Crypto donors are trying to make sure that never happens.

The woman mounting a long-shot challenge to Waters in California’s 43rd Congressional District has drawn more than two-thirds of her donations from the cryptocurrency industry.

Nonprofit executive Myla Rahman, 53, who is running as a younger alternative to the 87-year-old Waters, has taken 69 percent of her campaign contributions from crypto figures.

Rahman’s biggest single donor is Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse, a leading voice pushing for looser regulations on crypto who has been active in the debate over pending crypto legislation in Congress.

Garlinghouse’s $6,600 donation last month helped bring Rahman’s total haul to $14,540 since announcing her long-shot campaign in February. The total haul is a pittance compared to what it would take to mount a viable campaign against Waters, a legendary figure who is serving her 18th term in the House. California’s primary election takes place on June 2. (Ripple Labs declined to comment.)

Still, any opposition funding could serve as a nuisance to Waters, a relative lightweight when it comes to fundraising compared to other top names in Congress. (Neither Waters’s nor Rahman’s campaigns responded to requests for comment.)

Rahman’s second biggest benefactor was Colin McLaren, the head of government relations at the crypto advocacy nonprofit Solana Policy Institute. He chipped in $3,500.

The crypto industry has ample reason to target Waters. While other Democrats have proven more accommodating, Waters has supported tighter oversight from her powerful position in the House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the crypto industry.

With Waters potentially assuming the helm of the committee next year, crypto is racing to win passage of a favorable regulatory framework in the form of a bill called the Clarity Act. Despite widespread support among the Republicans, the industry has faced intense pushback from banks and credit unions who worry that passage of the law could lead to a stampede of deposits out of their institutions and into crypto exchanges.

Ripple, which has an estimated valuation of $50 billion, fought a yearslong legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission that centered on the issues under debate in Congress right now.

Waters’s most recent campaign filing on April 15 showed that she had a little over $300,000 on hand. Many recent contributions came from the banks and credit unions squaring off against crypto on Capitol Hill.

Despite her stance on crypto regulation, Waters also received a campaign donation from Ripple Labs co-founder and Democratic megadonor Chris Larsen. He gave $3,300 to Waters on March 6, only a few days after Garlinghouse made his donation to Rahman.

Larsen gave one of the crypto industry’s highest-profile contributions to Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Related

Democrats Have a Gerontocracy Problem. The Crypto Industry Is Using That to Its Advantage.

Rahman’s campaign does not mark crypto’s first quixotic campaign against a prominent congressional industry critic. The crypto industry also funded a Republican challenger in 2024 in an attempt to unseat Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren in deep-blue Massachusetts and a since-suspended primary challenge to Democratic California Rep. Brad Sherman.

In Sherman’s race, the crypto industry made clear its intention to leverage a message of generational change against critics of blockchain currencies.

The post Crypto Critic Maxine Waters’s New Primary Foe Got Over Two-Thirds of Money From Crypto appeared first on The Intercept.

The Democratic votes on the pair of resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., were not enough to overcome universal opposition from Republicans.

Still, the votes represented a watershed moment in the party’s relationship with Israel and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel had continued to enjoy strong support from Democratic leaders, despite outrage from the base over the war on Gaza. Sanders said the votes signaled that party leaders are finally taking note.

“This is where the American people are. The polls are very clear: The overwhelming majority of American people do not want to continue to give weapons to Netanyahu and his horrific wars in the Mideast,” he said. “I think the Democrats have caught on to that. It took a little while, but they caught on to that. But Republicans, I think, are standing in opposition to millions of their own supporters.”

Some of the most notable names to vote in favor of blocking military transfers to Israel on Wednesday are potential 2028 presidential contenders.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Arizona Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego were among the Democrats to vote for both the resolutions.

Related

With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank

One resolution targeted the sale of the bulldozers that have been used to demolish neighborhoods in Gaza. Critics say the heavy equipment could accelerate the destruction of Palestinian property in the West Bank, an Israeli-occupied territory that has come under greater threat of annexation under the country’s far-right government.

The bulldozer resolution drew support from 40 members of the Democratic caucus.

Democratic support for the measures came as Americans are increasingly expressing dissatisfaction with Israel in public opinion polls. Hassan El-Tayyab, a policy advocate at the Friends Committee on National Legislation who supported the resolutions, said the votes were a sign that Democrats are starting to take their voters seriously.

“What is happening on the Hill is a lagging indicator of these trends we have seen among Americans,” he said. “These folks are starting to see the writing on the wall, reading these tea leaves, that continually supporting this blank check to Israel is going to cost them electorally.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was among those who voted against it, as did Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; Chris Coons, D-Del.; Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.; John Fetterman, D-Pa.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; and Jacky Rosen, D-Nev.

The other resolution, which failed 36–63, was aimed at blocking the transfer of 1,000-pound bombs, of the type that have been linked to civilian casualties in attacks by Israel on Gaza and Lebanon.

That resolution drew support from fewer Democrats. Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island joined the others in voting against it.

El-Tayyab said the bulldozer vote seemed to be an easier commitment for some Democrats.

“It was directly tied to annexation efforts by Israel in the West Bank that threatened the two-state solution,” he said.

On the other hand, the massive bombs were viewed by some senators as defensive weapons. “We heard some arguments on the Hill that certain members considered the 1,000-pound bombs defensive in nature, as they were a deterrent that helped prevent attacks,” said El-Tayyab.

The argument, he said, held no water.

Republican Attacks

The breadth of support among Democratic members for the resolutions surprised even of advocates who have sought to cut off the flow of U.S. arms sales to Israel.

Related

Trying to Block Arms to Israel, Bernie Sanders Denounces AIPAC’s Massive Election Spending

Sanders has fought a long and, at times, lonely fight across administrations to block arms sales to Israel. The first resolution he sponsored, while Democrat Joe Biden was president, drew only minority support within the Democratic caucus.

As the war on Gaza dragged on, however, Democrats’ opinions on Israel soured. The prior high-water mark for one of Sanders’s resolutions was in July 2025, when 27 of the 47-member Senate Democratic caucus, which includes two independents, voted to block the sale of assault rifles to the Israeli police.

If there was any doubt that 2028 contenders are listening, Kelly, the Arizona senator, dispelled it by introducing Sanders’s resolutions on the Senate floor. A longtime supporter of Israel whose political star has risen in the face of personal attacks from President Donald Trump, Kelly said he would always support the country’s right to exist but could not support the arms transfers.

“Our support for our allies must always be about what makes us stronger and safer,” he said. “And we can look at what is happening in the region right now and understand that this is not business as usual. And it is not making us safer. The United States and Israel are fighting a war against Iran without a clear strategy or goal.”

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in a joint statement with fellow Democratic California Sen. Alex Padilla, tied the arms sales to the ongoing war with Iran.

“We oppose actions that further deepen the United States in an unauthorized conflict in Iran — one with no clear strategy, no legal authority, and no defined end,” he said.

Senate Republicans blasted the resolutions, accusing Democrats of trying to undermine the war effort. Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jim Risch, R-Idaho, said the resolutions amounted to a helping hand to Iran from Democrats.

“I come to the floor and tell Iran: No one is coming to help you. Not China, not Russia, not North Korea, not Venezuela, not Cuba. Except for the 47 people that sit over here,” Risch said, referring to the Democratic caucus. “They are trying to help you, Iran. We are not going to let that happen. We are not going to abandon our ally, Israel. We are not going to abandon this fight that is taking place. We are going to win this fight, and we have already won it, to a very large extent.”

The arms debate came hours after Senate Democrats voted nearly unanimously, except for Fetterman, in favor of a war powers resolution meant to block Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was the sole Republican to vote in favor of the resolution.

The final 47–52 tally disappointed advocates who had hoped to draw more GOP support. Still, they remain hopeful that more Republicans will come onboard when Democrats force a vote on other pending Iran war resolutions.

The post The Dam Breaks: Democratic Senators Overwhelmingly Reject Arms Sales to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

While uniting against President Donald Trump on many fronts, Democrats are split on what to do over the domestic spying power — and the party’s leadership isn’t giving much guidance, according to a congressional notice obtained by The Intercept.

In the notice laying out leadership’s advice on bills up for a vote this week, Democratic Whip Katherine Clark simply explained that the relevant top committee leaders were split. House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes supports a clean reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, while Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin wants further reforms.

Clark gave straight up-or-down recommendations on many other pieces of legislation, but not the spying law.

With leadership silent, progressive activists are trying to step into the void to pressure members. They say Trump’s disregard for the rule of law in his second term means that representatives should only vote for the law with reforms. Government officials have engaged a pattern of abuses at the Justice Department.

Centrists on two key committees, on the other hand, say that modest changes enacted in 2024 went far enough and Congress should give Trump the so-called “clean” reauthorization he has requested.

“They, I don’t think, have a stance on this,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s security and surveillance project, said of the Democratic leadership. “I would hope the gutting of oversight systems and what we have seen at DOJ and politicization there would push them against that — but we don’t know yet.”

With Republicans themselves divided, the margin within the Democratic caucus could prove crucial.

Rather than advising members how to vote, however, Democratic leaders is stepping aside. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., has said that he personally supports reforms but has not signaled that he will pressure his caucus. (Jeffries’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The debate concerns Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which last came up for renewal in April 2024.

The law allows intelligence agencies to hoover up ostensibly “foreign” communications, such as text messages and emails, and then search them for information about Americans. Intelligence agencies conduct thousands of these “backdoor” searches every year.

Safeguards are supposed to ensure that the National Security Agency and FBI are only searching for information on genuine national security threats. Past reviews of the program have regularly found violations, however, including instances where spy agencies searched for information on Black Lives Matter activists and even members of Congress.

Related

Dan Goldman Supported Warrantless Spying on Americans. Now His Primary Opponent Is Hitting Him for It.

During the last reauthorization, Congress enacted a handful of reforms meant to put tighter rules into place for when intelligence agencies can search through the collected data, and to ensure that there are more after-the-fact audits. Since then, a review by an inspector general found a steep decrease in the number of apparent violations.

Supporters of a “clean” reauthorization say those reforms went far enough. Opponents say they still want Congress to force intelligence agents to go to a court to ask for a warrant.

Grassroots Opposition?

Progressive groups are trying to exert grassroots pressure. They targeted Himes, the centrist supporter of the “clean” renewal, at a town hall in his district last month, asking him to withdraw his support for the spying law.

Related

NSA Won’t Say If It Automatically Transcribes American Phone Calls in Bulk

Himes, however, has not budged, saying that he is confident that there have been no abuses under Trump. For his part, Himes is lobbying his fellow members: He convinced House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., to support a clean reauthorization.

On the other side of the debate, Raskin has pointed out that Trump has gutted key oversight bodies, including the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Advocates have also pointed more recently to a secret court opinion, reported by the New York Times, which found significant problems with how the government is tracking its searches of information about Americans.

Prior FISA renewal fights have rarely drawn the kind of in-person, grassroots activism on display at the Himes town hall. Advocates said that what has changed this time around are growing concerns about how spy agencies can use artificial intelligence to search through reams of information on foreigners and Americans.

“These models give a lot of leverage to analysts working inside the national security establishment,” Dave Kasten, the head of policy at the AI safety nonprofit Palisade Research, said on a call with reporters on Tuesday, “which certainly can be both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on the uses to which they are put.”

Further fueling those concerns is the fact that federal intelligence agencies increasingly rely on information obtained through commercial data brokers, which the government contends does not require a warrant even when it pertains to U.S. citizens.

Aside from committee leaders, the FISA reauthorization fight has also split some of the powerful Democratic caucuses.

The Congressional Black Caucus is poised to support a “clean” reauthorization, The American Prospect reported Monday. The caucus did not respond to a request for comment.

In contrast, the chairs of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus released a letter on Tuesday calling for “meaningful” reforms.

In addition to a warrant requirement for “backdoor” searches, progressives are also pushing to limit when and how intelligence agencies can use information obtained from commercial data brokers.

