The spurious allegations played a key role in Donald Trump’s massive — and deadly — immigration crackdown in Minnesota over the winter.

A semiannual report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General to Congress, however, highlights a different narrative.

The report, which covers enforcement actions over a six-month period, highlights the obvious: Corporations — not small immigrant-oriented healthcare providers, or undocumented immigrants illegally taking benefits — are responsible for the vast majority of alleged fraud in the American health care system.

Released earlier this month, the report highlights billions of dollars’ worth of healthcare fraud from corporate executives.

One CEO ran a scheme to target Medicare beneficiaries with medically unnecessary medical devices. An insurance broker and marketing executive orchestrated an Affordable Care Act enrollment scam that preyed on vulnerable people experiencing homelessness and substance abuse.

While C-suite fraudsters are the stars of the congressional report and most credible research on the topic, immigrants are at the cynosure of the administration’s public fraud campaign.

Freeing Actual Fraudsters

Experts on immigrant rights and healthcare say the administration is using immigrants as a scapegoat for systemic fraud in the healthcare system that can be attributed to corporate greed, while shielding actual bad actors who profit from a broken system.

“There isn’t really clear evidence of any systemic issues implicating immigrants,” said Sarah Krieger, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “The administration’s public messaging is focusing on immigrants and immigrant workers, but that’s constructing a narrative with the intent of hurting immigrants, not with actually rooting out any problems.”

Krieger pointed to examples of the Trump administration using clemency and pardons to get corporate healthcare fraudsters off the hook.

In May, President Donald Trump granted clemency to Lawrence Duran, the owner of a mental health company, American Therapeutic, who was sentenced to 50 years for “orchestrating a $205 million Medicare fraud scheme.”

An analysis by the California governor’s office found that Trump’s pardons had wiped nearly $2 billion in victim repayment and taxpayer recovery for Medicare and tax fraud, as well as other types of fraud.

Trump Focus on Immigrants

Though immigrants aren’t mentioned once in the report itself, they have been the relentless focus of the Trump administration.

In May, Vice President JD Vance and Mehmet Oz, a television doctor who is now head of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, hosted an anti-fraud press conference.

Related

Unnamed Source in Viral Minnesota Somali Fraud Video Is Right-Wing Lobbyist Who Called Muslims “Demons”

At the event, Vance erroneously warned that “there could be tens of billions of fraudulent payments in the California system” going toward “illegal aliens, going to fraudulent businesses.” Oz — best known for promoting diet pills — similarly claimed that hundreds of millions of dollars of “questionable expenditures” were linked to “immigration-related costs,” and that “folks who are undocumented” were fraudulently getting access to Medicaid funds in California.

The language is par for the course from administration officials. Later that month, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller went so far as to blame the national debt on immigrants committing benefit fraud.

“We could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the Treasury went to individuals who were properly lawfully correctly eligible to receive them,” Miller said at a press conference.

The public rhetoric from Trump officials would lead one to false conclusions about who commits large-scale healthcare fraud — and who benefits.

“We are seeing a trend around the administration scapegoating immigrants and not pointing to the actual bad actors: corporations,” said Isha Weerasinghe, director of the public benefits justice team at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates for people with low incomes.

$300 Billion a Year

The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association estimates that the cost of healthcare fraud could be as high as $300 billion a year.

Most of that fraud is from providers scamming patients and insurance by billing patients for services not rendered or performing medically unnecessary services for the purpose of generating insurance payments.

The administration does not want to highlight that type of fraud in their public rhetoric because they’re enabling it, said Krieger, of the National Immigration Law Center.

“The administration has cut funding for all sorts of internal enforcement mechanisms. They have provided clemency to people convicted of government fraud in the past. They’ve fired inspector generals for overseeing accountability,” she said. “They’re not actually interested in solving the problem.”

Data suggests that noncitizens are less likely to commit welfare fraud than citizens.

Weerasinghe said that the administration is using a well-worn tactic of blaming marginalized groups to take away benefits from the population more broadly. 

Related

Medicare Privatization Scheme Faced Legal Questions About Profiteering

“All of us know about the ‘welfare queen’ narrative, and that worked,” said Weerasinghe, referencing a racist trope popularized by Ronald Reagan to characterize Black people on benefits as greedy fraudsters. “It created a lot of hatred toward public benefits, and also this willingness for the public to be OK with this kind of crackdown that was absolutely unnecessary.”

Weerasinghe said the administration is using “the immigrant narrative in order to make their case to defer to defer funds.” Trump, for instance, recently froze more than $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota.

“They’re not interested in tackling any systemic issues that may exist,” said Krieger. “They’ve kind of constructed a problem in search of a solution, and the solution always is to blame immigrants.”

The post Corporations, Not Immigrants, Are Responsible for Vast Majority of Healthcare Fraud, OIG Report Shows appeared first on The Intercept.

By early March, after federal immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, 32 Democratic members of Congress had called to either abolish or dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including three members who had previously voted to “express gratitude to ICE.” Democrats rapidly introduced legislation to restrict, defund, or abolish the federal immigration agency. And for months, Democrats in the House successfully blocked funding of the Department of Homeland Security with the unrealized goal of obtaining minor restrictions on immigration agents. 

Although protesters took to the streets in Maine and Texas in the ides of summer to object to ICE’s killing of 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford and 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, that glimmer of enthusiasm for action appears to have died down in the halls of Congress.

“I’ll be honest. I’m not seeing [anger] to the extent I saw when Alex and Renee were executed by ICE in Minnesota. … I’ve seen some statements come up, and some conversations, but it has not been elevated to the extent that I would expect from a number of my colleagues,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill. “It feels like we’re normalizing it.”

Democrats caved on DHS funding in April, and with some exceptions, most of the caucus has been silent on the existing bills to restrict the agency. Progressives have criticized their colleagues for not continuing to fight against funding the Department of Homeland Security, and for only acting in a moment of heightened political attention. 

Related

Would-Be Platner Replacements in Maine Rally Around “Abolish ICE” (or Something Close)

In January, Ramirez and Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., introduced the Melt ICE Act, a bill that would end DHS funding to detain or monitor immigrants. The legislation, which Ramirez says is “not all things” but represents a meaningful step toward dismantling the entire agency, currently has 12 co-sponsors, including members of the progressive Squad and two retiring members who will leave Congress at the end of the current term.

Ramirez said she had hoped to pick up additional backing in the wake of Durán Guerrero and Salgado Araujo’s killings, but she has yet to hear from any additional co-sponsors — even from colleagues who were calling to “Abolish ICE” in February and sharing press releases with the words “Melt ICE” in them.

The Chicago congresswoman said she worried that the lack of action had to do in part with the fact that Pretti and Good were white U.S. citizens, and Durán Guerrero and Salgado Araujo were noncitizens from Colombia and Mexico, respectively. She noted that one of the first fatal ICE shootings under the second Trump administration — of undocumented Mexican immigrant Silverio Villegas González last September in Chicago — rarely gets mentioned.

“Why is it that for some, when the person seems to be lighter-skinned, a U.S. citizen, the uproar seems to be deeper?” Ramirez said. “And why was it that his name seems to be a name that many people don’t know?”

While political energy remains low, the Department of Homeland Security continues to be a lethal force. On Tuesday morning, a man in Florida running from immigration officers was struck by a semi-truck, marking the third time a person had been killed during an encounter with immigration agents within a week.

Violence has surged within detention centers as well. Within the first 500 days of Trump’s second term, 52 people have died in ICE custody, the highest mortality rate in over a decade, according to a recent report from Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights. On Monday, Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva, a 45-year-old Venezuelan man died in a private prison used for ICE detention in Georgia in an apparent case of medical neglect. 

Meanwhile, ICE has punished protesters who object to its brutality with more violence. Physicians for Human Rights and the UC Berkeley Law School’s Human Rights Center documented 412 incidents between June 2025 and May 2026 where law enforcement agents used excessive force or chemical weapons on ICE protesters, children, journalists, legal observers, and bystanders.

Dr. Rohini Haar, an adjunct professor of epidemiology at UC Berkley’s School of Public Health and lead author of the use-of-force study, said lawmakers should not allow these attacks to be met with “impunity” just because there is less impending political pressure.

“Do not ignore this just because it’s less newsworthy,” said Haahr, who is also a medical adviser for Physicians for Human Rights. “You’re going to keep getting [violence] when no one is held accountable.” 

Related

It’s Time for Concrete Action on ICE. Sadly, We Have the Democrats.

Progressives, including Ramirez, have criticized their colleagues for not anticipating that the violence would continue once DHS funding was fully restored. In April, House Democrats agreed to fund the Department of Homeland Security under a two-track model that would immediately fund most of the Department and push ICE and Border Patrol funding through a separate process that would not require any Democratic support. In June, Republicans voted to fund ICE and Border Patrol to the tune of $70 billion.

“I said this a couple of weeks ago, that I would not be surprised if, when ICE funding started up again, we would start to see more civilian deaths at the hands of ICE,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who did not co-sponsor Melt ICE, told reporters on Monday. “And that’s exactly what has happened.”

The Intercept asked whether the congresswoman planned to co-sponsor Ramirez’s legislation and was directed to her public statements on the DHS funding measure. The Intercept also reached out to Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar, D-Texas., who is also not a co-sponsor of the legislation, to ask if he planned to co-sponsor the bill in the wake of the Texas shooting, but did not receive a response.

Although anger has bubbled up again in protests across the country, the public’s attention does appear to have waned since its peak in January after federal immigration agents fatally shot Good and Pretti. 

Manisha Sinha, an American history professor at the University of Connecticut, said there are several potential reasons for lowered attention on Salgado Araujo and Durán Guerrero’s deaths. The Trump administration has changed its tactics to deemphasize cities where protesters and local leaders could jointly resist immigration enforcement, as they did in Minnesota. And, undoubtedly, the fact that “Alex Pretti and Renee Good were citizens” added to the public outrage over their killings, said Sinha. 

Without the same intensity of pressure from voters as there was in winter and spring, Ramirez said many of her colleagues are not motivated to take principled positions on immigration that might anger their deep-pocketed donors. But she said she understands that people may also be wary of risking their lives while members of Congress go about their business as usual. 

“People in the street don’t feel like the members on the inside really have the pulse of what’s happening to them, and that frankly they’re fucking tired,” Ramirez said. “And I hate that I have to ask them to keep showing up. But knowing this body, I know that this body only moves from pressure.”

The post In the Wake of Fatal ICE Shootings, Democrats Drag Their Feet appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs published an updated “notice of funding opportunity,” first announced in April, for service providers to apply for grants through Title X, a federal program that provides low and no-cost birth control and other sexual and reproductive health services to roughly 2.8 million people every year.

For months, the federal program had been plagued with uncertainty. Donald Trump eliminated Title X from his 2027 annual budget — and last year suddenly froze a large percentage of funds going to Title X recipients before eventually restoring the funding.

But when providers opened the funding notice in April, instead of being met with relief, many were horrified to discover that Health and Human Services had a new mission in mind for the only federal program dedicated to providing contraceptives: getting women to have more babies.

Grants funded through the program will help “build body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis” and other conditions that affect infertility, the notice said. Contraceptives are hardly mentioned, except in a section on “overmedicalization,” which appears to commend the fact that “reports have shown a decrease in females’ current use of any contraception.”

Related

A “Scheme” Against Dobbs: SCOTUS Dissent Hints at Next Phase of Abortion Rights Fight

The notice is a part of a quiet, but significant, push to retool the Department of Health and Human Services into a weapon for a pronatalist movement seeped in the racist history of eugenics — which insists on the supposed biological superiority of white, straight, able-bodied people — and in the denial of women’s bodily autonomy and right to exist outside of motherhood.

Providers fighting back against the new requirements in court argue that this will further cede power over vulnerable communities’ health to far-right actors inside of the administration, like Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine, a former penile implant surgeon and anti-abortion crusader who is in charge of administering the Title X program. 

“I would characterize it as really a shift toward this Project 2025 MAHA vision of prioritizing having babies over reproductive autonomy,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health research organization, “and really undermining the program from top to bottom.”

The notice had previously included a pre-merits alignment review that would require all grantees to undergo an ideological audit by political appointees based on their commitment to the administration’s priorities, including ending diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and gender-affirming care — even though the statute explicitly requires grantees to promote health equity and provide care to transgender recipients. However, it was later updated to remove the alignment review.

Friedrich-Karnik and other sexual and reproductive health experts argue that under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS is seeking to warp a public sexual health program to advance the goals of the administration’s allies in the pronatalist movement ahead of the November midterms. Pronatalists harbor close ties and, in some cases, overlap with white Christian nationalists who want not only for there to be more babies, but also more white babies. 

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

The pronatalist movement in the United States is largely, but not exclusively, divided between two categories: traditional conservatives and tech eugenicists.

Tech pronatalists like Elon Musk, a former administration official who is arguably the most prominent member of the movement, advocate for having as many children as possible to create an “elite” human race with more “high-IQ” people. Unlike traditional pronatalist conservatives, best exemplified by Vice President JD Vance, whose focus rests more on the nuclear family and defending “traditional” gender roles, tech pronatalists emphasize the use of technology such as in vitro fertilization to have as many children as possible. 

While pronatalists are often not as explicit as avowed white nationalists about their desire for more white children, they often talk about “declining genetic quality” in “the West” and generally oppose immigration, even as they decry the falling birth rate and nearing population decline.

Trump, Vance, and Kennedy have all been closely aligned with the pronatalist movement. Kennedy has repeatedly opined about declining birth rates and teenage boys’ declining “sperm count”; Trump has anointed himself the “fertilization president,” despite the fact that his administration gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s IVF team; and in his first address as vice president, Vance declared: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” 

This month, “Trump Accounts” went into effect, providing children born between January 2025 and December 2028 with $1,000 in an effort to boost the population. The president also floated the idea of providing mothers who have six or more children with medals. (After several people noted that the Nazis had done the same thing, that idea seems to be dead in the water.)

But behind the push to have more kids, there is an anti-autonomy agenda at play, said Taylor St. Germain, interim co-executive director of Reproductive Equity Now. 

“This is a part of the MAHA movement that is really a veneer for an anti-abortion agenda and an anti-bodily-autonomy agenda,” said St. Germain.

In June, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents the majority of Title X providers, and others, sued to challenge the notice, arguing that the Trump administration was willfully violating the statute and attempting to rewrite the law through a grant notice.

“We believe that this is truly an attempt by the administration to hijack the program,” said Clare Coleman, president of the NFPRHA. 

Although the administration has removed the pre-merits review that would have given additional authority to political appointees to reject providers based on politics before even assessing their ability to provide quality care, there are still concerns about the types of providers who will be brought in to the program with Christine at the helm of the Office of Population Affairs.

Christine has a long history of staunch anti-abortion advocacy, including his support for the expansion of so-called crisis pregnancy centers, deceptively advertised clinics that aim to manipulate people out of receiving abortions. Christine has called the clinics “a model for a post-Roe world.”

The problem with having crisis pregnancy centers fill the gaps of service providers is that they are “not real medical clinics,” said Friedrich-Karnik. 

