“It’s simultaneously infuriating and laughable that they’re charging the SPLC with funding hate groups,” said Mary Wynne Kling, an Alabama native and longtime supporter of the group. Pointing to the SPLC’s long-standing work battling extremist groups, which included bankrupting the United Klans of America, she added, “We knew they were paying informants.”

The indictment, filed Tuesday in the SPLC’s home state of Alabama, charged the group with fraud for funding hate groups and with money laundering for setting up fictitious business entities to route payments to informants. SPLC leadership has denied the allegations.

Kling and over a dozen other donors to the group told The Intercept that by using its money to root out information on hate groups, the SPLC was doing exactly what they hoped it would with their dollars.

Originally founded in 1971 as a civil rights-focused legal clinic, the SPLC struck on a lasting strategy of direct confrontation with hate groups in 1979. It soon shifted its focus entirely toward combating the far right and documenting extremism in its “Hatewatch” project, which identifies hate groups and their leaders — a practice that has drawn the ire of right-wing figures enraged at being labeled as purveyors of hate.

The Trump administration is taking aim at SPLC’s image by accusing the group of lying to its donor base and propping up the very groups it claims to fight in order to stay in business.

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a statement released on Tuesday. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”

FBI Director Kash Patel accused the group of taking advantage of the esteem in which its donors held the SPLC.

“They raised money by lying to their donor network — thousands of Americans — to go ahead and pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups,” Patel said the same day at a press conference.

The Intercept put out a call for responses and sent a survey seeking reactions to the indictment, verifying that 20 respondents were SPLC contributors with proof of donation. Seven of them spoke to The Intercept in interviews; 13 others submitted responses to the survey. All 20 verified SPLC donors said they continued to support the organization and felt their money had been put to good use — including when used to pay informants inside groups like the Klan.

Far from feeling defrauded, Ellie Wilson, a donor from Texas, said the indictment prompted her to make a new contribution to the group.

“I read up on the story this morning, before I made my donation, and to me, it doesn’t sound unusual,” Wilson told The Intercept on Wednesday. “There’s overhead costs associated with either joining these groups or doing their proper research and due diligence. If my donation was used to pay for the people who are infiltrating these groups to, you know, cover their expenses to join, to add to their cover, I see no problem with it.”

According to the indictment against the group, some of the funds used to pay informants went to existing members of hate groups, including people who were already on the SPLC’s list of extremists. One such individual, identified in court documents as a former chair of the National Alliance with the code name “F-42,” allegedly received more than $140,000 from the SPLC while being featured on its “Extremist File” page, according to prosecutors.

But according to Maya Lenox, a donor based in Texas, it’s only by working with such individuals that the SPLC is able to get the granular and encyclopedic information on the groups in its “Hatewatch” and “Hate Map” projects.

“This is an organization that has been providing very detailed information about how these hate groups have been moving, and of course, in order to have that information, you essentially are going to need spies,” said Lenox. “In order to obtain this information, you’re going to have to make it worth their time.”

In addition to the 20 verified donors, dozens of other self-identified donors to the SPLC, whose contributions were not independently verified, responded to The Intercept’s survey and expressed their support for the group and their skepticism of the indictment against it. Some respondents expressed mild criticisms of the group, pointing to controversy over its labor practices or accusations that its work chills free speech, but no respondent reported feeling deceived or defrauded by its use of paid informants in extremist groups.

All seven people who spoke with The Intercept for this story rejected outright the claim that the actions outlined in the indictment amounted to fraud. Multiple donors added that they found the current Department of Justice difficult to trust given the agency’s documented history over the past year of politically motivated indictments against the perceived foes of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

“Anything that comes out of this administration, this FBI, or this Department of Justice, I have to take it with a level of incredulity that I find really unfortunate,” said donor Joe O’Donnell of Buffalo. “We’ve seen this administration truly pick and choose where they want to be and how they want to enforce.”

The SPLC did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept, but the group is receiving support from fellow civil rights organizations and other organizations on the left. In an open letter published Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, and more than 100 other civil rights groups, labor unions, and religious coalitions agreed to a mutual defense pact and committed to defend one another against attacks by the Trump administration.

“We have the right to assemble—and we will continue to do just that, and we will encourage and support people and allied organizations to do the same, uniting across communities, sectors, issue areas and identities,” the pact declared. “We will not be silenced. We will continue to do the work that puts people over power.”

Tuesday’s indictment against the SPLC is just the latest shot in a long-running war between elements of the MAGA right and the civil rights group. In 2019, the Center for Immigration Studies — a hard-line anti-immigration group whose platform mirrors many of the Trump administration’s platform — sued unsuccessfully to get their group removed from the SPLC’s list of hate groups. In October, Patel and the FBI cut ties with the SPLC, which had been a longtime FBI partner, pointing to the work of his agency’s “Anti-Christian Bias Panel” and calling the SPLC a “partisan smear machine.”

Many of the donors who spoke with The Intercept cited this long history of animosity between the MAGA movement and the SPLC as a reason to be suspicious of the indictment.

“They’re in bed with groups that the SPLC has, in my opinion, rightly identified as hate groups,” said Kling, the donor from Alabama. “The SPLC has spent their entire existence fighting a lot of the things that it appears this administration supports.”

The post “We Knew They Were Paying Informants”: SPLC Donors Reject Trump DOJ Fraud Claims appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE put out a call for information from parties interested in securing a contract with the agency for up to 150 parking spaces, according to a government procurement document posted online on April 16. The infamous immigration enforcement agency is looking for a lot in the vicinity of its Varick Street field office in Hudson Square, just south of downtown New York City’s tony West Village.

The need for parking of ICE vehicles set off alarms for immigrant advocates like Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, who called on garage owners to resist the temptation of “a quick buck” in exchange for making ICE’s job easier.

“The Trump administration continues to expand its war on immigrants, and in this moment it’s incumbent on private parking facilities to not collude with immigration enforcement that separates families and guts our communities,” Awawdeh said. “New Yorkers are outraged by what we’re seeing day in and day out, and we should all be ensuring that we’re not complicit.”

ICE operates a fleet of vehicles to use in its deportation operations, including unmarked vehicles that agents use to get around and take people into custody. At a downtown lot near its Varick Street office, ICE has stored compact cargo vans with internal cages — the sort used to transport immigrant detainees — according to local news site The City. The contract for that lot is set to expire.

The new request for information about potential contracts says, “The ICE NYC Field Office is seeking no more than 150 exclusive secure, reserved indoor parking spaces to accommodate a mix of SUVs, mid-sized vans, and mini-buses.”

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There are at least a dozen parking garages within a quarter mile of the office operated by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations at Varick and West Houston streets, the distance specified in the request for information. Among the other requirements listed are 24/7 security monitoring, a single designated space within the facility for ICE vehicles, key-card access controlled by ICE, and a minimum height clearance of 7 feet and 6 inches. (ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The posting of the procurement document comes as one of the agency’s go-to parking spots in the area is set to become unavailable to ICE vehicles. In January, the Hudson River Park Trust, a publicly owned corporation overseen by the state and the city which administers the garage at Pier 40, announced it would allow its contract for ICE parking at a waterfront garage to expire.

A New York-based ICE observer, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation, told The Intercept they had seen unmarked ICE vehicles used for deportation operations using the Pier 40 garage as recently as last week.

The Trust had maintained the contract with ICE dating back to 2004, but, amid the mounting criticism of ICE for its instrumental role in President Donald Trump’s hyper-aggressive immigration crackdown, the corporation said it was no longer interested in providing space or taking ICE money.

“The Trust is currently in the last year of a five-year parking contract that commenced during the previous federal administration and does not intend to renew the contract,” a spokesperson for the organization told The City. News of the group’s continued business with ICE was first reported by Sludge, and its intent to let the contract expire was first reported by Hell Gate, another local news site.

It was unclear from the new request for information if the need for parking spaces is meant to address existing demand for ICE parking or whether it would be intended to accommodate any increased presence of ICE vehicles in Manhattan. In the 15 months since Trump returned to power, immigrant advocates in the city have waited in uneasy anticipation for a surge of Department of Homeland Security agents like those seen in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. 

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Thus far, it hasn’t arrived. But amid periodic threats from the Trump administration to target so-called sanctuary cities like New York, the threat of a large-scale surge remains on the minds of immigrants and their supporters.

For ICE observers in the city, monitoring ICE parking facilities is a key part of keeping tabs on the agency and trying to divine its upcoming moves.

“Agents are important to this process, but the vehicles they move in are of almost equal importance, and many of these vehicles begin and end their days at these contract lots,” said the New York-based ICE observer. “They have aggressive abduction quotas that they’re pursuing, and when you think about what they need to reach those quotas, people often think about detention capacity, but that’s the post-abduction side. The pre-abduction side is where you put all the goddamn cars.”

The post ICE Is Looking for Parking in New York City — For a 150-Vehicle Deportation Fleet appeared first on The Intercept.

Dusten Mullen, a sergeant with the Phoenix Police Department, has been suspended with pay pending an internal review of his conduct at a protest at Hamilton High School in Chandler, Arizona, on January 30, according to Phoenix Police Chief Matthew Giordano.

“As law enforcement professionals, we are held to higher standards of conduct — both in and out of uniform,” Giordano said. “When we fall short, we must be accountable, and we will not tolerate actions which undermine the trust the community has placed in the Department.”

Fox 10 Phoenix, the outlet to first identify Mullen, reported that Mullen told Chandler Police Department officers on the scene that he was there in the hopes of getting a rise out of the kids that would then allow the local cops to cuff them.

“My plan is legitimately to just let them all assault me and you guys arrest them all and I’ll keep it on film,” Mullen said, according to a police report obtained by the local TV news site. “I also have other people filming from a distance.”

The protest at Hamilton High School was one of dozens of student-led walkouts that took place across the greater Phoenix area that day, coming just over a week after the killing of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis. At Hamilton High, several hundred students walked out and rallied along a thoroughfare, chanting and holding signs decrying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mullen, who in 2025 drew a salary of $336,518, is suspended with pay and was required to surrender his badge and gun pending the outcome of the investigation, according to a spokesperson for the department.

Steve Serbalik, an attorney representing Mullen, said his client was within his rights as a member of the public to voice his disagreement with the students.

“Placing Sgt. Mullen on administrative leave and issuing a media advisory that suggests misconduct based solely on his lawful, off-duty expressive activity appears to chill the exercise of constitutionally protected speech and risks violating both federal and state constitutional guarantees,” Serbalik wrote in a letter sent Monday to Giordano and shared with The Intercept. “I respectfully urge you to immediately reconsider and lift the administrative leave, withdraw or correct the media advisory, and ensure that any ongoing review fully respects Sgt. Mullen’s constitutional rights.”

Gun at Teenagers’ Protest

Mullen’s appearance at the protest sent a wave of fear through some attendees. Megan Craghead, whose 18-year-old son attends Hamilton High School, showed up that day because her 13-year-old daughter wanted to take part in the protest. Craghead told The Intercept it was a peaceful, upbeat scene, and most passersby honked in support of the rally.

That changed suddenly when a pair of girls came running toward her yelling about a man with a gun.

“He was just walking up and down the sidewalk, talking kind of smugly and yelling at the kids,” Craghead recalled. “It felt like something that could easily escalate into something that’s going to be traumatic for all of these teenagers.”

As soon as she heard about an armed man on the scene, Craghead sent her daughter away with Craghead’s sister.