Related

Democrats Might Save Mike Johnson’s Push to Give Trump Domestic Spying Power

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has pointed to the pending April 20 expiration of Section 702 as the reason that Congress needs to urgently renew the law. Progressives, though, pointed out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court effectively provided the spy agencies with a yearlong extension of their spying powers, regardless of what Congress does.

In a rare cross-chamber letter on Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., urged representatives to wait before reauthorizing the program.

“[T]here are multiple issues related to Section 702 that the American people and many Members of Congress have been left in the dark about,” he said, “including a FISA Court opinion from last month that found major compliance problems. These matters should be declassified and openly debated before Section 702 is reauthorized.”

The post Dem Leaders Aren’t Even Bothering to Rally Caucus Against Trump Domestic Spying Powers appeared first on The Intercept.

Members of a resolutions committee meeting in New Orleans rejected one symbolic resolution that would have condemned AIPAC’s role in party primaries and tabled a pair of resolutions that called for conditioning military aid to Israel.

Polls show that Democratic Party members are increasingly skeptical of Israel and supportive of Palestinians — a shift that hasn’t been reflected in the party’s official position.

Related

The Democrats Don’t Know Who They’ll Be in 2028. Michigan May Offer an Answer.

Instead, party leaders rejected the AIPAC resolution and referred the hot-button issue of arms transfers to Israel to a task force created by DNC Chair Ken Martin, which has yet to produce concrete results since it was created in August.

Allison Minnerly, the DNC member from Florida who sponsored the AIPAC resolution, said the votes exposed serious shortcomings on the part of leadership.

“It says that the Democratic Party just isn’t willing to have a hard conversation, isn’t willing to stand up, and just misses the mark when voters need it the most,” she said. “It is an embarrassing display of cowardice.”

The DNC member chairing the meeting, Ron Harris, said the arms transfers resolutions would be better handled by the task force, whose work he defended.

“Just for the record, this isn’t one of those things where you kick it down the line, and a committee where things go to die. These are people working really hard over a very thorny issue, and taking the time that it takes,” he said.

The proposals before the DNC committee on Thursday once again put party leaders in the hot spot after an earlier resolution from Minnerly last August called for a ban on arms sales to Israel.

Minnerly’s latest resolution highlighted the millions of dollars AIPAC spent to influence recent Democratic primaries in Illinois before reaffirming the party’s commitment to “reducing the role of corporate money and large-scale outside spending in Democratic primaries and general elections.”

Related

AIPAC Is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.

AIPAC in recent years has dumped tens of millions of dollars into Democratic primaries via a super PAC called the United Democracy Fund. It has taken an increasingly aggressive stance against anyone who questions U.S. support for Israel — including one pro-Israel congressional candidate who said he was open to conditioning military aid on respect for human rights.

The group’s heavy-handed role in recent Illinois campaigns drew fire from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who blasted AIPAC when he won the Democratic Party primary for the 9th Congressional District.

In response to the growing backlash, AIPAC’s supporters have called its critics “antisemitic,” a charge echoed during the Thursday meeting when one member said that to single out AIPAC would be to “pick on the Jews.”

Separately, another resolution called for pausing weapons transfers to Israeli military units accused of human rights violations and recognizing Palestinian statehood, and a third called for conditioning military aid to Israel in compliance with international law in light of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran.

Those resolutions were referred to the task force.

The post DNC Shoots Down Resolutions Calling Out AIPAC and Limiting Arms to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

“We believe democracy cannot be delivered through missiles, and freedom cannot emerge from destruction and more death of innocent lives,” they said in the previously unreported letter.

The signers included Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, the first Iranian American Democrat elected to Congress.

Women have been at the forefront of demonstrations against the Iranian government in recent years, including the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022 that were met with a deadly crackdown. The international protest movement was set off by the Iranian government’s killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for allegedly failing to wear the mandatory headscarf properly.

Related

“Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War

The Iranian government’s suppression of that protest and another anti-government protest wave earlier this year have been cited as justification for the war that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched in February.

“Remember the great women march,” Trump said at an April 6 press conference at the Pentagon, going on to describe government snipers suppressing protests by shooting demonstrators. In a speech justifying last June’s Israeli-led war against Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the Women, Life, Freedom movement by name in Farsi.

The Iranian American women who signed the letter, however, said that the war is only encouraging further crackdowns.

“The Iranian people must not become casualties of geopolitical rivalry or instruments of foreign agendas,” the signatories wrote. “We refuse the false choice between repression at home and devastation from abroad. Both deny Iranians the right to determine their own future.”

Trump has given mixed signals as to whether he hopes to pursue regime change in the conflict.

The Iranian diaspora is deeply divided over the war, but a recent poll suggests Iranian Americans may be turning against it.

Related

With Trump Threatening Genocide in Iran, Military Must Disobey His Orders, Former Pentagon Officials Say

Despite the polarized exile politics, many groups responded with horror to Trump’s threat that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He has also threatened to destroy civilian infrastructure such as bridges and power plants, which would be a war crime; the U.S. and Israel have already launched scores of attacks targeting civilian sites across the country.

Ansari, the letter’s most prominent signer, said Monday that she plans to file articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for “repeated war crimes,” including the bombing of a school that killed scores of young girls.

“As the daughter of Iranian immigrants who fled the brutal Islamic Republic, and the first Iranian-American Democrat elected to Congress, I stand in strong opposition to this illegal war,” Ansari said in a statement. “Iranians deserve freedom and democracy. That cannot be delivered through bombs and destruction of civilian infrastructure. Iran’s future must be determined by Iranians alone — free from war and authoritarian rule.”

The 14 signers of the letter included women serving as city councilmembers, state legislators, and Democratic Party delegates.

The post Iranian Women Elected to Office in U.S. Reject Trump’s Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

Nearly two-thirds of Iranian Americans now oppose the war after opinions were near evenly divided at the start of the conflict, according to a Zogby Analytics survey.

The nearly 17 percentage point leap comes as the prospects that the Iranian regime will collapse seem to have dimmed, the conflict’s endgame becomes increasingly murky, and steady bombings have swelled the number of civilians killed.

Jamal Abdi, president of the nonprofit group that commissioned the poll, the National Iranian American Council, said the survey results show that the diaspora’s feelings on the war are more complicated — and more negative — than pundits have suggested.

“This is a war that is supposedly being fought in our name,” Abdi said. “There’s a lot of wish-casting and projection and voices from the diaspora claiming that there is this mandate from our community, and it’s not based on data or facts or reality. It’s based on a campaign for regime change no matter what the cost is. It’s dangerous for our community to be used like this.”

NIAC has long been one of the major voices in the diaspora expressing skepticism about war with Iran. In days leading up to the February 28 strikes that started the war, however, figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the country’s former shah, were given prominent platforms to argue for regime change.

Related

The Regime Survives, Trump Has to Deal, and Iranians Are the Biggest Losers

NIAC’s March 24 to 27 poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points, is the second that the group has commissioned from Zogby Analytics. An earlier survey was conducted from February 27 to March 5, a period that coincided with the final hours of U.S.–Iranian negotiations and the beginning of the conflict.

The survey results suggest that Iranian Americans are now more opposed to the war than Americans as a whole, after being more supportive at its start.

Iranian Americans are a sliver of the U.S. population, about 0.2 percent, making polling of the group more difficult than the general population. Abdi said that Zogby drew from a “significant list of contacts” in the Iranian American community to conduct the survey.

One prominent Iranian American, Ahmad Batebi — an exiled dissident who thanked President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the war began but has spoken out against targeting civilian infrastructure — questioned the poll results.

“My view is that the reported decline in support should be interpreted cautiously,” Batebi said in an email, “not only because opinion may indeed be shifting in real time, but because the more basic question is whether this polling instrument can credibly be treated as representative of the broader Iranian-American community in the first place.”

In the earlier survey, Iranian Americans showed nearly a 50-50 split in their position on going to war with Iran.

Iranian Americans now believe by a wide margin that President Donald Trump should end the conflict, according to the more recent numbers. 70 percent of respondents said that it was time to end the war. Only a quarter believed it should continue.

Trump is scheduled to give an address on the war Wednesday night, with officials giving mixed signals as to whether he will wrap up the conflict or expand it with a ground invasion.

The recent Zogby poll also captured an increasingly pessimistic view of the war’s likely outcome. Many Iranian Americans celebrated on social media when Khamanei’s death in an Israeli airstrike was confirmed on March 1.

Hard-liners have held onto power in Iran since then, however, leading to a dimming view of the future among the diaspora. Nearly 60 percent of Iranian Americans believe ordinary Iranians will be worse off a year from now and more than half believe the Islamic Republic will remain in power.

“There was probably some initial exuberance in that first week,” Abdi said, “and that has trailed off as we have seen civilian casualties and a shuffling of chairs in the regime but not any signal that the regime itself was going anywhere.”

The post Iranian Americans Have Turned Against the War, New Poll Finds appeared first on The Intercept.

The measure, sponsored by a young DNC member from Florida, could put party leaders on the spot about the pro-Israel lobbying group’s outsized role in Democratic primaries.

A lobbying behemoth that for decades courted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, AIPAC has become an increasingly toxic brand in the Democratic Party.

In recent years, Israeli leaders and their backers in Washington have become more closely aligned with Republican politicians. At the same time, however, AIPAC’s super PAC has focused tens of millions in spending on Democratic primary races.

Allison Minnerly, the committee member sponsoring the resolution, said it is time for the party to formally distance itself from the group.

“At a time when Democratic voters might really not have felt represented or seen when it came to Gaza or seeing their party support Palestinian rights or stand against military conflict, this could be one step toward bringing those voters back into the party,” she said.

Neither AIPAC nor the DNC immediately responded to requests for comment.

Minnerly’s resolution follows on the heels of another measure she sponsored last August calling for an arms embargo on Israel. That resolution was defeated, but not before it sparked a high-profile debate on the party’s relationship with Israel.

Democrats have soured on Israel while becoming more sympathetic toward Palestinians, surveys show.

That has not stopped AIPAC, through a super PAC called the United Democracy Project and other campaign arms, from plowing cash into Democratic primaries to elect pro-Israel candidates. Most recently it spent at least $22 million on Democratic primaries in Illinois, where its preferred candidates won two of four contested races.

“Given the recent primaries in Illinois, but also what we’ve seen across the country, I think it’s important that we specify that AIPAC as a growing force in our primaries needs to be specifically addressed when we talk about dark money,” Minnerly said.

Related

DNC Votes Down “Overwhelming Popular Position” Calling for Arms Ban to Israel

Minnerly’s resolution notes that AIPAC has expended massive amounts on political campaigns, then adds that “corporate money PACs have concentrated spending in primary races to oppose candidates who have advocated for Palestinian human rights, ceasefire efforts, or changes to U.S. foreign policy, raising concerns about the role of large outside spending in shaping Democratic Party positions.”

It later adds, “Democratic elections should reflect grassroots participation and the will of voters, rather than the disproportionate influence of wealthy donors or special interests.”

While the resolution’s is couched as a condemnation of dark money spending, it could nevertheless open a tense debate over AIPAC’s role in the primaries that some party leaders would rather avoid.

Ahead of the debate over the Israel arms embargo resolution last year, Minnerly was pressured to withdraw her proposal. DNC Chair Ken Martin put forward a competing resolution.

The ultimate product of that debate was the creation of a working group that has yet to produce any public findings. Critics have derided the group as a stalling mechanism.

This time around, Minnerly fears that the timing of the DNC resolution committee meeting could curtail debate of the measure. Her measure is set for discussion on the morning of April 9, as many DNC members will still be arriving for the meeting in New Orleans.

As high-ranking Democrats distance themselves from AIPAC, the group is hiring a new director of political operations and trying to defend itself against the critiques.

Michael Sacks, a Democratic megadonor who helped bankroll two secretive dark-money groups affiliated with AIPAC in the Illinois primaries, alleged that the group’s critics are trying to “chase” Jewish people out of the party in a Chicago Tribune op-ed on Tuesday.