“They do not have the expertise to provide reproductive health care. They often oppose hormonal birth control methods, which is directly contrary to making sure that folks in Title X have access to the full range of contraceptive methods,” she said. 

Related

The Shadow Medical Community Behind the Attempt to Ban Medication Abortion

The fact that contraceptives are rarely mentioned in the notice is “a sign that they are decentering the statutory intent of the program,” said Coleman. 

“Congress intended this program to help equalize access to contraception,” said Coleman. “The only mention of contraception is that mention in the pejorative, and talking about overmedicalization and side effects, so we just see this as a real throwaway of what the program historically has been focused on and what Congress still intends the program to be focused on.” 

The funding announcement stands in stark contrast to how the Office of Population Affairs described the program less than two years ago. 

A 2024 OPA handbook reads that the family planning services delivered by the program include “contraceptive products and natural family planning methods for clients who want to prevent pregnancy and space births; pregnancy testing and counseling; assistance to achieve pregnancy; basic infertility services; sexually transmitted infection (STI) services; and other preconception health services.” 

While fertility is mentioned, the handbook is filled with references to contraceptives and other reproductive and sexual health services that have nothing to do with increasing the birth rate. 

“RFK Jr. is really using this to push an extremist agenda that prioritizes increasing births over ensuring people have the information and health care they need to make their own reproductive care decisions,” said St. Germain. 

Related

Alabama Court Rules Frozen Embryos Made by IVF Are “Children”

The attempts to rewrite the mandate at HHS to focus on pronatalism are not exclusively tied to Title X. In June, the administration announced a notice of funding opportunity for an existing program called the Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services program, which was created to help raise awareness of programs that allow people to receive other people’s unused embryos. In the notice, the agency described an embryo as “a child already in existence.”

“They have defined, for the first time, embryos as children who already exist and are in need of a family,” said Coleman, “advancing this argument for fetal personhood with a certain religious belief that sperm meets egg equals life.”

Coleman said what we are witnessing now is a ratcheting up of the pronatalist agenda, using methods like funding notices that are unlikely to draw much attention outside of conservative circles. 

“It’s sneaky,” she said, adding, “It’s quite unusual in my 17 years in this job to do a lot of calls with reporters about funding announcements.” 

The post The Trump Administration Is Overhauling Birth Control Access for the Pronatalist Movement appeared first on The Intercept.

The MAHA enthusiast announced last month that HHS was demanding federal action on allegations that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also known as CAIR, and its California and Washington affiliates had misused federal grant funds. “If there is evidence of fraud, abuse, or ties to designated terrorist organizations, we will act,” he wrote on X. 

The post came as a shock at CAIR’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C., because the organization had never received nor solicited federal funding from Health and Human Services.

“Not even a penny,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of CAIR. “[Kennedy] would know that if he had spent any amount of time doing research before he decided to publicly attack us in this way.”

Kennedy’s mystifying crusade appears to be an attempt to satisfy the demands of a group of Republican members of Congress led by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, as an emboldened right wing chomping at the bit to target Muslim Americans dictates the decisions of the executive branch. After Roy and his colleagues argued without evidence that CAIR and its affiliates were connected to international terrorist organizations and had misused federal funds intended to help settle Afghan refugees, Kennedy’s fumbling attempt to address their concerns set off a bizarre chapter in the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent that left the intended targets wondering whether they were under a real investigation or had become pawns in a challenging midterm cycle.

“During election cycles we see the ramping-up of this type of anti-Muslim rhetoric,” said Saher Selod, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. “Saying we need to investigate CAIR national is following a playbook of trying to motivate a base to come out and vote, and Muslims have become the bait in this moment.”

CAIR, which advocates for the civil rights of Muslims in the United States, has been a thorn in President Donald Trump’s side since his first administration, when the group sued to block his infamous “Muslim ban.” In Trump’s second term, CAIR national and its local chapters have continued to push back against the administration’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim agenda through the courts and in public statements.

While CAIR national has never received HHS funding, CAIR California and CAIR Washington, which operate separately from the national branch and are overseen by their own boards of directors, have received federal health dollars to provide legal services to Afghan refugees fleeing after the Taliban took power in 2021.

Both chapters vehemently denied any wrongdoing and emphasized the extensive vetting process required by both their respective states and the federal government to use the funds under contention. 

“They won’t get anything out” of an investigation, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR California. “It is merely an attempt to create smear and destruction, to silence … the most important American Muslim voices in the country when it comes to issues dealing with Israeli abuses and the U.S. funding of those abuses.”

The allegations levied against CAIR and its local affiliates come amid a larger wave of anti-Muslim attacks as Republicans fight to hold onto power in a midterm cycle where they’re likely to lose seats. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis joined Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in December in designating CAIR as a “foreign terrorist organization.” In Tennessee, Republican Rep. Andy Ogles posted on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”

Democrats have hardly been immune from spreading Islamophobic rhetoric. During last year’s New York City mayoral election, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand had to apologize for comments characterizing now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim, as supportive of a “global jihad.” Before winning New Jersey’s June primary, Dr. Adam Hamawy faced attacks from some of his Democratic opponents over a brief 1995 trial testimony he gave for a religious leader convicted of plotting terror attacks, in what Hamawy’s campaign described as well-worn Islamophobic tropes.

Roy, who has been leading the charge against CAIR in Congress, was running his own campaign for Texas attorney general when he sent a letter to Kennedy urging HHS to investigate and suspend CAIR and CAIR California, accusing the organization of having long-standing ties to Hamas and documented “misuse of federal grant funds.” 

In response, CAIR California sent a letter to Kennedy refuting Roy’s claims as “lies, smears and defamatory statements.” The group noted that it was selected and vetted by the state of California to provide these services, and argued that its “use of public funds are fully accounted for, transparent and compliant with its legal obligations.” 

Over a month later, CAIR California received what Ayloush, its executive director, described as an “amicable” and “reassuring” response from HHS. In the letter, obtained by The Intercept, the director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, Paula M. Stannard, said she was directed by Kennedy to respond to CAIR California on his behalf.

“OCR plays a critical part in the effort to ensure that people are able to lead healthy lives free of discriminatory barriers,” Stannard wrote. “OCR’s policy and enforcement efforts continue to protect all Americans from unlawful discrimination; ensure equal access to health and human services and respect the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” 

The letter did not commit to anything, but Ayloush said that he did not get the sense that the secretary would be joining in on what he described as the “bashing of Muslim organizations.” 

So it came as a surprise when only a few days later, the secretary posted about an investigation not only into CAIR California, but also CAIR national and CAIR Washington. 

“There’s an interesting divergence between what he said privately to CAIR California in writing, and then what he said on social media,” Mitchell, the national deputy director, said. 

So far, all three organizations told The Intercept that they have not received any correspondence from HHS. “To this point, we have not received any communication from him indicating that he’s looking into anything,” said Mitchell. “No subpoenas, no nothing at all, just this shot across the bow in the court of public opinion.” 

Roy, who founded the Islamophobic “Sharia-Free America Caucus,” thanked Kennedy in June for “investigating CAIR’s alleged ties to the groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.” 

Imraan Siddiqi, executive director of CAIR Washington, said that accusing Muslim Americans of fraud had become a convenient line of attack politically. He pointed to attacks in Washington state on predominantly Somali Muslim childcare workers after conspiracy theories that Somalis were committing child care grant fraud spread in Minnesota.

Related

GOP Megadonor Leonard Leo Is Bankrolling a Website on the Warpath Against Somalis

“They’ve found a line of attack that some people are responding to or resonates with them,” he said, particularly in an era where social media can easily amplify misinformation for an audience eager to confirm their own biases. 

Hatem Baizan, an Ethnic Studies lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, said the administration does not need to prove these claims to smear CAIR and its affiliates.

“Facts are immaterial for this current administration,” he said. “The aim is to throw as much dirt as possible, use as many investigative tools as possible with the hope that you have enough delegitimization, enough doubt, to actually get people to distance themselves from CAIR.” 

The post RFK Jr. Claims He’s Investigating Terrorism Now, Too appeared first on The Intercept.

The 35-year-old asylum-seeker from Belarus has spent nearly a year at Farmville Detention Center. There, he says, he’s experiencing medical neglect as a tumor grows on his arm. 

“It hurts when you touch it,” Shcharbachenia told The Intercept, holding his arm up on a video call to show a growth the size of an egg. He said he’d lost feeling in the fingers on his right hand, and though he requested to see a specialist in December, as of last week he hadn’t seen one nor received a diagnosis. Instead, as Shcharbachenia attested in an internal oversight complaint to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. government illegally tried to deport him back to Belarus, where he fled political persecution in 2021.

Shcharbachenia is one of thousands of immigrants being held in detention facilities where the federal government or private contractors control their access to food and medical care. Soon tens of thousands more could be joining him, as the Trump administration and Congress move to rapidly expand the deportation and detention machine. And advocates warn that Farmville, purchased last year by private prison contractor CoreCivic for $67 million, has long been dogged by allegations of neglectful and unsanitary conditions.

“Dogs” live better than detainees there, Shcharbachenia told The Intercept. “I want people to know what really happens inside here.” 

The Intercept spoke to Shcharbachenia via a Russian translator arranged by an abolitionist organization, Free Them All VA, and reviewed several complaints he submitted to the DHS Office of Inspector General about the lack of medical attention for the enlarged mass on his arm and his treatment on the attempted deportation flight. When The Intercept called the inspector general’s office to discuss Shcharbachenia’s case, the number was no longer in service.

Earlier this month, Congress approved roughly $70 billion for immigration enforcement efforts. Last year, the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act allocated more than $170 billion over the next four years for immigration enforcement. And the Trump administration has been rapidly purchasing detention centers with a plan to have the capacity to detain 100,000 immigrants at once.

“What we expect is that the mass infusion of cash will only put online more detention facilities that are going to be run as private businesses, and offer the bare minimum at the cost of human life and human suffering,” said Sophia Gregg, senior immigrants’ rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia.

Gregg said that there’s no indication that the administration will manage these new facilities, many of which are converted warehouses and “temporary shelters,” any better than the current ones in operation.

“They’re using detention as a form of punishment as a way to get people to relinquish their rights to remain in this country and creating conditions that ultimately create suffering in order to induce people to elect to be removed,” she said. “And so with that being the goal of the administration to deport people as quickly as possible, they have no incentive in creating conditions that are humane.”

In fact, Shcharbachenia believes he was targeted for just that reason. In May, he was caught sharing “know your rights” information with new detainees, and guards soon placed him in solitary confinement. He was there for two weeks, Shcharbachenia recalled, and only let out of his cell with his legs and arms bound by chains.

Related

ICE Contractor Says It Doesn’t Use Solitary Confinement. Photos of Its Isolation Cells Reveal Otherwise.

In a statement to The Intercept, CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd said the contractor does not use solitary confinement and instead opts for “restrictive housing,” a term that describes confining a detained person in isolation from other people. He denied allegations of retaliatory treatment.

ICE did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

When Farmville Detention Center opened in 2010, its initial owners, Immigration Centers of America, argued that private management would be more humane than what the government could provide. They sold it to the community as “almost a summer camp environment,” said a spokesperson for Free Them All VA, which has been monitoring the facility for years.

Instead, advocates argue they created a hellscape for immigrants. 

In 2015, a guard pepper-sprayed a detainee while he was in full restraints and confined to a medical isolation cell, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement records released under the Freedom of Information Act. In another instance from the same records, a detainee was restrained to a bed and chair for over four days. The “vendor” at the time, Immigration Centers of America, did not deny the incident but said that the action was justified. ICE responded that they would not sanction the facility for the use of force. 

The facility did receive a “one-time deduction” of its monthly invoice after detainees found “white worms” in their food, but only because Immigration Centers of America had posted a memorandum threatening anyone who “attempted to degrade the reputation of” the facility, which the government interpreted as threatening complainants.

Related

ICE Pepper-Sprayed, Beat Detainees for Protesting “Horrific Conditions” in Delaney Hall Jail

In 2020, detainees initiated a hunger strike to demand their release as Covid swept through the facility. In August of that year, 72-year-old Canadian man James Hill died after contracting the disease inside. Instead of responding to the growing concerns about the spread of the coronavirus, guards reportedly used pepper spray against detainees on hunger strike. 

Then CoreCivic bought the facility in 2025.

“Things since [the facility] moved to CoreCivic have only gotten worse,” said Gregg. “Medical services are difficult to get for individuals, if not impossible.”

Shcharbachenia, who was picked up by immigration agents at a truck stop in Virginia in August 2025, agreed with Gregg’s assessment of the care. He said the facility’s ventilation system is dirty, and it’s often freezing inside. The water is “undrinkable,” he said, and the food is disgusting and “artificial.”

Shcharbachenia, who primarily speaks Russian, said CoreCivic staff have denied access to a translator or any assistance in filing his asylum claim. He said he had received documents related to his claims while in detention, but without a translator, he was unable to do anything about it.

In February, two months after he requested urgent medical attention, Shcharbachenia said he was finally seen by an onsite doctor about his arm, but he claims that she only measured the growth on his arm and did not provide any treatment, and that he still has not seen a specialist. He said he also had a telehealth appointment, but it was for mental health care. In a letter from Shcharbachenia to the DHS Office of Inspector General in March, he detailed his medical condition and repeated requests to receive outside “specialist evaluation and imaging.”

Todd, the CoreCivic spokesperson, told The Intercept that he was unable to comment on whether Shcharbachenia had seen a specialist or received a diagnosis but said he was seen multiple times by onsite medical staff. 

“The safety, health and well-being of the individuals entrusted to our care is our top priority, and we take seriously our responsibility to adhere to all applicable federal detention standards at our Farmville Detention Center (FDC),” Todd wrote in a statement to The Intercept. He denied Shcharbachenia’s claims about his lack of access to a translator as well as the state of the drinking water and ventilation system, arguing that it’s the same “clean drinking water” that supplies the local community, and that the staff drink the same water and use the same ventilation systems.

On May 20, after his two weeks in isolation, ICE moved Shcharbachenia to a facility in Chantilly, Virginia, according to a separate complaint filed with the DHS Joint Intake Center. He recalled an agent asking him if he was ready to fly to Belarus.

ICE flew him to Turkey, where he begged not to be returned to Belarus as best he could in English. He said he showed officers documents he’d printed out on human rights abuses in his home country and warned that if he returned, he would likely be murdered, leaving his two daughters fatherless.

Related

They Flee Russia as Dissidents Seeking Asylum. The U.S. Locks Them Up.

But it was to no avail. He was flown from Turkey to Azerbaijan, where was able to speak with immigration officers who understood his native Russian. He refused to board the next plane to Belarus.

Shcharbachenia said that agents from the United States and Azerbaijan began to argue, but because he did not have his passport, he was unable to leave the airport. ICE eventually escorted him back to Turkey, where he was placed in a cell in the airport.

What happened next still haunts his dreams.

“They took out of their backpacks some white plastic collars, like dog collars,” he said, referring to U.S. immigration agents. As they entered the cell, Shcharbachenia said he begged a Turkish police officer who was present for asylum. He said a U.S. immigration agent approached him from behind and hit him across the head, causing him to lose consciousness.