“We had no idea why he was there, he’s wearing a mask, and even if he did not plan to use his gun, we still don’t know what’s going to happen, right?” Craghead said. “We had all just witnessed the shooting of Alex Pretti, where he was at a protest with a gun and he ended up getting shot and killed. And so even if this armed person did not touch his gun, we still don’t know what’s going to happen.”

In a TikTok video from the scene, Mullen was seen in a T-shirt emblazoned with an American flag and the words “Trump 2024” and “We took the country back.” He concealed his face with a neck gaiter and wore a handgun, along with several extra magazines on his hip.

Surrounded by young people jeering at him, he told a Chandler Police Department that he had been assaulted as he appeared to record the scene on a cellphone.

“Nobody assaulted you,” one person told Mullen.

“Grown-ass man, out here with a gun crying about a little kid,” another person said.

In the wake of the incident, the Chandler Police Department told reporters that a girl was arrested for throwing a water bottle at Mullen, but video of the incident published by Fox 10 appears to show just water — no bottle — hitting him. The charges against the girl were later dropped by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

A spokesperson for the Chandler Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Department With a History

Chandler, a city of about 275,000 people, lies in an area known as the East Valley, and its deep-purple electorate is not particularly known for progressive activism. Amid the deadly immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and heightened border tensions in Arizona, however, many students could see a direct impact on their own lives or those of their friends, according to Craghead.

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“They’re seeing a lot of their friends that are immigrants or have immigrant families feeling really scared right now,” she said. “There’s a lot of things happening in politics that are not directly affecting the lives of teenagers, but this is one of those things that they can see has a direct impact on their own lives.”

Bill Moore, a defense attorney in Phoenix, said he was pleased to see Mullen placed on administrative leave, citing the department’s history of frequently failing to hold its personnel accountable — part of a pattern of misconduct and impunity severe enough to trigger a civil-rights probe by the Justice Department in 2024.

“The ‘blue line’ thing is still very much a thing here,” Moore said, referring to an unwritten code where police look out for one another instead of pursuing complaints about misconduct. “That they took this action tells me that their internal investigation must be fairly damning.”

The revelation that the armed man who showed up to the protest in January was actually a cop sent ripples of anger through the community, according to Brandy Reese, a co-leader of the local Indivisible chapter for Chandler and the neighboring city of Gilbert.

“I find it especially upsetting that he went there armed,” said Reese, who was observing the protest that day from the sidelines. “Why did he feel he needed to do that? I think the whole situation is unfortunate and upsetting.”

Craghead, the mother of the protest attendees, said her opinion of what should happen to Mullen has gone back and forth in the days since she learned that a police sergeant was the masked, armed man who she had seen trying to pick a fight with the kids at the rally. After an initial reaction of wanting his immediate termination, she wondered if he wasn’t within his First and Second Amendment rights to show up, off-duty and armed.

The more she’s thought about it, she said, the more she’s felt anger at his conduct.

“We have a duty to hold our public safety officers to a higher standard. If this was a regular person that had come to counter-protest and they happened to bring their gun, that would be one thing,” she said. “The issue is that he went there with the purpose of agitating children to get them to break the law so that they could be arrested, or worse. So now I’m back to thinking he should be fired.”

The post Armed Off-Duty Cop Tried to Incite Violence at a High School Anti-ICE Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

Prosecutors have until May 1 to provide a slew of records, including Ross’s personnel file, to a magistrate judge to review and determine which files should be released. The materials could shine light on the killing of Good, an observer who died after Ross shot her during a January 7 confrontation amid a monthslong immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. 

The order came in response to a motion from the defense attorneys for Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, a man who Ross attempted to apprehend in a separate confrontation in June. After Ross broke a window in Muñoz-Guatemala’s car and fired his Taser, Muñoz-Guatemala drove away and was later convicted of dragging Ross with his car.

Muñoz-Guatemala’s defense attorney Eric Newmark praised the ruling as key to defending the rights of his client, but also important for public understanding of what transpired in the shooting of Good.

“My client is entitled to a full hearing and to review these documents to determine whether there’s any basis for a new trial,” Newmark told The Intercept. “Ultimately, we’re seeking dismissal of the charges against my client. This information is important because it will help me provide a full and complete defense.”

Beyond mounting an argument for a new trial or a reduced sentence, Newmark said the information could provide crucial information on Good’s death to Minnesotans hungry for answers.

“As Minnesotans, we’re frustrated with the apparent lack of a full investigation, the lack of prosecution, and the lack of federal cooperation with local authorities,” Newmark said.

In addition to Ross’s personnel and training file, the order issued Thursday in Minnesota federal court by Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan commands prosecutors to turn over records of statements Ross made in the 60 minutes before and during his shooting of Good; records of statements by Ross and other federal officials; witness statements regarding the Good killing; medical records pertaining to Ross’s fitness for duty; cell data that might have been extracted from Ross’s phone; body-worn camera footage of the incident; and more.

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Muñoz-Guatemala’s case rose to prominence in January when Ross’s identity as the shooter of Renee Good came to light, in part because both incidents involved Ross confronting a civilian in a car. Ross, a deportation officer based in the ICE field office in St. Paul, was attempting to detain Muñoz-Guatemala during a traffic stop on June 17, when Muñoz-Guatemala attempted to drive away. In the process, he dragged Ross, who had his arm thrust into the window, according to court records.

On December 12, a jury found Muñoz-Guatemala guilty of one count of assault on a federal officer. After Ross’s killing of Good was revealed, Newmark, Muñoz-Guatemala’s attorney, submitted a request for post-conviction discovery, arguing that the facts of the Good case could be grounds for a new trial or support a lesser sentence for his client.

“Even if this Court ultimately determines that Defendant is not entitled to a new trial based on newly discovered evidence, he must still be sentenced,” Newmark wrote. “Given the recklessness of Ross’ decision to step in front of Good’s vehicle, the violence he showed by continuing to shoot at a vehicle that was passing harmlessly by, and the extreme callousness he displayed after it should have been clear that he either killed Good or injured her terribly, it would be reasonable to assume he presented similar danger to Defendant in June of 2025. However, without the full investigative file, Defendant cannot make that conclusion.”

If prosecutors comply with the order, the materials will not immediately be made public. The materials will go first to a magistrate judge who will determine their relevance to the defense team’s case and perform any necessary redactions before handing it over to the defense. At that point, Muñoz-Guatemala’s team would be able to review the material and use it as needed to mount a bid for a new trial or to present as mitigating factors warranting a reduced sentence. Barring a protective order sealing the information, whatever materials submitted as mitigation by the defense could then become a matter of public record.

“This judge is effectively doing the investigation that the United States has turned its back on,” said Shauna Kieffer, a defense attorney in Minneapolis. 

But Kieffer, who is not party to the case, expressed reservations about premature celebration of the transparency the order could provide. 

“I think because this order is so thoughtful and it’s legally sound, that I think there’s a strong chance that the government will dismiss this case if they’re forced to go forward with complying with the order,” she said.

In a statement to The Intercept, Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., joined the calls for transparency.

“I am glad to see this case finally moving into discovery, but let’s be honest — it should never have taken this long to get here,” said Balint. “Renee Good’s family has been forced to wait for answers while DHS and ICE closed ranks. That’s not how justice works in a healthy democracy. Her family deserves full transparency and accountability, and Americans need to see our government protect them and not just those in power.”

Spokespersons for the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office and the Hennepin County District Attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Government Ordered to Turn Over Files on ICE Agent Who Killed Renee Good appeared first on The Intercept.

The Maine Wire launched in 2011, and for the next decade most of its output was standard libertarian fare. But as the U.S. right took a hard nativist turn — and amid an infusion of cash from some of the most powerful right-wing money men in the country — the site developed a fixation on Maine’s Somali community, a highly visible immigrant population in a state that’s over 90 percent white.

Amid the runaway success of a right-wing YouTuber’s viral video about “Somali fraud” in Minnesota, the site played an enthusiastic role in selling a similar narrative in Maine, spinning nuggets of truth into overstated claims of massive graft. And they got results.

In January, the Department of Homeland Security launched a surge of federal agents into the state, sweeping up hundreds of migrants while also performing showy raids on Somali-owned businesses linked to people who had been mentioned in the Maine Wire. In February, top federal officials, including Donald Trump himself, called for greater scrutiny of the state’s Medicaid system in language that directly targeted Somalis — a tack that closely followed The Maine Wire’s lead.

Editor-in-chief Steve Robinson, a Maine native who spent years producing shock-jock radio in Boston, came to the publication in 2023. The shift in tone was evident almost immediately. “Maine Governor Wants to Resettle 75,000 Foreign-Born Migrants in Maine by 2029,” Robinson warned in a headline that year. Critics blamed the piece for sparking an anti-immigrant rally by neo-Nazis at the state Capitol a few weeks later.

Robinson and his staffers present the website as a plucky upstart fighting for the common Mainer, but their work is not all driven by lobstermen and loggers. In recent years, The Maine Wire and its parent organization, the libertarian-leaning Maine Policy Institute, benefited from millions of dollars in donations from entities associated with Leonard Leo, the judicial activist widely credited with the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court, and Thomas D. Klingenstein, a MAGA megadonor and chair of the ultra-conservative Claremont Institute.

Between 2020 and 2024, the most recent year for which records are available, the Maine Policy Institute saw its annual revenue nearly triple — with a surge in funding from entities linked to Leo and Klingenstein, according to an analysis of tax documents by The Intercept. In 2024, at least $1.2 million of the institute’s $1.9 million budget came from organizations connected to Leo’s dark-money network.

The budget boost came amid a broader push by Leo, Klingenstein, and other conservative bankrollers to inject cash into state-level projects, ensuring their authoritarian, anti-immigrant, and climate-denial efforts have local staying power. (Representatives for Leo and Klingenstein did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

Matt Gagnon, the Maine Policy Institute’s CEO, declined to comment on how much of that cash goes into the operations of The Maine Wire. But over the course of those years of plenty, its staff has more than doubled to include three reporters, one “digital media correspondent,” and three editors.

In the process, The Maine Wire has carved out a belligerent presence in the state. Its reach is felt especially on social media, where it boasts some 200,000 followers across Facebook and X, as well as 26,000 subscribers to a spinoff on Substack. (Maine’s population hovers at around 1.4 million.) Gagnon credited Robinson for this growth, praising him for pursuing a web-savvy strategy and a voicey style.

“What we’re trying to do with The Maine Wire is not like a Wall Street Journal,” Gagnon told The Intercept. “It’s not ‘Just the facts, ma’am,’ or completely free of bias or opinion. We try to shake through our bias to make sure we’re reporting accurately, obviously, and to make sure that we’re not engaging in tabloid garbage news, but we’re very open about our perspective.”

That perspective is openly hostile to Maine’s Somali community. While discussing the Minnesota fraud scandal on a podcast, for example, Robinson posed, “You get one Somali on a jury in Minnesota, you think they’re going to convict anybody?” — ignoring the dozens of people indicted and convicted by federal prosecutors under President Joe Biden.

This apparent bias leads to similar distortions at home in Maine. Many of The Maine Wire’s claims of fraud rest on existing state audits from years past in which investigators — employed by the state of Maine — found evidence of improper payments. Without producing hard evidence of equivalent examples that have gone unaddressed, the site presents these as the tip of the iceberg, rather than instances of the state actually doing its job to combat fraud.

