Netanyahu is wanted by the ICC for alleged war crimes committed during Israel’s 16-month war on Gaza, including using starvation as a method of warfare; deliberately attacking civilians; murder; and persecution. His former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant faces the same charges.

Yet Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk last week waived his country’s legal obligations as an ICC signatory to arrest Netanyahu, instead offering the Israeli leader unhindered travel to the 80th Auschwitz memorial service on January 27.

“It would be a grave mistake for the Polish EU Presidency to welcome Netanyahu to an official Holocaust memorial ceremony,” Borrell, who stood down as head of the European External Action Service last month, told The Intercept. “This would make a mockery of the EU’s strong commitment to the International Criminal Court, which the EU27 unanimously reaffirmed in June 2023.”

Without mentioning Poland by name, Sven Koopmans, the EU’s Middle East peace envoy, told The Intercept that the ICC was “supported by the entire EU including the institutions and the 27 member states — and that includes all that comes with it.”

It is unclear whether Netanyahu will attend the Auschwitz service, as he has in the past. Tusk’s offer has proved unpopular in Poland, and lawyers have warned of “immediate and robust legal action” in the Polish courts, if Netanyahu sets foot on Polish soil. 

Israeli press reports suggest that Israel’s Education Minister Yoav Kisch may go in Netanyahu’s place, and the Israeli PM’s spokesperson did not return emails, texts, or calls on the subject.

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The ICC is already coming under attack from the new U.S. administration of Donald Trump, who has long sought to shut the court down. That political crisis could be compounded if Poland bestows impunity on Netanyahu by allowing an unfettered visit, undermining the court from within.

“Treating the Rome Statute like an à la carte menu would not only set a very dangerous precedent for the international criminal justice system it would undermine respect for EU treaty obligations at large,” Borrell said. “If Poland, or any other EU Member State, welcomes an ICC fugitive indicted for crimes against humanity, do we really expect others to take us seriously when we ask them to enforce the arrest warrant against Putin?”

Yet if Netanyahu avoids Poland, it will highlight the extent to which he has become persona non grata in the wake of bloody onslaught on Gaza that has sparked genocide charges in The Hague.

An Outrageous Invitation

The ICC has 120 member states that are obliged to fulfill its arrest warrants. But Italy, France, and Hungary have all said that they would not arrest Netanyahu, with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán going so far as to say he would invite him to Budapest.  

Poland signed on to an EU Council statement in June 2023 backing the ICC system to lead the fight against impunity and “bring justice to victims everywhere.” It also called for the “prompt execution of outstanding arrest warrants.”

Tusk’s office did not respond to requests for comment on how the exemption for Netanyahu was consistent with Poland’s obligations. The Polish prime minister has previously defended the red carpet offer to Netanyahu as a way of “paying tribute to the Jewish nation, millions of whose daughters and sons became victims of the Holocaust.”

Netanyahu, though, is a polarizing figure, who has previously appropriated the issue to compare October 7 to the Holocaust, and Hamas to the Nazis. He has falsely blamed Palestinians for the Holocaust, triggering widespread condemnation.

Two survivors of the Nazi genocide who have spoken out against the killing of over 47,000 Palestinians in Gaza told The Intercept that they were disgusted by Tusk’s planned guest list.

Gabor Maté, 81, who survived the Holocaust as a baby in the care of strangers while much of his family perished, described Tusk’s offer as “a travesty, a betrayal of all humane principles and international law, and a cynical political move to curry favour with the US. Netanyahu does not represent the ‘Jewish nation.’ An increasing number of Jews internationally are appalled by the horrors inflicted in their name by the state he leads.”

Stephen Kapos, 87, is one of them. A Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust in a shelter run by a Protestant church, his father was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and many of his relatives were killed. He depicted the reserved seat for Netanyahu at the memorial as “a desecration of the sacred memory of Holocaust victims.”

“Netanyahu is a straightforward war criminal and Poland’s decision to provide him with assistance, a platform and safe passage is an outrage,” he said. “He even made a statement in Yad Vashem” — Israel’s Holocaust memorial — that ‘never again is now,’ linking what they were doing to the Palestinians with the Holocaust. It’s criminal to do that. They’re openly enacting a genocide in Gaza. There’s no other interpretation when 2,000-pound bombs are indiscriminately raining down on civilians.”

“Netanyahu shouldn’t be at an Auschwitz memorial. He deserves to be hauled up for trial in The Hague.”

The post Netanyahu Has an ICC Arrest Warrant. Poland’s Promise to Ignore It Would Be a “Grave Mistake.” appeared first on The Intercept.

When Bourgeois-George later picked up the box, she was shocked by how heavy it was. Then, she looked down at her hands. They were covered with a gray, dusty substance. The ashes of her father, Alfred Bourgeois, were seeping out.

“The ashes were so heavy and I didn’t expect that. It was like a punch to the gut because it just reminded me of him as a person, like a heavy human being. And then there he was, just minimized to ashes,” Bourgeois-George said.

As she looked inside the box, she realized it was the closest she had been to her father in almost 19 years, since the day of her high school graduation dinner in LaPlace, Louisiana. They had shared a deep embrace when they said their goodbyes. Bourgeois-George didn’t think much of it, but then a month passed without hearing from him.

She would eventually learn that he had been arrested in Corpus Christi, Texas, for the sexual abuse and murder of his 2-year-old daughter, Ja’karenn Gunter, Bourgeois-George’s half sister. He was convicted on federal charges in 2002 and maintained his innocence until his death. The Trump administration executed the 56-year-old Bourgeois in December 2020, despite evidence of an intellectual disability that would make his execution unconstitutional. He was the 10th out of 13 people executed in an unprecedented federal killing spree.

Bourgeois-George is convinced of her father’s innocence. For the past four years, she has waged a sometimes-lonely battle to clear his name, pointing to myriad filings by his death penalty attorneys that cast doubt on his conviction. The filings include sworn statements from medical experts stating that Ja’karenn’s death could be explained by an internal head injury due to ingestion of salt water during a recent trip to a California beach, rather than abuse.

Her advocacy ranges from media interviews and public appearances to efforts to secure a retrial of the case. Most recently, she submitted a posthumous pardon request to President Joe Biden, whose decision late last month to commute the sentences of almost all of the men on federal death row renewed Bourgeois-George’s hope in getting justice for her father. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“The wrongful conviction and execution of Alfred Bourgeois represent a moral failure of our justice system—a failure that can and must be addressed,” Bourgeois-George wrote to Biden. “While nothing can bring Alfred back, granting a posthumous pardon would restore his dignity, acknowledge the truth, and send a message that the United States values fairness, accountability, and human life.”

A Tragic Loss

In the summer of 2002, Bourgeois took a road trip with his wife at the time, Robin Batiste, and three of his daughters, including Ja’karenn. He was a truck driver, and the family traveled out west in an 18-wheeler truck in a mix of leisure and work. On the morning of June 26, when Bourgeois was making a delivery to a Corpus Christi naval base, Batiste awoke to find Ja’karenn, her stepdaughter, unconscious. The parents took Ja’karenn to the hospital, where she died the next day. The official cause of death was “an impact to the head resulting in a devastating brain injury.”

Batiste and Bourgeois’s 6-year-old daughter Alfredesha quickly identified Bourgeois as a suspect; because they were on federal property at the naval base, he was charged by federal prosecutors. Alfredesha would later testify that she saw her dad hit Ja’karenn’s head against the backseat window four times and physically abuse her. Though Alfredesha blamed her dad for the killing, she also said that she enjoyed being in her father’s truck, where on many occasions she would talk into the speaker and type on the computer for fun during their trips. She also said her dad never hit her or her younger sister and that he treated her “like an angel.”

Bourgeois vehemently denied the allegations and said he was deeply troubled by losing his daughter. At trial, he testified that he never harmed Ja’karenn, never touched her inappropriately, and did not cause her death.

He was the only witness for the defense, court documents show. In an interview, Bourgeois-George said that she, along with more than 20 others — including Alfred’s pastor, family members, and childhood friends — were subpoenaed to testify by her father’s defense team, only to be told that they would not be called. Most of them, including Bourgeois-George, weren’t even allowed in the courtroom.

When Ja’karenn was hospitalized, a sexual abuse nurse examined her and found no evidence of sexual abuse. The autopsy also showed no such evidence. Still, the government argued that Bourgeois had abused his daughter, pointing to a single forensic test that indicates the presence of p30, a prostate-specific antigen that is widely understood as faulty because it can also be found in female fluids. In the years since, the FBI has reportedly abandoned its practices of testing for p30 because it is incapable of reliably determining the presence of semen.

In closing arguments, Bourgeois’s lawyers argued to the predominantly white jury that even if they believed that he had abused and killed Ja’karenn, there was still no evidence of premeditation. After deliberating for less than two hours, the jury found Alfred, a Black man, guilty.

In the coming years, Bourgeois’s appellate lawyers would challenge his conviction, arguing that his trial counsel was ineffective in presenting readily available evidence that cast doubt on his guilt. His appellate lawyers also revealed that the prosecution did not disclose that four people in jail were promised some benefit in exchange for testifying against Bourgeois.

A month after his execution, Bourgeois’s death row attorney shared his case file with Bourgeois-George. The documents — including autopsy reports, affidavits, witness testimony, clemency, and stay of execution petitions — help form the basis of her request for a posthumous pardon.

Expert Opinion

Among the key pieces of evidence against Bourgeois that his lawyers questioned was an examination of Ja’karenn’s brain after her death, which showed that she had a subarachnoid hemorrhage — bleeding between the brain and its membrane — caused by the burst of a weakened blood vessel wall, with no skull fracture. The consultation report also cited bruising and hematomas, or a collection of blood that forms outside of a blood vessel.

In 2007, Dr. Werner Spitz, a pathologist and chief medical examiner, wrote an affidavit as part of an appeal for Bourgeois’s innocence saying that the suggestion of bruising was “misleading and exaggerated,” that the photo had been enhanced, and that “dark skinned individuals frequently have variations of skin pigment and tones often mistaken for injuries.” Spitz also testified that the hematoma was at least a week old.

“I disagree with the witness testimony whereby the child’s head was struck multiple times on the interior of the vehicle,” Spitz wrote in the affidavit. “The findings place in question causation of the injuries and their timing.”

Four years later, Dr. Jan Edward Leestma, a consultant in forensic neuropathology, testified in an appellate hearing that what he observed of the subdural hematoma was not consistent with an injury that was inflicted within the 24-hour period that they were on federal grounds in Corpus Christi. While the doctors at the time found new blood (no more than three days old) in the subdural hematoma, Leestma said there was no indication that the injury occurred on the naval base. They had no reliable means to age and date it, Leestma said, noting that existing subdural hematomas from over a week can bleed without additional injury.

Bourgeois’s lawyers consulted additional medical experts as they prepared a clemency petition ahead of his scheduled execution in 2020. One doctor who reviewed the medical evidence, Roland Auer, said that there were no findings that would be expected of a fatal blow to the head in a 2-year-old girl, “especially when the skull is as thin as observed in the autopsy.” Auer explained that the injuries were consistent with venous thrombosis, a blood clot blocking a vein, which he said was possibly caused by ingestion of salt water from the family’s trip to the beach in California just over a week before the death. That could be why the brain injuries predated the day of the alleged murder, Auer said.

Elizabeth Rouse, the doctor who examined the autopsy for the prosecution at the time of the trial, reviewed Auer’s findings and said she “did not disagree” that Ja’karenn “suffered venous thrombosis, occurring more than a week before death, or that the venous thrombosis was possibly caused by the ingestion of salt water,” according to the clemency petition.

Throughout his entire incarceration, Bourgeois was held in isolation. He was not allowed visits, phone calls, or letters with his family. With all this time alone, Bourgeois-George said that he developed an intellectual disability, which his lawyers used to contest his execution. The Supreme Court has deemed it unconstitutional to execute someone with an intellectual disability, yet the justices declined to step in to spare his life.

Bourgeois was killed on December 11, 2020. “I did not commit this crime,” he said in his final statement. “I love my kids with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

Bourgeois-George filed her request to Biden almost exactly four years later, on December 17. She says that as time passes, the feelings of grief get harder, not easier, especially with the possibility he might never get justice. Though she sees no end in sight, she is determined to keep fighting. “My father did not deserve this. He was a good father. He was a wonderful man,” she said. “He was tortured and tormented by his own country for 18 and a half years, and this is how his story ended.”

The post She Lost Her Dad to Trump’s Killing Spree. Now She Wants Biden to Clear His Name. appeared first on The Intercept.

Qasem peered out the window to see what was going on. His family worried that Israeli troops would enter their town of Jabalia that night. Trying to calm them down, he countered, “There’s nothing left for them to enter.” 

Since Israel had launched its assault on Gaza a year earlier, the army had twice invaded Jabalia. “What’s left for them to destroy?” he recounted in a recent interview, an Israeli quadcopter’s strikes audible in the background. 

Qasem’s family, it turns out, was right. That night marked the start of Israel’s scorched-earth assault on northern Gaza — the so-called General’s Plan to purportedly combat Hamas while clearing the area of its residents.

Tens of families immediately fled Jabalia. “People were running barefoot, with clear horrors on their faces,” Qasem, who is 28 years old, told The Intercept.

His family stayed put at first, but as the days passed and the bombing grew stronger, his disabled brother, mother, and sisters went to a relative’s house in Gaza City, nearly 3 miles to the south of their hometown. They had already lost one family member, Qasem’s twin brother, back in April. Yet Qasem chose to remain.

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Since October 6, the Israeli army has paired its ground offensive with a nearly impenetrable siege and constant airstrikes — effectively starving the population while making it impossible for rescue teams and health care workers to do their jobs. While more than half of the area’s 200,000 remaining residents have fled since October, 65,000 to 75,000 people remain in the north, according to UNRWA. 

“The implementation of the so-called General’s Plan, and all the Israeli army’s actions in northern Gaza, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity,” said Yehya Muharab, an international law attorney. “These include grave violations of legal and humanitarian protections for civilians, hospitals, shelters, and vulnerable populations such as women and children.”

The Israeli military has killed at least 1,800 Palestinians in its ongoing assault on the north, said Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defense. On October 23, Basal said, an Israeli army drone played an audio message ordering rescue teams to evacuate the area — leaving an untold number of people trapped under the rubble or on streets that civil defense crews cannot reach. 

“We were instructed to stop responding to appeals from residents, cease practicing our profession, and even refrain from driving our vehicles,” Basal said. The military directed the rescue workers to evacuate through the Indonesian Hospital, where soldiers arrested nine workers. After halting its rescue operations, the civil defense has “received a lot of appeals from residents blockaded in the north to send them food and water. It’s a very miserable disaster.” 

The area’s two remaining hospitals — Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda — have meanwhile struggled amid Israeli bombings and the military’s refusal to allow the delivery of medical supplies and fuel. 

“We don’t even have a single ambulance to transport the injured from disaster sites,” Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, told The Intercept. He recounted getting distress calls from people trapped under the rubble and being unable to dispatch emergency workers to help them. “The next day, their voices were gone, and they were counted among the dead, with their homes becoming their graves. This scene is repeated daily.”

The hospital’s patients — children and adults alike — are suffering from malnutrition and dehydration, the doctor added, due to Israel’s siege. “Every hour, we lose patients due to these severe conditions.”

Abu Safiya himself was injured in an Israeli bombing on Kamal Adwan Hospital on November 24. This past weekend, Abu Safiya reported that the Israeli military had once again struck the hospital. He refuses to leave his post, determined to continue caring for those who remain.

Whether they fled or stayed behind, the survivors of Israel’s ongoing assault in the north have seen their lives indelibly shaped by fresh traumas compounding a full year of horrors. 

Family Separation

Amal Almasri’s entire pregnancy was defined by Israel’s assault on Gaza. Even after her house in Beit Hanoun was bombed in the first week of the war, and as relatives started moving to the south, her family defied Israel’s evacuation orders, moving between temporary shelters instead. When she found out she was three months pregnant in March, they had already spent several months sheltering at various schools in the north, life in a house of their own a distant memory.

The war raging around them made it almost impossible for Almasri to seek regular prenatal care, let alone to get the nutrients she needed to care for herself and the child growing inside of her. “I only met a doctor once every four months,” the 30-year-old mother of five told The Intercept. “It was severe starvation, no hygiene, and sewage flooding the streets. We relied on food aid. Sometimes we only ate every other day.”

After multiple false starts, she went into labor on October 3 — amid a period of intensified Israeli bombing that was a a precursor to the General’s Plan.

“My face was pale due to malnutrition,” she recalled. She was accompanied at the hospital by a friend, while her husband, Yousef Almasri, stayed behind at the school shelter to be with their other children. The morning after giving birth, Amal Almasri returned to the school herself. 

Their newborn baby was healthy, but the mother was physically drained. The couple had been expecting a son, and when they were surprised with a baby girl, they were unsure what to name her.

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The next day, the Israeli army began heavily bombing the area once again, as soldiers launched a ground invasion and besieged four schools housing displaced people. This continued for three days; on the fourth, the army rounded all the Palestinians up in a single school — the one the Almasris were at — before ordering them to leave the area.

The troops separated the men and women. Almasri moved slowly, hoping to be able to leave with Yousef, but the army threw a stun grenade into the building, then forced the women and children to evacuate.

“I went out and I saw about 30 men tied up,” Almasri said. “There was a large hole where [the Israeli army] had tied the men’s arms behind their backs and blindfolded them. [My daughter] shouted, ‘Mama, there’s Baba.’ I saw him, but I couldn’t wave to him. A soldier yelled at me to lower my hand, so I lowered my hand.”

Her 10-year-old daughter tried to get near her dad. “My daughter Handa left the checkpoint,” Almasri said. “She wanted to go to her dad but the soldier raised his gun and said, “Go back!”

The girl came back crying.

The soldiers instructed the women and children to evacuate south. Exhausted from childbirth, Almasri had no choice but to leave without her husband.

“I was so fatigued, as I had just given birth four days ago. I lost hope and had to evacuate without Yousef,” Almasri said. Her children were distraught, too. “Handa was carrying her 4-year-old brother, crying and saying, ‘We left Baba behind us.’ I tried to reassure her, promising she would see him soon. Handa suddenly collapsed under a tree, saying, ‘Mama, I’m tired. I can’t bear it. The road is so long. I want to wait for Baba.’ But we had to keep going.”

After a few hours, they arrived at another school in Gaza City, where they spent the night in freezing weather without blankets. Over the next few days, Almasri repeatedly tried to contact men who had been with her husband, but to no avail. On the fourth day, she received a call telling her that Yousef had been injured and was in Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City.

“I didn’t believe he was alive until Yousef called me. Most of the arrested men were killed by Israel,” Almasri said.

Later, they reunited in the school.

“They used my husband as a human shield,” she said, referring to the Israeli military. After shooting him in the leg, the soldiers forced him to walk in front of them during their invasion of schools and other places. “The army gave him some evacuation orders to deliver to Kalam Adwan Hospital. He did and escaped with people.”

After his release, the couple decided on a name for their daughter: Somod, which means resilience.

The Final Prayer

During the first year of the war and despite five bouts of displacement, Ramez Abu Nasser and his family stood their ground in northern Gaza. But as Israel’s attacks intensified this fall, they decided on October 5 that it had become too dangerous to stay.

They were lucky to find an apartment in a relative’s four-story building in Gaza City.

A week later, they prayed together before going to bed, as they always did. It was the last time they would do so.

“I woke up at 2 a.m., covered by rubble. I opened my eyes and saw fire everywhere, so I closed them again,” Abu Nasser told The Intercept. In that moment, he conjured the Muslim declaration of faith. “I started reciting the shahada.”

An Israeli airstrike had hit their building without warning. The family was trapped under the rubble.

“I managed to pull out myself and my 11-year-old brother, Adam, from the rubble. My younger brother, 15-year-old Rajab, was immediately killed and trapped beneath rubble,” he recounted. “My other brother, 20-year-old Hatem, was also trapped. I was digging with my hands, begging him to hold on. His muffled cries and screams shattered my heart.”

Abu Nasser was also looking for his parents.

“I remembered my mom and dad were in another room. I exited the house through a small opening in the wall, and entered through a window into my parents’ room,” he recalled. “I heard them yelling, ‘Get us out, we’re suffocating.’ I couldn’t do anything. They were under at least a meter of rubble.”

His 28-year-old brother Fady, who hadn’t been at the apartment, rushed back to help them. The civil defense crews arrived, but they had almost no equipment. Suddenly, some parts of the roof fell on them again. For two hours, they worked to pull the family members out from under the rubble. In that one night, Abu Nasser’s parents and two of his brothers were killed, while he and another two brothers were injured. 

“We buried them in a park, temporarily,” Abu Nasser said. “All the graveyards were full. We’re still looking for a graveyard to bury them in together.”

As Hatem recovers from his critical injuries, Abu Nasser hasn’t broken the news of the deaths in the family. 

“I told Hatem, our parents can’t visit you because our mother’s leg is broken and our father’s back hurts him.”

Abu Nasser himself was haunted by the loss. His face was pale, and he struggled with basic functions.

“I can’t sleep, eat, or do anything. I’m constantly zoning out,” he said. “When I enter the house, I unconsciously call out for my mother. I’m shocked every time I remember she’s gone. She was an amazing mother and a close friend.”

His parents were optimistic about rebuilding their lives once the war ended. He can’t fathom that, when the day comes, he “would return without my mom and the others.”

A few weeks after the attack, Israel struck Abu Nasser’s extended family’s house, killing 117 people. Only one man survived, and Abu Nasser helped him bury the casualties.

“I can’t guarantee my life for a minute,” he said, his voice filled with desperation. “There are no hospitals, no rescue equipment, and no one cares about us. I appeal to the world to stop the war.”

Scared and Starving

One reason so many families stayed in northern Gaza was that, quite simply, they had nowhere else to go. Such was the case of Hamza, a young man from Jabalia who asked The Intercept not to publish his last name out of fear for his safety. The war had taken its toll, with his 88-year-old grandfather, Atiyya, severely ill, suffering from malnutrition caused by starvation for over a year.

“He had hypertension, lost his appetite, and was unable to move,” Hamza told The Intercept. “We couldn’t even evacuate him because the sound of tanks was so close, and the Israeli drones (known as quadcopters) were constantly firing on our street.”

On October 7, the bombing in their neighborhood intensified, and Atiyya suddenly passed away.

“It was a night of relentless insane bombing. My grandfather used to say, ‘I am so afraid of the bombing,’” Hamza said. “We cried a lot. We called the ambulance, but they told us the area was too dangerous, and the Israeli army doesn’t allow them to operate in the area.”

It was too risky for Hamza’s family to leave the house to bury Atiyya in a graveyard.

“The only option was to bury him under the stairs of the house,” he recounted. “My brother and I dug a hole in our house and buried him there.”

The next day, the family decided to make the journey to Gaza City. They traveled separately “so that if some of us were killed, others might survive,” Hamza said. He was the first to leave, armed with a bag of canned food his mom packed for him. Hamza navigated narrow streets and eventually reached his relative’s house in Gaza City. A few hours later, he received a gutting phone call.

“They told me it was getting too dangerous,” he recalled. “I cried and wished I hadn’t taken any of the canned food, knowing there was so little.”

During the following days, his family remained besieged, drinking contaminated water and suffering from pangs of hunger. An Israeli shell hit their house, and his nephew was slightly injured by the shrapnel.

The family eventually managed to escape, traversing an Israeli military checkpoint separating Gaza City and the north. Though they’ve been reunited, the memory of grandpa’s final days still looms overhead. 

“My grandfather died scared and starving,” Hamza said. “He was older than Israel itself. He witnessed the Nakba. He told us this war was worse and more brutal than the Nakba.”

The post Trauma and Terror in the North of Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

In Nuseirat, Aldremly had struggled to find a school for her children. After her family found relative safety in Rafah, which is the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip, she decided to take matters into her own hands.

“I used to spend at least three hours a day teaching my children,” she told The Intercept, juggling their lessons alongside domestic tasks, like cooking and heating water, that had become much more taxing amid the war. “It was incredibly challenging.” 

By that point, schools across Gaza had been transformed into shelters for displaced people. Over the past 13 months, the Israeli army has destroyed 93 percent of Gaza’s schools and educational institutions, suspending formal education for an entire generation in what United Nations experts have dubbed a “scholasticide.” Gaza’s Ministry of Education reports that approximately 650,000 school-aged students, 200,000 higher education students, and 35,000 children enrolled in kindergarten have had their schooling disrupted, while Israel has killed 11,600 school-age children and injured tens of thousands more.

In September, the Palestinian Ministry of Education in the West Bank launched e-schools for students in Gaza to allow them to continue their education online. Frequent internet and electricity blackouts, however, have made that impossible for countless people in Gaza; even those who escaped to Egypt continue to struggle with access to schooling.

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Parents like Aldremly, intent on maintaining a semblance of education for their young children, are turning to informal arrangements offered by out-of-work teachers and volunteers instead.

Aldremly’s 9-year-old son Yousef used to be a top student, she recalled, but two months into the war, he was struggling to write his name. The war has taken a psychological toll on him and his 11-year-old sister, Fatina, their mother said.

“Their focus has been severely affected,” Aldremly said. “It’s a psychological issue.”

Displacement Shelters as Schools

Yousef and Fatina have witnessed a lot. When Israeli soldiers fired artillery shells at their building in Nuseirat last December, Aldremly’s leg was wounded while two of her husband’s relatives were killed. After several months in Rafah, Israel’s invasion of the area — where more than 1 million Palestinians were living — forced the family to pick up and leave once again. In May, they returned to Nuseirat, to the same room in the same building they had stayed last year.

With formal schools still closed, many volunteers and nonprofit organizations have launched educational initiatives for displaced students. But it was not easy for Aldremly to find a spot for her children in Nuseirat.

“I came across some educational initiatives run by NGOs and activists teaching students in tents. But they were full and could not accept my children,” she said.

Eventually, Aldremly found Aya Hasan, a displaced English teacher who was sheltering nearby and offering lessons to families in the area.

Hasan told The Intercept that she started teaching her own children, 10-year-old Imad Aldain, 7-year-old Nadia, and 5-year-old Adam after they fled from Gaza City. Later, many displaced families asked her to teach their children.

At first, Hasan would visit families’ tents for lessons. Then the owner of Aldremly’s 35-apartment building offered Hasan a small space free of charge, allowing her to teach displaced children in the area for very minimal fees. Hasan had lost her job as a teacher and translator because of the war, she said, and the classes were the sole source of income for her family of five. She would charge students two shekels ($0.54) per class, earning around 700 shekels a month. 

