giants of surveillance infrastructure like Palantir, will collectively make billions from DHS spending. What author John Ganz has called “ICE’s function as an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob” — now with 22,000 officers — will also continue to be handsomely funded.

None of this is a surprise: When Congress passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocating ICE nearly $80 billion in multiyear funding, the administration made clear that money would be no object in enacting its project of ethnic cleansing and the expansion of the carceral system for targeted groups of immigrants and opponents. The warehouse purchases and related government contracts have, as The Lever reported, been a boon for Trump-connected real estate brokers and a bailout for “commercial real estate owners, who have struggled to sell their properties over the past year under the weight of macroeconomic headwinds and Trump’s tariff war.”

Economic stimulus based in ethnic cleansing would, of course, be despicable. But the Trump regime can’t even pretend this dizzyingly expensive project serves its own base. Only a small number of interested businesses and parties stand to gain. Meanwhile, as public resistance in both Republican- and Democratic-majority locales has already made clear, everyone else stands to lose. And hundreds of thousands of our immigrant neighbors stand to lose the most.

Trump’s mass deportation plan is estimated by the libertarian Cato Institute to have a fiscal cost of up to $1 trillion over a decade. And the losses? Due to the loss of workers across U.S. industries, the American Immigration Council found that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by 4.2 to 6.8 percent. It’s money that could be spent improving our collective lives. The $45 billion total budgeted for ICE detention centers is nearly four times the $12.8 billion the U.S. spent on new affordable housing in 2023. The huge budget for ICE mega warehouses reflects the most Trumpian mix: cronyist dealmaking in service of white nationalism.

The historian Adam Tooze has at various points recalled the words of economist John Maynard Keynes, who said in 1942 that “anything we can actually do we can afford.” Keynes was arguing that sovereign governments have extraordinary capacity to mobilize finances; the constraints lie elsewhere. Tooze has stressed that the limits of what a government can “actually do” are political, technical, material, and logistical — and extremely complicated as such. But, he points out, they are not budgetary. The Trump administration has made clear that it can afford anything when it comes to the rounding up and brutalizing of immigrants and antifascist protesters. That, however, does not mean the government can actually do everything it wants.

A number of warehouse owners, facing local backlash and pressure, have already backed out of lucrative sales to ICE. According to Bloomberg, Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison’s company announced that a transaction to sell a 550,000-square-foot warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, “will not be proceeding.” The company made clear that the move was political, saying, “We understand that the conversation around immigration policy and enforcement is particularly heated, and has become much more so over the past few weeks. We respect that this issue is deeply important to many people.”

For ICE, money is no object. But constant and relentless public protest, blockades, boycotts, and local government pressure significantly lessen the appeal for warehouse owners and potential contractors to do this fascist work.

Deals for warehouses near Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, and Byhalia, Missouri, have also fallen through. In each case, warehouse owners faced protests and mounting pressure. In some jurisdictions, backlash to ICE warehouses have come in the worst sort of NIMBY variety — including complaints from Republicans who do not want immigrant detainees brought to their town en masse. Concerns about water and sewage systems and economic strains in remote areas also abound. But if local self-interest becomes a barrier to the expansion of Trump’s deportation regime, that’s no bad thing, given the urgent need to hold back Trump’s deeply unpopular but otherwise unrestrained forces.

We need every possible limit on what Trump and his loyalists can actually do.

The post Can Trump’s Plan for Warehouse Immigrant Detention Camps Be Stopped? appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., questioned how the social media company approved an ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security featuring the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which is popular in neo-Nazi spaces. The lawmakers urged Meta to cease running the ad campaign on its social media platforms and asked whether the company would commit to ending its digital advertising partnership with DHS.

The Intercept was among the first to report ICE’s use of the song in a paid post recruiting for the agency, which published shortly after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. In their letter, the members of Congress cite The Intercept’s reporting.

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The lawmakers also questioned imagery contained in the ads that extremism researchers said echoes far-right “reclamation” narratives long associated with racist violence and accelerationist ideology.

“Businesses are not on the sideline at this moment and it is important they also know how they are contributing to what is happening in Minnesota and across the country,” said Balint. “A lack of change is not neutrality but complicity.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security, which has not responded to the congressional letter, defended its recruitment messaging in a statement to The Intercept.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected comparisons between the ads and extremist propaganda, arguing that criticism of the campaign amounted to an attack on patriotic expression.

“By Reps. Becca Balint and Pramila Jayapal’s standards, every American who posts patriotic imagery on the Fourth of July should be cancelled and labeled a Nazi,” McLaughlin said. “Not everything you dislike is ‘Nazi propaganda.’ DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on our historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”

McLaughlin also accused critics of “manufacturing outrage” and said the controversy had contributed to a rise in assaults against ICE personnel. “It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she said.

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McLaughlin did not provide evidence to support the claim. Similar assertions by the Trump administration about sharp increases in assaults against immigration agents are not reflected in publicly available data.

The most controversial ad in the campaign was a paid DHS recruitment post that published less than two days after the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. It paired immigration enforcement footage with the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots. Popular in neo-Nazi online spaces, the song includes lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat.” In the ad, it played as a cowboy rode a horse with a B-2 Spirit bomber flying overhead.

After publicly rebuking allegations that the song had neo-Nazi ties, DHS later removed the recruitment post from its official Instagram account, according to a review of the page and reporting by other outlets. The department did not announce the deletion or respond to questions about why it was taken down. DHS did not address the song’s documented circulation in white nationalist spaces or its appearance in the manifesto of a 2023 mass shooter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project has separately documented the song’s origins and circulation within organized white nationalist networks. The song was written and performed by Pine Tree Riots, a group affiliated with the Männerbund, which the SPLC has previously identified as a white nationalist organization. Hatewatch also found that the song has circulated widely in extremist online spaces and appeared in recruitment efforts by far-right groups.

Balint and Jayapal framed the controversy as bigger than a single post. They accuse Meta of profiting from a large-scale digital recruitment campaign relying on themes that would stand out to white nationalists. They questioned what safeguards existed to prevent extremist-linked content from appearing in government advertising, and whether recent changes to Meta’s hate-speech policies allowed the company to run the ads.

The letter details the scale of the recruitment push. According to the lawmakers, DHS spent more than $2.8 million on recruitment ads across Facebook and Instagram between March and December of last year, and paid Meta an additional $500,000 beginning in August. During the first three weeks of last fall’s government shutdown, ICE spent $4.5 million on paid media campaigns, the lawmakers write. The letter also cites reporting showing DHS spent more than $1 million over a 90-day period on “self-deportation” ads targeted at users interested in Latin music, Spanish as a second language, and Mexican cuisine.

Balint and Jayapal argue that such spending has been made possible by an influx of funding for ICE. A decade ago, ICE’s annual budget totaled less than $6 billion. Under new federal appropriations enacted last year, the agency has roughly $85 billion at its disposal, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States. According to analysts cited by lawmakers, its budget is bigger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.

The lawmakers pointed to what they described as a deterioration in internal oversight and hiring standards, including waived age limits, large signing bonuses, and reports of recruits being rushed into the field without adequate training. They argued that the combination of rapid expansion, aggressive recruitment, and weak platform safeguards poses risks to public safety.

“It is important that we scrutinize how that funding is being used, particularly if it is being used to attract certain demographics for hiring while pushing others to the periphery, or out of our society,” Balint said.

The letter asks Meta to disclose the scope and duration of its advertising agreement with DHS, provide any communications related to the recruitment ads, and explain what restrictions apply to paid government content under its policies.

Meta’s Community Standards prohibit content that promotes dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, or calls for exclusion or segregation targeting people based on protected characteristics, including race, ethnicity, national origin, and immigration status.

The policies also state that Meta removes content historically linked to intimidation or offline violence and applies heightened scrutiny during periods of increased tension or recent violence involving targeted groups. The members of Congress questioned whether those standards were enforced consistently for paid government advertising tied to DHS recruitment.

“There are a whole host of safeguards that should be considered,” Balint said. “But at a minimum, they need to abide by their own community guidelines.”

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Balint said the inquiry is ongoing and could expand beyond the recruitment campaign itself. “I am certainly going to continue looking into how private groups are profiting off of or contributing to the untenable dynamic with ICE that is putting our communities at risk,” she said.

Since the recruitment campaign became the subject of public scrutiny, DHS and ICE have not made additional posts using the same song, imagery, or music across their official social media accounts.

The post Lawmakers Call on Meta to Stop Running ICE Ad Featuring Neo-Nazi Anthem appeared first on The Intercept.

With masked paramilitary forces grabbing nonwhite people from the streets and shooting civilians with impunity, it can be difficult to keep focus on all the other ways Republicans are entrenching a fascist status quo nationwide. For trans people, however, the legislative and policy assaults, which have been escalating red states for nearly a decade, are only getting worse — and, as ever, drawing all too little concern from Democratic leaders.

Just last week, the Kansas legislature passed some of the most far-reaching measures to push trans and gender-nonconforming people out of public life to date. Bathroom bans that bar trans people from restrooms aligned with their gender identity have become grimly common; over 20 states have such a law on the books. But Kansas’s new anti-trans bathroom bill adds a dangerous twist: a bounty hunter provision.

The law would permit private citizens to sue and seek monetary reward based on claiming to encounter a trans person in the bathroom. That’s on top of some of the harshest punishments of any existing bathroom bans, such as criminal charges, steep fines and even jail time.

As journalist and trans rights advocate Erin Reed first reported, the bill’s vague language means that its reach could extend beyond public buildings — the remit of most bathroom bans around the country.

“As written, it would not only be the first bathroom bounty law to target transgender people directly, but also the first to extend a bathroom ban into private spaces,” noted Reed, “effectively creating the nation’s first private bathroom ban if enacted by empowering bounty hunters to search for trans people in bathrooms.”

The language of the bill, while vague, says that any person who alleges to be “aggrieved” by the presence of a trans person they encounter in a restroom facility can file a civil suit against that individual for “damages” of at least $1,000.

Kansas Republicans rushed through the bathroom ban, skirting public comment by essentially sneaking the bill into another piece of legislation aimed at denying trans people correct government IDs. The ID legislation is in and of itself extreme: it would invalidate driver’s licenses, government IDs, and even birth certificates that don’t list a person’s sex as assigned at birth.

The bill would require trans people to surrender their correctly identifying driver’s license or risk a misdemeanor offense for driving with a invalid license. Trans Kansans would thus have to choose between carrying identification with their assigned sex at birth — inviting potentially further harassment and violence in public — or forgoing aspects of public life entirely. It’s a policy in line with the Trump administration’s move to stop issuing accurate passports to trans Americans.

The bathroom bounty hunter ban was then layered on top of the ID law in a so-called “gut and go” maneuver.

The twin bills passed both the state House and Senate with over two-thirds of the vote, given the significant Republican majority — enough to override a veto from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

“Transgender people are already vulnerable to violence, especially in restrooms, and this bill layers prospective physical violence on top of the existing privacy violation of forced changes to identification documents,” said Logan DeMond, director of policy and research at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, in a statement.

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The fondness of Trumpian Republicans for bounty hunter laws comes as no surprise, recalling the dark legacies of Fugitive Slave Act laws and Jim Crow civilian surveillance. Now, whether criminalizing abortions, rounding up immigrants, or policing gender expression, far-right leaders and think tanks embrace vigilante violence as a key mechanism of enforcement. The aim is to produce a climate of distrust and terror.

Anti-trans zealots have been harassing people they believe to be trans — including multiple incidents involving cis women — even without the promise of financial payoff. The Kansas legislation only “turbocharges,” as Reed put it, the violent policing of access to public life.