“The Maine Wire has a way of telling half-truths and then getting Mainers riled up about it,” said Paige Loud, a social worker running for Congress in the state’s 2nd Congressional District.

After an initial interview fell through, Robinson stopped responding to The Intercept’s attempts to reschedule. When contacted with a detailed list of questions prior to publication, he declined to comment.

On the homepage of The Maine Wire, the reader finds a grim portrait of the state. In between stories hinting at — but hardly proving — extensive fraud in Maine or scaremongering about the security of mail-in ballots, the site’s coverage is a miasma of stock tabloid fare: Tales of small-time drug busts and mugshots of vacant-eyed defendants abound. To take the site at face value, it would seem that Maine is awash in fraud, upcoming elections are in danger, and violence lurks around every corner — often at the hands of immigrants, and specifically members of Maine’s Somali diaspora.

Whenever possible, links to Somali people and institutions are presented as red flags. The term “Somali-linked” appears frequently, suggesting a stain of corruption inherent to anyone of Somali descent; one recent article managed to squeeze the word “Somali” twice into a single headline. In another story, a reporter flagged a business as suspicious in part because it shared an address with a hawala, a type of money-transfer business found in Muslim communities worldwide, which The Maine Wire described as “equipped to funnel taxpayer money back to Africa.”

The fixation on Somalis only recently became the site’s bread and butter. In the first 11 months of 2025, The Maine Wire published approximately 23 articles that included the word “Somali,” averaging about two per month. 

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Beginning in December, as right-wing audiences frothed over the viral Nick Shirley video in Minnesota, The Maine Wire leapt into action. Its journalists dusted off earlier reporting to suggest the existence of a sprawling conspiracy of Medicaid fraud, protected by a sordid alliance between Democratic political elites and allegedly corrupt Somali-run nonprofits and health care providers. That month, the Maine Wire published at least 31 articles that included the word “Somali” and kept it up with at least 26 in January, at least 14 in February, and at least nine in March. Robinson published still more stories about the issue on his Substack, dubbed The Robinson Report.

Somali Americans in the state are no strangers to nativism, but people who spoke with The Intercept said the past few months have been unusually tense, thanks in large part to The Maine Wire’s obsession with their community, which numbers less than 3,000 people, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data.

“It’s created a lot of stress for me,” said a Somali American resident of Lewiston who has been the subject of reporting by The Maine Wire and harassed by its readers. “The Maine Wire started this rhetoric against Somalis last year, and a lot of people really are saying horrible things on social media that are very, very racist. And that’s just kind of normalized now.”

Still, the site wins praise from readers for reporting on issues they feel are ignored by more mainstream publications. Maine journalists who spoke with The Intercept for this story admitted a grudging respect for some of the work that The Maine Wire has done, including a series on illicit marijuana grow houses owned and operated by Chinese nationals. But they criticized the site for overhyping the idea of widespread fraud.

“Some of the people who work there seem like they actually have the smarts and the talent to be good journalists. It’s just that the whole damn thing is geared towards electing Republicans,” said Steve Collins, a longtime reporter in the state who writes a column for the Portland Press Herald and has been openly critical of the website. “They take information, and instead of using it to report news in some kind of straight, rational way, it’s just a way to bash people and stir up fear.”

Others were blunter.

“The Maine Wire is poison,” said independent journalist and former Maine state legislator Andy O’Brien, who has written critically of Steve Robinson. “When you look at the comments, they are so often violent and racist. It gets scary.”

The “think national, act local” strategy has won The Maine Wire an audience of ever more powerful people, a fact that was made clear in February when Mehmet Oz — the quackery-boosting former television personality who now helms the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — took to Instagram to issue an ultimatum to Gov. Janet Mills. 

“You’ve probably heard about Minnesota’s fraud problems. Maine also needs to clean up its act,” Oz wrote. “Somali fraudsters in Minnesota stole millions from a similar program, and we’re seeing all the same red flags in Maine.”

In a February 6 letter, Oz gave Mills 30 days to produce documentation of Maine’s public health funding and the safeguards in place to prevent fraud. The letter included a provision for an extension, but when Mills asked for one, Oz denied it. According to Ben Goodman, a spokesperson for Mills, The Maine Wire knew about the denial before it even hit the governor’s desk. 

“Addressing allegations of fraud is — and should be — a collective, professional effort between the State and Federal government, not a political cudgel from a President desperately trying to distract from his failed agenda,” Goodman told The Intercept in a statement. “So let’s be clear about what this is — yet another attempt to attack and intimidate those who dare stand up to Trump’s abuses of power.”

It’s no accident that the events playing out in Maine resemble the playbook used to justify the federal crackdown in Minnesota, according to Graham Platner, a U.S. Senate candidate running against Mills for the Democratic nomination.

“This is a nationwide project. This is directly connected to the story in Minnesota to demonize Somali communities, which brought about ICE raids there,” Platner told The Intercept.

It made sense, Platner added, to see Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rush into Maine after The Maine Wire ramped up its Somali fraud coverage.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the dots,” he said.

For some Mainers who’ve found themselves in the outlet’s crosshairs, its tactics have raised questions about its accuracy.

In February, as part of a series alleging widespread fraud and abuse at group homes in Maine, the site posted a video of a young man with autism who had wandered out of his facility. The article did not say when the video was taken, but Claudia Millett, the man’s mother, told The Intercept it was almost a year old: Her son had escaped from his home in March 2025, and since then, she said, the staff responsible had been fired, and he has been safe and well taken care of.

“My son is non-verbal, with level-III autism,” Millett said. “He did get out that time, but they haven’t had any trouble since, and they have been really great with my son.”

Millett said she reached out repeatedly to The Maine Wire, but the outlet showed no interest in talking to her.

“I sent them a message on Facebook Messenger about them posting that video, but they haven’t even read it,” she said. “I think it’s unethical, because they haven’t even contacted me for comment.”

Loud, the social worker running for Congress, said she saw firsthand how the state’s byzantine system for documenting Medicaid claims — and an unwillingness by lawmakers to confront the problem — led to worker burnout and frustrated patients. But rather than covering those systemic causes, The Maine Wire’s staff have pushed to dismantle Medicaid and MaineCare and target immigrant-owned businesses.

“Unless Medicaid is abolished all of the fraud hunting will be just a fun exercise for data nerds,” Robinson wrote on X in February. “Abolish Medicaid, deport all foreign recipients and all foreign Medicaid profiteers.”

“Steve Robinson has been able to lock in on a topic that a lot of Mainers are talking about but that the Democratic legislature is unwilling to comment on,” Loud told The Intercept. “I wish it was in good faith, because this population deserves a voice. But unfortunately, the only people giving them a voice are trying to use it against them.”

The Maine Wire has not always been such a combative force for nativism. The Maine Policy Institute first launched the site in 2011, and in the intervening decade, its content stuck mostly to sober articles pushing for libertarian-minded policies. (Allegations of Medicaid fraud have been a constant, but the focus on allegations against Somalis is more recent.) Then known as the Maine Heritage Policy Center, the think tank had an annual revenue hovering just over half a million dollars in the 2010s, tax records show, much of it from relatively modest donations from family foundations linked to its local backers.

The organization was caught flat-footed by Trump’s 2016 victory, according to a former employee who worked there in the latter half of the 2010s, spurring “a wake-up call for the organization.”

“If we wanted to be more successful in the state, not just spreading our ideas, aligning with MAGA in some form might be advantageous,” the former employee said, speaking on condition of anonymity to not jeopardize future job prospects. “It was just a realization that there’s more money to be made and more eyeballs to attract.”

The money began to arrive in earnest in 2021, thanks to the largesse of groups connected with two of the country’s most powerful right-wing donors: Leonard Leo and Thomas D. Klingenstein. Leo, a longtime vacationer in Maine, moved to the state in 2020, and his fingerprints could soon be found on various political campaigns and causes.

Leo, who has been publicly connected with The Maine Wire since at least 2023, has spoken obliquely of his support for the site, including in a lovefest of an interview in 2023 with Robinson in which he told the editor that it had “been a privilege to be able to support your work.”

An analysis by The Intercept of tax documents detailing donations to the organization showed that funds controlled by or linked to Klingenstein and Leo donated at least $2.6 million to the Maine Policy Institute between 2020 and 2024, while a handful of other donor-advised funds — a common vehicle for anonymous donations — provided at least another $390,965 during that period.

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In 2021, the Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund contributed $249,000, and overall contributions leapt from $693,536 to $1.07 million. Funding surged yet again two years later, to $1.7 million in 2023, including another $200,000 from Klingenstein’s foundation and a gift of $760,100 from a donor-advised fund that had previously received tens of millions of dollars from a nonprofit linked to Leo.

In 2024, the most recent year for which tax documents are available, the Maine Policy Institute had $1.9 million in total revenue — including $760,000 from the 85 Fund, a Leo-linked nonprofit, and $450,000 from DonorsTrust, a conduit for dark money that has is heavily funded by Leo’s network.

The Maine Policy Institute does not disclose its donors, but Gagnon, the CEO, acknowledged having received support from Leo.

“He has publicly disclosed an association with us, so I’m not going to sit here and tell you that’s not happening,” Gagnon said. “He’s been supportive around the country of many projects which he believes will help the conservative media universe.”

The money being funneled into the Maine Policy Institute might be a drop in the bucket for megadonors, but it’s more than enough to make a real difference in a small state like Maine, said Platner, the U.S. Senate candidate.

“This is a very clear example of what happens when too much wealth gets consolidated in our political system,” Platner told The Intercept. “In a state like Maine, which is not a wealthy state, and there are not a lot of resources around, they can come in and utilize their money as power to drive specific media narratives and to incentivize certain kinds of stories.”

For now, those certain kinds of stories continue to revolve heavily around Somali Americans and other immigrants in Maine.

“They are spewing hate and demonizing an entire population as un-American, as scammers, and the right is just eating that up,” said one Somali American community organizer, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of further targeting by the site and its readers. “The fascist regime we’re under right now, that is one of their tactics — to change the conversation and the public opinion of certain groups in order to destroy democracy.”

The post GOP Megadonor Leonard Leo Is Bankrolling a Website on the Warpath Against Somalis appeared first on The Intercept.

In a March 11 memo, Hegseth, who has made grooming and appearances a central focus in his time at the helm of the U.S. military, raised the bar to qualify for a religious exemption to his blanket ban on beards. The guidelines lay out a strict new process by which service members may apply for a religious exemption and subject those who’ve already received one to a reevaluation, arguing they need to ensure their religious beliefs are “sincerely held” and have a genuine conflict with the grooming standards.

Service members who have spoken against Hegseth’s focus on grooming standards say his restrictions on beards are exclusionary to people from religious communities that require adherents to follow specific tenets of faith around beards, hair, and other grooming matters.

Sikhs, for example, who have served in the U.S. military since at least World War I, are required by their faith not to cut the hair on their head, to keep a beard, and to wrap their long hair in a turban. Members of many schools of Muslim tradition likewise have rules around beards and hair length.

A Sikh advocacy group derided the new requirements as “completely unnecessary.”

“Sikhs and other service members of faith already earned their accommodations, under policies and processes established under both the Obama and first Trump Administrations,” the Sikh Coalition said in a statement. “If there are accommodations that the Department of Defense feels are not sincere, they could have chosen to pursue those cases with a process that doesn’t force every single soldier, sailor, airman, guardian, and Marine with an accommodation through more paperwork and bureaucracy.”