Related

Illinois Results: Daniel Biss Beats Kat Abughazaleh in Blow to Left and AIPAC Alike

“Let’s be clear: The campaign against AIPAC is not a policy discussion,” he wrote. “It’s a thinly disguised effort to make support for Israel politically toxic in the Democratic Party, to chase Jews and their allies out of our big tent coalition.”

AIPAC shared the op-ed on social media.

Jim Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, said the criticisms of AIPAC and its dark-money affiliates were about the group’s “hardball” tactics.

“Having been a witness to AIPAC handling of campaigns going back to the 1970s and ’80s,” he said, “it takes a certain degree of chutzpah to play victim, when in fact what they have done is victimize candidates and incumbents who didn’t fall in line behind their positions.”

The post DNC Resolution to Reject AIPAC Funding Puts Democratic Leaders in the Hot Seat appeared first on The Intercept.

Johnson decided to delay a vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that had been scheduled for this week, Politico reported Friday. The move gives critics of the law more time to push for reforms, including a requirement that federal agents get a warrant before searching for information on Americans.

If the bill ultimately advances to the House floor, however, some top Democrats — including the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut — are already lobbying colleagues to vote for Trump’s request. Others, including members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are pushing back.

The internal debate among both Democrats and Republicans is a rerun of a clash two years ago over FISA — only this time, Trump’s reelection and the war on Iran have raised the stakes. The spying law expires next month.

With Republicans split, advocates say Democrats have a rare chance to push through added safeguards.

If they want to.

Figures from the Democratic establishment have often been ambivalent or openly hostile to reforming the law, one of the most controversial pieces of post-9/11 legislation and a focus of Edward Snowden’s disclosures.

“Evidence of Misuse”?

Johnson initially seemed poised to push through a vote on the law this week — but reports emerged last Friday that he had delayed the vote until the middle of April. That delay came in the face of skepticism about extending FISA without reforms from hard-liners in Johnson’s own party, such House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, R-Md.

Section 702 of FISA allows employees of the FBI and other agencies to search for information on U.S. citizens and residents among spy data that is collected abroad.

Congress has passed a series of partial reforms intended to curb widespread abuses of the law by the FBI. During fiery debate over the law in 2024, Johnson managed to narrowly get the bill through the House by agreeing to a two-year extension.

He also teamed up with then-President Joe Biden to pressure members to defeat by a single vote reformers’ most highly sought-after amendment, a provision that would have forced federal agents to go to a judge before searching for information about Americans.

The vote this year is shaping up to be as much of a nail-biter, and it appears that Johnson may need Democrats to lend an assist. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., says that he will vote against extending the law without reforms, which means that Johnson can only afford to lose one other GOP member.

Himes, who is leading the push to get Democrats to pass a “clean” renewal of Section 702, said in a letter to his party colleagues last week that he understood why they might have concerns about the Trump administration having access to that powerful spying tool. Still, he urged them to vote for reauthorization if the bill makes it to a final floor vote.

Related

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

“If I saw any evidence that Trump administration officials were directing the intelligence community to use Section 702 for illegal or improper purposes, such as to persecute, surveil, or harass Americans,” he said, “I would urge a ‘no’ vote on reauthorization, even though I recognize the program’s unparalleled national security value. I have not seen evidence of misuse, despite being on the lookout for any hint of it.”

One House staffer who asked for anonymity to speak freely said they were surprised that Himes has not pushed for concessions from Johnson — on FISA or other legislation — in exchange for Democratic support.

That support could be especially crucial if Johnson struggles to pass a procedural vehicle, known as a rule, to get the bill onto the House floor for a final vote.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said during a press conference last Thursday that his entire caucus would oppose proceeding to a vote under a rule, which is standard practice for the opposition party in the House.

Jeffries left open the possibility, however, that Democrats could freely cross party lines to support bringing the bill to the floor under a suspension of the rules, which would require support from a two-thirds majority of House members.

“Jim Himes is emerging as arguably the most important actor in this fight,” said Sean Vitka, executive director of the left-leaning group Demand Progress, which supports further reforms to FISA. “The most significant question at the moment is: Will he be able to marshal enough Democrats to go with his play? And that ultimately is a question of whether or not members of Congress think people are looking.”

“Times Have Changed”

On the opposite side of the debate from Himes, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., sent a letter to Democrats Thursday urging them to oppose a “clean” reauthorization of the surveillance bill.

Under pressure from the Biden administration and to the disappointment of privacy advocates, Raskin voted in favor of the legislation two years ago. He said in his letter this week that “times have changed.”

“The safeguards put in place in 2024 have been badly eroded by the Trump Administration,” he wrote. “The ‘clean’ extension favored by President Trump and Stephen Miller leaves the Trump Administration in charge of policing its own abuses of this authority — and what could go wrong with that?”

Raskin did not directly condition support for the bill on adding a warrant requirement, the longtime holy grail of privacy advocates.

In a letter Thursday, more than 90 civil rights and progressive groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Demand Progress, and Indivisible called on Congress to require the government to obtain a warrant before searching for communications about Americans.

Related

FBI’s Warrantless Search Ruled Unconstitutional in a Blow to Government Spying

They also highlighted a relatively new issue: the data-broker loophole. Under current law, intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been able to skirt civil liberties protections by buying information from data brokers that could include location data, search histories, and transaction records of Americans.

FBI Director Kash Patel testified during a Senate hearing Wednesday that the agency was gleaning “valuable intelligence” from such data.

Advocates hope that in addition to a warrant requirement, Democrats could use their leverage in the surveillance bill debate to close the data-broker loophole.

Dems in Disarray

Some Democrats who helped doom a warrant requirement last time have yet to signal how they will vote this time around.

Related

Dan Goldman Supported Warrantless Spying on Americans. Now His Primary Opponent Is Hitting Him for It.

Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., gave a passionate defense of the domestic spying bill on the House floor in 2024. His primary opponent, former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, has already attacked him over the issue.

Patel and CIA Director John Ratcliffe gave a closed briefing to House members about the law on Wednesday. Speaking to The Intercept after that meeting, Goldman said he was still deciding whether to support a clean reauthorization.

“From my perspective, I’m going to need more data and information and need to have some way of verifying the information that they are providing, because I have no faith that this administration is doing anything by the law,” Goldman said.

Another Democrat who voted against a warrant requirement in 2024 and now faces a primary challenge from the left, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said he also has yet to decide.

“There are threats to the country, and then there are threats for the country from this administration,” Cohen said. “It’s kind of a balancing act.”

“Fake” Deadline

Advocates pushing for added reforms would have to guide them through both the House and Senate before the April 20 expiration of the current law.

Related

Counterterror Director Used Hamas Attack to Justify Mass Surveillance Program Renewal

The ongoing conflict with Iran is adding to the pressure, with Trump’s supporters arguing that it makes passage of a “clean” reauthorization more important.

One supporter of a warrant requirement, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said this week that he now supports a clean reauthorization.

“We have been at this for 10 years,” Jordan told reporters Wednesday. “There has been huge improvement based on the reforms we have done over the last decade, and this is a temporary extension, a short-term extension at the time we have this military operation going on in Iran.”

Reform advocates, however, have argued that the pending deadline is not as pressing as it seems. If the law expires next month, intelligence agencies may still be able to force tech companies to hand over communications under existing authorizations from a special surveillance court that do not expire for months.

“We have time to get this right,” Raskin said in his letter. “Opposing ‘clean’ reauthorization does not mean Section 702 suddenly turns off in April. FISA explicitly allows existing certifications to continue past a sunset. The government is in court right now making sure that Section 702 surveillance extends well into next year, no matter what.”

The post Democrats Might Save Mike Johnson’s Push to Give Trump Domestic Spying Power appeared first on The Intercept.

Biss’s victory came amid mixed results for outside spending groups representing pro-Israel, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrency interests — with crypto regulation supporter and state Rep. La Shawn Ford winning in the 7th Congressional District while the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s favored candidates, Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller and former Rep. Melissa Bean, won in the 2nd and 8th. In the closely watched Senate race, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton received AIPAC’s congratulations for her win over Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly.

With five open House seats and one open Senate seat heavily favored for Democrats, the Illinois primaries presented a test for the future of the party — and became a top target for outside groups that poured more than $50 million into races throughout the state. The infusion of outside cash included more than $35 million in spending from groups linked to the AIPAC and the cryptocurrency and AI industries. 

Dozens of super PACs in Illinois sought to influence the competitive Democratic primaries, often while concealing both their donors and broader intentions. In the 9th District, AIPAC used groups with uncontroversial titles like “Elect Chicago Women” and “Chicago Progressive Partnership” to boost its pick, Fine, and pit progressive candidates against one another. The spending appeared to come up short Tuesday night, when Fine finished in third.

The groups’ competing ads at times inflamed and at times distracted from voter concerns over civil liberties, the economy, bipartisan fealty to corporations and wealthy donors, and now the unfolding war in Iran.

The Illinois primaries presented a test for AIPAC in particular, which with its affiliated groups spent more than $22 million in races in and around deep-blue Chicago while obscuring the pro-Israel lobby’s involvement amid growing criticism. In several races, AIPAC donors have funneled money to candidates where it did not officially endorse, including in the U.S. Senate race, The Intercept reported. 

The crypto industry spent more than $13 million in Illinois races through the super PAC Fairshake, including close to $10 million against Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton in the Senate race and more than $3 million in two races attacking candidates who have voted for consumer protection regulations on cryptocurrency. The AI industry poured in another $2.5 million into two House races.

Detailed results from the Senate race and the 2nd, 7th, 8th, and 9th districts are below.

Senate: After Laying Low, AIPAC Congratulates Stratton

Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton defeated Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly in the highly anticipated Democratic primary to replace retiring Sen. Dick Durbin. The often bitter race was defined by debates over dark money, establishment endorsements, and race and identity. 

Stratton won just shy of 40 percent of the vote in the crowded 10-way race. While AIPAC publicly stayed out of the contest, suggesting that the group had become politically toxic with Democratic primary voters, reporting from The Intercept found that at least 27 AIPAC donors gave to Stratton’s campaign.

On Tuesday night, AIPAC publicly congratulated Stratton for her primary win over Kelly, writing on X that Kelly’s “most recent actions have undermined the U.S.-Israel alliance,” and that the group looks “forward to continuing our long-standing partnership” with Stratton.

Related

AIPAC Is Staying Out of Illinois Senate Race — But Its Donors Back Juliana Stratton

Neither Stratton nor Krishnamoorthi have called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide or said they would push to condition aid to Israel, as Kelly repeatedly pointed out in her attempts to carve out a lane to their left. 

Stratton’s victory does represent an early defeat for the crypto industry, which spent millions against her candidacy. The industry’s main PAC, Fairshake, spent nearly $10 million against Stratton, in a move that likely favored Krishnamoorthi. The Illinois congressman is known as a top fundraiser, with a massive $30 million war chest. 

In addition to concerns over the influence of money in politics, the race was also plagued by questions over the role of establishment endorsements. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker endorsed Stratton, his longtime running mate, and donated $5 million to Stratton’s super PAC, spurring controversy about the perception of establishment Democrats throwing around their political weight. 

But Stratton’s most controversial endorsement of the cycle was an alleged posthumous endorsement from the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose family later said he did not come to a decision about the race before his death.

The fight for support from Black voters was already a highly contentious issue within the primary, with concerns that Kelly and Stratton, who are both Black, would split the Black electorate in Illinois. Kelly took offense to those comments, arguing at a recent campaign event that “no one talks” about spoilers “when two white men are running.” 

Illinois has not sent a Republican to the Senate since the 1990s, and Stratton is expected to easily win her general election in November. 

2nd District: AIPAC Beats AI PAC

Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller fended off a comeback attempt from former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. in a race that pitted AIPAC against the artificial intelligence industry.

Miller was backed heavily by a PAC affiliated with the pro-Israel group, while Jackson drew support from an AI PAC funded by tech leaders.

Jackson had the star power of his civil rights activist father’s name but was tarnished by a federal fraud conviction for misusing campaign funds over a decade ago during his previous stint as a U.S. representative.

