According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month.

Attorneys for the Reddit user say their client’s posts and their anonymity are squarely protected under the First Amendment and that ICE’s use of a grand jury marks a disturbing escalation for the agency after seeing its previous efforts to investigate political speech quashed in court. The subpoena was issued by federal prosecutors in the capital after ICE’s effort to identify the same user failed in a Northern California federal court. (The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington declined to comment on the case.)

Since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, federal agents have increasingly demanded social media companies reveal the users behind anonymous accounts critical of his immigration crackdown, expressing particular interest in those that identify employees of the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE or share real-time information on enforcement activity. The administration claims the accounts are engaged in doxing and endanger officer safety, but they have also targeted social media users seemingly doing nothing more than expressing anger at the government.

Digital free speech advocates with the Electronic Frontier Foundation have closely tracked the investigations, finding that the government repeatedly folded when challenged in court. A grand jury subpoena, however, is a much different animal, said David Greene, EFF’s senior counsel. Shrouded in secrecy and advantageous to prosecutors, the existence of a federal grand jury, particularly one convened in Washington, could suggest the government is moving toward a significant criminal case.

Greene knew of no examples during the recent wave of immigration enforcement-related investigations in which a leading tech company has been called to appear before one of the secret panels. Free speech protections are at their weakest in the context of a grand jury, he explained: The proceedings are not adversarial; their purpose is to permit a prosecutor to file charges.

“We should be very, very, very concerned that they’ve now taken one of these to a grand jury,” said Greene. “It’s something to be taken very seriously.”

The convening of a federal grand jury presents a considerable challenge for Reddit in particular, a platform that prides itself on protecting the free speech rights of its 121 million daily users. The company declined to say whether it intends to challenge the government’s order.

“Privacy is central to how Reddit operates, and we take our commitment to protecting that seriously,” the company said in a statement to The Intercept. “We do not voluntarily share information with any government, especially not on users exercising their rights to criticize the government or plan a protest.”

When the government seeks data on users, the statement continued, Reddit reviews the commands for “legal sufficiency and routinely object[s] to requests that are overbroad or threaten civil rights.” Users are notified of the requests “whenever possible so they can defend their interests,” the company went on to say, and Reddit provides only the “minimum” data required to satisfy law enforcement demands.

Failed Attempt

The story of how Reddit became ensnared in an ICE-related grand jury began early last month, when the company received a request to turn over the name, address, phone number, and other data associated with an account belonging to a user identified in court records as John Doe.

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The request was what’s known as an administrative summons or administrative subpoena, a powerful legal tool typically associated with serious crimes such as child trafficking. Under Trump, the subpoenas, which do not require judicial approval, have increasingly become a weapon wielded against opponents of the president’s immigration policies.

While it does not disaggregate ICE’s activities from other law enforcement agencies’ requests, Reddit reports that January to June 2025 marked the highest volume of requests the company has ever received in a single reporting period. Sixty-six percent of the 1,179 requests came from agencies in the U.S., including 423 subpoenas and 27 court orders. Reddit disclosed user data in 82 percent of those cases. While most requests concern child safety, the next highest category of data sought by law enforcement agencies falls into what Reddit lists as “other/unknown investigation types.”

In the John Doe case, Reddit received an initial request on March 4 from an ICE agent in Fairfax, Virginia.

“Failure to comply with this summons will render you liable to proceedings in a U.S. District Court to enforce compliance with this summons as well as other sanctions,” the summons read. “You are requested not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time. Any such disclosure will impede the investigation and thereby interfere with the enforcement of federal law.”

Two days later, the social media company alerted John Doe of the federal request for information. Based in the Pacific Northwest, the Reddit user obtained representation from the Oregon-based Civil Liberties Defense Center, an organization that had recently succeeded in beating back ICE’s requests for information on social media users.

The ICE agent wanted more than a month’s worth of electronic data, but offered no information as to what, exactly, caught the agency’s attention. When John Doe’s attorneys later reviewed their Reddit posts, they found nothing to suggest criminal activity or intent.

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There was a thread from early January, after news outlets including The Intercept identified Jonathan Ross as the ICE officer who shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis. Commenting on a Minnesota Star Tribune article, another Reddit user posted that Ross might be welcomed as a hero in Florida or Texas. John Doe responded by sharing that Ross had lived in Chaska, Minnesota; grew up in Indiana; and served in the Indiana National Guard — biographical details that were circulating widely at the time. “Hopefully he moves up to Stillwater State Penitentiary,” they wrote.

In another post, a Reddit user asked what they should write on an anti-ICE protest sign. John Doe suggested the lyrics to a song: “Urine speaks louder than words.” In a third instance, Doe wrote, “TSA sucks and we all know it.” According to the Reddit user’s attorneys, these were the most aggressive posts they could find.

On March 12, John Doe and their CLDC lawyers filed a motion to quash the summons in the Northern California federal court district where the San Francisco headquarters of Reddit is located.

In its summons, ICE indicated the basis for its request was a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. John Doe informed the court that they had nothing to do with the kind of activities at issue in the near-century-old statute, which governs boat show sales, wild animal imports, forfeited wines and spirits, and cross-border trade in other goods.

“I use this account to post about events and issues local to my region of Oregon and beyond,” the Reddit user said in a sworn declaration. “Neither I nor my Reddit account are associated with importing or exporting any merchandise or any other thing subject to tax or duty into or out of the United States.”

CLDC attorney Matthew Kellegrew argued that ICE’s request well exceeded the scope of the law, and that the First Amendment raised the bar for disclosure considerably in cases where investigative activity “intrudes into the area of constitutionally protected rights of speech, press, association.”

What’s more, Kellegrew noted, federal immigration officials attempted to use the tariff statute to unmask the president’s critics before, during the first Trump administration, and were reprimanded for doing so by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General in a 2017 report.

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CLDC had recently prevailed in challenging the feds’ use of administrative subpoenas in California’s Northern District. Last fall, the group intervened on behalf of a Meta user targeted in an administrative ICE subpoena. In October, federal Magistrate Judge Kandis A. Westmore sided with the civil liberties advocates, ordering Meta not to provide the information sought by ICE.

After intervening in the John Doe case last month, CLDC attorneys received an email from an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of California informing them that the government was withdrawing its request. It would not, however, be the last Reddit heard from the federal government about the matter.

Grand Jury Subpoena

On March 31, just four days after ICE’s summons was withdrawn, Reddit received another message from the feds.

This time, instead of requesting information on an individual user, the government ordered Reddit itself to appear before a grand jury — not in California, but in Washington.

The request came not from an ICE field agent but rather from a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in D.C., where Reddit has received the highest number of federal law enforcement information requests. The records sought spanned a period roughly three times longer than what ICE had originally requested.

Lauren Regan, director of litigation and advocacy for CLDC, suspects the success that advocates had challenging ICE’s social media subpoenas in California may explain why the Trump administration is now calling one of the world’s largest tech companies to appear before a secret tribunal in Washington.

“Because they were repeatedly losing those attempts at subpoenaing stuff in court, in what they’re doing is illegal and unconstitutional, they have now switched to this other mode,” she said. “They are able to strong-arm information that they were denied through the courts legally.”

None of the records associated with the grand jury case will be accessible to the public.

“The only valid use of a grand jury is to investigate federal crimes,” said Regan. What crime John Doe’s Reddit posts may have constituted or facilitated is unclear. According to Regan, “They are able to hide what they are doing under the guise of a federal grand jury.”

The post A Redditor Criticized ICE. Trump Is Trying to Unmask Them by Dragging the Company to a Secret Grand Jury. appeared first on The Intercept.

Though details continue to emerge from the operation, which set off a spasm of violence that left at least 70 people dead, some of the information that led Mexican security forces to Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes was delivered by a new Joint Interagency Task Force called Counter Cartel, based out of Southern Arizona.

The outfit operates out of Fort Huachuca, a military intelligence hub nestled in a rugged mountain chain 15 miles north of the U.S.–Mexico border. According to media reports, the task force, staffed by a combination of some 300 military and civilian employees, provided its Mexican counterparts with a “detailed target package” in the run-up to Sunday’s operation. The CIA also provided key support for the mission.

Existence of the task force was first revealed in a little-noticed ceremony at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, last month. Its online footprint is slight. The information that is publicly available, however, confirms deepening ties between President Donald Trump’s domestic homeland security agenda and his lethal drug war operations abroad.

Known internally as JIATF-CC, the task force is part of the U.S. Military’s Northern Command, once considered a backwater that today enjoys renewed prominence under Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. In the past year, Trump and Hegseth have used the Southern Command, NORTHCOM’s counterpart in the Western Hemisphere, as well the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, to conduct the kinds of targeted killing missions long associated with the war on terror against targets in Latin America.

To date, the military has conducted more than 40 airstrikes against alleged drug traffickers, killing at least 137 people without producing a shred of evidence to support its claims. While those strikes have been concentrated in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, the task force involved in Sunday’s Mexico operation is distinct for its focus much closer to U.S. soil.

“What the Trump administration has done more than its predecessors is give NORTHCOM a hugely bigger role,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group.

With that newfound stature has come a greater level of secrecy over what, exactly, the command is up to — and whether its operations might spill back over the border into the U.S.

In years past, when his organization would raise concerns over U.S. operations, the military would make available attorneys who could quote the Posse Comitatus Act — the law restricting military involvement in domestic policing — by chapter and verse, Isacson recalled. No more. Even his contacts on Capitol Hill, staffers working on armed services and homeland security issues, have found their letters to department chiefs met with silence.

“It freaks me out when I talk to oversight staff,” he said. “They’re just not getting answers.”

Scant Public Information

In a sparse January press release, Northern Command said the JIATF-CC is a component of the Homeland Security Task Force National Coordination Center. Its mission, the release said, is to “identify, disrupt, and dismantle cartel operations posing a threat to the United States along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

While information on the coordinating center is similarly scant, FBI national security branch operations director Michael Glasheen testified in December before the House Committee on Homeland Security that the president created a wide network of Homeland Security Task Forces in accordance with an executive order he signed on his first day back in office in January 2025.

Titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” the order called on the attorney general and the DHS secretary to “jointly establish Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) in all States nationwide.” Their shared mission would be to “end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States” and “dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks.”

Though the order made no mention of the U.S. military, Glasheen’s testimony confirmed the Pentagon had joined the HSTF mission.

“This task force construct is the first of its kind,” he told lawmakers, taking a “whole-of-government” approach and “consolidating all of U.S. law enforcement, military, and intelligence efforts into a targeted effort in combatting these threats.” According to Glasheen, individual task forces are led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the powerful investigative wing of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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In addition to more than 8,500 federal agents and officers, hundreds of analysts and legal attachés from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies support the HSTF mission worldwide, Glasheen testified. The national coordination center that the new border-focused JIATF-CC belongs to, he continued, “serves as the primary federal coordinating entity to align law enforcement, defense, and intelligence efforts.”

A recent job posting for a database administrator for the center — requiring at least a “secret” security clearance and paying upward of $189,750 a year — described the “care and feeding” of hundreds of terabytes of law enforcement data.

The precise relationship between the U.S. military and federal agencies like ICE and the FBI in support of the president’s homeland security mission is unclear. Northern Command did not respond to The Intercept’s request for an interview.

Crossing Borders

For generations, the U.S. military has played a driving role in the drug war abroad, training allied security forces, sharing intelligence on wanted drug traffickers, and facilitating covert kill-capture operations in nations such Colombia and Mexico.

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Beginning under President Ronald Reagan and continuing into the administration of Bill Clinton, Northern Command oversaw a steady growth in military counternarcotics operations on the U.S.–Mexico border, including on U.S. soil. Those operations ended when a Marine sniper team killed an American teenager named Esequiel Hernández while he was tending his family’s goats in West Texas in 1997.

Since then, the Pentagon has largely kept its focus south of the border. That, however, may be changing. A defense official speaking to Reuters said the new Arizona task military force is working to map suspected drug cartel networks on both sides of the international divide.

The director of the task force, U.S. Brig. Gen. Maurizio Calabrese, compared his team’s mission to the targeted killing campaigns previously waged against terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The motivations were different, he said, but in terms of sheer size, the drug cartel threat was perhaps even larger.

The general estimated that hundreds of leaders occupied the upper echelons of Mexican organized crime, supported by as many as a quarter-million lower-level operatives, which he referred to as “independent contractors.”

Correction: February 24, 2026, 2:26 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story contained an errant reference to the military command responsible for strikes against alleged drug smugglers. It has been corrected to reflect that the strikes were carried out by the Southern and Special Operations Commands.

The post Mexico Got Help Killing Drug Lord From Secretive U.S. Campaign Led by FBI and ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

The images told the story of the streets, but even as the administration moves to wind down its historic immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities, announcing a drawdown of operations this week, another story unfolds behind locked doors and drawn curtains. It is the story of tens of thousands of families living in terror, too afraid to venture into their communities for life’s most basic necessity: food.

On the ground in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and communities across the state, this is the reality that has kept people up at night.

In response to unprecedented conditions, an underground army coalesced to bring sustenance to families in hiding. The Intercept was recently invited inside a nondescript Minneapolis warehouse to observe their operations in action.

It was delivery day, which meant volunteers stuffing boxes with oatmeal and spaghetti, flour and chicken, rice, tomato sauce, vegetable oil, and more. Six hundred boxes were prepared the day before. Hundreds more would be added by day’s end. Inside, volunteers left notes telling recipients they were missed, and that they hoped to see them again soon.

The packages were loaded into a fleet of station wagons and SUVs. Alongside the food was baby formula, medication, and other essentials. Many of the vehicles were driven by teachers taking supplies to the families of students who haven’t been to class for weeks. They would proceed carefully on their mission, one eye on the rear-view mirror as they ferried their precious cargo.

As the latest in a series of dragnets targeting Democratic-led cities and states, Minnesota’s “Operation Metro Surge” saw 3,000 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol personnel deployed in early December. Across the state, immigrant families went into hiding.

Joe Walker, director of nutritional services at the Sanneh Foundation, a local charity that operates a mobile food shelf in the Twin Cities, saw the impact immediately.

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Not only were families no longer appearing to receive food, Walker told The Intercept, delivery vehicles were being followed, and distribution sites were being staked out by suspected federal agents. To volunteers on the ground, it felt as though the government was weaponizing hunger to root out a foreign enemy.

“We have to play by all the rules,” Walker said. “They don’t.”

Building an Aid Operation

Guiding operations at the warehouse visited by The Intercept was a 24-year-old soccer coach named Mu Thoo. Thoo spent his first eight years in Thailand and the rest of his life in the Twin Cities. He went to work for Walker’s mobile food shelf in 2022. 

As part of the immigrant community, Thoo acknowledged that Metro Surge upended life for countless families.

“It’s scary,” Thoo told The Intercept, but, he added, “I don’t believe in living in fear. People are going to need food, and that’s something every human should have a right to. And we’re gonna come out and give food to people.”

A veteran of the battle against hunger in Minnesota, Walker helped craft the state’s regulations surrounding food shelves and served on the governor’s hunger task force, counseling emergency management teams during the pandemic and the uprising that followed the murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd.

The 46-year-old was immensely proud of the system his team had built. At its core were weekly, in-person distribution events in parks across the city. Held year-round, they were designed to provide a farmer’s market-style experience, where families could pick and choose from the food on offer. Naturalists came to put on demonstrations for the kids. Families from South America would visit with volunteers. Bonds of community were forged between residents who otherwise may never have met.

Watching the Trump administration’s immigration blitzes in Chicago and Los Angeles, Walker braced for a similar assault in Minnesota. His team began noticing a steady drop-off in people of color showing up to receive food in late summer and early fall. After Metro Surge was announced, participation plummeted, from a high of nearly 700 people receiving food during a busy week last year to just over 60 once the operation began.

It was clear a major strategy shift was in order. At first, Walker experimented with using delivering trucks to provision clients no longer showing up in person. Soon, however, it became evident the risks were too high. In January, a food shelf delivery volunteer was taken by federal agents in the parking lot of a community center. A coalition of roughly 100 hunger relief organizations signed a letter describing the apprehension as part of a broader pattern of federal agents exploiting food delivery to jack up arrests.

With one of his own drivers followed by a suspected ICE vehicle, Walker recognized that such surveillance could tip off federal agents to dozens of families in a single day. To safely get food to people would require a low-profile, under-the-radar approach. To get there, Walker and his team embraced a decentralized, word-of-mouth method of operations, working with community members who were already known and trusted by their neighbors in hiding.

The pivot took off. In December, the mobile food shelf made deliveries to 735 families. In January, they delivered to 1,640, an increase of 123 percent.

Lasting Damage

On Thursday, Trump’s border czar and former ICE Acting Director Tom Homan announced a drawdown of Operation Metro Surge, effective immediately. It will likely take years to unpack the full cost of the campaign. Already, the early indicators are staggering.

While the true number of households that have received aid is impossible to know, estimates in mid-January from just one network of schools and churches hovered around 30,000 — likely a considerable undercount considering the vast number of smaller-scale operations and neighbor-to-neighbor relationships facilitating care.

The mass fear engendered by the government has cost the local economy upwards of $20 million a week. Immigrant businesses have suffered tremendously, with revenue losses as high as 100 percent. Local healthcare providers estimate a 25 percent drop in emergency room and clinic visits. Isolated from their classmates and friends, immigrant kids have reverted to Covid-style online learning, as parent pick-up and drop-off sites having become hunting grounds for federal agents. 

In his address this week, Homan stressed that “mass deportations” remain the administration’s chief immigration objective in Minnesota and around the country, suggesting the fear that has kept people inside these past several months is unlikely to abate anytime soon.

Although Minnesotans in the field of hunger relief take pride in their state’s progressive policies, efforts to feed people in need were already strained before Metro Surge began. Trump’s signature 2025 legislation, the Big Beautiful Bill, which pumped an unprecedented $75 billion into ICE, making it the most well-funded law enforcement agency in history, also cut a record $186 billion in funding for the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, significantly heightening the risk of food insecurity for tens of millions of people nationwide.

Schools with high immigrant student populations, where high attendance rates are linked to the availability of free breakfasts and lunches, have seen more than 60 percent of their kids stop coming to class. When those students join their parents in hiding, the 10 meals they would have received each week fall to their parents to provide; parents whose ability to move in the outside world, let alone earn money, is threatened by continuing deportation operations. Those burdens are exacerbated in families with multiple children and cases where the head of the household is disappeared by the state.

It’s not just undocumented families being affected, Walker explained.

“There’s a lot of Black and brown people that are just scared to be out and about,” he said, regardless of their immigration status. “It’s like Covid hit a certain population of the Twin Cities.”

Even as ICE prepares to draw down its presence, Walker and his team recognize that picking up the pieces after an operation that left two Americans dead and funneled thousands of residents into the deportation pipeline will take months, if not years.

“Families are being ruined financially, businesses are being ruined. It’s a huge economic hit,” he said. “And that is not even the hardest part. When it’s all done, then there’s the count of the missing. Where are they? Are they going to come home? These are our neighbors.”

“There’s no vaccine for this one,” Walker continued. “When do we call it’s all clear? I have no idea.”

“The Fear Never Leaves”

Walker’s team continues to provide in-person food availability at local parks. At one drop-off location, The Intercept saw a girl of perhaps 12 years of age and what looked to be her younger brother wheel a pair of empty strollers into a recreation center. The girl loaded her reusable grocery bags with oranges, chicken, and milk. It was her second time visiting the site, she said.

Before leaving, the children spoke briefly with Sanneh employee Alberto Hernández.

“With a lot of the first-gen kids being born here, they do come for their parents,” Hernández told The Intercept, after the children went on their way.

The 25-year-old Hernández could relate. He was a first-gen kid himself, the son of Mexican immigrants, born and raised in the Twin Cities area. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps after high school and joined Sanneh in September, just months before Metro Surge took off.

Hernández is a big guy, clean cut with a friendly face. He’d served his country and was now spending his days giving back to the community that raised him. Even he was scared.

“I carry everything,” he said. “I carry my veteran ID. I carry my passport.”

It was Hernández who’d been followed by suspected ICE agents while making runs for the food shelf. His experience was just one of many. One of his closest friends hadn’t left home since late December. Another, a legal resident, was surrounded by eight ICE agents while shopping at a Home Depot. According to Hernández, the barrel of an AR-15 was pressed to his skull and agents threw him to the ground before permitting him to go.

“The thing is,” Hernández said, “the fear never leaves.”

Despite being a military veteran with a white girlfriend, Hernández still felt uncomfortable going out to eat.

“We can’t even sit and just chill,” he said. “People need to know that. That’s how it is here. Always looking over your shoulder.”

At the same time, life in Minnesota wasn’t all paranoia and dread. To Hernández, who lives in downtown Minneapolis and witnessed a 50,000-person march last month demanding ICE’s retreat from the city, it was a moment of neighborly solidarity the likes of which he’d never seen. It was a reminder, to him, that he was not alone.

“As someone who’s a child of immigrants, it’s really nice,” he said. “It’s very, very, very beautiful to see. The people of Minneapolis, and the people of Minnesota, stand up for the community and their neighbors.”

The post Trump Attacked Immigrant Food Aid in Minnesota. Locals Fought Back. appeared first on The Intercept.

“Please help,” the woman said, again and again, her voice rising to a scream.

Then, her pleas stopped.

By the time support arrived, the observer was gone. All that remained was an empty SUV, engine running, abandoned in the middle of the city’s snow-lined streets.

Referred to locally as abductions, it was at least the fourth such disappearance of the day — the third in a span of less than 30 minutes.

The observers call themselves commuters. They are locals who have organized to resist “Operation Metro Surge,” a massive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol campaign targeting Minnesota’s undocumented population, by monitoring federal operations in the Twin Cities. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both agencies, has called the incursion the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.

Three days before the commuters were taken, the new head of Metro Surge, Trump administration border czar Tom Homan, announced a “drawdown” of 700 federal officers and agents. The president had tapped Homan to head the mission a week earlier, appointing the former ICE acting director to take over from Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose heavy-handed tactics culminated in three shootings in three weeks, including the killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Homan has vowed to take a more “targeted” line of attack in Minnesota. His announced drawdown has fueled speculation that the civil rights abuses and unlawful arrests documented in viral videos and court filings during Bovino’s tenure may be coming to an end. On the ground, the feeling is quite different.

In a message circulated among commuters Friday, the community group Defrost MN, which uses crowdsourced data to track federal immigration operations, warned residents of an “uptick in abductions” — which refer to arrests of both immigrant community members and legal observers — following Homan’s takeover and an increase in the number of government personnel and vehicles involved in those operations.

“National attention on Minnesota has waned with the departure of Bovino and rhetoric by Homan that things are de-escalating,” the group noted, but recent data and reports from commuters in the field did not support those conclusions. Despite orders to the contrary, the group continued, “Agents continue to draw their weapons and deploy chemical agents against observers.”

Meanwhile, the deportation pipeline out of Minnesota continues to flow, with 66 shackled passengers loaded onto a plane the night of Homan’s address — the highest total in nearly two weeks — according to evidence collected at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport.

Friday’s midafternoon disappearance of multiple commuters in quick succession provided visceral evidence that, despite the change in leadership, the struggle between President Donald Trump’s federal agents and residents continues.

Commuter Kaegan Recher was among those who hurried to the scene of the observer who disappeared while on call.