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

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Hegseth introduced the new guidelines as the military increasingly embraces overt Christianity and Christian nationalism, including an ideological turn on the Air Force Academy’s oversight board and the presentation of the war on Iran as part of “God’s divine plan.”

The changes come months after Hegseth declared war on “beardos” in a combative speech in September.

“If you want a beard, you can join Special Forces. If not, then shave,” Hegseth said at the time.

In a November letter to Hegseth, four senators — Gary Peters, D-Mich.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Tim Kaine, D-Va.; and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. — warned that an overly strict grooming standard could force religious service members from the ranks and ultimately harm the military’s primary mission of national security.

“This will happen either by forcing out servicemembers with accommodations earned through carefully following their branch’s established processes or signaling to members of these religious communities that their contributions are not needed in the world’s greatest fighting force,” the senators wrote. “At a time when readiness and retention remain urgent concerns, such a move would be ill-advised.”

Federal courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of service members’ rights to observe tenets of faith while in the military, limiting Hegseth’s ability to put in place an outright ban on any facial hair. He has opted instead to tighten the screws on anyone wishing to get an exemption.

Courts have generally required the military to accommodate sincerely held religious beliefs unless it can demonstrate a compelling operational need.

Under the new rules, anyone applying for an exemption — or facing reevaluation under the new guidelines — must submit a sworn statement affirming their religious beliefs, a statement detailing those beliefs, a statement explaining how the grooming standard would conflict with those beliefs, and supporting evidence backing up their “sincerely held” beliefs. Additionally, anyone applying for an exemption must receive from their unit commander a written assessment of the applicant’s sincerity of belief.

The policy also places commanders in the position of evaluating the sincerity of a service member’s religious beliefs. False statements could expose service members to disciplinary action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The post Hegseth Makes Troops Prove “Sincerely Held” Faith in Latest Beard Crackdown appeared first on The Intercept.

As email dated Thursday compares immigration enforcement to fighting wildfires and other disaster response and implores civilian employees and contractors to “step up for our country’s next challenge.”

Those who volunteer “will directly support the operations of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they work to ensure a safe and orderly immigration system,” reads the email, listed as from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. “To date, participants have helped ICE and CBP develop concepts of operation, provide logistics support, and managed enforcement activities that enhance public safety.”

ICE and CBP have faced a wave of public backlash in recent months, as immigration operations have terrorized communities across the country and killed two civilians in Minneapolis. President Donald Trump fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month, and in February, Congress triggered a partial government shutdown by letting DHS funding lapse while Democrats request reforms.

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A photo of the memo, which was first reported by Military Times, appeared Thursday afternoon on an unofficial Facebook page for Air Force personnel. A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, but the email’s details match those of an earlier department press release published March 11.

The Pentagon’s current call for DHS support appears to be a re-up of an earlier ask for volunteers made last August. At that time, Michael A. Cogar, the deputy assistant defense secretary for civilian personnel policy, expressed pride in civilians joining the efforts of DHS.

“This is a national security problem, and our civilians have the critical skill sets to support DHS in their mission,” Cogar said in August. “We’re proud that our civilians are already willing to sign up.”

The memo sent out Thursday claimed that more than 900 people had submitted applications so far to take part in the details, but did not specify how many people have been deployed. The March 11 press release claimed that around 200 civilians had deployed as part of the program.

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The email linked to a page on USA Jobs, a clearinghouse for federal job opportunities. The page, titled “Volunteer Force,” advertises a salary range of $25,684 to $191,900 per year. A list of potential volunteer duties include data entry, operational support, assisting ICE and CBP with managing the flow of detainees, and logistical planning.

The Pentagon has taken an active support role in DHS activities since the beginning of Trump’s second term, when Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border and authorized the armed forces to deploy there.

Pentagon spending on border security has been the subject of controversy over the past year. In December, Democratic lawmakers accused the Trump administration of siphoning at least $2 billion from the Pentagon’s budget and prioritizing hard-line border initiatives and political stunts over its traditional focus on national security.

Spokespeople for DHS, ICE, and CBP did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The post Pentagon Implores Civilian Workers to Join ICE “Volunteer Force” appeared first on The Intercept.

Kent’s resignation came as the most recent and perhaps most consequential of a series of rifts opening on the far right over the war in Iran. While most of the defections had come from MAGA media figures, Kent’s departure from his role as director of the National Counterterrorism Center was the first major defection from the administration.

In his letter of resignation, Kent condemned the war as a violation of the president’s campaign promises to steer clear of foreign wars, criticizing what he described as Israeli pressure as a catalyst for dragging the U.S. into a deadly potential quagmire.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” wrote Kent in a letter posted to X, where it had received nearly 100 million views as of Friday morning. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

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Kent is not the only government national security professional disaffected by Donald Trump’s war in Iran, according to advocates for conscientious objection who say they’re fielding nonstop calls from distressed service members. Many service members could refuse to take part in the war, either by refusing outright — and risking punishment — or by declaring as conscientious objectors, according to Mike Prysner, executive director of the Center on Conscience and War, a group that counsels members of the military on their rights in objecting to participation in or support of combat operations.

“This is the kind of thing that really resonates: seeing respected people in positions of power validating what many service members feel, which is that this is bad and people shouldn’t take part in it,” Prysner said. “There are a lot of people who may be inspired by what Kent did.”

Skyrocketing Objections

Prysner said that in the weeks since the war began with joint U.S.–Israeli airstrikes on February 28, the group’s phones have been ringing around the clock. Active-duty military personnel and military families are scrambling, he said, to figure out what their rights might be in refusing to take part in the war. His group has helped dozens of service members explore or start applications to declare as conscientious objectors.

“We’ve started more people in the CO process in the past two weeks than we typically do over the period of a year,” Prysner said.

Prysner said the group has spoken with service members occupying ranks from major to private, including three fighter pilots.

Prysner’s numbers could not be independently confirmed, and representatives of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the number of new applications for conscientious-objector status.

Kent, an Army veteran who later served in the CIA before running as a hard-right House candidate in Washington state, is the most senior member of the administration to resign over the war in Iran. Until Tuesday, he served under Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence and herself a former critic of pressure to the U.S. and Israel to carry out regime change in Iran.

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The resignation came amid a broader split in the MAGA movement, with some Trump loyalists backing up the president’s decision to go to war while others, perhaps most notably conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, questioning the logic of attacking Iran in concert with Israel. In the wake of Kent’s announcement, Trump called his departure “a good thing,” while White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the letter was brimming with “false claims.” Kent, according to media reports, was the subject of a leak investigation by the FBI.

“Sooner the Better”

The U.S. military offers service members avenues to avoid combat or even be discharged from the ranks if they can prove that they hold religious, moral, or ethical objection to “war in any form.” The practice in the U.S. of declaring as a conscientious objector goes back as far as the U.S. military, although the regulations around it and the reasons cited by would-be conscientious objectors have expanded over time, and in the current, all-volunteer military, regulations require that one’s believes have “crystalized” since signing on.

“It’s totally valid for people to cite a specific conflict in their CO application, as long as that leads them to the broader realization that they cannot participate in any war,” Prysner said. “It’s absolutely valid for service members to look at the war in Iran and make the conclusion that they can’t be part of this in any form.”

Prysner is himself a veteran who served in the Iraq War, and came to anti-war activism after his deployments there. He said he began to question the violence unleashed in Iraq after coming into contact with Iraqis. In the age of the internet, however, the horrors of war can be quickly beamed into people’s phones and social media, potentially spurring more members of the military to question their role in that violence.

That dynamic was on display in Iran, Prysner told The Intercept. The surprise nature of the U.S.–Israel attack caused the families of service members to reach out to loved ones stationed abroad, while numerous active-duty members who reached out had been motivated by the clear and devastating impact of the war on civilians, notably a U.S. airstrike on February 28 that killed 168 people, most of them children, at a school in the Iranian city of Minab.

“By far the most common thing we’ve heard from people for a specific thing that caused them to reach out was the Minab school massacre,” Prysner said. “It’s not wanting to be a part of what they see as crimes against people they have no reason to hurt.”

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Hundreds of service members resisted participation in the Iraq War, including many who successfully applied as conscientious objectors. But many had a difficult time successfully proving that their opposition to war was not simply a fear of serving overseas. Others went AWOL, with at least 200 service members fleeing to Canada to avoid fighting.

Some, such as former Marine Stephen Funk, served jail time for refusing to deploy. Funk also faced discrimination in the Marines as a then-closeted gay man and spent months in the brig for his refusal to ship off to Iraq. In the years after his discharge, he worked with anti-war groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veteran Artists to promote peace and work with other vets to reintegrate.

Funk told The Intercept he has been horrified to see the U.S. yet again charging into a war that has already killed hundreds of civilians and stands to kill, injure, and morally compromise members of the U.S. military. He urged service members facing a crisis of conscience to listen to their heart.

“I would say go for it, the sooner the better,” Funk told The Intercept. “You don’t want to have injuries, or moral injuries, that you’ll carry for the rest of your life.”

Correction: March 20, 2026, 12:25 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story contained an errant reference to Mike Prysner’s military service; he did not serve in Syria.

The post Joe Kent’s Resignation Could Bolster a Wave of Conscientious Objectors to Trump’s Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

Jordan Wood, who is running for the Democratic nomination in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, is the former executive director of democracyFirst PAC, a group that — despite its left-of-center orientation — donated to at least one Republican PAC, in addition to giving thousands of dollars to at least six GOP campaigns for House and Senate seats during the 2024 election cycle, according to the records.

In total, the group donated $75,000 to various House and Senate races, including Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah; Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb.; and Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., with contributions ranging from $1,000 to $3,000.

Wood’s PAC also gave $5,000 to Republican Governance Group/Tuesday Group PAC, a group of moderate Republicans that has gradually moved to the right as it aligned with the policy priorities of the Trump administration.

“I don’t necessarily condemn anyone for contributing to left or right candidates as long as they’re actively protecting our civil rights, but this is pretty troubling,” said Maine state Rep. Amy Roeder, a Democrat.

While some of the candidates democracyFirst donated to were running for safe seats in deep-red districts, others, such as Valadao, an incumbent, were considered to be more competitive. Valadao, first elected to the House in 2012, lost his seat to Democrat TJ Cox in 2016 before regaining it four years later.

Though some of the GOP lawmakers supported by democracyFirst have at times voted for President Donald Trump’s agenda items, most are considered moderate Republicans. Valadao, for instance, was one of just 10 House representatives to vote to impeach President Trump.

But at least six GOP lawmakers who received money from democracyFirst, including Valadao, voted along party lines to support Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a sprawling funding bill that realized a wide array of long-standing conservative aims, including cuts to Medicaid, tax cuts for billionaires, and a $75 billion infusion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At the state level, democracyFirst pitched in to help several campaigns for state legislature seats and county commissioner positions in Pennsylvania, including that of County Commissioner Mike Pries, of Dauphin County, who went on in 2025 to vote to reject a resolution that would have restricted local cooperation with ICE.

“democracyFIRST was built to do one thing: defeat Trump-aligned candidates who were trying to seize control of America’s election infrastructure,” Wood said in a statement. “Every Republican candidate democracyFIRST ever supported held an office with direct authority over election administration or certification, and every single one of them was in a primary against an election denier who supported Trump’s false claims of a rigged election. We were trying to take their power away. It was a carefully designed firewall to safeguard future elections.”

Wood is one of several candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in the race to replace Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine. Golden was already facing a primary challenge from State Auditor Matt Dunlap.