AIPAC’s role in the race made headlines in February, when retiring U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, vacating her 9th Congressional District seat, withdrew her endorsement of Miller over the group’s support for her.

Meanwhile, the progressive standardbearer in the race — state Sen. Robert Peters — was trailing far behind on Tuesday night, despite endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Peters made the involvement of outside groups ranging from AIPAC to cryptocurrency to artificial intelligence PACs a theme of his campaign, blasting his opponents for relying on their support.

7th District: AIPAC and Crypto Lose Despite Heavy Spending

State Rep. La Shawn Ford beat Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin the primary to succeed retiring longtime Rep. Danny Davis Tuesday night, despite the nearly $5 million AIPAC spent to boost her and nearly $2.5 million a crypto PAC spent against him.

Conyears-Ervin conceded early in the night, before the Associated Press called the race for Ford.

Related

Crypto Spends Big in Illinois House Races to Say Consumer Rights Supporters Are Corrupt

Ford was the target of heavy spending from the cryptocurrency industry PAC Fairshake because of his support for state-level consumer protections. Ford told The Intercept earlier this month that the money spent against him underlined the need for campaign finance reform.

“We are a grassroots campaign that is struggling to get our message out and make sure that people know that our experience and our platform is out there,” he said. “We don’t have a budget to counter lies.”

The crowded race made polling difficult, and the heavily Democratic nature of the district, which stretches from Chicago’s Loop and South Side to leafy suburbs to the west, meant that several candidates were competing for the progressive lane.

AIPAC donors backed former real estate mogul Jason Friedman early in the race, but the pro-Israel group’s campaign arm later spent nearly $60,000 opposing him and $4.8 million boosting Conyears-Ervin, according to a tally by political consultant Frank Calabrese.

Ford and Conyears-Ervin both brought ethical baggage to the race: He successfully fought off a raft of federal bank fraud charges more than a decade ago, pleading to a single misdemeanor count, while she was forced to pay a $30,000 fine to settle two ethics cases, including one involving the firing of two whistleblowers who warned her not to use city resources to organize prayer events on Facebook, according to WTTW Chicago.

Anthony Driver, executive director of the Service Employees International Union Illinois State Council, drew heavy spending support from his union and an endorsement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He finished well behind the leading candidates.

8th District: Former Blue Dog Beats Would-Be Squad Member

Former U.S. Rep. Melissa Bean took a big step closer to a comeback Tuesday night by defeating Junaid Ahmed, a progressive backed by the group Justice Democrats.

Bean, a previous member of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, drew a big assist from more than $4 million in spending from AIPAC-affiliated PACs, as well as spending from crypto and AI PACs.

Both candidates were vying to replace Krishnamoorthi.

9th District: Anti-AIPAC Candidates in Top Slots

Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss prevailed in a crowded Democratic primary race largely defined by outside spending from groups associated with AIPAC, which spent millions targeting Biss and Palestinian American activist and journalist Kat Abughazaleh, who came in second. 

Biss, a former math professor who stressed his anti-war bonafides on the campaign trail, sought to define himself as the tested progressive favorite while Abughazaleh’s campaign gained steam.

Initially, AIPAC-affiliated groups focused their attacks on Biss, who is Jewish, because of his support for conditions on aid to Israel. The AIPAC-affiliated group Elect Chicago Women spent nearly $1.5 million to oppose Biss and over $4 million to boost state Sen. Laura Fine, who came in third. But as the race heated up, Abughazaleh, who drew a harder line on Israel, surged forward in the polls and became their central target. 

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Biss said he had been pressured to move away from what he called a nuanced view on Israel and Palestine. He also took a direct swipe at AIPAC.

“This district understands nuance and wants someone who accepts the reality of competing, even contradictory-sounding priorities and values and realities,” Biss said. “Now, that point of view is not the point of view of AIPAC. AIPAC spent an unbelievable amount of money — over $7 million — to try to buy this seat, to support the idea that we can’t accept nuance.”

The district is deep blue, and Biss is expected to handily win his general election. He becomes the Democratic nominee on the heels of a scandal that broke in the final hours of the race, after his former student, Megan Wachspress, went public about a past relationship with Biss on Monday in a Bluesky post. 

“If he’s going to get a national profile on the strength of a younger woman’s campaign,” wrote Wachspress, who is now a lecturer at Stanford Law School, referring to Abughazaleh, “I’m going to come out and say it: during his short-lived tenure as a math professor, Biss had an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of his undergraduate students. I was that student.” 

Biss acknowledged the relationship on Tuesday, calling it “ill-advised.”

Related

Kat Abughazaleh on the Right to Protest

Though Abughazaleh earned key progressive endorsements, including from the group Justice Democrats and Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Biss pulled Schakowsky’s support, as well as that of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

The Chicago Progressive Partnership, another AIPAC-affiliated group, spent roughly $1.2 million in the latter half of the race to counter Abughazaleh. The former journalist also faced alleged “dark money” spending from the PAC Democracy Unmuted, which she claimed was paying influencers $1,500 to push negative rhetoric about her on social media. 

AIPAC also spent money boosting Bushra Amiwala, a progressive Muslim activist, who was seen as a potential spoiler for Abughazaleh. When the race was called, Amiwala was in sixth place and had received just over 5 percent of the vote — a share larger than the difference between Biss, at just shy of 30 percent, and Abughazaleh, slightly under 26.

AIPAC, for its part, put a positive spin on the results Tuesday night.

“While disappointed that Laura Fine did not prevail, voters rejected two anti-Israel candidates in this race,” the group posted on X. “We were especially proud to help defeat Abughazaleh.”

In his victory speech, Biss said he would fight for self-determination and justice for everyone in the Middle East and beyond. “AIPAC found out the hard way: The 9th District is not for sale,” he said in his closing remarks.

Biss also thanked J Street, which was founded as a liberal counterweight to AIPAC, for wading into the race to back him. J Street’s President, Jeremy Ben-Ami, said in a statement that the group had bundled more than $200,000 for Biss’s campaign while an affiliated super PAC spent $150,000.

“AIPAC and its affiliates poured more than $7 million into a Democratic primary to stamp out opposition to Netanyahu’s policies — using shell PACs to obscure their involvement — and the voters rejected that effort,” Ben-Ami said. “Tonight’s results should send a clear message to candidates across the country: you do not have to fear AIPAC’s spending or intimidation.”

This developing story has been updated.

The post Illinois Results: Daniel Biss Beats Kat Abughazaleh in Blow to Left and AIPAC Alike appeared first on The Intercept.

In at least two Illinois congressional primaries, candidates vying for the progressive vote are being accused by a crypto political action committee of corruption. Fairshake PAC is trying to smear one candidate backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as a corporate tool and another candidate who successfully fought a federal indictment as a tax cheat.

The industry has thrown at least $3.3 million into negative attacks on the campaigns in the 2nd and 7th Congressional Districts thus far, according to an analysis from a Chicago political consultant. That spending represents only a fraction of the PAC’s war chest for the remainder of the primary season.

“Ironically, we’re in a very anti-corruption moment, and you know that is true because one of the most corrupt actors in the country is trying to appropriate an anti-corruption argument,” said Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, a crypto industry critic. “The threat is that the cynical deployment of an anti-corruption politics undermines the potential for success of a genuine anti-corruption politics.”

Fairshake declined to comment.

In both races, crypto industry interests are attacking Democratic candidates — state Sen. Robert Peters and state Rep. La Shawn K. Ford — who voted for consumer protection regulations on cryptocurrency in the Illinois statehouse last year.

That legislation, supported by Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, forces crypto companies to register with the state and comply with local rules if they want to serve Illinois residents. Crypto companies have long opposed state-level regulations, preferring a single set of looser regulations at the federal level.

As the congressional elections heated up this year, the crypto industry began delivering payback.

Mailers targeting Peters, for instance, accuse him of being a “corporate pawn” and “bankrolled by special interests,” based on campaign contributions he has received.

Peters has responded by noting that he is endorsed by national progressives including Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D- Mass., who are fierce foes of corporate interests.

Commenting on the Fairshake mailer, Peters said that it was “paid for by Trump’s top donors, to make sure they buy a lapdog in this congressional seat who will let them avoid all regulation. Nasty work.”

Two of Peters’s top opponents, Jesse Jackson Jr. and Donna Miller, have received A ratings from Stand With Crypto, an industry group, based on their promises to pass industry-friendly legislation. (Their campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.)

Ford, the state representative, has been the target of $2.5 million in attack ads from Fairshake, according to a tally by Chicago political consultant Frank Calabrese.

One TV attack ad highlighted the 17-count bank fraud indictment that federal prosecutors brought against Ford in 2012 — without noting that the case fizzled away and Ford ultimately pleaded guilty to only a misdemeanor tax charge.

Local media have called the ad misleading, a claim that Ford echoed in an interview with The Intercept.

Related

AIPAC Donors Back Real Estate Tycoon Who Opposed Gaza Ceasefire for Deep-Blue Chicago Seat

“I think that it’s slander. It’s the reason why we have to have campaign finance reform to get dark money out of races,” he said. “They are misleading voters. Even though they know that, they are advertising that I was convicted of 17 counts of bank fraud and tax fraud, they know that the Department of Justice dropped those charges, and yet they mislead voters.”

Ford’s campaign has sent Fairshake, the crypto PAC, a cease-and-desist letter.

One of Ford’s top opponents in the race to replace outgoing Rep. Danny Davis, City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin, received an A rating from Stand With Crypto. (Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ford noted that industry figures including Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, a crypto exchange that is one of Fairshake’s major funders, have worked closely with President Donald Trump to win favorable regulations.

Coinbase donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund in December 2024 and has given further donations to Trump’s White House ballroom project.

“It’s funny, because they are cronies with Donald Trump and they want to say that I’m not fit to go to Congress,” Ford said. “Yet Donald Trump was actually convicted on 34 counts, and they support him for president.”

The post Crypto Spends Big in Illinois House Races to Say Consumer Rights Supporters Are Corrupt appeared first on The Intercept.

The widely watched trial could serve as a bellwether as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to crack down on left-wing groups — and the convictions could encourage prosecutors to bring more such charges. A top FBI official said in December that the agency is now treating “antifa” as a major domestic terror threat.

In a statement posted online, a support group for the defendants said, “Everything about this trial from beginning to end has proven what we have said all along: this is a sham trial, built on political persecution and ideological attacks coming from the top.”

The Trump administration celebrated the verdict.

“Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities — not under President Trump,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”

The court case centered on a nighttime July 4, 2025, protest outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility that started with demonstrators shooting fireworks and spray-painting cars in the parking lot.

Signal messages obtained by the government showed that the demonstrators believed that less confrontational protests against ICE — such as one that had occurred earlier in the day at the same facility — were ineffective. Some of the protesters had brought guns, which is legal in Texas. A police officer responding to the scene was shot in the neck by one of the protesters, Benjamin Song, who had brought an AR-15 with a trigger modified for a higher rate of fire.

The defendants said the protest was a peaceful demonstration meant to show solidarity, pointing to the megaphone that one member of the group brought to shout slogans to detainees. Prosecutors pointed to the guns, ballistic vests, and trauma first-aid kits they brought as evidence of malicious intent.

Song was convicted of one count of attempted murder for shooting the officer, but acquitted on two other counts of attempting to shoot at two correctional officers. Song was also found guilty of discharging a firearm during a violent crime. Four other people accused of attempted murder counts were acquitted on those charges. Song faces up to life in prison.

Related

Wearing All Black at Protests Makes You Guilty of Terrorism, Prosecutors Tell Jury

In a significant victory for the government, jurors convicted eight defendants on material support for terrorism charges for wearing black clothes to the late-night demonstration. That use of “black bloc” clothing was an antifa tactic that assisted in the shooting of the officer, prosecutors said during their closing arguments.

The defendants convicted of providing material support to terrorists were Song, Autumn Hill, Zachary Evetts, Savanna Batten, Megan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, and Ines Soto. They face up to 15 years in prison on that count.

The same defendants were also convicted of riot and two explosives charges related to the fireworks. Hill, Evetts, Morris, and Rueda were acquitted on attempted murder charges that would have carried sentences up to life imprisonment.

