The State Department shared the offending remarks in a thread on X, redacting the posters’ handles and avatars. Many of the comments were crass and incendiary — the kind of protected political speech at the heart of the First Amendment, which applies to citizens and noncitizens alike. One Argentine suggested that Kirk should “rest in fucking piss” because of his life devoted to “spreading racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rhetoric,” while a Brazilian national asserted that Kirk “DIED TOO LATE.”

Nota Baloyi, a South African who spoke to The Intercept on Wednesday, had his visa revoked for tweeting that Kirk “won’t be remembered as a hero. He was used to astroturf a movement of white nationalist trailer trash!”

Baloyi told The Intercept that he deleted his post from X after South African right-wingers flagged it for the State Department by tagging Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who tweeted in the days after Kirk’s death that visa revocations were “under way” and that noncitizens who were “cheering on the public assassination of a political figure” should “prepare to be deported.” Baloyi disputed that his post was mocking or making light of Kirk’s death. 

“I was keeping this matter to myself until the State Department posted about it,” said Baloyi, who is currently in South Africa and last visited the U.S. in 2023.

Last Friday he received a brief email notification from the U.S. consular office revoking his visa. The message made no reference to his social media activity.

“I thought immediately, ‘what could I have done?’” he said.

He realized what was happening after the State Department shared his post on Tuesday. “I was being targeted because I’m an enemy of right-wing South Africans,” Baloyi said, “especially those who have been going around the world and pleading to the Trump administration to let them in as refugees and victims of a nonexistent white genocide.”

Baloyi’s remarks and others flagged by the State Department are all examples of core political speech, according to attorneys who slammed the revocations as blatantly unconstitutional.

“This is a profound threat to free expression,” wrote Brian Hauss, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, in a statement to The Intercept. “The government is weaponizing immigration law to punish people for expressing disapproved opinions.”

“These kinds of visa revocations are censorship, plain and simple,” wrote Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney and legislative adviser at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

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“Mere ‘mockery’ can’t be grounds for adverse government action — whether revocation of broadcast licenses or revocation of visas,” DeCell added. “While the government can revoke visas for many reasons, the First Amendment forbids it from doing so based on viewpoint.”

Last month, in a lawsuit brought by the Knight Institute on behalf of professors and academics nationwide, a federal judge ruled that Rubio and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had unconstitutionally targeted noncitizens for deportation and detention based on political speech, namely criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza.

“Secretaries Noem and Rubio are engaged in a mode of enforcement leading to detaining, deporting, and revoking noncitizens’ visas solely on the basis of political speech, and with the intent of chilling such speech and that of others similarly situated,” wrote Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee to the federal court in Massachusetts, in his ruling. “Such conduct is not only unconstitutional, but a thing virtually unknown to our constitutional tradition.”

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In the email notification to Baloyi, who shared a copy with The Intercept, the State Department invoked the same broad law the Trump administration used to target Rümeysa Öztürk and other college students for deportation earlier this spring: section 221(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

That provision, which is currently being challenged by student journalists as unconstitutional to the extent it’s used to target noncitizens based on their speech, grants the secretary of state broad authority to revoke visas “at any time, in his discretion.”

Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian and author of a book about the American history of ideological deportation, said that this form of political targeting has a long-standing legacy in the United States.

“Historically, the United States has used ideological exclusions and deportations, and the threat of such exclusions and deportations, as tools of political repression to suppress dissent,” Kraut wrote in an email to The Intercept. “And this has always resulted in a chilling effect on freedom of expression and association.”

Eric Lee, a Michigan-based immigration attorney who offered to represent the targeted visa holders pro bono, told The Intercept that “the State Department’s efforts to censor criticisms of Charlie Kirk” were “part-and-parcel” of a larger “anti-democratic operation.”

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“The Trump administration is banning speech with which it disagrees, from criticism of the genocide [in Gaza] to criticism of fascism, which it now calls ‘anti-American’ or even ‘domestic terrorism,’” Lee wrote in an email. “We will do what we can in the courts, but the population now must stand up and oppose the drive to dictatorship.”

Baloyi said he has plans to return to the U.S. next February for a business trip. He expects his immigration attorney will be able to convince the State Department to reverse this “unfair and discriminative act” and grant him a new visa.

The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about the constitutional basis for revoking visas over political statements.

The post He Tweeted Charlie Kirk “Won’t Be Remembered as a Hero.” The State Dept. Revoked His Visa. appeared first on The Intercept.

Remittances like these are a typical part of the financial lives of immigrant families. But since Kordia, 32, was arrested in March by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Trump administration has pointed to these wire transfers as evidence that she potentially supports Hamas, in a bid to keep her at an ICE detention center in Texas.

“It was quite upsetting to hear the government claim that any transfer of money to Palestine and/or Palestinians was inherently suspicious,” Kordia’s mother, a naturalized U.S. citizen, wrote in another affidavit.

Kordia’s arrest came days after immigration agents grabbed Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil in New York City. In error-riddled statements and social media blasts, the Department of Homeland Security emphasized Kordia’s participation in a pro-Palestine protest a year earlier, near Columbia.

Unlike Khalil and other high-profile activists targeted for deportation, however, Kordia remains in custody despite findings from two different judges — one in immigration court, one in federal district court — that she should be released. She’s lost significant weight while in the Prairieland Detention Facility, near Dallas–Fort Worth, which has roaches, broken showers, and barely any halal food suitable for a practicing Muslim, Kordia alleged in a habeas petition.

To keep her at Prairieland, government attorneys tried to paint Kordia as a potential Hamas supporter and thus a danger if released on bond. In immigration court, they pointed to wire transfers Kordia sent to Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East over the years, without any evidence that these funds were for anything other than fuel, water, or medical expenses for her family members.

“She didn’t always have a lot of money to send, but she sent whatever she could,” wrote one of Kordia’s cousins, who lives in Florida, in another affidavit.

It took weeks for Kordia’s legal team to track down family members who received remittances as far back as 2017. Some were still in Gaza and the West Bank, while others had evacuated to Egypt and Dubai.

“In 2022, during one of the aggressions in Gaza, my building was destroyed and we needed money to rebuild,” wrote Kordia’s aunt, who ran a hair salon out of her home in Gaza before fleeing to Cairo. “My sister was in great need after that incident, so I asked Leqaa for her assistance in sending money,” Kordia’s mother explained.

After Kordia’s attorneys submitted these sworn statements, ICE attorneys switched arguments, and they barely addressed her wire transfers at a hearing in late August, according to Sarah Sherman-Stokes, one of Kordia’s attorneys.

“In the blink of an eye, it became a non-issue,” Sherman-Stokes, a professor at Boston University’s immigrants’ rights clinic, told The Intercept. “Because it was such a charade from the beginning.”

From the start, the Trump administration’s case against Kordia has been slippery and ever-changing.