“She was so scared,” Recher told The Intercept. “The terror in her voice was really, really horrible.”

Response to a Siege

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as the surrounding suburbs, tens of thousands of immigrant families are relying on churches and mutual aid for food and financial support. People have not left their homes for weeks. Local schools have reverted to Covid-era online measures to support immigrant students too terrified to come to class. Those students who still attend in person are transported by U.S.-born neighbors and family friends. Campuses at all grade levels are patrolled by volunteers in fluorescent vests, an effort aimed at deterring federal agents’ practice of targeting parent pick-up and drop-off sites.

Conservative estimates from local healthcare providers suggest emergency room and clinic visits in the Minneapolis area are down by 25 percent. City leaders report local businesses are losing upwards of $20 million a week. Immigrant-owned businesses have been devasted, with revenue losses hovering between 80 to 100 percent and many closing their doors for good.

These are the conditions commuters respond to. Their focus is two-fold: to document and alert. Some participate on foot, others by bicycle, many by car. They patrol neighborhoods, reporting suspicious vehicles, the license plates of which are run through a crowdsourced database of known or suspected Department of Homeland Security vehicles. When confirmations are made, commuters follow, honking their horns while observers on foot blow whistles at the passing vehicles. The Intercept has observed several such interactions in recent weeks.

Typically, federal agents try to lose the tail. If they are traveling in a caravan, one vehicle may drive slowly ahead of a commuter, allowing others to speed away. If commuters outnumber the agents, the maneuver can be difficult. Unable to shake their noisy entourage, agents will often head for the highway and, if the pursuit continues, retreat to federal headquarters.

Most commuters are careful to keep a distance between their vehicles and those of the agents. Sometimes, the authorities will pull over and stop. The commuters will stop behind them. Both vehicles will sit idling, waiting for the other to move, then carry on.

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Occasionally, agents, heavily armed and frequently masked, will exit their vehicles and warn commuters to cease their pursuit. Some commuters do; others don’t. Sometimes, commuters come upon agents at a home, a business, or an apartment complex. Given the heated state of affairs — two Americans dead, immigrants living in terror, children unable to attend school, and sweeping social and economic impacts — the encounters are often raw with emotion. Nearly everything is recorded, by agents and commuters alike.

As these interactions have become a familiar, legal experts have noted that following and filming law enforcement is protected under the Constitution. With the federal government asserting sweeping and highly contested immigration authorities, they say those efforts are more important than ever.

The Trump administration has taken a different view. Officials argue Minnesota is infested with “agitators” impeding law enforcement. Mounting evidence suggests they are mobilizing resources to put their resistance down.

Homan’s Takeover

Much of the recent media attention surrounding Metro Surge has focused on Homan’s reduction in forces, a move the border czar has linked to Minnesota expanding ICE’s access to jails, thus reducing the number of federal personnel needed to meet the administration’s immigration arrest quotas.

With some 2,000 officers and agents still on the ground, the current federal contingent is still 13 times larger than the agencies’ normal footprint, outnumbering the Minneapolis Police Department three to one.

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While reducing the number of federal agents dominated headlines, it isn’t the only talking point Homan has driven home since taking over.

Homan spent much of a press conference last week describing how ICE’s full withdrawal hinges on the public acquiescing to the agency’s mission, which, he stressed, is to achieve the president’s promise of “mass deportations.” The immediate goal in Minnesota is a complete federal drawdown, Homan explained, “but that is largely contingent on the end of the illegal and threatening activities against ICE and its federal partners that we’re seeing in the community.”  

In the past month, Homan told reporters, 158 people have been arrested for interfering with federal law enforcement, a crime for which penalties range from one to 20 years in prison. Of those cases, he claimed, 85 have been accepted for prosecution. The rest are still pending.

In most cases, people arrested for interfering with ICE are taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, a seven-story edifice that is part of Fort Snelling, the historic site of a government-run concentration camp during the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862.

Typically, commuters and other legal observers are held for around eight hours before being released. During that time, U.S. officials collect a range of identifying information. With ample evidence that the Department of Homeland Security is amassing a growing catalogue of the president’s critics, and with Homan himself advertising his desire to include people who follow ICE’s activities in a government “database,” community concern is running high over what, exactly, the Trump administration is doing with its information on U.S. citizens.

In his address last week, Homan described an evolving effort by federal officials, including creation of a “multi-agency surge task force” and a new “unified joint operations center” that will allow the agency to “leverage joint intelligence capabilities to effectively target threats.” He emphasized that there would be no reduction in security elements — often militarized tactical teams — assigned to guard deportation operations against “hostile incidents, until we see a change in what’s happening with the lawlessness in impeding and interfering and assaulting of ICE and Border Patrol officers.”

Homan reminded the press that he’s long warned that the “hateful extreme rhetoric” of the president’s opponents would lead to bloodshed. Now, he said, “there has been.” Without acknowledging whose blood had been spilled, or by whom, Homan implored local leaders to urge calmness and “end the resistance.”

“One Warning”

Recher, the commuter who responded to Friday’s observer disappearances, has been in the streets monitoring ICE’s operations since early January. His busiest week was after Homan took over. He’s since noticed that agents have been less prone to immediately jump out of their cars with guns drawn — a welcome change — but that a similarly unsettling directive appears to have gone out regarding ICE’s engagement with the public.

A video he shot Friday appeared to confirm as much, with a deportation officer telling Recher that he and his colleagues have been ordered to give commuters a single warning before taking them into custody.

“You just got one warning, that’s it,” the officer said. “What we’re told, that’s all you need.”

Recher heeded the officer’s warning. He received the panicked and disturbing call for help from the vanished commuter soon after.

“I hear less and less about successful abductions, which I’m glad,” he said. “But I hear more and more about abductions of observers.”

For Recher, like so many others following ICE’s operations in Minnesota, the point of commuting is the thousands of immigrant families living in hiding across the Twin Cities. It is an effort to push back against the pervasive fear at the heart of the Trump administration’s occupation.

“How do you justify terrorizing an entire community?” he asked. “It is the most un-American thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”

The post “Uptick in Abductions”: ICE Ramps Up Targeting of Minneapolis Legal Observers appeared first on The Intercept.

They banged on pots, pans, and drums in the falling snow; shouted into megaphones; and blew into their orange emergency whistles — a shrill call that’s become synonymous with the Trump administration’s assault in the Twin Cities.

From the building’s fourth floor, a group of men looked down on the raucous crowd, drinks in hand. They appeared to be off-duty members of Bovino’s locally despised detail. One of the men turned, set his can down, dropped his shorts, and shook his bare ass at the protesters before giving them the finger. Not long after, local police and state troopers wielding wooden clubs overtook the crowd. Several arrests were made.

The motivations for the send-off stemmed from masked federal agents running wild throughout Minnesota for the past two months, and from the trail of civil rights abuses, constitutional violations, and violent videos left in their wake.

The most recent insult was the killing of Alex Pretti. On Saturday, federal immigration agents shot the 37-year-old dead in the street while he attempted to help a woman whom they had shoved to the ground.

In the wake of the killing, Bovino claimed that Pretti, who worked as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” despite abundant and immediately available evidence to the contrary.

On Monday, amid a wave of national outrage that even had some Republicans questioning the heavy-handedness in Minnesota, Bovino was removed from his unusual “commander-at-large” position and booted back to California. He will reportedly retire soon.

The local relief at Bovino’s departure is easy to understand. What is far less clear is how much of a change his replacement, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, will bring.

“There’s been no changes in legal filings, no withdrawing claims, no admissions that people are being detained without cause,” University of Minnesota law professor Emmanuel Mauleón told The Intercept. “All that we know at this moment is that they’re swapping out personnel. That doesn’t tell us anything about policies. That doesn’t tell us anything about enforcement priorities. That doesn’t tell us anything about tactics — and to the extent that we look at the court filings, there are no indications that those things have changed.”

As one example among many, Mauleón noted that the Trump administration has provided no indication that it intends to rescind a recently disclosed internal memo that purports authorize immigration agents to enter homes without a judicial warrant, an assertion of authority legal scholars have decried as patently unconstitutional.

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This is an election year, and so far, the ultra-nationalist, hyper-militarized crackdown ordered up by White House adviser Stephen Miller and manifested in the streets of Minneapolis is proving decidedly unpopular. Currently, the messaging from both the president and Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz is that Homan’s arrival may bring a less divisive, more professional brand of federal immigration policing to the state.

And yet, there’s little evidence of ideological distinction between the new head of “Operation Metro Surge” and the rest of the Trump administration’s immigration hawks. The most notable difference between Homan and Bovino in particular is that Homan has deported a lot more people, and he’s done so at a national level.

“Certainly, swapping out Bovino for Homan might result in different policies,” said Mauleón, For now, though, “it seems to be a matter of crisis management more than anything.”

“A lot of this,” he said, “I read more as political cover rather than any real meaningful signals about what’s going to happen on the ground.”

Homan’s Record

Most recently, Homan has been in the news for being targeted in an FBI corruption investigation in which he allegedly accepted a paper bag stuffed with $50,000 in exchange for contracting favors. (The Trump Justice Department dismissed the case.)

Those with a somewhat longer memory will recall that Homan — along with Miller and others — was an architect of “zero tolerance,” a policy that saw thousands of immigrant children separated from their parents and spawned nationwide protests, much like the country is seeing today.

Those with an even deeper knowledge of immigration history will remember that Homan was key to President Barack Obama earning the monicker “deporter-in-chief.”

Like Bovino, Homan was once a Border Patrol agent, before transferring to the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service. After September 11, 2001, INS earned the dubious distinction of being the only federal agency to be disbanded over the terror attacks. (The agency approved visas for two 9/11 hijackers.)

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Under the colossal new Department of Homeland Security, Homan and his colleagues were folded into a novel agency called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE, which was divided into two wings, the deportation officers of Enforcement and Removal Operations, and the special agents of Homeland Security Investigations.

Homan moved to Washington in 2009 and quickly climbed the bureaucratic ladder, becoming head of ERO in 2013. Under Obama, he and his colleagues expanded a controversial program known as Secure Communities, which allowed ICE to work inside jails and prisons. The administration defined its enforcement priorities as people who presented a threat to “national security, public safety, and border security.”

During Obama’s second term, DHS ordered ICE to stop deporting people whose only offense was an immigration violation that occurred prior to January 2014. By the time he left the White House, Obama had more than 3 million deportations to his name.

Even amid the changing priorities, Homan distinguished himself as a high-functioning deporter, embracing the “worst first” mantra ICE used to refer the administration’s goals. At ERO, he deported more than 920,000 people — 534,000 of them being what ICE called criminal aliens. For this achievement, Obama awarded him a Presidential Rank Award in 2015, the highest annual honor given to the government’s senior service members.

Despite the recognition he received, Homan bristled at the Obama administration’s enforcement priorities. As ICE’s acting director during Trump’s first term, his big talking point was that all undocumented people — criminal record or not — should live in fear that the government is coming for them.

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Homan’s agency ramped up arrests by more than 40 percent during Trump’s first year. In New York City alone, the Immigrant Defense Project reported a 900 percent increase in ICE arrests or attempted arrests at local courthouses. Nationwide, the greatest increase in arrests was among immigrants with no criminal convictions. Under Homan’s watch, ICE’s “noncriminal” arrests more than doubled.

At a Border Security Expo in 2018, Homan railed against the institutions challenging ICE, especially lawmakers and the press.

“When they’ve seen what we’ve seen, then you can have an opinion,” he told agents and industry vendors. “Until then we’re going to enforce the law without apology.”

Nothing in nearly a decade since Homan’s leadership at ICE suggests his views have changed. What has changed, particularly in the past year, is the overtly militarized tactics of both Border Patrol and ICE; while it was personnel from Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol’s parent agency, that killed Pretti, it was an ICE agent who shot Minneapolis mother Renee Good to death three weeks earlier.

Those operations have spawned a resistance the likes of which Homan never encountered during Trump’s first term.

Under Trump 2.0, federal agents in Minnesota have run up against a network of tens of thousands of digitally connected rapid responders committed to preventing mass deportations in their neighborhoods and communities.

Homan has threatened those networks directly, warning that people who follow and film ICE operations will be arrested, prosecuted, and included in a “database.”

“We’re gonna make ’em famous,” he told Fox News the week after Good was killed. “We’re gonna put their face on TV.”

DHS correspondence obtained by CNN indicates the building of such a database is well underway, with agents in Minneapolis directed to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc.” Among those swept up in the department’s data collection efforts, prior to his killing, was Alex Pretti.

Homan’s interest in targeting Trump’s political opponents echoes a national security memorandum the White House released last year, NSPM-7, which orders federal law enforcement to direct its investigative powers against what the president has called the “enemy within.”

The post While Minnesotans Rejoice Over Greg Bovino’s Ouster, His Replacement Is a Deportation Hard-Liner appeared first on The Intercept.

A video Grijalva posted online shows an agent in green fatigues indiscriminately dousing a line of several people — Grijalva included — with pepper spray outside a popular taco restaurant.

“You guys need to calm down and get out,” Grijalva says, coughing amid a cloud of spray. In another clip, an agent fires a pepper ball at Grijalva’s feet.

Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin denied that Grijalva was pepper-sprayed in a statement, saying that if her claims were true, “this would be a medical marvel. But they’re not true. She wasn’t pepper sprayed.”

“She was in the vicinity of someone who *was* pepper sprayed as they were obstructing and assaulting law enforcement,” McLaughlin continued. The comment suggested a lack of understanding as to how pepper spray works. Fired from a distance, pepper-spray canisters create a choking cloud that will affect anyone in the vicinity, as Grijalva’s video showed.

In a separate video Grijalva posted to Facebook, the Democratic representative from Southern Arizona described community members confronting approximately 40 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in several vehicles.

“I was here, this is like the restaurant I come to literally once a week,” she said, “and was sprayed in the face by a very aggressive agent, pushed around by others.” Grijalva maintained that she was not being aggressive. “I was asking for clarification,” she said. “Which is my right as a member of Congress.”

Video from journalists on the ground show dozens of heavily armed agents — members ICE’s high-powered Homeland Security Investigations wing and the Department of Homeland Security’s SWAT-style Special Response teams — deploying flash-bang grenades, tear gas, and pepper-ball rounds at a crowd of immigrant rights protesters near Taco Giro, a popular mom-and-pop restaurant in west Tucson.

The Tucson Sentinel, a local outlet whose reporter was pepper-sprayed in the face Friday, reported that DHS targeted the restaurant as part of a larger human trafficking investigation dating back to the Biden administration. Protesters cornered several of the agency’s vehicles and kept them from leaving the area for approximately an hour before reinforcements arrived, the outlet reported.

According to McLaughlin, two “law enforcement officers were seriously injured by this mob that Rep. Adelita Grijalva joined.” She provided no evidence or details for the claim.

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“Presenting one’s self as a ‘Member of Congress’ doesn’t give you the right to obstruct law enforcement,” McLaughlin wrote. The DHS press secretary did not respond to a question about the munitions fired at Grijalva’s feet.

Grijalva “was doing her job, standing up for her community,” Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said in a social media post Friday. “Pepper-spraying a sitting member of Congress is disgraceful, unacceptable, and absolutely not what we voted for. Period.”

Additional footage from Friday’s scene shows Grijalva and members of the media face-to-face with several heavily armed, uniformed Homeland Security Investigation agents as they loaded at least two people — both with their hands zip-tied behind their backs — into a large gray van.

Grijalva identifies herself as a member of Congress and asks where they are being taken. One of the masked agents initially replies, “I can’t verify that.” Another pushes the congresswoman and others back with forearm. “Don’t push me,” Grijalva says multiple times. A third masked agent steps in front of the Arizona lawmaker, makes a comment about “assaulting a federal officer,” and then says the people taken into custody would be transferred to “federal jail.”

“We saw people directly sprayed, members of our press, everybody that was with me, my staff member, myself,” Grijalva said in her video report from Friday’s chaotic scene. She described the events as the latest example of a Trump administration that is flagrantly flouting the rule of law, due process, and the Constitution.

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“They’re literally disappearing people from the streets,” she said. “I can just only imagine how if they’re going to treat me like that, how they’re treating other people.” Earlier in the week, Grijavla similarly spoke out against a warrantless Border Patrol raid on a humanitarian aid station in Arizona, calling the operation “lawless, intentional, and part of a broader pattern of unchecked enforcement that treats border communities as if the Constitution does not apply.”

The violence Grijalva experienced Friday marked the latest chapter in what has been a dramatic year for Arizona’s first Latina representative.

Grijalva won a special election in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District earlier this year to replace her father, Raúl Grijalva, a towering progressive figure in the state who represented Tucson for more than 20 years before passing away in March.

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson delayed the younger Grijalva’s swearing in for nearly two months amid the longest government shutdown in history. Grijalva would add the deciding signature on a discharge petition to release files related to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, which she signed immediately after taking office.

Update: December 5, 2025, 7:31 p.m. ET

This story has been updated with additional information about Friday’s ICE action and Rep. Adelita Grijalva.

The post ICE Denies Pepper-Spraying Rep. Adelita Grijalva in Incident Caught on Video appeared first on The Intercept.

Video taken by No More Deaths, a faith-based aid group out of Tucson that operates the site, shows agents with flashlights prying open a trailer door and entering the structure. The camp, located just miles from the U.S.–Mexico border, has long been used to provide medical care to migrants crossing one of the world’s deadliest stretches of desert.

Monica Ruiz House, a No More Deaths volunteer who’d recently been involved in deportation defense work in Chicago, said the warrantless raid spoke to a rising culture of lawlessness among the Trump administration’s front-line immigration enforcement agencies.

“There’s this frightening pattern of impunity that’s happening across the country,” Ruiz House told The Intercept, “whether it’s Border Patrol, whether it’s ICE agents,” referring to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

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The November raid marks the third time in recent years that Border Patrol agents acting under the authority of President Donald Trump have targeted the remote Arizona site, and the first case in which the agency has entered a structure at the location without a warrant.

According to volunteers, Border Patrol agents claimed they were in “hot pursuit” when they broke into the group’s trailer. Hot pursuit has a particular legal meaning and typically applies in cases where law enforcement attempts to make an arrest, a subject flees into a private space, the opportunity to obtain a warrant is not available, and the risk of further of escape, destruction of evidence, or harm to others is high.

Amy Knight, an attorney who has represented No More Deaths volunteers in the past and is currently providing informal legal advice to the group, said there is no evidence that any of those factors were present in the November raid.

By all appearances, Border Patrol tracked a group of people to an aid camp but made no attempt to arrest them en route. “They were inside of a building on private property, and the agents were able to pretty well surround the place — so if they left, they could catch them,” Knight told The Intercept. “There was no reason why they couldn’t get a warrant.”

“Disappeared”

A handful of Border Patrol vehicles amassed at around 4:30 p.m. on the afternoon of November 23 at the organization’s gate near the unincorporated community of Arivaca, according to a summary of events produced by No More Deaths in the immediate aftermath of the raid.

“United States Border Patrol,” said a voice on a loudspeaker, according to the summary, which was shared with The Intercept. “Come out.”

Volunteers who approached the gate were informed agents had tracked a group of suspected migrants to the location and requested access to make arrests.

Three people were on the property receiving medical care at the time, Ruiz House said.

The volunteers refused access to the camp without the presentation of a signed warrant, the summary said. An hour passed before Border Patrol agents parked at the gate and on a nearby hill entered the property. They made a beeline for a trailer on the property.

“If there are people locked in that trailer that’s a big concern,” one of the agents reportedly said.

Asked about their lack of warrant, the agents replied that they were in “hot pursuit” of suspects, according to No More Deaths, and their warrant exception was authorized by “the U.S.A.” — potentially referencing a call to an assistant U.S. attorney, often referred to as an “A.U.S.A”

In the past, Border Patrol respected the need to have a warrant before entering structures, said Ruiz House. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, declined to comment on the agents’ purported justification for entering the aid group’s property.

The first of the three people taken into custody was dragged to a Border Patrol truck as volunteers prayed. No More Deaths has been working to find the arrestees in the weeks since, to no avail. “They’ve somewhat disappeared into the ICE custody black hole,” Ruiz House said. “We’re trying to locate them.”

Years in Trump’s Sights

No More Deaths, also known as No Más Muertes, is the most prominent of several humanitarian aid providers in the Sonoran Desert, offering medical care to migrants for more than two decades in a region that has claimed thousands of lives since the U.S. government undertook a program of intensifying border militarization in the 1990s.

In June 2017, Border Patrol agents staked out the group’s camp near Arivaca for three days during a blazing heatwave. They entered after obtaining a warrant, and approximately 30 agents took four Mexican nationals into custody who were receiving treatment for heat-related illnesses, injuries, and exposure to the elements. The men had been traveling by foot for several days in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.

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The operation marked the beginning of a multiyear campaign by the Trump administration to imprison U.S. citizens involved in the provision of humanitarian aid. In a January 2018 raid at a separate aid station, Border Patrol agents arrested No More Deaths volunteer Scott Warren and two Central American asylum-seekers who’d become lost in Arizona’s ultra-lethal West Desert.

The Trump administration additionally levied federal littering charges against several No More Deaths volunteers for leaving jugs of water on a remote wildlife refuge where the dead and dehydrated bodies of migrants are often found.

Warren’s arrest came just hours after No More Deaths released a damning report, complete with video evidence, showing Border Patrol agents systematically destroying water jugs the aid group left in the area.

Warren was hit with federal harboring and conspiracy charges and faced up 20 years in prison.

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The prosecutions became a cause célèbre in Tucson, with yard signs filling residents and businesses’ windows that read “Humanitarian Aid is Never a Crime — Drop the Charges.”

Both cases collapsed at trial, with Warren’s defense attorneys successfully arguing that his volunteerism was the product of deeply held spiritual belief concerning the sanctity of human life and thus protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The administration targeted the camp again in 2020, again after No More Deaths released unflattering documents concerning the agency’s operations.

In both 2017 and 2020, the raids targeting No More Deaths were carried out by agents with BORTAC, a specialized SWAT-style arm of the Border Patrol now tasked with carrying out high-profile and controversial arrests in cities far from the U.S.–Mexico divide.

“ICE is increasingly relying on Border Patrol to carry out its internal operations,” said Ruiz House. “Having Border Patrol operate in the interior is absolutely a force multiplier because the fact is ICE simply doesn’t have all the resources to carry out mass deportations, they are going to need other agencies to help them, but there’s also a very big symbolic dimension.”

The green, soldier-like uniforms, she argued, instill a “particular kind of fear” in immigrant communities. It is precisely this externalization of militarized border enforcement that aid groups in the borderlands have been warning about, and Border Patrol leadership have spent years clamoring for.

As one senior agent told the New York Times recently, “The border is everywhere.”

The post Border Patrol Raided Arizona Medical Aid Site With No Warrant, Showing Growing “Impunity” appeared first on The Intercept.

It was hunting season in Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, and the Marine sniper was alone on a backcountry trail more than an hour’s hike from his vehicle. He carried a camouflage Remington rifle and was in sight of an elk herd when a grizzly bear emerged from the brush. In a series of audio and video recordings from that autumn day in 2015, he narrated what happened next:

“I just got attacked by a grizzly.”

“I fucking laid into him.”

“I don’t want a big bear like that where I hunt.”

“I’m smoking him.”

“This is destiny. That bear attacked the wrong man.”