“I have sat here for five and a half hours and listened to this entire room debate my humanity and my ability to participate in the most basic functions of society,” said Kansas Democratic state Rep. Abi Boatman, who is the only trans lawmaker in the state, when the new legislation was debated. “I hope none of you have to ever sit through something like that.”

It should not need repeating that it is trans people who overwhelmingly face harassment and violence in bathroom facilities; the framing of bathroom bills as a question of cis women’s safety has always been a bunk excuse to enforce gender conformism. It should also be obvious that any laws encouraging the surveillance and control of our bodies, particularly with women’s bodies as the site of paranoiac anti-trans obsession, make all women less safe. And as with any such laws, it is always Black trans and cis women who face the worst scrutiny.

We should not forget that just one decade ago, the Christian far-right groups that pushed the first round of model bathroom bills into statehouses largely failed. Politicians faced huge public backlash; the state of North Carolina faced massive boycotts in response to its 2016 bathroom bill. But conservative think tanks got to work, refocused manipulative messaging around children and women’s sports, and astroturfed the issue to activate the right-wing base. In the following years, anti-trans legislation swept through statehouses.

All the while, far too many Democratic leaders, like the serpentine California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have been willing to throw trans people under the bus. While bathroom bills have been the preserve of Republican-led states, Democrats with national standing have roundly failed in supporting the sort of pressure campaigns that gave state lawmakers pause for thought 10 years ago. Bathroom bans now abound, and ​27 states have enacted laws or policies restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.

Within such a context, there’s little wonder that legislation is only becoming harsher and crueler. And while the attack on trans existence is part of a longer history of Christian right pro-natalism and attacks on bodily autonomy, it is not so long ago that public pressure made attacks on trans rights a political liability.

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It is our responsibility to make it so again — particularly for Democrats claiming to represent a united anti-fascist front. And, above all, to ensure we support community-based networks working in solidarity with trans adults and children around the country so that they can have health care, work, learn, socialize, and share in public life without scrutiny or challenge. These are the minimal conditions for freedom — apparently too much to ask for some Democrats.

The post An Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill With a Cruel New Twist appeared first on The Intercept.

Included in the search and seizure warrant for the raid on Natanson’s home is a section titled “Biometric Unlock,” which explicitly authorized law enforcement personnel to obtain Natanson’s phone and both hold the device in front of her face and to forcibly use her fingers to unlock it. In other words, a judge gave the FBI permission to attempt to bypass biometrics: the convenient shortcuts that let you unlock your phone by scanning your fingerprint or face.

It is not clear if Natanson used biometric authentication on her devices, or if the law enforcement personnel attempted to use her face or fingers to unlock her devices. Natanson and the Washington Post did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

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Natanson has not been charged with a crime. Investigators searched her home in connection with alleged communication between her and government contractor Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, who was initially charged with unlawfully retaining national defense information. Prosecutors recently added new charges including multiple counts of transmission of defense information to an unauthorized person. Attorneys for Perez-Lugones did not comment.

The warrant included a few stipulations limiting law enforcement personnel. Investigators were not authorized to ask Natanson details about what kind of biometric authentication she may have used on her devices. For instance, the warrant explicitly stated they could not ask Natanson which specific finger she uses for biometrics, if any. Although if Natanson were to voluntarily provide any such information, that would be allowed, according to the warrant.

Andrew Crocker, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept that while the EFF has “seen warrants that authorize police to compel individuals to unlock their devices using biometrics in the past,” the caveat mandating that the subject of the search cannot be asked for specifics about their biometric setup is likely influenced by recent case law. “Last year the D.C. Circuit held that biometric unlocking can be a form of ‘testimony’ that is protected by the 5th Amendment,” Crocker said. This is especially the case when a person is “forced to demonstrate which finger unlocks the device.”

Crocker said that he “would like to see courts treat biometric locks as equivalent to password protection from a constitutional standpoint. Your constitutional right against self-incrimination should not be dependent on technical convenience or lack thereof.”

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Activists and journalists have long been cautioned to disable biometrics in specific situations where they might face heightened risk of losing control of their phones, say when attending a protest or crossing a border. Martin Shelton, deputy director of digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation, advised “journalists to disable biometrics when they expect to be in a situation where they expect a possible search.”

Instead of using biometrics, it’s safest to unlock your devices using an alphanumeric passphrase (a device protected solely by a passcode consisting of numbers is generally easier to access). There are numerous other safeguards to take if there’s a possibility your home may be raided, such as turning off your phone before going to bed, which puts it into an encrypted state until the next time it’s unlocked.

That said, there are a few specific circumstances when biometric-based authentication methods might make sense from a privacy perspective — such as in a public place where someone might spy on your passphrase over your shoulder.

The post Washington Post Raid Is a Frightening Reminder: Turn Off Your Phone’s Biometrics Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Less than an hour before, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had posted a photo of the exact same scene, but in Noem’s version Levy Armstrong appeared composed, not crying in the least.

Seeking to determine if the White House version of the photo had been altered using artificial intelligence tools, we turned to Google’s SynthID — a detection mechanism that Google claims is able to discern whether an image or video was generated using Google’s own AI. We followed Google’s instructions and used its AI chatbot, Gemini, to see if the image contained SynthID forensic markers.

The results were clear: The White House image had been manipulated with Google’s AI. We published a story about it.

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After posting the article, however, subsequent attempts to use Gemini to authenticate the image with SynthID produced different outcomes.

In our second test, Gemini concluded that the image of Levy Armstrong crying was actually authentic. (The White House doesn’t even dispute that the image was doctored. In response to questions about its X post, a spokesperson said, “The memes will continue.”)

In our third test, SynthID determined that the image was not made with Google’s AI, directly contradicting its first response.

At a time when AI-manipulated photos and videos are growing inescapable, these inconsistent responses raise serious questions about SynthID’s reliability to tell fact from fiction.

Initial SynthID Results

Google describes SynthID as a digital watermarking system. It embeds invisible markers into AI-generated images, audio, text or video created using Google’s tools, which it can then detect — proving whether a piece of online content is authentic.

“The watermarks are embedded across Google’s generative AI consumer products, and are imperceptible to humans — but can be detected by SynthID’s technology,” says a page on the site for DeepMind, Google’s AI division.

Google presents SynthID as having what in the realm of digital watermarking is known as “robustness” — it claims to be able to detect the watermarks even if an image undergoes modifications, such as cropping or compression. Therefore, an image manipulated with Google’s AI should contain detectable watermarks even if it has been saved multiple times or posted on social media.

Google steers those who want to use SynthID toward its Gemini AI chatbot, which they can prompt with questions about the authenticity of digital content.

“Want to check if an image or video was generated, or edited, by Google AI? Ask Gemini,” the SynthID landing page says.

We decided to do just that.

We saved the image file that the official White House account posted on X, bearing the filename G_R3H10WcAATYht.jfif, and uploaded it to Gemini. We asked whether SynthID detected the image had been generated with Google’s AI.

To test SynthID’s claims of robustness, we also uploaded a further cropped and re-encoded image, which we named imgtest2.jpg.

Finally, we uploaded a copy of the photo where Levy Armstrong was not crying, as previously posted by Noem. (In the above screenshot, Gemini refers to Noem’s photo as signal-2026-01-22-122805_002.jpeg because we downloaded it from the Signal messaging app).

“I’ve analyzed the images you provided,” wrote Gemini. “Based on the results from SynthID, all or part of the first two images were likely generated or modified with Google AI.”

“Technical markers within the files imgtest2.jpg and G_R3H10WcAATYht.jfif indicate the use of Google’s generative AI tools to alter the subject’s appearance,” the bot wrote. It also identified the version of the image posted by Noem as appearing to “be the original photograph.”

With confirmation from Google that its SynthID system had detected hidden forensic watermarks in the image, we reported in our story that the White House had posted an image that had been doctored with Google’s AI.

This wasn’t the only evidence the White House image wasn’t real; Levy Armstrong’s attorney told us that he was at the scene during the arrest and that she was not at all crying. The White House also openly described the image as a meme.

A Striking Reversal

A few hours after our story published, Google told us that they “don’t think we have an official comment to add.” A few minutes after that, a spokesperson for the company got back to us and said they could not replicate the result we got. They asked us for the exact files we uploaded. We provided them.

The Google spokesperson then asked, “Were you able to replicate it again just now?”

We ran the analysis again, asking Gemini to see if SynthID detected the image had been manipulated with AI. This time, Gemini failed to reference SynthID at all — despite the fact we followed Google’s instructions and explicitly asked the chatbot to use the detection tool by name. Gemini now claimed that the White House image was instead “an authentic photograph.”

It was a striking reversal considering Gemini previously said that the image contained technical markers indicating the use of Google’s generative AI. Gemini also said, “This version shows her looking stoic as she is being escorted by a federal agent” — despite our question addressing the version of the image depicting Levy Armstrong in tears.

Less than an hour later, we ran the analysis one more time, prompting Gemini to yet again use SynthID to check whether the image had been manipulated with Google’s AI. Unlike the second attempt, Gemini invoked SynthID as instructed. This time, however, it said, “Based on an analysis using SynthID, this image was not made with Google AI, though the tool cannot determine if other AI products were used.”

Google did not answer repeated questions about this discrepancy. In response to inquiries, the spokesperson continued to ask us to share the specific phrasing of the prompt that resulted in Gemini recognizing a SynthID marker in the White House image.

We didn’t store that language, but told Google it was a straightforward prompt asking Gemini to check whether SynthID detected the image as being generated with Google’s AI. We provided Google with information about our prompt and the files we used so the company could check its records of our queries in its Gemini and SynthID logs.

“We’re trying to understand the discrepancy,” said Katelin Jabbari, a manager of corporate communications at Google. Jabbari repeatedly asked if we could replicate the initial results, as “none of us here have been able to.”

After further back and forth following subsequent inquiries, Jabbari said, “Sorry, don’t have anything for you.”

Bullshit Detector?

Aside from Google’s proprietary tool, there is no easy way for users to test whether an image contains a SynthID watermark. That makes it difficult in this case to determine whether Google’s system initially detected the presence of a SynthID watermark in an image without one, or if subsequent tests missed a SynthID watermark in an image that actually contains one.

As AI become increasingly pervasive, the industry is trying to put behind its long history of being what researchers call a “bullshit generator.”

Supporters of the technology argue tools that can detect if something is AI will play a critical role establishing the common truth amid the pending flood of media generated or manipulated by AI. They point to their successes, as with one recent example where SynthID debunked an arrest photo of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro flanked by federal agents as an AI-generated image. The Google tool said the photo was bullshit.

If AI-detection technology fails to produce consistent responses, though, there’s reason to wonder who will call bullshit on the bullshit detector.

The post Google’s AI Detection Tool Can’t Decide if Its Own AI Made Doctored Photo of Crying Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

News of the investigation broke when the Washington Post reported that investigators seized the work laptop, personal laptop, phone, and smartwatch of journalist Hannah Natanson, who has covered the Trump administration’s impact on the federal government and recently wrote about developing more than 1,000 government sources. A Justice Department official told the Post that Perez-Lugones had been messaging Natanson to discuss classified information. The affidavit does not allege that Perez-Lugones disseminated national defense information, only that he unlawfully retained it. The Justice Department and the Washington Post did not respond to request for comment.

The affidavit provides insight into how Perez-Lugones allegedly attempted to exfiltrate information from a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, and the unexpected way his employer took notice.