“I taught 30 students English, Arabic, and math using enjoyable methods,” she said. “It was a stress reliever for them more than an educational experience, as there were no books and notes.” 

Teaching against the backdrop of war was not without its challenges. “The space was small as more than 100 were sheltering in the same basement without any electricity or good ventilation. The lack of internet was a huge challenge as I needed it to play some educational songs or videos. I really hoped I had internet to follow up with my students after classes,” Hasan added.

“When bombings occurred during classes, the children became frightened. Some would run away, while others clung to my hands. I was scared of the bombings too.”

Though Aldremly’s children attended classes with Hasan, it was no substitute for traditional schooling, especially given the added horrors of war.

Fatina frequently reminisces about her old school in Gaza City.

“There was a football field and a basketball court,” Fatina told The Intercept. “When we fled, I didn’t take my new school uniform and bag. I benefited from the teacher [Hasan], but the same time last year, I was in my school. All I dream of is to return to our house in Gaza.” 

On October 4, Israel abruptly bombed the building the family was sheltered in. Along with more than 700 others, they were forced to seek new shelter yet again. With about 90 percent of Gaza’s population internally displaced and large swaths of the Strip totally destroyed, finding a new place to live is a challenge of its own. After some struggles, Aldremly was able to secure a tent in Al-Zawayda village, in the middle of the Strip. There, she’s found classes for her children in local tents.

Hasan, meanwhile, has yet to find another place to teach displaced children.

No Status in Egypt

More than 105,000 Palestinians escaped the war to Egypt, where many continue to face challenges accessing education and other services. That’s in large part because, upon fleeing Gaza, Egypt granted them only a 45-day visa that was not renewed. That means they have no legal status in the country and cannot enroll their children in public schools, open bank accounts, or subscribe to internet services.

One Palestinian from Gaza who arrived in Egypt in April with his two children described to The Intercept the hurdles he’s encountered trying to put his 6- and 9-year-old sons in school. He asked The Intercept to withhold publishing his name, citing fears for his safety. 

“I visited multiple public schools and the Ministry of Education in Al-Obour City [outside of Cairo], only to be told we don’t accept Palestinian children without residency,” he told The Intercept. Private schools, meanwhile, are out of reach. He said one school he looked into charges 280,000 Egyptian pounds ($5,740) per year, While another asked for 149,000 Egyptian pounds ($3,050).

“Imagine, we have lost everything in the war. How can we afford that?” he said. “They said they’d allow my children to register, but without a [completion] certificate if they did not have legal residency.”

After five months, he managed to find a new school in Cairo for Palestinian children that teaches the Palestinian curriculum free of charge. His kids are currently attending — but only after his oldest child had already lost a full year of school.

Another option for Palestinians in Egypt is Al-Azhar, a renowned Islamic institute. Some parents have enrolled their children in its schools but have struggled to adjust to the curriculum, which is heavily focused on religious studies.

“My children are not familiar with the new curriculum. It took them five months to achieve a little progress,” Fedaa Awni told The Intercept. She is in Egypt with two school-age daughters, while her husband remains stuck in Gaza.

Her 13-year-old daughter, Salma Imad, who has been attending Al-Azhar in Alexandria for five months, said that adapting to the new curriculum has been challenging.

“The religious classes are many, but the other subjects are fine. I still prefer the Palestinian curriculum. My Egyptian teachers are kind and the school is good, but my school in Gaza was bigger and more beautiful,” she told The Intercept.

The online classes offered by the Palestinian Education Ministry aren’t an option for Awni’s children.

“I don’t have stable internet, nor do I have laptops or iPads, and my technological knowledge is very limited. I’ve never even sent an email,” she said. 

Besides, she thinks online teaching isn’t as effective as in-person instruction. Many students from Gaza who are taking online classes while in Egypt are doing it just to get the certificate, she said, but they’re supplementing their schooling with private lessons. Her 9-year-old daughter, Siba, views these challenges — especially her father’s absence — through a different lens.

“I want to keep studying for two reasons,” she told The Intercept. “First, for my father. I want to make him proud of me. Second, to challenge Israel. They destroyed our schools to make us uneducated.”

The post With Gaza’s Education System in Ruins, Parents Take Matters Into Their Own Hands appeared first on The Intercept.

Inside, they found 27,000 chicks densely packed across the floor, like “just a sea of yellow,” recalled Sarah Weldon, one of the activists. “There were a lot of chicks that were already deceased, in various stages of decomposition,” she said. “Some were so deformed you couldn’t even tell they used to be baby chicks, just fluffs of feathers.”

Activists with Meat the Victims, a decentralized, global movement to abolish animal exploitation, later uploaded gruesome photos of injured and dead chicks to social media platforms. This is how, Weldon suspects, the police identified her and issued a warrant for her arrest, along with 14 other activists. She was charged with criminal trespassing, a Class B misdemeanor, and quickly turned herself into jail.

The local police weren’t the only ones paying attention. An FBI agent in Texas had been secretly monitoring the demonstration. His focus? Weapons of mass destruction. 

The FBI has been collaborating with the meat industry to gather information on animal rights activism, including Meat the Victims, under its directive to counter weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, according to agency records recently obtained by the nonprofit Animal Partisan through Freedom of Information Act litigation. The records also show that the bureau has explored charging activists who break into factory farms under federal criminal statutes that carry a possible sentence of up to life in prison — including for the “attempted use” of WMD — while urging meat producers to report encounters with activists to its WMD program.

Animal rights lawyers and advocates view this new frontier for WMD allegations as a pretense, a fictive way to legitimize the criminal prosecution of animal rights activists. 

The FBI declined to comment on these plans or clarify whether it is still actively considering charging activists under statutes for WMD. 

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“This kind of escalation in charging or threats of charges is textbook escalation by government actors against successful efforts by social movements that they disagree with or find subversive,” said Justin Marceau, a law professor who runs a legal clinic for animal activists at the University of Denver. “The very framing of civil disobedience against factory farms as terrorism is a form of government repression.”

The bureau has floated the idea of charging animal rights activists under a statute prohibiting biological weapons, a subtype of WMD, the records show. This may include toxins, viruses, and microorganisms used to deliberately spur death and disease. 

Marceau described this focus on agroterrorism as an effort to pin blame on activists for the rampant disease outbreaks on factory farms.

“It’s a transparent form of scapegoating and blame shifting” that avoids “talking about the disease risks that come from having animals intensively confined in these high stress conditions,” he said, referring to factory farms. “We know these are just petri dishes of disease and contamination.”

A Quiet Collaboration

The new records — two FBI memos and a presentation — reveal a burgeoning relationship between the meat industry and the FBI’s WMD Directive, charged with countering the most serious biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear threats. Each of the FBI’s 56 field offices has a designated agent (a “weapons of mass destruction coordinator”) tasked with investigating suspected uses of WMD. 

Back in Texas in 2019, Holmes Foods, Texas’s largest privately owned chicken producer, tipped the feds off to Meat the Victims’ entry into a factory farm on January 26. The company purchases chickens from the poultry broiler the activists entered.

Just a day after the action, the chicken producer contacted the Dallas FBI outpost for “guidance on preparing for future incidents,” the records show. The following morning, the local WMD coordinator got on the phone with company executives and other local FBI agents to gather information about the incident. 

Holmes Foods’ executives told the FBI that “no damage or product loss was immediately identified” in the poultry barn. Yet Dallas’s WMD program documented the incident as part of its intelligence gathering on “animal rights environmental extremism,” which the FBI considers a form of domestic terrorism. This was collected “for situational awareness purposes,” the records show — a phrase that some claim law enforcement agents use as a cover to surveil activists exercising First Amendment rights. “What they call situational awareness is Orwellian speak for watching and intimidation,” Baher Azmy, a legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, previously told The Intercept. 

Holmes Foods declined to comment. 

This collaborative relationship between the FBI’s WMD outpost in Dallas and the meat industry continued into the following year. 

The Meat Institute (formerly North American Meat Institute), the largest trade association for poultry and livestock industries in the United States, invited a federal agent to its 2020 Animal Care and Handling Conference to “provide insight into agroterrorism and federal law enforcement’s approach to protecting the United States meat industry,” the records show. 

At the virtual conference, the agent for Dallas’s WMD program presented a slideshow, titled “Agroterrorism in the Meat/Livestock Industry,” before a crowd of over 80 attendees largely from the meat industry. The agent detailed the “emerging” WMD and domestic terrorism threats posed by animal rights activist groups — naming Meat the Victims as well as Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE — which often break minor criminal laws, such as prohibitions on trespassing, to bring attention to animal cruelty. 

The agent warned that these “minor criminal actions associated with animal rights activist extremism have a tendency to escalate toward substantial direct actions, to include the unintentional introduction of biological materials, toxic chemicals or other hazards into a herd and/or flock,” the records note. The agent also encouraged industry groups to report this type of civil disobedience to its WMD Directive or Joint Terrorism Task Forces, displaying a map of all the FBI’s field offices.

The agent then gave a glimpse into the legal strategy the FBI has been exploring, including potential charges under three federal criminal statutes that cover biological forms of WMD. One statute defines a WMD as “any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector” and specifies that the damage inflicted by a WMD can conclude the “deterioration of food.” Another statute relies on the same definition for a WMD, but criminalizes sharing information about how to make or use these unconventional weapons.

The agent also noted that the Meat the Victims activists in Texas were “charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass,” but also “emphasized the potential [domestic terrorism] and WMD food sector connections,” suggesting that this is the type of activism the bureau might target with criminal charges. 

Will Lowrey, the legal counsel for Animal Partisan, noted the stark contrast between the FBI’s apparent willingness to protect the meat industry and its attitude toward those concerned with protecting animals. “The activists are in a different position when it comes to the government than the meat industry, which can reach out to the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country and say, ‘We want you to talk to us and help us figure out how to defend against these people,’” he said. 

Bioterror Allegations

The FBI has tried to frame animal rights activists as biosecurity and infectious disease threats in at least one other known instance. In 2019, the FBI’s field office in San Francisco claimed that activists with DxE were breaking into poultry facilities and rescuing birds with “little to no regard for basic biosecurity measures” according to a memo first published by reporter Lee Fang. Citing a handful of journal articles, the FBI determined that this contributed to the spread of Newcastle disease, a highly contagious bird illness. 

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Zoe Rosenberg, an organizer with DxE, said that the group goes “above and beyond” the biosecurity protocols laid out by federal and state agencies. That includes wearing a biosecurity suit, gloves, hair net, and shoe covers while interacting with any farm animals. Upon exiting a facility, “all of that protective equipment is sealed and disposed of safely, just in case it is contaminated with any bacteria or virus from within the facility,” said Rosenberg. 

Even still, in Rosenberg’s ongoing prosecution for felony and misdemeanor charges stemming from an action last year, a local California prosecutor painted her as a bioterror threat.

Weldon, of Meat the Victims, said the Texas poultry farm she entered didn’t lock its gate or barn door, so “they’re obviously not too concerned about biohazards,” she said. 

The most serious risk, she added, would have likely remained hidden without the activists’ intervention. “Nobody is coming in there and cleaning up the dead bodies,” said Weldon, referring to the chicks. “If there’s disease, you know, disease is just going to spread rampant.”

The post The FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program Has a New Target: Animal Rights Activists appeared first on The Intercept.

“The security forces did not allow me to enter the port. They kicked me out by force,” recalled Beheşti. To his great surprise, he said, the security officers told him “‘No, you are on the blacklist. We will not let you go and see your ship.’”

It was the latest roadblock for Beheşti and his fellow activists from an international coalition that has been trying since April to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. They had already struggled to find countries that would lend their flags to the ships in the flotilla, as such a move could be seen as antagonistic to Israel. Once they did obtain flags, the flotilla planned to depart from Turkey, which famously supported a 2010 effort to break Israel’s siege of Gaza. But now, even though the Conscience has secured a flag and the support of U.N. rapporteurs, Turkish authorities are continually blocking its departure.

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The mission is personal to Beheşti, whose father was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier during the 2010 effort, when military forces stormed aboard and opened fire. Five weeks ago, after he was told he’d been blacklisted by the port, Beheşti and other organizers launched a sit-in, using chains to effectively block the port entrance, in protest of the Turkish government’s obstructions. 

Lawyers for the flotilla have also filed an administrative lawsuit and a criminal complaint against the Port Authority, both alleging misconduct in obstructing the aid mission.

Turkish authorities at the port and Ministry of Transportation have not made a public statement about the flotilla, and did not respond to attempts by The Intercept to reach them, nor did the Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Turkey is quietly blocking the flotilla’s departure even as its leaders have been among the most vocal supporters of Palestine on the global stage. Gönül Tol, founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program, attributed the government’s posture to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s domestic standing. 

In light of his party’s recent defeats in Turkey, “he’s not strong electorally” and must be cautious on foreign policy, Tol said. Turkey’s weak economy is dependent on investments by Western and Gulf countries, and Erdoğan would be reluctant to risk those relationships now.

In speech, Erdoğan maintains public support for Gaza, Tol said, as among the Turkish public “pro-Palestine sentiment is very strong, especially among the constituency that Erdoğan wants to keep on his side.” At the same time, despite Turkey’s trade restrictions with Israel, the country still helps Azerbaijani oil get to Israel via a BP-operated pipeline through the country.

“His words don’t really match his actions,” said Tol. “He has to sound tough. … But there are limits to what he can do.”

She continued, “Punishing Netanyahu will come at a cost to Erdoğan.”

Bureaucratic Hurdles

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, an alliance of human rights organizations, has periodically attempted to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Palestine since 2010. That first mission ended when Israeli forces stormed the Turkish aid vessel Mavi Marmara and opened fire, killing 9 Turks and one Turkish American. 

This year, amid Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, the coalition planned to conduct a “Break the Siege” mission in late April. That mission was meant to include three boats carrying 5,500 tons of aid, along with nearly 1,000 participants from 52 countries, according to organizers.

But their original April departure had to be rescheduled when Guinea-Bissau, which originally flagged one of the vessels, abruptly withdrew its flag the day before departure. The flotilla has continued seeking a flag for that passenger vessel, the Akdeniz; its outreach to countries including South Africa, Ireland, and Spain did not pan out, said organizers, who are now in talks with Venezuela and Nicaragua. The flotilla’s cargo ship, the Anadolu, wound up delivering the aid to an Egyptian port in June, where it was unloaded into trucks and driven to Gaza. 

That left the Conscience, a pleasure yacht owned by the Mavi Marmara Freedom and Solidarity Association, whose president is Beheşti. Though the Conscience would carry significantly less aid than the cargo ship, organizers stress the significance of breaking the siege with passengers aboard.

Over the summer, flotilla organizers negotiated with the Turkish government for passage, but Turkish authorities repeatedly refused to allow the ship to depart, according to Hüseyin Dişli of Worldwide Lawyers Association, or WOLAS, a nonprofit organization providing legal counsel to the flotilla. This was despite multiple concessions from the flotilla, including agreeing that the Conscience would depart from Istanbul empty, only picking up passengers at European ports, and that it would not carry any Turkish nationals.

By mid-July, the flotilla seemed to have gotten over the hurdles. And on July 31, the passenger vessel was fully prepared and more than up to code, and hundreds of volunteers from multiple countries were ready to sail, so Beheşti took the final step: requesting departure papers from the Istanbul Port Authority. 

This is a simple administrative task that typically takes less than an hour, said Beheşti; hundreds of ships receive departure papers to move out of the Port of Istanbul each day. The Conscience had already received such papers weeks earlier when it needed to change locations for repairs. “We made sure, technically and procedurally,” everything is correct, he said. 

But days passed, then weeks, and the departure papers still didn’t arrive. Instead, the port requested more inspections. Beheşti agreed, only to then be informed by the Port that there would be no inspection after all. The explanation, according to Beheşti, was that “the Ministry of Transportation has given instructions on this matter, and we will not allow this ship to set sail.”

“Two Faces”

WOLAS lawyers made a formal request on August 20 for public documents clarifying why the port would not provide departure papers. A few days later, Beheşti was turned away from the port by security forces, according to an administrative lawsuit that the group filed against the Port Authority on September 23 for illegally obstructing the ship.

According to the suit, which The Intercept translated from Turkish, WOLAS lawyers and Beheşti have also requested that the port provide documentation of the reason for him being blacklisted, but have not received any.

The lawsuit accuses Turkey of blocking the ship “for political purposes.” It continues, “in verbal conversations between the [Mavi Marmara] association officials and the defendant administration’s officials, it was clearly stated that the ship was not allowed to sail because of … the country’s international political balances, and because they were afraid of pressure from various actors at the international level.”

Dişli, the WOLAS lawyer, said the denial of exit papers is outside the scope of Turkish law. 

“Legally, it’s a huge surprise,” he said. “Under Turkish law there is no condition the ship didn’t meet.” 

He added that Turkey is potentially violating various provisions of international law that require freedom of navigation and prohibit the obstruction of aid. That includes the January decision from the International Court of Justice which imposed on states a “negative responsibility to not hinder civil society missions to deliver humanitarian aid” as part of its provisional ruling that Israel was plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.

Beheşti, whose sit-in at the port is ongoing, has appealed to several authorities, he said, including the chair of the Port Authority and senior transportation authorities. The lack of a response has left him to draw only one conclusion.

“The Turkish government have two faces,” Beheşti said. “They have to show themselves to support Palestinians. But at the same time, they have a different agenda with Israel.”

The post They Planned to Deliver Aid to Gaza by Sea — Then Turkey Shut Them Down appeared first on The Intercept.

Alabama prison officials gave McKenzie these responsibilities even after a prisoner accused the guard of smashing his head through a window, then driving him head-first into a concrete floor. 

The injuries McKenzie inflicted were severe and lasting, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the prisoner, Lawrence Phillips, in May 2020. Phillips lost consciousness and was taken from Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore to a Mobile hospital. Medical records show he was treated for bleeding in his brain and received sutures, staples, and a neck brace. 

“I’ve not been the same since, and my memory fades in and out at the time,” Phillips wrote in his complaint. “I have nightmares, accompanied with post traumatic stress from the fears of this happening to me again.” 

McKenzie, who was promoted to captain two months after Phillips filed the lawsuit, claimed that he was acting in self-defense; attorneys from the state who represented the officer wrote in a legal filing that Phillips “angrily lunged” at McKenzie, who reacted by “using his elbow to protect himself and push inmate Phillips away, and they then collided with a glass window nearby.” Another incarcerated person who witnessed the altercation submitted an affidavit supporting Phillips’s account.

McKenzie didn’t respond to questions from Bolts and The Intercept about his role in executions or the allegations of abuse from Phillips.

While the Alabama Department of Corrections, or ADOC, ultimately concluded that the use of force was warranted, Katherine Nelson, a federal magistrate judge, thought the lawsuit against McKenzie should proceed. In a report and opinion denying the officer’s effort to resolve the case before trial, she wrote that a reasonable jury could conclude “that the force was applied maliciously and sadistically to cause harm, rather than in a good faith effort to restore or maintain order.” Court records show that in August 2023, McKenzie’s state lawyers and Phillips settled the suit. The settlement terms were not disclosed.

Meanwhile, McKenzie kept his job as captain and has overseen recent executions. That position earned him more than $135,600 last year, according to pay records reviewed by Bolts and The Intercept. 

An investigation by Bolts and The Intercept into Alabama’s execution team shows that McKenzie isn’t the only execution team member who has previously been accused of violent behavior or mistreating incarcerated people. Earlier this year, Bolts and The Intercept were given a list of names of ADOC staff members on the execution team from a lawyer who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation. Bolts and The Intercept have independently verified 14 names on the list through interviews, court records, and personnel files. 

The records reveal that one officer on the team previously faced discipline for leaving a man hanging in his cell instead of cutting him down. Another member drunkenly attacked a jail guard in Florida. ADOC found that both of those men violated department policy.

Even after these incidents, ADOC allowed both of these officers to participate in executions, each earning more than $100,000 last year in a state where the median household income is around $62,000. One of them has been promoted since his infraction. The other was demoted.

Death penalty experts say that even these officers’ role on Alabama’s execution team raises questions about how incarcerated people are treated in their final moments. They say the officers’ backgrounds also hint at a culture of impunity among prison staff tasked with carrying out death sentences and reinforce concerns about Alabama’s ability to conduct executions as a regulated legal proceeding.

Allowing these men to work executions “shows a disregard for the sanctity of the task of carrying out an execution,” Brian Stull, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, told Bolts and The Intercept. “A system that cannot be trusted to keep prisoners safe is a system that should not have the right to kill,” said Alison Mollman, legal director at the ACLU of Alabama.

Problems with the conduct of those who carry out executions in Alabama extend to leadership at Holman, a maximum-security prison that houses death row inmates and the state’s death chamber. In 1999, the prison’s warden, Terry Raybon, was fired from his job as a state trooper after two women accused him of domestic violence. No charges were filed against him. Under state law, Raybon is the executioner and is responsible for pushing lethal drugs and starting the flow of nitrogen gas. 

Pointing to Raybon’s history, Mollman called the findings of Bolts and The Intercept’s investigation “unsurprising.”

ADOC did not respond to questions sent for this article, nor did the state attorney general and governor’s office. The execution team members named in this article also did not reply to requests for comment. Isaac Moody, another execution team member whose personnel record contained no history of violence or mistreatment, picked up the phone but was quick to end the call. 

“We’re not allowed to talk to any media,” Moody said. “There’s an oath, code, we take. We don’t speak about it. I could lose my job.” When asked if the code was administered by the department, he said “yeah” and then hung up.

A History of Secrecy

The identities of the people involved in executions are a well-guarded secret. 

Fourteen states have enacted secrecy statutes to shield information about executions from the public since 2010. While Alabama has not passed such legislation, it remains “among the worst” states for execution transparency, says Robert Dunham, the director of the Death Penalty Policy Project.

ADOC has kept details of how Alabama carries out executions and the people behind them hidden. The state did not release its execution procedures until 2019, when it was ordered to do so by a judge. Even then, it only released a heavily redacted copy of the process the execution team is supposed to follow. State officials still continue to tightly guard records detailing the actors who carry out executions and fight in court against releasing information about their capital punishment practices. 

The members of Alabama’s execution team are not medical or science professionals, and they work among the people they execute. Together, the team is supposed to ensure that death sentences are carried out as outlined in the state’s execution procedure manual by performing a series of tasks. In lethal injections, for example, some of these team members will secure the person to a gurney before a separate team, composed of medical personnel, sets IV lines. Despite their significant roles, the majority of their activities are performed in secret without witnesses. 

Dale Baich, a federal public defender who represented death row prisoners for more than 30 years, stressed the importance of knowing the identities and personal histories of execution team members. “You don’t want someone who has a history of being abusive toward prisoners,” he said. “You don’t know if the person who is assigned to do the job is qualified.” 

The backgrounds of execution team members have taken on more importance as the state argues to the courts that it should be allowed to continue to carry out death sentences with nitrogen gas, a method it first used when it executed Kenneth Smith in January. Under the method, the execution team carries out technical responsibilities such as monitoring oxygen levels and assembling equipment used to administer lethal gas, according to the state’s execution protocol.  
Smith’s execution did not go as promised. Officials had said in court that Smith would lose consciousness “seconds” after the nitrogen began flowing. Instead, he writhed and thrashed in “seizure-like movements” for two minutes, according to The Associated Press, which was present. Another witness called it the “most violent” execution he’d ever seen. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall had a different opinion, calling the execution “textbook” and a “historic achievement.”

Alabama is now poised to conduct a second death sentence with nitrogen on September 26, when it will execute Alan Eugene Miller, a man the state tried and failed to execute via lethal injection in 2022. 

Miller’s lawyers have claimed the nitrogen method violates their client’s constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The state has responded by relying on testimony from McKenzie, the execution team captain, to argue that the state’s first nitrogen execution went as planned. 

McKenzie, who was inside the death chamber for Smith’s execution and fitted the respirator mask to his face before the nitrogen gas started flowing, submitted an affidavit in July. Contrary to the statements of media witnesses, McKenzie wrote in his legal filing that “I did not see Smith make any violent or convulsive movements.” Miller’s lawyers later poked holes in McKenzie’s account, noting that the guard “miraculously” made very specific claims about Smith’s oxygen levels seven months after the fact, despite “routinely not remembering other information related to the execution during his deposition,” and questioning whether he could have even seen the levels during the execution.

McKenzie is also involved in ensuring that executions do not violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. During lethal injections, for instance, a team member is tasked with ensuring the person being executed is unresponsive after a sedative is administered so they don’t feel the pain of the following two drugs that will paralyze them and stop their heart. To do so, the team member is supposed to say the person’s name, brush their eyelids, and pinch their arm to determine whether they need more of the sedative before receiving the lethal drugs — a process that Bolts observed McKenzie perform during the execution of Keith Gavin in July.

As ADOC proceeds with nitrogen executions, Dunham, of the Death Penalty Policy Project, noted that the inconsistencies between the department’s narrative and witness testimony in executions over the last few years underscores the need for more transparency. 

“Alabama officials have shown significant impairment in telling the truth that other people observe,” Dunham told Bolts and The Intercept. “When you have a state that has a history of secrecy and a history about lying about things that other people have seen with their own eyes, that tells you that oversight is critical.”

Dereliction of Duty

When Tarji Jackson’s nephew, Jamal Jackson, died by suicide on Alabama’s death row in 2020, she said Alabama prison officials didn’t call her about it, even though she was listed as next of kin. Instead, she learned the news through another family member. When Tarji called Holman, she was connected to the prison’s chaplain. “All I know is that Jamal hung himself,” she told Bolts and The Intercept. “They told me no details on nothing.”

An ADOC investigation later concluded that Christopher Earl, a then-lieutenant and member of the state’s execution team, had disregarded protocol for prisoner suicides. ADOC demoted Earl in 2020, finding that he did not immediately cut Jamal down or seek medical assistance, despite department policy instructing guards to first cut the ligature and give medical workers a chance for lifesaving measures. According to department records, Earl first ordered a nurse to go back to the infirmary before asking him to return to the cell, where Jamal’s body was left hanging for nearly 12 minutes after Earl first spotted him.

Afterward, Earl left work before Jamal’s body was picked up by the ambulance service, in violation of ADOC’s protocol for the deaths of incarcerated people.  