“What we’re seeing is that the Department [of Homeland Security] is throwing whatever they can at the wall and seeing what sticks,” Sherman-Stokes said.

The sole formal claim against Kordia in immigration court is that she overstayed her student visa, which she let expire in 2022 on the mistaken belief that her mother’s family visa petition gave Kordia lawful status. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved this petition in May 2021, according to court filings, which Kordia thought meant she was close to getting a green card.

But soon after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Homeland Security Investigations, the intelligence division of ICE, devoted considerable resources to investigating Kordia for purported “national security violations,” according to court records.

Starting in early March, agents from HSI’s Newark office put a trace on Kordia’s WhatsApp account, interviewed her family and friends in Paterson, and even got a four-page report from the New York City Police Department about her arrest at a protest in April 2024, along with dozens of other people.

Since the charges were quickly dropped, Kordia’s arrest report was supposed to be sealed, and New York laws prohibit NYPD from assisting federal agencies with civil immigration enforcement. The city’s Department of Investigation told The Intercept that its inquiry about NYPD’s sharing of records with HSI is ongoing, and a public report should be issued by the end of the year.

HSI also subpoenaed Kordia’s records from Western Union and MoneyGram, which showed Kordia sent money abroad as recently as February 2025.

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Once in ICE custody, it was Kordia’s legal burden to prove to an immigration judge that she should be released on bond. At a hearing in April, ICE attorneys pointed to her protest arrest and remittances to argue that she was a danger to the community and potentially a Hamas supporter.

“They first tried to argue that exercising her free speech rights by attending a protest somehow made her a danger to U.S. security,” Sherman-Stokes explained, and when that didn’t work, “they moved on to suggesting that she was sending nefarious money transactions to people in the Middle East.”

From the start, the immigration judge didn’t buy it.

“In the absence of evidence of any connection to terrorist organizations, the Court cannot find that [Kordia] is supporting a terrorist organization by sending money to a family member in Palestine,” wrote Immigration Judge Tara Naselow-Nahas in an April ruling that ordered Kordia released on a $20,000 bond.

ICE attorneys appealed that order to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which, like immigration courts, sits within the Department of Justice rather than the federal judiciary, and Kordia remained at Prairieland.

While the BIA deliberated, a magistrate judge in federal court found in late June that Kordia’s due process rights were likely violated by her ongoing detention and recommended that she be released. But a district court judge ordered the magistrate judge to hear additional argument from the government.

In early August, the BIA remanded the bond order back to the immigration judge for “more complete findings of fact” about Kordia’s money transfers.

“It is a testament to the entrenched nature of anti-Palestinian sentiment that the mere fact of sending remittances to family abroad was enough for DHS and the immigration appeals body to aver that Leqaa was supposedly a threat,” said Naz Ahmad, co-director of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project at CUNY law school, which also represents Kordia.

The BIA’s remand order set off the quest to track down Kordia’s family members for affidavits swearing they had not used any of her money to support Hamas.

“Not only do we have to contact them to prove they are who say they are, and that they received money for a medical procedure or because their house was bombed during the Israeli military campaign,” said Sherman-Stokes. They also had to ask each one a “horrible question,” she said: “Can you prove to me that you’re not a terrorist?”

Kordia’s brother, a tailor in Ramallah in the West Bank, wrote in an affidavit that the money she sent helped him open his shop in 2021, where he sells curtains. Other transfers helped cover rent, gas, electricity, and hospital bills for Kordia’s niece.

A cousin, who now lives in Dubai, wrote that a February 2025 transfer helped pay for a medical procedure. Three other cousins in Gaza and Cairo attested that Kordia’s transfers helped cover living expenses and medical bills.

“To further insist that Leqaa justify every single penny sent to a family member overseas, at a time when some of the same are living through a genocide, only underscored the pernicious nature of the government’s empty allegations,” said Ahmad.

In her own affidavit, Kordia wrote that, since 2023, she’s lost “nearly 175 family members — almost an entire generation — to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

In late August, the immigration judge again found that Kordia’s remittances were not grounds to keep her at Prairieland.

“The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the money was sent to [Kordia’s] extended family members who were in desperate need of financial assistance,” wrote Naselow-Nahas.

Again, Naselow-Nahas ordered Kordia’s release on a $20,000 bond, and again, the Trump administration appealed to the BIA. Now, ICE attorneys argue she’s a flight risk because she consulted with an attorney before surrendering in March.

“Adding insult to injury, the government abandoned its ‘dangerousness’ claim based on the remittances and swiftly pivoted to a flimsy ‘flight risk’ argument to prolong Leqaa’s confinement punitively,” said Sadaf Hasan, an attorney at Muslim Advocates, another legal nonprofit that represents her. “These tactics reflect the dehumanizing and racist imperatives of the administration to weaponize immigration laws to punish Palestinian identity and the growing movement for Palestinian advocacy.”

Sherman-Stokes said that, based on more than a decade working in deportation defense, it’s not unusual for the government to make spurious arguments or offer little evidence.

“What’s uncommon here is the government’s unwillingness to admit defeat,” she said. “They have so little evidence, yet they continue to appeal and appeal and appeal in the face of an immigration judge finding not once but twice that she should be released,” Sherman-Stokes said.

The government’s targeting of Palestinian people or Muslim immigrants is also hardly new. From the post-9/11 “Muslim registry” to the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban,” Middle Eastern immigrants have faced additional scrutiny for decades.

“But it certainly seems to have escalated,” said Sherman-Stokes, who called the government’s arguments about Kordia’s money transfers “vague and spurious claims that are really grounded in racism and xenophobia.”

Sherman-Stokes said it was also unusual for Kordia to be held in detention indefinitely based just on her overstayed visa, without any criminal conviction.

“She exercised her First Amendment rights along with thousands of other people,” Sherman-Stokes said. “This is someone we should welcome into the country, not demonize.”

Kordia’s habeas petition for release is currently pending in federal court, and on Tuesday she filed a brief urging her immediate release despite the government’s “procedural gamesmanship.” Briefs are due to the BIA next week, and Kordia’s next hearing in immigration court is scheduled for October 23.

After more than six months in Prairieland, Kordia is eager to be back with her family in New Jersey. Before moving to the U.S., she and her mother were apart for nearly two decades, since Kordia stayed with her father in the West Bank after her parents divorced. On top of working multiple jobs and collecting money for family abroad, Kordia helped look after her half-brother, Omar, who has autism, and helped her mother, who has limited mobility and other health issues, with errands and cleaning.

“Against my will, I was separated from my mother for nearly twenty years,” Kordia wrote. “Being separated from her again is unbearable.”

The post She Sent Money to Family in Gaza. ICE Claimed It’s Evidence She Supports Hamas. appeared first on The Intercept.

Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee to the federal court in Massachusetts, found that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, along with their subordinates, “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target noncitizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech.”

“This is a new invention that in important ways goes beyond its closest analogues in the Red Scare,” Young wrote in his 161-page opinion, calling the case “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court.”