Rueda and her husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, were convicted of conspiracy to conceal documents. That charge centered on Sanchez’s movement of boxes containing radical pamphlets after her arrest. Sanchez was also convicted of corruptly concealing a document.

The prosecution of the Prairieland defendants represented the federal government’s first use of the material support charge against alleged antifa members accused of domestic terrorism.

The verdict came after 10 days of testimony inside a Fort Worth courtroom packed with family members of the defendants, law enforcement officials, and journalists.

Prosecutors called the wounded police officer and detention center guards to describe what it was like on the receiving end of a barrage of bullets, as well as four cooperating defendants who pleaded guilty before trial.

Another significant witness was a researcher at a right-wing think tank who said the tactics used by the demonstrators that night, including “black bloc” clothing and the encrypted messaging app Signal — the latter of which the witness said he also used — were typical of antifa.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The post Anti-ICE Protesters Convicted on Terrorism Charges for Wearing All Black appeared first on The Intercept.

A printing press.

That printing press was never presented to jurors. Still, the government has kept it locked away because it hated the pamphlets and zines it published, lawyer Blake Burns said.

Burns represents Elizabeth Soto, one of nine defendants whose fates were in the hands of jurors as deliberations began Thursday. All are accused of roles during or after a late-night noise demonstration outside Prairieland Detention Center, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Dallas that ended with a local police officer wounded by gunfire.

The case has become a bellwether for the Trump administration’s crackdown on dissent from the left. The government charged people involved with the anti-ICE protest with a slew of charges, including attempted murder and terrorism counts that defense attorneys said are being used to criminalize protest.

“They’re here asking you guys to put protesters in prison as terrorists,” Burns, the defense lawyer, told jurors. “That’s not happened before. And you are literally the only people in the world who can stop it.”

During 10 days of testimony in a packed Fort Worth, Texas, courtroom, prosecutors bombarded jurors with images of radical zines printed on the press, anti-government internet memes, drawings of burning cop cars, and a video of an unidentified street brawl between far-left and far-right protesters.

Prosecutors acknowledged those materials were protected by the First Amendment but said they showed the roughly dozen people who assembled outside the ICE facility were steeped in antifa tactics.

Eight of nine defendants on trial this month face material support for terrorism charges for wearing “black bloc” clothes at the protest. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have hailed the first-ever use of terrorism charges against alleged antifa members.

Defense attorneys argued Wednesday that prosecutors had wildly overcharged a case that should have centered on the alleged shooter, Benjamin Song, instead of the larger group.

Guilt by Zine

Prosecutors presented much of the evidence that might be expected at an attempted murder trial: ballistics and fingerprint experts, eyewitness police officers, and cooperating witnesses.

They also presented lengthy testimony about radical pamphlets and artwork collected from the defendants arrested that night or in raids during the following days.

Despite labeling the defendants “a North Texas antifa cell” in their indictment, prosecutors have acknowledged that they were at most a loose-knit collection of people from the Dallas–Fort Worth’s small leftist scene of anarchists and socialists.

Two of the scene’s fixtures were Elizabeth and Ines Soto, a married couple who operated the printing press and helped run a local reading group called the Emma Goldman Book Club, named for the early 20th-century anarchist revolutionary.

At one point during testimony Tuesday, a prosecutor spent more than half an hour scrolling through a Twitter account allegedly operated by the Sotos. The Twitter feed included a retweet of a December 2016 post with the words “How to handle fash in your hood” that included a shaky video of a street fight between protesters accompanied by the Flatbush Zombies song “Death 2.”

“I crack your fucking skull and use that as a bowl for cereal. I’m so serial. Ted Bundy, give me money, Son of Sam, gun in hand. Jeffrey Dahmer, with two llamas,” the jury heard in the song’s lyrics.

Defense attorneys objected to the introduction of the video as evidence.

“Yes, it is prejudicial,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Shawn Smith told the judge in defense of using the video. “The whole reason we’re putting it into evidence is because it’s prejudicial.”

Though U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee, allowed the Twitter feed to be presented in court, prosecutors could not definitively establish whether the Sotos had posted the video or what incident it depicted.

The Sotos, however, have not disputed that they were key members of the reading group. In his closing argument, Smith said the group was a front to recruit new antifa members.

“Emma Goldman Book Club,” Smith said. “It sounds very innocuous. It’s camouflage for what it is.”

“Your Body as Camouflage”

To help jurors interpret the book club’s readings and other materials, prosecutors presented a researcher at a far-right think tank as an expert.

Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy once focused his research on the Muslim Brotherhood. After the 2020 George Floyd protests raged, he wrote a book about “black identity extremists.” In recent years he has focused on another right-wing boogeyman: antifa.

Shideler said Monday that he helped write the definition of “antifa” included in the government’s indictment. He walked that testimony back Tuesday, saying that he only conferred on a draft.

Related

Islamophobic Think Tank Helped Write Indictment Against ICE Protesters

Prosecutors also had Shideler read Trump’s September 22 executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, in an apparent attempt to suggest that the language was borrowed from the order.

Shideler described what he said were common tactics of antifa, including using the messaging app Signal — which Shideler said he also used — and wearing “black bloc” clothes to obscure identities. The phrase refers to instances where groups of left-wing demonstrators dress in all black to make them less individually identifiable.

The point of that testimony came into focus during the prosecution’s closing arguments. Using Signal and wearing black-bloc clothing were “tactics that assisted in the ambush of a cop,” said Smith.

“Material support. It sounds — I don’t know — nefarious. Complicated. It’s actually very simple,” Smith said.

He said that wearing black clothes at the noise demonstration would be enough to convict the eight defendants accused of material support.

“Providing your body as camouflage for others to do the enumerated acts is providing support,” he said. “It’s impossible to tell who is doing what. That’s the point.”

Related

How Many Members Does Antifa Have? Where Is Its Headquarters? The FBI Has No Answers.

The government used Shideler and the antifa talk to try to distract jurors from the defendants’ actual actions on the night of July 4, said MarQuetta Clayton, an attorney for defendant Maricela Rueda. She also warned that the trial served as a larger proving ground for the government’s attempts to criminalize antifa.

“The government’s expert on antifa said his career may be boosted by the outcome of this case,” she said. “This is an experiment for them. But this courtroom is not a laboratory, and Maricela is not a lab rat.”

Charged for Carrying a Box

Rueda’s husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, is the only defendant on trial who is not accused of participating in the July 4 protest. Instead, prosecutors have charged him and his wife with conspiring to obstruct justice by moving a box of zines out of Rueda’s house after her arrest.

Free speech advocates say that Estrada’s arrest sets a dangerous precedent that criminalizes the mere possession of anti-government material.

“He is on trial for two things,” said Sanchez’s public defender, Christopher Weinbel. “Carrying a box, and conspiracy to carry a box, of which they try to call evidence.”

Weinbel said the box contained Sanchez’s own possessions, the timeline of his movements disproved the theory that he was acting at the direction of his wife, and that a government agent had also testified that none of the materials were used in the investigation.

Smith, the prosecutor, argued that moving the boxes was part of a larger cover-up in the hours and days after the demonstration.

“What is important to the group is hiding their material,” he said. “This anarchist, insurrectionist, hating-the-government material.”

Song and the Rest

Defense attorneys chose their words carefully when it came to Song, the person accused of shooting an AR-15 rifle at two detention center guards and the Alvarado, Texas, police officer who was hit.

None of the defense lawyers overtly blamed Song for the bloodshed, but several suggested that the government should have distinguished between Song and the rest of the protesters.

“This should have been a three-day attempted murder trial of one person,” Weinbel said.

Prosecutors painted Song as the ringleader that night. Still, they argued that four defendants who are also on trial for attempted murder — Song, Rueda, Autumn Hill, and Megan Morris — could have reasonably foreseen that Song would use violence based on conversations before the demonstration.

The eight defendants who face material support charges gave aid to the attack by wearing black clothes, prosecutors allege. They include the defendants accused of attempted murder along with the Sotos, Savanna Batten, and Zachary Evetts.

Song’s attorney, Phillip Hayes, said during his closing argument that Song was only trying to shoot “suppressive” fire at the ground after police arrived on the scene. Hayes suggested that a ricocheting bullet wounded the officer.

The post Wearing All Black at Protests Makes You Guilty of Terrorism, Prosecutors Tell Jury appeared first on The Intercept.

Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy said under questioning from a defense attorney that he provided language that prosecutors used in the first-ever domestic terrorism case against a purported antifa cell.

The decision to use the language was the government’s, Shideler said.

“I told them what I believed to be an accurate definition of antifa, and they used it,” Shideler said.

The courtroom testimony provided a window into the extraordinarily close cooperation between federal prosecutors and a Washington advocacy group that has regularly argued for government action against left-wing activists.

Shideler himself was the author of a September article titled “How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks: A Roadmap for the Trump Administration” that called on the Justice Department to take more aggressive action against left-of-center activists. He said he conferred with prosecutors in October, a month before they obtained an indictment in the Texas case.

Related

How Many Members Does Antifa Have? Where Is Its Headquarters? The FBI Has No Answers.

Defense lawyers raised questions about Shideler’s professional home, the Center for Security Policy. The nonprofit think tank was founded by Frank Gaffney, a former Defense Department official under President Ronald Reagan who has routinely been described as an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist. Gaffney’s views on Islam are commonly espoused at Center for Security Policy events.

The center itself has been branded a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a designation Shideler bristled at in court.

“Yes sir, the Southern Poverty Law Center has mislabeled many people as a hate group,” he said in response to questioning from defense lawyer Phillip Hayes.

The nine defendants on trial this month face years or life sentences in prison for a noise demonstration outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center on July 4 of last year.

Related

Texas “Antifa Cell” Terror Trial Takes On Tough Questions About Guns at Protests Against ICE

After demonstrators used fireworks in a show of solidarity for the detainees held inside the Alvarado, Texas, facility, local police arrived to confront them. One of the responding officers was shot in the neck.

Shideler testified as an expert witness for the government over the objections of defense attorneys, who were overruled by U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee.

In lengthy testimony, he provided a recounting of the history of antifascist organizing that ranged from 1930s Germany to 1980s U.K. activism to the present-day United States. Various tactics used by the Prairieland demonstrators to protect their identities — such as Signal chats, “black block” clothing, and a general “security culture” — were all consistent with antifa practices, Shideler said.

Under questioning from prosecutors, Shideler sought to tie the ideas laid out in anarchist zines recovered from the defendants’ possession with their actions outside the detention center.

Several cooperating defendants have testified that they did not consider themselves members of antifa, defense attorneys pointed out during cross-examination.

They also went on the attack over Shideler’s professional qualifications and his conclusions. Shideler acknowledged that he does not use academic social science methods, does not submit his research for peer review, and relies largely on open-source materials whose authenticity is difficult to verify.

Shideler called Signal a “hallmark of antifa” before adding that he uses it himself.

The antifa trial is Shideler’s first time testifying as an expert witness in a trial, he said. One defense lawyer noted that Shideler was invited to testify about antifa before the Senate Judiciary Committee in October and asked whether his courtroom appearance this week would provide a further boost to his career.

“I guess it will depend how it goes,” he said.

His testimony is set to continue Tuesday.

The post Islamophobic Think Tank Helped Write Indictment Against ICE Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.

Nearly all Republicans were joined by Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., in blocking a resolution that would have forced Trump to seek congressional approval for further strikes.

Related

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

Advocates of the measure and a companion in the House, known as war powers resolutions, acknowledged they were uphill battles given the near-unanimous support for the war among the Republicans who control Congress. They said the votes were still important as a test for lawmakers given Trump’s opposition to seeking congressional approval for the joint Israeli–American war on Iran.

The House of Representatives is set to vote on another measure Thursday that also faces long odds, in part because a small group of pro-Israel Democrats have introduced competing legislation.

The companion resolution to the Senate’s was sponsored by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky. Besides Massie, however, only one other Republican has been identified as a potential yes vote for the resolution.