Finally, after tracking down the federally protected grizzly he had shot, seeing blood along the way, he said, “Looks like I found a dead bear.”

Kneeling over the dead grizzly with his rifle in hand, the man took selfies and recorded a narration of his wilderness adventure. The bear’s coat was splattered in blood. The Marine cut off one of its claws then continued his hunt, spending two more nights in the woods.

It wasn’t until he completed his hunt several days later that he reported the bear’s death, as required by federal law. By then, investigators were already on the case, alerted to the grizzly’s killing by an anonymous tipster who had encountered the Marine during his trip. The Marine kept the bear claw as a souvenir, the tipster told investigators, according to their report.

The Marine, on reserve duty at the time, told U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents that the bear charged him. The killing was in self-defense, he said. He was “happy for the experience and thought it was pretty cool.” After killing the bear, the Marine admitted, he went on to kill an elk that he did not tag, ignoring his legal obligation to register the kill with state officials who issue a set number of hunting licenses each year. His plan, he told investigators, was to illegally use his tag for a future hunt.

The Marine, whose name is redacted in the report, had a history of legal infractions, the agents soon discovered, including a warning from a Wyoming wildlife law enforcement officer for harming or killing a kit fox. They seized his recording devices. Besides photos of the dead bear and elk, they found pictures of a bald eagle carcass. The Marine claimed he had nothing to do with the bird’s death.

Killing an endangered or threatened species in self-defense is not a crime. Cutting off a grizzly’s claw for a souvenir, however, is a clear violation of the Endangered Species Act and associated regulations. In their incident report, the feds determined that the Marine had likely violated a slew of federal and state laws.

The hunter was found guilty of wasting an elk under a Wyoming state law and ordered to pay a $640 fine. A federal prosecutor, however, declined to bring charges under the ESA. The Marine faced no consequences for desecrating a protected grizzly bear.

A Failure to Protect

Steve Stoinski was one of two Fish and Wildlife Service agents who interviewed the Marine. Based out of Lander, Wyoming, Stoinski had spent much of his adult life investigating wildlife crimes in the American West before retiring in 2020. He remembers the case well — especially the Marine’s shifting version of events.

“Parts of his story were just too hard to believe,” Stoinski recalled in an interview with The Intercept. “One minute he’s underneath it, shooting it. The other minute, he’s not being touched by it and firing a shot two feet away but couldn’t hit it.” Still, the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute was no surprise. Stoinski knew he and his partner were facing an uphill battle. The dismemberment of the bear was apparently not compelling enough for the U.S. attorney’s office to take the case. And with no direct witnesses and a victim that couldn’t speak even if it were alive, it would be next to impossible to disprove the claims of self-defense.

“You can’t charge people what you think they should be charged with,” Stoinski said. “You can only charge them with what you can really prove beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The Marine’s case is hardly an anomaly. Despite the Endangered Species Act’s fearsome reputation as a powerful tool for securing environmental protection, an Intercept investigation drawn from nearly 4,000 pages of Fish and Wildlife Service case files reveals that when it comes to grizzly bears, federal prosecutors rarely bring criminal charges under the landmark law. (The accounts of grizzly bear killings in this article are drawn from those case files, which The Intercept obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.)

The Endangered Species Act turns 50 years old this year amid a growing global crisis of biodiversity loss and increasing attacks by right-wing lawmakers who see predator control as a front in the battle over states’ rights. In theory, a law that the Supreme Court has called “the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species enacted by any nation” would serve as a critical bulwark against further ecological damage. Under Section 9 of the statute, Congress declared it illegal to kill, harm, harass, or otherwise “take” protected species; prohibited the transport or possession of such animals or their body parts; and established civil and criminal penalties for violators, including imprisonment of up to a year. Investigations into suspected ESA crimes fall to special agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which sits within the Department of the Interior. The investigators hand their files off to Justice Department prosecutors, who make the final call on whether to bring a case.

The factors that shape those decisions, however, reveal the limits of the country’s most famous conservation law. From 2015 through 2022, according to the records reviewed by The Intercept, the Fish and Wildlife Service completed 118 investigations for violations of the ESA stemming from the killing or harming of grizzly bears in their primary range in the Lower 48: Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Fourteen involved bears preying on livestock, while 74 others involved claims of self-defense, most stemming from hunters encountering bears in their habitats. Many of the cases contain evidence to support such claims. At least a dozen, however, show clear and, in some cases, flagrant ESA violations — from hunters admitting to stalking grizzlies before killing them, to dismembering animals for trophies, to describing efforts to cover up their kills. And yet only five of the cases led to criminal penalties under the ESA, and only two led to a prison sentence, one of which was overturned on appeal.

Grizzly bears were added to the endangered species list in 1975 and are currently considered a threatened species. An iconic symbol of American wilderness and a conservation success story, the bears are beloved by millions of people around the world. That adoration makes grizzlies a revealing barometer: If the ESA is failing to protect even them, what hope is there for the many imperiled species that don’t have a well-funded army of human defenders?

A Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson, in response to a series of questions from The Intercept, said the agency “prioritizes the investigation of take of ESA-protected species domestically and abroad,” including grizzly bears, and “works effectively and efficiently with state partners across the country.” (The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.)

In his corner of Wyoming, Stoinski said, the story of the grizzly bear over the half-century since the ESA’s passage shows how the law’s lofty goals continue to clash with ingrained cultural beliefs. “It’s a rural area — lots of ranching influence, that Western cowboy mentality, if it isn’t in the greatest interest of cattle, then it needs to be removed from the landscape,” he said. “That generally seems to be the way some people operate — shoot these bears, shovel, and shut up about it.”

The experiences of seasoned federal agents like Stoinski raise serious questions about the nation’s commitment and ability to uphold the ESA. In the case of the grizzly bear, the data and associated case reports obtained by The Intercept show a federal government that has failed to robustly enforce the historic statute despite evidence that it is being flouted on the ground. The upshot is diminished security for grizzly bears, current and former federal officials say, a downstream consequence of the Fish and Wildlife Service losing its way — chasing headline-making cases that span the globe while letting its domestic operations wither.

“They’re stuck spinning their wheels, trying to spend most of their time on these international smuggling cases, when they have so many incredible cases in their backyard that are just considered ‘game warden’ cases,” said one Interior Department official. The official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said that this dynamic has huge implications for the grizzly bear: “They might as well be delisted right now with how we’re acting.”

No Deterrence

Over the course of more than three years, starting in 2015, Stoinski led a probe into another grizzly killing in the Shoshone National Forest. His investigation of the so-called Barbers Point grizzly (a reference to the 4-year-old sow’s kill site) culminated in a nearly 300-page case file — and one of the only ESA convictions in the records reviewed by The Intercept.

At points, Stoinski’s report reads like a dark episode of the popular “Yellowstone” TV show, with confidential informants passing on word of incriminating barroom boasts and a pair of offenders making every attempt to bury evidence of their crimes — sometimes literally.

A week after a pair of motorists discovered the dead bear on the side of the road, Stoinski made a critical break in the investigation: A source turned in an audio recording surreptitiously obtained at a bar 30 miles south of the kill site.

In the recording, a man boasted of killing the bear, which was well known to locals and not considered a problem animal. He described how he and a friend encountered the bear twice — harassing and throwing rocks at her on the first occasion, then killing her on the second. “I don’t give a fuck. I would have been in jail by now if they would have found out about it,” the man said as he pulled up photos and videos to show other bar patrons. “There are so many of those cock suckers around here, I don’t give a fuck anymore. Fuck them!”

The recording led Stoinski to two residents of Dubois, Wyoming: 27-year-old Kelly J. Grove, the man on the tape, and 25-year-old Matthew John Brooks.

When Stoinski first interviewed Grove, he denied having anything to do with the grizzly’s killing. “As much as I would have fucking loved to, I didn’t shoot that fucking bear,” Grove said — though he applauded whoever did: “They should be given a gold medal.”

Stoinski continued to pursue the case, interviewing witnesses and collecting evidence. In the summer of 2018, Grove and Brooks pleaded guilty to violating the ESA. In their plea agreement interviews, the duo said they decided to kill the bear to improve the poor hunting season they’d been having. Late one night, they staked out the site where they had seen the bear guarding an elk carcass. To prevent GPS tracking, the men turned off their cellphones and stuffed them in the console of the vehicle. When the bear emerged, they stepped out in the dark, each armed with a rifle. Brooks fired. The bear wheeled and headed back for the trees, where it let out a dying moan. The two men left the scene, but not before dusting the tracks left by their vehicle. Weeks later, they made a midnight journey to a remote creek where they buried Brooks’s rifle and the paperwork associated with the weapon.

Brooks admitted to prosecutors that he pulled the trigger and said it was the most irresponsible period of his life. Grove was less contrite. When asked why they killed the grizzly, he responded, “Because we hate bears up there.” He added, “I thought it was great! Another dead bear!”

A federal judge ordered them to pay thousands of dollars in restitution, temporarily revoked their hunting privileges, and placed them on unsupervised probation for five years. 

If the intent of ESA prosecutions is to deter future violations of wildlife laws, it didn’t work on Grove. Just a few months after his sentencing, he was convicted on charges related to deer and elk poaching under Wyoming state law. The federal judge in the Barbers Point case then revoked his probation and sentenced him to six months in prison — half the maximum sentence allowable under the ESA. (Grove declined to comment for this story. Brooks did not respond to a request for comment.)

Like the handful of other convictions, the Barbers Point case broke from the typical trajectory of grizzly investigations in the West. As the Fish and Wildlife records reveal, most cases die the moment that a human — typically a hunter creeping around bear habitat at dawn or dusk — describes their fear during a bear encounter.

Making ESA cases more difficult still is a long-standing Justice Department policy requiring the government to prove that a suspect knew they were killing an endangered or threatened species when they did the deed. Known as the McKittrick policy — named after a Montana poacher who was convicted under the ESA for killing a Yellowstone wolf — the rule was established in 1999 as the result of a winding legal fight that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Among conservationists and wildlife investigators, it is derisively known as the “I thought it was a coyote” rule. When it comes to bears, if a hunter kills a grizzly but claims they thought it was a black bear, for example, the case is often dead on arrival.

In 2013, two environmental groups sued the Justice Department over the policy, arguing that it was fueling the unlawful killing of Mexican wolves. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately dismissed the claim because the plaintiffs were not able to cite “any specific instance where the DOJ has declined to prosecute a wolf killing because of the McKittrick policy.”

When it comes to grizzlies, however, federal prosecutors declined to take on at least 18 cases under the ESA from 2015 to 2022 based on such claims of mistaken identity, according to the documents obtained by The Intercept.

In one of the most explicit examples, a rancher living near Big Timber, Montana, buried three bullets in a grizzly bear that had wandered onto his property in 2016. He told law enforcement officials that he went out to investigate a disruption in a cattle enclosure on his property in the early morning and encountered a bear. It was dark out, and he said he didn’t know what kind of bear it was, but he shot at it first when it started moving toward him and again when it began approaching his girlfriend. He only realized it was a grizzly, he said, after the bear bled out on the property.

Fish and Wildlife Service investigators later discovered several discrepancies in the rancher’s story and concluded that he “shot the grizzly bear in defense of his cattle and not necessarily in defense of his life.” The prosecutor who reviewed the case agreed that the rancher’s account was “implausible,” “inconsistent,” and “suspect in numerous respects.” Nevertheless, the Justice Department declined to bring charges. The reason was clear. “The primary difficulty we would encounter,” the prosecutor explained in an email, “is proving that [the rancher] knew he was shooting a grizzly bear.”

The difficulty of ESA enforcement also stems in part from the nature of the law itself. Despite its hefty maximum fine of $100,000 and potential year in prison, conviction under the ESA is a federal misdemeanor. The same Justice Department attorneys tasked with bringing such cases are responsible for enforcing every other federal crime. While a Fish and Wildlife agent’s most important investigations might fall under the ESA, a prosecutor’s priorities are different. Given their finite resources, public demand, and the potential for career advancement, government attorneys are structurally incentivized to chase felonies involving human victims over misdemeanors involving animals.

“Their priorities are felony prosecutions,” Stoinski said. “So when we show up and we say, ‘Yeah, we’ve got this misdemeanor whooping crane case,’ they hear misdemeanor; it’s almost like a switch, because they don’t have the time or resources.”

Alternative Methods

Given the hurdles federal agents must overcome to bring an ESA case, they’ve found other means to seek justice for poached grizzlies. Sometimes, that means assisting in cases that will be taken up by state, rather than federal, prosecutors.

In 2021, for instance, Fish and Wildlife investigators teamed up with Idaho game wardens after a bullet-riddled mother grizzly was found in a river on the western edge of Yellowstone National Park. It was the third such killing in just seven months. The public demanded answers. While regional nonprofits pulled together a $40,000 reward for information leading to the killer — or killers — local and federal officials went to work. They collected nearly 50 bullet casings from the scene and obtained a warrant allowing them to zero in on phone activity in the area. The warrant paid off. Phone data led investigators to a man who had traveled to and from the scene, repeatedly visited the Idaho Fish and Game department’s online ad seeking information on the bear’s killer, and attempted to sell 1,000 rounds of ammunition — the same kind found at the scene of the crime — weeks after the shooting. The man told state police that his father had joined him in killing the bear; they were arrested and pleaded guilty to state charges. 

Whether such state-federal collaboration will continue across the West is an open question. In 2021, the Fish and Wildlife Service circulated an internal briefing saying that its state counterpart in Montana would no longer investigate grizzly kills without a federal agent present.

Federal agents facing challenging ESA cases often turn to the Lacey Act, a law passed in 1900 prohibiting the transportation of illegally killed wildlife that includes felony penalties. The files reviewed by The Intercept describe one such case in Montana, in 2017, in which a man turned up at a hunting camp bragging of shooting a grizzly and rolling it off a cliff. He was said to be “smiling” and “looked proud” as he showed off photos and video of the bear, investigators wrote. “In one video the bear was still breathing,” agents noted, adding that the man “did not mention anything about self-defense while he was showing everyone pictures and video.”

Investigators ultimately discovered that the bear’s front claws had been removed with a knife. An autopsy revealed that a bullet had obliterated the bear’s spine, paralyzing it — likely explaining why the shooter could take smiling selfies while the animal was still alive. Investigators soon identified the killer as a 35-year-old man from Marion, Montana. In an interview with the feds, the man claimed the bear charged him. He acknowledged ignoring his legal obligation to report the incident and admitted his attempted cover-up. “I rolled the dice on whether I’d ever see you guys or not, and obviously it didn’t pay off,” he said. When asked why he dismembered the bear, the man cited his “straight up hatred for these things.”

“I basically said, ‘Hey, fuck you.’ And I cut his claws off,” he said. “I wanted to keep them as a memento.”

Facing a challenging self-defense claim under the ESA, federal agents instead pursued a Lacey Act charge for stealing the bear’s claws. The man was convicted, placed on probation for three years, and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.

The case files reviewed by The Intercept account for only a portion of the total grizzly killings in the Northern Rockies between 2015 and 2022 — they are the ones the authorities know about. Chris Servheen, the president and board chair of the Montana Wildlife Federation, said that while the Fish and Wildlife Service’s case count of 118 is “a big number,” the death toll is undoubtedly higher.

“Illegal kills are certainly happening out there across the landscape,” Servheen told The Intercept. “The implications are serious because they’re ongoing.”

For nearly three decades, Servheen was the top Fish and Wildlife Service biologist responsible for grizzly recovery in the Lower 48. Having seen the application of the ESA in grizzly cases up close, he believes federal agents do their best with what are often difficult crimes to solve — taking place in remote locations, among distrustful communities, with victims that cannot speak — but in the vast reaches of the West, there’s only so much they can do.

At the time of his 2016 retirement, Servheen was a prominent supporter of turning grizzly bear management over to the states. In 2021, a wave of Republican-sponsored, anti-predator legislation — rooted, as he sees it, not in science but in politics — changed his mind. He’s been fighting for the grizzly’s continued federal protection ever since.

“If the grizzly was ever delisted, I worry that the illegal kills would increase,” he said. The state’s posture would send a message. “There’s going to be a certain category of the public that would feel that it’s easier now, it’s more relaxed now, I can just kill ‘em,” Servheen said. “The feds aren’t involved.”

“Animal Prejudice”

In some pockets of the West, biologists and wildlife officials say, an old anti-predator adage still reigns: shoot, shovel, and shut up.

Anti-predator hate is bound up in a long, complicated relationship going back to the beginning of westward expansion. In the early days of the nation’s founding, predators were a problem to be eradicated, mostly with guns and poison. As cultural attitudes toward ecology, wildlife, and conservation shifted over the course of a century, predators’ standing in the eyes of millions of Americans did too. Those shifts in thinking were foundational to the passage of the ESA, while also becoming a central conservative talking point in the West — symbolic of a country disowning its heritage and traditions to serve the interests of a coastal liberal elite, and of the federal government’s tyrannical disregard for states’ rights. The animals that most symbolized that shift — wolves, grizzlies, and the like — thus became avatars for a particular political class. Stoinski calls it “animal prejudice”: when frustrations over human politics are grafted onto animals. It came with the territory. Sometimes, he even heard it from his colleagues working in state agencies.

“Those animals die without a sound and the only voice they had was ours,” Stoinski said. “I was happy to champion grizzlies, even against the opposition of some of my state counterparts who are not fans of protecting them anymore.”

“Those animals die without a sound and the only voice they had was ours.”

Stoinski, articulating a complaint echoed by every current and former federal wildlife official that spoke to The Intercept, argued that the near-total absence of grizzly killing prosecutions speaks to a larger, more fundamental problem for the future of conservation: a multidecade failure on the part of Fish and Wildlife Service leaders in Washington to grow and adapt their agency in the face of difficult political, cultural, and environmental circumstances.

While major conservation initiatives have rescued grizzlies from extinction, their continued recovery hinges on human tolerance. In the nearly five decades since the bears became a protected species, human presence in grizzly habitat, clamoring by conservative lawmakers for the feds to relinquish management to the states, and the number of unsolved grizzly killing cases have all grown. At the same time, the number of federal agents conducting investigations on the ground — never more than 250 — has stayed the same.

“The only day I knew that we were close to 250 was the day I graduated the academy” in 1998, Stoinski said. “We had 248.”

“We never got that close in the next 25 years of my career,” he continued. “We were losing people as fast as we could hire them. On a good day, we probably had 200, and I did the math — 49 of those people were supervisors or managers of some sort, not even carrying a caseload anymore.”

When Stoinski arrived in Lander — having cut his teeth in Colorado, Alaska, and Wisconsin — he was one of two agents responsible for running down every grizzly poaching case in Wyoming, he said. The Justice Department had four assistant U.S. attorneys in the local office, focused mostly on the nearby Wind River Indian Reservation, and one prosecutor handling the wildlife docket for the entire state.

At first, Stoinski said, things were manageable. The prosecutor was motivated, and they got along well, but then a job opened up at a judge’s office and he left. A second prosecutor soon followed. Neither post was refilled. In Stoinski’s final years on the job, there were just two prosecutors in Lander responsible for everything the feds brought in: Homeland Security human trafficking cases, FBI agents investigating missing and murdered Indigenous women, Drug Enforcement Administration drug war operations, and finally, the Fish and Wildlife cop looking into dead bears.

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency has two special agents in Idaho, two in Wyoming, and three in Montana — a total of seven agents covering more than 328,000 square miles, much of it rugged backcountry wilderness.

“I was one agent doing 18 different cases at one time,” Stoinski recalled. “I don’t know how detectives do it in cities — if you got like 10 homicides, does one guy do all the homicides himself, or do they got a team of people? Usually, I’m just an army of one, coordinating with state people to help.”

As the Justice Department presence contracted, Stoinski’s responsibilities expanded. “The last two years of my career, we were so shorthanded, I was covering southern Wyoming, western Colorado, and all of Utah,” he said. “By myself for two years.” Stoinski had wanted to be a game warden as far back as he could remember. While he still believed in his mission, making a meaningful impact felt impossible. “I was just fried,” he said. “I couldn’t get big picture things done. I was just fighting brush fires.”

Rivers of Resentment

David J. Mattson and his wife Louisa Willcox live in southwest Montana, where bears venturing out from the protected confines of Yellowstone National Park run into an increasingly human-inhabited patchwork of public and private lands. The couple has made grizzly recovery their life’s work, with Willcox a full-time conservation advocate and Mattson one of the country’s leading scientific experts on grizzly habitat use.

The pair sees the “dead bear problem” — their term for the absence of accountability in grizzly killings — as a product of factors in both the ecosystem and the institutions of wildlife management, which are exacerbated by culture war politics.

In recent years, grizzlies have experienced reduced access to key food sources, Mattson explained. With declining populations of cutthroat trout, for example, the bears have increased their predation on ungulates, like elk, which they find by zeroing in on the areas where humans hunt and seeking out the animals they kill. Grizzlies have also descended from the remote high elevations where critical white bark pine populations have dwindled into areas where they can prey on livestock instead. In both cases, Mattson argues, bears are pursuing “anthropogenic meat” — that is, meat with a connection to humans — which can have deadly consequences.

“There are now two causes that account for probably 30-plus percent of the known and probable mortalities, and that’s conflicts over livestock — depredation — and encounters with big-game hunters,” Mattson told The Intercept. “It’s all plausibly linked to the demise of foods that kept bears out of harm’s way.”

As the bears’ diets have shifted, legal battles over their protected status have led many in the West — especially conservative lawmakers — to argue that grizzlies as a population are recovered and that the only thing keeping them under federal management are out-of-state environmentalists and well-funded nongovernmental organizations.

Whether grizzlies are truly recovered is a complicated question. The top scientific body tracking grizzly populations in the U.S., the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, where Mattson served as lead investigator from 1983 to 1993, tracks four fragmented populations of grizzlies in the Lower 48. Altogether, the four populations contain about 2,000 individual bears — up from the brink of extinction 50 years ago, but down from the estimated 50,000 bears that roamed the continent when settlers first marched West two centuries ago. Mortality records compiled by the team, meanwhile, show 456 known and probable grizzly bear deaths between 2015 and 2022 in the Greater Yellowstone region alone, with causes ranging from illegal killings, self-defense killings, and vehicle strikes to natural deaths and the killing of problem bears by government officials.

Numbers like that make fulfillment of the ESA’s ultimate aim — full recovery of imperiled species to their historic home range — difficult to imagine. “In terms of just looking at the science, to ensure long-term population viability in meaningful terms, you’re talking about ensuring that bears are going to be around almost certainly for 400 years,” Mattson said. That would require breeding between contiguous grizzly populations of as many as 2,500 to 9,000 bears. “We’re not even close to that in any of the populations we have,” Mattson argued. “Not even close.”

Population numbers are just one variable that goes into the federal government’s decision to keep an animal listed. States seeking to manage an animal population on their own must also show that they have a responsible regulatory structure in place to ensure continued recovery. It is on that point that Mattson and Willcox are most concerned.

In February, the Fish and Wildlife Service said that it would spend 12 months reviewing petitions from Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho calling for the delisting of grizzlies under the ESA. Should the states prevail, it would open the door to legalized hunting seasons across the Northern Rockies.

Related

Lauren Boebert Waved Around Pictures of Dead Babies in Her Call to Gut the Endangered Species Act

The petitions are part of a wave of ESA-related, predator-centered GOP action in the West. Republicans are not only demanding that the Fish and Wildlife Service delist grizzlies through the ESA administrative process, but also backing federal legislation that would circumvent the scientific deliberation required under the ESA altogether and delist gray wolves nationwide — Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert’s “Trust the Science Act.” 