Shcharbachenia said he woke up on the floor with another officer “choking him so hard he couldn’t breathe.” Shcharbachenia passed out again and awoke with the plastic collars around his legs and arms, Shcharbachenia told The Intercept and wrote in three complaints filed with internal DHS oversight agencies. 

Shcharbachenia was eventually transferred back to Farmville, where he said he received no medical treatment for the injury he sustained from being hit on the back of the head. Todd, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said that the assault and head injury were not reflected in Shcharbachenia’s medical records.

As for the growing mass on his arm, Shcharbachenia said he has made multiple grievance requests for treatment. He said staff at first promised to get him an appointment within the month, but eventually, Farmville Detention Center stopped responding. 

Update: June 23, 2026, 10:53 a.m. ET
This story has been updated with an additional statement from CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd sent after publication.

The post ICE Tried to Deport an Asylum-Seeker. Now He’s Being Denied Care for a Growing Tumor in a Private Prison. appeared first on The Intercept.

His opponent, City Council and Democratic Socialists of America member Janeese Lewis George, was “sitting on her hands and playing politics” by opposing a police-enforced curfew for minors, McDuffie said.

So-called “teen takeovers,” or large, coordinated meetups of teenagers in public spaces, have become a key political cause in D.C., where McDuffie argues the city needs to crack down to stave off the worst excesses of the federal government. His critics say he’s falling into a rhetorical trap laid by the Trump administration.

“When teen takeovers threaten the safety of residents and the young people themselves,” McDuffie wrote in a letter to the City Council, “the Council cannot afford to leave law enforcement and communities without every appropriate tool at their disposal.” 

Last summer, before the federal takeover of D.C., McDuffie and Lewis George both voted in favor of broad emergency curfew powers that allowed Mayor Muriel Bowser to create targeted zones that youth could not enter after certain hours, enforced by local police. D.C. has long had limited curfew laws on the books, and an update to the city’s permanent curfew law with new restrictions on enforcement is set to go into effect mid-July.

The candidates, who will face off in a Democratic primary to replace Bowser on Tuesday, have since split. Lewis George voted against both extending the emergency and implementing the new permanent law. McDuffie, though no longer on the council, said he supported both. 

To some, the scene at the Chipotle represented lawlessness and amplified their fears around the city’s youth. To others, the incident, which police told local media caused no injuries or damage, failed to warrant curfew policies which would increase arrests and police harassment of teenagers, primarily Black teens. 

The neighborhood around the Chipotle is beautiful, said Alex Dodds, “designed as a space where people should come and gather.”

“When Black children do that, they are seen as criminals,” said Dodds, campaign director for Free DC, an organization advocating for the city’s sovereignty that has endorsed Lewis George. “I don’t even understand what we want children to do.” 

A few miles away from McDuffie’s Chipotle press conference, Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, struck an eerily similar chord to McDuffie. 

“Teen takeovers … have terrorized our neighborhoods,” said the former Fox News host. “They have shut down businesses, and they have wasted hard-earned tax dollars of law-abiding residents who just want to live and work in peace.” 

Federal law enforcement officials would soon begin a “summer surge” targeting teenagers, Pirro warned. She added that her office would begin “aggressively prosecuting parents” whose children violated curfew laws, threatening them with up to six months in prison.    

McDuffie has weaponized the teen gatherings in campaign advertisements and public comments to argue that strict curfew zones — and the tough-on-crime mayoral candidate pushing them — will help forestall more aggressive actions by the Trump administration.

But advocates for D.C. sovereignty and youth in the criminal justice system warned that his rhetoric would only legitimize the administration’s efforts to incarcerate D.C. youth on a large scale, and that there is no evidence teen curfews reduce violent crime. Instead, they say, such curfews would increase the rates of arrest and harassment, particularly of Black teens, at a time when the city is swarming with federal agents. 

“Kenyan McDuffie is much more buying into the Trump administration’s playbook of lock-them-up and using fear to gain support,” said Dodds. “It’s so frustrating for our elected leaders … to obey in advance and go out of their way to press for a youth curfew.”

Trump personally weighed in on the race on Thursday, threatening to “take back Washington, run it on the federal basis,” if Lewis George were elected.

The theory in favor of juvenile curfews is that if you deter teens from gathering, they’ll have fewer opportunities to commit crime. But that relies on a misconception, said Riya Saha Shah, chief executive officer of the Juvenile Law Center.

Related

After Uvalde, Texas Stuffed Schools Full of Cops. They Brutalized Students.

“Social science research has shown us that [curfews] are actually not effective at reducing crime or victimization,” said Shah. “It could result in increased crime or displaced crime in different places or at different hours of the day.” 

In 2015, research on juvenile curfews in D.C. found that they actually increased rates of gun violence among youth. Researchers theorized that the emptier streets that resulted from curfew policies could make “remaining offenders more comfortable opening fire.” 

While juvenile curfews do not reduce crime, Shah said, they do increase run-ins with police, particularly for Black and brown children. A 2011 study found that African American youths were 269 percent more likely to be arrested for violating curfew laws than white ones. The laws can also end up criminalizing teenagers for being unhoused, and an estimated 10,000 children in D.C.  experience housing insecurity or homelessness every year. 

“They may be brought into a system by virtue simply that they don’t have the ability to go home,” Shah said.

In D.C., where nearly 20 federal agencies have been deployed, these types of curfews pose immense risks for teens. “There are so many different kinds of law enforcement all over the city now,” said Shah. “It really increases the likelihood that children will be arrested.”   

In his letter to the City Council urging extended youth curfews, McDuffie argued the curfews were necessary to protect “Home Rule,” the 1970s law that gave Washington, D.C., relative independence from the federal government. 

“President Donald Trump has deployed the National Guard on D.C. streets and floated proposals to try 14-year-olds as adults. Every week that this Council allows curfew authority to lapse, it hands the White House and its allies fresh evidence for that narrative and justification for federal intervention,” he wrote. 

Lewis George, by contrast, has emphasized that her primary objection to the curfew extension is the intense presence of federal law enforcement in the city.

Despite the lack of evidence to support the idea that teen curfews lower violent crime rates, the policy is overwhelmingly popular with D.C. voters. A Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 71 percent of voters supported imposing curfews in certain parts of the city at night.

Though her current position is unpopular, Lewis George has continued to surge in the polls, leading McDuffie by 11 points in the same poll. Internal numbers shared with The Intercept have her up further. 

But Lewis George has not done as well as her opponent with Black voters, a key constituency in the capital sometimes known as Chocolate City. In the Washington Post-Schar School poll, she trailed McDuffie by 5 points with Black voters. A spokesperson for her campaign said that Lewis George was proud of the multiracial coalition she had built, and argued that she does best in the most racially diverse areas of the city. 

The relationship between race and power is complicated in Washington D.C. Rapid gentrification has pushed out much of the city’s Black population, displacing an estimated 20,000 between 2000 and 2013. Between 2000 and 2020 Black residents went from being 59 percent of the population to 41 percent. And yet, the city’s political leadership has largely remained Black — it’s had a Black mayor since Home Rule was established. 

Kurtis Hagans, chair of Metro DC DSA, which endorsed Lewis George, said it is understandable that people with long-standing ties to the city would be skeptical of someone promising change at the scale Lewis George is calling for. She has pledged to build 72,000 new homes in five years to deal with the city’s housing affordability crisis — double the goals set by McDuffie and Bowser; called for stronger labor protections; promised to vigorously enforce wage theft laws; and vowed to establish a Federal Workforce Transition Center to retrain the thousands of federal workers who were laid off by the Trump administration.

Lewis George strongly outperforms with voters 18-39, and she does the worst with voters 65 and older. 

“There’s an element of disappointment with the Democrats in the city, folks who have before promised big change and transformative change, and then have let them down,” said Hagans, referencing previous mayors Vincent Gray and Adrian Fenty. “I can imagine that’s like, OK, well, at least we know Bowser.” 

Mayor Bowser has not officially endorsed a candidate, but she has clearly made known her preference for McDuffie, who has benefited from her coalition of more centrist Democrats and the city’s business community. 

In Dodds’s view, Bowser has spent much of her final term in office attempting to appease Trump with little to show for it. 

“If appeasement was working,” she said, “we wouldn’t be getting attacked, and they wouldn’t be sending in troops, and they wouldn’t be escalating law enforcement, and they wouldn’t be overturning our laws, and they wouldn’t be attempting to destabilize our budget. But they are still attempting to do all of that, so what good has appeasement gotten us?” 

She noted that crime rates had been declining for two years and that the Trump administration still deployed the National Guard and federalized the police force in August 2025. A month later, Trump pushed a House bill to charge children as young as 14 as adults. 

Alignment between local leaders and the White House on pushing carceral policies predates Home Rule. 

In “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” scholar James Forman explains how many Black leaders in Washington and elsewhere were complicit in pushing the carceral policies of the 1970s, including teen curfews, that eventually led to the mass incarceration of Black Americans. 

As Forman and scholars like Elizabeth Hinton have noted, those leaders were asking for support services alongside these carceral policies, as McDuffie is doing now. But those large-scale investments failed to materialize. Instead, their communities were ravaged by policing and mass incarceration policies that tore families apart. 

Lewis George, who initially ran for her council seat on a platform of divesting from the police, is no stranger to attacks calling her soft on crime. But for some, it’s disappointing to see those same attacks coming from McDuffie, who previously was largely aligned with Lewis George on issues of criminal justice. 

McDuffie had previously expressed skepticism over the emergency teen curfews, though he and Lewis George both voted in favor.

“The research has shown that curfews do not prevent violence,” McDuffie said at a City Council meeting last year. 

McDuffie has taken progressive actions on policing in the past. In 2020, amid heightened political energy around police brutality and broader calls to defund the police, McDuffie voted to pull $15 million from the Metropolitan Police Department’s budget. And in 2021, he said that “we need to redirect funding away from the police department.”

Dodds said it concerned her that McDuffie’s campaign appeared to be capitalizing on D.C. residents’ fears. She argued that’s what the Trump administration wants.

“They very much want us to feel afraid of young people and of Black children in ways that are inherently racist,” said Dodds, “because when we feel afraid, we fight each other instead of fighting for one another.” 

The post D.C. Mayor Candidates Are Fixating on Teen Hangouts — and Turning the Cops on Them appeared first on The Intercept.

Steve Hilton, a conservative former political aide and commentator, finished second Tuesday, a week after the state’s nonpartisan primary day. He will compete with Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary under President Joe Biden. The pair edged out Tom Steyer, a billionaire philanthropist who ran on a progressive platform.

The ascension of Hilton, a conservative power player endorsed by President Donald Trump, suggests dissatisfaction with the slate of Democratic candidates on offer in the open primary and an inability for Steyer, who has never held elected office, to break through with a campaign vowing to help redistribute the wealth.

It also offers Becerra an easier path to election, with California voters expected to skew heavily Democratic in November.

Becerra, who ran a relatively quiet campaign focused on his credentials, previously served as California attorney general under Govs. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom. He came under fire for his work in that office, as The Intercept reported last month. In 2018, Becerra’s office pushed for the state Supreme Court to artificially inflate the IQ of an intellectually disabled Black man in order to execute him, and he fought to uphold death penalty sentences during the Covid pandemic, despite a moratorium Newsom imposed. Becerra has also been criticized for his alleged mishandling of migrant children who were in his office’s care while serving as HHS secretary. 

Related

“Me Too” Comes Back to Congress

His primary campaign managed to overcome those criticisms, racking up high-profile endorsements from figures including Reps. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., and Ted Lieu, D-Calif., as well as several notable labor unions. Becerra’s campaign was also boosted by the rapid and scandalous departure of former front-runner Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including rape. Swalwell denied the allegations but swiftly resigned from Congress and ended his gubernatorial campaign, clearing a path in the centrist lane that Becerra quickly filled. 

Hilton, meanwhile, spent months neck and neck in the polls with Steyer, a former hedge fund manager who used his immense wealth to fund his campaign yet ran on what was widely considered the most progressive platform in the race, earning the head-turning endorsement of Our Revolution, the group founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. 

While he’s a relative unknown in the United States, Hilton has a reputation in the United Kingdom for helping to orchestrate the rise of former British Prime Minister David Cameron. If he manages to defeat Becerra in November, Hilton will be California’s first Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger, the architect of the state’s open primary system.

The post In California, a Former Biden Official Will Face Fox News Personality for Governor appeared first on The Intercept.

The second-place finish for Raman means that in the coming months, Bass will have to grapple with a challenger from her left. The incumbent mayor’s establishment bonafides at once lend her a strong political apparatus and make her the object of voter frustration. Raman, meanwhile, will face an uphill battle against the entrenched Democratic machine, which helped Bass easily secure a first-place finish. The embrace of mail-in voting by Angelenos slowly turned the tide for Raman, who initially trailed Pratt when polls closed last Tuesday.

Related

The Los Angeles Left Is at War With Itself Over the Mayor’s Race

Under California’s nonpartisan, open primary system, all viable candidates stood for the same June election — putting Pratt, a Republican, in the same primary as the heavily Democratic field. The top two advance to a runoff in November, meaning Los Angeles voters will choose between two Democrats in the general election ballot.

The emergence of Pratt, who rode a wave of outside conservative funding, prompted an intense debate among the city’s left on how to vote in the open primary. Rae Huang entered the race early on a progressive platform of strident police accountability measures, free and fast buses, and public housing. Raman, a city councilmember, decided to run at the last moment, with polls quickly showing she had a clearer path to a November runoff to fend off Pratt. Huang and her supporters insisted that she had the bolder leftist vision for the city, while Raman’s backers accused the Huang campaign of splitting the left amid a real threat from Pratt. The left is now faced with the task of repairing its fractures ahead of the November runoff. 

Following Zohran Mamdani’s successful run for mayor in New York City, pundits were quick to ponder whether Los Angeles might be having its own Mamdani moment. But closer watchers of LA politics have been asking whether a different New York import could improve elections in the nation’s second biggest city: ranked-choice voting.

A ranked-choice voting system allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. The system often leads to opponents with similar platforms and voter bases to cross-endorse, as was the case with Mamdani and his fellow progressive opponent Brad Lander, which helped stave off the more conservative-leaning former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In the LA race, ranked choice would have allowed Raman and Huang to forge a similar alliance without compromising their positions and cooling the fierce debates among their supporters.

“We’ve heard lots of voters that they are voting strategically, they try and follow the polls instead of supporting their real favorite — that’s the narrative that I think ranked-choice voting would solve,” said Rachel Hutchinson, deputy director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonprofit that is pushing for ranked-choice voting across the U.S., including in Los Angeles, where City Council has until June 26 to decide whether to place a measure on the November ballot that would implement the system in future elections.

“Not only do people not have to drop out, but they can actually act civilly toward each other, especially if they share an ideology or they represent a similar community,” Hutchinson continued. “Voters under this system would feel more empowered to vote their conscience because they can still support their candidate.”