According to the FBI, Perez-Lugones printed a classified intelligence report, albeit in a roundabout fashion. It’s standard for workplace printers to log certain information, such as the names of files they print and the users who printed them. In an apparent attempt to avoid detection, Perez-Lugones, according to the affidavit, took screenshots of classified materials, cropped the screenshots, and pasted them into a Microsoft Word document.

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By using screenshots instead of text, there would be no record of a classified report printed from the specific workstation. (Depending on the employer’s chosen data loss prevention monitoring software, access logs might show a specific user had opened the file and perhaps even tracked whether they took screenshots).

Perez-Lugones allegedly gave the file an innocuous name, “Microsoft Word – Document1,” that might not stand out if printer logs were later audited.

In this case, however, the affidavit reveals that Perez-Lugones’s employer could see not only the typical metadata stored by printers, such as file names, file sizes, and time of printing, but it could also view the actual contents of the printed materials — in this case, prosecutors say, the screenshots themselves. As the affidavit points out, “Perez-Lugones’ employer can retrieve records of print activity on classified systems, including copies of printed documents.”

It’s unclear which printer management software was used by Perez-Lugones’s employer. But several commercial systems allow workplace administrators to view the contents of printed documents.

For instance, PaperCut software offers a print archive feature that, when enabled, allows system administrators to browse the contents of all documents printed or scanned through its software system.

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Whenever someone presses print in a network outfitted with this printer monitoring software, the program creates a clandestine copy of the file and generates an image of page every printed. This happens in the background — users might be entirely unaware that the contents of printed files are archived. Workplace administrators can choose how long to retain copies of the documents and how much space the documents can take up.

Aside from attempting to surreptitiously print a document, Perez-Lugones, investigators say, was also seen allegedly opening a classified document and taking notes, looking “back and forth between the screen corresponding the classified system and the notepad, all the while writing on the notepad.” The affidavit doesn’t state how this observation was made, but it strongly suggests a video surveillance system was also in play.

Perez-Lugones’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.

The post FBI’s Washington Post Investigation Shows How Your Printer Can Snitch on You appeared first on The Intercept.

How many people will the Trump administration deport this year? Will Gaza suffer from mass famine? These are serious questions with lives at stake.

They’re also betting propositions that two buzzy startups will let you gamble on.

The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. One can now find a place to bet, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced.

Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds.

If you believe the hype, the promise of these companies isn’t in the money they take in as bookkeepers. They argue that the bets they collect offer a more accurate forecast of the future than traditional institutions. (In fact, they’ll tell you that you’re not betting at all but trading on futures contracts — a distinction that feels so tenuous it’s hard to justify with a full-throated explanation.)

This pitch has been especially enticing in the wake of the 2016 election, when polling missed the rise of Donald Trump, and its allure hasn’t faded as collective distrust of traditional institutions grows. But if the initial wave of social platforms — the Facebooks and Twitters of the world — fractured our sense of a shared reality, the predictive platforms are here to monetize the ruins.

Polymarket acknowledges the gravity of some of its more shocking propositions. It tells those who click on its more unsavory wagers: “The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today.” The app goes on say that “After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and 𝕏 could not.”

It might seem odd, then, that these very platforms have lately been signing deals to entrench themselves into mainstream news coverage. Earlier this month, Kalshi signed on as an exclusive partner to offer its betting wagers on CNN and CNBC. Polymarket signed a similar deal with Yahoo Finance last month. Time Magazine signed with a lesser known platform Galactic.

For publishers, prediction markets offer a salve for deteriorating trust in journalism. For betting markets, these partnerships could help legitimize an industry that was mostly illegal until a few months ago. The marriage of these two industries is perhaps best encapsulated by Time Magazine’s recent press release announcing its partnership with Galactic. Stuart Stott, CEO of Galactic, called the deal “a new normal for readers” that promises them “the opportunity to participate in where the future is going.” Time Magazine COO Mark Howard described the partnership as motivated by the company’s “ambition to continue to push the boundaries of traditional media to ensure our content and audience experience is compelling, accurate, and evolving.”

Set aside the extreme cynicism in the conceit that audiences need to bet on genocide in order to read about it — if accuracy and trust are a concern, these partnerships may end up doing the media more harm than good.

To understand why the prediction markets apps believe they’re a better forecaster of the future, one needs to understand their governing philosophy, the “wisdom of the crowd.” The theory goes: In a well-functioning market with a diverse group of participants, traders acting on different information and insights collectively arrive at the most accurate price — or, in this case, probability of an event happening. The market, in other words, will self-correct to the most accurate outcome.

Betting apps have at times delivered better accuracy than polling results. For example, while pollsters clocked last year’s presidential race as deadlocked in the days before the election, Polymarket gave Trump an edge at 58 percent.

But whether they are consistently better is a whole other story. Some initial analysis suggests that they might not be as accurate as these companies suggest. One study found that Kalshi’s political prediction markets beat chance 78 percent of the time during the final five weeks of the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, compared with 67 percent accuracy on Polymarket. PredicIt — one of the older betting markets run by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, that has more limits on how much money users can bet — came out on top at 93 percent. But even PredicIt got the 2016 election as wrong as the polls, and in the days preceding the last election suggested a slight edge for Kamala Harris that obviously didn’t materialize.

That same study found that when tracking the market for the same event, prediction markets often reacted in very different ways to the same information during the same time frame — something that wouldn’t happen if the markets were as efficient forecasters as its pushers suggest. “Markets are composed of humans, not omniscient rational forecasters,” the paper’s authors write.

One reason why Kalshi or Polymarket may struggle with accuracy hinges on who makes up the crowd. On November 6, 2024, in a rush of people collecting their post-election winnings, Kalshi saw a peak of around 400,000 users, and Polymarket counted about 100,000 less, according to a Fortune review; by June, their daily active user numbers had fallen over 90 percent to 27,000–32,000 and 5,000–10,000, respectively. While they don’t publish much information about their demographics, by some accounts their userbases tend to skew in the direction of crypto bros.

That can make these platforms just as inaccurate in edge cases, when they lack the requisite diversity to glean much wisdom about the real world. Consider the 2022 midterm elections: Up until election night, the major prediction markets “failed spectacularly” and “projected outcomes for key races that turned out to be completely wrong,” according to one expert analysis.

While polls are far from perfect, prediction markets are also more prone to manipulation than they’d have you believe. And this can give deep-pocketed political actors another vessel for information warfare.

Kalshi was even embroiled in a legal battle with federal regulators as recently as this summer for this very reason. In its brief, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission pointed toward a “spectacular manipulation” on Polymarket involving “a group of traders betting heavily on Vice President Harris.” “Unwitting participants may believe Kalshi’s contracts are less susceptible to manipulation or misinformation because they are on a regulated exchange, but this should heighten concern for the public interest, not allay it,” the CFTC continued.

One study found that trades intended to manipulate the market could have an impact as much as 60 days from the original trade. It also suggested the best way to game a prediction market was by making repeated bets of “varying sizes” on a single market to skew odds.

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According to the CFTC, when the agency brought up the possibility of this type of election interference, Kalshi argued the regulator could just use its enforcement authority against bad actors. But as the agency noted: “The CFTC cannot remediate damage to election integrity after the fact.” Despite these grave concerns, since Trump took office and has hired crypto insiders to oversee the CFTC, the agency has largely dropped lawsuits and investigations against Polymarket and Kalshi.

The major betting platforms have also aligned themselves with Trump’s inner orbit.

Both Polymarket and Kalshi count Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser. His venture capital firm has invested in Polymarket, whose founder Shayne Coplan has framed investigations against his company as politically motivated attacks by the outgoing Biden administration.

One doesn’t have to look far to see how the company’s positionality in the Trumpverse translated into what very well could be election interference. Shortly before election day in New York last month, Polymarket ran a questionable advertisement featuring an AI-generated Zohran Mamdani looking tearful with the headline: “BREAKING: Mamdani’s odds collapse in NYC Mayoral Election.” As this ad ran, however, Polymarket’s platform didn’t show Mamdani’s odds collapsing. Whether Polymarket intended to bait users into betting more, or to dissuade Mamdani voters ahead of Election Day, is unclear. What is clear is that for a platform partnering with a news organization, a commitment to veracity does not appear to be its first priority.

The first priority appears to be growing the number of customers. That’s likely why these betting apps are now trying to team up with major broadcasters and publications: Reporting shows that both Kalshi and Polymarket are losing bettors, which stands to hurt their bottom lines and make their predictions worse.

Whether deals between betting apps and news outlets will help either industry is an open question. But these partnerships may just end up worsening our crisis of trust in an already-fraught information environment.

Update: January 3, 2026
This article has been updated to clarify which bets were offered on Kalshi and Polymarket, respectively.

The post These Apps Let You Bet on Deportations and Famine. Mainstream Media Is Eating It Up. appeared first on The Intercept.

Following the announcement that Netflix would buy the film and streaming businesses of Warner Bros for $72 billion, it has been difficult to find anyone who views this development as positive, with even Netflix investors displaying concern. Yet rampant speculation over what this might mean for consumers or even the art of cinema itself has risked overshadowing ominous portents for the workers who stand to lose the most — and what they might do in response. The entertainment industry may be brutal toward those it depends on, but it is particularly vulnerable to their power when they act together.

Predictably, much attention has been consumed by the hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery’s assets, launched by Paramount Skydance after its own attempt to acquire WBD was beaten out. Despite Paramount chief executive David Ellison arguing that his company would be more likely to gain the approval of federal competition regulators (and Ellison reportedly promising the White House to clownify CNN à la CBS under the Bari Weiss regime), a formal response from the WBD board this week advised shareholders to reject the offer, though Paramount may still return with a higher bid.

Regardless, a victory for either Netflix or Paramount would produce an industry-warping megacorporation that makes the word “monopoly” unavoidable. Whoever wins, we lose.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., warned on NPR’s Morning Edition that a Paramount–Warner Bros. merger could result in “one person who basically decides what movies are going to be made, what you’re going to see on your streaming service, and how much you’re going to have to pay for it.” Even President Donald Trump — not exactly renowned for his zeal for corporate propriety — commented that the combined size of Netflix and WBD “could be a problem.”

The most vociferous condemnation of a Warner Bros. merger has come from those unions representing the industries that would be most affected by it. Responding to the Netflix deal, a joint statement from the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East was unequivocal: “The world’s largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent.

“The outcome would eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers. … This merger must be stopped.”

In the fiscal year ending in December 2024, WBD had approximately 35,000 employees, while Netflix had 14,000 and Paramount 18,600 (though Paramount Skydance already began layoffs of 2,000 U.S. jobs in October). Many may share organized labor’s fears.

According to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, these fears are unfounded. “This deal is pro-consumer, pro-innovation, pro-worker, it’s pro-creator, it’s pro-growth,” Sarandos claimed in a call with Wall Street analysts last week, presumably before explaining why bridge purchases are a hot investment, and later fabulating at a UBS conference that the merger would be “a great way to create and protect jobs in the entertainment industry.”

Notably unconvinced — and with good reason — is Lindsay Dougherty, the Jimmy Hoffa-tattooed director of the Teamsters Motion Picture Division, who told The Hollywood Reporter that “in any merger or acquisition we’ve seen in our history, it hasn’t been good for workers.”

This is a plain statement of fact: Corporate mergers are rarely marked by employees getting a pay rise and reassured job security, as evidenced by the dramatic mass layoffs that followed Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox and AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, the latter of which led to roughly 45,000 job losses across AT&T’s media and telecom divisions. Both of these examples also demonstrate that, whatever regulatory scrutiny a Warner Bros. deal may face, it is far from assured that present antitrust enforcement is enough to prevent one.