While state and federal authority has long been contested, the balance of power has recently shifted. All three Northern Rockies states are now led by Republican governors backed by Republican legislatures who argue that the ESA has for too long served as a Trojan horse for paternalistic liberal intervention in the West. Now in the political driver’s seat, they are passing measures to slash the populations of large predators throughout the region, from wolves to mountain lions. Should grizzlies lose federal protection, conservationists fear the bear would be next. “Management of grizzly bears under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act has become so symbolically identified and tangled with the culture wars,” Mattson said, “that there’s just this manifest displacement of resentments onto bears.”

In the 1980s, Willcox recalled, the federal government understood that grizzly bear extinction was a real possibility. Given the stakes, federal authorities were willing to confront illegal grizzly killing, despite the social and cultural costs involved.

“That kind of stuff doesn’t happen now,” Willcox said. “And that’s because the fear, the concern, about potential extinction is gone.” In its place, she argued, is an anger that’s been bubbling for years: “Now you’ve got that river of resentment flowing into the river of resentment that’s the ultra-right crowd, increasing the decibel level of the anti-bear movement.”

Ambitions Abroad, Neglect at Home

It’s true, says Doug McKenna, a retired Fish and Wildlife investigator: Agents working grizzly killing cases face serious challenges — but they aren’t insurmountable. An experienced investigator can navigate the hurdles, provided they have two things: local connections and support at headquarters. And there was a time, he said, when agents on the ground had both.

McKenna grew up in Montana, went to college there, and became a state game warden in the 1980s, shortly after grizzly bears were added to the endangered species list. He was then recruited to join the feds and spent the next two-and-a-half decades working Fish and Wildlife cases from the Northern Rockies to the desert southwest before retiring in 2012.

In his more than 30 years of wildlife law enforcement, McKenna observed a steady, disturbing turn by Fish and Wildlife Service leadership away from domestic wildlife enforcement and toward flashy cases with international ties.

When McKenna became a federal agent in the late 1980s, the Fish and Wildlife Service was placing agents in remote, one-person stations across the region. McKenna spent a decade working out of one such outpost in New Mexico. He would ride deep into the Gila Wilderness on horseback, searching for poachers along the New Mexico–Arizona borderline. “I knew all the locals,” he said. Those bonds were critical. “You have to have the locals and the state game wardens on your side,” he said. “They’re generally in the know about the different suspects and places people frequent.”

“The powers that be, they came in and they wanted to centralize everything. That’s kind of an FBI concept, and it doesn’t work in wildlife enforcement.”

The method worked well, but around 2010, McKenna noticed a change. Agents were being called back from their posts — in Victorville, Flagstaff, Yuma, and elsewhere — and told to report to cities across the West.

“The powers that be, they came in and they wanted to centralize everything,” he said. “That’s kind of an FBI concept, and it doesn’t work in wildlife enforcement.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service defended the evolution of enforcement and investigative strategies in recent years. “The methods used by state and federal enforcement to obtain and investigate allegations of illegal take have changed and developed over time but are generally considered to be an improvement over strictly employing backcountry patrols,” a spokesperson for the agency said in an email. “The advent of cell phone, GPS, and satellite technology — as well as the availability of aircraft to reach remote areas — has increased the speed with which reports of take are received and can be acted upon.”

The desire McKenna sensed among leadership — to reshape the agency in the image of its more high-profile counterparts, projecting a modernized institution with a global reach — was real. And it wasn’t going away.

In 2013, during a visit to Tanzania, President Barack Obama announced an executive order establishing a new task force of 17 federal departments and agencies to train law enforcement personnel and park rangers across Africa. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s law enforcement agents would play a key role in the $10 million global initiative. The agency’s attaché program, a first-of-its-kind State Department-backed initiative unveiled in 2014, further propelled the international shift.

Washington’s new embrace of international wildlife enforcement claimed its first high-profile win in Operation Crash, a sprawling effort that bundled multiple investigations targeting the illicit trafficking of rhino horns under the same umbrella. The first arrests came in 2012 and snowballed from there. The operation soon became the largest Fish and Wildlife Service investigation in history, pulling in more than half of the agency’s special agents and involving its every office in the country.

By 2017, the Justice Department claimed Operation Crash had led to nearly 50 convictions and the recovery of roughly $7.8 million. That same year, Edward Grace, who designed and headed the investigation, was appointed assistant director of the Office of Law Enforcement at Fish and Wildlife Service, where he remains today.

It was a career-making case for Grace and an era-defining moment for the agency. In a 2018 interview, Grace likened his agents’ casework to that of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations wing. “We use informants, we use undercover operatives, we use the same investigative techniques you’ll see in the investigation of another commodity,” he said. “Instead of having cocaine as a commodity, you have rhino horns.”

None of the current or former officials who spoke to The Intercept questioned the importance of targeting the illicit, international wildlife trade. What they did take issue with was seeing their agency pluck personnel from a small pool of stateside investigators and then leave those positions unfilled — as though the United States, having somehow transcended its struggles with poaching and wildlife conflict management, now had agents to spare.

“I trained game rangers, and I did investigations,” McKenna said of the attaché program. The work was “fine and dandy,” he said. “But I think the priority needs to be the domestic wildlife, especially the threatened or endangered species, because that’s ours.”

The Interior Department official who spoke to The Intercept said the same. “They’re pushing so hard for agents to work these cases with criminal networks and international smuggling rings, which are great, but the agency doesn’t have the capability to do it like [Homeland Security Investigations] does,” said the official. For animals like grizzly bears, the official argued, there’s now an absence of proactive deterrence in the field: “People go out and they know there’s no one out there looking.”

Another former Fish and Wildlife Service official, Ed Newcomer, served 20 years with the agency before retiring in 2022. Rising through the ranks in Southern California, he became an expert in international wildlife trafficking and was appointed the agency’s attaché for southern Africa in 2015.

The problem went deeper than his former employer simply deprioritizing its domestic mandate in favor of a foreign one, Newcomer argued. It was a failure on the part of the service’s leadership to keep up with times and, specifically, to push Congress for the resources the agency needs to address domestic wildlife crimes with the same urgency that it now does abroad.

“Nobody is doing any long-term strategic thinking in the leadership at the Office of Law Enforcement,” Newcomer said. “We have not expanded our agent force, at all, since 1983. Forty years. We have not asked Congress to expand our agent force, despite the fact that we have taken on a hugely new and much different mission.” While the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Drug Enforcement Administration have national programs to draw new recruits to their mission, he added, “we have a very half-assed one. It’s in name only.”

A Fading Flame

Despite progress in recent decades, the grizzly bear still walks a delicate line in the West. While the crush of human development shrinks its habitat, the animals are continually run down on highways and gunned down in fields and forests. Meanwhile, frustrations in local communities — the kind that can lead to bears being poached — continue to fester.

“I am concerned that the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to work itself into irrelevancy because they’re not getting enough done.”

Recently, Stoinski bumped into one of his old tribal counterparts at a local store in Lander. The game warden was frustrated. There were more and more grizzlies on the reservation and no support from the Fish and Wildlife Service to be found. For Stoinski, it was a testament to the regrettable reality of his final years as a federal agent. “We’re neglecting our state counterparts who need help. We’re neglecting our tribal counterparts,” he said. “They’re pulling people off to do these international things. Guys are sitting in their offices now looking on the internet for someone trafficking in some wildlife commodity, instead of being on the ground where the bears and the wolves and the eagles and all the other critters are living.”

“It’s just a huge disservice,” Stoinski said of the agency’s priorities. “I am concerned that the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to work itself into irrelevancy because they’re not getting enough done.”

Hanging up his badge didn’t come easy for Stoinski. The veteran investigator had hoped to leave the state of conservation better than he found it. “You want to pass that torch to somebody,” he said. “You want to see them carry it, and you hope you’re leaving it in good hands.” He isn’t sure he did. “I think that’s the biggest regret I have about retiring — am I leaving it in better hands than I got it in?” he said. “I feel like the answer has become no.”

This project was made possible in part by support from the Fund for Environmental Journalism.

The post Grizzly Bear Poachers Flout the Endangered Species Act — and Get Away With It appeared first on The Intercept.

Late last month, federal prosecutors in Arizona invited the family of 58-year-old Raymond Mattia to meet in Sells, Arizona, a main population center of the Tohono O’odham Nation, which spans large swaths of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mattia’s loved ones and legal team attended the September 19 meeting under the impression that lingering questions surrounding Mattia’s May 18 killing would finally be answered. Instead, the family says they were given general descriptions of the law alongside confirmation that the officers and agents involved in the shooting would not face charges. Federal prosecutors, joined by a tribal liaison and an FBI agent, refused to answer questions as to how, specifically, the government reached its conclusion.

“It felt like we lost him again.”

“It’s kind of still surreal,” Mattia’s niece, Yvonne Nevarez, who attended the meeting, told The Intercept. “It felt like we lost him again.”

Prosecutors gave the family the impression they would have their questions answered at the meeting, said Ryan Stitt, a California-based attorney for Mattia’s relatives. Stitt said the refusal to answer questions undercut new Justice Department guidelines on the rights of crime victims.

“We wanted to have a fact-driven discussion about what happened to better understand their decision not to prosecute,” Stitt told The Intercept. “I was very clear that I did not want to recommend to the family that they come to this meeting if it wasn’t going to be a fact-driven discussion.”

In the absence of answers, Mattia’s relatives plan to file a civil rights lawsuit against the federal government. “It was disappointing and upsetting for the family,” Stitt said. “It puts them in a position where they have to file a lawsuit to get basic questions answered, like who shot Ray and why.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona said, “Department of Justice employees, including supervisory and line Assistant U.S. Attorneys, a victim advocate and an FBI agent, met with Mr. Mattia’s family and the family’s lawyers in Sells on September 19 for more than an hour.”

“The employees explained our conclusion in the criminal investigation — that the agents’ use of force under the facts and circumstances presented in this case does not rise to the level of a federal criminal civil rights violation or a criminal violation assimilated under Arizona law — and addressed questions posed by the family and the lawyers,” spokesperson Zach Stoebe said. “We decline to comment more specifically on the meeting between the family and the Department employees: victims have an inherent right to speak with the press, and to criticize their government.”

Edited Body Camera Footage

Mattia spent the entirety of his life in Menagers Dam, a remote Tohono O’odham village situated directly on the border, where he was an active member of the community, artist, and avid hunter. In June, Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, released body camera footage of his final moments there, compiled in a 28-minute edited video.

Shortly before he was killed, Mattia had exchanged a series of text messages with his sister, reporting that three men — presumed border crossers — had been in his home demanding to use his phone. The confrontation was apparently tense, with Mattia grabbing his hunting knife to run the men off. Mattia told his sister he called authorities to report the incident.

Soon after the exchange, a convoy of law enforcement vehicles rolled into the village. According to CBP, Border Patrol agents were responding to a call for back-up from Tohono O’odham police, who had received a report of shots fired in the area. No names or addresses were given, and the origin of the purported shots was unclear.

The team met in the dark at a recreation center. The Border Patrol agents wore tactical gear and carried rifles. “It’s going to be a little bit of a guessing game trying to find it,” a Tohono O’odham police officer said of their target, according to the body camera footage. “I don’t know exactly where that motherfucker’s at.”

The tribal officer led the agents to Mattia’s home. Mattia stepped out in the dark to greet them. He was ordered to step forward and show his hands. As Mattia complied with the commands, law enforcement officials mistook a cellphone in his hand for a gun. Initial reports indicated as many as 38 rounds were fired. A medical examiner’s report, ruling the case a homicide, said Mattia was shot nine times. The body camera footage indicated that roughly 31 seconds passed from the moment Mattia received his first command to the moment the first shot was fired.

Though Mattia’s family went into last month’s meeting with notice that charges would not be filed, they still had questions. From the outset, the edited body camera footage had raised their concerns.

“We mostly wanted to know why we weren’t allowed to view the entire video,” Nevarez said. “We also wanted to ask if there was something that they saw that we didn’t.”

Additionally, the family sought clarity on the murky circumstances that brought the authorities to Mattia’s door in the first place. They wanted to know if investigators had considered the mindset of the agents who responded to the call. Having reviewed the body camera footage herself, Nevarez thought it looked like less like law enforcement and more like battlefield prep for a night raid on an enemy compound.

“They were all there, hyped up, walking in like a war zone,” she said. “He really didn’t have a chance. They were out to get somebody.”

Victims’ Rights

Ahead of the meeting, at the request of the assistant U.S. attorney leading the government’s case, Stitt shared a list of the family’s questions. The two sides had agreed that they qualified as victims under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. That meant the family was entitled to rights established in revised guidelines Attorney General Merrick Garland unveiled in 2022.

The new rules — which went into effect this year and which Garland described as “victim-centered and trauma-informed” — advise federal authorities that a “strong presumption exists in favor of providing, rather than withholding, assistance and services” to victims. In meetings, the guidelines say, prosecutors should strive to both obtain and share information.

“We were very clear we wanted to assert their rights under the rules as victims to the fullest extent possible,” Stitt said. The questions the family had were neither complicated nor sensitive, he argued. They wanted to know how many shots were fired and if the Tohono O’odham police officer on hand participated in the shooting.

“They would not answer that question,” Stitt said. “They would not answer the question about how many shots were fired or why. They said that all the Border Patrol officers made statements to the FBI but would not disclose any detail about those statements other than they exist.”

At one point, Stitt said, the family was told that the purpose of the meeting was not to gather ammunition for a civil lawsuit. The comment was surprising and unsettling, given that the same federal prosecutor responsible for overseeing the decision to not bring criminal charges in Mattia’s case would also defend the federal government if his family brought a civil suit.

“It seems like it was an inappropriate response to the family to treat the meeting as just a way to tell them that no charges will be filed.”

“No civil case has been filed, and the family is looking for honest questions about what happened,” Stitt said. “We certainly can’t say that they’ve acted unethically, but we obviously have a lot of questions, and we were hopeful to get answers during the meeting. It seems like it was an inappropriate response to the family to treat the meeting as just a way to tell them that no charges will be filed and to provide no further factual explanation why.”

Among the most pressing of the family’s concerns, Nevarez said, was the unanswered question of what — if anything — the federal government intends to do to disentangle the relationship between the Tohono O’odham Nation Police Department and the U.S. Border Patrol going forward.

“We feel like we don’t even want to call TOPD or trust TOPD anymore because they can call Border Patrol just like they did for my uncle Ray,” she said. “We’re afraid the same thing would happen to us.”

The post Justice Department Won’t Charge Border Patrol Agents Who Killed Native Man appeared first on The Intercept.

In July, amid a lethal and record-setting heatwave, The Intercept captured photos of roughly 50 migrants caged in an outdoor pen at the Border Patrol’s Ajo Station, deep in the Sonoran Desert two hours west of Tucson. The high temperature that day was 114 degrees. According to CBP officials who are based in the state and have direct knowledge of the situation, the caging was no isolated incident: Supervisors at the remote station have been using the pen, as well as other exposed areas, since at least last winter to detain large numbers of people in extreme cold as well as extreme heat.

“This has been going on for a long time,” one of the officials told The Intercept. “Management is forcing us to violate these things that they should have — basic human necessities.”

Since 2020, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector has been under a “permanent injunction” following a class-action lawsuit revealing that migrants, including women and children, in custody in Southern Arizona were systematically held in deplorable conditions. Under the injunction, the Border Patrol is legally obligated to provide anyone in custody for more than 48 hours with a bed and blanket, showers, adequate food, potable water, medical assessments, and more. Agents sign paperwork acknowledging that they have read and will abide by the order.

In a moment of dire humanitarian need, CBP’s use of the outdoor pen reflects deeper problems at the Border Patrol’s Ajo outpost, the officials said, one that’s rooted in a lack of foresight or acknowledgment of the life-or-death urgency inherent in the desert. In July alone, the Office of the Pima County Medical Examiner, whose remit is within the Tucson Sector’s jurisdiction, cataloged the recovery of 44 sets of migrant remains in Southern Arizona — the third highest monthly total in a decade and a half — including 22 people who died a day before being found.

The CBP officials interviewed by The Intercept recounted the same specifics and timing of the detention conditions at the Ajo Border Patrol station. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press. To corroborate their claims, the sources provided photos and video of conditions both from within the station and on the border itself. The Intercept is withholding publication of those images, which feature the faces of scores of people — including men, women, and children — to protect their privacy.

The CBP officials stressed that by failing to provide the humanitarian resources needed for an influx of asylum-seekers, the Border Patrol has made it impossible for agents in Arizona to abide by the federal injunction mandating the humane treatment of noncitizens in U.S. custody.

“What we’re doing now is a disgrace,” one official said. “We need full-blown infrastructure down here. We need mobile command centers and tents and air conditioning and caregivers and EMTs down on the border.” They added: “If we got an EMT on shift, we’re lucky. There’s just nothing being flooded in.”

In a statement, CBP spokesperson Justin Long said the agency was “prioritizing all available resources in response to human smugglers endangering large groups of people by sending them into remote desert areas during extreme summer heat.” That response includes increased deployment of medical personnel in the Tucson Sector and the construction and retrofitting of facilities in the area. “Despite the increase in encounters in this dangerous and remote area, the Ajo station has remained one of the Border Patrol stations with the lowest average Times in Custody as we rapidly move people on from this area,” he said.

“CBP takes allegations of mistreatment very seriously and has policies and procedures in place for the care of individuals in our custody,” he added. While CBP does not comment on ongoing litigation, Long said, the agency understands the injunction in Arizona to cover both outdoor and open-air facilities. “Tucson Sector constantly reviews the practices and procedures of all the stations within sector to ensure compliance with the injunction,” the spokesperson said. “Tucson Sector continually monitors its detention situation, if Tucson Sector’s conditions are not consistent with its obligations, proper notifications are made.”

“These people should have warmth in the wintertime and shade, at the very least, in the summertime.”

While apprehensions have recently dipped elsewhere on the border, that has not been the case in Arizona, where the Tucson Sector has become the busiest in the nation — not to mention the most lethal. In July, agents in Southern Arizona recorded nearly 34,000 apprehensions: a 28 percent increase compared to last year. Tucson Sector Deputy Chief Justin DeLaTorre told local outlet AZPM News that while most 2022 apprehensions involved single adult men, this year, nearly half are families. DeLaTorre added that roughly 80 percent of the people taken into custody turn themselves in — typically to seek asylum, a right enshrined under domestic and international law, including for those who cross the border without authorization.

“If you’re taking people into custody, you’re the custodians. You’re taking away their ability to protect themselves, the ability to provide for themselves. You are accepting that you are going to do that, and they believe you’re going to do that,” one official who spoke to The Intercept said. “These people should have warmth in the wintertime and shade, at the very least, in the summertime.”

The denial of either was “reprehensible,” they said, and yet, that’s precisely what’s been happening.

“Deprived of Basic Human Necessities”

Border Patrol supervisors at the Ajo station began using an outdoor pen to cage asylum-seekers last winter, the officials said, when nighttime temperatures plummeted to near freezing. Initially, the pen included a tent. Men, women, and children would cram themselves on top of one another for warmth, while others huddled together and shivered outside. The tent was soon disassembled, however, because agents could not see inside. People were left to fend for themselves against the elements.

“A lot of these guys, they don’t have jackets. They don’t have cold-weather gear,” the first official said. On certain shifts, agents were directed to take the jackets people did have and replace them with Mylar emergency blankets.

“Can you imagine?” the official asked. “We’re stripping them of their jackets and their hoodies in December, January, February, and then we’re handing them a Mylar blanket and telling them, ‘There you go. Hang out outside.’ Because somebody believes that these families from India are going to stab us through their jacket or something insane.”

In time, some asylum-seekers developed a preference for heavy-duty garbage bags over the Mylar blankets and would wrap themselves in those instead. “That’s the kind of laughable thing about the brilliance of the Border Patrol, or the stupidity,” the official said, “is they actually created a situation where now you need an emergency blanket. You’re now in an emergency, and the only thing they’re going to give you is an emergency blanket. This just keeps going on and on with stuff like this.”

Throughout the winter, the number of people in the pen would swell into the hundreds, added the second CBP official. The station set up an outdoor heater, but it did little good. The pen is “totally exposed to the desert air,” the official said. “Unless you are sitting directly in front of the heater, you’re not going to get warm. So that’s when you start to see all these aliens sitting out there, huddled up and they’re shivering, which is a bunch of bullshit.”

Day and night, as winter turned to spring and spring turned to summer, asylum-seekers cycled through the pen. “The thing that drove me crazy was the fact that it’s a rock area,” said a CBP official. “It’s fucking gravel, and it’s fairly hefty gravel. It’s not even fine gravel. They just gotta lay in there. It’s insane.”

Given the rough ground and the scalding rocks, cushioning of any kind was in high demand among migrants. The scarps of cardboard that agents use to pass out food became a valued commodity. “I’ve literally seen guys get into these squabbling fights over the cardboard,” the official said. “It’s wild.”

An arch over the pen provided a strip of shade that moved with the sun, hardly enough to provide relief to the swelling crowds. “Most of the shade that it provides gets cast way outside that fenced-in area,” the official said. “So they just get hit with the sunlight.”

Following The Intercept’s publication of photos depicting the pen last month, the Border Patrol stretched a shade cloth over the enclosure and hung white sheeting around its perimeter.

“It just blows my mind that it took all winter and damn near half the summer just to go out there and just lay a tarp across that outdoor pen,” one CBP official said. The Ajo station has ample shaded area for Border Patrol vehicles, they noted. “How come all these vehicles are getting fucking shade, but these migrants don’t?” the official asked. “Who cares if the paint fades or if the car’s really hot to get into?” they said. The material damage to a truck, they argued, would pale in comparison to the loss of human life due to heat stroke.

“How come all these vehicles are getting fucking shade, but these migrants don’t?”

According to the officials who spoke to The Intercept, some agents were fine with the outdoor caging, making comments like, “That’s what they get for coming here illegally.” That indifference was not universal. “They have normal rights just like any other person,” said one official. “You can’t just take them and just have them out there shivering all fucking night in the dark.” A second official agreed. “I don’t like seeing people freeze,” they said. “I don’t care how they got here.”

“There’s a lot of people that are really pissed off about what’s going on,” they added. “We’re all actually in shock. It’s kind of like a bad relationship. You think you’re going to come to work the next day and things will be a little better, and they never are.”

The growing numbers of asylum-seekers turning themselves in, the clear commands of the federal injunction that agents vowed to uphold, and the plainly dangerous conditions at the station became a subject of concern at muster, the routine pre-shift meetings where the rank and file receive their marching orders from station supervisors.

Agents wanted to know who signed off on plans to detain people outside and how those plans were consistent with the injunction they swore to follow. “The personal liability risk is real,” one official said. “And there’s nobody answering these questions.”

The official noted that the court order pertains to indoor detention practices. “I don’t know if any of this stuff is OK for outside detention,” they said. The injunction specifically calls for CBP’s comportment with detention industry standards, they added, and prohibits the depravation of basic human necessities. “They’re kept outside in a cage with no shade. No walls. On a rock ground,” the official said. “I’m pretty sure they’re being deprived of basic human necessities.”