Golden, a centrist who has caught heat from progressives for voting against party lines in several key instances, announced in November that he would not seek reelection. In the wake of the announcement, Wood was months into a campaign to unseat the longtime Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins, but swiftly pivoted to throw his hat in the ring for Golden’s seat.

In addition to the democracyFirst spending, Wood has been scrutinized for his ties to Mothership Strategies, a liberal-leaning fundraising outfit run by his husband, Jake Lipsett. The firm has gained a controversial reputation in Democratic circles for aggressive tactics, inflammatory and alarming rhetoric, and accusations of self-dealing and other unethical billing practices.

Wood has said he and his husband keep their professional lives separate, but FEC records show that in the months after Wood stepped down from democracyFirst to run against Collins, the new candidate’s old PAC began funneling money to Mothership to the eventual tune of more than half a million dollars.

Dunlap, meanwhile, has earned a chilly reception from national Democratic leadership over his decision to primary Golden, whose district elected Trump in the 2024 election by 9 percentage points, and faced criticism from the right for his role in auditing the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. Trump and his allies have said the agency exercised lax oversight in the disbursement of federal money to other state health care programs. The other main contender, Joe Baldacci, a state senator and the brother of former two-term Maine Gov. John Baldacci, joined the race in January. (Dunlap and Baldacci’s campaigns declined to comment.)

Whoever wins the Democratic primary will likely face up in the general against former Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a proto-MAGA populist. LePage, who occupied the governor’s mansion from 2011 until 2019, is known for his long record of foot-in-mouth gaffes and racially charged statements.

Baldacci and Dunlap are longtime residents of Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Wood, on the other hand, only announced after pivoting to the House race that he would to move with his family to the city of Lewiston in order to qualify. LePage has spent his years of political exile in the sunny wilderness of Florida.

“I am friends with both Sen. Baldacci and State Auditor Dunlap and have known them to be people of integrity and people who really give a damn,” said Roeder, the statehouse representative. “Jordan Wood was not a CD2 resident until very recently, and I personally look sideways at someone who moves into a district in order to run in that district. And I count Paul LePage as well.”

LePage, who announced his candidacy for the House seat in May, is making his second attempt at a political comeback after badly losing his 2024 bid to retake his old job as governor from incumbent Democrat Janet Mills.

The post Dem in Maine House Primary Funneled PAC Money to Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.

According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the attacks killed at least 333 civilians across 18 provinces of Iran in at least 59 incidents. In response, Iran launched a barrage of missile and drone attacks at U.S. and Israeli targets, both military and civilian, across the region.

The Intercept spoke with Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council, to make sense of what led to the attack on Iran, what we know so far, and how the situation might unfold in the days and weeks to come.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What have we seen today in Iran and in the wider region?

Trump has entered us into a major regime change war against Iran, and from what we know so far, it seems like hundreds of Iranians have been killed, with a plurality of those deaths taking place at a girls’ school where at least dozens, maybe over 100 people were killed.

We don’t know exactly why that school was bombed, whether it’s a case of bad intelligence or misfire or something. But those were among the very first casualties of the war, and that really underscores the life-and-death stakes here as the war is unfolding.

It’s just such a tragic loss, and it wouldn’t have happened if Trump had not made the decision to go to war. So, you know, regardless of what the reason was — whether faulty intelligence or misfire or whatever — those girls can’t come back. And that just really underscores the stakes of war, and why so many people try to prevent war from breaking out.

The Iranian government just confirmed the death of Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei. What does his death mean for Iran and the country’s position in the region?

Khamenei has been at the top of the Islamic Republic for decades here, and a big, huge part of each consequential decision that Iran has made for decades. Even before he was officially supreme leader, he was the president, and he was a key adviser to the first Supreme Leader, [Ruhollah] Khomeini. So he’s one of the original revolutionaries of the Islamic Republic. In a lot of ways, Iran wouldn’t be where it is today without him, and that cuts both ways. A lot of people think he’s held the country back. He’s been responsible for major human rights violations, and then has, you know, more or less picked a fight with the United States and put the country into a major trap here.

There’s only been one Supreme Leader succession before, and that was from Khomeini to Khamenei in 1989. And so it’s been a very long time, but there are processes in place. There’s a whole body whose whole job is basically to sit around and wait to choose the next Supreme Leader. It’s called the Assembly of Experts, and it’s made up of very senior figures in the Iranian establishment. It’s a little unclear whether they would do so immediately or would do so later, but at some point they will convene and consider who the next Supreme Leader will be. 

[Editor’s note: After this article was published, Iranian officials announced that a council of high-ranking jurists would rule in Khameni’s stead until a new leader is chosen.]

This happening during wartime throws a lot of questions into the air, but we will see, ultimately, what the system comes up with. Khamenei appears to have prepared for succession within the Islamic Republic and has been directing different decision-makers to appoint assessors and have a plan of operation so that events can continue and the system can move on, even in the circumstances of his death.

Will it make a difference the fact that he was killed in an attack, rather than dying of natural causes, in how the succession might play out or in who is picked?

I think there is a concern that, you know, if you’re choosing a leader during wartime, is that going to end up being somebody who is more dogmatic and rigid ideologically? Or is it going to be someone who’s more pragmatic and might work to try to end the crisis? We won’t know until the person is chosen and they start to make certain decisions.

Trump has made clear that the goal of this operation is regime change, and has called on the people of Iran to seize power and on the security forces to work toward a transition. What are we actually seeing at this moment, and what might we expect to see in the coming days and weeks?

It does seem like they want to do regime change, but a kind of stand-off regime change, where they don’t put boots on the ground, per se, and then they encourage people on the ground to rise up and overthrow the government for them.

One situation that comes to mind is in 1991, where George H.W. Bush stopped at repelling the Iraqis from Kuwait, and then encouraged Iraqis to rise up. And tens of thousands of people were slaughtered by Hussein’s regime in the wake of that call to rise up. I think there’s a clear historical parallel to Trump’s approach to Iran thus far, where a lot of Iranians have already been killed after Trump encouraged them to rise up.

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Even after strikes, you have to assume that at least elements of the Iranian government will maintain a monopoly on the use of force — meaning they still get the guns, and the Iranian people don’t. If this all leads to something where democracy somehow flows from bombs, well, we’ll see. I don’t think that’s a particularly likely scenario.

The [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] remains the strongest actor within Iran, both in terms of military capability and organization. Obviously, they have absorbed a lot of the blows in the initial U.S. strikes, but I think they are far and away the most powerful actor inside the system. So essentially, if the theocrats in the Iranian system are taken out, the IRGC are the ones in charge of much of Iran’s response and defense, and are best situated to fill any political and governmental void that may take place.

Based on how today played out, what can we divine about the logic of the Trump administration going into these strikes? What did they want to accomplish?

I think probably a lot of Americans were taken by surprise by this. But for those who read the news, you saw the biggest build-up in the Middle East since the Iraq War. And I think, reading the signs, it was either there would be a deal or a war.

This played out very similarly to June, where the diplomacy seems to have been a ruse. Trump seems to have been convinced by Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran months ago, probably predating the protests and so forth.

Essentially, they’re high off the Maduro operation. They thought: Hey, here’s an adversary that is weak — there’s never going to be a better time to strike. I don’t know if they ever considered the diplomatic option. It seems like it’s quite possible that it was just a ruse to try to lure the Iranians into thinking they might get a deal. 

You mentioned the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In that case, the Trump administration quickly replaced Maduro with a puppet government. Does the Trump administration have its eyes on specific successors in Iran? 

There have been a lot of reports of strikes targeting critics of the regime, such as Mir Hussain Mousavi, the Green Movement leader. His house, where he’s essentially been under house arrest for 15 years, was targeted in some of the initial strikes. That apparent eagerness to target past political leaders who may have had a falling out with the current government seems to be a signal that they’re trying to eliminate any potential people who could actually transition to democracy but still be a nationalist figure. I don’t know if they have someone picked out or if they don’t care, but I would guess that if that’s actually been part of the strike pattern that they have someone figured out that would be a pushover for U.S. and Israeli interests.

What does it tell other actors on the world stage that the U.S. and Israel carried out the attack amidst ongoing negotiations? And what message does it send to other major powers?

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This tells any potential adversaries of the U.S.: Get nuclear weapons. Hedging is not a strategy, and giving up your program like [Muammar] Gaddafi is not a strategy. The only successful strategy is what Kim Jong Un did, which is to get nuclear weapons. He’s the only surviving despot of the so-called axis of evil.

It just seems like the Wild West in the international system right now. It’s just “might makes right.” That is also a message that will be heard by other global powers like Russia or China that might have designs on smaller, weaker states out there. If the U.S. is saying “might makes right,” they say, “OK, if that’s how you want to play it, then we’ll pursue our own interests too.”

There has been considerable unrest in Iran over the past month, with massive protests against the government and a brutal crackdown that has killed thousands. Given that opposition to the government, what do you think the reaction might be inside Iran to the attacks?

Iranians have long been caught between authoritarianism of their own government and militarism of foreign powers, and this is a pretty clear-cut example of that. You have this horrible crackdown from the Iranian government in January, and then a major military attack from the United States, all within 40 days of each other.

I think there has been a growing contingent inside Iran of people who are for military intervention. I don’t know how widespread that is, but I think it’s certainly something that unbiased observers have witnessed over the years. Certainly a significant majority of the population does not like the Islamic Republic and would like it gone. But then you get to the question of who endorses military force and how widespread that is — I don’t think that is a majority of the population. And if it were that, once the bombs started falling, that support would evaporate pretty quickly. I think a lot of the people on the streets who participated in the protests did so for domestic reasons and also would oppose the U.S. bombing the country.

What can we expect to see in the coming days and weeks?

Trump seems to think this will be over in a couple of weeks. I have no idea if that’s realistic. I would probably take the over, at least in terms of the reverberations from this incident, which are going to be enormous. I think those will likely be measured in years rather than weeks.

This is probably in the realm of dangerous speculation, but I feel like the Iranian government is going to have a harder ideological edge to it, and that, if you take out the upper echelons of the leadership, the people that are going to fill those roles are, I think, still steeped in a good bit of the ideology of the Islamic Revolution and opposition to U.S. hegemony, and have lived through so many confrontations with the West and with the U.S. in particular. 

So it’s possible that they could replicate the Venezuela situation to some degree. But my assumption is that the people who step into the void are going to be more of Khamenei’s ilk, and may have less restraint as well, particularly on the nuclear program. Who knows where the nuclear program will be when all is said and done, but I think there will be very little holding Iranian leadership back from pursuing a nuclear weapon if any trace of the current government survives this.

Update: March 1, 2026

An editor’s note was added after Iranian officials announced that a council of jurists would rule until a new leader is chosen.

The post The U.S. and Israel Killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. What Comes Next? appeared first on The Intercept.

Elmina Aghayeva, a neuroscience researcher and influencer from Azerbaijan, took to social media to thank her supporters hours after her arrest caused an uproar on campus.

“I am so grateful for everyone of you,” Aghayeva wrote in an Instagram story posted on Thursday afternoon. “I just got out a little while ago. I am safe and okay.”

A spokesperson for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani confirmed Aghayeva’s release, which came after Mamdani discussed the issue in a meeting with President Donald Trump earlier in the day. Mamdani said on X that Trump had called him following the meeting to say that Aghayeva was set to be released.