One of the great lies of America is that monopolies are the one form of capitalism the republic will not tolerate. In truth, most victories against the practice throughout American history have quickly been revealed as hollow. Two decades after the Supreme Court famously ruled that Standard Oil be dissolved under the Sherman Antitrust Act and split into 34 companies, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey remained the largest oil producer in the world and a perennial nemesis of the anti-monopoly populist Huey Long, easily capable of avoiding serious regulation thanks to its bottomless resources.

Writing in The Verge this week, Charles Pulliam-Moore observed that “issues like layoffs and price hikes are an inevitable consequence of consolidation,” but it is important to remember that this is precisely the point of such consolidation. Monopolies are not naturally occurring; they are designed to maximize the outcomes desired by those who bring them into being.

With that in mind, the grim consequences of a Warner Bros. merger for entertainment workers should be understood as anything but accidental, particularly given the context of recent years. Instead, they should be seen as the latest manifestation of a sustained and regrettably successful push to immiserate and disempower the many thousands whose livelihoods depend upon those industries.

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One of the defining issues behind the strike by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America that paralyzed Hollywood for much of 2023 was the threat of AI, the dark allure of which was not difficult to discern. The fact that within the entertainment industry, this technology has thus far produced only laughable slop has not killed off the dream in some quarters that it might eventually do away with the need for human creativity, along with the awkward need to pay human beings. This is arguably why, despite their grudging acceptance of some safeguards and restrictions in order to bring the 2023 strikes to an end, Hollywood bosses refused to countenance prohibiting AI entirely. Along with the rest of the corporatocracy, the anti-worker potential they see in it is too great to resist.

Many of those concerned by what a Warner Bros. merger could do to the industry will be all too aware of its current unenviable state. There is a bleak irony in Netflix’s attempt to seize one of Hollywood’s oldest and most famous studios, as unemployment and precarity have exploded among entertainment workers thanks to a devastating labor contraction caused in large part by the streaming industry pulling back from Hollywood; August 2024 saw unemployment in film and TV reach 12.5 percent, triple the national unemployment rate. Meanwhile, those VFX workers lucky enough to be employed — and upon whom so many of the industry’s biggest shows and movies depend — regularly face impossible workloads and sweatshop-like conditions.

The goal of keeping workers hungry and desperate is as old as capitalism itself, and the goal of any monopoly is to create an entity so vast and powerful it can set the terms for the entire industry, leaving consumers with no other option, workers with no choice but to reckon with it, and unions helpless to defend them.

Contrary to what Sarandos and his peers would like you to believe, those in a position to play Monopoly with billions of actual dollars are not and have never been aligned with the interests of workers; the question of the hour is what can be done to protect them.

In the opinion of Variety’s senior media writer Gene Maddaus, unions and industry groups may not have the power to derail a Warner Bros. deal, but “the more noise you can kick up, the more opposition there is, the more political pressure is brought to bear.”

Yet as the history of Warner Bros. demonstrates, Hollywood is a union town, and organized labor will almost certainly be pondering what options it has beyond making noise. If the unions wish to stand strong for their members before layoffs or worse starts to bite, the strength and solidarity shown in 2023 may be needed once again.

The post The Netflix–Warner Bros. Merger Is a Broadside Attack on Workers appeared first on The Intercept.

On World AIDS Day 2025, humanity should be celebrating that there is a new shot available which offers six months of protection against the transmission of HIV, the virus which has already infected approximately 40 million living people and taken the lives of 44 million more.

Instead, public health workers are reeling from how President Donald Trump has helped HIV to circulate in more humans this year than last. The lethal ways the current U.S. health policy is harming the health and wealth of LGBTQ+ people worldwide will be felt for years, if not decades.

That’s because on the first day of his second term, Trump issued a stop-work order for all foreign aid and several orders that jeopardized the health outcomes of minority groups within the U.S.

The cuts were far-reaching yet highly specific. They reduced resources for short- and long-term health research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, universities, and community groups in the U.S. and around the world. Through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s gutting of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, the administration curtailed or ended funding for programs like the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, also known as PEPFAR.

These cuts disparately harmed several distinct but often overlapping populations: LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, sex workers, and people living with HIV/AIDS. They were swift, halting scientific trials and critical services within days (or even mere hours) of their posting on January 20, 2025. And they were significant, contributing to acute medical crises, hunger, homelessness, or even death.

In the U.S., cuts to federal spending resulted in the cancellation of over $125 million in National Institutes of Health grants for LGBTQ-focused health research.

Across the globe, cuts to USAID are disrupting life-saving services and forced community organizations to close across the globe. In South Africa, transgender people immediately lost access to gender-affirming care, leading to forced detransitioning, body dysmorphia, depression, and even suicide. In Lebanon, USAID cuts are causing job losses among humanitarian aid workers, impacting medical care and disrupting development programs. In Uganda, people living with HIV have lost access to condoms, lubricants, medication, and even to the food that USAID once provided to people living with the virus (as those who are starving simply cannot take antiretroviral medication).

While there are lethal exceptions, often, the effects of these cuts are unfolding gradually over time. HIV is a slow-acting virus, and the deadliness of halting its prevention and treatment now will take years or even more than a decade to manifest.

But it’s possible to take a toll of the damage nearly 11 months later today on World AIDS Day, to better understand the damage done and the suffering and death still to come. By early 2025, Politico reported that the administration canceled 86 percent of all USAID awards. One analysis found that 71 percent of HIV-related activities globally were terminated, including several HIV treatment awards and most HIV prevention programs. Overall, there has been a huge drop in the number of people starting antiretroviral medication and a decrease in viral load testing, which is crucial for monitoring the virus and preventing transmission. Without the infrastructure of monitoring, documentation, and care, HIV is transmitting unchecked in the dark.

And it’s also possible to get a pattern of HIV’s rise by talking to people doing the work on the ground (or who recently returned from it), people living with HIV, and people who are both. In the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Trump’s cuts are not merely harming these populations by reducing or eliminating services they receive; it is also harming them by taking away their jobs.

For instance, at one large university hospital we visited in the Midwestern United States, every single trans Black outreach worker — who had been integral in addressing high rates of HIV among Black LGBTQ+ Americans — had lost their job by May. In Europe, we found HIV nongovernmental organizations struggling not just with cuts from USAID, but cuts also dictated from Brussels and their own governments, as EU countries shifted money away from immigrants and foreign aid and toward NATO and Frontex, the ICE of the European Union.

In Lebanon, the executive director of an organization that helps some 600 people per month access HIV services and other care — including financial aid or case management for queer people experiencing violence — said they can no longer plan beyond eight months.

At a clinic in Uganda for “key populations” (the euphemism for LGBTQ+ people in a country where “aggravated homosexuality” is a capital offense), a medical assistant said the staff was cut from 15 to just four. When told that staff at a similar organization in South Africa had also been reduced to just four people — but from an original staff of 86 — one of the workers in Uganda could only laugh: “Wow, I thought we had it bad.”

The immediate consequences of the cuts are more economic than medical. For many, the cuts created an acute crisis of employment.

Research has long shown that people who identify as LGBTQ+ and/or living with HIV are prone to living in poverty. Often, the only work in the formal economy accessible to LGBTQ people — and trans women in particular — is to work in HIV prevention. Workers typically began as clients, then became volunteers, then stick with it for their career. These people often lack university or even secondary-school educations, and their jobs in HIV prevention are key to their economic and physical well-being, with salaries serving as lifelines for their families and economic engines in their communities.

And when the stop-work order came, they fell off an economic cliff that brought financial danger much faster than HIV ever could. This was true in every country where we reported.

In the United States, the cuts created a crisis of LGBTQ+ employment with a stark racial divide. In the same way DOGE’s cuts to the federal workforce overall disproportionately impacted Black women’s employment, the domestic health cuts particularly affected LGBTQ+ workers of color. Whereas the stop-work order led to job losses for Black and Latinx queer and trans Americans who worked directly with the public, the same has not always true for their supervisors who, in our findings and in scientific research about primary investigators and recipients of government health grants, were overwhelmingly white. Many of this latter group relied on data collected by Black and brown colleagues — in the U.S. and around the world — to do their work. But when those Black and brown colleagues lose their jobs, the white researchers were often able to take the data and pivot to other research projects or jobs.

This racialized LGBTQ+ employment crisis for front-line Black and brown workers is global. For instance, in Uganda, some health care workers who avoided layoffs had their salaries reduced by more than 50 percent, while other laid-off workers still go to their jobs just in exchange for food. In South Africa, one person at the Johannesburg HIV-prevention organization where staff was cut from 86 to just four people said, “If you go on Grindr,” a gay hookup app, “you will see many of my former colleagues offering services.” These HIV prevention workers had turned to for sex work — as there were no other jobs available to them.

Gutting the funding of HIV prevention globally harms workers in the short term, and humanity in the long run, by undermining a novel chance to curb or even end AIDS. In early 2025, trials were completed in some countries for lenacapavir, an injectable drug that can prevent HIV transmission for six months. Often hailed as a “breakthrough” medication, the potential benefits of lenacapavir were profound: If given to enough people for a period of time, it could diminish or potentially eradicate HIV. At the 13th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science in July, the World Health Organization recommended widespread use of lenacapavir as soon as possible.

Tragically, right as it was ready to begin rolling out, the Trump administration “decimated the infrastructure of global HIV prevention programs by its destruction of USAID,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. Despite the administration backing some small rollouts of the drug (about 500 doses of lenacapavir were delivered each to Zambia and Eswatini, which have a combined population of about 24 million people), Gonsalves described Trump’s “support for Lenacapivir” as “a hollow promise to millions who are at risk of HIV infection around the globe,” and “a drop in the bucket for a drug that can be manufactured by generic companies for $40 a year. We need the programs and services that Trump cut put back in place” — and for workers to be hired back to distribute this new drug to their peers.

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Over the last year, there has been an enormous decrease in those peer educators in Europe, Africa, and North America. USAID cuts took away money from their outreach in sex work “hotspots,” gay saunas, immigration processing centers, prisons, cruising grounds, food banks, and the many places where HIV lodges itself by people society has largely abandoned.

In Uganda, we witnessed an illustration of what USAID could be doing, what it’s no longer funding, and how people fighting HIV could be fighting it more effectively (without expending more human resources).

On November 21, the group Universal Love Alliance created a free STI clinic at a sex work motel in Kampala, where it gave condoms and lubricants to 200 sex workers, and tested 86 people for HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and urinary tract infections. People with urinary tract infections and syphilis were given antibiotics on the spot. There were three positive HIV cases detected (who were all enrolled into treatment immediately), six inconclusive cases (who were scheduled for follow-ups), and 77 negative cases.

Of those 77, about 60 began daily PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, and left with a 30-day supply of daily HIV prevention medication.

But the encounter revealed three warning signs.

First, most of the 15 people working were volunteers and were filling in for people who used to be paid to do this work.

Second, some of the boxes of supplies were marked “USAID: From the American People.” These were the last of their kind from a vanishing supply which will not be replaced. Universal Love Alliance is able to get antiretroviral drugs from a hospital for free, but it is buying all of its other supplies (including PrEP) with private donations, which limits how often it can offer such free clinics (at a time when such clinics funded by USAID and the CDC has ended).