Related

LAPD Won’t Do Immigration Enforcement — But Will Shoot You With Rubber Bullets for Protesting ICE

Raman joined the LA City Council as part of a wing of left-leaning victories that shifted the city’s political calculus, and has cast herself as a pragmatic leader with an eye for policy. But she faced challenges garnering support from the left amid accusations of flip-flopping and cozying up to entrenched local power. Despite running on defunding the police in 2020 as the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America elected to the council, Raman repeatedly voted to expand the Los Angeles Police Department budget, although she has pushed back on plans to expand the force. In 2024, Raman accepted an endorsement from Zionist group Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles, which opposed a ceasefire in Gaza, for which she was widely rebuked and even censured by DSA–LA.

Even though Raman and Huang are both DSA members, the local chapter declined to reopen the endorsement process for them. Raman’s three DSA colleagues on the City Council opted to endorse Bass. 

Bass focused much of her fire on attacking Raman, despite arguably having the biggest ideological disagreements with Pratt. Bass and Raman were once allies: Bass campaigned for Raman in 2024, and Raman supported Bass in her previous mayoral race. But once Raman launched her last-minute campaign, Bass criticized her for claiming to be an outsider with no control over the current issues plaguing the city, despite Raman having spent years in City Hall. 

On Monday, the local publication LA Material released a text message Bass sent Raman shortly after the latter filed to run; it contained only a tweet announcing Raman’s filing and a woman shrugging emoji.

Bass’s tenure as mayor has been rife with controversy, particularly over her handling of the deadly 2025 Pacific Palisades fire. The mayor was in Ghana attending an embassy party when the fire broke out, and she returned home the following day, with her city and reputation in tatters. Bass’s office has also been criticized for watering down an after-action report on the Palisades fire, including allegations that she scrubbed the most damning findings about the city’s shortcomings in responding to the blaze. 

Her supporters are quick to point out that the Santa Ana winds, and not Bass, fueled the intense fire. And in fact, President Donald Trump, who endorsed Pratt, also shares blame for the slow recovery effort. The president and Republicans in Congress have declined to release the $34 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency aid requested by California Gov. Gavin Newsom for assisting fire survivors. 

The controversy over the fires largely fueled the campaign of third-place finisher Pratt, a former television star on “The Hills” who has never worked in politics and is best known for getting into public spats with his female co-stars. He centered his pitch on his anger at Bass’s handling of the Palisades fire — which consumed his home as well as thousands of others — as well as his disdain for the city’s homeless population, whom he called “bums” and “zombies” and argued should be arrested en masse.

Housing experts told The Intercept that Pratt’s assertions were completely divorced from reality. But they pointed out that the lack of significant progress on the issue of homelessness in Los Angeles under Bass has emboldened figures like Pratt to swoop in and spread misinformation and dangerous propaganda.

The post Democratic Socialist Overcomes GOP-Funded Opponent to Advance in Los Angeles Mayor Race appeared first on The Intercept.

Friends and family feared the worst. Muhammad, an army veteran and activist serving the longest federal sentence of any 2020 Black Lives Matter protester, had been a target inside the state prison because of their outspoken political beliefs and organizing efforts while incarcerated, several of their friends and supporters told The Intercept. 

“We were calling everyone,” said Christopher Kuttruff, a close friend and supporter. “We were terrified that they were in the hospital or dead …your mind obviously goes to the worst places.”

For weeks, the activist disappeared from all tracking systems. The best Muhammad’s supporters could ascertain by early April was that they had been transferred to a “confidential location.” Late that month, Muhammad was able to get a letter out to their partner from Kirkland Correctional Institute, in South Carolina, an intake facility 3,000 thousand miles from Oregon — or, as Regan puts it, “as far away from me as possible.”

Muhammad described the conditions at Kirkland as deplorable, claiming that incarcerated people are denied access to enough water, food, and recreation, and are forced to sleep on mats on the floor, which sometimes get confiscated as punishment.

The South Carolina Department of Corrections had little to say of Muhammad. In mid-May, the state’s prison system told The Intercept they had no record of someone named Malik Muhammad anywhere in their custody; the prison system did not respond to a follow-up query in June. The activist had become a living ghost within the carceral system. 

Even now, friends and family struggle to reach Muhammad, with only the occasional letter or call to the few people approved to contact them serving as proof of life. 

Because she is not licensed in South Carolina, Regan said she has “not been able to speak on the phone or in person in an attorney-client privileged manner since their transfer,” seriously impeding her ability to represent her client. She had to hire a local attorney to speak with them in person and collect potential evidence.

Millions of people flow through the U.S. prison system every year. And every year, an untold number of them vanish off the map, lost in a massive system that is legally obligated to watch over them. In New Mexico, Stephen Slevin spent nearly two years in solitary confinement in county jail after county officials appear to have simply forgotten about him after charging him with driving under the influence. Slevin never saw a judge or a lawyer and had to pull his own tooth due to consistent medical neglect.

Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for the Prison Policy Initiative, said that people getting lost in the prison system is “pretty common,” even when they haven’t moved as far away as Muhammad. “There’s never any effort made by prisons to tell incarcerated people’s families, ‘Hey, we’re moving this person,’” said Bertram.

Related

Why Trump Is So Desperate to Keep Mahmoud Khalil in Louisiana

As the Trump administration ramps up its use of incarceration as a method of immigration enforcement, concerns are mounting about the already stretched system’s ability to keep track of the people within its care — and the opportunity such lapses in oversight create for authorities to target activists and dissenters adversarial to the government.

“Not only is [Malik] intelligent,” said Regan, a founder and director of litigation and advocacy at the Civil Liberties Defense Center, “but Malik is Black, Muslim, an anarchist, [and] a political activist, and they have targeted Malik as a result of all of those things.”

Muhammad, who was arrested in October 2020, received the harshest sentence out of the hundreds of protesters hit with federal charges in the wake of the 2020 summer protests for racial justice. After tens of thousands were arrested in some of the largest mass arrests in history, many were released without charges or saw their cases dropped, but some prosecutors pushed for harsh sentences and elevated state or local infractions to the federal level, arguing that rioters were masquerading as protesters.

Related

Two Brooklyn Lawyers Accused of Throwing Molotov Cocktails Are the Public Face of Trump Administration’s Crackdown on Dissent

Muhammad pleaded guilty to both state and federal charges, including two counts of “unlawful possession of a destructive device,” for throwing a Molotov cocktail during a protest in East Portland. In 2022, the then-25-year-old was sentenced to 10 years in state prison.

Their plea agreement specifically stated that they would serve their time in Oregon state prison, near their supporters and community. Regan says that Oregon’s prison system has reneged on the agreement — illegally transferring Muhammad interstate as retaliation for their activism while incarcerated — in another attempt by the criminal legal system to punish Muhammad for their organizing.

“Normally, they would have been sentenced to the federal prison system,” said Regan. However, “because their friends and family and supporters at the time were based in Oregon, they explicitly negotiated an outcome that ensured that they would remain in Oregon.” 

Federal prisons tend to be “better,” said Regan, because they often have more funding, allow for more freedom of movement, and have marginally better food. Put it this way, she said, “generally speaking, if you had a choice between Oregon State Prison or Federal Prison, most people would choose [federal].” But instead of relative comfort, Muhammad chose community.

Prisons are essentially a “black box” where people can disappear into solitary confinement or be transferred without their family’s knowledge, according to Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative. 

“There’s so many constant questions that you live with as the loved one of an incarcerated person, and then when that person suddenly disappears, it’s terrifying,” said Bertram.

To make matters worse, she said, “prisons have a kind of nasty habit of not telling the family when someone dies or is transferred to an outside hospital, or needs emergency care,” compounding concerns for people who cannot locate their loved ones on the inside.

In Regan’s view, there are “a number of reasons” to characterize Muhammad’s transfer as retaliatory. For starters, she said this is part of a pattern of behavior from the Oregon prison system. In 2024, The Intercept reported that Muhammad had been effectively held in solitary confinement, which in Oregon is called “special housing,” for more than 250 days — despite the fact that Oregon limits the use of this type of confinement to 90 days.

Related

Oregon Prison Limits Solitary to 90 Days. This BLM Protester Has Been in the Hole for 250.

She said Muhammad had met people in prison, many who’d been through excessive solitary, and suggested that they could become potential plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit the Oregon Justice Resource Center is seeking to file against the state prison system. “The prison is, of course, retaliating against them for basically assisting a nonprofit legal organization in bringing a giant lawsuit about the abuses of solitary confinement in the Oregon prison system,” Regan said. 

Oregon flatly denies sending Muhammad to South Carolina as retaliation.

“These decisions are not made lightly and require a thorough review process conducted by all parties. In the case of Mr. Muhammed [sic], there is extensive background for the reasons [they were] a candidate for an Interstate Compact,” Amber Campbell, communications manager at the public affairs division for the Oregon Department of Corrections, wrote in a statement to The Intercept. 

Muhammad’s advocacy and community building inside have consistently put a target on their back, said Jeremy, a close friend and pen pal. Friends described Muhammad as “empathetic,” “generous,” and “passionate,” as eager to sing for their cellmates as they are to share a book on political theory. 

Now, Muhammad’s friends and family have to sit and wait, and hope the prison system won’t lose them all over again. 

Correction: June 8, 2026, 1:56 p.m. ET
This story previously misstated which legal organization is seeking a class-action lawsuit against the Oregon state prison system; it is the Oregon Justice Resource Center.

The post They Were Serving the Longest Federal Sentence of Any 2020 BLM Protester. Then They Vanished in Prison. appeared first on The Intercept.

The youth climate group shared its endorsement with The Intercept with early voting underway in California and less than a week to go before primary day. Chakrabarti will face off against state Sen. Scott Wiener and San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Connie Chan, both Democrats, in a heavily contested primary race to succeed Democratic former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in California’s 11th Congressional District.

“For years, the Sunrise Movement has shown us the power that people like all of us have when we organize strategically,” Chakrabarti wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Together with Sunrise, we pushed Washington to respond to the needs of working people when most Democrats (and of course Republicans) refused to do so. We were able to change political reality in Washington, and we’ll do it again.”

Chakrabarti rose to national prominence after co-founding Justice Democrats in 2017 alongside other former presidential campaign staffers for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to support progressive primary challengers to establishment Democrats. He has been a thorn in the side of moderate Democrats ever since. 

Chakrabarti became Ocasio-Cortez’s first chief of staff after her upset victory over longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018, a win that helped put Justice Democrats on the map and ushered in the first members of the progressive Squad in Congress. In Ocasio-Cortez’s office, he worked with the Sunrise Movement and other stakeholders to draft the Green New Deal. Elements of the bill were later included in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, which invested $369 billion in fighting climate change but ultimately fell short of progressives’ loftiest ambitions. 

Chakrabarti has long espoused progressive views and is expected to vote with Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad if elected to Congress. But despite his prominent role in Ocasio-Cortez’s early rise, his former boss has not endorsed Chakrabarti. That has driven speculation of a rift, which the candidate has continuously denied. Progressive Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., have endorsed Chakrabarti, as has former Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y. Justice Democrats, the group Chakrabarti helped found, is also backing his campaign.

After leaving Ocasio-Cortez’s office, Chakrabarti went on to lead New Consensus, a progressive environmental policy think tank that recently released the Mission for America, which he bills as a “successor” to the Green New Deal. The policy proposal seeks to “rapidly slash emissions” and help “build a new, clean economy” to protect workers against the threat of job cuts driven by the rise of artificial intelligence.

Related

Saikat Chakrabarti’s Plan for the Political Revolution

“We’re proud to endorse Saikat Chakrabarti. Saikat has spent years fighting for the Green New Deal, taking on corporate power, and delivering for working people, not billionaires and special interests,” Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, wrote in a statement to the Intercept. 

The climate justice group pivoted this cycle to emphasize its explicit opposition to President Donald Trump and sees Chakrabarti as a candidate “ready to fight back with courage and vision,” Shiney-Ajay added. “We know he’ll be instrumental in helping build a Democratic Party that is unapologetically for working people, serious about confronting the climate crisis, and ready to take on authoritarianism head-on.”

Chakrabarti has relished his role as an opponent of entrenched political power. He has long antagonized the 20-term congresswoman he seeks to replace, slamming her in a series of 2019 tweets after then-House Speaker Pelosi penned an op-ed critical of AOC, who at the time was Chakrabarti’s boss. (Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, who hold divergent ideologies but are both known for their political savvy, have built bridges in the years since.)

While running for her seat, Chakrabarti has continued to provoke Pelosi, calling her out in a recent video after she endorsed Chan against him. He launched his campaign to challenge Pelosi before she announced her retirement in November, unlike his two opponents, who jumped in once it was clear they’d be competing for an open seat. 

“My goal, honestly, is to replace a huge part of the Democrat establishment,” Chakrabarti said in November during an episode of the Intercept Briefing. “I’m calling for primaries all across the country. … I think we actually have to get in there and be in a position of power where we can do all that, so it’s not going to be this constant compromising with the establishment, trying to figure out how we can push.”

Politics is Chakrabarti’s second act. The tech entrepreneur made millions as a founding engineer of the payment process platform Stripe.

Related

This California Congressional Hopeful Opposes a Billionaire Tax. So Do His Tech CEO Backers.

But in the tech-dominated district where Pelosi won reelection with 81 percent of the vote last cycle, Chakrabarti faces an uphill battle. Wiener, a state senator who has the support of the California Democratic Party, has a clear lead over both Chan and Chakrabarti, who appear to be neck and neck for second place. The top two candidates next Tuesday will advance to the general election in November.

“I believe we can improve the material lives of working people and build a future we all actually want to live in,” Chakrabarti told The Intercept. “I’m grateful to the Sunrise Movement for joining our coalition, and I look forward to working with them again in Congress.”

The post Sunrise Movement Backs Saikat Chakrabarti, Progressive Firebrand Behind the Green New Deal appeared first on The Intercept.

The 3rd Congressional District race unfolded along key fault lines animating the Democratic Party, from the influence of special interest groups to Israel and its genocide in Gaza. It staked out a clear contest between the party’s progressive and moderate wings.

The split marked a contrast to the 7th Congressional District primary in the Lehigh Valley, where the left and the establishment united behind Bob Brooks, a firefighters’ union chief who sailed to victory Tuesday night.

Brooks will run in what’s expected to be a tight general election in November against freshman Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie. Rabb is all but guaranteed to win the deep blue seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Dwight Evans.

Related

Philadelphia Could Elect Its First Muslim Congressman. He’s Not Sure Where He Stands on Israel.

Rabb, who has been a vocal critic of U.S. military support for Israel, attracted endorsements from progressive members of Congress like Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. One of his top opponents, state Sen. Sharif Street, earned the support of Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., while Dr. Ala Stanford, a pediatric surgeon, was backed by a pro-Israel super PAC. Also on the ballot was Shaun Griffith, an attorney who never broke through in the polls. 

In a statement released Tuesday night, the Democratic Socialists of America celebrated Rabb, who recently joined the group’s Philadelphia chapter, and pointed to key political causes for the left in Congress.

“There is a new Democratic Socialist in Congress,” the group wrote on X. “We will be with Congressman Rabb every step of the way in the fight to abolish ICE, free Palestine and win Medicare for All.”

Rabb has collected endorsements from 10 members of Congress, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and progressive groups including the Pennsylvania Working Families Party, the Philadelphia chapter of DSA, Justice Democrats, and Jewish Voice for Peace Action.