“The Mayor’s Office on Thursday morning asked that ICE not move her out of New York City, so she could have her day in court here, and ICE cooperated with the request,” the spokesperson told The Intercept. “Mayor Mamdani then raised the issue directly with the President at the White House, and shortly after their meeting, the President informed him over the phone that Aghayeva would be released.”

Federal agents detained Aghayeva at university housing early on Thursday morning, according to interim Columbia President Claire Shipman. In an email to the university community, Shipman wrote early Thursday that agents with the Department of Homeland Security entered a Columbia residential housing building and detained the student at approximately 6:30 a.m.

“​​Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person,’” Shipman said in her email.

Students rallying to get the student released collected information about the detention and, in a letter to New York City Council Member Shaun Abreu, said they had learned from a security guard at the building that federal agents represented themselves as members of the New York Police Department and Columbia security officials. 

“From what was relayed to us, the individuals who arrived were presented as NYPD alongside Columbia Public Safety,” the students wrote in the letter to Abreu, which was obtained by The Intercept.
At a protest outside the gates of the university on Thursday afternoon, Abreu alleged that the agents had masqueraded as NYPD cops.

“I consider it to be very much confirmed that they pretended to be NYPD officers in search of missing persons,” Abreu told The Intercept. “So they used false pretenses and they used straight-up lies to get the person they were looking for.”

In post on X, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal said,
“ICE used a phony missing persons bulletin for a 5 year old girl.”

“The fact is that this student’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when ICE entered this building under false pretenses and engaged in criminal conduct,” Hoylman-Sigal went on. “We have clear evidence that this was a criminal operation. They are the secret police.”

The Department of Homeland Security, New York Police Department, City Hall, and Shipman’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Columbia security guard declined to comment.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said it had arrested Aghayeva, who is Azerbaijani, for not having a proper student visa. 

“The building manager and her roommate let officers into the apartment,” the Homeland Security spokesperson told The Intercept. “She has no pending appeals or applications with DHS.”

The students who wrote the letter to the City Council also said they spoke with the detained student’s roommate, who said the agents did not present a warrant.

“According to the roommate, the individuals who entered did not present a warrant to the occupants,” the students said in the letter, whose contents The Intercept was unable to independently confirm. “She could not confirm whether a warrant existed, but stated that the officers or agents allegedly misrepresented themselves or the circumstances in order to gain entry into the apartment.”

Shipman implored members of the university community to not let unidentified people into campus buildings without a judicial warrant.

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“​​It is important to reiterate that all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University, including housing,” Shipman wrote. “An administrative warrant is not sufficient.”

The Department of Homeland Security, New York Police Department, City Hall, and Shipman’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The incident took place a day after students rallied on campus to demand protections for international students as well as calling for the release of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student who has been in federal custody since her arrest by immigration agents nearly a year ago.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The post Zohran Mamdani Kept Columbia Student in New York — Then Phoned With Trump to Secure Her Release appeared first on The Intercept.

Within hours of the operation in which troops killed cartel boss Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” in a rural hideout outside Guadalajara, gunmen loyal to his Jalisco New Generation Cartel group poured into the streets of several cities, burning buses and firing automatic weapons.

“The city was completely emptied,” said David Mora, an International Crisis Group analyst who happened to be in Guadalajara on Sunday, of the aftermath of the violence. “I mean it was a ghost town — there was no one on the streets yesterday.”

The fighting left at least 70 people dead, including 25 members of Mexico’s National Guard, which carried out the mission guided by intelligence from counterparts in U.S. military and law enforcement, according to President Claudia Sheinbaum.

“The country is at peace,” Sheinbaum said at her daily press conference Monday. “It’s calm.”

The spasm of violence came amid a heavy-handed pressure campaign by the Trump administration, which for the past year has explicitly blamed Sheinbaum’s government for allowing traffickers to flood the U.S. with fentanyl and other drugs. President Donald Trump has previously insinuated that the government of Mexico is captured by trafficking networks, and threatened unilateral military action to stop the flow of drugs.

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“Going after a big fish like this was kind of an indication of the new framing of this government’s security strategy,” said Mora. “But it also has to do with the elephant in the room, which is the pressure that Donald Trump is putting on Mexico to deliver this.”

Despite an almost unprecedented willingness on the part of Sheinbaum to hand over high-profile narcos to stand trial in the U.S. — and Trump’s willingness to pardon convicted drug traffickers — Trump has given little indication of relenting. Even as top U.S. officials took a victory lap and the deadly cost of the operation was just beginning to become clear, Trump hardly seemed satisfied.

“Mexico must step up their effort on Cartels and Drugs!” he wrote Monday on his social media platform.

In Mexico, however, the death toll, which is likely higher than what has so far been reported, and the chaos that was unleashed were a stark reminder of the heavy cost paid by Mexicans in a war on organized crime that is dictated in large part by pressure from Washington — even as the paramilitary groups in question are armed with guns and ammunition from the U.S. and fueled with money from drugs consumed by people north of the border.

“This is a breakthrough,” said Jesús Esquivel, a journalist with La Jornada and a longtime chronicler of the war on drugs. “But now the question now is: What are you going to do to reduce demand and consumption? What are you going to do to stop arms trafficking?”

Grim Repetition

In many ways, the violence that played out on Sunday was a familiar scene. On multiple occasions over the past decade, confrontations with high-profile drug traffickers have sparked bloody battles with heavily armed paramilitary groups, leaving numerous people dead and cities paralyzed.

Perhaps the most controversial incident of this scale came in 2019, when Mexican troops seized Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, only to release him following a siege of the city of Culiacán by gunmen loyal to Ovidio and his brothers.

In previous operations, Mexican troops and Marines have frequently operated in conjunction with “advisors” from the Drug Enforcement Administration and occasionally with the help of special operations forces and the CIA. Details are still emerging about how exactly the operation played out on Sunday, but it appears to have been carried out entirely by Mexican security forces.

“For the first time, I feel proud of the Mexican Army,” said Esquivel. “It’s a message to the U.S. government, and especially to Trump, that we may need your information, but we don’t need you to intervene unilaterally in our territory. We can take care of these guys.”

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For others, the scenes that unfolded on Sunday had a grim sense of repetition. It has been almost 20 years since President Felipe Calderón declared war on the cartels, a heavily militarized, U.S.-backed mission that has — despite endless arrests of high-level narcos — has done virtually nothing to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S. Instead, Mexico has faced decades of horrific violence, a widespread paramilitarization of drug gangs, and a fractured criminal landscape that has turned many areas of the country into low-intensity war zones fueled by weapons from the United States.

As the smoke clears in Jalisco, there are fears that a familiar pattern will repeat itself. In other areas in which a top trafficker was arrested or killed, it has become common for criminal groups to atomize into warring factions, according to Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist who studies organized crime in Mexico.

“This is a continuation of this militarized approach to organized crime,” said Jusionyte. “With the fracturing of these organized crime groups, there is more violence, but the structure remains intact — the drug demand in the U.S. and the gun supply from the U.S. remains, and in Mexico the impunity and the weakness of the justice system remain.”

The post Trump Demanded El Mencho’s Head. Mexicans Are Paying the Price. appeared first on The Intercept.

Hegseth is reportedly set to tour Bath Iron Works on Monday and give a speech on the recently announced “Trump” class battleship, according to the Bangor Daily News.

When the bosses reached out to workers for volunteers to attend the speech, however, few hands went up, according to one worker, who spoke with The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The speech is slated for Monday afternoon, shortly before a shift change, which means that workers who attend would need to stay past their normal work hours — and anyone who shows up would be required to stay until the event is over.

“They issued a polling sheet this morning to see who would attend and, at least from my crew, there were no takers,” said the worker, “and not even a mention of overtime.”

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Hegseth has made his speeches a high priority during his tenure as secretary of the War Department, including one address in which he railed against “fat” generals. He later ordered the entire U.S. military to watch the speech.

Devin Ragnar, a spokesperson for International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 6, which represents workers at the yard, confirmed that anyone attending the speech past shift change would receive overtime pay, but declined to discuss in detail how the arrangement was reached.

After the initial lack of enthusiasm on Friday morning, a later survey went out around noon that explicitly said workers would receive overtime if they stayed past the end of their shift, according to the worker.

“I don’t know if that was always going to be the case — a change to bribe folks to get a larger attendance ­— or if union leadership grieved it by saying they can’t mandate us stay past our shift and not pay us,” said the worker, whose hunch was that management was looking to entice people to attend. “This company doesn’t pay out for anything they don’t explicitly have to.”

Another worker who spoke with The Intercept expressed dread about the impending headache of Hegseth’s visit, echoing how unusual the offer of overtime pay was.

“I’m sure it’ll both interrupt the workday — which is very ironic since we’re always being hounded about productivity and efficiency — and create a lot of discourse that I don’t want to have to listen to all day,” said second worker, who also requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “I was also a little angry because, again, there are lots of other things that we get denied paid time off for — snowstorms, events during work hours that aren’t work-related, etc. But they’re offering OT for this?”

Representatives of Bath Iron Works did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and a Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment.

“We haven’t announced any trip for the Secretary and have nothing to add at this time,” said Joel Valdez, the spokesperson.

Located in Bath, Maine, at the mouth of the Kennebec River, the shipyard is one of the largest employers in the state and has long been one of the most reliable sources for steady, well-paying union jobs in the Midcoast region. A subsidiary of the defense giant General Dynamics, BIW plays a key role in building and maintaining U.S. Navy ships and has been the recipient of billions of dollars in government contracts.

Charles Krugh, the president of Bath Iron Works, has signaled to President Donald Trump that his facility is ready to take part in the construction of the “Trump” battleships.

“America’s warfighters deserve the most advanced, lethal and survivable combat ships we can deliver to protect our country and our families,” Krugh said in December, echoing Hegseth’s fondness for the term “warfighter.”

When news emerged this week that Hegseth was coming to the yard, however, reactions among the staff were muted, the BIW worker told The Intercept. They said many colleagues greeted news of Hegseth’s visit with feelings ranging from “apathy to disgust,”

“I hate Pete Hegseth to my core,” the first worker said. “He has no business discussing warships, or anything involved with what we do here. I find it insulting that he is given any authority or respect.”

The worker acknowledged that not everyone at BIW would share the same view of Hegseth.

“We have plenty of die-hard Trump supporters, and I don’t know how much of that fanaticism spreads to Hegseth,” the worker said. “I think if anything he’s an afterthought by most people.”

The post Shipyard Bosses Forced to Pay Overtime to Get People to Stay for Pete Hegseth Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

The 26-page letter — directed to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and the state and city comptrollers — took aim at Israeli bonds, a financial instrument that invests in the Israeli government for a set period and then is paid back with interest.

Israeli bonds have emerged as a crucial source of funding for the Israeli government, with money from bond sales flowing into the country’s coffers and allowing it to continue its genocidal campaign in Gaza and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.

“There’s no complicated analysis needed here: New York is using taxpayer money to finance a military the entire world has watched commit war crimes and crimes against humanity for years,” said Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s advocacy director. (Mamdani, City Comptroller Mark Levine, and the other elected officials named in the letter did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.)

On top of the financial risk of holding Israeli debt and the moral imperative of ceasing to fund the Israeli government, divesting from Israel bonds would simply put New York more in line with the opinions of its own citizens, said Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, DAWN’s director for Israel and Palestine.