And finally, while giving dozens of sex workers 30 pills PrEp is a good thing, if the team had been able to provide lenacapivr instead, “the six-month injectable PrEP, you could have potentially improved patient outcomes, increased adherence, and reduced the burden of HIV prevention,” Ahabwe Lenard, one of the lab technicians pointed out. With lenacapivr, Lenard and his colleagues would only have to try to find the people they’d treated again in 180 days instead of 30 — just two times a year, instead of 12 — which would free up everyone’s time and money (in a very poor country) while further reducing HIV.

But the benefits of this new drug will not be felt if it’s not available and if there aren’t trusted community health outreach workers to explain and administer it.

On World AIDS Day, it’s clear whose lives, employment, and health have been most affected by Trump’s budget cuts.

But make no mistake: Viruses travel, and Trump’s stop-work order has put the entire human race at higher risk for HIV and AIDS.

This essay is part of the series Global Stop Work Order, which will feature reporting about how the Trump administration’s cuts are affecting LGBTQ+ health and HIV/AIDS in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. The series is supported by a Pulitzer Center Global Reporting Grant and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post Trump Gutted AIDS Health Care at the Worst Possible Time appeared first on The Intercept.

For the second time in a decade, Washington has shut itself down in a budget standoff, and ordinary Americans are quite literally paying the price. As of this writing, the federal government is in its second month of a shutdown, and 42 million Americans who rely on food stamps got nothing on November 1 — the first time in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s 60-year history that benefits have been fully halted. Think about that: Millions of families woke up hungry because politicians in Washington couldn’t do their jobs. It’s nuts.

After public pleas of desperation and multiple court orders, the Trump administration was forced to turn the food back on, but it’s now appealing that ruling, whiplashing Americans facing acute scarcity and economic anxiety.  

We’ve started to accept these crises as routine, like a new season of some twisted reality show. With each episode, the fatigue and fury of being used as political pawns only deepens. But this shutdown is different in a way. For the first time in modern American history, its leader is intentionally starving his own people.

In the United States, federal shutdowns have become de facto political theater — a reckless game of chicken that recurs with grim regularity. Since 1976, Congress has triggered 20 funding gaps resulting in 10 full or partial shutdowns, with the longest stretching 35 days. What was once unthinkable has become almost seasonal. Autumn rolls around, and Americans brace for the familiar countdown to chaos: Will our representatives fund the government, or take it hostage?

The current saga began like so many before it: a clash of priorities and a collapse of governance. House Republicans pushed their budget cuts that would imperil health care; Senate Democrats insisted they would only vote to pass a budget that extended tax credits on health care and reversed Medicaid cuts. Republicans lack the needed majority to have their way and refuse to compromise with Democrats. Neither would blink, so on October 1, the lights went out. Offices shuttered. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers were sent home or ordered to work without pay. Lawmakers gave floor speeches and media soundbites, and went to politicking. But behind the grandstanding, real families immediately began to hurt.

To many on Capitol Hill, this is all just part of the show. A shutdown is treated as a leverage move, a stunt to score ideological points or appease extremist donors. In 2013, one senator read Dr. Seuss on the Senate floor during a shutdown, as if it were storytime instead of a national crisis. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump quipped that unpaid federal workers should encourage his shutdown tactics, while his commerce secretary mused that he didn’t understand why unpaid workers were visiting food banks at all.

These people behind mahogany desks don’t feel the flames they fan. They still draw their salaries — yes, members of Congress still get paid during a shutdown — while a janitor or a park ranger loses theirs. The disconnect would be darkly funny if it weren’t so brutal. From the comfort of cushy offices, political strategists are already gaming out the next confrontation, like it’s a chess match.

No group of Americans has been more cynically weaponized in this standoff than those who depend on SNAP. This isn’t some fringe handout; it’s the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, serving working-poor families, children, seniors, and people with disabilities. Shutting down the government has put these Americans directly in the crosshairs. When November arrived, nearly 42 million people who count on SNAP to eat were told there was no money for food assistance. Despite access to a $5 billion emergency fund that the Trump administration refused to disburse, the program for the first time ever simply stopped.

Food aid quickly became a bargaining chip to extract concessions. Trump (back in office and seemingly emboldened by chaos) outright threatened hungry Americans on social media, declaring that benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government … and not before!” In other words: We’ll let your children starve until we get our way. Trump is using food as a weapon, and he’s hardly hiding it.

Democratic leaders, for their part, tried a symbolic move to fund SNAP during the shutdown — only to be blocked by the Republican Senate majority, who accused them of political stunt-making. “Kids and families are not poker chips or hostages,” Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley said, decrying the “unbelievably cruel” reality that food aid was being held hostage by political games. Unbelievably cruel, indeed. To be absolutely clear, Republicans are holding Democrats to a dark arrangement: Give up extended health care tax credits and preserve Trump’s Medicaid cuts, or watch the poorest Americans go hungry. 

At food pantries across the country, the lines began swelling almost immediately. Food banks from New York to Texas saw surging demand as low-income households — and even furloughed federal workers — scrambled to fill the void. States like New York hustled to release emergency funds, and charities begged for donations to stave off mass hunger. The stopgaps will feed some, but they can’t possibly replace SNAP’s reach. A federal court ordered the Department of Agriculture to draw on contingency funds to ensure SNAP benefits are paid in November, but the ruling only provides a temporary remedy, not a long-term solution to the program’s broader funding crisis.

It’s pure absurdity: We live in one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, yet our leaders have engineered a method where millions can be cut off from food overnight as a negotiation tactic. That people in a country this rich require such support is an outrage in itself and the result of decades of bipartisan governing that has harmed the poor.

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Our government has spent years subsidizing corporations that pay poverty wages while providing just enough aid to keep workers afloat — and then they freeze that critical aid. Republicans and Democrats alike have failed to tackle the chronic issues of increased costs of rent, housing, food, and medical care, perpetually kicking the can down the road and placing ever-widening swaths of Americans at risk. Mega-employers like Walmart pay notoriously low wages that leave employees reliant on public assistance; in fact, Walmart’s low-paid workers cost taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion a year in food stamps, Medicaid, and other help. It’s a vicious cycle: Our policies prop up “working poverty” with programs like SNAP, effectively incentivizing companies to keep wages down. Both parties haven’t done enough to keep people off the brink, but one party right now is pushing people off it. 

We’ve set the stage so that millions of Americans are one missed check away from hunger, then we dangle that over their heads for political gain. As one grandmother in Tennessee put it when she heard her $563 in monthly food stamps might not come: “I don’t know what I’ll do.” There’s nothing abstract about a mother skipping meals so her kids can eat, or a disabled veteran quietly rationing canned soup because his country won’t keep its doors open. “Time is of the essence when it comes to hunger,” lawyers for food aid recipients reminded a federal judge, urging immediate intervention. 

The cruelty goes further. In this shutdown, even WIC — the program for women, infants, and children — teetered on the brink. Nearly 7 million mothers and young kids who rely on WIC for baby formula and basic nutrition were at risk of being cut off. Only a last-ditch shuffle of funds (raiding an Agriculture Department tariff revenue stash) kept WIC afloat for a few weeks.

But SNAP got no such rescue. The administration flatly refused to tap the same pool to cover food stamps, calling it “unacceptable” to shift $4 billion from other child nutrition programs. In other words, they argued feeding hungry families would steal from schoolchildren’s lunches — a false choice created entirely by their own refusal to govern.

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Meanwhile, the president’s allies in Congress insisted there was no reason to fund SNAP in isolation; if Democrats wanted to feed people, they should just surrender and reopen the government on Republican terms. Hunger, in their view, is leverage. In 2023, one GOP state senator even claimed that he had “yet to meet a person in [his state] who is hungry,” as he voted to block free school meals. Another Republican quipped that maybe a missed meal would motivate the unemployed to get a job.

Time after time, the GOP has made it public through policy and dialect its disdain for America’s working poor. Now the message is loud and clear: a little starvation is acceptable collateral damage in service of the agenda.

Step back and behold the full dystopia of this moment. We have a government that periodically sabotages itself. We have partisan warlords so entrenched in their battle that they’re willing to withhold food from their own citizens to win full control of the state machinery. The GOP’s long-term project isn’t just to shrink government — it’s to break it, to erode American’s faith that their government can or should serve the common good. 

We have surpluses and wealth in this country beyond imagination, yet 27.5 million tons of American soybeans sat unsold at one point as a result of trade war tariffs — food rotting in silos because of political machinations — while children in this same country go to bed hungry. How did basic governance get twisted into a hostage crisis? How did we, the people, become the hostages? Each shutdown, each manufactured crisis, chips away at whatever trust remains in our institutions. 

The karmic cost of this dysfunction is incalculable. For a growing number of Americans, the idea that the government can solve problems or serve the public good is dying out, replaced by nihilism and anger. And perhaps that’s the point for some of the perpetrators: Break faith in government, then point to the wreckage and say, “See, it doesn’t work.” It’s a cynical self-fulfilling prophecy.

As this nightmare of a shutdown drags on, one can’t help but feel that our democracy is at a precipice. A government that repeatedly holds its own people hostage will eventually lose those people’s hearts. We are tired, bone-tired, of the political arsonists and their endless theater. The real test of patriotism now isn’t in the Capitol’s rhetoric, it’s in the character of the nation’s people. And if there’s any hope to be found, it’s in those everyday patriots with grumbling stomachs and unwavering resolve. They remind us that America is not its lawmakers. America is its people. And if the people can somehow endure this abuse and still help each other through it, then maybe — just maybe — this house won’t burn down completely. 

The post The President Is Perfectly Fine If You Starve appeared first on The Intercept.

If those conditions are violated or serious suspicions arise that they are, the State Department is obligated to investigate and, in many cases, alert Congress.

In practice, however, a new Government Accountability Office report shows the system is ad hoc, with little guidance or follow through.

The State Department largely relies on overseas Defense Department officials for tips about potential end-use violations.

Since 2019, the Pentagon has flagged more than 150 incidents that could be violations. But the State Department has reported just three end-use violations to Capitol Hill.

The report added that the State Department hasn’t informed Congress what merits reporting and that it investigates violations inconsistently.

Experts in the arms trafficking and conflict monitoring are dismayed, calling the reported gaps an affront to both national and global security.

“It was really shocking to see how far the U.S had fallen behind,” said Kathi Lynn Austin, executive director of the Conflict Awareness Project, who added the number of potential incidents flagged was “extraordinary.”

“We are violating our law and not protecting our own security — at a time when there is so much volatility in the world,” Austin said. “We need to understand this is urgent, and Congress needs to push to maintain transparency and public trust in our arms dealings.”

The 39-page GAO report, published to little notice in September, lays out a simple mismatch: Defense personnel stationed abroad are often the first to see or hear about possible violations, but diplomats with the State Department haven’t told military officials clearly what to flag. (GAO, Pentagon, and State Department officials said the government shutdown left them unavailable to comment.)

In other instances of being tipped to potential violations, the GAO says, the State Department could not produce records showing whether anyone ever decided if the law’s reporting thresholds were met.

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The Arms Export Control Act requires notifying Congress when there’s information that a substantial violation may have occurred regarding purpose, transfer, or security; it also requires reporting when an unauthorized transfer actually happens. Those are low thresholds for alerting the legislature, by design. Yet the GAO found no formal procedures inside the State Department for making, recording, and sharing their decision-making process.

In the report, the State Department agreed with GAO’s six recommendations, including providing concrete guidance to the Pentagon, standardizing investigations with timelines, and creating procedures for deciding and documenting what gets reported to Congress.

The GAO cannot force a federal agency to bend to its report and relies on voluntary compliance.

If the changes aren’t actually implemented, however, Congress will continue flying blind when it comes to U.S. arms sales negatively impacting national — and international — security.