“Chris Rabb is exactly what Democratic voters nationwide are demanding — progressive trailblazers who fight for their communities, not just when it’s politically convenient but when it’s morally necessary,” said Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, in a statement. “While the party machine has spent decades failing to meet the needs of its voters, Rabb has taken the fight to corporate interests, billionaire CEOs, and Republican extremists his whole career.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, considered one of the Democratic Party’s moderate rising stars, waded into the race in its final weeks to try to stop a powerful Philadelphia union backing Street from inadvertently boosting Rabb’s campaign with attack ads against Stanford, Axios reported. Nevertheless, Stanford and Street appeared to split establishment-friendly support, trailing late Tuesday night with about 30 and 25 percent of the vote, respectively, to Rabb’s 44.

Union Boss to Compete for Key Swing Seat

In the Lehigh Valley, Brooks handily defeated his primary opponents in the 7th Congressional District, marking a win likely to be claimed by the left and center alike.

Brooks campaigned on affordability and fighting corruption, highlighting his union bona fides rather than aligning with a specific wing of the Democratic Party. By late Tuesday night he had secured more than double the support of any of his competitors: former federal prosecutor Ryan Crosswell; former Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure; and Carol Obando-Derstine, an engineer who previously worked for former Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and former Gov. Tom Wolf.

On the campaign trail, the retired firefighter argued that the real divide in his district was between the working class and the billionaire class and their allies. “The whole system is rigged against us, and the only way we’re going to fix it is by sending people like us to Washington, D.C., to represent us,” Brooks said at a recent event.  

Unlike in the 3rd District, progressives and more mainstream Democrats united behind Brooks. Shapiro, the governor, has been an outspoken surrogate for Brooks, who was also endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Working Families Party.

In a statement celebrating Brooks’s win on Tuesday night, Sanders pointed to two other candidates with union backgrounds who prevailed in primaries this year.

Related

AIPAC Strategy Backfires as Progressive Underdog Wins Key House Race in New Jersey

Brooks’s win “follows the recent progressive victories of iron worker and union leader Brian Poindexter in OH, and union organizer Analilia Mejía in NJ,” Sanders wrote on X. “We’re making progress!”

“We deserve representatives who come from the working class and will stand up for the working class, and that’s what Bob has done for his entire life and career,” said Nick Gavio, mid-Atlantic communications director for the Working Families Party, in a statement announcing the party’s endorsement.

The Cook Political Report rates the general election for the 7th District a toss-up, and Brooks is expected to face a tight contest against Mackenzie, who narrowly flipped his Lehigh Valley seat from blue to red in 2024 and is widely considered to be one of the most vulnerable members of the House this cycle. 

As of late Tuesday night, Brooks had nearly 42 percent of the vote, while Crosswell and McClure came just shy of 21 percent each, and Obando-Derstine received just over 17 percent.

Brooks benefited from critiques of his opponent, Crosswell, a former Republican who launched his campaign after quitting the Department of Justice in the early days of the Trump administration, when federal prosecutors were under pressure to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams’s cooperation on immigration enforcement. Crosswell faced criticism for his previous role in prosecuting “many, many” immigration cases as an assistant U.S. attorney while running for district with one the largest, but politically diverse, Latino communities in the state. 

“Trump has built his agenda on targeting our immigrant community. I’ve seen exactly what that means for families like mine,” Obando-Derstine, who was born in Colombia, wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Anyone who chose to carry out those attacks against our community has no business being in office. We deserve leaders who stand with us when it matters, not just when it’s easy.”

Related

Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms.

Advertisements from a mysterious super PAC called “Lead Left” also became a backdrop to the race. The ads attacked both Brooks and Crosswell on their progressive credentials, and sought to curry left-leaning support for McClure. “Lamont McClure kicked ICE out of Northampton. He takes on Trump and wins,” says the narrator in one of the advertisements.

Although the donors are anonymous, the super PAC reportedly has connections to a prominent Republican donation-processing firm.

This developing story has been updated.

The post Pennsylvania Results: Chris Rabb to Join the Squad in Congress as Bob Brooks Tries to Flip Key Seat  appeared first on The Intercept.

Both justices railed against the decision, with Alito calling it a “scheme” to get around their ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson that eliminated the nationwide right to an abortion in 2022. Abortions have increased since their decision, Alito lamented, largely due to telehealth access. 

In 2025, far more residents of states with total abortion bans received telehealth provisions of medication abortion than traveled out of state to receive care in places with fewer restrictions. And roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. in 2023 were medication abortions. But advocates warn that the dissents from Thomas and Alito highlight that the threat to abortion access still looms large.

“We’re breathing a sigh of relief. I would say that the immediate threat to mifepristone is over,” said Claire Teylouni, interim co-executive director of Reproductive Equity Now, “But it’s certainly clear from reading those dissents that the threat … is far from over.” 

In his dissent, Thomas argues that the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law passed in 1873 that remains on the books but has not been enforced in decades, prohibits the mailing of abortion medication. “The Comstock Act bans using ‘the mails’ to ship any ‘drug … for producing abortion,’” Thomas wrote. “Applicants are not entitled to a stay of an adverse court order based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise.”

The Comstock Act originally prohibited the mailing of “obscene” materials, such as pornography, contraceptives, and any drug or device that can be used to produce an abortion. But legal scholars have argued that the law is unenforceable and unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds and other modern case law. 

In 2022, a Department of Justice memo clarified that the law does not prohibit the mailing of drugs that could be used to perform an abortion because there is “an insufficient basis for concluding that the sender intends them to be used unlawfully.” 

Related

Texas Judge Cosplaying as Medical Expert Has Consequences Beyond the Abortion Pill

Despite the memo and the fact that the Comstock Act has not been enforced in decades, conservatives, including Thomas and Alito, have been eager to use the law to push a national abortion ban.

“Enforcement of the Comstock Act has the potential to threaten the broader supply chain with regard to the reproductive health care system as a whole,” warned Teylouni. Arguably if enforced, the law could even jam up access to surgical tools used in abortion care and the shipping of abortion medication to states without bans.

Republican lawmakers have argued that the Comstock Act should be enforced by the courts to “prosecute those who obtain mifepristone through the mail.” In Project 2025, policy analysts similarly argue that the Department of Justice should enforce federal laws like Comstock to prohibit the mailing of abortion medication writ large.  

President Donald Trump has previously claimed that he would not enforce the Comstock Act in this way, but advocates have seen troubling signs out of the administration about how they might eliminate access to mifepristone in other ways.

Related

GOP States Double Down on Fighting Medication Abortion After Supreme Court Keeps It Legal

“We’re focusing on some pressing threats that are already ongoing,” said Anna Bernstein, principal federal policy adviser at the reproductive and sexual health research organization Guttmacher Institute.

In late 2025, the Food and Drug Administration began a safety review of mifepristone, despite over 20 years of evidence that it’s a safe medication. Bernstein said her organization is keeping a close eye on the “politically motivated” review at the FDA, which she argues flies in the face of the science.

The combined regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol, the drug typically used in tandem with mifepristone to induce a medication abortion, carries a less than 1 percent risk of serious adverse events. Comparatively, the risk of maternal death associated with childbirth is roughly 14 times higher than the risk associated with abortion care.

But despite medical evidence of its safety, the threat to mifepristone from the FDA has increased in recent days. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned earlier this week, and he was replaced by Kyle Diamantas, a former lawyer.

Within hours of his appointment on Tuesday, Diamantas was reportedly on the phone with anti-abortion advocates reassuring them of his moral opposition to abortion. According to a press release sent from an anti-abortion advocate, regarding her conversation with Diamantas, she said that he promised that reviewing mifepristone would be a “top priority” and that he was “pro-life.”

“We continue to have concerns that the [review is] going to be politicized and not based in science and medicine,” said Teylouni.  

The Thursday ruling allows providers to continue to send mifepristone through the mail or to retail pharmacies, while the case plays out in the lower courts. Earlier this month, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had reinstated previous FDA requirements that mifepristone be dispensed in person, threatening telehealth access, a critical lifeline for abortion access for people in states with and without abortion bans. 

The Supreme Court issued an initial ruling staying the appeals court decision earlier this month, which they extended on Monday, before making their final decision on Thursday to allow access to continue while the Louisiana v. FDA case plays out in court.

But a looming concern for advocates is that both the courts’ more politically attuned conservatives and members of the Trump administration could be waiting to make a move on abortion access until after the midterms in a ploy to avoid the disasters of the post-Dobbs elections.

“We’re definitely concerned, because we know that the Trump administration understands that it’s politically unfavorable to restrict access to abortion and to mifepristone,” said Guttmacher Institute’s Bernstein. “We’ve all seen the reports of them slow-walking to the midterms, and we know why politically they might want to do so.” 

Related

Drug-Sniffing Police Dogs Are Intercepting Abortion Pills in the Mail

While the Comstock Act serves as a significant threat to abortion access, advocates note that if mifepristone is no longer able to be sent through the mail, people can still access medication abortion care. 

Mifepristone works by stopping the pregnancy from growing and initiates the separation of the embryo from the uterine lining. The other drug, misoprostol, causes contractions which expel the contents of the uterus.

Misoprostol can be safely and effectively used on its own to induce an abortion. However, the process of abortion “is prolonged when it’s with a misoprostol-alone protocol,” explained Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health research coalition. “And patients report higher levels of side effects, so a lot of cramping and a lot more bleeding.”

Despite the small victory yesterday, Teylouni said that abortion advocates cannot afford to be “complacent” right now. 

“This decision could have been the biggest blow to abortion access since the Dobbs decision,” she said. “Anti-abortion extremists are not going to stop attempting to ban abortion, and they want to see the Comstock Act invoked and enforced to limit telehealth prescribing again.” 

The post A “Scheme” Against Dobbs: SCOTUS Dissent Hints at Next Phase of Abortion Rights Fight appeared first on The Intercept.

Splashed across the screen, a bright red and white caption reads, “ICE was circling a local elementary school. I knocked on their door to have a conversation, but they ran away instead.”  

The man is Matt Little, 41, a former mayor and state senator from nearby Lakeville seen as the front-runner to replace outgoing Democratic Rep. Angie Craig in Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional district. 

He’s staking much of his campaign on one of the most politically salient issues in the Twin Cities. In a series of videos pinned to his campaign Instagram under the name “GET ICE OUT,” Little documents himself at protests and in encounters with immigration enforcement agents. “When I’m elected to congress,” wrote Little in a January post, “we will hold ICE accountable.” 

Not everyone in his district is buying it.

“For me, it smells like, ‘I’m going to try to use this to bolster my chances in a time of crisis,’” Paul Peterson, a local ICE rapid responder, told The Intercept. “Never let a good crisis go to waste, right?”

Related

Trump’s War on America

In his mostly suburban Minneapolis district, Little’s top political issue is at once highly motivating and highly fraught. As 3,000 federal agents descended on Minnesota for “Operation Metro Surge,” killing Alex Pretti and Renee Good and wounding or abducting scores more, Minnesotans who had not so much as lifted a protest sign a year ago joined ICE rapid response networks. Given the gravity of agents’ often unpredictable violence, many saw their work as putting their lives on the line. 

Democratic politicians are eager to turn engaged protesters and observers into door-knockers and voters. Nationwide examples point to a proof of concept: Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka’s approval ratings skyrocketed after he was arrested for trespassing while monitoring an immigration detention facility. Brad Lander, then a New York City mayoral candidate who is now running for Congress, saw his star rise after his arrest outside of a Manhattan immigration court. Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh finished second in a crowded primary after generating high-profile headlines for her federal indictment over a protest outside an ICE processing center near Chicago. (Baraka’s charges were dropped days after his arrest, and on Wednesday, federal prosecutors said they planned to dismiss felony charges against Abughazaleh. Lander rejected a deal to drop his charges last year and said he’d prefer to go to trial.)

In the area around Minneapolis, the surge was “surreal,” Little told The Intercept in a joint interview with his wife, Coco. “It was kind of all-encompassing there for many months. We knew we had to be out there. That was kind of personal for me because my wife is an immigrant.” 

The Intercept spoke with nearly a dozen people involved in ICE rapid response networks in and around the Minneapolis suburbs, including in leadership positions, several of whom felt that Little was “cosplaying” as an observer and overstating his activism for political clout. Others speculated that the outrage was manufactured to ruin his chances at the nomination.

There’s an inherent tension between enraged protesters who take matters into their own hands, outside of official political channels, and politicians who want to harness their rage into electoral energy. It raises the question of who gets to wear the mantle of resistance and blurs the line between when politicians are supportive — and when they’re extractive.

“There are many different legitimate ways for politicians to amplify our movements, like resistance to ICE,” said Justin Hansford, executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard Law School, “but how they do it is of the utmost importance.” 

In the suburbs of Minneapolis, the question of “how” would eventually tear a small community in half.

Jessica Vinar carries with her the hallmarks of progressive Minnesota politics. She’s a teacher, with a school lanyard and a water bottle adorned with political buttons, a Pride sticker, and a small 3D-printed whistle, the preferred ICE-alerting tool seen on residents’ keychains and in small bowls at cafe entrances across the city.

In a bustling coffee shop in the heart of Minneapolis’s South Side, Vinar recounted the events of February 17, when she joined a group watching the roads for blacked-out SUVs in the once-sleepy Minneapolis suburb of Savage. An online ICE-monitoring website had reported multiple federal agents armed with weapons and clad in tactical gear.

Vinar learned that one of her companions was congressional candidate Matt Little, and the others were journalists from the New York Times. Dashcam videos from the scene shared with The Intercept show Little standing with two other people next to a dark gray car that appears to be his, and one white SUV, which he identifies as ICE’s. “There’s two more down that way,” Vinar tells Little in the video. He responds: “All right, will you hang out here with us for a little bit?” 

There’s a six-minute gap in the dashcam video, when Vinar’s car is off and she’s standing outside. Vinar said she watched as the journalists photographed Little interacting with ICE agents and standing outside of a home. Then, “I hear him say something like, ‘I’m gonna see if they’ll chase me,’” Vinar recalled. “And they all pile into his vehicle, and they drive off.”

The day’s events received coverage in the New York Times and The Intercept, and Little confirmed this version of the events. But Vinar and Little disagree on what happened next.

Related

Federal Agents Are Intimidating Legal Observers at Their Homes: “They Know Where You Live”

In Vinar’s telling, she was left standing outside, alone, with an ICE vehicle behind her. When she gets back in her car and turns the camera back on, Little’s gray SUV is gone, and three other cars she identified as ICE’s are present. Masked people who appear to be federal agents drive past Vinar in the white SUV, waving and recording her. Then Little returns, following the white ICE vehicle as it drives past Vinar’s car a second time. The whole thing is over in a matter of minutes.

Little, who said he has not seen the dashcam video himself, told The Intercept that he thought the only ICE vehicle in the area had pulled out to follow him when he left, so he didn’t believe he’d left Vinar with the agents by herself. Vinar claims he did know and notes that, as captured in her video, she told him. Little told The Intercept that he believed that the additional vehicles she’d mentioned had left.

Several rapid responders in the area told The Intercept they have a strict protocol to never leave another observer alone with ICE, though one said people do get left alone from time to time. (Several activists spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from federal officials.) 