Then-ADOC Commissioner Jefferson Dunn determined that Earl had committed four infractions including inattention to the job, noncompliance with policies and procedures, serious violation of the rules, and “disgraceful” conduct. 

Since Jamal’s death, much of Tarji’s family has died, including her younger sister. She is still trying to understand what happened to her nephew but does not think Earl should have kept his job.

“For him to see my nephew in there, hang in and not do anything, and he’s still working. He should not be working. He shouldn’t even be at a desk in there,” she told Bolts and The Intercept.

Earl again was found to have violated ADOC policy a year later after he left three incarcerated people unsupervised in outdoor cages for three hours. He was suspended for three days. “The intent of this action is to emphasize the necessity for you to follow rules and regulations,” wrote Dunn in another letter to Earl. “Any similar infractions after this incident will result in further corrective action. Hopefully, your actions in the future will meet standards.”

Earl made more than $127,000 last year, according to pay records. 

Bolts and The Intercept sent questions about Earl’s conduct to an email account and phone number associated with him. The email went unanswered. In response to the text messages, someone who identified herself as his wife said she would not ask Earl to get in touch and threatened a lawsuit if the news organizations contacted other numbers associated with his name. 

“Sure we can set that up sometime between the hours of fuck off and never,” she wrote. “In case you didn’t know with the exhaustive amount of information you are able to access at the click of a button, members of an execution team don’t usually go on record.”

None of Earl’s violations have prevented him from participating in executions. Prior to the state’s attempted lethal injection of Alan Miller in 2022, Earl stood outside of Miller’s cell and alerted him that it was time to go to the execution chamber, according to a legal filing.

Miller is one of six U.S. prisoners to have survived his execution in the modern death penalty era. Three of those failed executions occurred in Alabama since 2018. 

During the state’s attempt to execute him, a prison guard hoisted the gurney vertically, leaving Miller, who weighed around 350 pounds, hanging in the air for 20 minutes. Eventually, Earl approached Miller and told him the death warrant had expired and guards ordered him to get off the gurney, according to a legal filing detailing the events of that evening. His body was so stiff that he asked the officers to help him bend his arms. Alabama officials never explained the maneuver, but it was not sanctioned in the state’s execution protocol that’s been publicly released. 

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In July, Miller sat for a deposition as part of a lawsuit he filed over Alabama’s plan to kill him with nitrogen. “I don’t concur with being gassed by incompetent people,” Miller told lawyers with the Alabama Attorney General’s Office. During the deposition, a state lawyer said that McKenzie, who had participated in the previous attempt to execute him, would be responsible for fitting the mask used to deliver the gas. Miller’s legal team has asserted that an improper fit would increase the risk of Miller suffering. 

“It’s incompetent people fitting it,” Miller said during his deposition. “They need to be professionals, medical professionals, a third party or somebody, you know, like — are these people that are going to fit it, what’s their training?”

Alabama started executing people with nitrogen gas after a series of long and bloody lethal injections that appeared to deviate from ADOC’s execution protocol. Days after officials called off the execution of Kenneth Smith in November 2022, Gov. Kay Ivey ordered a moratorium on executions and called for a review of the state’s capital punishment system. 

After just three months, Alabama wrapped up its “top-to-bottom” review of protocols in February 2023. In a letter announcing the evaluation had been completed, ADOC Commissioner John Hamm wrote that the department had reviewed its legal strategy on capital litigation, training procedures, and equipment on hand during executions. The two-page letter contained few details about the review and did not mention whether there would be increased oversight of ADOC staff who worked executions. One of the agency’s only significant changes was adding more medical personnel to participate in executions. 

The agency has refused to release its full assessment.

Enlisting in Executions

As a prison guard working on death row at Holman, Halle Lambert says she was given the chance to join Alabama’s execution team. She declined. “It was not part of my beliefs,” Lambert told Bolts and The Intercept. 

Lambert worked at Holman from September 2022 to November 2023, when she was arrested and fired for bringing in cigarette lighters and a cellphone. Prosecutors have alleged that she planned to sell those items. Lambert has pleaded not guilty, and the case is ongoing. 

During her time at Holman, Lambert learned who was on the execution team because she worked at the prison on execution days. In an interview, she confirmed the identities of team members whose names were provided to Bolts and The Intercept, including Bruce Finch, another officer with a history of arrests and discipline for violating ADOC policy. Finch also participated in the nitrogen execution of Smith in January, according to an eyewitness who asked not to be named out of fear of professional retaliation. 

Court records show that Florida police arrested Finch in November 2019 for trespassing outside a concert by heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch in Pensacola, just over the state line. According to a police report, Finch became “belligerent” with officers who had first given him a warning and ordered him to leave. Police took him to the Escambia County jail, where he grew so agitated that a guard eventually pepper sprayed him. 

Finch then charged at the guard and slapped him on the shoulder. The guard tried to handcuff Finch, but Finch “grabbed his face with his hand covering his nose and mouth,” making it difficult for the guard to breathe, according to the report. The fight escalated so much that another jail guard went into the room and tased Finch. 

Prosecutors charged him with battery on a law enforcement officer, a third-degree felony that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. 

Finch pleaded no contest to the charges, and four months after the arrest, a prosecutor agreed to not seek a conviction so long as he met certain criteria — such as undergoing evaluation for substance use, attending anger management, abstaining from alcohol, and paying a $100 fine. By mid-October of 2020, a probation officer said that Finch had completed his pretrial intervention program and sent the case back to prosecutors to dismiss the charges.

Finch, however, did not report the incident to ADOC, which eventually learned of the arrest. In May 2021, the department suspended him without pay for three days for failing to report it and other violations of the agency’s code of conduct.

Bolts and The Intercept found that Finch had been arrested other times as well. 

According to his personnel file, he was arrested for driving under the influence in Texas in 2017, for which he completed a pretrial diversion program. Another DUI, in Atmore in 2018, was dismissed. 

In January 2024, Florida police arrested Finch for drunk driving, writing in a report that he “continuously swerved” on the road and had an empty beer can in the center console of his car when they pulled him over. Records state Finch was “obviously unsteady on his feet” during a field sobriety test and blew .147 and .138 on a Breathalyzer. The legal limit is .08.

In May, he was sentenced to a year probation under the conditions that he undergo substance use evaluation, doesn’t drink alcohol, and submits to random urinalysis tests. His driver’s license was also revoked for six months. 

ADOC paid him more than $104,000 last year, pay stubs show. 

According to Lambert, Finch joined Alabama’s execution team after he was promoted to lieutenant at Holman in November 2022. She said some of the team members are retired prison guards who come back for executions. 

It was previously unknown how Alabama selects its execution team. No one on the state’s squad has ever gone public. The few available details about team members and their experiences have been limited to staff in other states who have spoken to the media. 

In Alabama, staff volunteer to be on the team and the existing group votes on who can join, Lambert said. She said there’s no financial incentive to join, aside from overtime pay. 

Curious about why her colleagues would be a part of executions, Lambert said she asked about their motives. She said one execution team member told her he could feign PTSD and retire early. She said another officer, who was a devout Christian, told her that he was “doing justice.” 

The post In Alabama, Officers Accused of Violence and Misconduct Carry Out Secretive Executions appeared first on The Intercept.

Nearly a year into the Gaza war, the sense of dread in Israel is all-consuming. Since the twin assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders within hours of each other in Beirut and Tehran, respectively, nearly two weeks ago, Israelis have anxiously awaited a retaliatory attack by Iran and its regional allies. Despite some indications from Iran that it’s not seeking an all-out war, fears of a larger regional escalation continue to reverberate around the globe. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor any other Israeli leader has publicly addressed citizens’ concerns or outlined how Israel will react, beyond saying that the country is prepared and will exact a heavy price from its enemies.

A version of daily life continues even as Israeli society is on edge. After 10 months, most people have become accustomed to it. They go to their jobs or the beach; kids head to summer camp. Yet some have started hoarding food and generators. Most flights to and from Israel have been canceled, preventing people from leaving and leaving many Israelis stranded abroad. Israeli media has been rife with speculation and scenarios for all-out war from almost every direction: Hezbollah in the north, Iran in the east, the Houthis to the southeast, and Hamas in the south.

Even before this escalation, many Israelis, especially those in the north, were demanding the government invade Lebanon, as if there is a magic button they can press to get rid of the threat from Hezbollah. A recent poll shows a majority of Israelis want the country to take more aggressive military action against Hezbollah, even as they are disenchanted with the leadership. Many of the mayors and municipal leaders who have been demanding the army turn its focus to Lebanon have also condemned the Netanyahu government for its intelligence and security failures, and for failing to devise a plan to restore security to Israel’s north.

In my life in Israel and in my work researching and analyzing its politics and security, I have observed a society gripped by despair but at a loss for how to carve a way out. The Israeli public is in a constant state of contradiction. Earlier this summer, polls showed that 72 percent of Israelis wanted Netanyahu to resign. They hold him responsible not only for the failure to protect Israelis on October 7, but also for delaying, undermining, and even rejecting a hostage deal, which a majority — 56 percent — want, even if it means ending the war in Gaza. A larger 62 percent asserted that getting the hostages back is more important than defeating Hamas.

While a small minority oppose the war on Gaza on moral grounds, among other reasons, most Israelis continue to be apathetic to the suffering of Palestinians, with reports of starvation, disease, and infections due to dire conditions in Gaza scarcely a news item. After Netanyahu’s speech in Congress last month, Israelis polled said Netanyahu is considered more fit to be prime minister than any of his political rivals. And after the twin assassinations the following week, Netanyahu’s Likud party led polls for the first time since October 7. This may less reflect Netanyahu regaining popularity than the dysfunctional paralysis that has gripped Israeli politics for the past several election cycles.

Despite these contradictory feelings, it appears clear now to most Israelis that Netanyahu is not and was never committed to getting a hostage deal. Top security officials have said it out loud. President Joe Biden reportedly chided him for it in a telephone call. As former deputy head of Israel’s national security Eran Etzion has pointed out, Netanyahu has a “clear strategy with a singular overarching objective — to survive in power, at any cost.” That means prolonging and even escalating the Gaza war for his own political survival — because reaching a ceasefire could lead to the collapse of his governing bloc.

The far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition have consistently rejected a ceasefire/hostage deal, instead openly seeking to implement their messianic vision for Jewish supremacy over the entire territory between the river and the sea, even at the expense of — or in order to — ignite a regional war. Seeing the impressive intelligence and operational precision that the Israeli security apparatus displayed in Beirut and most likely in Tehran, you hear people wonder how it is that Israel, with all these capabilities, cannot defeat Hamas or at least bring the hostages home.

On the issue of the hostages, protesting Israelis, especially families of those held captive, have articulated a clear message that without doing everything to bring them back alive — what some invoke as a Jewish obligation — there can be no victory. For its part, the security establishment sees securing the release of the hostages through a ceasefire as a strategic national interest. It would, as an Israeli intelligence official told me months ago, retain and restore public trust in the military. It would also deescalate the situation in the north (Hezbollah has said it would stop firing the moment there is a ceasefire in Gaza), allow the military to rest and regroup, and at this point avoid regional war. But however many Israelis may now agree with this, they are not able to push the government out — or onto an alternative path.

There are several reasons for this. For decades, Israel has defied international opinion — and now, according to the International Court of Justice, also law — in the occupied territories, creating a culture of lawlessness and impunity. The settlement project, and with it, settler violence, tells a story of normalized violence, the dehumanization of Palestinians, and a certain arrogance of power, which played an important role in the leadership’s blindness to the signs leading up to October 7. Within Israel, right-wing mobs recently broke into a detention facility and army base to protest the arrest of soldiers accused of torturing a Palestinian detainee. The Israeli right’s 20-year campaign, led by Netanyahu, to dominate the media, undermine state institutions like the Supreme Court, and demonize Palestinians and Israelis who don’t toe the line has created a vacuum in both politics and civil society. The latter finds itself incapable of prioritizing the saving of lives as a policy goal, an indifference that appears to extend from Palestinian lives to Israeli ones.

Perhaps the most critical reason for Israeli society’s inability to force political change is that it holds the army sacrosanct and relies heavily on the military’s use of force to maintain a semblance of control and stability. It is a society that has over decades of constant conflict with Palestinians become convinced that any compromise or diplomacy makes Israel appear weak and can only lead to defeat, a sentiment that has grown manifold since October 7. Today, not a single Jewish opposition leader in Israel talks about a two-state solution and not a single Jewish Israeli party voted against a recent Knesset resolution opposing Palestinian statehood — showing that even those who vehemently oppose Netanyahu also reject Palestinian self-determination.

Israel’s rise to the status of a regional superpower was the result of a quick and decisive war in 1967, when it defeated surrounding Arab armies and commenced the long-term occupation of territories home to millions of Palestinians. But ever since the next war in 1973, Israel has primarily fought nonstate armed groups and has yet to adapt its military and strategic approach accordingly. As a former senior military official told me recently, “A military that has not fought a war in 30 years no longer knows how to plan for war. … It’s a novel thing that we now engage in operations that are supposed to achieve deterrence without ever marking a decisive win.”

The effort to keep things at a low boil by “mowing the grass” in Gaza and maintaining a level of mutual deterrence with Hezbollah is no longer working, as the past 10 months have shown. As some Israeli military experts have told me, this means that more force is needed at a time of Israel’s choosing, that a larger war is inevitable, that the enemies are “only interested in destroying us,” and that Israel needs to strike a decisive blow, instead of kicking the can down the road time and again.

Yet if one thing is clear, it’s that Israel is not well placed to prevail over the threats it faces only through hard power, unconditional military support from the U.S. notwithstanding. It cannot create a secure place for itself without also embracing non-military channels of diplomacy, negotiations, and compromise, as it did when it signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan decades ago. Even as Israel has leveled Gaza to the ground and killed top Hamas leaders and Hezbollah commanders, it isn’t any closer to prevailing in either confrontation. On the contrary, it now faces the threat of a regional war. 

Israel is arguably at its most precarious moment in national security since its founding, with the public’s confidence in both political and military leaders at an all-time low. The question is whether Israelis will start to openly challenge the working assumptions on which their security has been based for decades. If they fail, or are unable, to do so, they can only pray that the other key actors — the U.S. and Iran — find it sufficiently in their interests to pull us all back from the abyss.

In recent days, Iran has indicated it may do by weighing its response under heavy international pressure and stating that a ceasefire in Gaza would delay and possibly deter retaliation. Even Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff who worked under Netanyahu, expressed trust that Iran and Hezbollah are not interested in an escalation but said he cannot say the same for Israeli leadership. For everyday Israelis, continuing to place their hopes in the army’s ability to just “finish the job,” as Netanyahu keeps promising, sadly offers little but the prospect of more of the chaos and uncertainty to which they have reluctantly become accustomed.

The post Israeli Society Is in a Deepening State of Contradiction appeared first on The Intercept.

“Everybody’s making a hard turn for ‘Fuck off Jew.’ It’s a hard right turn,” Fuentes says, laughing. The line is a reference to “Heck Off, Commie,” a far-right YouTube show run by one of Fuentes’s competitors. The crowd eats it up, chanting back “Fuck off Jew, fuck off Jew.” Fuentes shakes his head, grinning. “No, but that’s only a joke!”

He then gets serious, turning to former President Donald Trump’s support of Israel. The issue has always been a point of contention for Fuentes and has only intensified since October 7. Trump used to be their voice, Fuentes says, but now he seems more concerned with Israel. “I don’t know about you guys, but when he goes up there and says, ‘We’re gonna throw out all the anti-Israel protesters,’ that’s not my voice,” Fuentes says, referring to Trump’s promise to deport any foreign students participating in pro-Palestine protests on college campuses.

“You know that I am your voice,” Fuentes reassures them. “So in the spirit of me being your voice, I want you to raise your right hand, and repeat after me: ‘I solemnly swear that I will put America First and I will put Israel last every single time, because Christ is our king.’”

As he pauses for the audience response, people hold their right hands up as though they are taking a pledge. One man extends his arm into a Sieg Heil, giving Fuentes the Nazi-era salute as he repeats the words. Some people drop their hands early, perhaps noticing the salute, or maybe just tired of the position. But others slowly stretch their arms out too. By the end of the pledge, several people have made Sieg Heils.

“Because Christ is our king.”

Welcome to the fourth America First Political Action Conference.

Mainstreaming Extremism

Detroit is probably not the place you would expect to find a Republican convention, but that’s exactly where Turning Point USA chose to hold the People’s Convention in June. Founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012, Turning Point USA is an ostensibly mainstream youth-oriented conservative organization that has shifted into solidly MAGA territory. While TPUSA started as a network of conservative clubs on college campuses, it now includes high school chapters, a faith group, and a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit. The latter entity, Turning Point Action, is the arm responsible for the annual conference — and it is also boosting Trump 2024’s campaign. TPA is planning to spend $108 million on get-out-the-vote efforts in Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin. Turning Point Action also has a sizable footprint at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this week, taking over an entire restaurant within the secured perimeter for what it dubbed the Turning Point RNC Headquarters.

Fuentes has piggybacked off of the Republican conference circuit for years, holding his increasingly explicitly white nationalist America First Political Action Conference near the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, and Turning Point USA. He has been banned from events hosted by both organizations, and for good reason. Fuentes has openly praised Hitler, suggested he would like to marry a 16-year-old girl, and clearly stated that he does not want Jewish people in government. But having his own conference in such close proximity to mainstream events allows for a built-in audience — and the chance to recruit new, sympathetic followers.

For a time, association with Fuentes was enough to tank a career in politics. TPUSA used to make an effort to maintain a distance from him, even severing ties with an influencer after she appeared in a photo with Fuentes. On the first day of the TPUSA conference, Fuentes showed up knowing he would be kicked out. Wearing a red hoodie, sunglasses, and ill-fitting jeans, he led a small group of young men into the convention center. Once inside, attendees broke out in applause and chants of “groyper, groyper,” the name Fuentes fans have given themselves. Security quickly showed up and escorted Fuentes out.

The process is tradition at this point. The man who escorted Fuentes out had done so in the past at TPUSA events in other cities. Something different, though, was Fuentes’s posse’s lack of effort to conceal their identities or their status as TPUSA attendees. Some of the men who followed Fuentes into the convention were known figures. MMA fighter turned right-wing poster Jake Shields was in the mix, as were streamers from Fuentes’s livestreaming platform. But one lower-profile man hung close to Fuentes, only obscuring his face with sunglasses: Alec Beaton, the youth chair for the St. Clair County, Michigan, GOP. Like many of the men in the group, Beaton had a Turning Point badge around his neck. While TPUSA still does not directly associate with Fuentes, its conference attendees openly hanging out with him suggests that its hard line has changed. (Shields later told me that he had come out “because I had a pass for Nick,” and that he returned to the conference the next day. TPUSA did not respond to my request for comment, nor did Beaton.)

It’s possible the groypers’ confidence was brought on by the political connections Fuentes has managed to make within the GOP. In November 2022, he accompanied hip-hop artist Kanye West to dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump. In October of last year, Fuentes met with former Texas state Rep. Jonathan Stickland for nearly seven hours. Stickland was the head of both a well-connected consulting firm and a political action committee that distributed money largely from Tim Dunn, one of the biggest conservative donors in Texas. The Republican Party of Texas was briefly thrown into disarray; some wanted to outright ban party-affiliated groups from associating with Fuentes. The movement ultimately failed, and the PAC and consulting firm emerged from the kerfuffle largely free of any consequences. A new spinoff PAC, Texans United for a Conservative Majority, brought in $3.75 million from Dunn in a three-month period earlier this year. While Stickland is unaffiliated with that PAC, he has launched a new firm with help from a senior Texas GOP official.

“I don’t think Fuentes is the kiss of death that people think he is,” said Shane Burley, co-author of the book “Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide To Fighting Antisemitism.” “The world of these online influencers who say outlandish things has moved mainstream. You’re more likely to be around extreme voices and not have to take responsibility for it.”

A Hostile Reception

Fuentes planned to hold his fourth rendition of AFPAC alongside the People’s Convention in Detroit at the Russell Industrial Center. The day before his conference, the Russell Industrial Center told Fuentes it would not host the event. The venue told the Detroit Free Press that it was tricked by AFPAC, stating it would never have agreed to host the group, which had reserved the space through a third party. When Fuentes didn’t leave, the staff called the police, who sided with the venue. Fuentes said he planned to sue.

Fuentes did not tell would-be attendees that the venue was in jeopardy, leaving them in the dark. He would later claim, in tweets and during a livestream, that he was busy looking for a new place to hold the conference. Regardless of the reason, his silence meant that on the day of AFPAC, groups of men wearing suits and blue America First hats were stuck wandering around downtown Detroit, asking one another if they had any idea where or when AFPAC would be. Eventually, Fuentes came clean to his supporters: AFPAC IV was canceled.

Compared to the other cities that have held AFPAC, it seemed Detroit was particularly hostile to Fuentes’s ideas. The groups of would-be attendees, some of whom had made clear on social media they weren’t thrilled about coming to Detroit to begin with, were now without any plans at all. They managed to all find each other and march around the city a bit, before reconvening for an impromptu rally in front of a hotel across from the convention center.

Even though Trump was still inside TPUSA giving his speech and Fuentes himself was nowhere to be found, a sizable crowd had gathered by the time I showed up. I was a little worried that I would face a hostile reception. Some of the men who were taking charge of the rally knew me from my year undercover in the far right, or from my reporting that followed. Others might have known me because Fuentes has ranted about me on his show in the past.

Right away, I spotted Paul Ingrassia, an attorney who sits on the board for the New York Young Republican Club. Ingrassia works for the National Constitutional Law Union, an organization that aims to be a right-wing version of the ACLU. Both groups have ties to Trump, who recorded a video testimonial for the NCLU’s fundraiser a few months ago and was the keynote speaker at NYYRC’s annual gala in 2023, where he thanked Ingrassia for his support. Ingrassia refers to himself as Trump’s favorite Substacker, spends time in Mar-a-Lago, and pals around with Roger Stone. This week, he was in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention.

Ingrassia and I both stood near the raised platform in the concrete courtyard of the hotel that was being used as a makeshift stage. A few of Fuentes’s friends and streamers were speaking, presumably hoping to ramp up enough energy to draw Fuentes in. Unfortunately for them, the wind was working against them, making it difficult to hear. After 15 minutes of straining to hear, someone announced that Fuentes was on the way. Chants of “We want Nick” and “groyper, groyper” broke out.

When I reached out to Ingrassia to ask about his decision to attend the rally, he accused me of stalking him, made a barely veiled threat to sue me, and declared, “As a matter of best practices, to the extent you publish anything using my name, you have a duty to reprint my statement in full.” (I don’t, and I won’t.) Ingrassia said “it looked like a prayer vigil or some type of protest” and claimed he “walked past there for maybe 5 minutes out of curiosity … there was a lot of confusion, it was impossible to avoid if you were heading on foot in that direction.”

I replied with photos and video showing that not only had he stood directly in front of me for nearly 20 minutes listening to inflammatory speeches about making America a Christian nation; how unfair it was that Turning Point had banned Fuentes; and that “the Jews” controlled what Charlie Kirk does; but also that he had moved through the crowd and to the very front when Fuentes arrived. I pointed out that Fuentes and Ingrassia follow each other on X, so he must have known who Fuentes was. Instead of responding to this factual record of the rally, Ingrassia blocked me on X, ending our conversation. 

When Fuentes showed up, he commandeered the rooftop of the hotel, with his posse guarding the steps up. The group was steadily growing as TPUSA attendees exited Trump’s speech.

“Henry Ford was a genius,” Fuentes shouted into his megaphone, before bemoaning Ford’s “cancellation” for his intense antisemitism. “But Henry Ford is a great patriot, and his activism in exposing the influence of the Zionist movement and the Jewish mafia in the United States was an act of patriotism that we are all grateful for.”

“I freaking love Hitler!” one of Fuentes’s friends on the rooftop shouted.

A sea of maskless groypers stood staring up at Fuentes. Some of the men near me had Turning Point USA badges around their necks. Not long ago, it would have been unthinkable for credentialed TPUSA attendees to be in the middle of this crowd. Now, it hardly seemed to matter.

“Astonishingly Self-Assured”

The crowd thinned out shortly after Fuentes’s speech. After facing two cancellations, it seemed like the night was over for the groypers. It didn’t take long for them to start posting that the left could not keep them down, though. They had found another venue: Exodos Rooftop.

Fortunately for me, the bar next to Exodos Rooftop had couches out front, giving a direct view at anyone who entered or exited the club. I bought a drink and had a seat, waiting to see who would try to walk by. I figured I would be sitting there a while before they left, but within minutes groypers started to file out.

Inside the venue, there had been several increasingly bigoted speeches, according to videos that were posted online and my interview with a reporter who was in attendance. Jared Taylor, who organizes the white nationalist American Renaissance conference, talked about making America a white country. (He did not respond to my email about the event.) By the time Fuentes spoke, the antisemitic chants were too much. The staff, unaware who they had given the space to, turned the music up over their voices, drowning out the speeches. (The club did not respond to requests for comment.)

The crowd grew angry, and a groyper threw a drink at security. Conservative social media influencer Joey Mannarino got in the face of a bouncer and screamed “Fuck you!”, video from that night shows. (Mannarino later told me that he “arrived late” and “didn’t really get to see any of the speeches.” Mannarino, who is mutuals with Fuentes on X, also said, “I don’t know much about his ‘reputation’ because he’s so hard to watch due to social media banning him I haven’t ever had the chance to really see much of what he has to say.”)

The crowd joined in, chanting “Fuck you!” Finally, Sneako, a misogynist, pro-Hitler streamer and ally of white nationalism, reached up and knocked the bouncer’s hat off, another video shows. (Sneako, who is Black, did not respond to my request for comment.) In an instant, the bouncer raised his fist and dove through the air, punching Sneako in the face and breaking one of his teeth in half. The party was finally over.

As they trickled out, I saw Mark Ivanyo, the executive director of Republicans for National Renewal. RNR is a populist organization that often tables at TPUSA and CPAC (in both the U.S. and Hungary). It is known for its parties that show off how well connected its members are. Ivanyo spoke at CPAC Hungary earlier this year and recently was elected to be an at-large delegate for Texas at the Republican National Convention. Ivanyo had been slated to be a featured VIP guest at AFPAC. The conference’s social media team had tweeted a flier advertising his appearance, before quickly taking it down.