The American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, and the Middle East Studies Association filed a lawsuit against Rubio, Noem, and other Trump administration officials in March, following the arrests of Mahmoud Khalil and other campus activists. 

AAUP alleged that these arrests were part of an “ideological deportation” policy, which was aimed at chilling speech on campuses nationwide.

Young’s ruling was a significant departure from restrained judicial style. The judge even framed his opinion as a response to an anonymous, hand-scrawled postcard he received over the summer, an image of which is on the ruling’s cover page: “TRUMP HAS PARDONS AND TANKS… WHAT DO YOU HAVE?”

Young took issue with the federal government’s heavy reliance on the pro-Israel blacklist network Canary Mission in targeting advocates for Palestine, as officials from the State Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed during a nine-day trial over the summer. 

Agents used an “elastic” definition of antisemitism in their review, Young wrote, which included protected speech critiquing Israel’s war on Gaza.

In an “essentially frictionless” review process, Young wrote, ICE agents referred Khalil and others to the State Department, which quickly signed off on deporting them. Young found “virtually no evidence that anyone along the way seriously questioned whether pure political speech in support of Palestine or against Israel could be construed as support for terrorism.”

“This is a historic ruling that should have immediate implications for the Trump administration’s policies,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented the plaintiffs, in a press release. “If the First Amendment means anything, it means the government can’t imprison people simply because it disagrees with their political views. We welcome the court’s reaffirmation of this basic idea, which is foundational to our democracy.”

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Young agreed with the plaintiffs that this review process and the high-profile arrests of campus activists amounted to an unconstitutional policy designed and executed “intentionally to chill the speech of other would be pro-Palestine and anti-Israel speakers.”

At one point, he called testimony from ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, about agents’ purported need to wear masks “disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable. ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence.”

“To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan,” he wrote. “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.”

Young ordered subsequent hearings to decide what should be the appropriate remedy for these constitutional violations.

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Addressing his ruling to “Mr. or Ms. Anonymous” from the postcard, Young closed with his fears for the path ahead for our democracy, and a question: “I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.”

“Is he correct?” Young wondered. 

The post Judge Finds Rubio and Noem Intentionally Targeted Pro-Palestine Activists to Chill Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

The Department of Homeland Security sent an administrative subpoena to Meta in early September demanding the names, email addresses, and phone numbers associated with six separate Instagram accounts. Three Instagram users and immigration activists filed separate motions to quash the subpoena last week.

“Pending resolution of this motion, the Court now orders Meta not to produce the requested information without further order of the Court,” wrote Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse in a brief order on the motion filed by the activist who runs the Instagram account for the Long Beach Rapid Response Network.

“We are grateful that the Court took prompt action to prevent the irreparable injury to Long Beach Rapid Response if she had been stripped of her anonymity,” said Joshua Koltun, attorney for LBRRN, in an emailed statement. “We look forward to litigating this matter and vindicating the First Amendment rights of the people to speak and associate anonymously in opposition to the government.”

Another judge issued a similar order on Friday in one of the three cases, which was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California on behalf of Long Beach Protests and Events, which uses the handle @lbprotest on Instagram.

“I’ll be able to sleep tonight without worrying that government agents are going to come pounding at my door simply for exercising my First Amendment rights,” the second activist, who sued under the pseudonym “J. Doe,” said in an emailed statement on Friday.

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There has been no order so far in the third case, filed by activist Sherman Austin, who runs the Instagram account for StopICE.net. But Austin’s attorneys read the other two orders as blocking Meta from handing over their client’s information too, they told The Intercept.

“As a legal matter we believe the initial stay order issued last week in [the ACLU case] effectively blocked compliance with the subpoena in regards to all the folks named, including our client,” said Matthew Kellegrew, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center. “That said, I think we’d feel a lot better if there was an order in each matter that left no room for question.”

The Trump administration has not yet filed any briefs in response to the three motions to quash the subpoena, which were all filed in federal court in San Francisco, near Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

Meta declined to answer The Intercept’s questions, including whether the company would back its users’ legal challenges to the subpoena.

The activists and their attorneys had plenty of criticisms for Meta’s handling of the matter so far. In email notices sent to three of the six targeted accounts in early September, Meta gave users just 10 days to challenge the subpoena in court before the company would hand over their data.

“I feel like it’s getting lost in the shuffle here, but Meta is the subpoenaed party,” Kellegrew said. “Meta is in the best position to resist providing this information, and the fact that they appeared willing to comply without any thought for the constitutionality of the request essentially leaves it up to the individuals targeted to have the wherewithal to contact lawyers to intervene on a very tight timeline.”

Do you have information about DHS or ICE targeting activists online? Use a personal device to contact Shawn Musgrave on Signal at shawnmusgrave.82

Some of the accounts never even received Meta’s email about the subpoena. In a court filing, LBRRN said that due to a “technical difficulty,” it never received the notice sent to other users. “The process of opening a line of communications with Meta and determining the status has been disturbingly complex and slow,” their attorney wrote. 

Kellegrew said Meta had not responded directly to his team about the subpoena and what steps, if any, the company has taken in response to the federal government’s demands.

“It is totally possible they are taking this seriously and acting responsibly. However, there’s no way for us to actually know,” Kellegrew said.

The post Courts Block Meta From Sharing Anti-ICE Activists’ Instagram Account Info With Feds appeared first on The Intercept.

To the soundtrack of Z-Ro’s “Crooked Officer,” the post includes a montage of photos of a uniformed Border Patrol agent, some with a gaiter over the bottom half of his face and others with his face uncovered. In one photo, a visible name badge reads “G. Simeon.”

“Let’s welcome Georgy Simeon to the wall of shame,” reads the caption posted by Long Beach Rapid Response, a community defense group and one of six Instagram accounts tagged as “collaborators” on the video, along with StopICE.net, which has nearly 500,000 subscribers signed up for its crowdsourced alerts about immigration raids around the country.

The day after the post about Simeon, the Department of Homeland Security sent an administrative subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Instagram, for information about StopICE.net’s account and others.

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Despite clear protections under the First Amendment for photographing agents in public, the Trump administration has threatened to prosecute activists for “doxing” immigration officers. In May, ICE stormed a home in Irvine, California, in an effort to track down a man they accused of hanging posters with agents’ names and other information. Now DHS is trying to unmask accounts that dare to share the names of masked federal agents.

On Thursday, the developer behind StopICE.net, under the pseudonym “John Doe,” asked a court to block the subpoena, through a motion to quash filed in federal court in San Francisco by lawyers from Civil Liberties Defense Center.

The DHS subpoena was issued “without lawful authority,” the motion alleges, since it was based on a legal provision focused on immigration enforcement, rather than criminal matters.

“Providing the information requested by the government in its subpoena would compromise the exercise of Doe’s fundamental rights by chilling his ability to freely associate with others as well as to engage in political speech in a public forum,” the motion argues.