“Where you put your money — that means something,” Schaeffer Omer-Man told The Intercept. “We’ve seen a massive shift in public opinion over the past few years as a result of the Gaza war. The political class hasn’t necessarily caught up yet, but support for Palestinians and disapproval for Israel’s behavior, actions, and policies is at an all-time high.”

New York State’s Common Retirement Fund held $352 million worth of Israel bonds as of March 2024, making it one of the largest holdings in the U.S., according to DAWN. And while former City Comptroller Brad Lander allowed the bonds held in city-controlled portfolios to lapse in 2024 — earning DAWN’s praise — the city’s new comptroller, Levine, has pledged to reinvest.

“Brad Lander understood this and divested,” said Jarrar. “Mark Levine’s promise to reinvest is a promise to keep funding Israel’s war machine with New Yorkers’ money.”

DAWN pledged to explore legal action against the state for its investment should it decline to divest in the bonds, as well as against the city should Levine’s plan move forward.

Levine’s announcement of his intent to purchase Israeli government bonds put him at odds with Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel whose campaign did not shy away from a continued support for Palestinians despite continuous attacks smearing him as an antisemite.

“There’s a potential conflict coming up,” said Schaeffer Olmer-Man. “I hope that Mamdani holds his ground and exerts whatever influence he has to ensure these imprudent and arguably illegal investments do not renew.”

So far, Mamdani has held fast and signaled his opposition to Levine’s plan.

“I’ve made clear my position, which is that I don’t think that we should purchase Israel bonds,” Mamdani told reporters in an unrelated press conference on January 21. “We don’t purchase bonds for any other sovereign nation’s debt, and the comptroller has also made his position clear, and I continue to stand by mine.”

The standoff between the mayor and comptroller is an exact reversal of the dynamic that existed between former Mayor Eric Adams, a staunch supporter of Israel and bonds backer, and Lander, the former comptroller who allowed the city’s investment to lapse. At the time, Lander — a self-professed liberal Zionist who has been outspoken in his criticism of the genocide in Gaza — said he as simply doing his job as the steward of the city’s investments.

“We consulted our guidelines and made the prudent decision to follow them, and therefore not to continue investing in the sovereign debt of just one country,” said Lander in a July 13 letter penned in response to an ally of Adams critical of the move to wind down the city’s bonds position. “You appear to be asking that the City’s pension funds treat Israel better than all other countries. That would also be politically motivated, and inconsistent with fiduciary duty.”

The post Zohran Mamdani Wants NYC to Divest From Israel — But New Comptroller Pledges to Buy War Bonds appeared first on The Intercept.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said at a press conference Saturday that the victim was a 37-year-old resident of Minneapolis and is believed to be a U.S. citizen. The Minnesota Star Tribune identified him as Alex Jeffrey Pretti.

According to the paper and a public records database accessed by The Intercept, Pretti had a nursing license issued in 2021.

“He appeared to be an observer,” said an eyewitness who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the federal government. “Agents looked ready to leave and then they started pushing him and another observer across the street.”

The witness said that before they were accosted, Pretti and one other observer “were yelling at agents.”

Once the agents had Pretti on the ground, “he was out of my sight,” the witness said. “But when they started pushing him, agents that appeared to be headed to their vehicles turned around and went toward that confrontation.”

The shooting came just weeks after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Good, and a day after hundreds of thousands of people braved subzero temperatures to march in Minneapolis against weeks of rolling immigration enforcement raids by ICE, Border Patrol, and other federal agencies.

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A video of the incident, which surfaced on Reddit just before 10 a.m. Central Time, shows a number of apparent federal agents in tactical gear wrestling with a person on the ground and striking them multiple times before a shot rings out. As many of the agents scatter from the person, at least nine more shots ring out, and the person slumps to the ground.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirmed the shooting and claimed that the man was carrying a handgun, attaching a photo of a Sig Sauer weapon. The Intercept has not been able to independently verify the department’s claims.

Minnesota allows open carrying of firearms by people with valid permits. O’Hara said Saturday that the victim’s only known law enforcement interactions were over traffic tickets, “and we believe he is a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry.”

One eyewitness told The Intercept he headed to the area just before 9 a.m. Central Time to observe after hearing reports of federal agents staging in a parking lot next to Glam Doll Donuts near the intersection of Nicollet Avenue and East 26th Street. When he got there, the witness saw a handful of other responders and about 15 federal agents in tactical gear, but no apparent immigration enforcement targets.

“The people who were there were the people doing rapid response,” said the witness, who spoke with The Intercept on condition of anonymity.

The witness said there was some verbal back and forth between observers and federal agents, but said he saw nothing that hinted at a violent confrontation. About three minutes after arriving on the scene, he was standing across the street from the sidewalk next to the donut shop when he heard a series of gunshots in rapid succession and ducked into a doorway for safety alongside another observer.

“I don’t want to die,” the witness said.

In the immediate wake of the shooting, the witness tried to call 911, but the calls would not go through. A journalist for Bring Me the News who was on the scene reported witnessing federal agents giving the person chest compressions and calling for help.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz confirmed the shooting Saturday morning and called for federal agents to leave the state.

“I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening,” Walz wrote on X. “The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.”

At the press conference with O’Hara, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he had watched “a video of more than six masked federal agents pummeling one of our constituents, shooting him to death.”

“How many more lives have to be lost before this administration realizes that a political and partisan narrative is not as important as American values?” Frey asked.

O’Hara called for calm and appealed to the federal government to act with professionalism.

“Our demand today is for those federal agencies that are operating in our city to do so with the same discipline, humanity, and integrity that effective law enforcement in this country demands,” O’Hara said.

This developing story has been updated.

The post Man Feds Killed in Minneapolis Was an Observer, Eyewitnesses Say appeared first on The Intercept.

A Google digital watermarking system initially flagged that the image had been manipulated with Google’s AI tools. Later tests after the publication of this article resulted in different responses — raising questions about the consistency of Google’s SynthID system.

In the original photo, local civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong was shown being escorted by authorities after her arrest in connection to a protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at Cities Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota. 

The version published by the White House’s official X account showed an image that had been altered to make it appear as if Levy Armstrong were openly weeping.

“I was there when they arrested her, and she definitely wasn’t crying — she was calm, rational, and dignified,” said Jordan Kushner, an attorney for Levy Armstrong. “This is part and parcel of a fascist regime where they literally invent reality to serve their fascist agenda.”

According to an initial Intercept analysis using Google SynthID — a program that identifies hidden markers used by Google AI tools on photos — the photo had been altered with the tech giant’s generative AI tools. Subsequent tests at Google’s request produced inconsistent results. Though Google’s tool initially stated that the crying image had been manipulated using its AI, a later test claimed that image was authentic. (A Google spokesperson said, “We’re trying to understand the discrepancy” — but did not answer repeated questions about it.)

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In response to questions about the altered photo, a spokesperson for the White House referred The Intercept to a tweet from White House spokesperson Kaelan Dorr lashing out at “the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country.”

“Enforcement of the law will continue,” wrote Dorr. “The memes will continue.”

The original, unaltered image showing Levy Armstrong looking stalwart first appeared on the web in a pair of tweets by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, according to several image search engine tools.

About a half hour later, the White House posted its altered image showing Levy Armstrong in tears — including text labeling her as a “far-left agitator” and accusing her of “orchestrating church riots.”

The White House X account appears to have been the first place the altered image appeared on the web, according to the image search tools.

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Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Levy Armstrong’s arrest on Thursday. Along with Chauntyll Louisa Allen and William Kelly, Levy Armstrong faces charges under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law designed to limit anti-abortion protesters from impeding patients from seeking care. 

The arrests followed days of outrage online from the right over a protest on Sunday in which anti-ICE demonstrators entered the Cities Church, where a local ICE official serves as a pastor, according to The Associated Press.

“Religious freedom is the bedrock of this country,” Bondi wrote on X Thursday. “We will protect our pastors. We will protect our churches. We will protect Americans of faith.”

Jeffrey Lichtman, a defense attorney with numerous high-profile federal cases under his belt, told The Intercept that the post could conceivably have a prejudicial effect as the case against her proceeds.

“This altered photo makes her look weak and scared, and some people may interpret that as guilt,” Lichtman said. “I’d try to use it as evidence that this was a political prosecution. This isn’t, like, some aide that works in a congressional office somewhere, this is the White House, and it’s clear the White House controls Pam Bondi, and she’s the one responsible for this arrest.”

Ron Kuby, a veteran civil rights lawyer, told The Intercept that the problem lay less in the meme than in the prosecution itself. 

“As a defense lawyer, I’d work hard to make sure it wasn’t repeated, but it’s not going to result in dismissal of charges or any meaningful sanction from a judge,” Kuby said. “This is just Thursday in America. The outrage is not the graphic — the outrage is that they turned a simple disorderly conduct case into a federal prosecution for their propaganda efforts.”

Update: January 22, 2026, 5:27 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to reflect that Google declined to comment.

Update: January 24, 2026
This article and its headline were updated after subsequent tests of Google’s AI watermarking tool provided inconsistent responses about whether the image the White House posted on X had been manipulated by Google’s own AI tools.

The post White House Doctored Photo With AI to Make It Look Like an Activist Was Sobbing During Perp Walk appeared first on The Intercept.

In a video posted online last week, two detectives with the Miami Beach Police Department were filmed questioning Raquel Pacheco, a former candidate for statewide office and longtime resident of the seaside resort city, over a post she made criticizing what she said was Mayor Steven Meiner’s hypocrisy around Israel and Palestine.

“This Facebook post was protected speech, and it’s not a close question — not remotely,” said Daniel Tilley, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “In context, the actions and statements by government officials here are likely to have a chilling effect on those who would otherwise voice their critique of the government.”

Pacheco, a frequent critic of the Miami Beach mayor, said she didn’t think much of a Facebook comment she wrote on January 7, in which she pointed out the mayor’s hypocrisy over calling the city a safe haven for all.

“The guy who consistently calls for the death of all Palestinians, tried to shut down a theater for showing a movie that hurt his feelings, and REFUSES to stand up for the LGBTQ community in any way (even leaves the room when they vote on related matters) wants you to know that you’re all welcome here,” she wrote, following up with three clown emojis.

Pacheco’s comment came in response to a post by Meiner in which he called out New York City for alleged antisemitism after Mayor Zohran Mamdani rescinded his predecessor’s controversial executive orders on Israel. Meiner post echoed the Israeli government’s response to Mamdani.

“Our city is consistently ranked by a broad spectrum of groups as being the most tolerant in the nation,” Meiner wrote on January 6. “By contrast, certain places like New York City are intentionally removing protections against select groups, including promoting boycotts of Israeli/Jewish businesses.”

Pacheco said she was irritated by the insinuation by Meiner that New York City was rife with antisemitism, or that Miami Beach was free of bias. So she fired back.

“I was pointing to the hypocrisy of his statement,” Pacheco told The Intercept. “He claims Miami Beach is a safe haven for everyone, but the post itself is addressed to a specific group of people and makes false allegations against NYC.”

Meiner, who is Jewish, is a staunch supporter of Israel’s war on Gaza. He has used his office to clamp down on pro-Palestine speech. In March of last year, Meiner sought to evict an independent cinema from its city-owned space over plans to air “No Other Land,” a documentary on attempts by Israeli forces to demolish a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank. Meiner called the Oscar-winning film “hateful propaganda.”

Pacheco acknowledged that Meiner may not have verbatim called for the death of all Palestinians, but said she was taking aim at his “blind support for Israel” and the connotations of that support in light of the genocide in Gaza.