“Mark! Mark Ivanyo!” I yelled out, trying to get his attention, but to no avail. Ivanyo seemed to be ignoring me. When I later contacted him to ask about his attendance at the rooftop gathering, and his briefly advertised appearance as a VIP guest, he told me he was no longer an RNC delegate due to a “scheduling conflict,” offering no corroboration for this claim. He asked for evidence of my allegations, though he did not reply after I sent him photos, videos, and a screenshot of the tweet promoting his appearance.

A few days later, I ran into Ivanyo in Milwaukee at the RNC, where he refused to look at me or acknowledge my questions in person. While the Republican Party of Texas did not respond to my email asking if Ivanyo had been replaced as a delegate, he has been in photos posted to social media showing him with the Texas delegation on the convention floor.

Back in Detroit, Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP’s 2020 candidate for Senate, also appeared in videos from the event. She has boosted the baseless QAnon conspiracy and believes that Jewish people should not be in positions of power in our government. There was also Juliana Lombard, a VIP guest of the People’s Convention, and NYYRC’s former socials chair. In video of Fuentes’s speech, Lombard can be seen watching the show from a balcony, while the crowd below her chants “Fuck off Jew.” Lombard is currently running for a municipal office as a Republican in Hudson County, New Jersey. (She didn’t respond to my messages asking about her attendance.)

At previous AFPACs, attendees have adhered to strict rules about taking photos or video, but this year, footage from even the “private” event was readily shared all over social media. “They seem astonishingly self-assured about making their connections explicit,” said David Neiwert, a researcher, author, and journalist who has tracked the far right for years. “They deeply believe Trump will win and they will be in charge, so it makes sense to them to just make it a known reality.”

Correction: July 25, 2024
A previous version of this article identified a hotel in Detroit that was scheduled to host a VIP dinner for AFPAC, based on an employee’s verbal confirmation. After this article was published, the venue provided evidence that it was hosting a different group and said the employee “was confused and mistakenly confirmed over the phone that the hotel’s restaurant was hosting an event for America First Political Action Conference, when the hotel’s restaurant was closed for a long-planned private event with an entirely separate and unrelated group.” The reference to the venue has been removed.

The post I Watched Groypers Descend on Detroit — Where They Were No Longer Pariahs Among Mainstream Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.

John Criscio, the president of Absolute Standards, wrote to two Connecticut legislators last month that his company stopped manufacturing pentobarbital in December 2020. “We have no intention to resume any production or sale of pentobarbital,” Criscio added. 

The one-page letter, which has not previously been reported on, is the first formal acknowledgment by Criscio that his small family business was making pentobarbital, a barbiturate that has been used both by itself and in combination with other drugs to carry out lethal injection executions. 

The letter notes that the company had been registered with the Drug Enforcement Agency to manufacture pentobarbital, and it makes no mention of whether the company had provided execution drugs to the federal Bureau of Prisons. On two previous occasions, Criscio denied to The Intercept that his company had done so. The Intercept called Absolute Standards multiple times on Friday and was told that Criscio was not around. The company did not respond to an email requesting comment, nor did Criscio respond to messages sent to his personal email account. 

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Can Conservatives Expand the Death Penalty Using the “Trigger Law” Playbook?

Conservative policy leaders have been calling for an escalation of federal executions if Donald Trump retakes the White House. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has fantasized about expanding the list of crimes eligible for the death penalty and executing people who deal drugs. In a nearly 900-page policy wishlist published last year, conservative groups recommended that Trump should execute all of the 40 people on federal death row if elected.

But as pharmaceutical manufacturers have restricted the use of their medicines in executions, it’s become increasingly difficult for prison officials to obtain drugs like pentobarbital. The Bureau of Prisons spent years searching for a pentobarbital supplier, as The Intercept previously reported. The government obtained its first batch of the active ingredient in October 2018, according to a legal filing. While it’s unknown how many suppliers the federal government had, Absolute Standards’ decision to stop producing the lethal drug could impede future executions. 

In the wake of news reports this spring linking Absolute Standards to the federal executions, the company faced questions from Connecticut lawmakers and a pressure campaign from anti-death penalty activists. Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, an activist group that campaigned with Death Penalty Action to stop Absolute Standards from supplying the execution drug, said she would “cautiously, optimistically” trust Criscio’s pledge to stop making pentobarbital but would also remain “on watch.”

“It is the first response that anyone has gotten from this company that has done so much harm, and a response in which they actually say they’re going to stop. And so that’s meaningful, that’s important,” Tylek said. 

But, she continued, “they stopped just short of saying, ‘We would never do this again,’ and truly making that a long-standing or irrevocable statement to some extent.”

Shielded From Accountability

The Trump administration killed 13 people at the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, beginning in July 2020. In April, comedy news host John Oliver named Absolute Standards as the company that had supplied the Bureau of Prisons with execution drugs.

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“Little Home Market”: The Connecticut Company Accused of Fueling an Execution Spree

The Intercept subsequently revealed additional details about the company. We reported that Criscio and the company’s director, Stephen Arpie, told a source who met with the pair about obtaining lethal drugs that Absolute Standards produced the active pharmaceutical ingredient for pentobarbital that was used in the federal executions. A separate unnamed pharmacy then used that ingredient, or API, to create an injectable solution that would stop prisoners’ hearts.

That same month, Worth Rises and Death Penalty Action launched a public campaign to stop Absolute Standards from participating in executions.

Approximately 1,900 people sent 5,000 emails to Absolute Standards through a form created by the organizations, Tylek said. Activists also left negative Google reviews. “Perfect place to get execution drugs,” wrote one reviewer, who gave the company one star.

Connecticut state Sen. Saud Anwar and Rep. Josh Elliott, meanwhile, asked Criscio to stop making execution drugs and requested a meeting about his company’s activities, Anwar told The Intercept. 

Criscio, in his letter to Anwar and Elliott, declined a meeting, writing that he had been “inundated with vulgar, and sometimes threatening, attacks by telephone, letter, email, and social media.” 

He added, “Although some reports have given the impression that we acted illegally or even purposefully subverted the law, nothing could be further from the truth.”

Anwar and Elliott plan to introduce a bill that would make it illegal for Connecticut companies to participate in the death penalty. (The state abolished the death penalty in 2012.)

“If the commitment is there, I respect that,” Anwar told The Intercept, referring to Absolute Standards. “I’m more interested in making it illegal going forward. I think that laws last longer than legislators and issues and I feel that irrespective of their commitment, I am interested in having a law in the future … to make sure that we don’t have another similar situation that we learn about indirectly or directly five years, 10 years, 20 years from now.”

He said he hopes the legislature will pass the bill by the end of the 2025 session. If approved, it would be the first legislation across the country banning the sale of drugs or materials for use in an execution, according to Robin M. Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

Since 2021, Connecticut officials have been concerned that Absolute Standards was selling its drugs to states for executions. After a staffer for U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., sounded the alarm about the company’s suspected role in the federal executions in 2021, the state’s attorney general William Tong wrote in a letter to Absolute Standards that providing drugs for executions “is contrary to the values and policies of this state.”

For more than a decade, pharmaceutical producers have refused to sell pentobarbital and other drugs for use in executions. Despite these efforts, agencies have found ways to obtain substances needed for lethal injection. Last year, both Idaho and South Carolina announced that, after years of searching, they had obtained pentobarbital for executions.

States have gone to great lengths to shield the identities of their drug suppliers. Since 2011, more than a dozen states have enacted laws in efforts to hide information about their execution processes. 

After reviewing Criscio’s letter, a former BOP official familiar with the agency’s yearslong search for execution drugs wrote in an email to The Intercept that they were not surprised that Absolute Standards reported receiving threats. “That is why BOP and DOJ attempted to keep their name out of the media as long as possible.” 

The revelation also raises a new question, the former official continued. “I guess if they are not manufacturing pentobarbital any more, is there another supplier that stepped up? Who is providing it to the states that are using it?”

The post Company Linked to Federal Execution Spree Says It Will No Longer Produce Key Drug appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday, June 13, the World Bank Group’s Executive Board was scheduled to vote on whether to approve the International Finance Corporation’s plan to remedy harms relating to its $13.5 million investment in Bridge International Academies, following a lengthy investigation that concluded in December. The Compliance Advisor Ombudsman found a series of failures relating to school safety and labor practices at Bridge schools in Kenya, according to a summary of its draft report that was leaked to The Intercept. The CAO asked the IFC — the World Bank’s financing arm — to work with Bridge to establish processes to compensate the affected individuals for harms suffered. Yet the IFC’s proposal declines to do so, according to two sources familiar with the case. After this article was published, the board postponed the vote, instead holding an informal discussion with the IFC about its action plan.

This comes just months after the IFC bucked a CAO recommendation for direct payments as a remedy for harm in a separate investigation involving the sexual abuse of young female students in 2016 by a teacher at a Bridge school in Kenya. Instead, the IFC agreed to fund a program that would support survivors of child sexual abuse to access services, such as counseling and health care, on a case-by-case basis and regardless of whether they were abused at a Bridge school.

Civil society groups are up in arms about what they perceive as the IFC’s inadequate response to the CAO’s findings in both cases. “The truth is that the IFC knew about these problems. They failed to act when they became aware of the problems,” said Angelo Gavrielatos, campaign manager at the nonprofit Education International. “That is reckless and complicit behavior. It’s long overdue that they establish a remedy and contribute to that remedy for those who have been harmed.”

The IFC declined to comment specifically on the plan it was scheduled to present to the World Bank board, saying only that its policy is to publicize its action plans following board approval. In a statement on Thursday, World Bank leadership acknowledged the change in plans. “We … agreed that IFC will take more time to explore collaboration with relevant stakeholders before the Board formally considers the Management Response and Management Action Plan,” reads the statement.

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Since 2018, the CAO has investigated a series of formal, overlapping complaints against Bridge International Academies, which opened in Kenya in 2009, for issues including school safety and sexual abuse. The CAO’s probes, and reporting by The Intercept, have revealed that students, parents, and teachers in Kenya were harmed as a direct result of Bridge’s wrongdoing and the IFC’s failure to supervise its investment. Bridge did not respond to requests for comment.

Civil society experts say that the best way for the IFC to make amends is to give money directly to survivors with no strings attached, as a way to acknowledge their suffering, as well as to give them the autonomy to decide what they need to heal and move forward with their lives. There is global precedent for providing compensation to survivors of abuse, including sexual abuse. A task force at the World Bank Group itself endorsed this approach in a 2017 report responding to sexual misconduct during a Bank-funded development project in Uganda. The IFC, for its part, said it has never provided no-fault compensation for harms suffered by survivors of sexual abuse on any IFC-supported project.

The IFC is facing compensation requests in other ongoing investigations as well. Emily, a Kenyan woman who filed a complaint with the CAO last year about sexual assault she experienced at a Bridge school as a child, said that her decision to request compensation from the IFC was about acknowledging her father’s vehement advocacy on her behalf. (After first meeting Emily about a year ago, this writer introduced her to civil society groups that helped her to file the complaint, which is being reviewed by the CAO).

“I didn’t consider myself; I considered my father. He was always at the police station,” said Emily, who The Intercept is identifying with a pseudonym to protect her privacy. “He wanted me to go through this process and get justice, not only for myself, but for the others. Can you give something small to appreciate this man?”

“Deeply Inadequate”

The CAO probes misconduct that occurs at IFC-backed projects during the time of its investment and for 15 months afterward. In this case, the IFC poured millions of dollars into Bridge’s parent company, NewGlobe Schools, over the course of nearly a decade. In March 2022, amid the CAO investigations, the IFC quietly divested from NewGlobe Schools.

Yet the IFC still had indirect ties to the company because of its active investment in Learn Capital Venture Partners III LP, a venture capital firm that funds NewGlobe Schools. The IFC’s connection to Bridge ended in February, when Bridge transitioned away from NewGlobe Schools to become an independent foundation. (Learn Capital and NewGlobe Schools did not respond to requests for comment.)

The CAO launched its first probe into the IFC’s Bridge investment following a 2018 complaint by the Kenyan nonprofit EACHRights filed on behalf of parents and teachers at Bridge. Last December, the ombudsman completed its long-awaited investigation into the case, known as Bridge 01.

The CAO found that more than 100 Bridge students suffered potentially preventable injuries while at school, and at least two preventable student fatalities occurred during the years of the IFC’s investment, according to a copy of the executive summary of the leaked report, which is considered a draft until it is voted on by the World Bank board. Issues around worker compensation potentially affected thousands of Bridge employees, the report estimated. Overall, investigators found shortcomings in the IFC’s due diligence processes before making the investment, during the life of the project, and after its divestment.

The CAO recommended that the IFC work with Bridge to develop processes to provide fair and swift compensation to current and former workers and to the parents of current and former Bridge students. But the IFC declined to adopt the recommendation in its proposed management action plan, or MAP, which is scheduled to go before the World Bank board for approval on June 13, according to two sources familiar with the case as well as documentation viewed by The Intercept.

The IFC distributed a draft of portions of the MAP to some civil society groups on May 3 and gave them until May 15 to provide feedback. The limited timeframe reflected “a deeply inadequate and tokenistic approach to consultation and stakeholder engagement,” the nonprofit Oxfam wrote to the World Bank’s board on May 16 in an email obtained by The Intercept.

Oxfam also wrote that the MAP demonstrated “a clear lack of commitment to remedy by the IFC, despite a clear account of its failures that led to the harms outlined in the CAO report,” and “a lack of willingness to design a remediation program intended to address these harms.” Oxfam declined to comment to The Intercept.

Minimal Recourse

The IFC similarly resisted putting money in the hands of people who were hurt at Bridge’s Kenya schools following the CAO’s investigation into child sexual abuse. In October, the CAO published its report on the so-called Bridge 04 case, finding that the IFC had failed to supervise the project, leading to students being seriously harmed as a result. The watchdog asked the IFC to prepare an action plan and submit it for approval by the World Bank board.

In January, Emily and the other Bridge survivors wrote a letter to the board outlining their requests. These included money as reparations for the harm, as well as to pay for counseling, continuing education and training, and possible legal action. The survivors also asked for a public acknowledgment of and apology from Bridge for the harm that it caused to pupils.

Their request was backed by civil society groups as well as Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., who have repeatedly raised concerns to the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department about the sexual abuse allegations. (In April, Bridge penned a letter to Warren asking that she hold off on further action relating to the company until she was “fully aware” of Bridge’s work with the CAO, according to a source familiar with the matter.) Even 11 members of the World Bank Group board urged the IFC not to exclude financial support or compensation proposed by the CAO in its action plan.

But on March 7, when the IFC submitted the final MAP for approval, it did not include a provision to give money directly to Bridge survivors as compensation for the harm they endured. Instead, the IFC proposed a “collective response” that would support programs for survivors of child sexual abuse in the parts of Kenya where Bridge has operated, regardless of whether the abuse occurred at a Bridge location, and would provide survivors, on a case-by-case basis, with funds related to the program’s services. In other words, the plan leaves only a narrow window for Bridge sexual assault survivors to get funds.

A group of nonprofit organizations urged the Bank’s board to reject the proposal because it failed to provide direct compensation for harms suffered. “IFC’s MAP fails to do the one thing that is required of it: provide remedy to the Bridge survivors,” they wrote in a letter. “It is a global embarrassment that signals the moral bankruptcy of the IFC’s leadership.”

The Bank board approved the plan anyway, though it can be updated in the future. The IFC told The Intercept that its key objective was to develop a program that would give Bridge child abuse survivors the support they need, and that it would determine specific ways of offering financial support in consultation with survivors and other stakeholders. That process could result in survivors being given payments, Emily Horgan, a CAO spokesperson, told The Intercept. Civil society groups say they will continue to push for direct financial compensation.

World Bank President Ajay Banga, meanwhile, has tried to do damage control. In a May letter to Warren and Welch, he said that the Bank is “committed to supporting the survivors,” according to a source familiar with the matter. Banga, however, did not mention direct payments for harm as a possible remedy.

He later expressed regrets about the IFC’s failure to monitor the Bridge investment during a June fireside chat with World Bank employees, according to a video clip obtained by The Intercept. Banga referred to Bridge as stain on the World Bank’s reputation. “We owed it to ourselves and our children to investigate it, to be open about it to other shareholders, and to do something about it,” Banga said. He added that World Bank employees should be “caring about what the heck went wrong in our institution, and how can we all fix it together.”

The World Bank Group did not respond to requests for comment.

“We Have a Voice”

Last year, Emily and three other sexual abuse survivors approached the CAO about their experiences at Bridge. While the abuse they described was part of the same pattern that the CAO was investigating in the Bridge 04 case, the CAO launched an investigation into Learn Capital, the firm that had invested in NewGlobe Schools and which was an IFC client at the time.

Earlier this month, the CAO completed its assessment report related to the claims from the four young women, who filed the complaints anonymously for security reasons. In it, the CAO describes how neither Learn Capital nor Bridge wants to engage in a dispute resolution dialogue with complainants who did not want to reveal their identities. It is now up to the CAO to decide whether the allegations warrant further investigation.

“It is appalling to read how dismissive both Bridge and Learn Capital are of the complaints by former students who were sexually abused at Bridge schools. Any organization that is serious about their commitment to child protection and their duty of care to children in their custody would be doing everything possible to support these girls right now and to compensate them for the long-term harm they have suffered,” said David Pred, executive director of Inclusive Development International. 

For Emily, the process of seeking reparations and working with the CAO and civil society groups has been restorative in and of itself. “The more we meet, the more I learn new things,” said Emily, who, through this process, has found a way to destigmatize the sexual abuse. She has become a de facto leader for the other survivors, encouraging them to come forward and report. “We have a voice,” she said proudly.

Emily’s father passed away suddenly in September. Now living alone and working full-time as a beautician, she has decided to keep fighting for justice to honor his memory. She still has dreams of becoming a counselor and helping other survivors of sexual assault to heal and move forward with their lives. But for that, she needs money for school.

Update: June 17, 2024
After this article was published, the World Bank Group postponed its board vote on the International Finance Corporation’s action plan to address school safety and labor issues at Bridge International Academies schools in Kenya. The article was updated to note this development.

The post World Bank Financing Arm Rejects Calls to Directly Compensate Victims of Harm at Kenya Schools appeared first on The Intercept.

Where children played, the ground bubbled. Birds swarmed, feeding on trash. At one point, a pile of 20 dead dogs and cats were dropped in the yard of the elementary school, just 100 feet away from classrooms. This was no ordinary playground.

A horrific stench of dead rats and decomposing garbage was impossible to escape, recalled Wayne Fields, who still lives in his childhood home opposite the site. “The smell was so bad, during school, after school,” said Fields, a 69-year-old businessman. “It was ridiculous.”

Both of Fields’s parents were teachers at the school. “We used to say that when we turn off the light we can all see each other because we are glowing from the chemicals,” he said.

Despite violating multiple health statutes, the local government was unbothered. “This is a necessary evil. I think we’re doing a very fine job,” then-City Manager William Green said in 1963. Besides, he said, the city poured “glorified perfume” on the garbage every so often.

This “necessary evil” has haunted this Florida community for decades. Sixty years later, the site is overgrown grassland, but contamination at the school still poses a large risk to students’ health. In the last few years, community members have called on the Alachua County school district and state agencies to assess the connection between the contaminated land and health issues in the area.

It is often difficult to show a direct link between a contaminant and adverse health impacts, and no such investigation has yet been done at the school. But for years soil and air testing have consistently revealed evidence of substantial environmental toxins on the property. Levels of the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene peaked in 2020 at a concentration up to 218 times higher than what is considered safe for direct exposure in residential settings. Researchers, meanwhile, have pinpointed East Gainesville as an asthma hot spot.

For decades, a rotating cast of city, county, and state officials have been aware of the contaminants in the school yard — and have taken little action to address the problem, The Intercept found in an investigation based on hundreds of public and archival documents, government emails obtained through records requests, and interviews with dozens of Gainesville residents.

Alachua County officials have proposed renovations to the school and overseen the removal of some contaminated soil from the property in the last decade, while a local nurse’s advocacy prompted the state health and environmental protection departments to order additional soil testing in recent years. Their primary focus has not been the former landfill but another contaminant discovered decades ago: abandoned oil tanks. Yet what’s needed, former school district employees and community members say, is nothing short of the removal of the school in its entirety, a full cleanup of the site itself, and a comprehensive assessment of the impact of soil toxins on students’ health. Neither the school district nor the Florida Department of Environmental Protection seem willing to go that far.

“Williams Elementary is safe,” said Jackie Johnson, a spokesperson for Alachua County Public Schools, in an email to The Intercept. She added that the school board hasn’t received a formal recommendation to demolish or majorly reconstruct the school and that the district has no current plans to do so. 

District representatives met with the Department of Environmental Protection in January, Johnson said, and “it was made clear that there is currently no health threat to students or staff at the school.”

But just last month, the school board and the environmental protection department approved another round of soil and air testing at Williams.

The state Department of Health “has responded to many community concerns regarding Williams Elementary School,” Paul D. Myers, the department’s administrator in Alachua County, told The Intercept in an email. The state environmental protection department “continues to monitor the successful remediation at Williams Elementary” and will keep working with the school district and city “on any contaminated or potentially contaminated properties,” wrote Kathryn Craver, an external affairs director at the department’s northeast district.

This situation in Gainesville is not an anomaly. Dozens of schools across 35 states sit on or adjacent to former, or currently open, landfills, according to The Intercept’s analysis of news articles, state databases, and public records from across the country. From New York to Ohio, there have been many reported cases of illness, predominantly cancer, from both teachers and students who have attended schools next to hazardous waste. These occurrences tend to be in lower-income communities of color, The Intercept found.

No federal agency prohibits new schools being placed on, or next to, dump sites, or requires schools near landfills to conduct cleanups. In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency was authorized by Congress to create voluntary school siting guidelines, but these remain discretionary and don’t apply to existing schools.

Florida state law makes it illegal to build a new K-12 school on or adjacent to a known contaminated site unless steps are taken to ensure that children will not be exposed to threatening levels of contaminants. But at Williams Elementary, like other schools in Florida, the contamination surfaced years after it was built.

The lack of regulation to address decades-old problems deepens an enduring crisis of environmental racism.

“We see a really strong pattern where white affluent students are facing significantly less risk at school,” said Sara Grineski, a sociology professor at the University of Utah who studies environmental health disparities. “It’s this long-standing pattern of the devaluing of people of color, pushing them into less desirable spaces.”

Second-Class Citizens

Williams Elementary is named after the Black businessman who built it in the 1930s, seeing a need for a school on the east side of Gainesville. A middle school was built across the field in 1955 — a few years before the landfill was placed in the backyard of Williams.

“We were Black and seen as second-class citizens,” said Gussy Butler, aged 95, one of East Gainesville’s oldest residents. “They weren’t concerned; it was a Black area.”

The dump site was 150 feet away from students sitting in classrooms, and the pollution was made worse by the area’s impractical geography. The east side of Gainesville is lower and has more sensitive wetlands than the west, where economic development has generally been focused.

Local media began covering the dire consequences several years after the landfill was built. “The ditch is filled with black, stagnant water pumped from holes dug to hold the garbage,” the Gainesville Sun reported in June 1963. “The area being filled with garbage is wetter than normal so the odor problems are compounded. The health department conceded that the area is ‘a little too wet for an ideal landfill.’”

Still, the city stood firm. “Many of us and our children have spent many happy hours on top of a landfill,” wrote City-County Health Officer Edward G. Byrne in an op-ed at the time. “I do not believe this will be a major problem for Alachua County for some time to come.”

Yet by the end of that summer, following petitions to the city for relief, the dump was moved to airport land. It was already clear that the implications would be long-lasting. “Building on the filled land is out of the question for 10 to 15 years. As the garbage slowly decays the earth will gradually settle,” a Gainesville Sun article said. “Any building constructed on it probably would be ruined within a short period by the sinking.”

At the end of the decade, the Nixon administration founded the EPA, a pivotal moment in the monitoring of toxic sites. “Some of the reasons we have these situations occurring today is that prior to the foundation of the EPA, there were few, if any, environmental laws that protected human health,” said Claudia Persico, a professor at American University who researches environmental policy.

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Yet, the EPA’s process for identifying so-called Superfund sites — referring to polluted and hazardous locations — has often failed to capture the most deprived communities. The EPA’s national priorities list is “a little bit ad hoc,” said Steph Tai, an environmental law professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “It’s sort of advocacy based, like people have to advocate for something to rise to that level.”

In a chronically underfunded area such as East Gainesville, the landfill’s potential for long-term contamination was quickly forgotten after it was closed. With a lack of resources, people had other concerns. “It just went away,” Fields, who lives across the site, said. “Nobody discussed it.”

Sinking Buildings

At Williams Elementary, the prediction that buildings would sink proved prophetic, even a quarter of a century later. In 1989, the district began constructing a half-million-dollar music and art suite at the school.

“They put Williams at the top of the list because it had been deprived for so long,” said Jennifer Lindquist, a former art teacher at the school for 22 years.

Almost as soon as the new facilities were built, the building began to fall apart. “The crack became straight through the building and through the foundation and everything,” Lindquist said. “It was not sound ground. When they pulled up the borings you could still see decomposing trash.”

In April of that year, city planners — members of a citizen board that reviews land use — found records of the landfill while working on a report. Gainesville city commissioners told the Alachua County School Board to take soil samples. The school board was going to “run a plug down there and test the soil,” Norm Bowman, then planning board clerk, said at the time. “It’s no big deal.”

But the problems extended beyond the remnants of the former landfill. Around the same time, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection found “excessively contaminated soil” on the property that was polluting the groundwater. The contamination was attributed to four underground storage tanks containing heating oil. From the 1960s to 1980s, these were common in rural locations without main gas lines. The school board registered the tanks in 1987 but didn’t know when they had been installed, Craver, from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, told The Intercept in an email.

In 1988, the school district applied for the environmental department’s Early Detection Incentive, which provided state-contracted cleanup to owners of underground petroleum tanks with suspected contamination. The site was assigned a ranking score of 9 out of 10. According to the department, “the higher the score, the greater the potential threat.”

But state officials ultimately decided that excavating the soil was “considered to be inappropriate … because of the high cost due to the depth of contamination.”

There are multiple conflicting narratives on the dates the tanks were removed. State records reviewed by The Intercept state that, as of 1991, three of the four tanks had been abandoned in place. Craver, meanwhile, said that three tanks were removed in 1988, with the other in 1991, but “oil can remain in soil for decades until remediated.”