Peterson, who patrols for rapid response throughout the wider region and was in the chat, said he “isn’t politically involved,” and did not know who Little was ahead of the incident. “I don’t care about the theatrics of it,” he said, “[but] he put one of my people at risk, and that’s not OK.” 

The incident blew up across an intricate network of Signal chats, the local rapid response groups’ digital, decentralized town square. Was Little “trying to be helpful,” one chat member posed to The Intercept, or, as some suspected, “was Matt just staging a photo op?” 

In a message reviewed by The Intercept, one person accused Vinar of changing her story after realizing it was Little. In Vinar’s initial message, she said that ICE agents had followed Little and circled back to harass her; she then clarified that Little had left the scene with agents still present. Another observer wrote that Little was claiming Vinar’s story was “typical last-minute misinformation.” 

Little told The Intercept he “can only speak from” his own experience, but he and his wife are framing the activists’ anger as a manufactured political play. Vinar caucused for his opponent, state Rep. Kaela Berg, at a convention following the incident, Little added in a written statement after his interview. Pointing to his wife, he wrote, “Coco believed and still believes this is being spread as a political attack.” 

Coco also reached out to Savage resident Mark Kloempken and his wife, whose home was at the center of the February 17 incident. Kloempken said he was enjoying the day’s mild weather, unconcerned about the ICE agent parked by his driveway. 

“I’m waving to them and saying ‘hi,’” he said. “They seem friendly. They’re not a big deal.” Kloempken left to get some lunch, playing “Ice, Ice, baby,” as he drove off. 

“[She] hates that I did that,” he said, indicating his wife, who asked to remain anonymous when they spoke to The Intercept over Zoom from their Savage home.

The couple had met Little a week prior to the incident. They said the politician was handing out whistles in their neighborhood when he offered to take Kloempken’s wife along with him to an immigration raid on a nearby apartment building.

“I’m old,” she told The Intercept — meaning, she’s not in any of the Signal groups. But she believes that Little was not being performative. “The day I went on that impromptu ride with him, there were no pictures, no photos taken of anything,” she said, adding, “he had me film what was going on so that he could drive.” 

She said Little instructed her not to go out alone. “You always have to have two people,” she recalled him saying. 

At what point do politicians’ shows of solidarity become performative, or even counterproductive? It’s a question that has troubled Hansford of Howard Law for years. 

Hansford, 45, got his start in activism in earnest in Ferguson, Missouri, shortly after police officer Darren Wilson shot an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, igniting a firestorm of activism across the country. Over the years, Hansford has worked closely with politicians and movement organizers on shaping policy and finding common ground.

Those relationships can end up being exploitative, said Hansford, pointing to the aftermath of the protests against police brutality after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In 2020, after Democrats harnessed the energy of Black Lives Matter and other mass mobilization efforts to win a trifecta in the White House, the Senate, and the House, they failed to pass any of the signature legislation that movement leaders were calling for, instead favoring stunts like an infamous photo of Democratic leadership kneeling in red and green Ghanaian kente stoles.

“If you look up ‘extractive’ in the dictionary, it will be a picture of Nancy Pelosi with kente cloth on,” said Hansford.

Still, “it’s smart for [Democratic] candidates to tap into the energy around ICE,” said Nina Smith, a political communications strategist and former senior adviser to Stacy Abrams. “Their constituents are being harmed and impacted by this financially, mentally, and at times physically. So they have to talk about this issue.”

In Minnesota, activists did point to examples of politicians who were quietly protecting the community without looking for a political moment. Many cited Aurin Chowdhury, a 29-year-old Minneapolis City Council member who speaks with the exasperation of someone who is as tired of the political establishment as she is committed to challenging it. By the time the federal occupation had ended, Chowdhury had been tear-gassed several times and became a mainstay in anti-ICE activities throughout the city.

Related

Inside the Somali-Led Resistance to Trump’s Assault on Minneapolis

“When you have masked men and guns occupying your city by the thousands, killing people, taking children, separating them from their families, terrorizing pregnant women — that reality becomes right in front of your face,” Chowdhury said. “It felt impossible to just sit at my computer and answer emails, or try to hold, like, a constituent meeting.”

Tucked away in a quiet corner of city hall, Chowdhury seems aware of how easily popular movements can be used for individual political gains.

“I worry that that’s something that can happen when the struggle of people is co-opted by high-level Democratic leaders who are seen as elites and are only willing to take incremental steps versus, like, actually addressing the heart of the issue,” she said. She urged Democratic party leadership to worry less about questions like “What is the message? And how do we get the American people on our side?” 

“Maybe it’s just listen to what people are saying,” Chowdhury said, “and be bold and take risks.”

Matt Little is polite. He says “whoa” with a Midwesterner’s elongated O-sound, revealing more surprise than irritation when met with a new accusation.

He has spent most of his adult life on the political scene. He was elected to serve on the Lakeville City Council in 2010, when he was 25 years old. Two years later, while in law school, he became the youngest mayor in Lakeville’s history, defeating heavy outside spending from the Koch brothers’ super PAC Americans for Prosperity with a large war chest largely from labor unions. After one term as mayor, he was elected to the state Senate as a member of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party representing Lakeville, Farmington, and southern Dakota County, where he also served one term before he was unseated by Republican Zach Duckworth. 

As a congressional candidate, Little has positioned himself as a standard-fare progressive, focusing his campaign on largely local issues like affordability and “getting ICE out of Minnesota.” His website boasts a section on an “Anti-ICE Bill of Rights,” which calls for a series of reforms, including banning federal agents from wearing masks and cutting ICE funding to pre-Trump levels. Little has not joined calls from other progressive candidates to “Abolish ICE” — instead calling to “replace” the agency with a different federal immigration agency. 

Not unlike in his mayoral campaign over a decade prior, Little received endorsements from several labor unions, including the Minnesota Postal Workers Union and National Nurses United.

Little says that he’s “only posted a small margin” of the work he’s done on ICE and seemed confused by accusations that he was chasing clout. He sent The Intercept a list of roughly a dozen instances over the last six months where he claims he responded to ICE activity — some of which were documented on his social media. 

“When you are in a leadership position in the community, and you have a platform to highlight the awful things that ICE is doing. You should use it,” he told The Intercept.

In addition to his political work, Matt Little is a practicing attorney with a personal injury firm called Little Law. In 2021, he represented Kami Sanders in a case where she accused a school board member of campaign finance violations. In February, she called him to ream him out. 

“It would be super helpful if you would get your ass out here and actually help us,” she recalls telling Little over the phone, adding, “and leave your camera crews at home!”

Sanders is one of the older activists in the network of rapid responders. She has salt-and-pepper hair, vibrant and commanding eyes, and a face worn with decades of political work. She didn’t grow up in Minnesota, and instead carries a prominent East Texas accent and a homegrown personality to match. She answers questions by telling long, profanity-laced stories that crescendo into fiery one-liners like, “You can go fuck yourself until the cows come home.”

In the southern suburbs, four Minnesota state senators established one of the first rapid-response networks in the area and later designated themselves as the sole administrators of the group’s Signal thread — an unusual format for Minnesota anti-ICE resistance. According to Sanders, who administers the Dakota County Signal group, which includes Lakeville, while many elected officials were valuable participants in rapid response activities, power imbalances among some leaders and residents quickly created a rift within the network.

“They would only dispatch in the areas that they were elected,” said Sanders. “That feels political to me.”

Still, she credits them for showing up and for not publicizing their involvement for political gain. Sanders said she cannot say the same for Little. 

“There are other politicians in this who actually have been boots on the ground and are not using it. I mean, one of his opponents has been boots on the ground, and you never hear her talk about it,” said Sanders, referring to Berg.

The fact that the congressional candidate received coverage in the country’s premier mainstream newspaper appears to have further riled some of the activists. “When the New York Times article came out,” said Peterson, “everybody was kind of like, wait, do you guys see him around here? Because I sure haven’t.” 

Peterson, a former military member, police officer, and longtime Republican from Kentucky, espoused a persistent suspicion of American politics. He said the occupation of the Twin Cities prompted a shift in his political beliefs — just not the sort that you can vote for. His deep skepticism of politicians extends to Little, whom he accused of “grifting” off the movement.

By March, Little’s campaign was in crisis management mode. At a meet-and-greet at a crowded local restaurant, dodging plates of chicken fingers and quesadillas, Little admitted that he had “some apologies to make.”

“I got incredibly defensive,” Little said, his hands hovering by his heart as he spoke, “and I thought it was just a political attack. It became very clear to me from conversations today and yesterday that there was no political motivation.” 

Supporting Vinar’s version of the story, he added, “It also became very clear to me that ICE was still in the neighborhood. And had I communicated better with observers that were there, I would have known that.” 

A month later, however, Little is adamant that he led “the only remaining ICE vehicle away” from the house that day. 

“If [Vinar] is saying that ICE drove by that house again after I left, then yes, I believe her and have told her that directly and multiple times,” he wrote in a statement to The Intercept on Monday. “But when I left, there were no ICE vehicles remaining.” He added that he was frustrated Vinar had not released her videos from the scene.

“If this isn’t about politics, then just release the full dash cam video so everyone can see what actually happened,” Little wrote. 

“It is campaign season,” his wife said in the couple’s joint interview. Coco, who is active in the rapid response Signal chats and has been heavily involved in her husband’s campaign, said that Vinar “probably was very concerned on that day because of what happened, but I think some are definitely using it for political gain.”

“I hate to see her being used this way,” Coco added. 

Vinar said she was originally hesitant to speak out for fear of dividing the movement. But she couldn’t stomach the idea of the months of fear and work she and her friends had done in the district to be co-opted. 

“It feels like he’s using residents here as props,” she said. “And that doesn’t speak well to anyone, but it really doesn’t speak well to someone who is promising to represent us in our government.” 

Correction: April 29, 2026, 6:23 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to clarify which of Little’s confrontations with ICE on February 17 received media coverage.

Correction: April 30, 2026
This story has been updated to remove an erroneous reference to Kami Sanders working on the school board; she sued one of its members but did not serve on it herself. It has also been updated to note that Jessica Vinar kept a Pride sticker on her water bottle rather than her school lanyard.

The post ICE Watchers Worry Democrats Are Trying to Co-Opt Their Movements For Votes appeared first on The Intercept.

Within hours after the San Francisco Chronicle dropped a story Friday that accused Swalwell of sexually assaulting a former staffer, over a dozen Democrats had pulled their endorsements of the then-frontrunner for governor of California. CNN followed that evening with a story labeling the former staffer’s accusations as rape and revealing that three additional women were accusing Swalwell of sexual misconduct. He suspended his campaign for governor Sunday, and on Monday, he announced his resignation from Congress. He was out Tuesday at 2 p.m. ET.

The outcry made sense, in part, because of the severity of the allegations: The ex-staffer said Swalwell left her vaginally bruised and bleeding; another woman alleged Tuesday that he had drugged her in order to rape her. But the fact that Swalwell, who has denied the allegations, did not remain in Congress while under investigation suggests that American politicians are sensitive to concerns over sexual abuse and misconduct — particularly as the midterms approach against the backdrop of the Epstein files, and Democrats position themselves as defenders of victims as they head into November.

“It’s hypocrisy if they don’t” speak out, said Nina Smith, a Democratic communications strategist and former senior adviser to former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams. 

Smith said that the advocacy from Epstein’s survivors, as well as the people who’ve been speaking out online about Swalwell, helped force lawmakers to take a stand on this issue.

Related

Attorney for Epstein Survivors Warns That Justice Is Impossible With Bondi as AG 

“It has created this watershed moment on the Democrats’ part to address this issue quickly,” she told The Intercept. “Both parties are recognizing that accountability is something that is at the forefront of a lot of voters’ minds.”

In a February poll from Reuters/Ipsos, 69 percent of respondents said the statement that the Epstein files “show that powerful people in the U.S are rarely held accountable for their actions” represented their views “very well” or “extremely well.”

Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., said that Democrats have to demonstrate “accountability” even when allegations come up against one of their own.

“Our job is to center the people who were harmed, to take allegations seriously, and to make sure there are real systems for justice,” Lee wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “The work and bravery of Epstein’s survivors helped further expose just how deeply these systems are failing us — all while protecting perpetrators with money, connections, or status. That legacy demands more from all of us right now.”

Still, it’s too soon for Democratic leadership “to be patting themselves on the back,” about Swalwell’s swift rebuke, said Michael Ceraso, a Democratic communications strategist who worked on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. He pointed to the level of detail and corroboration in the stories that CNN and the SF Chronicle published, arguing the careful reporting “made it fail-safe for political leaders to do the right thing.” 

And that doesn’t excuse the people who had heard the rumors and continued to support Swalwell until the allegations were in a newspaper, Ceraso added. “I would call bullshit on people” within his proximity who are “claiming they didn’t know this,” he said.

There’s been heavy attention on Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who was long known to be a close friend of Swalwell’s. Gallego claimed Tuesday that Swalwell had “lied to” him — but admitted to hearing that his close friend and colleague was “flirty.”

“I definitely look at the world a different way now,” Gallego told reporters. “I certainly am going to make sure that I’m going to take, you know, personal steps and office steps to make sure that we don’t even get close to a gray line.” 

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown also alluded to other members of Congress being aware of Swalwell’s actions. “I’m not surprised frankly, because there have been rumors after rumors after rumors, his colleague in Washington pretty much said that. That’s what Adam Schiff said, that’s what Nancy Pelosi said,” Brown told ABC 7. 

The Democrats, Lee added, cannot ask voters to trust them on this issue if they fail to hold their members accountable when they engage in abusive behaviors.

“Accountability has to mean something, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it is one of your own, and even when power is involved,” she wrote. “No one and no party should ask for the public’s trust if it is unwilling to hold itself to the same standard.”

The Intercept has not independently verified the allegations against Swalwell. In a statement posted Tuesday, Sara Azari, a criminal defense attorney representing Swalwell, wrote that the former congressman “categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation of sexual misconduct and assault that has been leveled against him,” calling the accusations “a ruthless and shameless attempt to smear Congressman Swalwell.”

The Intercept reached out to Swalwell’s communications staff for comment; a reporter for The Hill wrote Tuesday that the relevant staff members no longer work for him. Azari did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Smith, who spoke out in 2018 about being sexually harassed and assaulted while working in the Maryland state legislature, said she believes that these abuses will continue to happen wherever disparities in power exist. But she was heartened to see how quickly Democrats called out Swalwell, which she said means that survivors have moved the needle on this issue.

“Survivors have been the most powerful piece of holding elected officials and officials accountable. … They are the ones who have continued to fight in a way that has made all of this possible,” said Smith. “Ten years ago, we really just talked about this behind closed doors.”

The post Swift Swalwell Fallout Suggests the Democrats Have Finally Learned From Epstein appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

After Torturing Him, U.S. Breaks Guarantees of Safety to Former Guantánamo Detainee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Denver, Sunrise is endorsing Melat Kiros, an anti-war candidate and attorney who was fired for refusing to take down her post on the genocide in Palestine, the group shared exclusively with The Intercept. Kiros is challenging longtime Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo. 