“A Disaster in There”

Despite the concerns raised by agents, supervisors at the Ajo station stayed the course amid deadly heat and, more recently, torrential monsoon rains.

While individual experiences may vary, it is not uncommon for asylum-seekers, particularly men, to spend hours exposed to the elements, the officials told The Intercept.

“They’d probably be there for anywhere from a few hours, up to a whole damn day,” said one. “They’d definitely be out there overnight. They’d get there at like noon to 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and they probably wouldn’t fuckin’ leave there until sunup the next day.”

The pen has a music festival-style outdoor sink and porta-potties, though the latter is far from sanitary. “Sometimes you can’t even get within like 15 feet, or you’ll fucking throw up — I mean not literally, but you’ll start gagging,” said one official. “And these people got to go take a dump in there.” Another official added: “I’ve never seen outhouses with water that close to spilling over with shit and piss. They can’t get the company to come and clean them daily.”

“I’ve never seen outhouses with water that close to spilling over with shit and piss.”

Conditions inside the station are similarly grim. “It’s a disaster in there,” one CBP official said. “They’re overcrowded to the point where they can’t give them all mats.”

The provision of mats is one of the requirements of the injunction against CBP. Prohibitions on overcrowding and sleeping on or near toilets are also listed.

“I’ve seen the cells so full that people are literally laying shoulder to shoulder, head to toe next to somebody else, and they’re all wrapped in Mylar blankets,” one CBP official said. “When you see so many people wrapped in Mylar blankets that the whole floor looks like a mirror, that’s an issue. And it goes all the way back into the toilets sometimes. They’re sleeping back in and around the toilet areas.”

Medical assessments are also required under the court order. There too, the officials said, CBP is failing to meet its obligations under the law.

The problem stems from a sea change in the demographics of asylum-seekers in recent years, from almost entirely Spanish speakers hailing from a predictable roster of Latin American nations, to people from all over the world arriving by the hundreds in large groups every day.

“Any day of the week you’re encountering at least five different languages, sometimes up to maybe 10,” one official said. “There’s no way to accurately do the medical questionnaires. You can’t possibly have 600 people at the station with another 300 waiting to come in and do medical questionnaires for people in seven different languages.”

The large numbers and the linguistic diversity create a processing bottleneck, they said, as does a lack of familiarity with the U.S. intake system among asylum-seekers themselves. While a Mexican or Honduran asylum-seeker — thanks to the experiences of loved ones or acquaintances in years past — may know that the Border Patrol will seize their personal items and pack accordingly, an asylum-seeker from India, China, or Cameroon, may not.

“These are groups that are coming with full suitcases,” the official said. “It’s like you’re going through their dresser drawer.”

Like the seasons of Southern Arizona, fluctuation in global migration trends can be planned for with a bit of effort, but in the case of the Ajo station, that clearly hasn’t happened.

“It’s foreseeable stuff,” the CBP official said. “They knew this was coming. They knew it was out there. They said, ‘There’s all these people waiting to get in.’ And it’s like, OK, where’s the tents? Where’s the plan? Where’s the cohesion?”

“Time in Detention Is Being Skewed”

Outside the walls of the Ajo station, on the border itself, conditions are even more dire.

Large numbers of asylum-seekers arrive at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, two large tracts of public land that run along the border. Guided by smugglers in Mexico, they appear at all hours of the day but especially at night. A photo shared by the chief of the Tucson Sector earlier this month purported to show the largest of several groups detained one weekend, compromised of more than 500 people from 17 different countries.

How such groups are received can vary widely, one CBP official explained. “From one shift to the next, nobody knows what the hell they’re doing,” they said. “There’s no coordinated effort most of the time.”

Some agents will order asylum-seekers to stay where they are until vehicles can pick them up, others will encourage them to turn back. “There’s a rift in the station,” the official said of the divided approach.

For large groups, the wait at the border often takes hours, and the time is spent in some of the most remote and deadliest terrain in North America. “There’s no tents. There’s no shelter. There’s nothing out there for them,” the official said. “You would think the Border Patrol would have a designated guy bringing water down there. That doesn’t always happen. One shift might, but the next shift might not, so they can be down there without water for a long time.”

Given the lethality of the landscape, some agents are inclined to implore asylum-seekers, particularly men, who are likely to wait the longest, to leave. “Get the heck out of here — don’t wait here in the desert to die,” the official said, describing the sentiment of what agents might tell the men. “But not everybody believes that.”

The encounters at the border create yet another concern when it comes to CBP’s injunction. While the order pertains to actions the agency is required to take after a person has been in custody for 48 hours, people are often being told to stay put by U.S. government officials for many hours — in some cases, up to a day or more — without any resources, but that time isn’t being counted as official “detention.”

“The time in detention is being skewed,” the official said. “They don’t start the clock the moment they’re encountered and detained.”

It is just one more example of the system breaking down, they argued, and failing vulnerable people caught in a dangerous situation. “I think a lot of these people probably have a legitimate claim to asylum,” the official said. “There’s a lot of reason to believe that.”

The dozens of human remains found in the Arizona desert last month were a fraction of the more than 4,000 the medical examiner in Tucson has logged in the past two-and-a-half decades, which are themselves a fraction of the unknowable total of lives lost across the border in recent years. In the face of that grim reality, people keep coming from more and more places around the world. The U.S. government, meanwhile, appears unwilling to adapt with the times.

“It’s just completely unmanageable,” said the CBP official. “I know that the border has been open, wide open, for a long time, but as far as the humanity of what we’re seeing with these people, I never seen anything like it.”

“We can bring eight buses down there, but the smugglers are just going to bring eight semi-trailers full of people,” they said. “At some point, there has to be acknowledgment that we do not have the resources to do this humanely.”

Update: September 8, 2023
This article was updated to include a statement that CBP provided after publication.

The post Border Patrol Violating Court Order Against Inhumane Treatment of Migrants, Officials Say appeared first on The Intercept.

With its sweeping mountain view, the hill was Canyon’s refuge. His 3-year-old yellow lab, Kasey, was his constant companion there.

The two set off as usual that afternoon. Kasey was thrashing one of his toys when Canyon spotted a sprinkler-like object protruding from the ground. He ran a finger along the device. Suddenly, he heard a pop, and an orange cloud burst forth. Canyon lunged back as the front of his body was doused in chemicals. The burning began immediately.

As Canyon grasped for snow to irrigate his eyes, he heard Kasey grunting near the device. He called to him, but he didn’t come. He stopped what he was doing and ran to him. Dropping to his knees, Canyon watched as Kasey writhed in spasms. Frothing at the mouth, the dog’s eyes turned glossy. The boy didn’t want to leave, but he knew he needed help. He sprinted down the hill for his mother.

Canyon’s father, Mark Mansfield, a family doctor, was at work when the boy called for help. He raced home as fast as he could. Pulling into the property, Mansfield rushed to Kasey and positioned himself above the dog, prepared to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Canyon stopped him. It’s poison, Canyon said.

Kasey was dead, and Canyon’s head was pounding like never before. Toggling between his training as a physician and his horror as a parent, Mansfield struggled to sort out his son’s symptoms from the trauma he’d just experienced. He told Canyon to get into the shower immediately.

While his son cleaned up, Mansfield called the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office. A bomb and hazmat team were dispatched. Longtime Sheriff Lorin Nielsen was at a loss, trying to answer what felt like an absurd question: Who would plant a bomb in Pocatello?

Cyanide Bombs

Across the American West lies an untold number of potent chemical weapons, tucked away and waiting to go off. There could be one on your favorite hiking trail, or on the loop where you walk your dog, or in the woods where your kids play. Packed with sodium cyanide, these spring-loaded devices blast clouds of poison gas five feet into the air. Once inhaled, the lethal toxins mount a multidirectional attack on your cardiovascular, pulmonary, and central nervous system. Death can come in a matter of minutes.

The weapons, known as M-44s, are placed by an under-the-radar federal agency called Wildlife Services. The agency was created to protect the livestock industry’s bottom line by killing off the competition: namely, wild predators. The so-called cyanide bombs do kill predators, but they can also kill anyone else unlucky enough to stumble upon them. And they have a hair trigger.

Wildlife Services, which falls under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is well known in conservationist circles. Most people, however, have never heard of it. For the uninitiated, a glimpse into the taxpayer-funded killing machine can be jarring.

In the past eight years, Wildlife Services killed nearly 21 million animals as part of its mission to oversee “the eradication and control” of species “injurious” to human endeavors, particularly ranching. While agents’ preferred means of killing is by air, with gunmen in helicopters and planes, M-44s were used to intentionally kill more than 88,000 animals from 2014 through 2022 — the period for which the agency has data available online. The total amounts to roughly 30 poisonings a day for much of the past decade.

M-44s are part of “a broad strategy that also uses non-lethal methods, and that is informed by ongoing wildlife biology research,” Wildlife Services spokesperson Ed Curlett said in an emailed statement to The Intercept. Curlett added that 98 percent of the agency’s poison devices are placed on private lands and “only when the private, municipal, state, or federal landowner or manager requests assistance and enters a written cooperative agreement.”

According to Wildlife Service’s data, an additional 2,200 animals were killed unintentionally over the 2014 through 2022 period, including endangered species, domestic livestock, and pets like the Mansfields’ dog.

After losing Kasey, the Mansfields went on the offensive, suing Wildlife Services and traveling to Washington to spearhead legislation banning the use of M-44s. The hill behind the family’s home is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, an agency of the Department of the Interior. Idaho, at the time of Canyon’s poisoning, had banned M-44s on public land, but they remained legal on private land and on public lands throughout much of the rest of the country.

Surely, thought Mark Mansfield, the near-death of his child would motivate lawmakers to stop government agents from planting poison bombs everywhere. He was wrong.

The 2019 introduction of “Canyon’s Law” — a bill prohibiting M-44s on public land nationwide — went nowhere. “I don’t care if you’re red, blue, purple. I don’t care if you’re rural or urban. It just seems like a no-brainer,” Mansfield told me. “But somehow this still goes on. I’m shocked. I thought it would be a done deal within months. Call me naïve.”

Four years after it was written, Canyon’s Law was reintroduced last month by Reps. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

“This is remarkable. They weren’t prompted. We didn’t have a clue that they even knew this hearing was going on.”

After years of setbacks, advocates in the Mansfields’ corner believe the tide may finally be turning against M-44s — thanks to the emergence of an unexpected but critical ally. During a congressional hearing on Canyon’s Law last summer, the Department of the Interior submitted a statement outlining its M-44s position. “The Department is concerned that these devices pose a risk of injury or death to unintended targets, including humans, pets, and threatened and endangered species,” the statement said. The Department had “no technical objections” with the proposed bill “and would work to implement the legislation, if enacted.”

Brooks Fahy, the executive director of Predator Defense, a national wildlife advocacy group, was shocked. While the Department of Agriculture manages 193 million acres of public land in the U.S., the Department of Interior manages 245 million. The scale alone made the statement highly significant. That the largest land management agency in the country would take a critical position on the issue was unprecedented. “This is remarkable,” Fahy told me. “They weren’t prompted. We didn’t have a clue that they even knew this hearing was going on.”

Sensing an opportunity, Predator Defense and the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity rallied organizations focused on wildlife preservation in the West. With more than 70 allied groups joining them, the groups filed a formal petition last month, on the heels of the reintroduction of Canyon’s Law, calling on the Department of Interior to ban the use of M-44s on its lands.

Success won’t come easy though. Behind the M-44 lies a well-connected industry that’s influenced the government’s predator killing program for generations, one that’s unlikely to relinquish its bombs without a fight.

The M-44 cyanide canister that killed the Mansfield’s dog, Kasey, in Pocatello, Idaho, in March 2017.

Years of Hell

Mark Mansfield had to figure out two things after his son was poisoned: What was the toxin, and who was responsible?

Luckily, one of the sheriff’s deputies had worked as a federal trapper. He suggested contacting Wildlife Services. Nielsen, the sheriff, had never heard of the agency and had no idea that it was mining his county with spring-loaded poison sprayers.

Mansfield, too, was puzzled. He was even more taken aback when Todd Sullivan, the Wildlife Services supervisor who planted the device, showed up at his house.

“He killed my dog and he had nearly killed my child,” Mansfield said. “At that point in time, there was a lot of stress. It was very difficult for me not to, you know — whatever.”

The family was kept inside while Sullivan escorted law enforcement up the hill. Unbeknownst to the sheriff’s department, Wildlife Services had planted 18 cyanide bombs throughout Bannock County. Sullivan had placed the M-44 that poisoned Canyon and killed Kasey in plain view of the Mansfields’ backyard, a second device 60 feet from the first, and two more elsewhere in the neighborhood.

The public land behind the Mansfields’ home abutted private property, where a local sheep producer had leased an allotment to raise his stock. In an interview with a Bannock County detective, Sullivan said he meant to plant his bombs on private land, in accordance with Idaho law, and while he had the means to differentiate between jurisdictions, he didn’t. The Wildlife Services supervisor also admitted that there had been no livestock predation cases in the area. He was simply trying to “get a jump on the season” by poisoning any coyotes that might pass through.

“It was three years of hell for his parents and more so for him.”

In his thousands of hours in the emergency room, Mark Mansfield had never dealt with a sodium cyanide poisoning. He called specialists around the country to gather as much information as he could. It did not look good. As one toxicologist explained in a 2019 interview, sodium cyanide’s effects on the human body are similar to those of sarin gas, an internationally banned chemical weapon used in war zones.

Canyon’s pounding headache worsened with admission to the ER. He experienced nausea and vomiting on a near-daily basis. His hands and feet went numb. The worst of it lasted more than a month, but the long-term effects, from migraines to mood changes, lingered for years.

“Finally, about 2020, he was back to his baseline,” Mansfield said. “It was three years of hell for his parents and more so for him.”

A Family Fights Back

In the days after Canyon was poisoned, his father received an unsolicited call from Fahy, the Predator Defense executive director. “A lot of people helped us,” Mansfield said. “But he was the one who explained it to us.”

Fahy’s first encounters with Wildlife Services began in the 1970s, when the agency was still known as Animal Damage Control. Working as an investigator for the Humane Society in Oregon, he encountered the mummified remains of snared coyotes and orphaned pups at dens in rural areas throughout the state. He started Predator Defense a decade later as an animal hospital before transitioning into advocacy.

Fahy had witnessed the physical damage Wildlife Services’ traps can do but found the agency’s arsenal of poisons more unsettling. “You can’t remove it,” he said. “That poison is in their system and watching an animal die slowly, whether it be from sodium cyanide or strychnine or compound 1080, is extraordinarily disturbing.”

Fahy can rattle off cases going back years. There was the Wildlife Services trapper who scattered M-44s around a Christmas tree farm. And the one who hanged coyote carcasses on a family’s fence after killing their dog. And then there was Dennis Slaugh.

A heavy equipment operator from Vernal, Utah, Slaugh had little in the way of money but took great pride in the work he did for the county. That ended following his brush with an M-44 in 2003. Plagued with daily vomiting, diminished breathing, and soaring blood pressure, the 61-year-old was forced to quit his job. Wildlife Services denied any fault in the matter and claimed that Slaugh exceeded the statute of limitations to file a claim of wrongdoing. Unable to work, the medical bills piled up as Slaugh’s health deteriorated.

“They took my life away,” Slaugh said in a 2020 documentary. “And now I can’t hardly change a light bulb. It’s all from this cyanide. It just took everything away from me.”

As the years went by, Fahy collected case after case of M-44s killing pets and harming people across the West. Never once, he said, did he encounter an incident in which Wildlife Services, per the M-44 use restrictions required by the Environmental Protection Agency, contacted local medical providers to inform them of devices planted in their area. Signage was another problem. A trapper may place a single sign at one entrance on a large plot with several entry points, or they might not place one at all. Both were common in the investigations Fahy undertook.

Fahy had never seen a case quite like the Mansfields’ where a child came so close to death. He shared everything he knew with the family. In June 2018, the Mansfields filed suit against Wildlife Services, accusing Sullivan of failing to follow a slew of regulations meant to govern the placement of M-44s, including the placement of warning signs.

The Justice Department initially responded by blaming Canyon and his parents for what happened, before admitting Wildlife Services’ negligence and agreeing to pay the Mansfields $38,500 to settle the case in 2020.

Thick as Pudding

Despite the national coverage the Mansfield case received, Wildlife Services has clung to M-44s as “an effective and environmentally sound wildlife damage management tool.”

In the wake of Canyon’s poisoning, the agency published a brochure justifying the devices’ use. “Our use of M 44 devices strictly follows EPA label instructions, directions, and use-restrictions; applicable Federal, State, and local laws and regulations; and agency and program directives and policies,” it said. “Our personnel do not use M-44s on any property unless the land’s owner or manager requests and agrees to our assistance. We must have a valid written cooperative agreement, agreement for control, Memoranda of Agreement, or other applicable document signed by the landowner or authorized representative to place any M-44s.”

After years of bad press, Wildlife Services is acutely aware of its reputation as the “hired gun of the livestock industry.” The source of the oft-repeated description is Carter Niemeyer, formerly one of the agency’s most productive trappers and today one of its sharpest critics.

“Their lobbying power makes or breaks Wildlife Services.”

Niemeyer is the author of “Wolfer,” an account of his quarter century as a Wildlife Services supervisor in Montana from 1975 to 2000. The veteran trapper believes the agency has important elements to its portfolio, and that many of its East Coast operations are quite professional. But in the West, he argues, existential ties to the livestock industry still reign. Unwillingness to relinquish M-44, he says, is an artifact of that bond.

“The very existence of Wildlife Services is dependent upon the livestock industry and all of the cooperators,” Niemeyer told me. “Their lobbying power makes or breaks Wildlife Services. If the cattlemen and sheep men lost their faith in Wildlife Services and didn’t do this insistent, persistent, powerful lobbying that they do, Wildlife Services would be dead in the water and probably disappeared.”

One of the starkest examples of that power came in 1998, when then-Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., introduced a bill to cut Wildlife Services’ budget from $50 to $10 million by taking an axe to its predator killing program. DeFazio was a longtime critic of the program, often telling reporters that Wildlife Services was more secretive than the intelligence agencies he worked with on the House Homeland Security Committee. His bill passed, but in a highly unusual turn of events, it was subjected to revote less than 24 hours later. The American Farm Bureau was in a fury. Overnight, agriculture lobbyists convinced 38 members of Congress to change their minds. The proposal died the following day.

“They were against the ropes, and it was all over,” Niemeyer said. “And in the last minute of the last hour of the last second, the livestock industry lobbyists somehow got to enough congressmen to turn the whole thing around and get that budget back when we’d pretty much heard that it was a done deal.”

Niemeyer never used M-44s and didn’t like them. The trappers who worked for him mostly felt the same. They were dangerous, required lots of paperwork, and trappers had plenty of other tools to do their jobs. “I was not disappointed if a guy didn’t want to use him,” Niemeyer said. “I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have either if I was in their shoes.”

There was one problem.

“My walking orders as a supervisor was to make sure the men used them,” Niemeyer said. “There was a real push from higher levels of the livestock industry to push for their registration and push for their use. Some of the sheep men, some of the notorious ones I remember, they figured that if you got snares, put ’em out. You got traps. Put ’em out. And for God’s sake, if there’s M-44s and you got a bunch sitting there in your cabinet, put ’em out.”

In its 2019 brochure on M-44s, Wildlife Services pointed to tens of millions of dollars lost every year by ranchers due to livestock killed by predators. Those numbers, Niemeyer pointed out, reflect survey data, self-reported by ranchers. They are not independently verified.

Though Niemeyer’s Wildlife Services tenure ended more than 20 years ago, the livestock industry’s continued support for M-44s is evident today on the webpage of the American Sheep Industry Association, which represents more 100,000 sheep producers nationwide. The site features a dedicated “Fact versus Fiction” page on the issue of M-44s. Among the fictions listed is the notion that cyanide bombs present a risk to the public. 

At this point, Niemeyer argued, clinging to M-44s is as much about symbolism as anything else. “Kinda like the old give ’em an inch, they take a foot,” he said. “If they take our M-44s, next year they’ll take our snares, and then the year after they’ll take our traps.”

There’s a material angle as well. In addition to federal funding, Wildlife Services relies on the financial support of “cooperators” to keep the lights on. In the case of its predator program, the cooperators are often agricultural interests.

“They’re thick as pudding,” Niemeyer said. “That lobbying power of the ag industry is what keeps Wildlife Services afloat. I wouldn’t call it a criminal, but they’re buddies. They needed us and we needed them, and that’s how it keeps going on to this day.”

For Dennis

Six years on, it’s impossible to measure the full impact that the poisoning had on Canyon, said Mansfield. “You’re not really going to have a control group on kids nearly killed by cyanide,” he said. “So anything and everything that ever happens to him, mentally and or physically, you say, ‘Oh, I wonder if cyanide has anything to do with that?’ It’s a haunting thought that comes up every single time.”

The family’s goal remains the same: getting Canyon’s Law passed. They are hopeful that the latest round of efforts will be the final push they have been waiting for.

Following Canyon’s poisoning, Idaho issued a statewide prohibition on the use of M-44s pending an environmental assessment that remains in effect today. Fahy, the Predator Defense advocate, had little time to celebrate.

“It literally ripped my guts out, the whole thing, what they got away with.”

In February 2018, he picked up the phone to learn that Dennis Slaugh passed away. The official cause was an acute myocardial infarction. Listed among his “conditions contributing to death” was “Cyanide Poisoning/Exposure From M44 Device 2003.” The words on Slaugh’s death certificate contradicted a claim on Wildlife Services’ brochure the following year — repeated on American Sheep Industry Association’s fact versus fiction page — which read: “No human fatalities have been associated with Wildlife Services’ use of M-44s.” When asked about the death certificate, Wildlife Services pointed to a 2008 federal investigation that purportedly cleared the agency of any culpability in Slaugh’s death.

Fahy was devastated. He, Slaugh, and Slaugh’s wife Dorothy had traveled to Washington together a decade before, urging lawmakers to act on M-44s before somebody was killed. Slaugh had never visited a city like D.C. before. He didn’t know what to expect, and he didn’t know what was happening inside his body — why, for example, he needed to pause periodically to vomit as he passed through the halls of the Capitol.

Looking back at a photo from the visit, Fahy notes the way Slaugh held Dorothy’s hand, squeezing it tightly. “He was scared,” Fahy said. He watched Slaugh’s slow and agonizing deterioration in the years that followed. His death was the outcome Fahy had dedicated his life to preventing.

“It literally ripped my guts out, the whole thing, what they got away with,” Fahy said. Approaching 70, Fahy has had his own health scares — a consequence, he believes, of internalizing decades of secondhand trauma. With Slaugh’s death, however, he vowed to continue their fight. Unlike Canyon’s poisoning, where at least there was some measure of accountability at the local level, he said, “with Dennis, Wildlife Services got away with it.”

“I find it unbelievable that there are people that could have treated him like that,” Fahy said. “Nobody stood up for him. They just walked right over him.”

The post Secretive Federal Agency’s Days of Killing Pets With Poison Bombs May Finally Be Ending appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday afternoon, The Intercept observed roughly 50 migrants confined in a chain-link pen at the Ajo Border Patrol station, a highly remote outpost two hours west of Tucson. From a ridge overlooking the Border Patrol’s facility, the migrants could be seen gathered under a carport-like structure, crowding themselves into a single, narrow strip of shade to escape the desert sun. The only furniture available was a short stack of metal bleachers baking in the extreme heat.