“This is a patent, open attempt to chill free speech critical of the government,” said Matthew Kellegrew, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which filed the motion.

Hours later, another of the Instagram accounts targeted by DHS — Long Beach Protests and Events, which uses the handle @lbprotest and is suing under the pseudonym “J. Doe” — filed a separate motion to block the subpoena, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

“I am haunted by the possibility that the government will find out who I am using this subpoena,” J. Doe wrote in an affidavit. “I imagine armed agents smashing through the door of my home in the middle of the night.”

U.S Customs and Border Protection did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the motion to block the subpoena. In response to a request for comment, Meta referred The Intercept to a webpage about the company’s compliance with data demands.

Sherman Austin, the developer behind StopICE.net, who is a U.S. citizen, doesn’t keep a particularly low profile. The Stop ICE Raids Alert Network website identifies Austin by name as the developer behind the project, and he’s given multiple interviews about his work. The group’s Instagram account also links to his personal handle.

But other accounts that collaborated on the video about Simeon, including Long Beach Rapid Response, are run anonymously.

Three days after the posting the video, Austin received an email from Meta’s Law Enforcement Response Team: “We have received legal process from law enforcement seeking information about your Instagram account.” The Instagram user who runs @lbprotest received a similar notice the same day, according to court filings.

At first, Meta did not tell them which agency was demanding information about their accounts or what the agents were after. Pressed for more details, Meta sent a redacted copy of the administrative subpoena from DHS.

The subpoena concerned “Officer Safety/Doxing: Simeon,” it reads, and DHS sent it “[p]ursuant to an official, criminal investigation regarding officer safety.” Meta also redacted the specific agency affiliation of the issuing officer, but it appears to have been sent by Border Patrol, based on the subpoena number and other details that were not redacted from the document. (An agency spokesperson said ICE did not issue the subpoena.)

“This was completely retaliatory, and a desperate attempt of intimidation because there’s obviously nothing illegal going on,” Austin told The Intercept. “They are trying to paint the false picture that reporting on ICE activity is somehow related to criminal activity, when it’s not. But that’s the precedent they are trying to set.”

The DHS subpoena asked Meta to provide the “subscriber names, e-mails and telephone numbers associated as of 08/01/2025 through 09/03/2025” for six Instagram accounts, according to the redacted copy sent to @lbprotest.

Siempre Unidos LA, a rapid response group whose account was also tagged as a collaborator on the Simeon video, told The Intercept that it has not received any subpoenas.

An attorney for Long Beach Rapid Response told The Intercept that the group also intends to file a motion to quash the DHS subpoena in the coming days. Although it never received any notice from Meta, potentially because of a technical glitch, Long Beach Rapid Response assumed its account was among those named in the DHS subpoena.

The two other accounts did not answer The Intercept’s questions.

Do you have information about DHS or ICE targeting activists online? Use a personal device to contact Shawn Musgrave on Signal at shawnmusgrave.82

DHS based its subpoena about the Simeon video on a broad legal provision that gives immigration officers authority to demand documents “relating to the privilege of any person to enter, reenter, reside in, or pass through the United States” or “concerning any matter which is material and relevant to the enforcement of” the U.S. immigration code.

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Earlier this year, ICE agents invoked the same provision in administrative subpoenas sent to Meta and Google about campus Gaza activists.

In this case, however, ICE indicated the subpoena was issued as part of a “criminal investigation” about “officer safety,” rather than anything to do with immigration enforcement.

David Greene, an attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it was “a stretch, at best” for ICE to invoke this provision to get information about the Simeon video. “The focus of the statute is obtaining evidence about immigrants — these subpoenas are not an effort to do that,” Greene wrote in an email.

“The idea of immigration enforcement officers using the subpoena power under 8 U.S.C. 1225(d) to target the authors of social media posts that they dislike or want to dissuade seems both concerning and like it is pretty attenuated from the purpose of the statute,” said Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who has studied ICE’s use of administrative subpoenas.

Tech companies are often much better positioned than users to challenge administrative subpoenas like these in court.

“ICE subpoenas are not self-executing,” Greene said, which means that “merely by receiving the letter, the platform is under no legal obligation to do anything. It remains the government’s duty to initiate a proceeding to enforce the subpoenas. So, we urge platforms to not voluntarily comply with these requests before any enforcement proceeding is initiated.”

But Meta told Austin and @lbprotest that they had 10 days to file a lawsuit before the company would hand their data over to ICE. The company later extended this deadline to September 19.

With this subpoena, the government “is attempting to improperly commandeer the traditional criminal investigatory powers reserved for other branches of federal government,” reads StopICE.net’s motion to quash. “Simply put, there is no legitimate immigration enforcement purpose related to a criminal investigation of a U.S. citizen and their online speech in this instance.”

Update: September 19, 2025
This story has been updated to reflect a second motion to quash that was filed in federal court after publication.

The post The Feds Want to Unmask Instagram Accounts That Identified Immigration Agents appeared first on The Intercept.

As they feared, Homeland Security Investigations, the intelligence division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was intent to track them both down. As agents scrambled to find Taal and Thomas-Johnson, HSI sent subpoenas to Google and Meta for sensitive data information about their Gmail, Facebook, and Instagram accounts.

In Thomas-Johnson’s case, The Intercept found, Google handed over data to ICE before notifying him or giving him an opportunity to challenge the subpoena. By the time he found out about the data demand, Thomas-Johnson had already left the U.S.

During the first Trump administration, tech companies publicly fought federal subpoenas on behalf of their users who were targeted for protected speech — sometimes with great fanfare. With ICE ramping up its use of dragnet tools to meet its deportation quotas and smoke out noncitizens who protest Israel’s war on Gaza, Silicon Valley’s willingness to accommodate these kinds of subpoenas puts those who speak out at greater risk.

Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who has studied ICE’s use of administrative subpoenas, said she was concerned but not surprised that Google complied with the subpoena about Thomas-Johnson’s account without notifying him.

“Subpoenas can easily be used and the person never knows,” Nash told The Intercept. “It’s problematic to have a situation in which people who are targeted by these subpoenas don’t have an opportunity to vindicate their rights.”

Google declined to discuss the specifics of the subpoenas, but the company said administrative subpoenas like these do not include facts about the underlying investigation.

“Our processes for handling law enforcement subpoenas are designed to protect users’ privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” said a Google spokesperson in an emailed statement. “We review every subpoena and similar order for legal validity, and we push back against those that are overbroad or improper, including objecting to some entirely.”

ICE agents sent the administrative subpoenas to Google and Meta by invoking a broad legal provision that gives immigration officers authority to demand documents “relating to the privilege of any person to enter, reenter, reside in, or pass through the United States.”

One recent study based on ICE records found agents invoke this same provision hundreds of times each year in administrative subpoenas to tech companies. Another study found ICE’s subpoenas to tech companies and other private entities “overwhelmingly sought information that could be used to locate ICE’s targets.”