What’s undisputed is that the tanks had corroded, leaving oil to seep out across the site. Still, the state went quiet for another two decades. This time, both the landfill and the oil tanks were forgotten.

Asthma Hot Spot

DeVante Moody, who started attending Williams in the late 1990s, remembers being teased about his “trash school.” At first he thought it was just typical school rivalry, or because the students sucked at sports.

“The running joke came from the community: ‘Oh, y’all go to the trash school,’” said Moody, now 31 years old and a support technician at the University of Florida hospital network. Like Wayne Fields, whose son also attended Williams, multiple generations of Moody’s family attended the school. His 11-year-old son now attends the neighboring Lincoln Middle School.

Moody recalls “the forbidden area,” a closed-off field the size of a large swimming pool, where students were not allowed to venture. They were never told why. Classrooms sat in trailers beside it, and children ran around the adjacent field at lunchtime.

It wasn’t until years later that Moody discovered it had been a landfill. “They literally meant ‘Y’all go to the trash school’ because it used to be a trash dump,” Moody realized. “So this is not a joke. This is serious.”

Throughout his childhood, Moody, like many of his classmates, had trouble breathing. “We were all just asthmatic children. We just thought it was normal,” he said.

Moody’s respiratory issues were particularly serious, and he was hospitalized twice with collapsed lungs. He distinctly remembers being in the intensive care unit at age 7, turning to his father and asking: “Am I going to die?”

Researchers recently identified East Gainesville as a pediatric asthma hot spot and linked poor health outcomes to racial and economic segregation. Across Alachua County, asthma-related hospitalization rates were nearly three times higher and emergency department visits were six times higher for Black residents than for white residents in 2018. Other research has shown that the hospitalization rate due to pediatric asthma in Williams Elementary’s ZIP code ranks among the worst 25 percent of ZIP codes in the state. The group most deeply affected are Black children aged 5 to 9. 

It’s part of a nationwide trend: A study published by The Associated Press last year found that Black children are more likely to have asthma than kids of any other race in America, mostly due to the influence of past racist housing laws and proximity to pollution.

In 2008, a few years after Moody left Williams Elementary, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection mobilized contractors to test contamination at schools across the county. “The state asked us to quickly go run out to all multiple schools and take soil samples around just to try and make sure that everything’s OK,” said Jesse Brown, senior engineer at Golder Associates, who visited Williams and 20 other schools at the time. “They just wanted a quick snapshot to see what risk each of these sites had.”

At Williams, Brown’s team identified two of the former underground petroleum tanks and took half a dozen soil samples. They didn’t find anything concerning, according to a report the firm submitted to the state environmental agency.

Yet that finding did not appear to sufficiently assuage the agency. Seven years later, the agency reached back out to the Alachua County School Board about Williams Elementary to offer more state funding for research into petroleum contamination. Another contractor was sent out to the school in 2015. Over the next two years, engineers who analyzed soil samples found high concentrations of multiple carcinogenic chemicals and benzo(a)pyrene equivalents, a way of evaluating the overall carcinogenicity of multiple compounds. BaP — which is commonly found in cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, and asphalt — and BaP equivalents are generally considered safe at concentrations of 0.1 mg/kg. At Williams, analysts detected a level of 7.2 mg/kg. Prolonged exposure to the chemical increases the risk of cancer, as well as asthma, according to scientific studies. 

In general, communities of color suffer disproportionately from environmental toxins. Grineski, the University of Utah sociology professor, said that her research shows that “a district with more foreign born kids and more Black kids has greater concentrations of cancer-causing air toxins than other school districts.”

The state’s health department, which investigates cancer clusters, does not consider East Gainesville to have a higher than normal incidence of cancer. The agency “does not have any data that is indicative of a cancer cluster in the community,” Myers, the department’s administrator in Alachua County, told The Intercept in an email.

Still, Fields, who struggles with various health issues — including trouble breathing since he had a heart attack a couple years ago — strongly believes it to be so.

On a drive around East Gainesville, Fields gave a biography of the generations of homeowners. As he pointed out house after house, he explained how each family had in some way been affected by the disease.

“This neighborhood is mostly made up of widows,” he said.

A Community’s Outrage 

In 2017, two years after the state funded a new round of testing at Williams Elementary, the Alachua County school district issued a press release notifying parents that elevated levels of BaP had been found in the soil, due to contamination from petroleum products.

The district said it would be removing and replacing soil from parts of the school courtyard. Still, school officials assured parents that “the levels found at Williams would not pose a health risk unless there is a lifetime of exposure, which would mean eating or touching the soil every day for thirty years.”

For Moody and Fields’s families, who had lived in East Gainesville all their lives, being in such close proximity daily is not that much of a reach. Yet, Moody, whose cousins attended Williams that year, said that, to his knowledge, his relatives didn’t hear about the contamination at the time. “My family had not one clue,” he said.

The state removed over 2,500 tons of petroleum-contaminated soil from the courtyard and transported it to a waste site in Georgia before the start of the school year in September. A concrete cap was placed over the remaining contaminated soil until it could be excavated in school breaks over the following year. Another 1,000 tons were removed between December 2017 and June 2018.

“Due to this excavation and removal, the accessible soils are no longer an exposure risk,” Craver said.

Meanwhile, the school district held a public forum, titled “Schools of the Future,” where community members could submit anonymous feedback. Many of the comments mentioned the Williams and Lincoln schools — and some referenced the former dump site. “Can Williams Elementary use the surrounding land to increase/renovate since the school was built on a dump site!! This should be a priority!!!” one comment said. “Remove Lincoln and Williams off the dump site,” another person wrote.

With no further action from local officials, community members continued to press the issue. In June 2019, Fields and other residents expressed their frustrations on the area’s history in a public county meeting on plans to expand another dump site in the area.

“What you’re talking about doing, it’s preposterous,” Fields said.

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As Covid-19 hit, others started asking questions. Alexandria Owens, a pediatric critical-care nurse scientist working in East Gainesville, began to look into why so many kids ended up in the intensive care unit with asthma issues.

Poking around online, Owens found the state records about the eroded oil tanks at Williams. She spent hundreds of hours reading documents and compiling data. She wondered if there was a correlation between the toxic soil and the state of children’s health in the area. “Kids end up on life support,” Owens said. “It’s alarming knowing that these types of chemicals can exacerbate asthma.”

Owens had no idea about the former dump site, which is not mentioned in state environmental or health department records. But she started reaching out to the school district in March 2020 about the high asthma rates in the neighborhood and the leaked oil tanks. “I felt like my argument was even stronger because these kids are at a higher risk, let’s actually sound the alarm because Covid-19 is happening,” Owens said. “But that did not happen.”

At every turn, Owens was being stalled. “You don’t need to be calling all these people,” a manager of the Petroleum Restoration Program at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection told her in a phone call in June 2020, according to notes Owens took at the time. “Pediatric asthma wasn’t in our top priority list,” a community programs administrator at the Alachua County Health Department told Owens the following month. (The employee was referencing priorities from a county-level assessment that happens every few years, according to Myers, the health department’s administrator in Alachua County.)

It was Owen’s outreach that ultimately triggered the Florida Department of Health to conduct an assessment at the school. In July 2020, the department published a report stating that it “does not expect the occurrence of health risks associated with exposure to groundwater and soil.” But the report was not comprehensive; the department could not evaluate indoor air quality or assess the impact on students prior to 2016 due to insufficient or unavailable data.

The department said the concentrations of BaP that had previously been found in the soil could create additional health risks if it vaporized into the air. The report recommended that the department continue to assess indoor and outdoor air quality for the presence of the chemical. Owens was relieved an assessment had been done but continued to press state and local officials on the issue.

At times, she grew frustrated with the process. In a July 2021 email outlining an apparent miscommunication between the school district and the state environmental agency about the state’s plans for the school, she wrote that such communication breakdowns “will continue to delay the timely remediation of a problem that could absolutely exacerbate health issues in the children from my community.”

She also felt that, in addition to testing, there needed to be more excavation — and that the school building should be moved.

Stalled Reconstruction

Carlee Simon, who became interim superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools in December 2020, shared Owens’s assessment. Simon had attended Williams as a child, and her parents were teachers in the district, but she knew nothing of the site’s toxicity before starting the job.

Based on the information she got from colleagues and the environmental department and the aged state of the building, Simon soon concluded that the only solution was to rebuild the entire school. “We needed to have the entire building demolished,” Simon said. “Our discussions were how long would it take between us tearing down the building and the soil actually being addressed and ready for us to build on. That was like a massive unknown.”

It was likely going to take years, and the school board was divided. “It was pretty clear that budget priorities of the past shaped that community,” she said. She noted that a new school was built in a wealthier part of Gainesville just a few years earlier. “The first completed school they built was in a highly affluent and influential community, not a dilapidated building on the east side,” she said.

Gainesville’s east side is also still haunted by the decision back in the 1950s to put a dump in a residential neighborhood near two schools. Archival records show that city officials placed the landfill near the schools with the hopes that burying trash in the swampy land would make the land usable in the future. Jennifer Smart, the communications director for the city of Gainesville, told The Intercept the current government couldn’t speak to the school’s environmental problems. “With so much of this timeline reaching back many decades, it’s a historical record in which current City of Gainesville leadership did not participate and have no specific knowledge,” Smart wrote in an email.

Experts told the Intercept that cost-pressed governments often build schools on cheap land. “The tension is often between like there’s concern for student’s health, but also there’s the concern about using public monies for more expensive lands,” said Tai, the UW–Madison environmental law professor. “So a lot of times economic concerns sort of pressure states into still siting schools in toxic areas.”

After multiple disagreements with the board, including on other topics such as how to handle Covid-19, Simon was fired from the job after 15 months — the seventh superintendent to leave the job in the last 10 years. She is now interim dean for the School of Education at the University of Alaska Southeast.

While internal school district emails indicate there were plans to renovate the school in 2021, that has still not happened. A list of reconstruction projects on the school district website dating back to November 2019 describes design plans for four other schools in the district. Williams Elementary, however, is stuck in limbo. According to the website, “the district is drafting the required state application for permission to demolish buildings on the campus.”

Johnson, the school district spokesperson, told The Intercept that the Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed the district’s reconstruction plans: “Facilities projects that have been completed have cost much more than originally expected, affecting the timeline for other proposed projects.” Williams is among the projects that fell by the wayside.

More Testing, More Toxins

Soil and air testing have been a constant at Williams Elementary over the last several years. Since July 2020, state contractors have been deployed to the school at least a dozen times. 

The most alarming results came in November 2020, when soil testing revealed BaP equivalent levels of 21.8 mg/kg in one part of the property: 218 times over the recommended residential limit. (State records show that BaP equivalent levels fluctuated over the next year and a half, dropping down to 7.8 mg/kg in that same area by July 2022 and to 2.6 mg/kg on a different part of the property.)

In a letter to Williams Elementary in December 2020, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection alerted the school that two chemicals, naphthalene and acenaphthene, had been found in the soil. The latter was present at three times the standard level. Exposure to naphthalene by inhalation is associated with hemolytic anemia, damage to the liver, and neurological damage, according to the EPA. In late 2021, the environmental department installed a venting system underneath one of the school’s buildings to mitigate soil concentrations of naphthalene.

Air quality has also been a persistent issue at Williams, and on at least one occasion in 2020, a teacher reportedly complained about it to the principal, according to an email obtained by The Intercept. State contractors, meanwhile, have repeatedly found elevated levels of chemicals in the air at Williams, including chloroform, a possible carcinogen that is often used in industrial processes. 

In February 2021, after Owens’s urging, the state Department of Health released a report sampling six indoor air and four outdoor locations at the elementary school. The department found that it was possible there would be vapor intrusion, which is the migration of chemicals from the soil into the air. The report found that some concentrations of chemicals, including benzene, carbon tetrachloride — which can produce kidney and liver damage — and chloroform were at a level where they could cause considerable health risk through exposure. The health department recommended continued air monitoring.

That same month, a firm contracted by the environmental department reported excess levels of naphthalene in the air, as well as BaP in the soil.

Despite the findings in Gainesville, the state health department touted Williams Elementary as one of its “Success Stories.” Though students and workers at the school had been “exposed to contaminated soil and air,” the post said, they were not expected to develop adverse health effects.

Experts studying air pollution in schools have revealed it has extremely damaging effects on children. “Air pollution can cause what’s called externalizing behaviors, aggressive behaviors in kids,” said Persico, the American University public policy professor. “That causes them to get into fights or to misbehave, and then they’re more likely to be suspended in school.”

An Ongoing Issue 

Despite years of appeals from within the school and the broader community, Williams Elementary is still trying to find a way to get rid of the polluted soil. The school district’s maintenance manager asked the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in an email last May “about the possibility of having some assistance with the removal of the contaminated soil, if and when the Board decides to demo Buildings 1 and 2 at Williams.”

An environmental consultant at the department responded that the agency could investigate and cover the cost of needed remediation if the school board approved renovations or demolition.

The environmental department recently contracted Leah D. Stuchal, a research professor at the University of Florida, to review air testing results from November that revealed excessive levels of chloroform. In February, Stuchal concluded that the excess levels “were not believed to be a result of petroleum contamination” and that monitoring for petroleum contaminants in indoor air was no longer needed. Still, Stuchal recommended continued monitoring for chloroform, of which the source remains unclear.

“The recommendation for continued monitoring of chloroform is because the source is unknown and the population exposed involves children,” Stuchal told The Intercept in an email.

Craver, of the environmental department, said that “out of an abundance of caution,” the agency “continues to maintain a passive venting system and conduct indoor air monitoring.”

The school recently concluded another round of testing, but there are no public records of testing at Lincoln Middle School across the field. And the long-forgotten landfill remains part of the land’s history.

Meanwhile, community members in East Gainesville have been waging a fight against the expansion of a different landfill. Just 2 miles from the schools, it was meant to close in January but has applied to continue operating until 2028. As a local news outlet reported last year, “It’s history repeating.”

“The people in our neighborhoods … I can guarantee you they have experienced enough tragedies,” Fields said in a county meeting on the proposed landfill plans. “It used to be an ongoing joke in our neighborhood, we are all gonna die from cancer because the dump site was right there between Lincoln and Williams Elementary. Well, guess what happened?”

The reporting for this article was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post For Decades, Officials Knew a School Sat on a Former Dump — and Did Little to Clean Up the Toxins appeared first on The Intercept.

Within weeks, he was in a state of psychosis. He and his parents sought assistance from local emergency rooms and the city’s crisis intervention team, but they couldn’t get any real help. On Christmas Eve, armed with an axe and a hunting knife, Bazur-Persing — who’d never before committed a serious crime — performed three robberies in quick succession, walking away with $610, a pair of earbuds, and a Bluetooth speaker.

He landed in the Allen County jail. No one gave him a psychological evaluation to determine his mental health status, and when Bazur-Persing’s parents, mindful of their son’s suicidal tendencies, urged medical personnel to reach out to his longtime provider about medications he might need, they refused.

“It was substandard care,” Ian’s mother, Lori Bazur-Persing, recalled. The crowded facility where her son remained for 75 days pretrial was the opposite of therapeutic. “There are no recreational facilities, no going outside. The lights are on all the time. He said it’s just terrible.”

Allen County is under a federal judge’s order to address overcrowding and poor conditions; three people have died at the jail since October. County commissioners and the sheriff would like to tear it down and build a bigger, more modern detention center with a separate mental health unit — at an estimated cost of $320 million. Some Allen County residents, however, say the current jail could simply be remodeled, with overcrowding and behavioral health issues addressed by policy changes and investments in community services instead.

The Bazur-Persings agree. “What we need is not a bigger jail, it’s a better version of the jail we have,” Tim Bazur-Persing, Ian’s father, said at a public hearing last fall.

To make the case for the new jail, county officials have repeatedly pointed to a 2022 study they commissioned, which uses three different methodologies and a bevy of graphics to illustrate that Allen County will experience a steadily rising need for jail beds over time. The current facility was designed for 732 incarcerated people and held an average of 700 in 2023; the study predicts that by 2041, the county will need space for roughly 1,500 beds.

The study wasn’t conducted by a prominent criminal justice organization or consulting company. It was done by Elevatus, a Fort Wayne-based architecture firm that has designed jails all over Indiana and in several other states. For counties that are considering expanding their current jail or building a new one, Elevatus produces feasibility studies that usually predict growing incarceration needs. In many cases, Elevatus also wins a contract to draw up the plans for the facility it recommended.

“What we need is not a bigger jail, it’s a better version of the jail we have.”

That’s what happened in Allen County. Four months after Elevatus released its study, the company was hired to design the new jail. If the county’s elected officials approve the project, the firm’s design fees — factored as a percentage of the project’s total cost, as is standard for architecture firms — could be around $10 million. (Elevatus did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, and Allen County’s commissioners declined to comment.)  

Elevatus is far from the only architecture firm creating feasibility studies and needs assessments that recommend substantially larger jails and then designing those buildings. Such blatant conflict of interest is occurring in counties all over the country, particularly in rural and conservative areas where local public safety agencies often operate with little scrutiny. These studies rely on thin data to justify spending millions of dollars in public funds. The most significant consequence, though, is that more people wind up incarcerated. As a common industry refrain goes, “If you build it, they will fill it.”

Projections Always Go Up

In public discourse about incarceration, the country’s 3,100 local jails tend to be eclipsed by prisons. That’s despite the fact that at any given moment in 2022, roughly a third of people incarcerated in the U.S. were detained in county or city jails. Seventy percent of them had not yet been convicted of any crime. Jails tend to hold people for shorter periods and see many return visitors; between July 2021 and June 2022, jail facilities around the nation recorded 7.3 million admissions.

While prison and big urban jail populations have declined in recent years, those numbers have swelled in more rural counties due to state and federal prisoners being sent to county facilities and an increased use of pretrial detention. Many jails are at capacity or overcrowded (defined as more than 80 percent full) and may be decades old and in serious disrepair.   

Commissioners and other elected officials considering expansion frequently turn to architecture firms that specialize in detention facilities to predict how many jail beds they’ll need down the line. In some states, the studies are mandated by law, and the companies are viewed as experts. Requests for study proposals rarely preclude the winning firms from later designing the facilities.

Most of the reports include legitimate design products like architectural drawings and space studies. Some also present pages of graphs and charts showing who has been in custody, when, why, and for how long. But the studies rarely analyze the bulk of that data to determine future incarceration trends; instead, most ground their projections solely on past population or incarceration numbers, seemingly undergirded by the maxim that crime will always get worse.

“The projections can be based on really problematic data,” said Beatrice Halbach-Singh, a senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice. For example, a feasibility study might take a jail’s population on a single day and extrapolate 30 years into the future. “It’s been shown time and time again that assessments and projections don’t match what actually happens.”

And even when an analysis shows crime or incarceration rates going down, she added, “a study will still recommend bigger facilities. They’ll say they need room to grow.”

That was the case in Genesee County, New York, where the existing 87-bed jail was routinely at or over capacity. In 2018, commissioners hired SMRT Architects and Engineers, out of Portland, Maine, to assess the county’s incarceration needs for the next 20 years. According to the firm’s report, crime had dipped in the past four years, and the county’s population was predicted to decline in the future. Nonetheless, the firm concluded that the jail would require 184 beds by 2042. County commissioners subsequently hired SMRT to design a new $70 million facility at just that size; construction is slated to be completed later this year.

In 2018, the Indiana-based architecture company RQAW wrote a feasibility study recommending that the state’s Vanderburgh County beef up its 540-bed jail with space for 900 to 1,200 additional people. Those numbers — and their $45 million price tag — may have been too much for the small county, which is now building a 158-bed expansion with a different architect.

And in 2022, Minneapolis-based Klein McCarthy Architects created a needs assessment for Cass County, North Dakota, that averaged the results of four methodologies to determine that the 348-bed facility would need to increase to 524 beds to meet the demands of the next 20 years. The report warned, however, “There is no commonly accepted methodology for making inmate population projections.” Klein McCarthy was unanimously selected by county commissioners to design the project, and the $30 million expansion is currently underway.

The report’s seemingly off-the-cuff observation was on target. Despite some architects’ stated rule of thumb that jails need three or four beds for every 1,000 people in the county, there is no formula that can predict future incarceration needs. And the Cass County Commission doesn’t seem to mind that. “Nothing is perfect. I don’t expect accuracy, just get us close,” said Chad Peterson, chair of the Cass County Board of Commissioners and a trained architect. He added that the county considered proposals from other firms, but that Klein McCarthy’s bid had the lowest cost. (Officials in Genesee and Vanderburgh counties did not respond to requests for comment.)

What does predict needs are laws and actions — and those can make the numbers go down as well as up.

“Who’s in jail is a product of the policies and practices of that criminal justice system,” said David Bennett, a consultant for the National Institute of Corrections, or NIC, a wing of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. “There’s no correlation between crime and incarceration rates. Until you examine data and operations, you’re not doing good planning. You’ll just have a bigger, more overcrowded jail.”

“Who’s in jail is a product of the policies and practices of that criminal justice system.”

Bennett has been focused on jail capacity planning since the 1970s and wrote the NIC’s Jail Capacity Planning Guide. The publication explains how to address overcrowding systemically by examining the disparate elements of a county’s criminal justice system that can affect incarceration numbers, including bail requirements, case processing times, diversion options, and sentencing mandates. Just about every local criminal justice system could keep more people out of jail who don’t need to be there, he said.

“With some exceptions, good planning isn’t done by architects,” Bennett said. “They don’t have the background and training. They don’t understand the criminal justice system and its intricacies.” Architects’ solutions to problems tend to be built structures. And if they benefit financially from designing larger jails, recommending that counties shrink them isn’t in their interest.

For county commissioners and sheriffs, there aren’t many alternatives to using architecture firms. The NIC offers free comprehensive jail and justice system assessments, but the service isn’t well known. And only a handful of other consultants around the country perform comprehensive evaluations.

Architects, though, are easy to come by.

Lucrative but Opaque

Firms that design detention facilities, police stations, and courthouses have dubbed themselves the “justice architecture” sector. The companies — some large and well-established, earning eight-figure annual revenues from the work — are all over the country, but the field isn’t particularly competitive. In Indiana, for example, which has been experiencing a major boom in jail construction since 2015, three companies — Elevatus, RQAW, and DLZ — have designed 90 percent of the state’s recent projects.  

While the word “architect” might conjure images of soaring ceilings and big windows, very few of the firms working on jails are creating innovative designs. The work is extremely specialized, but detention facilities tend to be very similar to one another; some companies have prototype jail plans they tweak for different customers.

Nonetheless, the field is profitable. Citizens tend to agree that their county needs a decent, secure jail, but few pay close attention to the public finance tools like bonds and taxes that pay for it. The costs are so giant that differences appear almost meaningless. With payments spread over 30 years, the distinction between a $50 million bond and a $60 million bond can seem trifling.    

It’s also a remarkably opaque sector. Few of the practitioners The Intercept contacted responded, and academics and advocates had little to offer. The American Institute of Architects, the field’s professional association, which runs the Academy of Architecture for Justice, a networking and continuing education committee, declined to comment for this story.    

Detention facilities tend to be very similar to one another; some companies have prototype jail plans they tweak for different customers.

The justice architecture field briefly surfaced in the news in late 2020 after a longtime campaign to limit architects’ involvement in human rights violations finally succeeded. AIA changed its code of ethics to bar members from designing spaces meant for execution or long-term solitary confinement. The organization’s New York chapter went further, calling on its members to refrain from designing any spaces of incarceration. At least one justice architecture firm backed away from the work in response.

The rule change doesn’t appear to be enforced. For example, new jail facilities include spaces for solitary confinement, which is considered torture when it exceeds 15 days. “We don’t have data on how many people are held for 15 days or more, though based on anecdotal information, we know it isn’t unusual,” said Jean Casella, director of Solitary Watch, a group that advocates against solitary confinement. Nonetheless, a majority of principals and lead architects in companies designing detention facilities are AIA members.

Like any other industry, the leaders of justice architecture firms cultivate relationships, sponsor affiliated conferences (“We are proud to continue to be a Badger State Sheriffs’ Association gold sponsor at the Q2 Training Conference” read one company’s Facebook post), and donate politically. In Allen County, both Elevatus and DLZ — the companies as well as their individual leaders — contributed handsomely to the sheriff’s and county commissioners’ campaigns in 2021 and 2022, campaign finance reports reveal.

Some firms now host citizen meetings and create websites touting potential jail development, particularly if the project requires public approval. In Greene County, Ohio, justice architecture giant HDR was paid not only to create a needs assessment, but also to monitor the social media activity of local opponents of a new jail. News of that surveillance later cost HDR the design job, but voters eventually approved the jail anyway.

“If You Build It, They Will Fill It”

Sometimes architects are the cheerleaders for a new, expanded jail and bring the county’s policymakers around. Often, however, elected officials — particularly sheriffs — want something bigger, and the design firms are simply justifying the desired bed increases.  

Maybe the sheriff wants to add mental health and programming facilities to better address the needs of people in custody, a trend that, conveniently for architecture firms, requires substantial new construction. Or perhaps the sheriff is hoping to earn revenue by renting out extra beds to nearby counties or to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, or the federal government. (That may or may not work. Those plans are vulnerable to policy changes and don’t always produce the projected profits.)  

Most of all, local officials likely want to add enough beds so that they don’t have to go through the process again anytime soon. Jail construction can be a Herculean task that takes years, as land acquisitions fall through, bond referendums fail, and county commissioners turn over. Officials reason they might as well add enough space to last another 20 or 30 years.

As the NIC’s Jail Planning guide states, “beds have a tendency to be filled,” in the same way that traffic actually increases when a highway is widened. Law enforcement officials and judges who were forced to seek alternatives for low-level offenders when a facility was full no longer have an incentive to keep people out or shorten their stays when the jail’s capacity expands. In Hancock County, Indiana, after a new jail more than doubled the number of beds available, a headline read, “Hancock County Jail fully open; inmate numbers on the rise.”

Experts like the NIC’s Bennett emphasize that the real way to reduce jail overcrowding is through policy, especially at the local level. Sheriffs have great discretion over how minor infractions are treated, who gets released on their own recognizance, and whether failure-to-appear warrants are called in. Changes like these were implemented during the pandemic, and jail populations dropped precipitously, with little downside.

Researchers agree that behavioral health problems, which are disproportionately experienced by incarcerated individuals, are best addressed in a community setting, not in jail. Treating people who struggle with mental illness or substance abuse elsewhere could radically reduce a jail population. And the expense could be far less than the many millions a new jail costs to design, build, and operate.