Several Democrats seem set oppose the resolution despite party leadership’s decision to whip votes on it.

One is Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., a staunch supporter of Israel who has offered a resolution of his own that would allow Trump 30 days to continue attacks. Gottheimer said in a statement that his measure would allow Trump to avoid a “potentially precarious withdrawal.”

An advocate backing the Khanna–Massie resolution noted that the 30-day time frame lines up with how long Trump has suggested the conflict might last.

“There is already a vote this week on Khanna–Massie. Any representative that is actually against the war, that’s the vehicle they should be voting for now, and not attempting to give Trump a blank check for 30 days,” Cavan Kharrazian, a senior policy adviser at the progressive group Demand Progress, said Tuesday. “We have already seen in the past four days the death and destruction and escalation with this war. I can’t even imagine what things look like in 30 days.”

Senate Shutout

The war powers resolution in the Senate was the latest attempt to check Trump’s growing appetite for foreign conflict. Relying on the War Powers Act of 1973, the resolution would have forced Trump to seek congressional approval to continue strikes.

As with previous resolutions focused on boat strikes in the Caribbean and Trump’s war on Venezuela, however, it fell short of obtaining the simple majority it needed despite support from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

Related

Fetterman Voted With GOP to Make Sure Trump Can Attack Iran Again

Fetterman defected from the rest of the Democratic caucus to oppose the measure; he was also the only Democrat to vote against a war powers resolution to block Trump’s attacks on boats in the Caribbean and one to impose restrictions after last summer’s attacks on Iran.

Paul was the only Republican senator to vote for Wednesday’s war powers bill. Republicans who have expressed skepticism of foreign intervention in the past seemed to learn a lesson from January, when Trump lashed out against GOP senators who defected from the administration on a Venezuela war powers resolution.

Much of the debate on the Senate floor Wednesday centered on whether the conflict will be over relatively soon, as Trump has sometimes suggested. Democrats raised the specter of the conflict spiraling out for years, in the mold of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“The only way that you will be able to destroy their capacity to make missiles and drones is to be permanently running jets overhead and constantly bombing the new sites that the hard-line regime sets up. That’s endless war. That’s trillions of dollars,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., pushed back against that argument in his floor remarks.

“It’s not an aimless exercise in the Middle East. This is a measured campaign to eliminate the ayatollah’s threat. It may take time to finish. We’re not going to put a time limit on it. That does not make it endless,” he said.

In a show of force meant to convey the gravity of the moment, Democrats packed the chamber during the vote count, while members of the Republican caucus trickled in and left.

“Not at War Right Now”

Even as Wicker sought to downplay the prospect of an endless conflict, Trump and top administration officials were sending mixed messages. Trump has ruled out the idea of seeking congressional approval despite the potential for a long war.

That did not bother House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who said at a press conference Wednesday that the conflict does not meet the definition of a war that would trigger the Constitution’s requirement for congressional approval.

“We’re not at war right now. We’re four days into a very specific, clear mission, Operation Epic Fury,” he said.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., noted that officials up to Trump himself have used the word “war.”

Related

Fool Me Twice: The Case for War With Iran Is Even Thinner Than It Was for Iraq

“And yet he refused to come before Congress as the Constitution demands and make his case for war. And after yesterday’s briefing, I think I know why,” Warnock said, referring to a Tuesday briefing from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and others. “It is exceedingly difficult to explain your rationale when it is not clear in your own head — when it changes every day.”

The post House Iran War Powers Resolution Could Lose Support to Competing Bill by Pro-Israel Democrat appeared first on The Intercept.

Soon enough, however, primary elections will give voters their say on that approach.

Starting Tuesday, a series of primaries will serve as referenda on candidates who have either given ambivalent responses to the war or who have drawn past support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying flagship that backed Trump’s strikes.

The first big test will come in North Carolina, where Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee-backed incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee is under attack from challenger Nida Allam over prior ties to AIPAC.

Allam, a Durham County commissioner hoping to topple Foushee in the 4th Congressional District, chose to make the U.S. strikes on Iran the subject of her final pitch to voters in a video ad where she condemned the war.

“I will never take a dime from defense contractors or the pro-Israel lobby,” Allam said. “I have opposed these forever wars my entire career, and I hope to earn your vote to be your proudly uncompromised pro-peace leader in Washington.”

Taking heat from Allam, Foushee says she also opposes the war.

“I will go on record right now: I do not support Trump’s illegal war with Iran and will do everything I can in Congress to support War Powers Resolutions to stop it,” Foushee said on social media Saturday morning, hours after the bombs began dropping.

A super PAC affiliated with AIPAC gave Foushee crucial support during her 2022 race. With the lobbying group’s brand becoming increasingly toxic within the Democratic Party, she has sworn off support from the organization this time around — but a group tied to an AIPAC donor has nonetheless flooded the race with ads on her behalf.

The North Carolina candidates’ stances reflect the overwhelming sentiment of Democratic voters, according to a pair of polls conducted over the weekend. Only 27 percent of Americans and 7 percent of Democrats approve of the attacks, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that lined up with the results of a Washington Post survey.

Avoiding the Underlying Issue

Democratic leaders in Congress have taken a different tack. Before the strikes, they dragged their feet on forcing a vote on a war powers resolution meant to block launching strikes without congressional approval.

Related

Democrats Finally Get Around to Forcing Iran War Powers Vote

After the attack, many top Democrats criticized Trump’s decision to launch the war without congressional approval, while being vague on the substantive question of whether it was right to go to war.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., for instance, tied the attacks to the Democratic campaign theme of affordability and blasted Trump for failing to ask Congress for approval.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has also stopped short of directly criticizing the idea of attacking Iran. In his statement, he invoked the threat of Iran attaining nuclear weapons, cited the public’s fear of “another endless and costly war,” and called on Congress to pass a war powers resolution.

Those positions allow Democratic leaders to focus their criticism on Trump’s violation of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the sole power to declare war, rather than the underlying issue of whether the war is warranted.

Democrats should be doing more than merely criticizing the process leading up to the war, said Hannah Morris, the vice president of government affairs for J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group that is lobbying members of Congress to support a war powers resolution that blocks Trump from launching further attacks without congressional approval.

“Process plus. This is not just about process, this is about a reckless war by choice, and it completely flies in the face of what President Trump ran on,” Morris told the Intercept.

One congressional candidate was blunt in her critique of the response from Democratic leaders.

“As we plunge headlong into another catastrophic war, Sen. Schumer and Rep. Jeffries’ throat clearing and process critique only serves Trump and the war machine. Democrats should speak clearly and with one voice: no war,” said Claire Valdez, a state assembly member who is running in New York’s 7th Congressional District with the blessing of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Only a few Democratic members of Congress have given their outright support to the war — most notably Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa.

Even in congressional races where none of the candidates have given the war their blessing, however, there have important distinctions in whether they focus Trump’s wrecking ball approach to the Constitution or the wisdom of the war itself.

In Illinois, a Democratic primary election in the 9th Congressional District on March 17 will give voters a test on whether they want candidates more forthrightly opposed to the conflict.

State Sen. Laura Fine, a top candidate in that race who has drawn the backing of AIPAC donors, supported Israel’s attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities last year. She was one of the candidates centering Trump in her response to the attack over the weekend.

“Donald Trump is leading us into another military conflict to distract from his own failures that puts American lives at risk and threatens to send the Middle East into further chaos,” she said. “He simply cannot be trusted and must be impeached.”

Two candidates vying for the progressive vote, Daniel Biss and Kat Abughazaleh, have both come out against the war. Biss called it “reckless and illegal.” Abughazaleh, a social media influencer, also called out Democrats who were willing to go along with the attacks in a video post.

Related

Trump’s Iran Attack Was Illegal, Former U.S. Military Officials Allege

“The problem is that many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle love playing into the idea of Iran as a boogeyman, and so they’re willing to bomb them to hell. Especially if it lines their pockets or gets them more donors from the military–industrial complex,” she said.

In Maine, firebrand oyster fisher Graham Platner was far ahead of popular two-term Gov. Janet Mills in a recent primary poll.

Platner, a Marine combat veteran, called an emergency protest over the weekend and called the war “tragic, stupid, ill-conceived.”

In her statement, Mills criticized Trump’s “unilateral” decision to go to war while adding that Iran could not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.

“The American people have had enough of forever wars,” Mills said, “that put the lives of American servicemembers and civilians in danger, that do not protect the American people, that hurt our alliances and escalate global tensions.”

The post Democratic Leaders Avoid Criticizing Trump’s Iran War. Now Voters Will Have a Say. appeared first on The Intercept.

Cuellar went on to win the general election in the 28th Congressional District. Then he won again in 2024, despite a federal bribery indictment. In December, President Donald Trump granted Cuellar a pardon from federal charges.

Trump’s assist might have generated a serious primary challenge for a Democrat elsewhere, but Cuellar does not have any well-funded opponents this time around in Texas’s primary elections on Tuesday.

That trend has repeated itself along the Texas border. In districts where progressives once drew national attention and fundraising dollars, a handful of candidates in the left lane are mounting shoestring campaigns.

Texas politicos chalked that phenomenon up to the disappointment from the defeat of progressive candidates in 2022 and 2024, mid-decade redistricting that made several seats in Texas more conservative, and concerns from national groups that some Latinos have permanently swung to the right after voting for Trump in 2024.

Some observers, however, believe that there’s a chance that Democrats may overlearned the lessons of 2024, when Trump made historic inroads among Latino voters along the border.

“I think there’s a decided progressive shift, especially among Democratic voters who are desperate for real change,” said Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “But I think they’re desperate to find candidates who can articulate that.”

One of the candidates who is vying for progressive votes Ada Cuellar, an emergency room doctor who has tapped her retirement fund as national donors line up behind a centrist competitor.

Ada Cuellar, no relation to Henry, is running in the Democratic primary against Tejano music scion Bobby Pulido in the 15th Congressional District, which stretches from McAllen on the border to the suburbs of San Antonio. Pulido has cast himself as the candidate most attuned to the district’s attitudes on social issues such as guns and abortion rights.

Washington Democrats are gushing over Pulido’s prospects to win over Republicans in a district that went 58 percent to 40 percent for Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024. Only a shotgun-wielding centrist like Pulido has a chance, the theory goes.

Cuellar disagrees. While she eschews the “progressive” label — she considers herself an “independent Democrat” — she is running on a platform that includes support for Medicare for All and abortion rights.

“The establishment has misread the moment, and they really shouldn’t have made a pick here,” said Cuellar. “I really think they shouldn’t make picks in general.”

Early polls, including one conducted by Cuellar’s campaign, showed her far behind the singer. The $824,000 that Ada Cuellar has loaned her own campaign, though, appears to be evening the score.

And national groups are rushing to prop up Pulido. Blue Dog Action is running ads responding to Cuellar’s attacks on Pulido over his views on abortion, for example. The centrist Democratic PAC spent close to $1 million in support of Pulido in February alone, campaign finance records show.

Cuellar is not the only candidate in the progressive mold running without national support.

In the 34th Congressional District, policy researcher Etienne Rosas is trying to take on conservative Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez — with $7,900 in cash on hand compared to the incumbent’s $1.3 million.

Gonzalez co-chairs the Blue Dog Coalition and voted in favor of the January appropriations bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, factors that would make him a tempting target for progressives elsewhere. Still, national groups have stayed away.

“To be honest, as a socialist myself, I’ve been kind of dismayed how much little outreach leftists that have a national platform have done to this district,” Rosas said.

Rosas is hopeful that support from local Democratic Socialists of America members will give him a people-power boost. Still, he wishes that more national progressives would turn their eyes to the border.

Gonzalez’s campaign did not return a request for comment.

Down in the Rio Grande Valley

National progressive groups and political figures have had a mixed record in supporting campaigns in the Rio Grande Valley.

In 2020 and 2022, Henry Cuellar faced serious primary challenges from immigration legal aid lawyer Jessica Cisneros in his district, which stretches from Laredo to the outskirts of San Antonio. Buoyed by the backing of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, she fell short by a few hundred votes of toppling Cuellar on her second try.