Unlike search warrants, administrative subpoenas like these do not require a judge’s signature or probable cause of a crime, which means they are ripe for abuse.

HSI had flagged Taal to the State Department following “targeted analysis to substantiate aliens’ alleged engagement of antisemitic activities,” according to an affidavit later filed in court by a high-ranking official. This analysis amounted to a trawl of online articles about Taal’s participation in Gaza protests and run-ins with the Cornell administration. The State Department revoked Taal’s visa, and ICE agents in upstate New York began searching for him.

In mid-March, the week after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in New York City, Taal sued the Trump administration, seeking an injunction that would have blocked ICE from detaining him too. By this point, he and Thomas-Johnson had both left their campus housing at Cornell and were hiding from ICE in a house 10 miles outside Ithaca.

Two days after Taal filed his suit, still unable to track him down, ICE sent an administrative subpoena to Meta. According to notices Meta emailed to Taal, the subpoena sought information about his Instagram and Facebook accounts. Meta gave Taal 10 days to challenge the subpoena in court before the company would comply and hand over data about his accounts to ICE.

Like Google, Meta declined to discuss the subpoena it received about Taal’s account, referring The Intercept to a webpage about the company’s compliance with data demands.

A week later, HSI sent another administrative subpoena to Google regarding Taal’s Gmail account, according to a notice Google sent him the next day.

“It was a phishing expedition,” Taal said in a text message to The Intercept.

After Taal decided to leave the country and dismissed his lawsuit in April, ICE withdrew its subpoenas for his records.

Do you have information about DHS or ICE targeting activists online? Use a personal device to contact Shawn Musgrave on Signal at shawnmusgrave.82

But on the last day of March, HSI sent yet another subpoena, this one to Google for information about Thomas-Johnson’s Gmail account. Without giving Thomas-Johnson any advance warning or the opportunity to challenge it, Google complied with the subpoena, and it only notified him weeks later. 

“Google has received and responded to legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account,” read an email Google sent him in early May.

By this point, Thomas-Johnson had already left the country too. He fled after a friend was detained at the Tampa airport, handed a note with Thomas-Johnson’s name on it, and asked repeatedly about his whereabouts, he told The Intercept.

Thomas-Johnson’s lawyer, who also represented Taal, reached out to an attorney for Google about the demand for his client’s account information.

“Google has already fulfilled this subpoena,” Google’s attorney replied by email, further explaining that Google’s “production consisted of basic subscriber information,” such as the name, address, and phone number associated with the account. Google did not produce “the contents of communications, metadata regarding those communications, or location information,” the company’s attorney wrote.

“This is the extent that they will go to be in support of genocide,” Taal said of the government’s attempts to locate him using subpoenas.

Correction: September 16, 2025, 12:40 p.m. ET
The story has been updated to correct the spelling of Amandla Thomas-Johnson’s last name.

The post Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

“To our understanding there is nothing in the data TRAC collects that provides information on an individual’s immigration status,” said Mayes’s spokesperson, Richie Taylor, in an email in April, “and TRAC data is used exclusively for money laundering investigations.”

But earlier this summer, after The Intercept filed a public records lawsuit for documents about TRAC, Mayes took steps to limit Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ access to the database, her office disclosed to The Intercept.

As of late June, agents from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, wing have been “de-platformed,” Mayes said in an emailed statement, and her office has “barred usage by agents and officials in these agencies for misuse of the data.”

“I continue to support the use of this data to assist law enforcement in our mission of defeating transnational drug cartels,” Mayes said, “but this data is not and has never been intended to be used for immigration purposes.”

Taylor attributed the change in Mayes’s stance to her increasing concern “about the unconstitutional actions of the Trump administration over the last several months.”

“The Attorney General’s Office is working on additional restrictions to safeguard the use of the data,” Taylor said. “And if there are any additional instances of misuse of the data, Attorney General Mayes is prepared to deplatform and ban additional agencies from using the database.”

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Mayes’s office acknowledged the shift in policy in response to questions from The Intercept about two instances this year in which agents from Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s intelligence wing, used TRAC data to locate noncitizens for deportation who were not accused of any crime aside from unauthorized presence in the country. In recent months, thousands of HSI agents have been diverted to support ERO in removal operations.

The American Civil Liberties Union told The Intercept that Mayes was “right to recognize the extraordinary harm that will flow from feeding this highly sensitive and revealing data to the federal government’s indiscriminate mass deportation machine,” but that her belated steps to rein in certain ICE agents’ access were not enough.

“Cutting off ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations agents still leaves access for the thousands of agents in ICE Homeland Security Investigations who have been unleashed by this administration to pursue civil immigration deportation efforts,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project in an email. “The only way to durably protect our communities is to shut this database down.”

At a bare minimum, Wessler added, “Arizona must require law enforcement agents to submit valid legal process, such as a warrant, identifying the non-immigration-related basis for the search.”

“These limited measures are insufficient to address the danger TRAC presents,” said Daniel Werner, a senior staff attorney with Just Futures Law, whose clients tried to challenge TRAC in federal court, in an emailed statement. “Even with these measures in place, the TRAC database could still be used to carry out deportations and continues to facilitate mass surveillance without individualized suspicion or court oversight.”

Leadership at TRAC, which was organized as a nonprofit by Mayes’s predecessor in 2014, has long dismissed concerns. TRAC’s president, Rich Lebel, wrote in an emailed statement in April that under TRAC’s “very clear data use policy,” the database “is to be utilized for money laundering investigation purposes.”

Previously, Lebel pointed to technical measures TRAC had taken to guard against potential misuses, including “data tokenization” and “routine monitoring of the system by TRAC personnel.” Under an agreement Mayes’s office signed with TRAC in 2023, users were required to promise not to abuse their access and declare the “underlying predicate offense” for a given query.

But until recently, TRAC users could select “something else” as the predicate offense, Mayes’s office told The Intercept. This option has been removed, and TRAC users must now select a specific racketeering offense as defined under Arizona state law.

“As long as law enforcement agents are allowed to run searches justified only by a selection from a drop-down menu, there will be abuse,” the ACLU’s Wessler said.

Lebel did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about why such a catchall category was available to TRAC users in the first place.

According to Mayes’s office, TRAC has sent emails to the hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the country with access to the database, “reminding users that TRAC data must be utilized for specific money laundering purposes, and unlawfully being present in the country is not an acceptable predicate offense.” TRAC also put a notice to this effect on the database home page.

“The AG’s Office is working with TRAC to implement additional restrictions to prevent the database from being used for immigration purposes,” Taylor, the spokesperson, wrote.

The Intercept and other outlets have identified two instances this year in which HSI agents apparently used TRAC data to identify and locate a noncitizen for deportation. In both instances, the agents searched wire transfer data before TRAC implemented the additional query restrictions in late June.