In some communities, grassroots coalitions opposing the construction of bigger jails are now scrutinizing architects’ feasibility studies. In California, for example, Decarcerate Sacramento succeeded in pausing an almost $1 billion jail expansion project while officials commissioned a third-party review of a justice architecture firm’s studies. In Berks County, Pennsylvania, another citizen-led group organized residents and forced a yearlong break in talks about a larger jail.

Back in Allen County, Indiana, Help Not Handcuffs is organizing against the jail. “Our stance has been, let’s figure out how to keep the jail where it is. Reduce the population and renovate the jail at a fraction of the cost of the proposed one, saving $200 million of taxpayers’ money,” said Emmanuel Ortiz, the coalition’s coordinator. “Nonviolent offenders, drug problems, people having mental health crises — that’s been a guidepost for our efforts, how to get people out of the jail.”

If reforms like those had been made two years ago, Ian Bazur-Persing may have gotten the mental health treatment he needed. Instead, he’s serving 15 years in an Indiana state prison.

The post The Little-Known Reason Counties Keep Building Bigger Jails: Architecture Firms appeared first on The Intercept.

Created by the Israeli company High Lander, Orion allows users to direct hundreds of drones at once by automating them to navigate and perform actions without user input. The software system turns drones into “next-generation security guards,” according to an Orion brochure.

In February, High Lander held a demo event in Baton Rouge to showcase the “drone-in-a-box solution,” which the East Baton Rouge Sherrif’s Office first tested out last June. “The system will be a game changer for the fight against crime in Baton Rouge,” High Lander wrote in a LinkedIn post about the event, which was attended by officers from around the country.

The company has used its pilot program in Louisiana to encourage other police agencies to check out Orion, and its February event in Louisiana was just one part of a tour that included stops in San Diego, Phoenix, and Miami, according to LinkedIn posts.

Orion’s capabilities are startling. A police force could have drones automatically launch from charging stations when triggered by “events like gunshots, burglaries, and car accidents.” Once they deploy, the drones can perform pre-set tasks: releasing cargo; relaying live video feeds; identifying and searching for people, objects, or vehicles using AI and thermal sensors; and making announcements over loudspeaker. If the system gets multiple calls, Orion can automatically choose which to prioritize. 

A High Lander blog post about the project adds “new capabilities are being discovered all the time.”

The East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office held “mock scenario testing” with High Lander’s system “approximately 5 times,” Casey Hicks, the department’s public information director, told The Intercept. Hicks added that the demos were conducted at the sheriff’s range facility and that they “are not aware of any use out in the community at any time.” 

High Lander did not respond to a request for comment.

There is a documented history of U.S.-Israel security tech exchanges, which civil rights and racial justice advocates have long criticized for contributing to the militarization of the police. The Tel Aviv-based High Lander collaborated with Stephenson Technologies Corporation, a Louisiana nonprofit that works with the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, to bring Orion to East Baton Rouge, with up to $1 million in backing from the Israel–U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation. That funding comes from an endowment provided equally by the U.S. and Israeli governments. 

“People should be really concerned that our tax dollars are often being put right in the pockets of American and Israeli tech millionaires or billionaires, and that those technologies are then used on us and our neighbors to make people more unsafe,” said Lou Blumberg, an organizer with both Jewish Voice for Peace and Eye on Surveillance, an organization that monitors the adoption of surveillance technology in New Orleans. 

“This technology that’s coming out of Israel is heavily implicated in human rights abuses,” Blumberg said, “because you can’t separate the tech from the apartheid.”

From Israel to Louisiana

In East Baton Rouge, High Lander and Stephenson Technologies integrated the drone platform “with the city of Baton Rouge’s citywide system of gunshot sensors” for testing by the sheriff’s department, according to High Lander’s website. In a December post about the project, the company quoted an employee who said “it was a great feeling to see that first autonomous dispatch.”

The city uses ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection technology recently dropped by the city of Chicago due to critiques of racist bias and inaccuracy.

The East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office has long been accused of mistreating and harassing people of color — including using acoustic weapons on protesters without proper training — raising concerns among local advocates about its use of Orion.

When Israeli security tech is exported to the United States, it is “used to surveil and criminalize, mostly, young Black boys,” said Blumberg. Pointing to other types of surveillance technology, including facial recognition, Blumberg added, “There’s actually no statistical evidence that it helps prevent crimes” or “that it helps make people safer.”

The head of training at the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office, Carl Dabadie, participated in a police training program in Israel about a decade ago — and promised to bring his learnings back to the local community.

The Anti-Defamation League invited Dabadie, then the chief of the Baton Rouge Police Department, to attend a National Counter-Terrorism Seminar in Israel in 2014. Seeking airfare for the training, Dabadie said there are “several terrrist targets” [sic] in Baton Rouge, apparently referring to local oil refineries, according to a document obtained through a public records request. He returned from the eight-day seminar, during which participants visited an Israeli police department in Jerusalem and a border outpost, and told local media he had plans to update the department’s riot gear.

“Instead of real bullets and shooting at people, they use foam bullets, tear gas, shields, and even paintballs,” he enthused.

Dabadie left the police department in the wake of his violent handling of protests over the 2016 police killing of Alton Sterling, which earned condemnations from Amnesty International and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association. Still, Dabadie defended “our militarized tactics and our militarized law enforcement.” In 2020, he was made head of training for the sheriff’s office.

Protesters and civil rights groups sued several police departments and officials, including Dabadie and East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux III, for violating their civil rights during the 2016 protests. 

In court proceedings stemming from one of the lawsuits, an officer testified that police had “fooled around” with a crowd-dispersing acoustic weapon and used it against protesters without sufficient training. (Those plaintiffs were awarded a $1.2 million settlement last year.)

The lawyer who filed that lawsuit, William Most, told The Intercept that the sheriff’s department’s track record makes him concerned about its use of an autonomous drone system. 

“Given EBRSO’s past trouble in complying with the Constitution, I would be concerned about it adopting a drone program without clear safeguards to protect the rights of Baton Rouge residents,” said Most.

In Israel, meanwhile, High Lander’s business has flourished amid Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza. After October 7, Israel passed an emergency measure saying that civilian drones can return to the skies only if they are connected to an approved unmanned traffic management, or UTM, system. High Lander became the first approved UTM system in Israel. (The country’s Air Force previously tested the company’s drone technology.)

The drones have “counter-drone” measures that can take over and land enemy drones, and detect the location of their controllers. In an April presentation, High Lander’s co-founder Alon Abelson, a former Israeli Air Force commander, describes a scenario in which Orion allows users to deploy “hundreds of PTZ [pan-tilt-zoom] cameras that hover and relay images from the air,” a surveillance capacity he described as unprecedented.

The company relies on hundreds of sensors around Israel, Abelson said in his talk, allowing them to turn drone fleets “into part of an information-sharing system that did not exist before.” The system allows settlements’ drones to automatically launch from chargers when triggered by cameras, smoke detectors, or “smart fences.” Since October 7, he said, “we have provided this system to hundreds of settlements throughout the country.”

The post An Israeli Company Is Hawking Its Self-Launching Drone System to U.S. Police Departments appeared first on The Intercept.

It doesn’t take much to be accused of supporting terrorism these days. And that doesn’t just go for student activists. In recent months, dozens of lawmakers and public officials have, without evidence, insinuated that U.S. news outlets provide material support for Hamas. Some even issued thinly veiled threats to prosecute news organizations over those bogus allegations.

Their letters were political stunts. Prosecutors would never have been able to carry their burden of proof under anti-terrorism laws, and all the pandering politicians who signed the letters knew that. But next time might be different, especially if nonprofit news outlets, such as The Intercept, manage to offend the government. 

That’s because a bill that passed the House with broad bipartisan support in April — after which a companion bill was immediately introduced in the Senate — would empower the secretary of the Treasury to revoke the nonprofit status of any organization deemed “terrorist supporting.” This week, the bill’s Senate sponsor, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced it as an amendment to must-pass legislation to renew the Federal Aviation Administration’s authorities. While it didn’t make the cut (the Senate didn’t vote on any of the dozens of proposed amendments), it’s likely to make its way to the Senate floor in another form soon.

Funding terrorism is already illegal, but the new bill would let the government avoid the red tape required for criminal prosecutions or official terrorist designations.

Related

In No Labels Call, Josh Gottheimer, Mike Lawler, and University Trustees Agree: FBI Should Investigate Campus Protests

You might think actionable support of terrorism is limited to intentional, direct contributions to terror groups. You’d be mistaken. Existing laws on material support for terrorism have long been criticized for their overbreadth and potential for abuse, not only against free speech but also against humanitarian aid providers. A recent letter from 135 rights organizations opposing the bill highlighted efforts to revoke the tax-exempt status of, or otherwise retaliate against, pro-Palestine student groups.

There’s no reason to believe the press is exempt from overreach. In their recent letters, elected officials called for terrorism investigations of the New York Times, Reuters, CNN, and the Associated Press, relying on allegations that those outlets bought photographs from Palestinian freelancers who covered Hamas’s October 7 attacks.

The feigned outrage originated with a spurious accusation, from an organization ironically calling itself HonestReporting, that those pictures evidenced that the photographers who took them had advance knowledge of the massacre. Otherwise how (other than, say, TV or the internet) would they have known where to go?

HonestReporting then reasoned that the news outlets that bought the pictures may have been in on it as well — because, of course, when an international news giant buys a picture from someone on its vast roster of freelancers, it’s reasonable to impute the freelancer’s alleged sins all the way up the chain.

HonestReporting eventually walked back that convoluted theory, admitting it had no evidence and was merely asking questions. After forcing the news outlets to publicly deny having ties to Hamas, HonestReporting said it believed them.

But that didn’t stop U.S. officials from surmising that the fact some Palestinian freelancers in Gaza had contacts with Hamas officials — which should not be surprising, given that Hamas is the governing authority in the besieged enclave — made anyone who hired them terrorism financiers.

And it gets even worse. One of the letters — signed by over a dozen state attorneys general — floated the theory that the outlets’ reporting could itself evidence support for Hamas. As the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker (another nonprofit news site, operated by Freedom of the Press Foundation, where I work) put it:

The letter also highlighted that “material support” for terrorist groups — both a federal and state crime — can include “writing and distributing publications supporting the organization.” It did not elaborate on what would be considered support, potentially chilling any reporting that does not unequivocally condemn Hamas or unilaterally support Israel.

The attorneys general then warned the outlets that they would “continue to follow your reporting to ensure that your organizations do not violate any federal or State laws by giving material support to terrorists abroad.” The writers continued: “Now your organizations are on notice. Follow the law.”

Many of those same attorneys general recently argued that “First Amendment speech and associational freedoms do not protect persons who provide material support” to terrorism. They failed to mention the Supreme Court’s skepticism that “applications of the material-support statute to speech or advocacy will survive First Amendment scrutiny … even if the Government were to show that such speech benefits foreign terrorist organizations.”

Members of Congress have set their eyes on news outlets as well. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., parroted HonestReporting’s disinformation in multiple letters, while 15 congressional representatives demanded that the news outlets provide information — potentially including source identities and communications — regarding the freelancers, threatening to issue subpoenas.

If there is any doubt about the nonprofit bill’s backers’ intentions, consider that five of its House sponsors also signed onto a letter to the Internal Revenue Service asking how it defines antisemitism and insinuating that the IRS should deny tax-exempt status to nonprofits that “promote conduct that is counter to public policy,” even if they’re not accused of supporting terrorism at all. 

Nonprofit news outlets are already struggling even without government harassment, but revocation of their tax-exempt status would be a death knell for outlets doing the kind of in-depth investigative journalism that is hardly ever profitable these days. The mere prospect would chill reporting, not only on Israel but also on U.S. foreign policy generally. And that’s not to mention the threat to nonprofit press freedom organizations that journalists depend on to protect their rights (including to not get killed in Gaza).

Unfortunately, this is just the latest piece of reckless, unnecessary “national security” legislation that puts the press at risk. Last month, President Joe Biden ignored civil liberties advocates and signed into law a bill that would allow intelligence agencies to enlist any “service provider” to help the U.S. spy on foreigners.

As Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., explained, the law could “forc[e] an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.” And that office could easily be a newsroom, where journalists often talk to foreigners whose communications might interest U.S. intelligence agencies.

Is the government going to immediately start conscripting reporters to surveil their sources, or shutting down nonprofit news outlets that stray from the Israeli military’s narrative? Probably not. But history teaches that once officials are given the power to retaliate against journalists they don’t like, they inevitably will. The prospect of the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act being weaponized against journalism was also once merely hypothetical — until it wasn’t.

And let’s not forget that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee publicly fantasizes about jailing and otherwise retaliating against journalists.

Those who claim a second Donald Trump term would mark the end of democracy need to stop passing overbroad and unnecessary new laws handing him, and future authoritarians, brand new ways to harass and silence journalists who don’t toe the line.

The post Criticizing Israel? Nonprofit Media Could Lose Tax-Exempt Status Without Due Process appeared first on The Intercept.

“I know what it’s like to see a dead fish that’s been speared,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like this.”

A series of cyclones and storms had battered the region in early 2022, and in the days afterward, the air was still and calm. As Randimbisoa paddled around in his dugout canoe, he recognized the different species and called them by their local names: fiambazaha, saroa, vily, and malemiloha. Overnight, the fish he made his living from, the fish his wife and children ate, the fish that supported the entire lakeside community, were nearly gone.

“It was scary, because we have been eating fish from this lake for so long. We have fed our families, and now it’s polluted,” said Randimbisoa. “We have told our families not to go to the lake.”

Randimbisoa has a theory about what killed the fish. “It’s dirty water from the factory of QMM,” he said.

Lake Ambavarano, where Randimbisoa works, is connected to two other lakes — Besaroy and Lanirano — through a series of narrow waterways. The lakes are adjacent to QIT Madagascar Minerals, or QMM: a mine in Madagascar that’s 80 percent owned by the Anglo-Australian mining and metals behemoth Rio Tinto, and 20 percent by the government of Madagascar. The mine extracts ilmenite, a major source of titanium dioxide, which is mainly used as a white pigment in products like paints, plastics, and paper. QMM also produces monazite, a mineral that contains highly sought-after rare-earth elements used to produce the magnets in electric vehicles and wind turbines.

After the fish deaths, the government of Madagascar’s environmental regulator and Rio Tinto conducted water sampling work. Citing such testing, Rio Tinto says there is no proof that its mining killed the fish. Water sample analysis revealed “no conclusive link between our mine activities and the observed dead fish by community members,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to The Intercept. Those results have not been made available to the public, despite requests by civil society groups and The Intercept.

Now, more than 15 years after QMM became operational, Rio Tinto is facing a likely lawsuit in an English court brought by U.K.-based law firm Leigh Day on behalf of residents of villages near the QMM mine. In a letter of claim, a document that is an early step in a lawsuit in the U.K., the villagers accuse Rio Tinto of contaminating the waterways and lakes that they use for domestic purposes with elevated and harmful levels of uranium and lead, which pose a serious risk to human health. Leigh Day commissioned blood lead level testing in the area around the mine as part of its research into the claim. According to the letter of claim, which was sent on Tuesday, the testing shows that 58 people living around the mine have elevated levels of lead, and that the majority of cases exceed the threshold at which the World Health Organization recommends clinical and environmental interventions, 5 micrograms per deciliter. The claim alleges that the most likely cause of the elevated levels is a result of QMM’s mine processes.

“They and other local families are being forced to consume water which is contaminated with harmful heavy metals.”

“Whilst Rio Tinto extracts large profits from its mining operations in Madagascar, our clients’ case is that they and other local families are being forced to consume water which is contaminated with harmful heavy metals. In bringing this case, our clients are seeking accountability and justice for the damage that has been caused to their local environment and their health,” Paul Dowling, Leigh Day’s lead partner on the case, told The Intercept.

Leigh Day’s blood lead level testing results are a significant development that may for the first time quantify the detrimental health impacts their clients allege are posed by QMM. Surface water pollution and lead poisoning are both global problems, and the case will be watched closely not just by Rio Tinto shareholders, but by global environmental justice advocates in other nations where villagers also accuse industrial giants of polluting their waterways.

“We have received the letter from Leigh Day,” said the Rio Tinto spokesperson, who declined further comment on the allegations. The spokesperson pointed to a published report that states that the company’s recent water analysis had not detected metals, including uranium and lead, that had previously been identified as potential concerns.

Madagascar’s environmental regulator, the National Office for the Environment, or ONE, says it has periodically monitored QMM’s activities over the last decade and has tested the water following past complaints about contamination. “In the face of these accusations, ONE requested several expert analyses … the results of which indicated no contamination of surface waters nor mining sites,” Hery Rajaomanana, ONE’s director of environmental integration and sustainable development, told The Intercept in March.

Rio Tinto, which has over 52,000 employees and saw net earnings of $12.4 billion in 2022, has a troubled track record in Madagascar. Local residents, civil society groups, and media outlets have accused the company of damaging the endangered forest, threatening rare endemic species, forcing villagers off their land without proper compensation, destroying fishers’ livelihoods, and failing to honor its promises to employ local people. Communities have been protesting the mine almost since its inception. Last year, skirmishes broke out in June and lasted more than a week as residents blocked road access to the mine. The government called in the police and army to assert control.

“QMM operates in a highly sensitive area from a water and broader environmental perspective,” wrote the Rio Tinto spokesperson who declined to attach a name to the statements from the company. “We are committed to working to address any specific issues that community members raise, and to engaging in constructive dialogue on how we can mitigate impacts of our operations while generating tangible and sustainable benefits for our host communities.”

The 150-year-old metals and mining giant has been embroiled in scandal for years. In 2020, Rio Tinto blew up two ancient Aboriginal Australian sites to expand its iron ore mining in the region. In 2022, a review conducted by Australia’s former sex discrimination commissioner found that bullying, sexism, and racism were rampant across the company. In March 2023, Rio Tinto agreed to pay a $15 million penalty to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after accusations surfaced that in 2011 it paid $10.5 million to a friend of the Guinean president to retain iron ore mining rights. Despite this, its Guinea project, the world’s largest and highest-grade new iron ore mine, is scheduled to move ahead this year. The company also plans to build on sacred Indigenous land in Arizona, has been accused of financial impropriety in Mozambique and Mongolia, and is currently facing pressure from investors over water quality concerns at several of its mining sites, including in Madagascar and Mongolia.

In early 2023, two longtime Rio Tinto insiders — Maurice Duffy, a top-level executive coach, and Richard Bowley, a project management mining executive — wrote a series of confidential reports commissioned by the Mongolian government’s anti-corruption regulator. The Intercept obtained two of the draft reports, which outlined allegations about Rio Tinto’s culture of bullying, bribery, and corruption in countries around the world from 2015 until 2023.

The Rio Tinto spokesperson said that the confidential reports have “not been published, and despite requests, we have not had the opportunity to review,” and did not provide an on-the-record response to most of the allegations. The Mongolian regulator did not respond to questions about the draft reports.

According to one of the draft reports, Duffy, a consultant, said he stopped working with Rio Tinto in 2018 because of concerns about the company’s conduct. He said that after his departure, Rio Tinto instructed him to destroy thousands of records documenting ethical issues, among them proof of irregular payments made in Madagascar.

“I reported irregular payments to Rio Tinto. The allegations of irregular payments in Madagascar are based upon information given to me by Rio Tinto employees,” Duffy told The Intercept. “I can only confirm that they were stated as inappropriate and irregular.”

According to the draft report, the company stated in writing to Duffy that it had “regulatory approval” for the destruction to occur, but despite many requests, Duffy has been unable to get details on which regulators gave permission to destroy the documents. Duffy sent photographs of documents being shredded and incinerated to Rio Tinto, as they had requested, the draft report states.

Rio Tinto’s spokesperson wrote, “We take our disclosure obligations extremely seriously and strongly refute any suggestion that this is not the case.”

One of the confidential draft reports offered an unnamed company executive’s perspective on legal challenges: “Our legal strategy is straightforward. FUCK them. Frustrate; Undermine; Cost; Kick into long grass.”

That report also outlined a key part of Rio Tinto’s strategy: using the chaotic nature of election campaigns to the company’s advantage. “Rio key strategy is based on the premise that Politicians always go short term,” the draft report reads. “It’s the nature of the beast, elections years are a good time to strike, and they can rely on their friends to filter the facts and articulate a different narrative.”

2023 was an election year in Madagascar, one of the world’s poorest countries, which rates 145 out of 180 on the global Corruption Perceptions Index. Incumbent President Andry Rajoelina faced a crowded field of opposition candidates, and he won in an election marred by accusations of fraud, low voter turnout, and violence.

Last August, Rajoelina’s top aide was arrested in London, accused of soliciting a bribe from the British mining company Gemfields to secure licenses to operate in Madagascar. Rajoelina fired the aide, who was convicted in a London court in February. Amid that chaos, Rio Tinto was renegotiating its 1998 fiscal agreement with the government. The parties finalized new terms in August 2023. As part of the agreement, Rio Tinto committed money to infrastructure and local community projects. The company hopes to expand into Petriky and Sainte Luce, two additional sites located along Madagascar’s eastern coastline.

Paradise Lost

QMM started exploring for heavy mineral sands around Anôsy, Madagascar, along the southeastern coast in 1986. The region is home to about 800,000 people, with more than 90 percent of rural residents living on less than $1.90 per day.

The area where the minerals were discovered is a unique ecosystem, a littoral forest occurring in the sandy substrates close to the Indian Ocean. Madagascar once had a continuous 1,600-kilometer band of littoral forest along its eastern coastline. Today, it’s estimated that only a fraction of that forest remains intact, like patches of hair on a thinning beard. New species are being discovered there all the time, but many of them are already endangered due to habitat destruction. Yet the region, with its famous lemurs and a concentrated diversity of plant species, remains one of the most important and fragile ecosystems in the world.

It is also one of the most beautiful places in the world. Towering, forested mountains cast shadows on sparkling freshwater lakes that flow through tranquil sandy beaches into the abundant waters of the Indian Ocean. Tiny dugout canoes manned by the region’s fishers dot the waterways. Women wearing mud masks to protect their skin from the sun bake fresh bread that rivals the baguettes in Parisian boulangeries. On clear evenings, the sunsets splash a palette of warm colors into the sky.

Fifty-two-year-old Tahiry Ratsiambahotra is the founder of LuSud, an activist organization that has become a thorn in the sides of the government and Rio Tinto. He grew up in Fort Dauphin but says he relocated to France after the government targeted him for his activism. (The Malagasy government did not respond to questions about LuSud.)

“I love this country,” he said. “I married an Anôsy wife. My children are Anôsy. I have a deep feeling that Fort Dauphin is my life.”

Ratsiambahotra remembers what Fort Dauphin looked like before Rio Tinto came into town. It used to be one of Madagascar’s top ecotourism destinations, attracting avid nature lovers and placid beachgoers alike. Locals talk about the city in terms of “before” and “after” the mine was built. “Before,” Fort Dauphin was a sleepy paradise, dotted with romantically named beach resorts, but it has turned into something grittier. The paint on the exteriors of the hotels is peeling. The forests are being cut down. Trucks spewing black exhaust dominate the roads. “After,” locals say, there are only the haves and the have-nots: the people with cushy jobs who benefit from the mine, and everyone else.

In the 1990s, after learning about Rio Tinto’s exploration of the area, Ratsiambahotra educated himself about the possible risks associated with a large-scale mineral sands project, including the potential for radioactive materials to be released into the surrounding environment, and grew alarmed.

“When I saw that the people in this country don’t have the capacity to understand what kind of impact this project can involve, I felt that as a learned person, I have a responsibility to investigate first and to acquire all the information needed to deeply understand the project, and then share it with the people,” he said.

So, in 1998, Ratsiambahotra started LuSud. In his capacity as founder, Ratsiambahotra says he met with local and national government officials to talk them out of moving ahead with the project.

“When I saw in the Establishment Agreement that the benefit to the Madagascar people was very, very tiny, I was shocked. They tried to exploit the Madagascar people,” he said, referring to the deal between the company and the government. “I asked to meet the Parliament at the time to convince them that this was not a project for us.”

Ratsiambahotra says he also collected 5,000 signatures from local villagers who were against the mine. To build QMM, Rio Tinto would have to buy land and property and displace a number of families. A World Bank assessment estimated that around 1,900 people would be temporarily or permanently displaced.

“They knew if QMM took the land, they were lost. So, they tried to protect the land,” Ratsiambahotra said. “But they were afraid of the government, because they were powerful. So, this is a question. They could fight against QMM, but how to fight against their own government?”

We were “eggs fighting against stones,” said 40-year-old Georges Marolahy Razafidrafara, a resident of Mandramondramotra, the village located closest to the mine.

In the end, the eggs lost the fight. QMM became one of the first large-scale investors in Madagascar in 1998, when the company signed an agreement with the government that allowed for concessionary breaks on taxes, duties, and royalties.

“People didn’t yet understand the ecological impact of the mine,” Ratsiambahotra said. “So, Parliament adopted the agreement.”

“People Were Eating So Well”

Mbola Jeannot is the patriarch of a large family living in a two-bedroom hut in a fishing village on the ocean shore. One day, representatives from QMM came to see him about land needed for the mine’s operations.

“They didn’t bargain,” said Jeannot. “They said, ‘Where is your land? Here? Everyone stand in your portion of land. This is yours? OK, here is your money.’”

Jeannot says he received a check and that he added his thumbprint to the bottom of the document of sales signed by the CEO of QMM, indicating that he read and understood the agreement.

Jeannot couldn’t afford to say no to the money. He felt that “we would have lost our land” either way, he said.

Since then, hundreds of Malagasy people around the region have tried to resist evictions and relocation and to get paid fairly for their lost lands. In 2010, Leigh Day considered taking action against Rio Tinto on behalf of villagers seeking compensation. The process fell apart, however, after many claimants accepted compensation from QMM. Rio Tinto and Leigh Day declined to comment.

The extractive industry watchdog Publish What You Pay conducted a community survey of 368 villagers living around the mine in March 2022. (The global watchdog’s in-country research was done by a coalition of 11 local civil society groups, led at the time by Transparency International’s Madagascar chapter.) The report found that over 90 percent of survey respondents said they had suffered as a result of losing access to natural resources, including their land. A third of respondents said they lost their lands directly to QMM. 60 percent of those surveyed said that they had received compensation from the mining company, 65 percent of whom reported difficulties in collecting this compensation.