The Misuse Pipeline

The mechanics of “end-use” sound bureaucratic, but the stakes aren’t. Around the world, U.S.-made weapons moves from legal sale to illicit use on the battlefield, stolen from depots, through corrupt commanders, transfers to proxies, or simple loss.

The results are everywhere. In Afghanistan, for instance, vast quantities of U.S.-supplied small arms and vehicles seeded regional black markets. Conflict Armament Research, a U.K. group that tracks conventional weapons, traced the Islamic State group’s ammunition stocks to dozens of countries — including U.S.-linked supply lines — often thanks to the chaos of collapsing units and unsecured stockpiles.

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“The biggest concern for the average American citizen is the potential for these arms to be used against us,” said Brandon Philips, a public affairs professor at California State University, East Bay. “We are in a position right now where we aren’t everyone’s favorite country.”

When the government puts tracking systems in place, however, more of the leaks get plugged. In Ukraine — a challenging venue for containing arms flows because of the sheer quantity of material being introduced — early Pentagon watchdog reviews faulted shortfalls in tracking designated sensitive items amid an active war. Follow-ups found marked improvement as the U.S. expanded “enhanced end-use monitoring,” boosted staffing, and raised compliance rates.

Even with a partner government that has strong incentives to cooperate, effective control requires sustained, well-resourced checks. But the U.S doesn’t even have a system for how those checks should happen.

In its report, the GAO zeroed in on this vagueness. Overseas Defense Department staffers told the watchdog they’re using “professional judgment” to decide what should rise to the State Department’s attention because the State Department hasn’t defined the incident types, thresholds, or timelines.

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The ambiguity increases the odds that important cases fall into a bureaucratic void, never formally investigated or reported. The GAO even found examples where one incident drew a full document review and coordination, while a similar one drew no action at all.

“A number of us for years have talked about insufficiencies around end-of-use monitoring, and this report continues to show the problems of how this is done,” said Jeff Abramson, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank. “The American people are attuned that a lot of harm is caused in the world by our weapons.”

The infrastructure exists to track weapons — the State Department has systems to vet its direct buyers, and the Pentagon has a program for enhanced end-use monitoring. But the GAO found that the connective tissue of such programs doesn’t.

“The fact that this report is mostly about things that happened during the Biden administration, and the second part of Trump, shows it’s a systemic problem. It shows that we are going sell things and not bother,” said John Lindsay-Poland, coordinator of the nonprofit Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico. Poland noted that the report only covers a small portion of government-to-government sales, while the bulk of U.S. arms exports are commercial sales and small arms.

“If your priority is selling stuff,” he said, “taking into account whether the stuff you’re selling is massacring people, destroying communities, strengthening terrorists and drug trafficking, or driving immigration is secondary.”

Gaza and Double Standards

The GAO’s accounting of the oversight vacuum comes at an incendiary moment.

In 2024, the Biden administration put a policy in place that required assessments of whether partners receiving U.S. arms in active conflicts were using them consistent with international humanitarian law.

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In May 2024, the administration’s report to Congress concluded it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used U.S.-provided arms in ways “inconsistent” with international law in some instances, while adding that wartime conditions made case-by-case attribution hard. Human rights groups blasted the equivocation and urged suspensions; Israel rejected the accusations.

In February 2025, the new administration scrapped the policy.

The Gaza debate is precisely where a functioning end-use system should be strongest.

Independent investigators and journalists have documented repeated Israeli strikes that allegedly used U.S.-origin munitions against protected sites or in ways that were indiscriminate. The State Department’s own human rights reporting, before becoming hollowed out this year under President Donald Trump, catalogued grave harms.

Abramson, who has tracked global armament and misuse, said failure to monitor end-use violations and report them to Congress can put American foreign policy in a diplomatic chokehold. 

“Around the world,” he said, “we are trying to make friends, But when they have seen our weapons being misused it undermines that ability, and makes us seem hypocritical, dangerous.”

The post The State Department Isn’t Telling Congress When U.S. Weapons Fall Into the Wrong Hands appeared first on The Intercept.

For everyone horrified by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, it is easy to be seduced by the latest headlines regarding President Donald Trump’s so-called peace plan. After two years of mass destruction, the present moment offers the contradictory possibility of a near-term pause in Israel’s deadly assault combined with the continued long-term subjugation of the Palestinian people.

How we arrived at this moment is the result of multiple factors, but it’s hard to overstate the impact of public outrage. Trump has never been subtle about his narcissistic desire to be seen as a peacemaker worthy of the Nobel Prize. At the same time, anti-Israel sentiment is now negatively affecting Trump’s approval ratings, with only 35 percent of American voters approving of his handling of Gaza. The Republican Party base is increasingly skeptical of the U.S.–Israel alliance, and Jewish Americans are demonstrating rising revulsion over Israel’s crimes against humanity. And no one should be surprised if there has been private engagement by Israeli elites who are already fed up with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and are seeking an off-ramp that enables them to escape global isolation — while preserving their domination over Palestinians.

The simple reality is that public opinion matters. Even if political elites in the U.S. and Israel pretend otherwise, they are impacted in different ways by public opposition to their policy choices. Though Trump’s long-term plan for Gaza is an ugly vision of neocolonial control, it can be bent and blocked by more of the global pressure that has made even this moment possible.

That’s why this is not the time for supporters of Palestinian self-determination to be quiet. It’s the moment for us to demand more.

To understand just how much has shifted in recent days, it is worth recalling the surprising headlines of the last week. First, Trump humiliated Netanyahu by releasing a photo of the Israeli leader apologizing to Qatar’s ruler for bombing his country. Then Trump announced his 20-point Gaza plan, threatening Palestinians in Gaza with more violence if Hamas didn’t accept his terms. When Hamas offered its limited acceptance, Trump called on Israel to stop bombing the Palestinian territory. “I am asking everyone to MOVE FAST,” he declared as he dispatched Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, to Egypt to mediate negotiations between Israel and Hamas.

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Despite the headlines, there are some sobering realities to consider. Israel is still bombing Gaza, regardless of Trump’s claims to the contrary. And Trump’s plan for Gaza calls for Israeli military withdrawal based on “standards, milestones, and timeframes” that would be decided in the future, a day that may never come. Israel has a decadeslong history of violating agreements in order to continue stealing what is left of Palestinian land. And the U.S. has a long history of sending Israel billions of dollars in military funding, no matter what Israel does or doesn’t do.

While Trump’s plan offers the important possibility of a pause or end to Israel’s genocide, the worst of Trump’s plan for Gaza is embedded in its long-term vision. The plan amounts to a blueprint for external neocolonial domination over Gaza, under which Palestinians will have no formal ability to assert their rights or determine their future. Trump’s plan for Gaza denies Palestinians self-determination and says nothing of Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Under the plan, Trump would personally chair an Orwellian “Board of Peace” that would rule over Gaza, with former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side. The Trump-run “board” would convene an unnamed “panel of experts” who would create a “Trump economic development plan” that would “rebuild and energize Gaza.” But dig a little deeper, and it is clear that Trump’s vision for Gaza is yet another page from the Trump family playbook for corruption and self-enrichment.

Back in February, after meeting with Netanyahu for hours, Trump called for Gaza to be developed into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” with “the United States owning that piece of land” and Palestinians being moved elsewhere. Though the plan no longer calls for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, it — like so many Trump proposals — appears to be a handout to his family businesses. (Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is already heavily invested in Israeli business interests that profit from Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, with at least $2 billion in financial support from Saudi Arabia’s ruling dictator, Mohammed bin Salman.)

But the Trump family is not alone in profiting heavily from this plan. In July, the Financial Times reported that the Tony Blair Institute, Boston Consulting Group, and Israeli businessmen Michael Eisenberg and Liran Tancman developed an investment plan for Gaza that included building an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone.” The investment plan called for cutting development costs by removing Palestinians from the territory. No surprise that the Tony Blair Institute has received at least $345 million from pro-Israel billionaire and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

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Under Trump’s plan, Palestinians would be required to relinquish all forms of resistance to Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide. While Trump’s “Board of Peace” would cash in on Gaza, it would delegate daily governance in Gaza to “a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” that would be “responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people in Gaza.”

The plan proposes that the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, could eventually take over Gaza, but only if it meets the so-called “reform” conditions previously outlined in an earlier plan Trump put forward in 2020. That 2020 plan required that the Palestinian Authority give up all claims against Israel or the U.S. before the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, “and all other tribunals.” Of course, the Palestinian Authority is already considered by many to be an undemocratic and corrupt institution that rules over Palestinians and serves as a subcontractor to the Israeli occupation. These new requirements would block any last vestige of justice for Palestinians.

The plan also requires that Hamas demilitarize as part of making Gaza “a deradicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.” But no mention is made of the fact that Israel has bombed Qatar, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and, of course, the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Nor is there any mention of “deradicalizing” the violent Israeli settler movement or holding accountable the thousands of Israeli soldiers and their leaders who are still committing genocide in Gaza today.

Given these details, the long-term implications of Trump’s latest “peace plan” appear startlingly similar to the goals that America’s white settlers must have had for Native American populations: Confiscate their resources and drive them into smaller and smaller parcels of land, whether through murder, violent displacement, treaties that would later be ignored, or all of the above.

While Trump pushes for an immediate, headline-grabbing “win,” the broader political trends make it clear that time is not on Israel’s side. A June Quinnipiac poll revealed that sympathy for Israel dropped 14 percent among Republicans over the last year, from a May 2024 level of 78% down to 64%. An April Pew Research poll showed that Israel’s unfavorable rating among Republicans aged 18 to 49 had risen from 35 to 50 percent. Meanwhile, loud conservative voices like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens have all spoken critically of America’s alliance with Israel. And a September New York Times/Siena survey found more American voters “siding with Palestinians over Israelis for the first time since The Times began asking voters about their sympathies in 1998.”

These shifts in U.S. public opinion reveal the path ahead. Activists across the U.S., Europe, and worldwide must continue isolating Israel and begin explicitly pushing their own governments to reject the full arc of Trump’s plan. Yes, an immediate deal that ends Israel’s genocidal violence and mass starvation of Palestinians is critical. But Trump’s longer-term vision for Gaza must be defeated. 

Massive waves of opposition to Israel’s genocide have already flooded cities worldwide, from the hundreds of thousands who protested in Amsterdam and Mexico City, to the millions who took to the streets in Italy. Protesters should now consider taking direct aim at Trump’s plan itself. Global pressure is critical if we are to see a future in which Palestinians can live free from Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide.

The post Trump’s Plan to Deprive Palestinians Any Say in Their Future appeared first on The Intercept.

Before dawn, federal agents moved on Chicago’s South Shore in camouflage uniforms with rifles drawn, the thrum of chopper rotors breaking the sky. Officially, it was a “targeted immigration enforcement operation.” In reality, it looked like a military incursion into a historic Black neighborhood — home to working families, elders, and churches that have held the South Side together for generations. By the end of the night, an entire apartment building was under siege.

U.S citizens and children were zip-tied, families separated, and residents of a community that is 92 percent African American reported being met with guns and flash-bang grenades. When a Chicago alderperson went to check on hospitalized residents, she says she was handcuffed by agents.

For some, the Trump administration’s Chicago assault was a shock. But for Black Americans, none of it felt extraordinary. It felt remembered. Generational experience has taught us what happens when the state builds a weapon for someone else: Sooner or later, it finds a way back to us.