“Voters today, they want to see their candidates and their representatives refusing AIPAC money and refusing [military industrial complex] influence,” said Kiros. “They’re seeing how much it has dragged us into these endless wars, and how much it is dragging our taxpayer dollars into funding this violence as well.”

Kiros is among a growing list of insurgent candidates — including William Lawrence in Michigan and Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, also both Sunrise-endorsed — who are taking Democrats to task on their complicity in the endless wars in the Middle East.

Related

Sunrise Movement, Founded to Fight Climate Change, Pivots to Fighting Trump

Sunrise’s endorsement is part of a broader strategy shift in which the activist group, founded in 2017 to fight climate change in particular, pivots to fighting authoritarianism more broadly. 

“There’s just no winning on climate unless we address how absolutely broken our political system is,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement. Focusing on corporate PAC money and the wars it fuels abroad is an essential part of the organization’s broader mission, she added. “The path towards winning climate legislation lies towards having a functional democracy, and that includes having a democracy that doesn’t prioritize endless wars abroad over the very real constraints of people right here.”

Shiney-Ajay said Sunrise Movement organizers are “really excited” about Kiros, 28, because of her moral clarity. “She is really clear about standing up for working people,” she said. “And she’s very clear about not taking corporate PAC money.”

Historically, foreign policy issues have not been top of mind for Democratic primary voters, said Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas. But as the Trump administration wages its unpopular war on Iran, he said, “candidates that are able to mesh together affordability and war, and opposition to support for Israel, I think, are gonna be the ones that might be able to break through.”

This argument requires nuance, as most Democrats — at least publicly — oppose the Trump administration’s war with Iran, often citing affordability as a concern. 

“This war is costing at least $1 billion every day,” said DeGette, Kiros’ opponent, in a public statement about her support for a War Powers resolution to block the administration’s violence. “That is billions of dollars that could go towards affordable health care and housing. I refuse to support this war.”

DeGette’s statement “rings hollow,” Kiros told The Intercept. “Democrats like DeGette had the opportunity to cut the military budget by 10 percent for that very reason — especially during Covid, when we needed that money for health care — and still voted no,” she said. 

Kiros blames the “military–industrial complex” and actors like AIPAC for pushing lawmakers to support defense contractor spending and wars that line their pockets.

Related

Trump’s War on Iran Could Cost Trillions

“There are corporations that are actively profiting from the war,” she said. “And I think it also has to do with the impact and the influence that we have seen from AIPAC and from Israel.” 

Kiros has criticized DeGette for receiving over $5 million from corporate PACs. The incumbent’s top contributor is the law and lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which is founded and chaired by former AIPAC vice president and board member Norman Brownstein, according to OpenSecrets. “At the end of the day, the people who get you into office are the ones you are going to be accountable to,” said Kiros. 

Nicole Shea Niebler, a Sunrise Movement organizer in Denver, recently confronted DeGette at a meet and greet for declining to support Block The Bombs, a bill that would limit offensive weapons transfers to Israel. Niebler said voters are right to be worried about candidates who take money from the groups pushing for war with Iran. 

“If you’re not willing to say no, what else are you willing to do that is not in the interest of your constituents?” she said.

Niebler sees her organization’s broader shift toward supporting anti-war candidates like Kiros as a moment of “clarity” for the organization, calling the U.S. military “the true number one danger to our environment.”

Sunrise is hoping to reverse its luck in recent races, where two of prominent endorsed anti-war candidates, Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam in North Carolina and activist Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois lost their primaries.

Allam, in particular, centered anti-Iran war messaging in her advertisements. “I will never take a dime from defense contractors or the pro-Israel lobby,” Allam said in an ad days ahead of the election earlier this month. “I have opposed these forever wars my entire career.”

Abughazaleh and Allam both lost by relatively narrow margins, which Shiney-Ajay said she doesn’t see as a broader defeat for their cause. 

“We’re up against a really steep battle and … millions and millions of dollars being poured in, and that is causing us to lose several races,” she said. “I do think there’s something happening where the narrative is that AIPAC money is poisonous, that corporate PAC money is poisonous, and that wasn’t true a few years ago.”

It’s challenging to parse out how successful the anti-war messaging was, because there were so many other factors in the races, Haider-Markel noted. “These challenger candidates also tend to be significantly younger and significantly more liberal than the incumbents they’re challenging. So all of those wrapped together,” he said. “It’s hard to distinguish which one actually played a role in some of these early defeats.”

In Denver, Kiros said she sees the anti-war and anti-military–industrial complex movement as a perpetual battle, one that will be fought in this election and others to come.

“The anti-war movement is one that has had to have this fight cyclically,” she said. “And so for me, it’s about understanding the military–industrial complex … and how we have allowed the military–industrial complex to influence our foreign policy, and to not just wait until it’s convenient, and it’s popular among the American people to be anti-war as it is right now.”

The post Sunrise Movement Pushes Anti-War Candidates, Endorsing Melat Kiros in Denver appeared first on The Intercept.

Few appeared more eager than Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., a moderate congressman and former presidential candidate with a reputation for bucking party leadership. 

“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” Moulton lamented to the paper. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” 

That was over a year ago. Now, Moulton is running to unseat one of the most progressive members of the Senate, in the bluest state in the country, on a platform of generational change. And the anti-trans comments he’d hoped would establish him as a thought leader could help tank his campaign. 

Polls consistently show Moulton trailing his opponent, incumbent Sen. Ed Markey, particularly among younger voters. Despite making a case for a new generation in office, Moulton has a 3 percent favorability rating among likely voters ages 18 to 34, compared to Markey’s 67 percent, according to a February 24 poll from the University of New Hampshire. Only 2 percent of likely Massachusetts primary voters under 34 said they would vote for Moulton if the race were held that day, while 53 percent said they would support Markey.

Though it’s still early — most Massachusetts voters won’t cast their ballots until September 1 — the state of the race suggests that Moulton, while attempting to style himself as the vanguard of a brash new Democratic party, picked up some serious political baggage.

Tatishe M. Nteta, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said Moulton was far from alone in his post-mortem for Kamala Harris. “The problem is, those comments now have defined [Moulton], not just as a national figure who bucked Democratic viewpoints, but now within the state,” he said. “In order for him to win, he’s going to either have to walk it back or justify it.” 

There were warning signs at the time. Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey said the Salem congressman was “playing politics with people,” but Moulton refused to apologize. He argued that the backlash only reinforced his point and accused Democrats of forcing people to “change our values” to meet “the demands of one very small minority group,” by doing things like making them “put pronouns in their email signatures.”

“We were extremely offended by the comments that Seth Moulton made,” David Seaton, a college student at Tufts University and vice president of political affairs for the College Democrats of America, told The Intercept. “While Seth Moulton is running on a platform of generational change, his ideas are from the last generation, and his values are certainly from generations past.”

Related

Jon Chait Thinks Kamala Harris Went Too Far Left. He’s Just Falling for Trump’s Demagoguery.

Moulton is now stuck in a political quagmire trapping other Democratic pundits and politicians, some with presidential designs, who tripped over themselves to blame Harris’s loss on the party becoming too woke and out of touch. But now, as voters seem more concerned with rising costs, mounting war, and waning access to health care than pronoun usage, those comments seem less like a prediction and more like a political liability. 

“When you look at how much the world has changed since that moment,” said Josie Caballero, director of voting at Advocates for Trans Equality, “it just seems very out of touch with where we are now.”

It might seem obvious that transgender rights aren’t the losing issue that Moulton predicted in deep-blue Massachusetts, where in 2018 residents overwhelmingly voted to keep statewide protections for trans people in place. But Caballero pointed to elections that suggested similar trends in red and purple states like Maine, Texas, and Virginia, where Republican Winsome Earle-Sears’s campaign and affiliated PACs spent millions on anti-transgender attack advertisements targeting her Democratic opponent, now-Gov. Abigail Spanberger. 

The former Virginia congresswoman did not capitulate on her positions regarding trans rights and not only trounced Earle-Sears on Election Day, but a poll of likely voters found they trusted her on “transgender policy” by a margin of 13 points.

Related

Democrats Swept Tuesday Night’s Election. Now What?

In New York City, Zohran Mamdani won his mayoral election after running an advertisement celebrating trans history and pledging his support to the community, along with a detailed policy agenda. 

Shelby Chestnut, executive director of the Transgender Law Center, said that voters this cycle are looking for candidates who can speak to universal issues like health care and affordability, instead of scapegoating vulnerable groups.

“I think we are living in a time where people are asking for an intersectional approach, where all bodily autonomy is respected, where people’s concerns are heard,” he said.

In Texas, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico has pivoted toward economic populism when addressing anti-trans attacks. 

“The only minority destroying this country is the billionaires,” Talarico said on TV news, criticizing the media’s fixation on trans athletes. “Trans people are 1 percent of the population. We are focused on the wrong 1 percent.”

Graham Platner, who is running in a competitive primary for the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has similarly addressed the issue of transgender rights.

“An out-of-state billionaire is funding an anti-trans ballot question in Maine — so that we’ll spend our time fighting about trans people instead of raising his taxes,” said Platner in an interview with Slate. 

Still, Chestnut said that while Platner and Talarico’s stances offer a necessary “starting point” for Democrats, they’ll also have to address the topic directly and advocate and explain their beliefs.

“We’re also in a moment where not saying anything proved to also be a losing strategy. Our opposition in the presidential election, on every corner, was blaming transgender people,” he said. “The Democrats’ response was, let’s not say anything and hope it’s just a non-issue. And the reality of it is, it’s an issue.”

In Massachusetts, Moulton’s tone has shifted from his more reactionary rhetoric in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, said Caballero.

“We went through the whole gay rights movement. We went through the whole civil rights movement. We never had to say, you know, ‘Seth Moulton: Straight’ or ‘Seth Moulton: White,’” he told WGBH at the time. “And all of a sudden, we have to change all our values to meet the needs or demands of one very small minority group.” 

Now, Moulton appears to be walking a tighter line without apologizing or qualifying his comments. He has shied away from making additional comments about trans athletes or pronouns in recent interviews and has instead focused on emphasizing his voting record.

“Congressman Moulton is acutely aware of the trauma the transgender community is facing,” wrote a spokesperson for Moulton in a statement to The Intercept, echoing other recent interviews. “He is a career-long ally with a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign for his voting record, and is a member of the Equality Caucus.”

The spokesperson added that Moulton still believes that “Democrats must engage in difficult conversations” in order to keep the transgender community safe.

Related

Gavin Newsom’s Biggest Problem Is Gavin Newsom

The tide has not completely turned. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the current unofficial front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has continued to fan the flames of hysteria over the participation of trans athletes in sports — despite the fact that there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of some 510,000 in the entire NCAA as of 2024. 

“We just couldn’t figure out how to make this fair,” he told Katie Couric this month, referring to trans girls’ participation in track competitions. 

Rather than assuaging people with questions about transgender issues, these comments from Democrats help Republicans to make trans rights a “wedge issue,” said Chestnut.

Despite his controversies, an Emerson poll in February found that Newsom had a slight lead with likely Democratic voters if the presidential primary were held that day — though there are still more than two years and one midterms cycle to go before voters pick their next president.

For his part, Moulton has denied changing his opinion on transgender rights or his rhetoric. “His position has never changed, and his record reflects this,” wrote a spokesperson for Moulton, emphasizing his support for the Transgender Bill of Rights in 2023, ahead of the 2024 election. He co-sponsored the bill again in 2026.   

But Bailey Kelly, a student at Tufts University and secretary of the College Democrats of Massachusetts, said they view Moulton as a fair weather friend on the issue. 

“We see through that flip-flopping,” said Kelly, who co-runs the College Democrats of Massachusetts’ digital operations in support of Markey, after the senator won their endorsement. “And it’s insulting that he thinks we don’t see it.” 

Related

Ed Markey Beats Back Senate Challenge From Joe Kennedy

Authenticity is key for younger voters, said Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something. “People are allowed to grow and change,” said Litman, “but it has to come from a place of truth by the candidate, or they’re not gonna be able to compellingly sell it. And I think that is the challenge for [Moulton].”

In January, both College Democrats of America and College Democrats of Massachusetts announced they were endorsing Markey after he won their internal vote in a landslide. Seaton said Moulton’s comments were “of the utmost importance” in the group’s decision not to support him. 

Redemption for candidates like Moulton is possible, Chestnut said. “There is nothing more powerful than some humility, and saying ‘you know what, I was wrong.’”

But to date, Moulton has not apologized for his comments, although he has stated that he “may not have used exactly the right words,” in an interview with CNN.

“Clarification is one thing, but walking back is another. And he has not done either up until this point, and Markey is going to seize on this,” said Nteta, the political science professor. “If Moulton is going to win, he is going to have to assuage the concerns of people in the state about how he is going to govern when he gets to the Senate.” 

The post Seth Moulton Saw Trans Rights as a Political Liability. It Could Doom His Senate Campaign. appeared first on The Intercept.

The race had come down to just over 1,000 votes and 1 percentage point as of Thursday morning, with Allam nearly catching up to Foushee in the eleventh hour. After initially saying she would request a recount, Allam conceded to Foushee on Wednesday night, writing on social media that the AI lobby had “bought” the race. Pro-AI groups spent roughly $1.3 million backing Foushee, who is now heavily favored to win the November general election in North Carolina’s Democrat-dominated 4th Congressional District.

In a statement sent to The Intercept, Allam urged her own progressive supporters to hold the incumbent’s feet to the fire. 

“It should not take being challenged in a primary to take bold stances that voters overwhelmingly support,” said Allam, “but I am proud that our movement pushed our incumbent to better reflect our deeply held values and convictions. It’s up to us as an entire district to demand that our Representative deliver on her promises.”

In a victory statement released Wednesday night, Foushee vowed to fight for a slew of marquee progressive causes. She pledged to fight to “stop Trump’s attacks on our democracy, regulate AI, overturn Citizens United, establish a Green New Deal, ensure Medicare for All, pass legislation to block arms sales to Israel, and lower the cost of groceries, housing, and education.”

Related

Democratic Leaders Avoid Criticizing Trump’s Iran War. Now Voters Will Have a Say.

Commentators on social media directed frustration over Allam’s loss at key progressive figures Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both of whom declined to endorse the challenger over the incumbent. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee David Hogg endorsed Allam, as did notable progressive organizations like Justice Democrats, and it’s unclear if input from the New York politicians would have made the difference in the North Carolina race. But with such a tight margin, some argued more forceful rallying from progressive surrogates could have helped Allam. 

As the race drew to a close, technology and foreign policy dominated the North Carolina primary. Allam repeatedly criticized Foushee as too cozy with corporate and pro-Israel interests, forcing the incumbent to play defense. These divisions intensified after the United States and Israel attacked Iran over the weekend.

Allam released a political advertisement on Monday criticizing her opponent for benefiting from millions in spending from AI-connected super PACs with ties to the United States and Israel’s attacks on Iran. Jobs and Democracy PAC — a super PAC supported by Anthropic, whose AI model Claude was reportedly deployed in the Trump administration’s strike on Iran — spent over $1.3 million in support of Foushee in the North Carolina primary. 

“As election day approaches, you will see nearly $2 million of ads for my opponent, funded by AI-backed super PACs,” Allam said in the ad, “the same AI corporation who powered Trump’s attacks on Iran, while my opponent takes donations from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics.”