This David-and-Goliath dynamic is typical of the company. Rio Tinto wields tremendous influence in Madagascar, which has a gross domestic product of at least $14 billion, less than half the GDP of the state of Vermont. Like other businesses, QMM pays fees to Madagascar’s environmental regulator for monitoring services. According to civil society reports, QMM’s fees come to $30,000-$40,000 per year. “How can we ever expect the ONE to be independent in its assessment when it’s fueled by companies?” said Ketakandriana Rafitoson, the national coordinator of Publish What You Pay Madagascar. (Rajaomanana, of the National Office for the Environment, told The Intercept that “ONE remains totally independent and objective in the realization of its monitoring duties.”)

Before building QMM, the company conducted a series of assessments to determine the potential social, environmental, and economic impacts of the mine on the surrounding area. Baseline water testing from 2001 revealed that the surface water from lakes and rivers surrounding the mine was free from high levels of cadmium, lead, and uranium.

To support its mining operations, QMM planned to construct a weir, or barrier, where Lake Ambavarano meets the mouth of the estuary that connects to the Indian Ocean to control water flows and water level heights. But the company was warned that the weir had the potential to permanently change the occasionally brackish lagoon system into freshwater, which would affect fish and fisherfolk in the region. With support from the World Bank, it also built a port in Fort Dauphin to export raw materials to Rio Tinto’s processing plant in Canada.

Despite myriad concerns by LuSud, the World Bank, and other bodies involved in early impact assessments of the mine, QMM received a legal license to begin operations in 2005. The license covered three mine sites to be mined sequentially under a 100-year lease from the Malagasy government. QMM’s mine and processing facility was built by Fluor, an American multinational engineering and construction giant. Mine managers estimated that at peak capacity, QMM would be able to produce nearly 2 million tons of unrefined ilmenite ore. Ilmenite ore imports to the U.S. were priced at $290 per ton in 2022.

The mine became operational in 2008. The barrier ended up entirely blocking inundations of salt water into Lake Ambavarano. Soon, nearly all the species of fish that thrived in the brackish conditions were gone. The March 2022 Publish What You Pay community survey found that at least 27 fish species appear to have completely disappeared from the lakes since the start of the Rio Tinto mining operation.

Olivier Randimbisoa is one of the lake fishermen affected by the weir. Working as a tour guide, ferrying visitors across the lakes on a white motorboat in his uniform of flip-flops and board shorts, Randimbisoa is always looking for business opportunities to help feed his wife of 16 years and his four children. He also serves as a lake police officer of sorts, checking on people’s nets to ensure they don’t catch pregnant fish or young fish that should be left to grow larger before being caught.

“Before the weir, people were eating so well. They were happy. They were fishing,” he said, carefully captaining the boat through the winding waterways that connect the lakes.

Randimbisoa has been fishing since he was 10 years old. Before the barrier was built, he could choose whether he wanted to catch crab, shrimp, ocean fish, or lake fish. Now, he catches the few species that are still around. Before, he could use any type of net to fish. Now he can only use a net with small eyes attached to a long rope because larger fish are scarce. Before, he could make 100,000 ariary (around $22.40) each day from fishing. Now, he says he’s barely making a fraction of that.

Carefully steering his boat in the shallows, Randimbisoa comes alongside two young men standing in chest-high water near the lake shore. Their arms pump methodically as they haul in a long fishing net. It takes nearly 20 minutes, and as they work Randimbisoa asks them questions. The men say they have been fishing since 7 a.m. In those three hours, they’ve gotten only one small cup of tiny silver fish. They say they can sell that for around 1,500 ariary (about $0.34) at the market. It’s not enough.

When QMM started operating, Randimbisoa says, the company assured him that it would assess how much he earned and compensate him if his work was affected by the mine. For a while, the company made regular payments to community members, but these payments stopped abruptly without explanation, Randimbisoa said. Rio Tinto did not respond to The Intercept’s question about the payments.

In 2019, QMM’s external Independent International Advisory Panel met with the fishers to assess their situations. “It is doubtful that any other community in the area has suffered greater direct damage to its livelihood from the mine’s operations,” the panel concluded. “Accordingly, we recommend urgent steps to remedy their situation.”

The lake fisherfolk are not the only ones affected by the mine. The region is also home for ocean fishermen. This is far more dangerous work. The men go out late at night on flimsy wooden boats that they row past rough breaking waves into deeper waters. The fish are bigger, but so is the risk.

Jeannot is an ocean fisherman. He’s handsome, with stocky barrel legs, a muscular build, and a warm smile that reveals a row of perfectly white teeth. Decades working at sea have kept him strong and healthy. Only the gray curling hairs on his head betray his age of 57 years.

Jeannot has been catching ocean fish and lobster since he was 14 years old. Like most people in the village, he never finished school. When he grew older, he passed his trade down to his sons. His eldest son Jossé Randrianambinina drowned at sea during a fishing expedition in 2015. His body was never recovered, and Jeannot has only one laminated photograph of him taken in 2011.

Jeannot now fishes with his younger son, 38-year-old Randria Mazakazézé, or Zézé for short. Jeannot and Zézé often leave home at 6 p.m. and fish all night in two different areas along the coastline. One of their best spots used to be a small fishing harbor in a natural bay that provides some protection against the strong winds.

But then QMM selected this harbor to build its port. It did so without consultation from the ocean fishers, Jeannot said. When construction on the port began, the fishers were warned that it could take up to 33 months to build. QMM compensated them during the construction period, and the fishers were told they could go back to work once it was completed.

But they were not told that construction of the port would permanently affect the quantity and species of fish in the harbor. Or that they would be permitted to fish there only during specific times when container ships were not using the port.

“In my opinion, our livelihoods have been destroyed,” Jeannot said. “The environment surrounding the port has been destroyed.”

Over the past 18 months, QMM has undertaken a grievance and compensation program with the government of Madagascar and community representatives to address such concerns. “By March 2023, over 5,000 eligible fisherfolk and natural resource users received compensation from QMM, based on the cumulative impact of QMM’s operations for each specific group deemed eligible since operations began,” the Rio Tinto spokesperson said. “Land claimants were deemed not eligible under this process and were managed by a separate process between the land claimants and the authorities.”

Heavy Sands

The QMM mine extracts ilmenite from mineral-rich sands by creating shallow, unlined, water-filled basins between 5 to 15 meters deep. By churning up the sands and passing them through a floating dredge, the mining process filters out the heavier sands, which contain ilmenite. The ilmenite is then extracted using electrostatic processing and shipped to Rio Tinto’s plant in Canada. Despite its small size, Madagascar was the fourth largest exporter of ilmenite in the world in 2022.

The mineral sands also contain radioactive elements, including uranium and thorium. The process of churning the sand allows these radioactive elements to dissolve in the mining water, which is then discharged as wastewater.

The Malagasy regulator requires an 80-meter buffer zone between a mining operation and any ecologically sensitive area to avoid contamination. In 2015, the government regulator approved QMM’s request to reduce this buffer zone from 80 to 50 meters. But in 2017, Yvonne Orengo, director of the Andrew Lees Trust, a charity also known as ALT-UK that works on environmental issues in Madagascar, accused Rio Tinto of breaching the buffer zone based on a series of satellite images she captured using Google Earth.

Rio Tinto initially denied the breach in correspondence with ALT-UK that was reviewed by The Intercept. The company agreed to conduct an independent study and identified a private company called Ozius to carry it out. To ensure an independent review, Orengo enlisted the help of Steven Emerman, a groundwater and mining expert, to conduct his own study. Using Ozius’s data as well as Google Earth images, Emerman calculated that, in addition to breaching the buffer zone, the company had encroached onto the lakebed by 117 meters, bringing the total breach to 167 meters, he said.

In early 2019, QMM announced that it would revise its plans and revert back to the 80-meter buffer zone. It later acknowledged that it had breached the original buffer zone, but only admitted to a 90-meter encroachment.

In mining, materials that are left over after the extraction process — like the mining basin water and scrap sands — are referred to as tailings. Tailings occur in mines around the world, can be highly toxic or radioactive, and should be contained and treated. But in reality, cost-cutting has led to sloppy standards, which in turn has caused a number of global disasters, like a 2019 tailings dam collapse in Brazil that killed 270 people.

The QMM mine relies on a “natural” system, usually referred to as passive water treatment, to treat its mining basin water. It releases the contaminated water into a series of “settling paddocks” to reduce the levels of floating particles, one indicator of water quality. When the water in the paddocks gets too high, the mine offloads the water into naturally occurring wetlands that connect to a nearby river. The idea is that the process of moving through the settling paddocks and wetlands would rid the mining basin water of its more harmful elements and allow safe water to flow into the surrounding environment.

One issue with passive water treatment systems is that they can remove contaminants, like lead and uranium, from process water and store them in the wetland sediment. A later change in wetland water chemistry, such as an increase in acidity, could remobilize those heavy metals back into dissolved form in the water column. “This is why passive water treatment systems are sometimes referred to as ‘chemical time bombs,’” explained Emerman.

Rio Tinto refers to its tailings dam as a berm, or an artificial embankment, and its tailings as process water — and thus denies having any tailings at QMM at all. In response to a question about tailings dam safety posed at the 2022 annual general meeting, Rio Tinto’s former board chair Simon Thompson asserted, “There is no tailings dam at QMM. The berm you refer to is an embankment made of sand which separates the mine from the external environment. … There are no tailings at QMM.”

There have been reports of berm failures at QMM since mining began, resulting in large releases of harmful mine waste. The first two were made in 2010 and 2018, with dead fish appearing in the lakes after the 2018 overflow.

In August 2020, QMM stopped regularly discharging its process water into the surrounding wetlands. The following year, Rio Tinto released a report that concluded that its “natural” filtration system was not working as expected, and excess levels of aluminum and cadmium were being released into the water around the mine.

Two additional berm failures occurred in early 2022, after a series of cyclones and other severe weather events battered the region. Shortly afterward, QMM carried out a controlled water release, authorized by the Malagasy regulator, to mitigate against another accidental berm breach and an uncontrolled incident that “could have significantly impacted the environment surrounding our operation,” Rio Tinto wrote on its website. Dead fish had started appearing in the lakes again, which is what Randimbisoa, the fisherman, had witnessed. In response, the authorities banned fishing, which led to widespread protests from communities living around the mine.

“When the river was polluted, we were not able to fish and all the fishermen were starving,” said Ramartial, a 58-year-old partially blind fisherman who lives on the shore of Lake Lanirano. Ramartial has seven children to feed. The local government “stopped us from fishing for months, and there was no compensation for that,” he said.

In addition to the water analysis QMM and the Malagasy environmental regulator conducted after the 2022 dead fish incident, Rio Tinto also commissioned a South African environmental research center to investigate the causes of the fish deaths. Those results have not been published yet.

In April 2022, ALT-UK also commissioned Stella Swanson, a Canada-based aquatic ecologist and radioactivity specialist, to analyze the potential causes of the fish deaths. She concluded that “the combination of acidic water and elevated aluminum in the water released from the QMM site is the most probable connection between the water releases and the fish kills observed after those releases.”

Rio Tinto maintained that its mining operations were not responsible for the fish deaths. Yet a similar combination of metals and low pH, or acidity, in water has caused fish deaths near multiple other mining sites. In the United States, for example, former lead and zinc mines at the Tar Creek Superfund site in Oklahoma caused environmental devastation and poisoned fish and people living around the mining sites, said Earl Hatley, the co-founder of LEAD Agency Inc., a grassroots environmental justice organization in the state.

With fishing no longer a viable option for single-income families, people have been forced to find other ways to make money.

“Life has gone badly since QMM took the port,” said Flogone Razatihanta, Zézé’s chatty 38-year-old wife. Razatihanta is a charismatic woman with sparkling eyes. A mother of four, she used to work as a fisherman’s wife, helping him sell his catch at the market. Like other fishers, they could make around 100,000 ariary on a good day, she says. Now, she says, that number is closer to 30,000 (about $6.72).

To help the family, Razatihanta joined a women’s weaving cooperative established by a nonprofit with financial support from QMM. Anôsy women are masterful weavers, making everything from baskets to rugs from a local reed called mahampy.

At the studio, which is located on a nearby college campus, dozens of women gather around a few long tables. A leather maker has come from Antananarivo to do some training workshops for them. Razatihanta sits cross-legged on the floor of the adjoining showroom, surrounded by colorful woven baskets. The problem is that she has no market to sell them. The project has provided the skills and training but has failed to connect the women to market opportunities. Zézé and Razatihanta say they are unable to send all their children to school at the same time, because they don’t have enough money.

Another challenge is procuring the high-quality mahampy needed to make the items. Ever since the mine was constructed, the mahampy forests along the water have been degraded, locals say. They don’t produce enough, forcing the women to buy from sellers outside the region.

“We have mahampy but it’s not enough,” said Razatihanta. “We have no access to it anymore.”

Blood and Water

Clean water has long been an issue around the QMM mine, and in recent years, it has become the main issue. Around 15,000 people draw their drinking water from the lakes and waterways around the mine.

Rio Tinto has made numerous promises around water provision for locals. “We believe that access to safe and clean water is a fundamental human right and continue to make this a community development priority,” the Rio Tinto spokesperson told The Intercept.

In July 2022, the company commissioned a global water treatment company to design and construct a pilot-scale unit to treat water using controlled addition of limestone, “so that it complies with the national decree for pH and aluminum concentration,” the spokesperson said. The plant has treated approximately 1,750,000 m³ of water during its first year of operation and will be expanded to a full-scale plant in 2024.

Today, residents complain of a water hierarchy in the area. Water treated in the QMM facility is intended only for the mine workforce and certain communities living close to the mine, QMM explained in its most recent water report.

Water treated in the QMM facility is intended only for the mine workforce and certain communities living close to the mine.

In that report, released at the end of 2023, QMM’s managing director David-Alexandre Tremblay wrote, “we have heard concerns that our operations at Mandena are potentially causing harm to the quality and availability of water,” and emphasized that QMM is trying to address concerns about the transparency and equity of water management.

One strategy is to develop a community-led water monitoring program. “We believe the more we involve the communities in water management, and understand how they use the land and environment, the better our water strategy will be,” said Rio Tinto’s spokesperson.

After Orengo, the director of ALT-UK, discovered the buffer zone breach discovery in 2017, ALT-UK asked Swanson, the ecologist from Canada, to conduct a radioactivity study to determine the presence of radioactive material in the surrounding waterways. The study found that uranium was detectable — in concentrations up to 50 times the WHO drinking water quality guidelines for chemical toxicity — in samples from all QMM’s river water monitoring stations.

“The QMM mine definitely releases more uranium into water on the site, thus creating an enhanced source of uranium to the Mandromondromotra River and Lac Ambavarano,” Swanson wrote in a 2019 memo.

In a response, QMM denied having any impact on the high levels of uranium in the water and claimed that the elevated levels were a naturally occurring result of local geological conditions. “This is not a QMM related impact and is an aspect of the water used by local communities before the commencement of construction or operations at QMM,” the company argued.

But the company has started bringing in water by boat to villages along the lakes anyway. It is also building water treatment facilities and pumps as it attempts to create permanent safe water infrastructure for the local population. These efforts are still underway, with half-completed construction projects dotting the landscape. And they are happening years after the mine became operational, and only after disruptive protests by the residents.

Following Swanson’s radioactivity study, Emerman, the mining expert who studied the breach, conducted his own analysis using data from Rio Tinto and samples collected by local residents. It revealed that the maximum downstream lead and uranium concentrations were 40 and 52 times higher, respectively, than the WHO-recommended standards for drinking water. Emerman also found that lead levels were 4.9 times higher downstream of the mine, and uranium levels were 24 times higher downstream. According to Emerman, these results, and their contrast with the 2001 baseline study, point to QMM as the source of contamination.

Because uranium is highly toxic, inhalation or ingestion can result in decreased kidney function or, in extreme cases, kidney failure. Lead poisoning is a more familiar issue. There is no safe level of lead exposure. Thirty percent of global idiopathic intellectual disability is thought to be a result of lead exposure. While it affects everyone, lead exposure has the greatest negative impact on children when consumed, because it affects neurologic development.

“They put in a lot of safety measures in countries where people are watching. Not in countries like Madagascar, where nobody’s watching.”

“That’s largely because children’s neurological development is still very immature. So, they’re developing neurons, they’re forming millions of them per day. And neural development itself is critical to your long-term cognitive ability,” said Gabriel Filippelli, a biogeochemist with expertise in lead poisoning.

Pregnant mothers exposed to lead can suffer spontaneous abortions. Nursing mothers are also at great risk, because they share the lead with fetuses in the womb, through breastmilk or formula mixed with lead-contaminated water.

Mining source contamination is an all-too-familiar problem. “We know this is a problem with mines. The mine operators know that it’s a problem with mines,” said Filippelli. “So, that’s why they put in a lot of safety measures in countries where people are watching. Not in countries like Madagascar, where nobody’s watching.”

The fisherman Olivier Randimbisoa and his 24-year-old niece Morella Razafimandimby both have young children who have been drinking lake water since they were born. Both say they have a child who is passing blood in their urine, and both blame QMM. Doctors have been unable to determine the source of the problem, and the parents are frantic.

“All we need is to be healthy,” said Razafimandimby.

In this part of Madagascar, which is rife with parasites and water-borne illnesses, it’s difficult to assign blame for any particular child’s illness. The area is deficient in high-quality health care facilities. A visit to a center that the government touts as a top-tier facility revealed a three-room building with a leaking roof and five rotting mattresses. Despite serving dozens of small villages living adjacent to the mine, there were only nurses to see patients, rather than medical doctors. Power was unreliable. Refrigeration was scant.

There were no blood lead levels testing publicly available for the population living around the QMM mine until now. In its new claim, Leigh Day states that blood lead level testing on 58 people living around the mine, among them children, shows elevated levels of lead. Scientific studies have found that children with blood lead levels above the WHO’s threshold of 5 micrograms per deciliter are likely to suffer at least some amount of mental impairment as a result. 

An expert clinical toxicologist working with Leigh Day has recommended ongoing periodic blood lead testing for all 58 of the clients who were tested. For at-risk groups such as children, women of child-bearing age, and those with a blood lead level above the WHO reference level, the expert has recommended additional interventions including clinical monitoring, more frequent blood lead testing, nutritional supplements, and additional antenatal care, where appropriate. One client with particularly high blood lead levels has been advised to undergo chelation therapy, which helps remove pollutants from the bloodstream.

“Rio Tinto continues to make bold public commitments about safeguarding vital water sources and respecting the rights of those affected by its operations wherever in the world they may be,” said Dowling, of Leigh Day. “We trust the company will now stand behind those commitments and engage constructively with our clients’ claims at an early stage to ensure the communities no longer have to rely on polluted water and get the medical attention they need.”

Late last year, Rio Tinto released its QMM Water Report 2021-2023, which included new water sampling data as well as additional information about the company’s developing water management practices. The report showed that all parameters were below the analytical limits of detection upstream and downstream of the mine’s release point during the reporting period. However, Emerman independently assessed the report and expressed concern that Rio Tinto looked only at recent data in isolation and ignored baseline and historical data, used inconsistent detection limits, and even appeared to have two versions of what should be the same dataset. Nonetheless, Emerman concluded that the new data confirmed “the detrimental impact of the QMM mine on regional water quality,” and that it failed to alter his earlier conclusions. 

“As presented in the Water Report 2021-2023, acknowledging the challenges associated with the on-site laboratory analytical processes, we decided in 2021 to use external accredited laboratories to conduct water quality sample analyses and also initiated work to upgrade our on-site laboratory capability and processes,” the Rio Tinto spokesperson wrote in response. “The metal monitoring data presented in this Water Report is based only on external laboratory data obtained from [an] accredited laboratory. In addition to their accredited quality assurance procedures, this facility undertakes water quality analyses with limits of analytical detection that are more suitable for environmental assessment.”

Rio Tinto also published the results of a new radioactivity study that it commissioned. “QMM’s contribution to radiation dose within the community has been assessed and found to be far smaller than the variation in natural background radiation levels and below national and international regulatory limits for radiation,” Rio Tinto wrote in a press release announcing the study results. The study “concludes there is no basis for heightened health concerns around local radiation levels,” the spokesperson told The Intercept, adding that the company is committed to managing radiation, water quality, and working transparently with the regulator and the communities.

“The consequence of being wrong is an increase in the risk of people getting cancer.”

Swanson, the radioactivity expert, independently assessed the study. While commending improvements in monitoring, she nonetheless concluded that “the level of confidence in the conclusions presented in the report cannot be determined quantitatively because of limitations of the study design.” Swanson expressed particular concern about a lack of data from the river during times when QMM process wastewater was being discharged.

“If I were a decision-maker, and I was asking them, ‘Are you 95 percent confident, or are you only 80 percent confident in the results of the study?’, they wouldn’t be able to say,” Swanson told The Intercept. “The consequence of being wrong is an increase in the risk of people getting cancer.”

The Rio Tinto spokesperson wrote that the company has invited Swanson to give her feedback on the report, but that the meeting has not yet happened. “We are keen to discuss Dr Swanson’s views on the report,” the spokesperson wrote. “We remain committed to managing radiation at our operations, and to transparently working with the regulator and the host communities to ensure effective monitoring.”

Work Is Work

Because jobs are scarce in the region, attitudes toward the mine’s presence are complex and often contradictory. People resent the environmental degradation, health problems, and other changes to their way of life that they attribute to the mine. Yet it remains, for many, the only hope they have of escaping poverty and providing a higher standard of living for their children.

“We’ve faced many hardships in life,” said Razatihanta, Zézé’s wife. “My dream is that my husband doesn’t have to work, so he doesn’t have to fish.” Razatihanta wants her sons to get their driving licenses, so they can get jobs as drivers at QMM. “The mine is already there, so what can we do?” she asks. “Whether we like it or not, it’s already operational, so it’s better to send our boys there to take advantage of it and earn a salary.”

Olivier Randimbisoa feels the same way. He has applied to work at QMM three times but has never gotten a job there.

“It doesn’t matter if we’re happy or not happy,” he said. “It’s the government that decided to bring this company here. But work is work. Less than half the population has work. You either work as a fisherman or you work at the mine, and fishing has changed a lot, so I don’t have much choice.”

According to Rio Tinto, QMM currently employs 2,000 people with the with the vast majority being Malagasy nationals and 73 percent coming from local communities.

But Randimbisoa believes that QMM reserves highly skilled jobs and training opportunities only for foreigners or people from the capital, Antananarivo.

“Even if you’re highly qualified, even if you have the best degree in the world, if you’re coming from Fort Dauphin, you get the worst jobs,” he said. “Most people from here are getting lower [paying] jobs, like drivers.”

Georges Marolahy Razafidrafara, who lives in a small bamboo house in Mandramondramotra, experienced this firsthand. He began working for QMM in 2001, before the mine had been built, as an environmentalist taking care of seedlings. In 2005, he was transferred to the mining site, where he helped the geologists with their work.

Razafidrafara says that in 2008, a QMM executive assured villagers in Mandramondramotra that they would be a top hiring priority for the company. Razafidrafara says he did work at the mine on three-month temporary contracts, at times making as much as 250,000 ariary (about $56) per month, but he was never given a full-time job. He says he lived in a state of constant insecurity.

One of his responsibilities was giving tours to students and people coming to visit the mine from Antananarivo. As Razafidrafara watched, some of those students got full-time jobs at the mine, while he continued making ends meet on the short-term contracts. “They were all well-treated,” he said, taking a strong drag from his cigarette.

“Rio Tinto doesn’t care about me,” he said. “They’re just here for profit.”

The dichotomy in this town is striking. Just across from Razafidrafara’s house is another home with a brand-new red motorcycle parked outside. A QMM engineer lives there. He has worked at the mine for 10 years, is a full-time employee with benefits, and has sent all his children to university. Critics of the mine say that its divide-and-conquer strategy is highly effective: Those benefiting from the mine will fight to protect it against anyone who wants to see it held to account.

Razafidrafara worries about the water quality, especially because he has a daughter who is still just a toddler. “QMM always says ‘Yeah, we take the water samples to analyze in the lab,’ but we never get the results,” he said. “They always come back and say it’s drinkable, but they truck water into the mine [for their employees].”

The way Razafidrafara sees it, the local population were promised prosperity. Instead, they got poison.

The reporting for this investigation was supported by a grant from Journalists for Transparency, an initiative of Transparency International.

The post Rio Tinto’s Madagascar Mine Promised Prosperity. It Tainted a Community. appeared first on The Intercept.

Last year alone, the Troopers signed at least $15 million in contracts for powerful new surveillance tools, according to a New York Focus and Intercept review of state data. While expansive, the State Police’s acquisitions aren’t unique among state and local law enforcement. Departments across the country are buying tools to gobble up civilians’ personal data, plus increasingly accessible technology to synthesize it.

“It’s a wild west,” said Sean Vitka, a privacy advocate and policy counsel for Demand Progress. “We’re seeing an industry increasingly tailor itself toward enabling mass warrantless surveillance.”

So far, local officials haven’t done much about it. Surveillance technology has far outpaced traditional privacy laws, and legislators have largely failed to catch up. In New York, lawmakers launched a years-in-the-making legislative campaign last year to rein in police intrusion — but with Gov. Kathy Hochul pushing for tough-on-crime policies instead, none of their bills have made it out of committee.

So New York privacy proponents are turning to Congress. A heated congressional debate over the future of a spying law offers an opportunity to severely curtail state and local police surveillance through federal regulation.

At issue is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which expires on April 19. The law is notorious for a provision that allows the feds to access Americans’ communications swept up in intelligence agencies’ international spying. As some members of Congress work to close that “backdoor,” they’re also pushing to ban a so-called data broker loophole that allows law enforcement to buy civilians’ personal data from private vendors without a warrant. Closing that loophole would likely make much of the New York State Police’s recently purchased surveillance tech illegal.

Members of the House and Senate judiciary committees, who have introduced bills to close the loopholes, are leading the latest bipartisan charge for reform. Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, meanwhile, are pushing to keep the warrant workarounds in place. The Democratic leaders of both chambers — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, both from New York — have so far kept quiet on the spying debate. As Section 702’s expiration date nears, local advocates are trying to get them on board.

On Tuesday, a group of 33 organizations, many from New York, sent a letter to Jeffries and Schumer urging them to close the loopholes. More than 100 grassroots and civil rights groups from across the country sent the lawmakers a similar petition this week.

“These products are deeply invasive, discriminatory, and ripe for abuse.”