In the 15th Congressional District, where Ada Cuellar and Pulido are competing now, Michelle Vallejo secured the Democratic nomination in 2022 and 2024, first as a progressive, then as more of a centrist.

Related

Silicon Valley Billionaire Storms Into Texas to Bail Out Abortion Foe Henry Cuellar

Vallejo drew national support, but that was not enough to put her over the top in two races against Republican Monica De La Cruz. In a January 2025 report, the local group Cambio Texas said that Vallejo’s campaigns fell short in part because she relied too heavily on national groups.

The report was also critical of national progressives’ alleged overreliance on “purity tests” and “ideological language.”

“When progressive messaging fails to resonate with Texas voters, the problem often lies with the messenger,” argued the group, whose executive director at the time, Abel Prado, is now serving as Pulido’s campaign manager. “Winning elections requires a willingness to engage with people outside one’s own social or political comfort zone.”

The defeats of Cisneros and Vallejo left a bitter taste in the mouths of national progressives and may have contributed to their relative absence this time. Another key factor is the redistricting that Trump pushed through the Texas legislature last year.

Under the new maps, every district along the border voted for Trump by a more than 10-point margin, save for the compact seat in El Paso represented by Democrat Rep. Veronica Escobar, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

That redistricting may make it difficult for Democrats to win even in the 23rd Congressional District, where sitting Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales is being dragged down by a scandal involving an affair with a former staffer. None of the candidates in the crowded Democratic primary there have seen significant donations come into their campaign thus far.

In recent years, national groups such as Justice Democrats pursued a strategy of trying to get the most progressive candidates possible elected in districts that are already blue, rather than attempting to boost candidates who share their views in purple or red districts.

“Redistricting has a part in it, absolutely,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director at Justice Democrats. “We look at pretty deep blue districts.”

Still, Andrabi is critical of the strategy that national Democrats have pursued of supporting conservative Democrats such as Henry Cuellar.

“You have a Democratic establishment that is actually OK with having a diet Republican represent south Texas, as long as they have a D after their name,” he said.

Along with Gonzalez, Cuellar was one of seven House Democrats to vote for funding the Department of Homeland Security last month. He is the House’s sole Democrat opposed to abortion rights. And he voted against a war powers resolution that would have forced Trump to seek congressional approval for further attacks on Venezuela.

Cuellar’s campaign did not respond to a request for his pitch to progressives in his district.

The argument from national Democratic groups for supporting relative conservatives such as Cuellar, Gonzalez, and Pulido is consistent: They are all the most likely to win a general election in districts that voted heavily for Trump.

Yet as polls show Democrats fired up and Latinos shifting away from Trump, candidates such as Rosas and Ada Cuellar believe that national Democrats have misjudged the border. Cuellar says she is hardly bothered anymore when people call her a progressive.

“It’s not really a scary thing to get that label,” she said. “I have noticed that the Democrats get very energized by a person who is more progressive. And I have also noticed that right now, there is such a hunger for a person who is a fighter and who is competent.”

The post Texas Progressives Say Democratic Establishment Is Blowing It In the Rio Grande Valley appeared first on The Intercept.

In a joint statement, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and other top Democrats said they would force a vote as soon as Congress reconvenes next week.

The delay in forcing a vote means, however, that Trump or Israel could attack Iran before a vote even happens. No matter the timing, observers expect the war power resolution to fail due to scattered Democratic opposition.

Pro-Israel hard-liners Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., have both come out against the bill. They have taken the position that Trump should have a free hand — with Moskowitz even deriding the resolution as the “Ayatollah Protection Act.”

In Moskowitz’s case, his position is drawing fire from primary opponent Oliver Larkin, a Democratic Socialists of America member who said Moskowitz’s comments showed “unseriousness” about the looming war.

“He is ultimately willing to cede congressional war powers authority, which is required under the Constitution. He is willing to continue this failed, multiple decades of ceding congressional power to the president, to the executive, with catastrophic results,” Larkin said.

Moskowitz’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Gottheimer and Moskowitz have taken a different public stance than Democratic leaders, who have generally expressed caution about the prospect of war with Iran.

It was only Thursday, however, that top Democrats including Jeffries gave a full-throated endorsement of a bipartisan war powers resolution from Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky.

At a minimum, Democratic leaders could have been more aggressive in pursuing a vote on a possible U.S attack that Trump has floated for weeks, said Erik Sperling, the executive director of the nonprofit group Just Foreign Policy.

“But what really counts is having the vote and having it before the war. If they’re willing to get behind Khanna–Massie and whip for it, then that’s what the Democratic base and the American people hope to get from them, so that would be very positive,” Sperling said Wednesday.

The exact timing of the House floor on the Khanna–Massie resolution remains unclear, but members are back in their districts until Monday. In the Senate, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Wednesday that he will move to force a floor vote on his resolution “very soon.”

Gottheimer was the first Democrat to oppose the war powers. In a February 20 joint statement with Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., Gottheimer said that Iran posed a “direct threat.”

Related

Trump Menaces Iran With Massive Armada Capable of Prolonged War

“We respect and defend Congress’s constitutional role in matters of war. Oversight and debate are absolutely vital. However, this resolution would restrict the flexibility needed to respond to real and evolving threats and risks, signaling weakness at a dangerous moment,” the lawmakers said.

Moskowitz was even more blunt in his statement to the news outlet Jewish Insider last week.

“I am not willing to preemptively tell the supreme leader that he has nothing to worry about, no reason to negotiate because you are totally safe, and that the people of Iran can’t depend on us. They should just rename it the Ayatollah Protection Act because that’s what it does,” he said.

If Gottheimer and Moskowitz were hoping to lead a Democratic stampede, it hasn’t materialized yet. Still, their votes appear likely to block the resolution, since almost all the Republicans in the House are expected to vote against it.

Related

Trump Bullies Flip-Flopping Senators Into Defeating Vote to Block Venezuela War

A series of war powers resolutions in the House and Senate aimed at blocking strikes on Iran and Venezuela have failed since Trump took office for a second time, most recently when the president crushed a short GOP insurrection in the Senate over his attack on Venezuela.

Even if one of the measures were to pass, Trump could veto it. He has also argued that the 1973 law creating a process for Congress to pass the resolution is unconstitutional, a position that scholars have dismissed as wrong.

Still, advocates argue that there is still value in putting members of Congress on the record about a matter as weighty as war, if only so that voters in the next elections know where they stand on the issue.

Larkin, Moskowitz’s primary challenger in Florida, said Democrats have lost ground there because voters have been disillusioned by the party’s record on Israel and Gaza.

“The larger trend here, if we continue to nominate these neoconservative establishment Democrats, is that the Democratic Party is going to lose ground,” he said.

The post Democrats Finally Get Around to Forcing Iran War Powers Vote appeared first on The Intercept.

The spooks operating in the shadows of the Sunshine State would track and “neutralize” people “whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat” to Florida.

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Danny Alvarez, a Republican from the Tampa area, would create a state-level counterintelligence and counterterrorism unit inside the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Alvarez says the unit is needed to defend against the likes of China and Cuba. Critics, however, see a civil liberties nightmare in the making that could be used to target Muslims and alleged subversives based solely on their views or opinions, much like the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program.

During a Tuesday committee hearing, Alvarez said he was preparing to introduce an amendment to address civil liberties concerns and gave a fiery defense of his bill.

“People are looking for boogeymen here. There’s no boogeyman. I’m going to strip everything that makes you question it. You just have to trust me to get to the next committee,” he said. “But while you look for boogeymen, I need to be looking for terrorists. I need to prevent the next bomb.”

Alvarez’s promise of a rewrite did not persuade state Rep. Michele Rayner, the committee Democrat who raised the specter of COINTELPRO, which targeted 1960s radicals using illegal methods. She said that as a black woman working in the civil rights field, she herself had been tracked by law enforcement.

“I don’t know if there’s any iteration of this bill that I could support, because quite frankly that means any of us in this room could be a target,” she said.

The legislation has already passed votes in three Florida House committees, and a companion bill is pending in the state Senate, giving it a stronger chance than most of making it into law.

The proposed unit is already drawing interest from the spy industry. The Israeli spyware company Cellebrite is tracking the bill’s progress through a registered lobbyist, according to state disclosures, which do not list the company’s position. (The lobbyist, Alan Suskey, did not respond to a request for comment.)

September 11’s Long Shadow

Alvarez argues that Florida needs to step up to protect itself, especially in light of two intelligence failures in the past three decades: the September 11 attacks and the more recent New Year’s truck-ramming attack in New Orleans. He said he envisions the unit as a complement to federal law enforcement.

In a statement, Alvarez denied that the new unit would be allowed to open investigations based solely on people’s views.

“It does not authorize investigations based solely on speech,” he told The Intercept. “Any action must be tied to demonstrable conduct and constitutional standards. The First Amendment remains fully intact, and the unit operates under strong statutory safeguards and oversight.”

At a minimum, the current language of the bill leaves the spy squad’s targeting process open to debate. The bill says state intelligence officers are supposed to detect so-called “adversary intelligence entities” and “neutralize” them.

Related

“Terrorist”: How ICE Weaponized 9/11’s Scarlet Letter

According to the bill, those entities include but are not limited to “any national, foreign, multinational, friendly, competitor, opponent, adversary, or recognized enemy government or nongovernmental organization, company, business, corporation, consortium, group, agency, cell, terrorist, insurgent, guerrilla entity, or person whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat or are inimical to the interests of this state and the United States of America.”

The unit will also deploy “tradecraft” against Florida’s enemies, among other language in the bill drawn from the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage that raised questions at the Tuesday hearing.

There’s no specific language in the bill protecting U.S. citizens from being targeted. In a press release last month, Alvarez said he wants it to tackle “both foreign and domestic threats.”

Civil Rights Worries

Bobby Block, executive director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, said the bill’s sweeping language leaves open the possibility that the new unit could target people simply based on their views, citing the language about actors who hold views deemed “inimical” to Florida.

“What does that mean? If I’m not a white Christian nationalist, does that mean my views are inimical to the values? It begs a lot of questions,” Block said.

The lack of explicit civil liberties protections in the bill worried Block, who pointed out that Congress passed a host of such legislation in the 1970s after the famed Church Committee investigated intelligence community abuses, including COINTELPRO.

With ongoing attacks in Florida against Muslim groups, CAIR-Florida officials think they know who will wind up being a target of the new counterterrorism unit.

In the past few months, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis joined Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in deeming the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, as a “foreign terrorist organization,” a designation the Muslim advocacy group is challenging in court.

“If it’s anything like what we’ve seen, which we’re pretty sure it is, it’s going to be one particular group that is going to be surveilled,” Omar Saleh, a civil rights lawyer for CAIR-Florida, told The Intercept. “They are not going to go into churches or synagogues or any other places of worship — they’re going to focus on mosques.”

Saleh said he believes that Alvarez’s legislation is one of several pending attempts to “codify” DeSantis’s executive order if it is struck down by a judge.

Alvarez didn’t respond directly to a question about whether Muslims would be targeted, but he dismissed the idea that the bill would lead to civil liberties violations.

“Anyone pretending that safety equals tyranny is guilty of performance art,” he said. “Some people act as if safety and liberty can’t coexist. In Florida, we believe they can, and they do.”

The post Florida Might Make Its Own Spy Squad. Muslims Think They Have a Pretty Good Idea Who’ll Be Targeted. appeared first on The Intercept.

They were there for less than an hour before things took a turn: A police officer was wounded by a gunshot.

Only one member of the group is accused of pulling a trigger, but 19 people went to jail on state and federal charges. Attorney General Pam Bondi labeled the defendants terrorists, and FBI Director Kash Patel bragged that it was the first time alleged antifa activists had been hit with terror charges.

Months later, the Trump administration recycled the label to smear Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Minneapolis residents who were shot and killed by federal immigration agents. They were supposedly dangerous left-wing agitators, in Pretti’s case legally carrying what the government said was a “dangerous gun.” The videos of Good and Pretti’s killings disproved the administration’s lies.