Just one day earlier, Tucson set a new record with 11 consecutive days of temperatures exceeding 111 degrees. The unincorporated community of Ajo and surrounding areas have been even hotter, with Thursday’s high hitting 114 degrees.

“The U.S. Border Patrol has surged personnel and transportation resources in recent weeks to respond to a significant increase in encounters near Ajo, AZ — some of the hottest, most isolated, and dangerous area of the southwest border — where individuals have been callously sent by smuggling organizations to walk for miles, often with little or no water,” a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, said in a statement to The Intercept Friday night.

The Border Patrol “is prioritizing expeditiously transporting noncitizens encountered in this desert environment, which is particularly dangerous during current weather conditions, to USBP facilities where individuals can receive medical care, food, water,” the statement continued.

CBP did not answer several specific questions from The Intercept, including how long people are being kept outside in the heat, whether children are among those who have been kept outside, and whether anyone held outside has required emergency medical care. The agency did, however, reiterate its standard practice to provide medical screening for migrants upon arrival to the Ajo station and said that migrants held outside are provided with a large canopy, large fans, hot meals, water, and bathrooms.

No such canopy was visible during The Intercept’s observation of the Ajo station on Thursday.

“We are absolutely horrified at learning about how people are being treated at the border wall and the Ajo border patrol station — it is inhumane. This is abject mismanagement of a situation that could have been predicted, and should have been planned for,” Morgan Riffle, a volunteer with the Phoenix branch of No More Deaths and the Ajo Samaritans, two groups that provide humanitarian aid in the Sonoran Desert, said in a statement to The Intercept. “The lack of resources equates to neglect and is at the point of extreme physical endangerment and abuse.”

“We hear from other involved humanitarian aid groups that many agents on the ground want the resources to adequately take care of folks,” Riffle added, “yet it seems that upper management is failing to address the situation to the point of indifference.”

The Border Patrol station in Ajo can process a few hundred people a day, and on Monday upward of 800 to 1,000 people turned themselves in at the border wall, said a second humanitarian volunteer, who asked not to be named and has spent weeks providing aid at the border wall south of Ajo. “If you have a better idea what they should do, bring it,” he said, referring to the Border Patrol. “They’re out of buses. They’re out of equipment. I can imagine they would put people out in the parking lot if they have to. I don’t know they had a choice.”

The southwest is currently experiencing what the National Weather Service has described as “a dangerous, long-lived, and record-breaking heat wave.” In recent days, much of Southern Arizona, including the Ajo area, has been under an “excessive heat warning,” putting everyone at significantly increased risk for heat-related illnesses. The NWS recommends that people in the area stay in air-conditioned rooms and take extra precautions when spending time outdoors.

On Wednesday, officials in Maricopa County, north of Ajo, reported that at least 18 people have died from heat in Phoenix this year, with 69 other cases under investigation.

In the desert to the south, the extreme heat makes an already deadly landscape all the more the lethal. On Friday, Humane Borders, a nonprofit group that provides water for migrants crossing the desert and works with the Office of the Pima County Medical Examiner to map migrant deaths, reported the recovery of 13 sets of human remains on the border in the past month, including four people who had died within a day of their discovery.

Over the past two and a half decades, the medical examiner’s office in Tucson has logged more than 4,000 migrant deaths in Southern Arizona — a figure that border researchers widely agree is an undercount. The rugged terrain surrounding the Ajo Border Patrol station, known as Arizona’s West Desert, is notorious for being the state’s most lethal region. In response to the recent arrivals and the surging heat, Humane Borders has set up aid stations near the border wall south of Ajo but the group — along with the Border Patrol — has been struggling to meet the demand, said the volunteer who has been providing aid there.

“They cross between 1 and 3 in the morning, a majority, and the Border Patrol is in a race to get them out of there before it gets hot,” the volunteer said. The optics of migrants being held in pens are terrible, but the alternative is “pulling dead bodies out of the desert,” he said. “That’s what I did last weekend.”

The Intercept observed conditions at the Ajo facility for more than an hour as the temperature hovered around 108 degrees. During that time, Border Patrol agents lined up approximately 30 men and marched them to another area of the facility, leaving roughly as many people behind. Those people were still standing in the heat when The Intercept left the scene. Large floodlights above the enclosure suggested it was also being used for overnight detention.

Though most of the detained migrants appeared to be men, the ages and genders of everyone inside the pen were impossible to determine at a distance. Few, if any, of the people had hats or other sun-protective clothing. Most wore T-shirts; some were shirtless. At least one large fan and misting machine were visible at the enclosure’s edge, but both were positioned in full sunlight and directed toward the metal bleachers. Scores of empty plastic water bottles littered the ground. At one point, a vulture circled overhead.

Update: July 22, 2023
This article was updated to include a statement from CBP that was provided after publication.

The post Border Patrol Is Caging Migrants Outdoors During Deadly Arizona Heatwave appeared first on The Intercept.

Birds chirped as the 76-year-old traced the 75,000 acres of mining claims on the edge of her community with her finger. She wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a fearsome wolf hovering above a rugged mountain range. The wolf is the calling card of the Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, or PARA. The local group monitors industrialized mining in the Patagonia Mountains, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Schafer is president of the board.

“This is our new logo,” she said, picking up a pamphlet with the wolf on the front. The old mascot — a cute cartoon dog — no longer matched the moment. A vigilant pack animal sent a more appropriate message.

“We think of ourselves as local watchdogs,” Schafer told me. “We pay attention to what’s going on with the companies and the agencies, and then we bark really loudly to the big dogs, who have the staff, the knowledge, and the experience to do what is necessary.”

The big dogs, Shafer and her allies believe, are needed now more than ever. Last month, the Biden administration announced the “first-ever” inclusion of a mine in a federal program that expedites permitting for high-priority projects. In this case, it was the extraction of minerals from the Patagonia Mountains to support the president’s green energy agenda — manganese and zinc, specifically, for producing electric vehicle batteries and fortifying renewable energy installations, among other purposes. In the weeks since the announcement, the Forest Service has issued permits advancing large-scale drilling in the area.

The operation is the Hermosa project, which encroaches on the Coronado National Forest, an hour southeast of Tucson. The company is South32, an Australian spin-off from global mining giant, BHP Billiton. The program, FAST-41, was created in 2015 to streamline the federal permitting process. The Permitting Council, an agency with a nearly $100 billion portfolio in government infrastructure projects, oversees the program.

The administration’s support for the mine follows President Joe Biden’s 2022 determination invoking the Defense Production Act, which ordered an increase in domestic mining of “critical” materials sufficient to create a large-scale battery supply chain and move the nation away from fossil fuels and foreign production lines. Manganese was singled out as critical. Congressional passage of the Inflation Reduction Act also called for increased domestic mining in the name of green energy.

With an initial estimated outlay of $1.7 billion, South32 anticipates a lifespan of 22 years for Hermosa’s zinc deposit and 60 years for its manganese deposit. Full production is slated to begin in 2026 or 2027. Company executives celebrated their FAST-41 inclusion with the Permitting Council’s director in a press call last month. Hermosa project President Pat Risner drew a direct line between Washington’s goals and his company’s aims.

“These policies pave the way for a vast domestic expansion in electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable power production,” he said. “South 32’s Hermosa project is the only advanced mine development project in the U.S. currently that could produce two federally designated critical minerals as its primary products, those being manganese and zinc.”

Shafer was blindsided by the news. “That really wasn’t on our radar screen at all,” she said the first time we spoke. In the month that followed, PARA cranked up its advocacy like never before, organizing with larger NGOs and telling any reporter who would listen about the project’s extraordinary ecological stakes.

PARA’s Lawsuit

Last Tuesday, the calls for help became a call for action. PARA, with support from the nonprofit advocates of Earthjustice and the Western Mining Action Project, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Forest Service and the supervisor of the Coronado National Forest, where the mining activity is concentrated. Several of the region’s environmental organizations — and its most experienced litigators — joined as co-plaintiffs, including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Tucson Audubon Society, and Earthworks.

The groups alleged a series of Forest Service violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, resulting in the rushed release of two permits for exploratory drilling projects in the Patagonias last month. One of the projects is overseen by South32 in conjunction with the high-priority Hermosa project. According to the lawsuit, the permits impede recovery of the threatened Mexican spotted owl and the yellow-billed cuckoo, as well as disrupt federally protected migration corridors for endangered jaguars and ocelots. (The Forest Service declined to comment on the pending litigation.)

“Drilling could begin at any time.”

Hermosa project at South32 is not named in the lawsuit. In an email, Risner suggested PARA’s ecological concerns were overstated.

“With a surface footprint of just 600 acres, the Hermosa project is a fraction of the size of most mining projects and keeps sustainability at the core of our approach,” he said before the lawsuit was filed. “Hermosa has also had in place for more than a decade a robust biological monitoring program.”

PARA and its supporters called on the court to declare that the Forest Service broke the law and quash the agency’s authorizations. The moment demands urgency, they argued: “Drilling could begin at any time.”

A Sky Island

The weekend before PARA and its allies filed their lawsuit, Shafer and her partner, Robert Gay, an architect and journalist, invited me on a bumpy drive deep into the mountains to survey the Patagonias’ rivers and canyons and offered their take on current fight and its wider implications.

The Patagonias are an iconic member of the “sky islands,” a network of mountain ranges that rise up out of the desert of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Home to an estimated 100 endangered or threatened species, the mountains contain the largest cluster of mammal species anywhere north of Mexico, more than 500 species of birds, the highest density of breeding raptors on the planet, the most reptile and ant species in North America, and the most bee species on Earth.

The virtually unmatched biodiversity has made the town of Patagonia — with a population of around 900 residents — a world-class birding and wildlife research destination for generations. The town is also a launching point for the famed Arizona Trail, an 800-mile hike that traverses the state from north to south. More recently, it’s become home to a growing gravel bike scene, with riders pedaling through the mountains to reach the stunning San Rafael Valley, one of the last unbroken stretches of grassland ecosystems in the American Southwest.

Together with the unique abundance of flora and fauna, outdoor recreation has made Patagonia a hub in the “nature-based restorative economy” of Santa Cruz County. According to a 2021 University of Arizona study that PARA and other conservation groups in the area helped produce, the attractions generate tens of millions of dollars for local businesses and residents.

Though the battle over mining in the Patagonias goes back generations, this latest iteration is frustrating activists on the ground for reasons particular to the present moment.

Shafer and Gay are both diehard environmentalists. An “Earth Day is every day” flag hangs outside their home. They are deeply concerned about the climate crisis and would never say otherwise, but they are just as concerned about biodiversity loss and the planet’s unfolding sixth extinction. For them, a mine that would accelerate one cataclysm in the name of combatting another is unacceptable.

The minerals needed for a green energy revolution can be found elsewhere in the world, Shafer argued: “There’s no other place to go for Mexican spotted owl. Yellow-billed cuckoo. Jaguar. Ocelot.” The frustration in her voice rose as she ticked off the names.

Wild West

In the U.S., mining is governed by a law President Ulysses Grant signed in 1872. With scant regulations, the Wild West-era statute has undergone little substantive change in the century and a half since. Technology, however, has changed. The lone Civil War veteran busting his back hoping to strike it rich in a national forest has been replaced by multibillion-dollar corporations with the most advanced extraction tools money can buy.

In the Patagonias, the main hub of activity centers around an old mine water treatment site run by the American Smelting and Refining Company, or ASARCO. In the 1960s, the endeavor collapsed in a storm of bankruptcy and environmental damages, including pollution of Patagonia’s water.

Decades later, Arizona Mining Inc., owned by billionaire mining tycoon Richard Warke, purchased the land. South32 bought out Arizona Mining in 2018, in a $2 billion sale that marked one of the biggest mining deals of the year.

The area surrounding the old ASARCO site is largely national forest land, which South32 is actively exploring, as well as ranches and other parcels of private property. The privately held land is shrinking though, with South32 buying up properties one by one in recent years.

“It’s very, very active out here right now,” Shafer said. “These mountains, unfortunately, are chalked full of valuable minerals.”

For Shafer, the heart of the matter is water. Patagonia relies on the mountains entirely for its water, but the range’s hydrological significance doesn’t stop there. The mountains are the headwater of Sonoita Creek, which flows into the Santa Cruz River that provides water for more than a million people.

“The community’s concern is: What is this going to do to that ecosystem?”

When ASARCO was running its mine in the 1960s, the company’s chief problem was water; it would fill the mine’s shaft and the company lacked the technology to keep it out. Facing the same challenge today, South32 has received permission from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to run up to 4,500 gallons of water per minute through one of its two water treatment plants, then dump that water into Harshaw Creek, a tributary to Sonoita Creek. At max capacity, Shafer noted, that would mean more than 6.4 million gallons of water flowing into the Harshaw on a potentially daily basis.

“We don’t know how much water they’re taking out and using on site, but that’s how much they are permitted to discharge into the Harshaw Creek,” Shafer said. “The community’s concern is: What is this going to do to that ecosystem?”

“Desiccate and Saturate”

A small stretch of the Harshaw has perennial water. Monsoon season aside, the water tends to lap around a person’s ankles. The rest of the creek is typically dry. What 6.6 million gallons of water a day would do — and more when the heavy rains of late summer hit — is difficult to fathom.

To put the town at ease, South32 released a video last year. The minerals the U.S. government seeks lie below the water table under the Patagonia Mountains, the company explained. South32 would drop the table by pumping water out. The water would then pass through a treatment plant before being dumped into the Harshaw. This would create “a cone of depression” around the well site, allowing safe underground work.

“Most of the discharged water will soak back into the ground. Some will evaporate or be used by vegetation, but most will recharge the aquifer without ever reaching the town of Patagonia,” the company said. Even in the event of a 100-year, 24-hour flood, the increase would not have an “adverse effect” on the hamlet, South 32 said, nor did the company “expect that wildlife would be negatively affected.”

PARA consulted with hydrological experts and responded with a video of its own. Noting that South32 planned to pump “the equivalent of 10 Olympic-size swimming pools per day” into the Harshaw every day for up five years, the experts predicted the creek would quickly go from almost entirely dry to constantly flowing, carrying any undetected contaminants from the mine wherever it ran and heightening flood risks during monsoon season.

As we prepared to head out for our drive into the mountains, Gay pulled out a poster he made, detailing the expanse of water South32 expects the town of Patagonia to receive in the event of the 100-year flood — and how it would cover the town’s properties. “When you look at that closely,” he said, “it’s 70 percent of the lots now.”

In Patagonia, the problem would be too much water. In the mountains, it would be the opposite. “My fear is it’s going to dewater the mountain,” Shafer said. “If it dewaters the mountain, it kills the plant life. If it kills the plant life, there’s no place for this incredible biological diversity to survive. That’s my bottom line, but that’s not speaking as the organization. That’s speaking as Grandmother Carolyn.”

“It’s feast or famine,” Gay added. “I call it desiccate and saturate.”

Hoping for a Miracle

Patagonia’s paved roads disappeared in the rear-view mirror. Gay’s beat-up 4Runner crept slowly over the rough terrain. Approaching the old ASARCO site from the north, we passed abandoned mining tunnels from decades before, ranches that had been sold to the mining company, and others that soon might be.

“It is a patchwork of extreme complexity,” Gay said, leaning forward on the wheel. “Just a snarl, between the bumpiness of the land and the irregularity of the property lines.”

At a town council meeting last month, South32 presented its plan for managing the convoys of trucks that would run these roads, hauling minerals for green energy out of the mountains. In the early stages, it would be 62 heavy trucks, 26 buses, and 139 passenger vehicles daily. The flow would increase as the project became fully operational, at which point more than 200 heavy-duty trucks — in addition to the buses and passenger vehicles — would come through.

Given the landscape, traffic at that scale would require significant road work and with it, the obliteration of the mountains’ otherwise serene quiet. Like the water in Harshaw Creek, the change was difficult to imagine.

“Patagonia in 10 or 15 years won’t be recognizable anymore,” Patagonia Vice Mayor Michael Stabile said in an interview in the Patagonia Regional Times. Stabile was a founding member of PARA, though he no longer works with the organization. “They’re going to flood us with water,” he said. “And they’re going to flood us with trucks.”

“Patagonia in 10 or 15 years won’t be recognizable anymore.”

Days before we met up, Shafer had a similar moment of unsettling clarity. “I just realized I have shifted into grief about what is happening here,” she said. “Because of the realization of how special this is to me and that I will not be able to come out here for at least seven years, and when I do get to return, what will it be like?”

South32’s assurances about safeguarding the ecological systems were cold comfort for Shafer. “There’s nothing legally we can do to stop it. What we can legally do is mitigate the potential damage. That’s what we’re working very hard to do,” she said. “But unless something under the definition of miracle happens, there will be destruction by industrialized mining in these mountains.”

“The disaster of that,” Shafer said, “is that this is one of the regions of the world most in need of protection for species survival.”

The Cathedral

There was little to see at the old ASARCO site. A locked gate. A handful of “no trespassing” signs. We turned around and headed west into Humboldt Canyon, where work is currently overseen by Barksdale Capital Corp., a Canadian company specializing in mineral exploration — the kind that precedes a company like South32.

“I am in a stronger relationship with the natural world in this canyon than I am in any other canyon,” Shafer said, as we passed under a majestic spire of twisted rock. “This is a spiritual experience for me — full of experiences of dear friends of mine.”

Years back, Shafer officiated her friends’ wedding in the canyon. The couple was among PARA’s original founders. The groom was Glen Goodwin, an old-school Arizona cowboy who, in 2014, detected extensive water contamination stemming from the Patagonias’ old mine sites — including sites that are revving back up again today. Goodwin died last year. His ashes were spread in Humboldt Canyon.

The road twisted deeper into the mountains until coming to a stop in a clearing. Shafer got out and leaned against a tall pine tree, listening to the birds. “For me,” she said, “this meets the classic definition of a cathedral.”

On our way off the mountain, we stopped to watch mule deer grazing in a field. We dropped Gay off in town before leaving for the tour’s final destination: the perennially flowing stretch of Harshaw Creek.

Willow trees lined the way, along with massive Arizona sycamores. We walked down to a particularly beautiful bend in the creek. Shafer mentioned a paper she recently heard about discussing the mental health benefits of birdsongs.

“When you live with something all the time, you don’t think much about it,” she said. “But I have birdsong all day long, and it is something I do appreciate.”

Shafer is the last of PARA’s original core still living and working in Patagonia. “Two are now dead, two have moved out of country,” she said. She knows that stopping the mine is next to impossible, but then, the same could be said of her.

Shafer’s mission now is making the cost of doing business in the Patagonias match the value of the place. “I’m sorry if you’re not going to get a 25 percent profit margin,” she said. “If you have to live with 5 percent to honor what is here and you don’t like that, then go away.”

She leaned forward, smiling, and added in a whisper, “It wouldn’t hurt me if you left.”

The post Biden Fast-Tracked a Green Energy Mine in One of Earth’s Rarest Ecosystems. Arizona Locals Took It to Court. appeared first on The Intercept.

The 58-year-old was killed in a hail of gunfire last month, after stepping outside to find nearly a dozen Border Patrol agents and at least one tribal police officer advancing on his property in the dark. Late last week, a tensely awaited medical examiner’s report ruled the case a homicide, finding that Mattia was shot nine times. Border Patrol body camera footage released at the same time confirmed that what the authorities thought was a gun was in fact Mattia’s cellphone.

For Mattia’s family, more questions arose from the videos than answers, hardening their resolve to find accountability for the loss of a beloved father, brother, and uncle.

“If they’re allowed to get away with this now, it’s not going to stop.”

“We feel after watching the video that he was trying to comply the best he could,” Mattia’s niece, Yvonne Nevarez, told The Intercept. “If they’re allowed to get away with this now, it’s not going to stop.”

On Friday, Tohono O’odham Chair Ned Norris Jr. and Vice Chair Wavalene Saunders issued a statement on the body camera video and autopsy. “The information contained in the report and the body camera footage is graphic and concerning,” it said. “But we must not prejudge the situation and continue to allow investigating agencies to do their fact-finding work.”

The case is still under investigation, with the participation of the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, as well as the FBI and the Tohono O’odham Nation. Of the 10 Border Patrol agents involved in the incident, three opened fire, CBP has said. Those agents are currently on administrative leave. Whether Tohono O’odham police also opened fire is unclear.

The family hoped that the body camera videos would provide answers to their questions. When they arrived at a Tohono O’odham police substation last week to view the footage, however, they found that was not the case. Though CBP had confirmed that all 10 agents involved in the incident were wearing body cameras, the family was shown the same 28-minute edited video the agency released to the public last week, which only included video from the three agents who opened fire.

“We were under the impression that we were going to watch raw footage,” Nevarez said. “The way they put it together feels like a cheap attempt to justify what they did, and it feels like none of them are on our side. It feels like they’re just trying to defend themselves, instead of defending my uncle Ray.”

At around 9 p.m. on May 18, according to CBP, a Border Patrol station in Arizona’s remote west desert received a call for assistance from the Tohono O’odham authorities. The tribal police had received a report of shots fired in Menagers Dam, a Tohono O’odham village on the U.S.-Mexico border, 140 miles southwest of Tucson.

In a recording of the call, a Tohono O’odham police dispatcher reported that two tribal officers were headed to the village. A convoluted story then followed, involving multiple unidentified people and a restraining order, and mentioned a report of a shooting the previous day and a dangerous man in the area with a rifle. No names or addresses were relayed by Tohono O’odham authorities, and the origin of the purported shots was unclear.

“Everybody is saying they heard two,” the dispatcher said. “Nobody can pinpoint where it came from.”

Border Patrol agents mobilized within minutes. At 9:27 p.m., the agents met with an officer from the tribal police department at the Menagers Dam recreation center. The officer gave the agents the name of a man — redacted in the videos released last week — and said shots were fired in the vicinity of his property.

“It’s going to be a little bit of a guessing game trying to find it,” the officer said. “I don’t know exactly where that motherfucker’s at.” They would be approaching two homes with two brothers living in the buildings, he explained; one had a rifle.

“It’s dark as fuck,” he said, as the combined unit headed out, carrying rifles of their own.

At approximately 9:35 p.m., a convoy of seven law enforcement vehicles descended on Mattia’s property. Four minutes after arriving, the officers and agents approached his front door.

Standing outside his home, Mattia was ordered to approach with his hands up. “I am,” he said. Mattia was then ordered to “put it down.” In the body camera footage, an object can be seen tossed away by Mattia after he received the command; it was his sheathed hunting knife. The officers and agents then began shouting at Mattia with escalating intensity. 

“Get on your fucking face,” one of the men yelled.

“Put your hands out of your fucking pocket,” ordered another, his gun pointed at Mattia.

Mattia pulled his hand out of his pocket. One second later, the officers and agents let loose of volley of shots — initial reports indicated as many as 38 rounds were fired.

Mattia wheeled around then crumpled to the ground. The officers and agents began screaming at him. “Put your hands up so we can help you,” shouted one. “He’s still got a gun,” yelled another. “Put your hands out, bro,” said a third. “You’re gonna get shot again.”

Face down in the dirt, moaning and bleeding heavily, Mattia did not move. His hands were cuffed behind his back. The authorities, intent on finding a weapon, did not. Instead, they found Mattia’s cellphone.

“They asked him to take his hands out of his pockets. And that’s what he did. And then they shot him.”