“These products are deeply invasive, discriminatory, and ripe for abuse,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, which signed both letters. They reach “into nearly every aspect of our digital and physical lives.”

Jeffries’s office declined to comment. Schumer’s office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

Both letters cited a Wired report from last month, which revealed that Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, pointed to New York City protests against Israel’s war on Gaza to argue against the spying law’s reform. Sources told Wired that in a presentation to fellow House Republicans, Turner implied that protesters in New York had ties to Hamas — and therefore should remain subject to Section 702’s warrantless surveillance backdoor. An intelligence committee spokesperson disputed the characterization of Turner’s remarks, but said that the protests had “responded to what appears to be a Hamas solicitation.”

“The real-world impact of such surveillance on protest and dissent is profound and undeniable,” read the New York letter, spearheaded by Empire State Indivisible and NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice. “With Rep. Turner having placed your own constituents in the crosshairs, your leadership is urgently needed.”

Police surveillance today looks much different than it did 10, five, or even three years ago. A report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, declassified last year, put it succinctly: “The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits.”

That report called specific attention to the “data broker loophole”: law enforcement’s practice of obtaining data for which they’d otherwise have to obtain a warrant by buying it from brokers. The New York State Police have taken greater and greater advantage of the loophole in recent years, buying up seemingly as much tech and data as they can get their hands on.

In 2021, the State Police purchased a subscription to ShadowDragon, which is designed to scan websites for clues about targeted individuals, then synthesize it into in-depth profiles.

Related

ShadowDragon: Inside the Social Media Surveillance Software That Can Watch Your Every Move

“I want to know everything about the suspect: Where do they get their coffee? Where do they get their gas? Where’s their electric bill? Who’s their mom? Who’s their dad?” ShadowDragon’s founder said in an interview unearthed by The Intercept in 2021. The company claims that its software can anticipate crime and violence — a practice, trendy among law enforcement tech companies, known as “predictive policing,” which ethicists and watchdogs warn can be inaccurate and biased.

The State Police renewed their ShadowDragon subscription in January of last year, shelling out $308,000 for a three-year contract. That was one of at least nine web surveillance tools State Police signed contracts for last year, worth at least $2.1 million in total.

Among the other firms the Troopers contracted with are Cognyte ($310,000 for a three-year contract); Whooster ($110,000 over three years); Skopenow ($280,000); Griffeye ($209,000); the credit reporting agency TransUnion ($159,000); and Echosec ($262,000 over two years), which specializes in using “global social media, discussions, and defense forums” to geolocate people. They also bought Cobwebs software, a mass web surveillance tool created by former Israeli military and intelligence officials — part of that country’s multibillion-dollar surveillance tech industry, which often tests its products on Palestinians.

That’s likely not the full extent of the State Police’s third party-brokered surveillance arsenal. As New York Focus revealed last year, the State Police have for years been shopping around for programs that take in mass quantities of data from social media, sift through them, and then feed insights — including users’ real-time location information — to law enforcement. Those contracts don’t show up in the state contract data, suggesting that the public disclosures are incomplete. Depending on how the programs obtain their data, closing the data broker loophole could bar their sale to law enforcement.

The State Police refused to answer questions about how its officers use surveillance tools.

“We do not discuss specific strategies or technologies as it provides a blueprint to criminals which puts our members and the public at risk,” State Police spokesperson Deanna Cohen said in an email.

Closing the data broker loophole wouldn’t entirely curtail the police surveillance tech boom. The New York State Police have also been deepening their investments in tech the FISA reforms wouldn’t touch, like aerial drones and automatic license plate readers, which store data from billions of scans to create searchable vehicle location databases.

They’ve also spent millions on mobile device forensic tools, or MDFTs, powerful hacking hardware and software that allow users to download full, searchable copies of a cellphone’s data, including social media messages, emails, web and search histories, and minute-by-minute location information.

Watchdogs warn of potential abuses accompanying the proliferation of MDFTs. The Israeli MDFT company Cellebrite has serviced repressive authorities around the globe, including police in Botswana, who used it to access a journalist’s list of sources, and Hong Kong, where the cops deployed it against leaders of the pro-democracy protest movement there.

In the United States, law enforcement officials argue that more expansive civil liberties protections prevent them from misusing the tech. But according to the technology advocacy organization Upturn, around half of police departments that have used MDFTs have done so with no internal policies in place. Meanwhile, cops have manipulated people into consenting to having their phones cracked without a warrant — for instance, by having them sign generic consent forms that don’t explain that the police will be able to access the entirety of their phone’s data.

In October 2020, New York police departments known to use MDFTs had spent less than $2.2 million on them, and no known MDFT-using department in the country had hit the million-dollar mark, according to a report by Upturn.

Between September 2022 and November 2023, however, the State Police signed more than $12.1 million in contracts for MDFT products and training, New York Focus and The Intercept found. They signed a five-year, $4 million agreement with Cellebrite, while other contracts went to MDFT firms Magnet Forensics and Teel Technologies. The various products attack phones in different ways, and thus have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the type of phone, according to Emma Weil, senior policy analyst at Upturn.

Cellebrite’s tech initially costs around $10,000–$30,000 for an official license, then tens or low hundreds of thousands of dollars for the ability to hack into a set number of phones. According to Weil, the State Police’s inflated bill could mean either that Cellebrite has dramatically increased its pricing, or that the Troopers are “getting more intensive support to unlock more difficult phones.”

If Congress passes the Section 702 renewal without addressing its warrant workarounds, state and local legislation will become the main battleground in the fight against the data broker loophole. In New York, state lawmakers have introduced at least 14 bills as part of their campaign to rein in police surveillance, but none have gotten off the ground.

If the legislature passes some of the surveillance bills, they may well face opposition when they hit the governor’s desk. Hochul has extolled the virtues of police surveillance technology, and committed to expanding law enforcement’s ability to disseminate the information gathered by it. Every year since entering the governor’s mansion, she has proposed roughly doubling funding to New York’s Crime Analysis Center Network, a series of police intelligence hubs that distribute information to local and federal law enforcement, and she’s repeatedly boosted funding to the State Police’s social media surveillance teams.

The State Police has “ramped up its monitoring,” she said in November. “All this is in response to our desire, our strong commitment, to ensure that not only do New Yorkers be safe — but they also feel safe.”

This story was published in partnership with New York Focus, a nonprofit news site investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The post Congress Has a Chance to Rein In Police Use of Surveillance Tech appeared first on The Intercept.

In most cases, it takes having a foreign passport to be evacuated from Gaza into neighboring Egypt, though some people with serious injuries are sometimes allowed to exit as well. As Israel threatens to invade Rafah, where more than 1 million people from across Gaza have been displaced, Palestinians are increasingly desperate to get out. With no other options, they are turning to unofficial channels instead: paying what is known as a “coordination” fee for a travel permit. These days, that can cost $5,000 to $7,500 per person — an exorbitant markup of the prewar cost of $250 to $600.

Shatila’s family estimates that they need £30,000, or about $38,000, to pay the travel fees for six people. Having lost everything during the war, they don’t have anything close to that kind of money. So like many others in Gaza, they are now reluctantly raising funds online to support their escape.

“Even affording the basics now is beyond our means here,” said Shatila, whose sister urgently needs medical care after being injured in an airstrike. They launched a crowdfunding campaign, with the help of another sister who lives outside of Gaza — out of hopes that they can someday soon “sleep without fear or anxiety and wake up without the sound of warplanes and missiles,” Shatila said.

Palestinians who are able to scrape together the money pay the fees to a travel agency, which takes a commission before sending the remainder to officials in Egypt with connections to the state intelligence agency, according to people in Gaza with knowledge of the process. Within 10 days, the traveler’s name appears on a “coordination register,” separate from the official Gaza government register — allowing the traveler swift processing at the border. Mada Masr, an independent Egyptian news outlet, reported in a detailed investigation last month that a well-connected businessman with close ties to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is running the show.

Officials in both Gaza and Egypt have denied the existence of a system to collect fees from would-be travelers. “We have nothing to do with imposing any fees on citizens for travel, and we listen to complaints, but we do not have any authority in this matter,” an official on the Hamas-controlled side of the crossing told Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. An Egyptian intelligence official, meanwhile, asked Palestinians to “notify the Egyptian security authorities at the crossing if they are blackmailed or under pressure from anyone profiting from their case.”

It’s an open secret in Gaza that travel agencies coordinate with Egyptian authorities to buy passage for people seeking to leave the Gaza Strip. The process dates back to at least 2015, according to an employee of a Gaza travel agency, who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity. By that point, Gaza had been under a punishing Israeli blockade that was reinforced by Egypt for nine years. The prolonged closure of the Rafah border crossing (which continues to this day) meant that people waited for months for government permission to leave the Gaza Strip, giving rise to coordinators who facilitated travel permissions for about $3,000, the travel agency source said.

The Hamas-run government has long officially opposed the practice, which is illegal, but it is commonplace nonetheless. “The government used to require some travel agencies that had worked in coordination, to sign an agreement stating that if they were caught breaking the rules again, their business would be shut down,” the employee said. “Then the government turned a blind eye.”

For Gazan youth who face travel restrictions to Egypt, paying the fee has long been one of the only ways out: a path to medical treatment, an education, or better economic opportunities abroad. The coordination fee has fluctuated over time, generally more expensive in the summer than during winter months. In the months preceding the current war, the fee was around $250 to $600, according to the worker and Palestinians who paid such fees last summer.

“The Egyptian side determines the coordination fees, but sometimes Gazan coordinators manipulate prices,” the worker said. He added that the local fixers send the money to Egyptian officials through a currency exchange office in Gaza or another cash transfer service.

For the Egyptian public and others sympathetic with the people of Gaza, the idea of Egyptian officials pocketing thousands of dollars in coordination fees is unforgivable.

As those prices have skyrocketed in recent months, and as fundraisers for Palestinians hoping to cross into Egypt have proliferated online, the Egyptian government has faced increased scrutiny for its management of the border crossing. Keeping the border closed and ceding to Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid is controversial enough; for the Egyptian public and others across the Muslim-majority world who are strongly sympathetic with the people of Gaza, the idea of Egyptian officials pocketing thousands of dollars in coordination fees is unforgivable. The Egyptian government, for its part, has continually denied that such an arrangement exists.

Yet a retired security source who used to work with Egypt’s military intelligence in North Sinai, a province that is near the border with Gaza, confirmed to Middle East Eye that there is a network of mediators connected to different parts of the state’s security apparatus who were facilitating the entrance of foreigners from Egypt’s eastern borders.

In its recent investigation, Mada Masr reported that a travel agency called Hala Consulting and Tourism Services, owned by Ibrahim al-Argany, has usurped control of the coordination process, effectively becoming the only agency capable of ensuring travel permits. Human Rights Watch scrutinized Argany’s dealings back in 2022, reporting that Hala “has strong links with Egypt’s security establishment and is staffed largely by former Egyptian military officers.”

In a recent post, a Facebook page affiliated with the travel agency advertised prices of $5,000 for adults and $2,500 for those younger than 16.

“Hala agency’s offices in Cairo are overcrowded,” Asil, a Palestinian woman who recently paid $24,000 for her family’s travel, told The Intercept. “They are willing to pay any amount to get their families out of Gaza.”

Two-thirds of people in Gaza have been displaced since the start of the war. Most of them, some 1.3 million, are now caught in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza that Israel had declared a safe zone.

The Shatila family’s displacement journey began in the first week of the war. Residents of Gaza City, they had moved south to Rafah to shelter at a relative’s house. On October 17, they were sleeping when an Israeli air raid struck an adjoining house, wounding all of Shatila’s siblings and father.

“Suddenly, the house roof fell on us, and a large stone struck my head. I was bleeding from my head and nose, vomiting blood. We were screaming for rescue,” Shatila said. “I didn’t find my eyeglasses and couldn’t see anything to look for my family. I was screaming and calling my family, but I didn’t find them.”

Nearly three months after launching the fundraising campaign, the family is still stuck in Gaza, having raised just over half the money they need for the six of them to leave the country.

“I know we may not raise the whole amount as it’s very high, hoping it goes down soon,” she said.

Hana Khater, another Gaza resident whose family was displaced by Israeli bombings, fled to Egypt after paying $6,000 per person. Asking to be identified by a pseudonym for safety reasons, she said she and her family took shelter in Khan Younis when the war erupted. A week later, the city came under intense bombing.

“All of a sudden, a huge missile hit a neighboring building. Stones and windows fell on us,” she said. Everyone inside was injured, and her mom took a particularly hard hit to the back. Their faces were covered in dust, their clothes torn as they screamed for help. “The scary blaring sirens of ambulances added to the chaos.”

After the attack, they took shelter in an office where they had little access to food or clean drinking water.

“The polluted water and food made me sick, but we didn’t have any choice,” Khater recounted. “We used to eat one meal to save food. We couldn’t take a shower or wash our clothes daily. Then things got worse and worse.”

“It is unbelievable to pay $36,000 to travel.”

Since October 7, her family had debated whether to leave Gaza. Her father was opposed at first, fearing another Nakba, or catastrophe, an Arabic word that is commonly used to describe the events of 1948, when armed Zionist militias forcibly expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their lands and established the state of Israel.

By early December, they made up their minds. On December 5, they paid the fees, and five days later, the six of them exited the strip through the Rafah crossing.

“It is unbelievable to pay $36,000 to travel. One has to sell all his belongings to pay for coordination,” Khater said.

The Egyptian government is obligated to evacuate its citizens from Gaza, but some have been unable to get out through official channels and turned to coordination instead. The fees for them are considerably lower than those imposed on Palestinians: $1,200 per person, according to one Egyptian national who has gone this route.

Yasmine Khaled, a Palestinian from Gaza who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, tried to travel to Egypt on October 10 with her family, as her mother is Egyptian. As they waited in Rafah for a bus to cross into Egypt, travelers were instructed to seek shelter as Israel was preparing to bomb the crossing.

“They bombed the crossing with three missiles. There wasn’t any place to hide. You can’t imagine the crying and horrors. The situation was very difficult. Then we were told to stay until the next day to travel. We stayed awake in the crossings,” Khaled told The Intercept.

Her family, along with hundreds of other people, were prevented from crossing by Egypt and had to go back to Gaza. They moved from shelter to shelter four times before finding somewhere to settle, an overcrowded house in Khan Younis, where several U.N. employees were residing with their families.

“There were around 80 people, including infants and children, in the house. We didn’t have water for most of the time and we had to line up to use the bathroom,” she recalled.

Desperate to leave, and unable to afford exorbitant coordination fees, they reached out to officials in the West Bank and Egypt for help evacuating. Those efforts went nowhere, but they eventually learned that there was a separate coordination process for Egyptians and their families in Gaza. Ten days after applying, they traveled to Egypt. Khaled’s dad and her brother were denied entry at the time, she said, but paid $10,000 in mid-February and eventually made it to Egypt.

Both Khaled and Khater said that the traumas of the war have traveled with them to Egypt.

When Khater hears an airplane overhead, her instinct is to anticipate a bombing. “I doubt we can fully recover from our fears,” said Khater, who is now trying to learn German so she can travel to Germany for grad school. Khaled, for her part, said she is constantly thinking about those they left behind in Gaza, as well as the uncertainty of what will happen when their tourist visa expires.

“My nephews and nieces become frightened when they hear the sounds of planes,” she said. “We have no plans for the future. It’s completely vague. I don’t know what we’ll do after our 45-day stay here, or what I’ll do with my job. We have a lot to be concerned about.”

The post Desperate To Escape Gaza Carnage, Palestinians Are Forced to Pay Exorbitant Fees to Enter Egypt appeared first on The Intercept.

The hospital is run by the Palestine Red Crescent Society, which has been raising alarm about the 18-day siege, during which at least one Red Crescent volunteer was killed. On Tuesday, Israeli forces ordered thousands of people to evacuate the hospital, most of whom were displaced from other parts of Gaza throughout the monthslong war. Hundreds of medical workers and wounded or disabled patients remain stranded inside.

Last month, the World Health Organization reported that more than 600 people had been killed inside health care facilities since Israel launched a retaliatory war on Gaza on October 7. The “ongoing reduction of humanitarian space plus the continuing attacks on healthcare are pushing the people of Gaza to breaking point,” a WHO spokesperson said.

After ordering residents of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south early on in the war, the Israel Defense Forces have been waging an intense assault on southern Gaza in recent weeks, including in Khan Yunis. The city’s largest hospital, Nasser Hospital, has also been besieged, with only five doctors left to treat the wounded. Just this week, hundreds more Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombs, with the death toll since October nearing 28,000.

The Intercept spoke with Saleem Aburas, a relief coordinator with the Palestine Red Crescent’s Risk and Disaster Management Department, who has been trapped inside the Al-Amal Hospital complex since January 21.

“The siege we are enduring within the hospital feels like a never-ending nightmare,” Aburas said. “Even though there are wounded and deceased people right outside the hospital, we are paralyzed, unable to assist them, as the occupation’s snipers and Israeli aircraft target anyone venturing outside the hospital premises.”

The hospital’s ability to care for patients has deteriorated amid the blockade and a shortage of essential medical supplies, a situation made more dire by the lack of drinking water and food. “We face immense challenges in delivering adequate health care services to the injured, hampered by the occupation’s restrictions on the entry of medical supplies into the hospital,” Aburas said.

For those inside the hospital, communications with the outside world have been largely shut off. (To get online using an eSIM, Aburas must climb to the roof of the hospital and risk bombings or sniper fire.) “The communications blackout was another source of terror,” he said. “Everyone trapped in the hospital doesn’t know anything about his family and loved ones outside the hospital. All we know is that the Israeli bombing continues throughout the Gaza Strip.”

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Aburas, who is 30 years old and joined the Red Crescent as a volunteer in 2011, said that the current war is unlike anything he has ever seen in Gaza. “Although I have lived through six Israeli aggressions and many escalations, the nature of the injuries that we saw during this Israeli annihilation of the Gaza Strip is unprecedented, to the point that medical teams are unable to deal with such critical cases due to the deterioration of the health situation.”

Israeli soldiers have at times made announcements over loudspeakers to tell people to stay inside the hospital. They have also targeted civilians in the hospital’s vicinity, Aburas said. On January 28, a sniper shot and killed a 40-year-old man named Omar Abu Hatab and then shot a 21-year-old man who tried to rescue him, Ahmed Muhareb. The two were buried on hospital grounds. “The occupation killed these two people, who were civilians, in cold blood,” Aburas said. 

January 30 was the most violent day of the siege, he said. “The Israeli air and artillery bombardment never stopped, causing damage to Al-Amal Hospital, with broken windows and fragments and debris flying into the hospital from the bombings.” That evening, Israeli soldiers stormed the hospital grounds, igniting fires in an area full of tents and ordering the displaced people gathered there to leave, he recalled. “The occupation ordered them to evacuate the garden,” Aburas said, “but there was nowhere to go, as every place in Gaza was targeted.”

On February 2, Israeli forces killed Hedaya Hamad, a 42-year-old Red Crescent employee, who was also buried on hospital grounds. Hamad is one of three Red Crescent workers who were killed at Al-Amal Hospital, Aburas said, and the eleventh who was killed since the start of the war in October, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. On Thursday, the Red Crescent reported that one more member of its team was killed, bringing its death toll to 12.

Aburas said that Hamad’s killing “shattered our collective hearts. She had an angelic presence, helping everyone and diligently working to ensure that the work crews got their share of the meager food supplies. To us, she was like a nurturing mother.”

As the siege entered its third week, Aburas said the hospital was at risk of running out of fuel, which powers its backup generators and oxygen supplies. “Just today, an elderly woman perished due to the oxygen shortage,” he said on Wednesday.

Other challenges include a risk of infection due to overcrowding and a shortage of supplies, and the scarcity of food and milk for children. Some medical staff evacuated alongside the thousands of displaced people who left the hospital earlier this week, leaving even fewer health care workers to tend to the wounded. 

An estimated 8,000 people evacuated the hospital earlier this week. They left for Rafah, another area in southern Gaza where more than a million Palestinians are now trapped as the Israeli military threatens a full-scale assault. “The displaced people embarked on a journey into uncertainty, a heart-wrenching scene,” Aburas said. “They were forced to travel from Khan Yunis to Rafah on foot, while those remaining in the hospital — hospital staff, Palestinian Red Crescent personnel, and the wounded — are stuck within its confines, deprived of even the most basic necessities of life.”

The post A Palestinian Aid Worker Describes a Harrowing 18-Day Siege Inside a Gaza Hospital appeared first on The Intercept.

A new report by Harvard University-affiliated researchers and the nonprofit group Physicians for Human Rights found the dangerous confinements have not only persisted over the past decade, but also increased in frequency and duration under the Biden administration.

The report highlights the gap between President Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric and the lived reality of an estimated 3,000 immigrant detainees held in isolation last year, often for prolonged periods — a practice that the United Nations warned can amount to torture.

“This is a sheer failure of the Biden administration to stop egregious human rights abuses,” Tessa Wilson, a senior program officer for Physicians for Human Rights and a co-author of the report, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ. “The use of solitary confinement is actually only increasing.”

The adverse effects of solitary confinement — generally defined as isolation without meaningful human interaction for 22 hours a day or more — are well documented. It can cause extreme psychological and emotional distress, and lead to sleeplessness, chronic depression, hallucinations, self-harm, and suicidal impulses.

In the U.S., home to the world’s largest immigration detention system, solitary confinement has become a go-to tool to manage the swelling number of detained immigrants. More than 38,000 people, including long-term U.S. residents and people seeking asylum, were in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as of January 28, 2024.

In 2019, ICIJ and The Intercept published Solitary Voices, an investigation that examined the misuse and overuse of solitary confinement, labeled “segregation,” in detention centers under the agency’s control. A review of more than 8,400 internal ICE incident reports from 2012 to 2017 revealed that many detainees were placed in isolation cells for weeks or months at a time, including people with preexisting mental illnesses and other vulnerabilities.

The investigation found that solitary confinement was used to punish some detainees for offenses as minor as consensual kissing or giving haircuts to one another. ICE also segregated hunger strikers, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities.

One of ICE’s directives acknowledges that isolating detainees — who aren’t considered prisoners and aren’t held for punitive reasons under federal law — is “a serious step that requires careful consideration of alternatives.” And yet the new report found the agency recorded more than 14,000 solitary confinement cases from 2018 to 2023.

Researchers said the number is likely an undercount due to ICE’s poor recordkeeping. They filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, beginning in 2017, to obtain the relevant data from ICE and other agencies, and eventually resorted to litigation.

The average length of the recorded confinements was 27 days, researchers found, stretching well beyond the 15-day period that meets the threshold for “inhuman and degrading treatment” defined by the U.N. special rapporteur on torture. The data revealed dozens of examples of facilities holding people in solitary confinement for over a year.

Through more than two dozen interviews with detainees, researchers also gathered accounts of the grueling conditions inside isolation cells. Interviewees described cells that were freezing cold; constantly lit, causing sleep deprivation; or had toilets only guards could flush.

“The light is on 24 hours a day … the guards wouldn’t dim or turn them off at times,” an unnamed 30-year-old female former detainee told the researchers. “We went crazy.”

Echoing ICIJ and The Intercept’s previous findings, researchers found that solitary confinement was often used as a disciplinary measure for minor infractions and to segregate transgender detainees in “a pattern of systemic discrimination and neglect that contravenes ICE’s own policies.”

Since 2019, the number of detainees with recorded mental health conditions placed in solitary confinement jumped from 35 percent to 56 percent in 2023, the report states. U.N. experts have warned specifically about the grave dangers of isolating people with mental illness.

Mike Alvarez, a spokesperson for ICE, said that the agency had not yet received the report and declined to answer specific questions about it. But he defended the agency’s practices in an emailed statement.

“More than 15 internal and external entities provide oversight of ICE detention facilities to ensure detainees reside in safe, secure, and humane environments, and under appropriate conditions of confinement,” Alvarez said. “The agency continuously reviews and enhances civil detention operations to ensure noncitizens are treated humanely, protected from harm, provided appropriate medical and mental health care, and receive the rights and protections to which they are entitled.”

“Inappropriate and Inhumane”

The new report also highlights ICE’s troubling use of solitary confinement for “medical isolation” of detainees who are sick, disabled, or experiencing a mental health crisis.

“ICE’s failure to ensure adequate medical resources in detention centers created life-threatening conditions for immigrants in solitary confinement,” the report states.

Katherine Peeler, a co-author of the report and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said that in many of the cases researchers reviewed, ICE should have sent detainees to outside medical facilities.

“Every ICE detention center has a relationship with a local hospital, so there’s always a better option than solitary confinement,” she said. “The conflation of medical isolation and solitary confinement is inappropriate and inhumane.”

The report is a collaboration between Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Law School, and Physicians for Human Rights.

In 2019, ICIJ and The Intercept identified at least 373 instances of detainees being placed in isolation due to suicide risk — and another 200-plus cases of people already in solitary confinement being moved to “suicide watch” or other forms of observation, often in altered solitary cells.

“This is the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire,” Kenneth Appelbaum, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who has examined ICE’s segregation practices as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said at the time.

“A Tipping Point”

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have publicly acknowledged concerns over the widespread use of solitary confinement by ICE but have done little to fix the problem.

As a candidate, Biden pledged to end the use of solitary confinement. His proposed ban, as outlined on his campaign website, would have “very limited exceptions such as protecting the life of an imprisoned person.”

Likewise, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, also advocated for ending solitary confinement. In late 2019, Harris, along with other senators, introduced extensive legislation that would outlaw locking detainees in solitary confinement in most instances as a punishment. The bill did not advance.

The new report is not the first time the Biden administration has been criticized for its handling of solitary confinement in its immigration detention centers.

In 2022, whistleblower Ellen Gallagher, a supervisor within the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the vast U.S. immigration detention apparatus, told ICIJ that there “continues to be a stunning level of inaction.” She said she was “not aware of any systemic change in this area” at that time.

Gallagher first went public with her concerns about ICE detention policies in interviews with ICIJ and The Intercept as part of the 2019 investigation. “People were being brutalized,” Gallagher said at the time.

She expressed dismay at the new report’s findings.

“As this report makes clear, despite a plethora of data displaying profound human suffering, existing executive and legislative oversight mechanisms have failed to stop this madness,” Gallagher said. “If there is a tipping point, I hope it’s now.”

The post ICE’s Use of Solitary Confinement “Only Increasing” Under Biden appeared first on The Intercept.