The raid wasn’t an aberration; it was a continuation, the latest verse in a long American refrain where safety is promised, and Black lives become the proving grounds. What the nation calls “targeted enforcement,” we recognize as the same searchlight sweeping back across the map.

We’ve seen this movie before, and Black communities have been telling America how it ends.

From Red Scares to Black Files

For more than a century, Black Americans have watched the United States build extraordinary enforcement tools for a supposedly narrow enemy — and then turn them inward. The Palmer Raids of the 1920s were justified as a way to root out communists but swept up Black labor leaders. COINTELPRO was sold as means to counter “subversives” but was used to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. and raid Black Panther homes. After 9/11, the war on terror built fusion centers, joint task forces, and counter-extremism programs that soon labeled Black activists as “Black Identity Extremists.” The Department of Homeland Security grants and surplus weapons meant to stop terrorism rolled into Ferguson and Baltimore in armored vehicles.

Now the same pattern is playing out with immigration enforcement. Databases, cross-deputized local cops, and DHS-led raids built to target migrants have expanded into Black neighborhoods. The Chicago raid didn’t just catch “gang-linked migrants” — it detained U.S. citizens in a majority-Black area under the same machinery.

After 9/11, Washington rewired the government around suspicion. The Department of Homeland Security absorbed 22 agencies and cast immigration as a national security threat. Programs like NSEERS singled out Muslim and Arab men for registration and interrogation before being scrapped years later. DHS-funded “fusion centers,” sold as vital to counterterrorism, were later blasted by a bipartisan Senate investigation for producing “a bunch of crap” intelligence while eroding civil liberties. Despite mounting criticism, that infrastructure didn’t disappear. It morphed and migrated into everyday policing and immigration enforcement.

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The Strange Tale of the FBI’s Fictional “Black Identity Extremism” Movement

Built to hunt terrorists, those intelligence hubs eventually began circulating threat bulletins on Black activists and protest movements, labeling them “Black Identity Extremists,” and once again shifting the federal sword of authority to point toward domestic Blackness. In practice, the “BIE” label surfaced in instances like the firearms case against Dallas activist Rakem Balogun, also known as Christopher Daniels, in which the government cited his Facebook posts praising a Dallas gunman who shot police. A federal judge ultimately released him, and the case collapsed in May 2018. 

After public backlash, FBI officials told Congress in 2019 that the bureau had stopped using “BIE” and folded activities into “Racially Motivated Violent Extremism,” yet leaked records show an “Iron Fist” program directing undercover surveillance of Black activists under the rebranded category. 

Activists and civil liberties advocates are echoing the similarities to COINTELPRO all over again. The very machinery designed to guard the homeland ended up treating Black dissent as a domestic threat. Now amid waning political interest in the global war on terror, America has recast its gaze and fear to a new subject: the immigrant.

The current crackdown on immigrants shows how this bleed-over works. ICE’s 287(g) agreements deputize local police as immigration agents. The program has ballooned in scope and reach, with DHS touting more than 1,000 partnerships. Research finds these entanglements don’t reduce violent crime — what they do is make entire neighborhoods too scared to call the police. Meanwhile, the feds cast wider and wider nets. In 2008, the Secure Communities data pipeline was installed, funneling every American’s arrest fingerprints and biometric data to immigration databases, supercharging dragnet mistakes.

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One 2011 independent analysis found that the system had led to false hits and culminated in the arrest of 3,600 U.S. citizens by ICE. A 2018 Los Angeles Times investigation found ICE had to release more than 1,480 people from custody after they asserted U.S. citizenship. Other analyses estimate thousands of citizens have been wrongfully targeted by detainers. The point isn’t that every raid snags the wrong person — it’s that the system is designed to view these unconstitutional detentions as collateral damage.

And Black people, historically over-represented in the criminal legal system and targeted by law enforcement officials, knew we’d eat the collateral most.

Black organizers have been warning about this for years. The Movement for Black Lives explicitly called for ending deportations and the 1996 crime–immigration laws that knit policing to banishment. The Black Alliance for Just Immigration has documented how immigration detention is “anti-Black” in its outcomes. And long before the rest of the country learned to say “surveillance state,” Malkia Devich-Cyril wrote and organized about the way targeted spying on Black neighborhoods would metastasize into mass surveillance.

It’s About Flexing Power

Many Americans were sold a comforting bargain: If you’re innocent, government “vetting” will sort it out; body cameras will guarantee accountability; and an attorney will fix any mistake. The reality is rougher.

Immigration courts are civil, not criminal. That means there is no general right to a government-appointed lawyer, and most detained people go to court alone. As for body-worn cameras, the best meta-analyses find mixed or null effects on police use of force and accountability. And “vetting”? Ask the U.S. citizens who’ve been cuffed, jailed, or even deported by mistake how that worked out.

But most of all, on the street, the liquid dialect of “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause” will always bend hardest toward the poor, the immigrant, and — most of all — us. Too often, those lessons are learned at the wrong end of a police door ram, or in the back of a van.

And it’s not effective.

Here’s the part national TV pundits won’t tell you: Chicago’s shootings and homicides have fallen dramatically this year. Through the first half of 2025, homicides are down roughly a third and shootings nearly 40 percent, with independent analysts calling it a historic decline. Federal claims that heavy-handed immigration raids are a necessary crime-fighting tool don’t square with the city’s own data. The crackdown isn’t about safety; it’s about flexing power.

Black voters aren’t a monolith in our beliefs, but we have long voted cohesively when the stakes are existential. Political science calls it “linked fate.” History calls it survival. Survey work and decades of elections show Black voters remain the most reliably aligned bloc against authoritarian drift — not because we love any party, but because we recognize the pattern when the state builds machines of exception and promises to deploy those tools only on “them.” We know “them” becomes “you” sooner than you think.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones once reminded readers that the real outlier in American electoral life is the Black vote — no other group, including Asians or Latinos, votes with such cohesion. Her point was simple: We have always recognized the stakes most clearly.

Decades of polling show that issues of criminal justice and policing have remained top concerns for Black voters, because our safety and freedom have always been the first to be tested when state power expands.

After Trump’s reelection, far fewer Black Americans took to the streets — or even to social media — to protest. Instead of marching, many watched quietly, feeling a sharp sting of betrayal: betrayed that our persistent warnings about white supremacist power went ignored, and betrayed by the system that insists on invalidating our lived experience until it becomes everyone’s problem. Some Black women publicly expressed a tactical withholding — “stepping back,” “rethinking our role,” “not showing up in the same way”— because the emotional weight of being the reliable backbone in a democracy that constantly disfranchises you is too heavy. Particularly without giving them rest, pause, or reflection to their words.

During Trump’s second inauguration and early policy blitzkrieg, Black organizers didn’t pivot to spectacle; they braced for bleed-over. They’d already watched terrorism authorities spill into protest monitoring; already watched immigration powers swallow due process; already watched fusion centers and data-sharing as routes to harass communities over unmerited suspicions. They also watched red-state leaders preside over higher gun deaths while labeling liberal big cities as lawless war zones — facts we reported here at The Intercept. That context makes what happened in South Shore feel less like an aberration and more like the next link in a chain.

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Listen to the voices who warned you: the freedom-movement veterans who endured COINTELPRO; the Muslim organizers targeted after 9/11; the Black immigration advocates who saw detention’s cruelty up close. The lesson isn’t merely solidarity, it’s self-interest. The tools built for “others” always come home.

Black America has always been the first to feel the temperature drop in the room of democracy. We have mapped this country’s overreaches with our bodies and our ballots. When we speak of raids, of suspicion, of the quiet erosion of rights, we’re not predicting — we’re recalling. Listen to Black people. The warning isn’t a sermon; it’s a survival manual.

The post Black People Knew This Would Happen appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s approval of the Ambler Road Project is a reversal for the federal government. Only last year, the Bureau of Land Management released its Record of Decision selecting “No Action” on Ambler Road, in cooperation with Alaska tribal councils, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and many others.

In the document, the impact on fish habitat, water and air quality, disruption of groundwater flow, hazardous materials from spills, and the negative impact on the Western Arctic caribou herd, which has been steadily declining since 2017, were all cited as reasons for denial. The Record of Decision also stated that the Ambler Road Project would forever alter the culture and traditional practices of Alaska Native communities, who have lived and thrived in the region for centuries.

Thanks to the BLM’s findings, the Biden administration denied the Ambler Road Project on June 28, 2024. The project resurfaced after the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority filed a direct appeal to Trump over his predecessor’s denial of transportation permits.

Trump’s decision to approve the Ambler Road Project comes months after his administration announced plans to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, opening 45 million acres of national forest land to logging and road construction. While the Ambler Road Project is not directly tied to the “roadless rule,” it’s one of a growing list of examples of the U.S. government prioritizing corporate interests over the natural world.

Ambler Road will begin at milepost 161 on the Dalton Highway, near the towns of Wiseman and Coldfoot, before crossing over 3,000 streams and multiple rivers. It will require up to 50 various bridge projects, as well as aid stations, airstrips, turnouts, and culverts, before ending at the proposed mining site near the town of Ambler.

On Monday, Trump sat in the Oval Office with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright and made it clear that he was approving the project to stay ahead in what he considers an AI race against China.

“Ambler Mining District, at the end of [the 211-mile road] has some of the richest mining deposits in all of America,” Burgum said, while gesturing at a map of Alaska behind the Resolute desk. “These are minerals that are absolutely essential to defense, to industry. … Just take copper alone. This is one of the richest copper locations in the country.”

The haul at the end of the 211-mile road is presumed to be a copper deposit worth more than $7 billion. Copper has many uses, among them being the primary component to efficiently help power and cool the massive data centers that run AI applications. As a result, and as AI advances, copper is in massively high demand. According to the 2025 Global Critical Minerals Outlook, copper supplies will fall 30 percent short of the required demand by 2035.

“China controls 85 to 100 percent of all the mining and refining of all the top 20 critical minerals,” Burgum said. “And in this mine area up here, we got copper, lead, zinc, gold, silver, gallium, germanium — rich in all of the minerals that we need to win the AI arms race against China.”

Burgum said that the U.S. has “gotten out of the energy and mining area,” and that when Trump said, “Drill, baby, drill,” he also meant “Mine, baby, mine.”

Trump emphasized that the copper was needed to power AI data centers — but also immediately contradicted himself on whether it’s needed to surpass China, or rather to maintain what he described as America’s undisputed lead in AI.

“We get a road done, and with that, we unleash billions and billions of dollars in wealth,” Trump said to the press on Monday. “It’s pretty amazing when you think of it. And it’s wealth that we need if we’re going to be the number one country. We’re number one now with AI, you’ve probably read. We’re beating everybody with AI at levels that nobody ever thought even possible.”

But Trump said the U.S. currently lacks the power to support its tech companies, so he has greenlit them to “build their own power.”

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Immediately after taking office, Trump announced a $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence — led by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank — called the Stargate Project, aiming to create a nationwide network of AI data centers. The first opened in Abilene, Texas, in September, after which five more were immediately announced.

Also in September, Trump hosted a roundtable of AI giants to discuss AI innovation and investments into its future. Included in the guest list were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Each of whom, coincidentally, donated exactly $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

AI data centers significantly impact the environment due to their immense electricity consumption, high water usage, greenhouse gas emissions, and demand from local power grids.

But along with the AI craze, a modern copper rush has begun, and it’s moving quickly. What was originally proposed as a three to four-year timeline for the Ambler Road Project appears to have been significantly sped up. Burgum said that construction will begin next spring with “planning throughout the winter.”

“We’ll get it done in less than a year,” Trump added.