“They asked him to drop his weapon,” Nevarez, Mattia’s niece, said. “That’s why he threw his knife toward them, and it was still in its sheath. They asked him to take his hands out of his pockets. And that’s what he did. And then they shot him.”

At 9:46 p.m., the authorities called for an air evacuation but were advised that one could not be provided due to inclement weather. A doctor declared Mattia dead at 10:06 p.m.

Roughly 31 seconds passed from the moment Mattia received his first command to the moment the first shot was fired. His body would remain where he had fallen for nearly seven hours. 

In the moments before he was killed, Mattia was on the phone with his older sister, who lives nearby in the village. Requesting that her name be withheld out of fear of retaliation, she described what she saw and heard that night — and what her family has experienced in the weeks since.

Mattia’s sister had been working outside all day. After sundown, she had turned on the TV and begun cooking dinner when her dog barked in the direction of her brother’s home. She texted him to see if everything was OK. Mattia replied that a man was just in his house, demanding to use the phone, presumably after crossing the border.

“He said he argued with him. And then another male walked into his home, and then another,” Mattia’s sister told The Intercept. “There were three of them all together. And he said that he just grabbed his hunting knife and scared them off. And he said they ran.”

The experience was not uncommon in Menagers Dam, but, depending on the situation, it could be unsettling. “Peaceful migrants who are trying to come through for a better life have never been a problem,” Nevarez said. “But there is a lot of illegal activity that happens here with drug smuggling and human traffickers.”

Help was never guaranteed. “It takes hours for anyone to come out here,” Mattia’s sister said. “If they’re not in the area, they don’t make their way over here.” One person she could count on was her brother. “Ray has always been here to protect me in the yard,” she said. “We hear something, our dogs start barking, and he’ll walk around with a flashlight to see what’s going on.”

Mattia told his sister he called authorities to report the men in his home, though which authorities he may have called is unclear. Around the time of the siblings’ text exchange, a convoy of law enforcement vehicles began filing into their village, and armed men began jumping out. Mattia’s sister was alarmed. This time, she called her brother.

“I said, ‘They’re running all crazy,’” she recalled. “I told him, ‘They’re in the wash running toward your house.’”

“I was in shock, just hearing all those gunshots, knowing they were shooting at my brother.”

Mattia’s sister remembered Raymond responding calmly, telling her that he would go outside and talk to the agents. Seconds later, she heard a sound she will never forget: a cacophony of gunfire so heavy that she thought a cross-border shootout was underway. She could see lights flashing around her brother’s property and heard a man’s voice shouting for someone to grab his bag. She immediately knew he was seeking his first-aid kit.

“I was in shock, just hearing all those gunshots, knowing they were shooting at my brother,” she said. “I saw Border Patrol running from vehicle to vehicle, and I shouted to them: ‘What are you guys shooting at? Did you just shoot my brother Raymond?’ And they said, ‘We possibly did.’ And they kept running.”

At a loss for what to do, Mattia’s sister called her children but was so distraught, they could barely understand what she was saying. She decided to drive to the home of her adult niece and nephew — Raymond’s children — and go from there.

Together, the family approached the scene of the shooting. Mattia’s sister was met by the Tohono O’odham police officer who led the operation. “I said, ‘I want to know what happened to Ray — why were they shooting Ray so many times? Why are they all here?’” she recalled asking. “All he told me was, ‘You can’t go over there. It’s a crime scene now.’”

The family stood and watched as Border Patrol agents picked up the bullet casings that littered the ground. An overnight storm rolled in. It began to rain. The family continued to wait. “They were there for a while, and we were just watching them,” Mattia’s sister said. “As I saw them walking by with their guns, it just felt like they were walking in slow motion.”

The hours ticked away. The family was unsure if Mattia was alive or dead. “Nobody’s talking to us. Nobody’s telling us anything,” Mattia’s sister said. Eventually, the worst was confirmed: Mattia was gone. His sister told an investigator that they needed to perform a blessing on the body. “It’s traditional,” she said. The family was denied, though the man did offer to set a candle by Mattia’s corpse.

In the early morning hours, Mattia’s remains were finally loaded into a vehicle. The family said their goodbyes to an unopened body bag.

“We did a blessing for him while he was in the vehicle in a body bag, and we had one of our traditional singers sing a song for him, a traditional song,” Mattia’s sister said. “We all took it very hard.”

Mattia’s body was taken to Tucson.

“I asked the coroner, ‘When we have Ray’s funeral, will we be able to have an open casket?’” his sister said. “She said, ‘His face is OK, but from the neck down — it’s not very good.’”

In the weeks since, Mattia’s sister had a single meeting with a Tohono O’odham investigator. Other than that, the family has not been interviewed by the authorities, including the federal authorities at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security involved in the investigation.

Mattia was a member of the community council in Menagers Dam, where he had been outspoken against the corruption he saw on the border, including corruption involving border law enforcement. He was a traditional singer, an avid hunter, and an artist, making jewelry, pottery, and paintings that honored the borderlands that the Tohono O’odham call home.

For Mattia’s family, none of the information that’s emerged so far has been able to explain why the authorities ended up at his home in the first place. The references to a restraining order and a double shooting in the community the previous day don’t make sense.

“My uncle Ray was out of town celebrating his birthday the night before,” Nevarez said. “The dispatcher states that they couldn’t pinpoint where the shooting was coming from, but yet, when they are there at the rec center, they’re coming straight to my uncle Ray’s house, with their guns drawn.”

“They’re walking around like it’s the war zone,” she said. “This is a village. People live here. Our houses are in close proximity to each other, and there’s people with families and children that live around here.”

The post Border Patrol Video of Killing Shows Native Man Had No Gun, Complied With Orders appeared first on The Intercept.

When the sun goes down, the wall’s ecological footprint expands up and out, with lights reaching into the sky and illuminating cross-border habitats. Most of that illumination is concentrated near population centers and ports of entry, but with the flip of a switch, that could easily change.

According to a new survey, federal contractors have placed nearly 2,000 stadium-style lights in southern Arizona alone in recent years, imperiling some of the most ecologically complex and celebrated public lands in the United States.

In a report published Tuesday, the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based environmental organization, revealed the placement of more than 1,800 lights on federal land in the Sonoran Desert between 2019 and 2021, including wildlife preserves that are home to at least 16 threatened or endangered species. The new lights are not yet in use, and according to the report’s authors, they never should be.

“The scientific record clearly shows that artificial light at night can have costly, even deadly effects on a wide variety of species including amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, insects and plants,” the group said. “High-intensity lighting in these priority conservation areas would be devastating to the rich biodiversity of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico.”

The Center for Biological Diversity documented the placement of lighting in several of the most famed ecosystems of the American Southwest, including the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, and the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.

Together, the four parcels provide a habitat for hundreds of species of birds and an astonishing number of ecosystem-sustaining insects, while also featuring some of the only U.S.-Mexico jaguar migration corridors on the planet, all of which depend on dark skies to survive and thrive.

“The entire purpose of the wildlife refuges where these lights are is contradicted by the actions of CBP.”

The Center for Biological Diversity’s findings mark the latest example of the mission of the Department of Homeland Security — especially Customs and Border Protection — colliding with that of federal agencies mandated to protect public lands and wildlife. Those collisions have been particularly acute in Arizona, where CBP has blown apart national monuments and wildlife refuges and desecrated sacred Native American heritage sites to make way for wall construction.

“The entire purpose of the wildlife refuges where these lights are is contradicted by the actions of CBP,” Russ McSpadden, the Center for Biological Diversity’s borderlands advocate and lead author of the report, told The Intercept. “It’s outrageous that they built these. These are some of the most important conservation lands in North America.”

The expansion of Arizona’s border wall lighting began in 2019 under former President Donald Trump. The additions created a major hurdle for officials at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, who were in the middle of applying for certification with the International Dark-Sky Association for recognition of the monument’s unique lack of light of pollution.

Monument Superintendent Scott Stonum, in a statement to Arizona Luminaria, a Tucson-based news outlet, said the National Park Service “provided comments at the request of CBP concerning potential impacts and suggested mitigations” at the time of the expansion. The service’s “concerns included potential impacts to natural and cultural resources: disturbance of archeological sites, disruption of wildlife corridors, wilderness values, scenic vistas, night-sky, and others.”

In a call with reporters last year, CBP officials outlined a series of construction projects related to the border wall, from repairing gates and roads to filling gaps. New lighting was not included in the contracts for the “remediation” work, officials said in September, adding that the agency was “currently evaluating the operational requirements for lighting across the southwest border” and “looking at the technology available that may help reduce the need for light.”

Whether CBP’s position holds 10 months later is unclear; the agency did not respond to a request for comment by publication. The Center for Biological Diversity’s report, however, shows that whether new lighting goes up or not, the infrastructure is already in place in southern Arizona to do significant environmental harm.

“If they ever switch the lights on, you’d be able to see this huge linear line of lights from space.”

The group’s investigation began after McSpadden called several of Arizona’s federal land management offices and learned that they had no idea how many lights CBP had placed in their jurisdictions. He began making trips to the border and counting lights on the wall, then cross-checked those counts with public records requests and follow-up calls with federal officials.

“The biodiversity in these regions is off the hook and they built it right across federally designated critical habitat, habitat for at least 16 endangered species,” McSpadden said. “If they ever switch the lights on, you’d be able to see this huge linear line of lights from space.”

Contrary to the desolate desert images of the popular imagination, the ecosystems of southern Arizona are among the most vibrant on the planet.

“Half of all breeding bird species in North America are known to use the San Pedro River corridor,” the Center for Biological Diversity noted, “along with 82 species of mammals and 43 species of reptiles and amphibians.”

A single game camera along the river documented more than 1,100 instances of wildlife crossing through the borderlands in a three-year period. The travelers included badgers, bobcats, javelina, mountain lions, raccoons, and multiple species of skunk and deer.

Additionally, the report added, “the borderlands between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, contain some of the highest diversity of insects in the world.” According to one study cited by the group, “the highest diversity of bee species anywhere on Earth exists within just six square miles of San Bernardino Valley, including the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.”

“Turning on the existing border lighting infrastructure at Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta would be devastating for lesser long-nosed bats.”

The insects provide food for the area’s world-famous bird and bat populations. Lesser long-nosed bats in particular, which migrate by the thousands over the border wall each summer, are key pollinators for Arizona’s iconic saguaro cacti. They are also prone to significant behavioral disruptions when confronted with giant beams of light.

“Turning on the existing border lighting infrastructure at Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta would be devastating for lesser long-nosed bats, shooting a massive wall of light into the sky stretching dozens of miles,” the Center for Biological Diversity reported.

The danger was one of many cited in the report. Others manifested in aquatic habitats, such as the famed Quitobaquito Springs on Organ Pipe, where threatened and endangered species like the Sonoyta turtle and the Quitobaquito pupfish are barely clinging to existence.

The impacts on the desert’s smallest creatures would have cascading effects on the ecosystem’s largest and most iconic animals, the report added, including endangered populations of jaguar and ocelot that still roam the borderlands: “Exposure to artificial lighting has been demonstrated to substantially change behavior patterns of rodents and prey species, thereby altering predator-prey relationships and diminishing hunting opportunities for carnivores.”

Lighting up the borderlands “would worsen the already devastating harm caused by border walls,” the report argued, “further altering behavior patterns and degrading habitat.”

The post The Feds Have Thousands of Stadium Lights on the Border. Switching Them On Would Devastate Desert Ecosystems. appeared first on The Intercept.

The group was small. A man, two women, and two children, a boy and a girl. Their bright shirts made them easy to spot against the green and gold of the desert. The boy waved his arms above his head as I drove nearer, like a shipwreck survivor on a deserted island. I rolled down my window. He looked to be about 8 years old, maybe 9. Just tall enough to peek over my door, he said hello in English. The man beside him looked exhausted and desperate. I asked if they needed help. They did.

It was the morning of Friday, May 12. Roughly 12 hours had passed since President Joe Biden lifted a public health order known as Title 42, which had strangled asylum access at the border for more than three years. He replaced the measure with a new suite of border enforcement policies that would have much the same effect.

Across the country, the headline was chaos. The details didn’t matter as much as the perception. Title 42 created a massive backlog of asylum-seekers south of the border, and now it was going away. The president’s critics did the smugglers’ advertising for them, repeating ad nauseam the lie that the border was now open and Biden wanted the migrants to become Americans.

In a press conference earlier in the week, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, outlined the new enforcement framework. “Our overall approach is to build lawful pathways for people to come to the United States and to impose tougher consequences,” he said. Simply showing up at the nation’s doorstep was no longer enough. Asylum-seekers could download an app and to join an electronic line now. Those who failed to seek asylum in another country first would not get in. Deportations would be fast-tracked, and new tweaks to the asylum interviews were aimed at making them harder to pass.

How it would all play out remained to be seen. “I think DHS is just absolutely terrified and clueless,” a senior asylum officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, told me while Mayorkas spoke on Thursday. The administration had reason to be concerned: The estimated arrival numbers were historic, and Republicans clearly smelled blood.

By the time the first day was through, the headlines imagining chaos were replaced by reports of calm across the border. While that may have been true in some parts, on a far-flung strip of border road east of the tiny community of Sasabe, Arizona, the first 24 hours in post-Title 42 America offered a grim suggestion of the days to come. Heeding the call of the state’s right-wing political leaders, armed vigilantes stalked and harassed humanitarian aid providers during the day and by nightfall rounded up migrant children in the dark. The events followed weeks of rising tensions that included the arrest of a longtime aid volunteer by federal authorities. Caught in the middle, as ever, were desperate families facing a deadly desert.

An hour and a half southwest of Tucson, the beauty of the Buenos Aires refuge belies its capacity for lethality, and yet, people from around the world, kids included, cross the landscape in sneakers, without sufficient water or any real sense of where they are, all the time.

Over the past two-and-a-half decades, ever since the government began enlisting the Sonoran Desert in its war on unauthorized migration, the office of the Pima County examiner in Tucson has recorded more than 4,000 migrant deaths along the state’s southern border. Nationwide, experts put the minimum death toll at around 10,000, though all agree the true count is undoubtedly higher. Last year was the deadliest on record.

The refuge has seen its share of migrant deaths, the most recent known case an unidentified man whose skeletal remains were recovered on the road running parallel to the border wall, just west of Coches Ridge, last October. The medical examiner estimated he had been dead for at least six months, maybe longer. The cause was unknown.

The man’s bones were found not far from the spot where the boy stood outside my truck on Friday morning. As usual, I had come to report but knew, as anyone who ventures into the Sonoran Desert’s backcountry should, that such an encounter was possible. The man in the group told me they had no water, no phone, and they had been walking through the wilderness for three days. They were from Ecuador. I asked if they wanted me to call the Border Patrol. The man said yes. I gave him the jug of water I had brought just in case and drove off to find cellphone service and call 911.

The Border Patrol agent who came rumbling down the road was gruff. I told him the situation. He asked if I knew that I was trespassing. While I was on a public road on public land, I knew the Border Patrol had recently adopted some novel interpretations of the law when it came to U.S. citizens passing through the area. I guided the conversation elsewhere. The Ecuadorians reported being in the elements for three days, I explained. They all say that, the agent replied, before driving off to collect the migrants waiting down the road.

They all say that because it’s almost always true. A day earlier, I had spoken to Dora Rodriguez, a Tucson-based borderlands activist. In the summer of 1980, Rodriguez was among a group of 26 Salvadoran refugees who were abandoned by their guide in the unforgiving expanse of the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, 150 miles west of Buenos Aires. Thirteen of Rodriguez’s companions lost their lives that day. She was 19 years old. It was the deadliest event of its kind at the time.

Today, Rodriguez is the director of Salvavision, an organization devoted to Salvadoran migrants and deportees. She also volunteers with Humane Borders, an aid group that maintains large water tanks in areas where migrants are known to die, and she’s a co-founder of Casa de la Esperanza, a migrant shelter in Mexico southwest of Buenos Aires. She knows what migrants passing through the Sonoran Desert face as well as anyone.

“On the Mexico side, there is still two hours from the road to get to the border wall,” Rodriguez told me the day before Title 42 ended.

The more difficult the U.S. makes it to cross the border, the more demand there is among people who want or need to cross it, fueling an ever-expanding market of illicit service providers. The customers don’t choose where they’re crossed. The smugglers do, and in the region of northern Sonora that abuts the Buenos Aires refuge, that means a long walk through the wilderness before you even make it to the border.

In addition to powering a vicious cycle that puts vulnerable people in dangerous situations, the smuggling market is in constant dialogue with shifting policies and narratives in the U.S. In the small town in northern Mexico where she works, everybody knows the border is now open, Rodriguez explained. She hears it from the women who staff her shelter.

“It just boggles my mind how they say, ‘Oh, Dorita, the border is going to be open, so people are going to come.’ And I say, ‘Where have you heard that?’” she said. “If that’s their mentality, if that’s what they hear, I am sure that’s what the smugglers are telling our people.”

Of course, detachments from reality know no border. Last spring’s arrival of a group of QAnon adherents who set up camp along the Buenos Aires border road proved it.

With Bibles in hand, the vigilantes intercepted groups of migrant children, who they claimed were being sex trafficked. They targeted local humanitarian volunteers as the perpetrators, posting their targets’ names, photos, and home addresses online. Eventually, after they ran out of money and a New York Times story exposed their harassment, they left.

Soon after, humanitarian aid volunteers in the area began noticing unusual “no trespassing” signs along the border wall. Though attached to federal property on federal land, the signs cited a state trespassing statute. Nevertheless, it was Border Patrol agents who began warning the volunteers that they could no longer stop on the road to provide aid.

In the wake of the QAnon affair, the Border Patrol resolved to never again allow camping near the border road, John Mennell, a Customs and Border Protection supervisory public affairs specialist in Tucson, told me.

There is no federal law that directly authorizes Border Patrol agents — employees of an immigration enforcement agency with some drug interdiction authorities — to arrest U.S. citizens for trespassing on federal public lands. In Arizona, however, there is a state trespassing law that allows for the arrest of U.S. citizens who disobey law enforcement officers under certain conditions. There’s also a federal statute, the Assimilative Crimes Act, that allows federal authorities to enforce state laws on federal land when no federal version of that law exists; the resulting charge, though drawn from a state statute, is filed at the federal level.

Putting two and two together, the Border Patrol took the position that U.S. citizens could drive along the border wall, but if they stopped, they would be violating the state’s trespassing laws and subject to federal prosecution. “The farmers and ranchers can use the border road to get up and around on their property or things like that,” Mennell said. Beyond that, the road would be considered off-limits. “What they don’t want is what we had earlier,” Mennell said, “where we had people camping on the road.”

“When you’re 75, eh — it’s just like, don’t mess with an old woman. I’m not afraid.”

Jane Storey, a 75-year-old retired schoolteacher, is among the Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans’ most active members. She is also one of two Samaritans whose personal information the vigilantes posted online. “They used to harass me all the time,” Storey told me last week. She didn’t let it get it to her. “I don’t know,” she said, “when you’re 75, eh — it’s just like, don’t mess with an old woman. I’m not afraid.”

After moving to the border in 2018, Storey found a calling in aid work. She ditched her Prius for a used Subaru that could better handle the rough terrain of the region. She went to the wall as often as she could. “I started keeping track because I was finding people all the time,” Storey said. She tallied 193 people, mostly children, who she provided aid to up until March 17, the day the Border Patrol finally placed her under arrest.

According to her account, Storey had pulled over for a group of children who were approaching a gap in the wall, one of whom was holding a baby. A Border Patrol agent had been trailing her and got out when she did. She asked the agent if she could give the children water. No, he told her, she had been repeatedly warned not to stop by the wall. Storey asked if she was going to be arrested. The agent said yes. The volunteer handed her car keys and phone to two of her companions.

With flex-cuffs fastened tight around her wrists, the retired teacher was driven to Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson and placed in a cold, concrete cell. Having written her attorney’s phone number inside her shoe, she was able to place a call for help.

In a statement, Diana L. Varela, executive assistant to U.S. Attorney Gary M. Restaino, acknowledged Storey’s arrest and explained her office’s decision not to prosecute the case. “Charging the subject in those circumstances would have been a hasty solution,” she wrote. That did not, however, mean that federal prosecutors would never bring such a case. “The United States has clear jurisdiction to prosecute crimes, including state law trespass crimes, on the Roosevelt Reservation near the border,” Varela said, referring to the strip of land that runs parallel to the border wall. “Whether or not prosecution is justified depends on the nature of the intrusion into Border Patrol activities and the nature of the trespass activity.

“We will continue to evaluate potential charges for trespass on a case-by-case basis,” Varela added. “Because we cannot resolve border issues through prosecution alone, we are also looking for an opportunity to engage in a dialogue about Samaritan activities — and the adverse impact some of those activities can have on Border Patrol’s efforts to safely secure the border — with the leadership of the organization.”

Storey was released from her cell. A forest service officer drove her to a gas station on the southeast edge of Tucson. The officer parked behind the building and told her to get out. Storey had been unable to reach her family while she was locked up. She had no phone, the sun was going down, and she was more than 30 miles from home.

If Storey’s arrest hadn’t rattled humanitarian providers enough, the return of the vigilantes did. In the weeks leading to the lifting of Title 42, the volunteers repeatedly found their water tanks shot through with holes or drained at the spigot. “Almost every week, we have a tank that’s been shot,” Rodriguez said.

One of the prime culprits in the destruction is a man named Paul Flores, who made local news after verbally berating a group of birders as pedophiles. He has posted videos online claiming that the humanitarian aid groups were in cahoots with the Biden administration and “the cartel” in a plot to destroy the country.

Ahead of and after the end of Title 42 in Arizona, claims that the state is under invasion have only intensified. Pinal County Sheriff and Senate hopeful Mark Lamb has made the claim repeatedly in videos to his supporters. Rep. Paul Gosar, the ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorist representing Arizona’s 9th congressional district, has taken it a step further, telling his constituents that “America is under a planned and sustained invasion — we must act accordingly.” On the other side of the state, the Cochise County Republican Committee has taken it further still, with chair Brandon Martin calling on residents to “build an army” and “repel the invasion.”

On Thursday night, with plans to visit the wall the next day, Rodriguez found herself worrying. Her concerns were not misplaced. The following day, Flores was back in the desert posting videos of himself emptying a Humane Borders water tank. Rodriguez and her fellow volunteers, meanwhile, were followed by truckload of well-known armed right-wing extremists, including a member of an Arizona Proud Boys chapter.

At one point in the day, the men pulled over to film a video of themselves harassing the humanitarian aid providers. Among the most talkative of the crew was Ethan Schmidt-Crockett, a bigot provocateur who was recently convicted of harassment-related charges. In multiple photos and videos shared throughout the day, Schmidt-Crockett appeared with a rifle over his shoulder.

By evening, the men were documenting themselves corralling a group of migrant children on the border road, purportedly an attempt to gather their biographic information. Despite complaining of Border Patrol “harassment” earlier in the day, the vigilantes managed to avoid arrest.

That the people who need refuge most are often the ones least likely to find it is an age-old border problem. That dynamic has now worsened, Randy Mayer, the pastor of the Good Shepherd church in Green Valley, told me the morning before Title 42 was lifted.

Mayer has spent more than two decades providing humanitarian aid on both sides of the border. He sees the administration’s CBP One app as a failing attempt to implement technocratic solutions for flesh-and-blood problems. The app is meant to allow migrants to schedule an appointment at a port of entry, now a prerequisite to requesting asylum.