“He may not have said it in those words, but that was my interpretation,” she said.

Pacheco said she thought little of the post until days later, on January 12, when a pair of plainclothes detectives with the Miami Beach Police Department knocked on her door wishing to discuss the post.

In the video of the interaction filmed by Pacheco and provided to The Intercept, Pacheco answers the door to a pair of officers, one of whom is holding a cellphone with a screenshot of Pacheco’s Facebook post on the screen. One of the officers asks several times if Pacheco was the author of the post, but she declines to confirm.

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“What we’re just trying to prevent is someone getting agitated or agreeing with the statement,” the officer says, before reading aloud from the post in which Pacheco accused Meiner of “consistently calling for the death of all Palestinians. “

“That can probably incite someone to do something radical. That’s what we’re here to talk about,” he says. “I would think to refrain from posting things like that, because that could get something incited,” he continues.

“I appreciate your concern,” Pacheco responds, while still declining to confirm that she was the author of the post and saying she would only answer questions with a lawyer. A few seconds later, the officers depart.

Shortly after the incident at her home, and after consulting with a lawyer, Pacheco decided to post the video of the police visit online, kicking off a local controversy in Miami Beach.

In response to criticisms from the ACLU of Florida and other groups, Miami Beach Police Chief Wayne A. Jones took responsibility for sending the detectives to Pacheco’s home.

“Given the real, ongoing national and international concerns surrounding antisemitic attacks and recent rhetoric that has led to violence against political figures,” Jones said in a statement on January 16, “I directed two of my detectives to initiate a brief, voluntary conversation regarding certain inflammatory, potentially inciteful false remarks made by a resident to ensure there was no immediate threat to the elected official or the broader community that might emerge as a result of the post.”

Representatives for Meiner and Jones did not respond to requests for comment from The Intercept.

Pacheco, for her part, said she hopes the controversy might make city government think twice before pulling a similar move with other critics.

She said, “This stops at my door.”

The post She Criticized the Mayor’s Support for Israel on Facebook. Then the Cops Showed Up at Her Door. appeared first on The Intercept.

In multiple confrontations in the Minneapolis area, agents repeatedly referred to civilians learning their lesson — in an apparent nod to the use of deadly force in Ross’s killing. In a video posted to Reddit, a masked ICE agent can be heard repeatedly admonishing a driver to “go home to your kids.”

“Stop fucking following us,” the ICE agent screams.

Phil Maddox, a local resident, told The Intercept he recorded the video on Sunday morning during a quick drive around his neighborhood to keep tabs on federal agents in the area. After briefly following one unmarked car, he said another car boxed him into an alley, and he found himself surrounded by agents, including at least one with his gun drawn.

As the video continues, Maddox pans his phone camera to reveal another agent standing by the passenger-side door with a handgun drawn. Stomping back past the car, the first agent continues his tirade, telling Maddox that he won’t “like the outcome” if he follows the agents.

“You did not learn from what just happened?” the ICE agent asks. “Go home to your kids.” Maddox said he immediately interpreted the question as a threat.

“They’re saying, ‘Get in our way and we’ll shoot you,’” Maddox said. “‘We have immunity, we can do what we want, and you should fear us.’”

Understanding what “learning your lesson” means as a warning goes beyond Maddox. The phrasing has been widely interpreted as a threat by protesters, activists, and advocates on the ground in Minneapolis.

“That’s a veiled threat, 1,000 percent,” Luis Argueta, a spokesperson for the immigrant rights group Unidos Minnesota, told The Intercept. “They can’t exactly say it, but the way they reference Renee Good — they’re using that to strike fear.”

The threats have come amid broader scenes of violence inflicted against protesters in the Twin Cities by roving bands of ICE and Border Patrol agents. Thousands of agents have been deployed in phases by President Donald Trump as part of a massive immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities. Over the weekend, agents were captured on camera pepper-spraying observers and smashing car windows while followed closely by protesters blowing whistles and yelling at them. (The Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE and Border Patrol, did not respond to a request for comment.)

“This is a classic situation of overreacting, over-policing, and ultimately use of excessive force,” said Andrew G. Celli Jr., an attorney specializing in police misconduct and constitutional rights. “It’s tragic but predictable that the reaction has been as strong as it has been. And of course, when you have that kind of reaction that gets provoked, then the police, whose job it is to oversee and control crowds and demonstrations — they can sometimes overreact, and so it becomes a vicious cycle.”

On Sunday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced that hundreds more federal agents would be deploying to the region, adding to the more than 2,000 agents who made up the surge that began on January 6. The violence continued on Monday as federal agents unleashed clouds of tear gas on a residential street, according to footage posted to social media.

Monday’s clashes set the stage for a lawsuit filed by state and local officials in Minnesota seeking to end Trump’s surge of federal agents, which the administration claims is aimed at combating social-services fraud in the state.

In an 80-page complaint filed in Minnesota District Court, the state of Minnesota, joined by the city governments of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, detailed a litany of abuses by federal agents under the aegis of what the Trump Administration has dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” and the social, political, and economic impact it has had on the state. The suit, led by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, demands an end to the operation.

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“When the federal government itself violates legal rights and civic norms on such a broad scale and public panic is high, state and city governments bear the costs—both tangible and intangible,” the complaint read. “Defendants’ agents’ reckless tactics endanger the public safety, health, and welfare of all Minnesotans. Additionally, Defendants’ agents’ inflammatory and unlawful policing tactics provoke the protests the federal government seeks to suppress.”

More than one agent has been caught on camera in recent days invoking the idea of “learning” a “lesson.” In a video posted to TikTok, one federal agent warns two separate people in separate vehicles that they have not learned the lessons of recent days — an apparent allusion to the killing of Good.

@milaisconfused44

♬ original sound – mila⸆⸉

“You don’t fucking learn — what’s fuckin’ happened in the last couple of days,” the agent says to someone as two other agents pat down the occupants of a car. Seconds later, the agent approaches a woman filming from a second vehicle and issues a similar warning.

“Listen, have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?” says the agent, who was clad in tactical gear without any insignia identifying his agency. “Have you not learned?”

“Learned what?” the woman responds. “What’s our lesson here? What do you want us to learn?”

In response, the agent appears to swat at the phone in the woman’s hand.

“Following fucking federal agents,” he says, before the video cuts out.

It was unclear what happened after the apparent swat at the phone, but the original poster of the video later said on TikTok that both she and the woman filming were safe.

Numerous other videos have captured agents violently attacking protesters, including one agent who appeared to tackle a man filming an interaction in the street, another chasing down and tackling a man at a gas station, and multiple agents piling onto a Richfield Target employee in the store entryway.

In multiple instances, agents can be heard accusing protesters of impeding their efforts. Filming the police, though, is not a crime. A majority of courts repeatedly and across jurisdictions have held that there is a constitutional right to record police and other law enforcement carrying out their duties in public places, so long as an observer doesn’t interfere with officials and complies with reasonable orders, such as keeping a safe distance.

“You can follow them around, you can film them, you can say, ‘Hey, fuckhead,’” said Celli, who is a partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP. “But I will tell you, after 25 years of representing people who do just that: You will likely get arrested. The Constitution is only as good as the people willing to follow it.”

Adding to the chaos, Celli said, is the fact that the agents from ICE and Border Patrol may be out of their depth when it comes to street-level enforcement.

“These guys are not street cops,” Celli said. “They’re not accustomed to this, and they’re not trained for this. This isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Maddox, who remained calm throughout the recorded interaction on Sunday, said only later did fear set in over what could have happened. He remained angry, however, about the impact that the raids were having on his children and on his neighbors, many of whom are Latino.

“No one feels safer with [ICE] here,” he said. “My kids are scared their friends are going to get nabbed, or that their friends’ parents or relatives or their neighbors will get nabbed.”

The post Federal Agents Keep Invoking Killing of Renee Good to Threaten Protesters in Minnesota appeared first on The Intercept.

Betar U.S., the American chapter of an international Zionist group of the same name, will dissolve its not-for-profit status in New York and wind down operations in the state following a settlement with James’s office. 

“New York will not tolerate organizations that use fear, violence, and intimidation to silence free expression or target people because of who they are,” James said in a statement. “My office’s investigation uncovered an alarming and illegal pattern of bias-motivated harassment and violence designed to terrorize communities and shut down lawful protest.”

The investigation into Betar by the Office of the Attorney General found that, in addition to violating state civil rights laws barring bias-motivated violence and harassment, the group had never registered with the state-level Charities Bureau.

In an email, a Betar U.S. spokesperson said the group denies all wrongdoing, but did not answer follow-up questions.

The investigation began in March of last year after her office received formal complaints of harassment by the group, James said. If Betar continues its activities, it faces an $80,000 fine and other potential consequences, according to a statement from James’s office.

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“The OAG investigation determined that Betar engaged in a pattern of violence and harassment driven by explicit hostility toward protected groups,” the statement alleged. “The OAG uncovered numerous public and private statements by Betar leadership and members expressing anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim animus, including repeated use of slurs and demeaning language.”

The group, which has been accused of links to the far-right Kahanist movement that is banned in Israel, gleefully claimed a role in the arrest last year of pro-Palestine students by immigration officials. Members frequently threatened pro-Palestine demonstrators with violence, including a campaign to send pagers to its opponents in reference to Israel’s 2024 use of rigged devices to assassinate Hezbollah militants — killing nearby civilians — in Lebanon.

At a vigil last year in New York City for Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old girl killed by the Israeli military in Gaza, the group chanted “ICE, ICE, ICE.” Members made a show of documenting people’s faces with the stated goal of using facial-recognition software to identify them and give names to the Department of Homeland Security.

Betar’s methods are so extreme that they have even drawn the ire of fellow Zionists, including the Anti-Defamation League, which included the organization in a list of hate groups, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Correction: January 13, 2026, 5:48 p.m. ET
This story has been corrected to reflect that Betar U.S.’s dissolution was not ordered by Attorney General Letitia James, but came after her office’s investigation. This story has also been updated to include a statement from Betar U.S. received after publication.

The post New York Attorney General Slams Pro-Israel Group Betar U.S. for Biased Harassment of Arabs, Muslims appeared first on The Intercept.

The Department of Homeland Security told The Intercept that the agents responsible for the shooting were conducting immigration enforcement with the U.S. Border Patrol, a division of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. KATU, the local ABC affiliate, had previously reported the agents were with CBP.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the agents shot the two people during a traffic stop, calling the passenger “a Venezuelan illegal alien affiliated with the transnational Tren de Aragua prostitution ring” and saying the agency “believed” the driver was “a member of the vicious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.” DHS has provided no evidence for the allegations, nor for McLaughlin’s additional claim that the passenger was “involved a recent shooting in Portland.”

According to a briefing published by the city government, Portland Police responding to a report of gunshots at 2:18 p.m. “confirmed that federal agents had been involved in a shooting.”

Minutes later, Portland Police “found a male and female with apparent gunshot wounds,” the briefing states. They were transported to a hospital.

“We are still in the early stages of this incident,” said Portland Police Chief Bob Day. “We understand the heightened emotion and tension many are feeling in the wake of the shooting in Minneapolis, but I am asking the community to remain calm as we work to learn more.”

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The shooting came just one day after an ICE agent in Minneapolis, who The Intercept identified as Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who had been observing protests against immigration raids.

This developing story has been updated.

The post Border Patrol Agents Shot Two People in Portland During Immigration Stop appeared first on The Intercept.