Following the announcement of the approval for the Ambler Road Project, Burgum stated that the Department of War and the U.S. government will take a 10 percent stake in Trilogy Metals, a Canadian mining company with claims in the area.

“America was a mining powerhouse for a long, long time, and our mining industry got squelched,” Burgum said. “Now we’re seeing it come back to life.”

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order to take immediate measures to increase American mineral production. The order states: “It is imperative for our national security that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.”

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In April, the Trump administration fast-tracked a controversial transfer of ownership of Oak Flat, Arizona, from the U.S. Forest Service to Resolution Copper. The Apache Stronghold, who have sacred and ceremonial ties to the land, have been in lengthy legal battles to try to halt the transfer. Resolution Copper, a conglomerate owned by British and Australian mining companies, plans to blast a hole 2 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep, decimating the sacred Apache site to gain access to the deep copper reserve.

In August, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge put a temporary injunction on the land transfer, and Trump released a scathing post on Truth Social in which he called the 9th Circuit “radical left” and the Apache Stronghold “anti-American.”

On October 6, the Supreme Court declined to hear the Apache Stronghold case.

The proposed destruction of public land — held sacred by Native Americans at Oak Flat and the Northwestern Arctic of Alaska — and numerous other sites, every year across America, in the name of progress, is merely one more example of a continued and very pointed genocide of Native American culture.

In response to Trump’s approval of the Ambler Road Project, environmental advocacy groups blasted the decision, saying it’s another example of Trump protecting business interests over the planet.

“As with every other shortsighted, self-serving decision by this administration, this move is silencing the people who will be impacted the most,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “Trump is sidestepping the views of Native Alaskans and short circuiting the federal government’s obligation to hear from them.”

“We build a road that’s over 200 miles long through a very beautiful area of the world,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “It’s incredible when you look at it. But a rough area from the standpoint of building.”

The post Trump Sacrifices Alaska Wilderness to Help AI Companies appeared first on The Intercept.

The consolidation of the new police state has not been announced. There was no press conference declaring that local, state, and federal law enforcement — plus the military — are all marching to the same drum. No news conference featuring a bunch of police captains standing before a microphone to express their commitment to the new regime.

But it is here.

In the past six months, a quiet, mass reorganization of resources and rules and personnel has rippled across the country in order to enforce the Trump administration’s desires.

This realignment is happening swiftly, smoothly and without fanfare. That the police have been so quiet in a historically loud moment should be a dead giveaway that a shift is under way. The line between order and chaos is moving. And the police are adapting to meet the changing norms.

Politics was always in their job description — whether by origin (slave catchers) or by election or appointment. But under this new order, the police — arm in arm with immigration agents, the military, and the rest of the federal agencies — are starting to function more as political police force. That is, an instrument of a specific regime. City by city, state by state, the police have been reorganizing themselves to align with the priorities of the White House. This is what the free agents of fascism do: They make themselves useful. They figure out how to stay in the mix, how to serve the emergent status quo.

Since the summer, where there have been Trump administration escalations, police have been lurking on the margins — or lending a helping hand.

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Sometimes, the assistance matches the fiery timbre of repression put forth by the White House. When thousands showed up in downtown LA to protest federal immigration raids, in June, the Los Angeles Police Department seemed to cast aside decades of sanctuary city policy forbidding cooperation with immigration enforcement authorities by working alongside federal forces to violently repress protestors. LAPD officers on horseback trampled a man and beat him with batons while their colleagues alternated with members of the Department of Homeland Security and National Guard to shoot people — including an Australian journalist — with “less than lethal” bullets and pepper spray.

Other times, the help aids and abets. During a raid, the LAPD blocked in formation as Immigration and Customs Enforcement quarterbacked an operation that resulted in the violent arrest of Service Employees International Union California and SEIU-USWW President David Huerta. Then, at an ICE staging area at Dodger Stadium, the LAPD helped federal agents exit though a different gate after one was blocked by protesters and the press. One month later, during “Operation Excalibur” — a “show of presence” by the National Guard and Customs and Border Protection — police officers worked crowd control at MacArthur Park. (Then, when they were done, they swerved at a few Angelenos protesting the federal scare tactics.)

In the nation’s capital, D.C. Metropolitan police, under the president’s orders and backed up by Mayor Muriel Bowser through an executive order, are formally cooperating with ICE, helping with immigration checkpoints and, apparently, responding to calls for backup. This month, when a resident followed a group of National Guard troops on patrol, playing the storm troopers theme music from “Star Wars,” one soldier threatened to call the police.

This kind of collaboration is easy to overlook. If, during the regular course of a work week or at a major community event — like the recent West Indian Day festivities or the African American Day parade in New York City — the cops are around every corner, why wouldn’t they also make random cameos during ICE raids?

You might not think much of these because they feel so banal in the face of the spectacular terror and brutality being perpetrated daily. If you’re watching political violence take place — say, ICE agents gunning down a man in Chicago — the uniformed officers directing traffic fade into the background.

But they’re signs of the Thin Blue Line’s willingness to go with the federal flow.

Gone are the days of beefs between local cops and federal agents, the plot engine of blockbusters like “Bad Boys” and “Beverly Hills Cop,” and auteur productions like “Inside Man” and “Dog Day Afternoon.” Instead of drama over one department stepping on another’s toes, the police, federal agents, and military forces are now taking turns as leading role. During the Biden administration, the local police were the strong arm violently cracking down against the student protesters objecting against Israel’s genocide. Now, they’re playing second fiddle to ICE’s top billing as America’s violent first responders.

Sworn duties and responsibilities have become blurred between jurisdictions, and, in some cases, downright bizarre. The distinctions — agencies, budgets, and even uniform design — between different departments of law enforcement are becoming subsumed under one identifier: police. Agents of the state take to the field united by the word “POLICE” on their vests.

This is, in part, a function of Trump’s relentless push to replace the rule of law with the rule of Trump, a system built on confusion and dubious legality. His deportation program and his illegitimate constitutional subventions have perverted the relationship between the immigration and justice systems, with the administrative proceedings of immigration enforcement transformed into crackdowns on so-called criminals — or even “foreign terrorists” — who can be renditioned to gulags in far-off countries with no due process.

Trump’s insistence on the presence of crime — his claim of crime as not just a feature of immigration but as the principle prism through which immigration must be understood — justifies leveraging all means of enforcement to fix the system. And that system needs endless resources.

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Trump’s deployment of the National Guard has only further corrupted these distinctions and made the job duties stranger. Troops are spreading mulch and picking up trash on the Mall, and the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Secret Service; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives are conducting traffic stops, asking for drivers’ immigration status. Meanwhile, military lawyers are being recruited to sit as immigration judges.

The perversion of job duties might seem like a natural progression. To encounter a police officer taking on tasks that might seem beyond the core job of a cop — “being asked to do too much,” in the words of New York mayoral favorite Zohran Mamdani — is unremarkable because that has been the norm for some time.

In New York, all sorts of services mysteriously and bafflingly fall under the stewardship of the police: school crossing guards, street vendor citations, traffic enforcement, staffing summer and after-school programs at what are, ostensibly, community centers administered by the Police Athletic League.

But the mission creep has accelerated.

As of October 1, 2025, ICE has signed 1,036 memorandums of agreement for state and local cooperation in 40 states, including New York, under its 287(g) program. Police surveillance is merging with federal surveillance more than ever before. And the technology is advancing faster than regulators, the media, and the general public can keep track of.

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In March, a Guardian investigation found that local police and ICE had “gained access to troves of data” in sanctuary cities such as Westchester from vast networks of license plate readers. In April, New York Focus revealed that the New York State Police are funneling information from the 20-year-old gang database it maintains into a federal database used by ICE to further its deportation efforts. In June, 404 Media reported that ICE has been field-testing Mobile Fortify, an app that uses facial recognition captured via a smartphone to access your biometric data in various government databases. 404 Media also reported that, in Oregon, local police “casually offered various surveillance services to federal law enforcement officials from the FBI and ICE, and to other state and local police departments, as part of an informal email and meetup group of crime analysts.”

According to Forbes, ICE has a $4.4 million contract — first procured during the Biden administration — with a manufacturer that produces Stingray, the fake cell tower that can be used to trace the whereabouts of anyone in range.

This month, The Guardian reported that ICE obtained access to begin the use of Israeli spyware to hack phones and encrypted apps. And a week later, 404 Media reported ICE spent $10 million on Clearview AI facial recognition software to support Homeland Security Investigations, supposedly allowing the agency track people it accuses of “assaulting” officers. This is all on top of HSI’s contract with Peter Thiel’s Palantir, which, according to a dossier of documents reviewed by The Guardian, built a platform called ImmigrationOS that “will service ICE branches beyond HSI” and includes a “searchable super-network” for agents to comb through government and private databases. One wonders if and when the NYPD’s elaborate operation of data collection, which includes everything from OMNY taps to CCTV feeds taken from “free” Wi-Fi networks at public housing developments, will be the next searchable feast for federal authorities to sink their teeth into.

The budgetary allocation to immigration enforcement contained in the Big Beautiful Bill will soon kick into overdrive, meaning there will be a huge leap in recruitment and the acquisition of more tools of technological surveillance and repression. (DHS claims any “lapse in funding” brought on by the government shutdown “will not slow ICE down.”) ICE recruitment is moving ahead swiftly and will surely accelerate. The agency is working full stop to crush counter-surveillance efforts by organizers and concerned citizens. At the same time, its propaganda machine is hard at work creating hero narratives and poisoning the discourse.

The police state of our nightmares is nearing its final form. Even the so-called opposition leaders have proven themselves useful stewards of the cause. In many of the blue cities and states Trump has attacked, Democratic elected officials have used Trump’s actions to serve as cover for their desired expansions of the police at the expense of taxpayers, while appropriating the president’s crime narrative to fit their own ambitions.

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Ahead of Trump’s invasion in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass signed off on increasing the LAPD’s $1.86 billion budget to $1.98 billion just before she found herself holding press conference after press conference decrying the president for sending in troops to do what her LAPD could handle on its own. And she has all but assured that liability claims against the city, exacerbated by the police-fed crowd control crackdown, will continue to mount, despite huge budget shortfalls made worse by lawsuits against the LAPD.

In D.C., Mayor Bowser has greenlighted her Metro police force, home to the now infamous “jump out boys,” to implement Trump’s desired broken-windows policies. “We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” she said, wishing out loud for more local police. (In her executive order, announcing her compliance with the White House, she even adopted Trump’s branding in establishing a “Safe and Beautiful Emergency Operations Center.”) In other words, it’s jump-out season once again.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul boasted of her deployment of National Guard troops and cameras in the MTA to boost safety, then she asked the president by phone not to deploy troops to the city. When DHS cut $187 million in security funding for police, she worked with Trump to reinstate it.

Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a constant Trump critic, seized on the president’s conspiracies and deployed the California Highway Patrol to fight “crime.” He doubled-down on this deployment at the end of August, citing its overwhelming success.

There never was a red police state or a blue police state, only a United Police State of America.

The rounds of beta testing are behind us. We are through the looking glass already. The police state expansions long pre-date Trump’s deportation program. The level of coordination is just getting more sophisticated. Propaganda and technology and fascism are all working together in overdrive. The police are collaborating across that trinity. They’ve figured out how to adjust their tune to meet the dystopian new reality that’s emerging. Their quietude in this moment should be setting off all the alarms that the Gestapo are already hard at work. Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth are openly preparing to wage war on the “enemy within” — but the political police have been moving in the shadows for quite some time.

The post The United Police State of America Has Arrived appeared first on The Intercept.