Unlike the Minneapolis shootings, the full events at Prairieland were not caught on video. Instead, a jury in federal court will hear evidence against nine defendants at a trial starting next week, which will serve as the first major courtroom test of the Trump administration’s push to label left-wing activists as domestic terrorists.

Court hearings in the case have taken place under heavy security, with police caravans whisking defendants to and from an art deco courthouse in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. Inside the courtroom, straight-backed officers maintain a perimeter.

The odds once looked long for the Prairieland group given the conservative jury pool and the seven defendants who pleaded guilty before trial, including several who are cooperating with the prosecution. The protests, crackdowns, and killings in Minneapolis, however, may have shifted perceptions of what happened seven months earlier in Texas.

“When they were crafting this indictment, they came up with that there is such a thing as a ‘north Texas antifa cell,’” said Xavier de Janon, a lawyer representing one defendant in state court. “I wonder how they are going to make it stick when their attempts at framing Alex Pretti didn’t work, fell flat on its face.”

Jurors in the Prairieland case will be faced with key questions about protest in the Trump era. Are guns at protests a precaution or a provocation? Can the government succeed in using First Amendment-protected literature, such as anarchist zines, to win convictions? And how far can activists go when they believe their country is sliding into fascism?

Making Noise

Federal investigators and a support committee for the defendants offered starkly different takes on the purpose of the late-night gathering at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas.

For the feds, it was a planned ambush of law enforcement staged with guns, black garb, and bad intentions. Prosecutors described the defendants as “nine North Texas Antifa Cell operatives.” Supporters of the defendants say the protest was an attempt to conduct a noise demonstration, of the sort that have since become common outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement buildings in places like Chicago and Minneapolis.

Related

“Antifa” Protesters Charged With Terrorism for Constitutionally Protected Activity

The Prairieland facility, which was built to hold 700 people, housed over 1,000 by the spring of 2025. The privately operated detention center was in the news again this week, when the family of a Palestinian woman detained there since last year on alleged visa violations said she had been hospitalized after weeks of deteriorating health.

On July 4 last year, a larger group of protesters had staged a traditional demonstration of the conditions inside the lockup. That night, a group of people who had conferred on an encrypted chat app arrived outside the detention center.

Around 10:37 p.m., the fireworks started flying, according to the testimony of an FBI agent at a pretrial hearing. Some of the group of a dozen or so slashed tires on cars in the parking lot near the detention center and sprayed “ICE Pig” on one car.

Guards called 911. Local police showed up. Within minutes, an Alvarado police officer who answered the call had been shot in the neck.

The U.S. attorney’s office alleges that the shooter was Benjamin Song, a former Marine Corps reservist who was a fixture in local left-wing organizations such as the Socialist Rifle Association and Food Not Bombs.

At a preliminary hearing in September, prosecutors painted a dramatic picture of the shooting: Minutes after police arrived, Song allegedly shouted “get to the rifles” and let loose with an AR-15 that had a modified, binary trigger designed to fire at a fast rate.

At the same hearing, however, defense attorneys poked holes in the government’s narrative that the shooting had been planned.

Prosecutors’ case that the group wanted to commit violence depends heavily on messages that members of the group allegedly sent through the encrypted messaging app, Signal, or at an in-person “gear check” before the action.

“I’m not getting arrested,” Song allegedly said at one point.

Defense attorneys objected to the idea that such ominous-sounding statements were proof that the group planned an attack.

Under questioning from a defense attorney, an FBI agent acknowledged that no one had talked about killing police that night in the Signal group. Meanwhile, in addition to guns and black clothes, the protesters brought bullhorns.

One defense attorney asked an FBI agent on the case whether the group’s members might have thought they needed guns for self-defense from police.

“A person peacefully protesting, I would say there’s no risk to be killed by law enforcement,” said the agent, Clark Wiethorn.

When asked whether he would acknowledge that at least some of the protesters had no plans to commit violence, the agent pushed back.

“I would say every person out there had the knowledge of the risk of violence,” Wiethorn said.

While the government has portrayed the group as a disciplined team of antifa attackers, the messages show members of the group squabbling.

“All this stuff was kind of ad hoc,” said Patrick McLain, the attorney for defendant Zachary Evetts. “When I’m reading these texts, they were just all over the place, and they’re getting into stupid arguments with each other.”

Casting a Wide Dragnet

Song, the former Marine accused of shooting the officer, managed to escape a massive police response that night. According to testimony at a pretrial hearing, they hid in brush for 24 hours before supporters whisked them away.

Shawn Smith, an assistant U.S. attorney, said at the hearing that the fact that so many people were willing to help Song “speaks to the kind of personality of Mr. Song and what he can motivate.” At another point, he likened Song to a cult leader.

In the weeks that followed, investigators arrested and charged people with far looser connections to the action at Prairieland.

One of them was Dario Sanchez, a soft-spoken teacher who lives in a Dallas suburb. He was at home on the morning of July 15 when officers ripped open his door and tossed flashbangs to gain entrance.

In an interview with The Intercept, Sanchez said he was taken away in handcuffs. Law enforcement attempted to question him in a car, warning him that he faced decades in prison if he did not cooperate. Sanchez said he told his interrogators that he knew nothing about the July 4 protest — but that did not stop them from arresting him.

The allegations, Sanchez would later learn, centered on the claim that he purposefully booted a defendant accused of helping Song out of a Discord group chat operated by the Socialist Rifle Association.

Sanchez was arrested twice more, once when he was rearrested on a new charge, and another time on an alleged probation violation.

He faces only state charges in Johnson County, Texas, and he plans to take his case to a trial that has been set for April, after the federal proceeding is over.

Law enforcement has delved deep into messages among the protesters that night that appear to show allegiance to antifascism.

To boost their case against the defendants, the government has secured the services of a witness who works at a right-wing think tank, the Center for Security Policy, that was founded by Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney.

Related

The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine

Prosecutors also highlighted the pamphlets and zines that two of the defendants were publishing from a garage printing press, and the membership of some defendants in a local leftist reading group, the Emma Goldman Book Club.

The titles the government spotlighted at the September hearing include “Safer in the Front,” “Our Enemies in Yellow,” and “Why Anarchy.”

One defendant faces charges solely for ferrying such materials from one residence to another at the request of his wife, which advocates say essentially criminalizes the possession of materials protected by free speech.

“I think what they’re going to be poring through in those things is any writings in there that advocate violence or harm, and somehow they are going to try to stretch that out,” McLain said. “They are really stretching.”

Judging by the Signal messages obtained by the government, many of the Prairieland defendants self-consciously distanced themselves from more mainstream protesters. Still, the case could have implications beyond the Dallas-Fort Worth anarchist and socialist scenes — even though at the September court hearing, a prosecutor appeared to express surprise at schisms on the left.

“They actually don’t like these liberal protesters who are out there just holding signs?” Shawn Smith, the prosecutor, asked the FBI agent, who agreed with him.

The Trump administration cited Prairieland as part of a supposed wave of antifascist terrorism backed or encouraged by nonprofits and Democrats. In his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, issued in September, Trump cited both the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Prairieland action as proof of a wave of organized political violence from the left.

“A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required,” Trump said.

Although many of the Prairieland defendants had already been arrested by the time NSPM-7 was issued, it was only in October that the government obtained its first indictment charging some of them with material support of terrorism.

Sanchez believes prosecutors have pursued the case so aggressively because of a “weird antifa delusion.”

“These people can’t imagine that someone would care about someone else, really,” Sanchez said. “Why the hell would a bunch of people show up to protest outside an ICE detention center? Why would anyone care about these people? They can’t fathom that people would have that amount of empathy, and so in their minds, they have to cook up the idea that this has to be some kind of weird conspiracy.”

The post Texas “Antifa Cell” Terror Trial Takes On Tough Questions About Guns at Protests Against ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

The requests, in a joint letter from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats, do not attempt to claw back funding for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the two agencies at the heart of the political firestorm over their violent deployments to American cities.

Instead of cutting funding, Democrats focused on measures such as prohibiting ICE agents from wearing masks or entering homes without a warrant. Sen. Brian Schatz, D- Hawaii, the Democratic deputy whip, on Wednesday described the requests as “reasonable reforms that are 70-30 propositions with the public.”

That did not win them any points with congressional Republicans, who dismissed the reforms out of hand.

Progressives in the Senate, meanwhile, had not only become more strident in their rhetoric about ICE, they also called for clawing back increased ICE spending passed as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Though some of these Democrats are sticking by their more robust demands, they nonetheless avoided criticizing their party leadership over the request for more limited reforms.

“The urgency of the moment is about stopping the violence,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told The Intercept. “If it were up to me, we would be rewriting the whole immigration laws and policies. But right now, we’ve got to get some constraints in place so that roving bands of ICE agents stop terrorizing American communities. That is our first priority.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the ranking member on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, took a similar line, setting aside his stronger demands of ICE.

“I have a much longer list of things that I want to change in the Department of Homeland Security,” he said, “but we are trying to put a targeted list of reforms that will end the abuse on the table so that we can get something done.”

10 Demands

Schumer and Jeffries’s demand list has significant overlap with previous calls from progressive members of Congress such as Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

The progressives made their demands soon after the January 24 killing of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, which derailed a full-year funding bill for DHS and led to a brief shutdown of several government departments. The House voted to end the shutdown Tuesday by approving full-year appropriations for other departments while temporarily funding DHS through a new February 13 deadline.

The Democratic leaders unveiled their official list of demands ahead of the deadline on Wednesday, calling for ending indiscriminate arrests, prohibiting masking, requiring ICE and CBP officer identification, protecting sensitive locations such as churches and schools, halting racial profiling, upholding use of force standards, preserving the ability of states and cities to prosecute DHS misconduct, and requiring the use of body cameras when interacting with the public. (Schumer and Jeffries immediately began watering down one of their clearest demands, suggesting in public comments that they might allow agents to wear masks in some circumstances.)

The biggest split between what Schumer and Jeffries proposed and what more progressive Democrats requested was a reduction of spending on ICE and CBP.

Those agencies received $75 billion and $64 billion, respectively, in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to be spent through 2029. That money came on top of the amounts already available to the agencies through their annual appropriations.

Related

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

Clawing that money back has been a top priority for advocates, who note that it has been used to supercharge hiring and spending on surveillance technology.

“These demands MUST include cuts in funding,” Heidi Altman, the vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said in an email last week. “The money pays for the violence. It has to stop.”

Last month, Sanders proposed an amendment to the DHS appropriations bill that would have redirected the additional ICE funding to Medicaid, which he estimated would prevent 700,000 Americans from losing their health care.

Sanders’s amendment drew the support of every Senate Democrat and two Republicans, but it failed on a 49–51 vote.

In negotiations with the White House, Schumer is likely to be able to offer the potential support of only a fraction of his caucus for a full-year appropriations bill for DHS.

Some Democrats in Congress have already ruled out the idea that they will vote for any more funding.

“When you have a reckless and out of control agency that is unwilling to follow the law, passing new laws is no assurance to me whatsoever that they are not going to continue this lawlessness,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told The Intercept.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., have shown no willingness to negotiate on key Democratic requests, Booker said.

“There’s a lot of things I know my caucus would support, but clearly the speaker and the leader are not even interested in having those kinds of conversations,” he said, “even though most of their base thinks what’s happening with this agency is unacceptable.”

DOA With GOP

Democratic leadership figures like Schatz have described the latest demands as an attempt at reaching consensus.

“They are not a Democratic wish list. We are simply asking that ICE not be held to a different standard than every other law enforcement organization in the country — state, county, and federal,” he told reporters Wednesday.

The requests fell with a thud with Republican leaders, however. Johnson has already ruled out banning masks and requiring warrants.

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., the lead GOP negotiator, called the demands “a ridiculous Christmas list of demands for the press.”

Republicans have already floated the idea of another short-term extension of DHS funding to allow further negotiations.

The post Senate Dems Who Pushed Meatier ICE Reform Shy Away From Criticizing Schumer’s Softer Package appeared first on The Intercept.