“A family might get two people registered and then it’s shut down because all the appointments have been taken. So it’s separating families.”

“It’s just a crapshoot if you’re going to be able to get an appointment, and it’s really hard to get your whole family in,” Mayer said. Entering information for each person takes about an hour, he explained. “A family might get two people registered and then it’s shut down because all the appointments have been taken,” Mayer said. “So it’s separating families.”

It’s also creating a two-tiered system for refuge. A family with a laptop in Mexico City stands a far better chance of securing a place in line than does one relying on a beat-up phone that’s crossed three countries connected to dodgy Wi-Fi at an internet café near a border shelter, Mayer said. Most importantly, the app does not undo the conditions that cause people to flee their homes in the first place.

“I’ve talked to Guatemalan Uber drivers who’ve been robbed, their vehicles stolen by the gangs, they literally are fleeing intense danger. The gangs are after them. They’ve killed family members,” Mayer said. “They’re running for their life.”

The pastor, drawing from decades of personal experience, believes the present moment has a clear and predictable end state — one with dire consequences for potentially millions of people down the line. “They’re gonna end up coming to the desert,” he said. “You may not see that right away, but that’s where this is headed.”

The post Desperate Families and Gun-Toting Vigilantes Converge in Arizona After Title 42 Ends appeared first on The Intercept.

Peppered with racist stereotypes, the proposal ultimately crumbled in the face of local and national backlash, but the tone was set.

In the months since, the Montana GOP’s willingness to push the envelope against perceived cultural enemies has only intensified, culminating this week in the exile of Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr, the first transgender lawmaker in the state’s history, from the House chamber.

“They have such anger and disdain and disgust that they can’t control it.”

As policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Montana office, Keegan Medrano has been in the Capitol in Helena day after day for the past four months, meeting with lawmakers and advocate on bills impacting Native American and LGBTQ+ communities. For Medrano, a queer descendant of the Muscogee Creek nation, the work is both professional and personal.

“What we’ve been seeing over this session is that there is such disdain, such animus, such disgust with queer people, Indigenous people, people that don’t fit in within their vision of what Montana is,” Medrano told The Intercept. “They have such anger and disdain and disgust that they can’t control it,” he said. “And they’re now weaponizing the institutions to exclude us and police us.”

In a vote that broke along party lines Wednesday, Montana Republicans banned Zephyr from speaking or voting from the floor or the gallery of the Capitol for the remainder of this year’s session, which ends next week.

The move against Zephyr followed a pitched battle in recent weeks over a bill that would bar gender-affirming medical care for Montana youth; similar proposals have been introduced and passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country. On April 17, Montana’s Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte indicated he would sign the bill, despite the pleas of his own son.

“He talks about compassion toward children, the youth of Montana, while simultaneously taking away health care from the youth in Montana,” David Gianforte, a 32-year-old member of Montana’s LGBTQ+ community said of his father’s support for the legislation in an interview with the Montana Free Press.

Powered by an influx of ultra-wealthy conservatives and the ever-expanding regional influence of Christian nationalism, Montana’s reputation as a live-and-let-live state has increasingly given way to the hard-right politics of its Republican Freedom Caucus in recent years.

Greg Gianforte, the governor presiding over the shift, rose to national prominence in 2017, when he choke-slammed a journalist on the eve of his election to Congress. Drawing on millions of dollars in donations to himself — Gianforte was then the richest man in Congress — the evangelical tech entrepreneur was elected governor in 2020, breaking the hold Democrats had on the office for a decade and a half.

The GOP’s grip on the levers of state power further tightened with a series of wins in last year’s midterm elections, giving the party a supermajority heading into this year’s legislative session.

Zephyr, a 34-year-old representing the liberal college town of Missoula, found herself in the crosshairs of Montana’s Republican hard-liners after speaking out against the bill to ban medical care for transgender youth.

“If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” Zephyr told her colleagues earlier this month.

That night, in a letter and tweet that deliberately misgendered the Democratic lawmaker, all 21 Montana Freedom Caucus members demanded Zephyr’s censure for “using inappropriate and uncalled-for language during a floor debate.”

Zephyr’s efforts to speak from the gallery in the state capital were repeatedly rebuffed in the days that followed. On Monday, hundreds of protesters converged on Helena. “Let her speak,” they chanted. Capitol police in riot gear were deployed. Seven people were arrested on trespassing charges, including two of Medrano’s staffers.

Among Zephyr’s constituents, a combination of frustration, fear, and outrage had been building from the moment the legislative session began, Medrano said; the protest was a form of release.

“I think that all sort of came out,” he said. “After over 80 days of not only the jokes, not only the questions, but also the policy, and then now, where we’re actually targeting, harassing, being retaliatory toward individuals from those communities.”

For Medrano, there is a throughline that binds Indigenous rights, trans rights, and reproductive rights: three areas where the Republican Party has directed much of its attention this session.

“Every single one of those individuals practices their own sort of body sovereignty and autonomy,” he said. “The Montana Republicans, the Freedom Caucus, they’re all afraid of these people, and so they legislate to extinguish their existence and/or to make their existences not palatable and not a part of what Montana is.”

“We’re seeing — across age, across race, and even really, across political belief — a real movement being started here to push back and to respond.”

Silenced by her Republican colleagues, Zephyr now sits on a bench outside the Capitol gallery, voting on bills and staying connected with her constituents on her laptop.

“It casts a pall over that building,” Medrano said. “There are lots of awful things that happened there, but there are truly new lows being explored by the supermajority.” At the same time, he added, “I think it speaks to her perseverance, her courage, and bravery.”

Medrano believes the Republican Party’s actions in Montana may, in the end, expand the movement it has sought to control.

“I think this is the moment. I’ve never seen such a groundswell and such camaraderie amongst people,” he said. “We’re seeing — across age, across race, and even really, across political belief — a real movement being started here to push back and to respond.”

The post An Insider’s View of the Montana Legislature’s Attacks on Trans Rep. Zooey Zephyr appeared first on The Intercept.

In a hearing that stretched into the wee hours of the morning Wednesday, the Texas House of Representatives heard testimony from first-generation college students, undocumented activists, parents, and children about the inherent dangers of House Bill 20. The author of the controversial proposal, Republican Rep. Matt Schaefer, meanwhile, was grilled by his Democratic counterparts over his bill’s logical and constitutional implications.

In his most extensive public defense of his bill to date, Schaefer, the founder and chair of the arch-conservative Texas Freedom Caucus, collapsed the issues of fentanyl overdoses and migration, ignoring facts and evidence to argue that migrants are responsible for a wave of death and suffering that exceeds the worst episodes of national trauma in modern American history. Pointing to national overdose statistics, he described “a scale of death far greater than Pearl Harbor, the attacks on 9/11, or the totality of the Vietnam War.”

“So much fentanyl is coming across the border, it’s unreal,” the Texas lawmaker said before proceeding to conflate and misrepresent several issues regarding migration and drugs.

As federal officials, border researchers, and journalists have documented ad nauseam, most fentanyl illegally trafficked into the United States comes through U.S. ports of entry, often in vehicles driven by U.S. citizens; according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data cited in Wednesday’s hearing, 86 percent of defendants convicted of smuggling fentanyl through ports of entry are U.S. citizens.

Migrants, on the other hand, overwhelmingly cross the border between ports of entry, thanks to successive bipartisan policies that have made admission at the ports — including pursuit of asylum claims — all but impossible. Customs officers who work the ports where most of the drugs are crossing are distinct from the Border Patrol agents who work between them, undermining a central argument Schaefer made that Mexican organized crime uses migrants to pull away U.S. officials who would otherwise be intercepting drug flows.

“Many of them are coming here just for a better life and make wonderful neighbors,” Schaefer said of the migrants themselves, but “some of them are criminals — rapists, gang members, MS-13.” To address the threat, Schaefer has proposed the “Border Protection Unit,” a new security force composed of law enforcement personnel and private individuals alike, answering directly to the governor in a mission to “arrest, detain, and deter individuals crossing the border.”

Schaefer’s bill, which Texas Democrats have dubbed the “vigilante death squads policy,” was among a bundle of proposals lawmakers heard Wednesday that would create a parallel, state-led border and immigration enforcement apparatus in Texas.

The bills are part of an explicit GOP effort to provoke a legal fight that would ultimately overturn Arizona v. United States, a 2012 Supreme Court decision that struck down a similar set of policies in Arizona as unconstitutional. Republican thought leaders, both on the border and in Washington, believe that the current conservation composition of the court is inclined to reverse the decision.

Democratic Rep. Rafael Anchía drilled down on whether the intent of Schaefer’s bill was to undo the Supreme Court case.

“The intent of the bill is to assert the authority of the state of Texas under the United States Constitution,” Schaefer told him.

“Is there a reason you’re being cagey and coy and not wanting to answer?” Anchía asked.

“I’ve answered your question,” Schaefer replied.

Rep. Chris Turner, also a Democrat, pressed Schaefer about the fundamentals of his proposal as it related to drug overdoses, asking where the majority of the fentanyl smuggled into the U.S. comes from.

“The southern border,” Schaefer said.

“Where specifically?” Turner asked.

“I think there’s some debate about that, Representative,” Schaefer replied. “I think you’re going to hear some say that most of it comes through the ports of entry.” Others, he added, without specifying who, will say “a lot of it comes through in between the ports of entry, but I think in a way it’s distinction without a difference.”

Turner noted that seizure data from Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency responsible for border security, shows that more than 90 percent of the fentanyl trafficked into the U.S. comes through the ports.

Though he used CBP’s figures concerning the apprehension of people at the border repeatedly throughout his testimony, Schaefer said he did not trust the data. At one point, the Republican lawmaker attempted to turn the tables, pressing Turner to tell him the last time he had visited the border.

“We’re gonna talk about your bill, and I’m gonna get to ask you the questions,” Turner said. “I don’t represent a border community, and last I checked, you don’t represent a border community, so we’re both talking about a region of the state that neither one of us represents, frankly.”

Schaefer’s hometown of Tyler, Texas, is more than 500 miles from the border, closer to Arkansas than Mexico.

“What I’m trying to get to is the data and the facts, and the facts indicate that we know fentanyl is a huge crisis in our country,” Turner said. “We have a lot of different strategies that we can use to deal with that. I don’t think your bill addresses fentanyl at all. That’s that’s my problem with your claims.”

Schaefer’s proposal came at the end of a grueling day of testimony involving multiple bills that would effectively institutionalize Operation Lone Star, a $4 billion program that Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott authorized in 2021. The program has been riddled with scandal — including the deaths of National Guard personnel and systemic civil rights violations that have led to a Justice Department investigation — while making no discernable impact on the illicit movement of drugs or people across the border.

By midday, more than 300 people were registered to testify on Schaefer’s bill, nearly all of them in opposition. Many drove across the state to make their voices heard and did so despite the fact that Schaefer didn’t rise to defend his bill until after 9 p.m.

Across four hours of testimony, one speaker after another blasted the proposal as racist, sloppy, dangerous, and unnecessary.

Undocumented activist María Treviño recalled the “dark history” of a state-backed vigilante groups targeting Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas.

“This bill doubles down on these racist and illegal activities by potentially training and employing anti-immigrant hate groups,” Treviño said. “I oppose this pricey, xenophobic, and unconstitutional legislation that undermines the separation of powers of our country and believe that Texas legislators should instead prioritize the health of our residents.”

The youngest of the speakers was 9-year-old Asher Vargas, the son of a firefighter, who took the microphone late in the evening.

With Schaefer sitting behind him in the front row of the hearing room, Vargas told the lawmakers about his shifts volunteering at the local migrant shelter, folding clothes, preparing meals, and, with his dad’s help, arranging travel plans for families new to the U.S.

“I find joy in helping the migrants,” Vargas said. His grandmother came to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1980s, he explained, making his family’s life possible. “Migrants come seeking peace and better lives, just like my abuelita did,” he said. “This bill will make it harder for them, which is not very kind.”

“Do you want to be known as a hateful, unwelcoming state?” Vargas asked. “I know I don’t.”

The post Hundreds Turn Out to Denounce Texas Republicans’ “Vigilante Death Squads Policy” appeared first on The Intercept.

In a 44-page decision last week, Judge Todd Robinson ruled that U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, officials violated New York City pastor Kaji Dousa’s constitutional rights by adding her to a blacklist of border activists and calling on Mexican authorities to apprehend her — all despite lacking any evidence that she was involved in illegal activity.

For Dousa, whose experience The Intercept chronicled in an investigation last year, the victory marked the end of an exhausting ordeal that’s spanned more than four years.

“I had two real reasons for going into this — one, of course, to make sure that I’m safe to travel, but the other is that I just wanted it to help people, and from the responses that I’ve been getting, it seems like it will,” Dousa told The Intercept. “I feel like it’s a win for the helpers.”

Dousa filed suit against CBP and other elements of the Department of Homeland Security in July 2019 after a government whistleblower leaked internal documents showing that the pastor was added to a secret blacklist of journalists, lawyers, and advocates associated with migrant caravans in the San Diego-Tijuana area. A Homeland Security inspector general’s report later confirmed that she was one of at least 51 U.S. citizens who were targeted and tracked by their own government for their proximity to asylum-seekers as part of CBP’s Operation Secure Line. Nearly half of the so-called lookouts CBP placed “were on people for whom there was no evidence of direct involvement in illegal activity,” the inspector general found.

Through her litigation, Dousa’s lawyers discovered that she was also on a list that included 14 U.S. citizens whose personal information a CBP official shared with Mexican authorities, claiming that the pastor and the others were “caravan organizers/instigators” and requesting their apprehension. In his court testimony, the CBP official in question, Saro Oliveri, confirmed that he had no basis for making the highly unusual and potentially dangerous request for Dousa’s capture by foreign security forces.

“I think this has to be one of the most egregious rights violations in recent memory.”

“We view this as a really significant victory for religious liberty and for free speech generally, but I think this decision especially stands out,” Stanton Jones, Dousa’s lead attorney on the case, told The Intercept. Dousa’s experience may not have had the broad impact of other major cases on the border under Trump, such as family separation or the Muslim travel ban. “But on an individual basis,” he said, “I think this has to be one of the most egregious rights violations in recent memory.“

In a three-day bench trial in August, Robinson, a Trump-appointed federal judge who previously served as federal prosecutor working drug cases on the border and as a CIA operations officer, heard from Oliveri and several other San Diego-based officials responsible for Operation Secure Line. Oliveri told the judge that his request to Mexican authorities was “literally creative writing,” that he had never made such a request before, that he did so “without any basis” in fact or law, and that he could not recall who ordered him to send the message.

The email featured prominently in Robinson’s ruling, with the judge finding that Oliveri and his colleagues retaliated against Dousa for her ministry to migrants at the border — activity that was clearly protected under the First Amendment — and that the “email to the Mexican government would chill a person of ordinary firmness from continuing to engage in Dousa’s protected activities.”

“Not only does it appear that the decision to send such an email was unprecedented, but even Oliveri acknowledged that the email was ‘[l]iterally, creative writing … [w]ithout any basis,” the judge wrote. Robinson added that while Oliveri testified that he never intended to retaliate against the pastor, “the absence of any proper basis for writing and sending the email is incontrovertible evidence of Oliveri’s retaliatory motive.”

“I think that what it illustrates is really a pervasive culture and sense of lawlessness and lack of accountability within CBP.”

The judge additionally ruled that the sending of the email amounted to a violation of Dousa’s rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and ordered the U.S. authorities to contact the Mexican government and formally withdraw the request.

“CBP falsely told a foreign government to detain an American citizen who is a Christian pastor because CBP didn’t like the Christian ministry that she was providing to migrants,” said Jones, Dousa’s attorney. “I think that what it illustrates is really a pervasive culture and sense of lawlessness and lack of accountability within CBP.”

The post Pastor Wins Civil Rights Suit Against Trump Administration Border Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept.

“Since we’re talking about the Endangered Species Act, I’m just wondering if my colleagues on the other side would put babies on the endangered species list,” Boebert said, as she flipped through a series of graphic images. “These babies were born in Washington, D.C., full-term. I don’t know, maybe that’s a way we can save some children here in the United States.”

Boebert did not elaborate on the connection she saw between a law passed to protect imperiled wildlife and the viability of the human species, the most widespread mammal on the planet. Nevertheless, the tone for the day was set.

Boebert was on hand Thursday to discuss her “Trust the Science Act,” a proposal for the nationwide removal of federal protections for wolves, before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries. The subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Cliff Bentz, R-Ore., also heard from fellow GOP Reps. Matt Rosendale of Montana, and Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, who have both introduced legislation to remove grizzly bears from the endangered species list in their states.

“This is the first hearing that we will hold on the ESA but certainly not the last,” Bentz said of the landmark environmental law.

The Republican bills would capitalize on a precedent their Democratic counterparts set more than a decade ago: legislatively removing animals from the endangered species list, then barring those removals from judicial review, rather than following the scientific process required by the Endangered Species Act. The proposals are part of wider movement of Republican lawmakers — backed by supporters in the firearms and trophy hunting industry — to liberalize hunting of the West’s most iconic predators.

“While each of these bills is unique, they share the common thread of circumventing the scientific processes currently underway.”

Steve Guertin, a deputy director at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act, testified that the proposals “would supersede ongoing scientific analysis being conducted by the service regarding the status of wolf and grizzly bear populations right now.” The agency opposed the measures, Guertin told the lawmakers. “While each of these bills is unique,” he said, “they share the common thread of circumventing the scientific processes currently underway.”

California Rep. Jared Huffman, one of the few Democrats who participated in the hearing, described the day’s agenda as “a hot mess of extreme anti-science, anti-tribe, anti-wildlife bills.”

“The sheer hubris of these bills is impressive,” Huffman said. “The idea that we as members of Congress sitting here in Washington are more qualified than scientists and experts at the top of their field to make delisting decisions for the Endangered Species Act, and then to lock those in by insulating them from judicial review — that is incredibly extreme.”

While many environmentalists would agree, the move was not without precedent. In 2011, Montana Sen. Jon Tester, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, attached a rider to a must-pass budget bill that reversed a federal judge’s decision returning wolves to the Endangered Species List and prohibited judicial review. The judge blasted the move as blatantly unconstitutional. Wolf hunting and trapping in the Northern Rockies has been legal ever since.

In the past two years, Republicans in Montana and Idaho passed a series of laws to slash their wolf populations — in Idaho by as much as 90 percent — through the use of bait and snares, aerial hunting, night hunting with thermal goggles, and more. In Montana, Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte abolished wolf hunting quotas altogether on Yellowstone National Park’s northern border in 2021, leading to the deadliest season the park has ever recorded, with nearly a fifth of its wolves eliminated. As Huffman noted, “Some of these states want to ‘manage’ wolves and grizzlies like Buffalo Bill managed bison.”

Boebert’s proposal would turn wolf management over to the states in the rest of the country, while Rosendale’s and Hageman’s bills would add grizzly bears to the mix as well.

Despite the high popularity, anti-government Republicans have long cast the law as one of the worst things to ever happen to the West. “For far too long, the Endangered Species Act has been weaponized by extremists, extremist environmentalists, to restrict common sense multiple use activities that they disagree with,” Boebert testified.

In 2020, voters in Boebert’s home state passed a historic measure mandating the reintroduction of wolves, which had disappeared from Colorado thanks to a government eradication campaign in the 1940s. The vote was extraordinarily close, with 50.9 percent of voters supporting reintroduction and 49.1 voting against. Supporters were largely based in urban centers on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, while the opposition was concentrated where the wolf reintroduction will happen, in Boebert’s district on the western slope.

Despite its name, Boebert’s promotion of the “Trust the Science Act” puts the politics of predator management front and center. “Its [sic] far past time that we removed leftist politics from listing decisions,” she said in unveiling the proposal last year. The bill received enthusiastic support from Safari Club International, a lobbying giant of the trophy hunting community, and the National Rifle Association.

Hageman and Rosendale sounded a similar tone in calling for delisting grizzly bears. “There’s a small handful of members on this committee that actually have grizzly bears in their districts,” Rosendale told his colleagues. “Yet, these bureaucrats and some members of this committee insist on telling Montanans how they should go about their everyday lives by keeping the species listed without ever feeling the impact of this decision.”

In advancing their proposals, the authors of the anti-predator bills often misrepresented basic facts related to wildlife biology and management.

Boebert read a statistic that “from 2002 to present day, approximately 500 people have been attacked by wolves with nearly 30 of these attacks resulting in human deaths.” Though she did not cite a source, Boebert seemed to be drawing from a recent Norwegian Institute for Nature Research report. She neglected to mention that only two of the cases were reported in the U.S. and only one was fatal.

As the report itself noted: “Considering that there are close to 60,000 wolves in North America and 15,000 in Europe, all sharing space with hundreds of millions of people, it is apparent that the risks associated with a wolf attack are above zero, but far too low to calculate.”

Hageman, for her part, repeatedly used the term “Canadian gray wolf” when discussing wolves residing in the Northern Rockies and described them as “non-native.”

The so-called non-native Canadian gray wolf is a feature of a conspiracy theory in which the wolves that were reintroduced to the U.S. in the 1990s were part of a super-large strain of extra ferocious predators deployed by the federal government to destroy the Western way of life. It is not true. The wolves that were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in 1995 were members of the same species — canis lupus — that the federal government exterminated over the preceding century.

Rosendale, meanwhile, focused on the “150 confirmed or probable” claims of grizzly bears eating livestock in Montana and the “hundreds of thousands of dollars lost.” Rosendale left out some key context. According to the Montana Department of Livestock, grizzly bears were responsible for killing 143 of Montana’s more than 2.7 million sheep and cattle in 2022, contributing to a loss of .0052 percent of the state’s livestock. The state paid ranchers $234,378.37 to compensate for those losses.

Rosendale also said Montana’s pivot to heavy-handed wolf hunting was “because the gray wolf population is about 10 times the target population” and “it continues to grow.” The “target population,” as Rosendale framed it, does not exist. In the early 2000s, Montana needed at least 150 wolves to obtain and retain state management authorities under the Endangered Species Act. The number was a minimum, not a target to maintain in perpetuity. As for the continued growth of Montana’s wolf population, biologists broadly agree that those numbers stabilized in recent years, and some of the region’s leading experts have raised concerns that the state may in fact be overestimating its totals.

The Republicans’ most challenging witness was Chris Servheen. For 35 years, Servheen led the U.S. government’s effort recover grizzly bears before retiring in 2016. Until recently, he was the most visible proponent of removing grizzly bears from the endangered species list. As detailed in an Intercept profile in January, the veteran biologist’s views changed with the anti-predator political pivot in the Northern Rockies.

As Servheen reiterated throughout his testimony, the Endangered Species Act is about more than numbers. States must have regulations in place that will ensure continued recovery before assuming management authority over a listed species.

“The adequacy of regulatory mechanisms is just as important as the numbers of animals,” Servheen said, and in the Northern Rockies “the lack of adequate regulatory mechanisms is due to political interference.” He added: “It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that if grizzly bears were delisted by congressional action and turned over to state management, the legislatures and the governors would do the same thing to grizzly bears that they are currently doing to wolves.”

The post Lauren Boebert Waved Around Pictures of Dead Babies in Her Call to Gut the Endangered Species Act appeared first on The Intercept.