In one case, an HSI agent in Hawaii described how she used “information from a money remittance company” to track down a Mexican man, based on 11 instances when he sent “individual remittances to individuals located in Mexico” between October 2021 and May 2025. The case was first reported by Honolulu Civil Beat.

The agent’s target, Gregorio Cordova Murrieta, had no criminal history and was not accused of money laundering or the other grave crimes used to justify TRAC. He was indicted on a single count of reentering the country without authorization after having been previously deported to Mexico.

This week, Cordova Murrieta was sentenced to time served after spending 76 days at a federal detention center in Honolulu. He will remain behind bars as he awaits deportation, according to Civil Beat.

The Intercept identified a second instance of an HSI agent using wire transfer data as part of the deportation crackdown, in El Paso, Texas.

In January, Monica, who lives on the north side of El Paso, less than 10 miles from the U.S. border, received a wire transfer from her family in Mexico.

It was not a massive transfer — less than $2,000, according to Monica’s attorney, Eduardo Beckett, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition that his client be identified by a pseudonym.

“Picking up money isn’t a crime,” Beckett said.

Monica, a mother and homemaker, first came to the U.S. in 2006, on a visa that expired in 2016. “She’s never been accused or convicted of any crimes,” Beckett said. “Her only crime is overstaying her visa.”

A few months after Monica received the transfer via Western Union, a special agent for ICE found her “while conducting law enforcement database queries,” HSI special agent Garrett Corley later wrote in a report filed as part of Monica’s deportation proceedings.

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Court records from other cases show how HSI’s investigative focus has changed. In court records from 2023, Corley identified himself as part of HSI’s “Financial Crimes Unit,” writing that he had “conducted investigations which have involved criminal enterprises and their elements of financiers, manufacturers, distributors, and money launderers.”

Another court record, filed by Denver prosecutors in 2024, described Corley’s legwork on a multistate investigation that led to the conviction this year of a man who had produced and distributed millions of fentanyl pills.

But the Trump administration has shifted thousands of HSI agents like Corley away from hunting down money launderers, drug smugglers, human traffickers, and war criminals. Instead, Gorley used the suite of surveillance tools at his disposal to find Monica, via database queries conducted in mid-June.

Corley and an ERO officer arrested Monica on July 2, according to Corley’s report, and then brought her to the El Paso Service Processing Center. Beckett said Monica was later released from detention on bond.

Corley’s report did not specify the database he used to access the details of Monica’s wire transfer, including the address she gave as part of the Western Union transaction.

The Arizona state attorney general’s office established TRAC in 2014 as part of a settlement agreement with Western Union. As of July 2024, the TRAC database contained records about nearly 340 million transfers, including transfers of $500 or more sent via Western Union to or from Mexico, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas stretching back more than a decade.

Mayes, like her predecessors, sends administrative subpoenas to Western Union, MoneyGram, Ria, and other companies, which send bulk data about their customers straight to TRAC.

Over the years, ICE has played an outsized role in TRAC. Using legally dubious administrative subpoenas of their own, agents from two HSI offices funneled data about millions of wire transfers to TRAC, according to findings published by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in 2022 and 2023.

ICE agents have also been top users of the database, served on TRAC’s board, and at one point even funded the nonprofit’s operations.

Along with hundreds of other ICE agents, Corley’s name appears on a list of registered TRAC users from 2018, along with an ICE email address registered to Corley, who did not reply to The Intercept’s questions. The Intercept obtained the list of TRAC users from a public records request to Mayes’s office, which is currently fighting The Intercept’s lawsuit for additional records about the relationship between the state agency and TRAC.

Mayes’s office did not answer whether Corley and the HSI agent in Hawaii, Tabitha Hanson, were suspended from using TRAC. ICE did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

For years, civil liberties advocates have warned that ICE would use TRAC data for purposes beyond money laundering investigations.

“We have long warned about the dangers of this kind of indiscriminate bulk surveillance,” Wessler said of Monica’s case. “Authorities like to say they will reserve this surveillance for only serious financial crimes, but its apparent use to fuel the federal government’s indiscriminate deportation dragnet shows why Arizona must shut down the TRAC database immediately.”

Wessler noted that Mayes’s latest restrictions on TRAC also fail “to prevent officers in other local, state, and federal agencies from running queries at ICE’s request, something we have seen in similar contexts.”

Beckett said that his client’s case should be a warning about the danger of surveillance tools like TRAC, especially in the hands of ICE.

“As Americans we should all be concerned. Today they target immigrants. Tomorrow, they’ll target U.S. citizens,” he said. “They want 3,000 people a day. They’re going to do whatever it takes.”

The post Many ICE Agents Lose Ability to Spy on Immigrants’ Payments to Family Back Home appeared first on The Intercept.

But one student newspaper is fighting back. 

The Stanford Daily — the independent publication covering Stanford University — filed a First Amendment lawsuit suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem earlier this month over two tactics they’ve used in targeted deportation cases.

“What’s at stake in this case is whether, when you’re in the United States, you’re free to voice an opinion critical of the government without fear of retaliation,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, a civil liberties group representing the plaintiffs.

“It does not matter if you’re a citizen, here on a green card, or visiting Las Vegas for the weekend — you shouldn’t have to fear retaliation because the government doesn’t like what you have to say,” Fitzpatrick said.

Soon after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration agents in early March for his role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, student journalists and editors around the country sensed a shift.

“That’s when we saw a significant uptick in calls,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, who manages the nonprofit’s hotline.

Over three decades helping student reporters navigate censorship and First Amendment issues, Hiestand had never fielded so many calls focused on potential immigration consequences for coverage on campus, both for the journalists and their named sources.

Öztürk’s arrest just a couple weeks later sent the legal hotline “into overdrive,” Hiestand told The Intercept. He heard from reporters, editors, and even political cartoonists worried their work about Israel, Palestine, and student protests might make them targets too.

In early April, the Student Press Law Center put out an unprecedented alert with other student journalism organizations, which advised campus publications to consider taking down or revising “certain stories that may now be targeted by immigration officials.”

“ICE has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms,” reads the alert.

The next week, the Stanford Daily editors ran a letter about the chill its own staff was facing on campus.

“Both students and faculty have been increasingly hesitant to speak to The Daily and increasingly worried about comments that have already been made on the record,” their letter read. “Some reporters have been choosing to step away from stories in order to keep their name detached from topics that might draw unwanted attention. Even authors of dated opinion pieces have expressed fear that their words might retroactively put them in danger.”

Following the editors’ letter, FIRE approached the Stanford Daily’s editors to sue the Trump administration. It’s not the first time the publication has fought for freedom of the press in court. In 1978, a case brought by the Stanford Daily over a search warrant targeting its newsroom reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-3 that the warrant was valid and did not violate the First Amendment.