But the harsh words weren’t enough to oust Foushee, who also beat Allam by a far larger margin in a 2022 race after the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent almost $2.5 million in her favor. While the congresswoman said that she would not accept money from AIPAC this cycle, signaling the megadonors’ unpopularity with Democratic voters, Allam and her supporters continued to hammer home that Foushee was the pick of the pro-Israel foreign policy establishment. 

American Priorities, the anti-AIPAC super PAC looking to counter pro-Israel spending in elections, sunk nearly $1 million into supporting Allam, hoping to use her win as an early example of Democratic primary voters shifting allegiances away from supporting Israel. The PAC, which has endorsed several other progressive challengers, including Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, will get another chance to test its theory in the upcoming months with primary candidates in Tennessee, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.

Allam further connected Foushee and her AI lobby backers to the war in Iran during an interview with former CNN host Don Lemon on Monday. “What I’m seeing is the same thing that my constituents and folks all across the country are seeing, is that they don’t want their taxpayer dollars being used for another endless war,” said Allam. “And unfortunately, this is what the corporate war machines have been lobbying for and spending millions of dollars in elections and millions of dollars lobbying legislators for this outcome.” 

Foushee pushed back against Allam’s characterization of her as a warmonger in the pocket of the AI industry, arguing that she would vote to rein in the administration and regulate the technology. 

“I respect our primary system, but I am grateful that my constituents have rejected the baseless attacks from out-of-state groups that my family and I have had to endure,” Foushee wrote Wednesday.

Related

Even Former AIPAC Democrats Are Signing On to Block Arms Sales to Israel

The focus on AI also manifested in more concrete issues at home. The district is the potential site of several new data centers, including one proposed center in the town of Apex in Wake County, despite objections from local residents. A poll from Justice Democrats, the national progressive group that backed Allam, found that 63 percent of district residents believed data centers “hurt their community by raising utility costs and harming the environment.”

Chatham County residents in the 4th District recently rejected a proposal to build a data center in their community, voting for a one-year moratorium on any data centers being built in their community. The district also contains the cities of Durham and Chapel Hill, known as relatively progressive areas defined largely by the presence of major universities.

The county commissioner surged ahead in in-person votes in Wake County, the proposed location of another controversial artificial intelligence data center. But Foushee far outperformed Allam in early votes and mail-in ballots — and ultimately the gap was too far to bridge.

Allam has been critical of developing new data centers. The Durham county commissioner signed onto a pledge led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for a nationwide moratorium on the construction of new data centers. Conversely, Foushee serves as co-chair of Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy, which has been widely criticized for its industry ties. 

The post Nida Allam Concedes to Valerie Foushee With Razor-Thin Loss for Progressives in Key Midterm Primary appeared first on The Intercept.

The state’s proposed “trigger laws,” which will be heard in committee on Wednesday, are direct challenges to Plyler v. Doe, a narrowly decided 1982 Supreme Court case that enshrined the right to a free K–12 public education regardless of immigration status. The parallel bills would also likely violate federal statutes that codify the same right. 

The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, has officially called on other states to pass similar laws challenging Plyler, situating Tennessee’s push as among the first in a broader national effort to overturn the decision.

“Illegal aliens should not be eligible for federal, state, or local government benefits, including through their children,” wrote Lora Ries, the director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center, in a February 17 post, “because the receipt of such benefits facilitates longer unlawful residence in the United States and takes resources from American citizens and lawful immigrants.”

So far, six states — Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Indiana, New Jersey, and Tennessee — have introduced bills that would violate Plyler. If passed, their implementation could force a challenge at the Supreme Court.

Related

Trump Attacked Immigrant Food Aid in Minnesota. Locals Fought Back.

Educators and immigration advocates told The Intercept that if Tennessee and other states were to get Plyler overturned and enact legislation to track and potentially expel undocumented children from public school, it would “end public education as we know it.” 

“This feels like a credible threat,” said Cassandra Zimmer-Wong, an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center. “The ramifications of this are huge … denying children carte-blanche education would create an uneducated, potentially illiterate underclass of children and then adults in this country.”

Last year, the Tennessee state legislature introduced a bill, H.B. 793, that would allow schools to refuse to enroll students who cannot prove “lawful presence” in the United States or charge them tuition, but it was tabled due to concerns about potential federal funding losses because the law violated federal statutes. The bill would also require schools to report the number of students who enroll without a birth certificate. The Tennessee Senate version would allow schools to choose to deny enrollment to undocumented students only if they are unable to pay. 

Now, the bill is back — and scheduled for a state House Finance, Ways, and Means Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. A companion bill, which would require schools and other entities that receive state funding, like hospitals, to report to the government on recipients’ immigration status, moved out of committee last week. The second bill is also scheduled to be heard by the House State & Local Government Committee on Wednesday. It can only be enacted if H.B. 793 passes and Plyler is overturned.

Sam Singer, a high school teacher who teaches English language learners in Tennessee, said she’s had “numerous students” who’ve heard of the bills ask if they’re still allowed to go to school. 

“They’re questions that no child should ever have to ask, much less come to school and wonder about,” said Singer. “The expectation should be, of course, you’re supposed to be here, you’re a kid. This is where you belong.” 

School should be a “safe space” for children, said Singer, “where you can trust that teachers are here to help you become your best self as you grow into the young adult you want to be.” Instead, the bills would effectively turn school administrators and teachers into immigration agents.

Across the state border in Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has said that he would seek to overturn Plyler for years. U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican Texas congressman now running for attorney general, has called for the 1982 ruling to be overturned as well. 

“For illegal alien children, the Supreme Court said we have to fund education for them. The fact of the matter is that it is a massive tax burden on the people of Texas,” Roy said in an interview last week. “I don’t believe that the Constitution requires that the state of Texas should fund it, and we should make a new precedent by taking it to court.”

The Texas state legislature previously introduced two bills challenging Plyler. The first bill would allow public schools to charge undocumented children to attend, and the latter bill would require proof of citizenship to enroll in public school. Both of those bills have stalled, but Krystal Gómez, managing attorney for the Texas Immigration Law Council, said she expects more challenges to Plyler in the next legislative session.

Related

Linda McMahon Has No Education Experience Except Wanting to Defund Public Schools

“It used to be that we had a federal government in the Department of Education that didn’t seem interested in it, and was able to sort of put this to kibosh and have like a backstop to states that got a little out of hand in trying to create these chilling effects or overturn Plyler outright,” said Gomez. “We don’t have that now. So it’s sort of the wild, wild West, and whatever sad, terrible thing that a state can dream up, they can probably get away with.”

The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment. 

In Texas, immigrant student attendance has already declined dramatically since the start of Trump’s immigration enforcement ramp-up. The Houston school district lost nearly 4,000 immigrant students this year, a decline of roughly 22 percent of the school district’s immigrant population. It’s unclear how many of those students left the United States willingly, or were deported, and how many children still living in Houston are simply too afraid to return to classrooms.

The stress of constant raids weighs on many of the immigrant children still attending school, said Klara Aizupitis, 34, a high school English teacher in Terlingua, Texas. 

“You’re living under the constant threat of either being picked up and deported or your parents or your siblings being picked up and deported,” said Aizupitis. “That stress is going to have an impact on, certainly, academic performance, but also your ability to manage your emotions in everyday life.”

Further eroding protections for immigrant students would devastate the border community where Aizupitis teaches. “We do really have a shared culture, on both sides of the [Rio Grande] river,” she said.

The district’s funding is based on average daily attendance, so losing undocumented students would “threaten the existence of our school district,” said Aizupitis. “Moreover, it would threaten the existence of our entire community.” 

An estimate from FWD, a criminal justice and immigration policy organization, found that undocumented students would lose a collective $1 trillion — or 600,000 individually — in lifetime income if they were denied access to public education.

Related

ICE Held an NYC Child Incommunicado at Secret Hotels, Then Deported Him

Heritage frequently suggests that undocumented students represent a substantial burden on taxpayers, arguing in a statement to The Intercept that “unaccompanied alien children sent to states cost them hundreds of millions of dollars for one year of public education.” But according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented people in the U.S. pay nearly $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes annually. Tax contributions from undocumented people far outweigh the financial burden of K–12 education for undocumented children. 

The Heritage Foundation’s argument, said Zimmer-Wong, “does not hold up to any kind of basic scrutiny.” 

The FWD report found that educating undocumented students provides $633 billion more money in state and local income tax contributions than the cost of their education. The report also found that, if Plyler were overturned, the U.S. workforce would decrease by 450,000 workers in critical jobs that require at least a high school or college education.

None of that accounts for the expense of implementing a widespread immigration surveillance system in schools. “It would be extremely costly,” said Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition Votes.

Schools would have to acquire “new software, new computers, new administrative processes and staff” to track and determine the immigration status of the tens of thousands of children within any given school district, not just students who are undocumented, she said. 

“The Heritage Foundation reports notes the burden placed on schools, [from undocumented children],” said Ignacia Rodriguez Kmec, policy council at the National Immigration Law Center, “yet their solution is for school personnel to become essentially DHS and TSA agents, verifying, reviewing documents, and recording immigration status.” 

The Heritage Foundation pushed back on criticism of its plan, telling The Intercept that undocumented children would still have the option to receive an education — if they paid tuition, self-deported, or left the state. 

“These are the consequences for the decision the parent or student made to break our law. American taxpayers should not have to pay for law breaking. Nor can American taxpayers afford it,” Ries wrote in a statement to The Intercept.

Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which originally litigated Plyler, said that he doesn’t believe the Supreme Court will allow these bills to be implemented. Because the bills would violate federal statutes, they would run up against the supremacy clause of the Constitution, Saenz pointed out. 

However, if the courts were to look favorably on a challenge to Plyler and its corresponding federal statutes, Saenz said, the consequences would be devastating. 

“It would have the impact of ending public education as we know it, because when a certain cohort of kids is allowed to be out of school, what happens next is that their siblings and friends don’t go to school,” Saenz said, “and rapidly, no one goes to school.” 

The post Tennessee Wants to Let Schools Ban Immigrant Kids, Threatening to “End Public Education as We Know It”  appeared first on The Intercept.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson had attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair in 2024 for all of five minutes, but the action got him banned from campus. When President Donald Trump assumed office and issued a series of executive orders targeting students who protested in support of Palestinians, Thomas-Johnson and his friend Momodou Taal went into hiding.

Google informed Thomas-Johnson via a brief email in April that it had already shared his metadata with the Department of Homeland Security, as The Intercept previously reported. But the full extent of the information the agency sought — including usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers — was not previously known.

“I’d already seen the subpoena request that Google and Meta had sent to Momodou [Taal], and I knew that he had gotten in touch with a lawyer and the lawyer successfully challenged that,” Thomas-Johnson said. “I was quite surprised to see that I didn’t have that opportunity.”

The subpoena provides no justification for why ICE is asking for this information, except that it’s required “in connection with an investigation or inquiry relating to the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.” In the subpoena, ICE requests that Google not “disclose the existence of this summons for indefinite period of time.”

Thomas-Johnson, who is British, believes that ICE requested that information to track and eventually detain him — but he had already fled to Geneva, Switzerland, and is now in Dakar, Senegal. 

Related

Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing Thomas-Johnson, and the ACLU of Northern California sent a letter to Google, Amazon, Apple, Discord, Meta, Microsoft, and Reddit last week calling on tech companies to resist similar subpoenas in the future from DHS without court intervention. The letter asks the companies to provide users with as much notice as possible before complying with a subpoena to give them the opportunity to fight it, and to resist gag orders that would prevent the tech companies from informing targets that a subpoena was issued.

“Your promises to protect the privacy of users are being tested right now. As part of the federal government’s unprecedented campaign to target critics of its conduct and policies, agencies like DHS have repeatedly demanded access to the identities and information of people on your services,” the letter reads. “Based on our own contact with targeted users, we are deeply concerned your companies are failing to challenge unlawful surveillance and defend user privacy and speech.”

In addition to Thomas-Johnson’s case, the letter refers to other instances in which technology companies provided user data to DHS, including a subpoena sent to Meta to “unmask” the identities of users who documented immigration raids in California. Unlike Thomas-Johnson, users in that case were given the chance to fight the subpoena because they were made aware of it before Meta complied.

“Google has already fulfilled this subpoena,” an attorney for Google told Thomas-Johnson’s lawyer, as The Intercept previously reported. “Production consisted of basic subscriber information.”

The ICE subpoena requested the detailed information linked to Thomas-Johnson’s Gmail account. Thomas-Johnson confirmed to The Intercept that he had attached his bank and credit card numbers to his account to buy apps.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo Law and a former staff attorney with ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said that by not giving prior notice, Google deprived Thomas-Johnson of his ability to protect his information.

“The problem is that it doesn’t allow the person whose personal information is on the line and whose privacy may be being invaded to raise challenges to the disclosure of that potentially private information,” Nash said. “And I think that’s important to protect rights that they may have to their own information.”

Tech companies’ data sharing practices are primarily governed by two federal laws, the Stored Communications Act, which protects the privacy of digital communications, including emails, and Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive trade practices.

“Under both federal law and the law of every state, you cannot deceive consumers,” said Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University St. Louis who specializes in privacy, the internet, and civil liberties. “And if you make a material misrepresentation about your data practices, that’s a deceptive trade practice.”

Whether or not corporations are clear enough with consumers about how they collect and share their data has been litigated for decades, Richards said, referencing the infamous Cambridge Analytica lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the company misled Facebook users about data collection and sharing.

Google’s public privacy policy acknowledges that it will share personal information in response to an “enforceable governmental request,” adding that its legal team will “frequently push back when a request appears to be overly broad or doesn’t follow the correct process.”

According to Google, the company overwhelmingly complied with the millions of requests made by the government for user information over the last decade. Its data also shows that those requests have spiked over the last five years. It’s unclear how many of those users were given notice of those requests ahead of time or after.

Richards said that cases like these emphasize the need for legal reforms around data privacy and urged Congress to amend the Stored Communications Act to require a higher standard before the government can access our digital data. He also said the federal government needs to regulate Big Tech and place “substantive restrictions on their ability to share information with the government.”

It’s hard to know exactly how tech companies are handling our personal data in relation to the government, but there seems to have been a shift in optics, Richards said. “What we have seen in the 12 months since the leaders of Big Tech were there on the podium at the inauguration,” Richards said, “is much more friendliness of Big Tech towards the government and towards state power.”

From Dakar, Thomas-Johnson said that understanding the extent of the subpoena was terrifying but had not changed his commitment to his work.

“As a journalist, what’s weird is that you’re so used to seeing things from the outside,” said Thomas-Johnson, whose work has appeared in outlets including Al Jazeera and The Guardian. “We need to think very hard about what resistance looks like under these conditions… where government and Big Tech know so much about us, can track us, can imprison, can destroy us in a variety of ways.”

Update: February 10, 5:54 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to reflect that Thomas-Johnson’s legal team still does not know the full extent of the information that Google provided to ICE, but that Thomas-Johnson said his bank and credit card numbers were attached to his account.

The post Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist’s Bank and Credit Card Numbers appeared first on The Intercept.