The student newspaper’s current suit — filed with two individual plaintiffs suing under the pseudonyms Jane Doe and John Doe — challenges two broad, arcane legal provisions that have become Rubio’s go-to tools against student activists and campus critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The first provision, which was added to the country’s immigration code in 1990, grants the secretary of state sweeping authority to render noncitizens deportable if they “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” The second law is even broader, allowing the secretary to revoke visas “at any time, in his discretion.”

There are relatively few cases in which either statute has been the grounds for deportation, particularly compared to the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has rounded up and detained since Trump returned to the White House.  

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In fact, immigration scholars found that invoking the foreign policy provision as the sole grounds for deportation was “almost unprecedented,” according to a brief submitted in Khalil’s ongoing court battle by more than 150 lawyers and law professors. Based on government data, the scholars identified just 15 cases in which the foreign policy provision has ever been invoked, and just four in the past 25 years — most recently in 2018, during the first Trump administration.

“At a minimum, the government’s assertion of authority here is extraordinary — indeed, vanishingly rare,” the scholars wrote in their brief.

In Khalil’s case, the government identified only two others beside Khalil who had been targeted by Rubio under the “foreign policy” provision: although not identified by name, descriptions of the cases match Rubio’s orders against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, and Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University. Oddly, the government failed to mention the case of Yunseo Chung, another Columbia undergraduate with a green card, whose deportation Rubio authorized in the very same letter as for Khalil.

The State Department greenlighted Öztürk’s detention, meanwhile, under the second, broader provision, court records show. The government has not made any similar accounting of how many times Rubio and his staff have invoked his “discretion” to revoke visas over alleged antisemitism. At one point Rubio claimed to have revoked as many as 300 visas, without specifying the authority under which he did so.

“The chill is the point,” Fitzpatrick, the FIRE attorney, said. “It doesn’t take deporting thousands of noncitizens to accomplish that chill,” since no one wants to become “the next Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk.”

In recent months, numerous courts have cast doubt on whether these two statutes can be used to target noncitizens based on their speech.

In Khalil’s case, which is currently pending in a federal appellate court, a district court judge in New Jersey ruled in June that the “foreign policy” provision is “very likely an unconstitutional statute.”

Similarly, in May a judge in Vermont ordered Öztürk’s release to “ameliorate the chilling effect that Ms. Ozturk’s arguably unconstitutional detention may have on non-citizens present in the country.” The government has also appealed that order, along with similar rulings that freed Mahdawi and Suri from detention, and another ruling that blocked the Trump administration from detaining Chung.

Now, the Stanford Daily is mounting a direct challenge to these two laws as deployed by the Trump administration. The student newspaper argues both provisions are unconstitutional under the First Amendment, at least when used to retaliate against protected speech.

“The Secretary of State and the President claim to possess unreviewable statutory authority to deport any lawfully present noncitizen for speech the government deems anti-American or anti-Israel. They are wrong,” reads their complaint, filed August 6. “The First Amendment cements America’s promise that the government may not subject a speaker to disfavored treatment because those in power do not like his or her message.”

Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian who has written about the history of ideological deportation in the U.S., told The Intercept that Congress never meant for the foreign policy provision to be used “as a tool to suppress freedom of expression and association.”

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“Members of Congress intended for the foreign policy provision to be used in unusual circumstances, and only sparingly, carefully, and narrowly to exclude or deport specific individuals who would have a clear negative impact on United States foreign policy,” Kraut said, citing changes signed into law after the Cold War.

“What this case is seeking to establish is that political branches’ authority over immigration does not supersede the Bill of Rights,” FIRE’s Fitzpatrick said.

Briefing in the case is ongoing, and a hearing is scheduled for October 1.

“It’s gratifying to see a student newspaper upholding free speech at a time when many institutions are bending the knee,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford, in an emailed statement. “Many students are afraid to protest the Trump administration’s actions not only because of the deportations, but because their own universities restricted speech and harshly disciplined protestors. I hope their courage inspires others to act.”

The post The Student Newspaper Suing Marco Rubio Over Targeted Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.

The records were filed in a federal criminal case in Hawaii, as first reported by Honolulu Civil Beat earlier this week.

Gregorio Cordova Murrieta, who is originally from Mexico, was not indicted for money laundering, human trafficking, or any of the grave offenses that law enforcement officials typically offer to justify financial surveillance of wire transfers.

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Instead, he was indicted in early July on a single count of reentering the country without authorization after having been previously deported to Mexico. This was the sole basis for the arrest warrant submitted by a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, which once marketed itself as hunting down war criminals and drug smugglers but under the current Trump administration has shifted resources toward tracking down undocumented people and critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.

In a filing to a federal magistrate judge on June 25, HSI Special Agent Tabitha Hanson explained how she found Cordova Murrieta using financial surveillance data.

Using “information from a money remittance company,” Hanson identified 11 instances when Cordova Murrieta sent “individual remittances to individuals located in Mexico” between October 2021 and May 2025. The financial data included an address in ‘Aiea, near Honolulu, where ICE agents surveilled Cordova Murrieta in mid-June and later arrested him on June 26.

“It is disheartening to see ICE and HSI resorting to surveillance tactics that turn routine, lawful actions — like sending money to loved ones — into grounds for immigration enforcement,” said Salmah Y. Rizvi, executive director of the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, in an emailed statement. “Hawaii’s large immigrant community relies on remittances to support families abroad, and this kind of government overreach creates a chilling effect, making people feel unsafe even doing everyday tasks.”

Jacquelyn Esser, a federal public defender representing Cordova Murrieta, said his was the only case she had seen in which ICE targeted an individual for deportation using remittance data.

Hanson’s affidavit did not identify the source of such detailed financial data, and ICE did not respond to questions about her investigation.

But ICE agents have access to detailed data about hundreds of millions of wire transfers to Mexico through a secretive database run by the Transaction Record Analysis Center, a nonprofit in Arizona.

The Arizona state attorney general’s office established TRAC in 2014 to house a database that, as of July 2024, contained records about nearly 340 million transfers sent via companies like Western Union and MoneyGram. Like her predecessors, the current attorney general, Democrat Kris Mayes, powers this data dragnet using administrative subpoenas served on the companies, which send data about their customers straight to TRAC.

“TRAC was, at least on paper, created to investigate money laundering,” said Abigail Kunkler, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, by email. “Sharing the information in TRAC with ICE is a prime example of function creep, when you gather all this information for one stated purpose but later use it for something else against a person’s set expectations.” 

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Hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country have access to TRAC’s data, but ICE has long played an outsized role in the nonprofit’s operations. ICE agents even used legally dubious subpoenas of their own to feed data about more than 6 million wire transfers into TRAC, until Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., exposed the arrangement in 2022.

The Intercept is currently suing the Arizona attorney general and TRAC under the state public records law, after both entities refused to release documents about the database earlier this year. Neither office responded to The Intercept’s questions for this article.

But both previously downplayed the possibility that ICE agents might use TRAC data to target immigrants for deportation.

“To our understanding there is nothing in the data TRAC collects that provides information on an individuals’ immigration status and TRAC data is used exclusively for money laundering investigations,” said Mayes’s spokesperson, Richie Taylor, in an email in April.

“TRAC has a very clear data use policy that states that TRAC data is to be utilized for money laundering investigation purposes,” TRAC’s president, Rich Lebel, wrote in a statement by email, also in April. “That data use policy has not changed during the current administration, nor has the routine monitoring of the system by TRAC personnel for any abuses.”

But Lebel was less categorical in a statement to Civil Beat, saying that money laundering constitutes “the majority of cases” for which agents use TRAC.

Before searching the TRAC database, agents must promise not to abuse their access and declare the “underlying predicate offense” for a given query, under an agreement Mayes’s office signed with TRAC in 2023.

Hanson did not respond to questions about what role, if any, TRAC data played in her surveillance of Cordova Murrieta, and, if so, what “predicate offense” she entered before accessing the data.

“The use of financial data in this way violates our assumed privacy and raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns,” said the ACLU’s Rizvi. “If this is what’s being done today, we must ask: what else are we surrendering to unchecked surveillance under the guise of enforcement?”

The post ICE Hunts Down Immigrants by Spying on Their Wire Transfers appeared first on The Intercept.

But a different investigation into the catastrophe moved at a much quicker pace. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority scrambled to figure out who had leaked video of the incident to the news media, according to documents obtained by The Intercept through a public records request.

The reports offer a panoramic view of how the leak investigation unfolded, the squishy statute the cops used to investigate and charge CNN’s source with a crime, and how the network’s failure to crop the leaked footage inadvertently aided the investigation.

On January 31, two days after the crash, CNN published two videos showing “previously unseen angles of the collision.”

“The videos, both shot on cell phones, show video replays of surveillance cameras capturing the crash between the passenger flight and the military helicopter,” CNN reported.

It didn’t take long for the MWAA police to determine the provenance of the source material.

Patrick Silsbee, a detective with the agency, recognized the shots as coming from airport security cameras and set about trying to smoke out the leaker. “The video shows camera angles and views that can only be found on the Metropolitan Washington Airport’s Authority CCTV video,” Silsbee wrote in a January 31 report, noting the location of landmarks in the videos, including a boathouse near the airfield.

The locations of the MWAA security cameras are redacted in the reports provided to The Intercept, ostensibly “to prevent the disclosure of law enforcement and security techniques and procedures not generally known outside the law enforcement community,” according to an accompanying letter from MWAA.

However, in one of the videos published online by CNN, the following text appears to be briefly visible in a corner of the clip, The Intercept found: “Terminal 2 FAA Tower South View,” seemingly corresponding to the security camera feed from which it was recorded. This material was cropped from the clip in CNN’s initial broadcast segment about the videos. The MWAA reports do not note this detail about the online version of the video.

CNN did not respond to a request for comment.

Once Silsbee identified the leaked videos as having come from CCTV footage, his next step was figuring out where that footage could be accessed. Based on additional visual clues in the clips aired by CNN — such as the particular kind of monitor mount, and flashing lights visible in the area behind the monitor — Silsbee determined that the leaker must have recorded the video from monitors inside the MWAA police dispatch center.

“After reviewing the leaked footage several times, it is evident that the video comes from inside of this facility,” Silsbee wrote in the same report, noting a “very quick glimpse” of the dispatch center at the beginning of one video.

Silsbee’s next step was finding out who had made the recordings. He reviewed surveillance footage for the dispatch center and identified a dispatch worker, Mohamed Mbengue, who “clearly photographs and filmed the incident on his personal cell phone,” Silsebee wrote.

Silsbee also reviewed access records for Mbengue’s workstation during his overnight shift.

“Between the hours of 2256 and 0545, Mr. Mbengue can be seen on multiple occasions utilize [sic] his personal cell phone to record video and photograph these critical scenes,” Silsbee wrote.

Investigators frequently review CCTV footage during leak investigations, especially once an initial leak location has been identified or a suspected leaker is flagged.

Earlier this year, as part of a case against an alleged would-be leaker at the Defense Intelligence Agency, an FBI agent reviewed video surveillance footage of the suspect’s desk station, according to court documents. The footage showed the suspect, Nathan Vilas Laatsch, writing notes while looking at his computer monitor, then folding the notes and tucking them in his socks. In May, Laatsch was arrested and accused of attempting to pass classified information to a foreign government.

Checking surveillance tape isn’t a tactic reserved for government investigators. Following an embarrassing story about waste at Tesla in 2018, internal investigators reportedly reviewed factory CCTV footage in an attempt to identify the leaker.

“Computer Trespass”

Having identified Mbengue as the suspected leaker, Silsbee and other detectives obtained warrants to arrest him and search his phone, which had already been seized during an interview at Mbengue’s home.

Both the search and arrest warrants against Mbengue were predicated on alleged violations of Virginia’s “computer trespass” statute, a misdemeanor offense.

But Andrew Crocker, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has written about the federal counterpart to the Virginia law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, called the application in Mbengue’s case “pretty staggering.”

The CFAA and its state counterparts were drafted quite broadly, which makes them tempting “catchall” infractions for police and prosecutors to throw at “any kind of behavior that’s objectionable in some way using a computer,” Crocker said.

The typical “computer trespass” case involves some sort of hack or unauthorized access. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to violate the federal CFAA, a person must have accessed “particular areas of the computer — such as files, folders, or databases — that are off limits to him.”

But the MWAA reports suggest Mbengue merely recorded what he saw playing on the screen, and this was the sole basis for his alleged violation of the Virginia statute. Silsbee’s report indicates that dispatch center employees sign agreements not to share or record information they obtain on the job, but there is no indication that Mbengue lacked authorization to view videos of the crash.

“It seems like a real reach to me to say it’s a computer trespass,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, an attorney and tech policy researcher at Stanford University, who likened it to a “throwback to earlier attempts to expand the bounds of computer hacking law.”

“If the theory is recording a computer screen is a violation, I don’t know where that stops,” Pfefferkorn said.

On January 31, Mbengue was arrested during his shift at MWAA and taken to the Arlington Detention Center. He was later released on his own recognizance and arraigned on February 4.

The reports don’t indicate what, if anything, MWAA police found on Mbengue’s phone; whether the phone was unlocked; or how they otherwise obtained access to its contents. They note that it took the digital forensics lab several weeks to finish processing the data. According to the Arlington County Commonwealth’s Attorney, which handled Mbengue’s prosecution after Silsbee filed charges, Mbengue admitted to sending the footage to CNN and initially negotiated with the network over a potential fee but later retracted his fee demand. 

In May, Mbengue pleaded no contest to a single charge under the state computer trespass law, which local media reported was part of a pretrial diversion agreement that will expunge the charge after a year of good behavior.

Mbengue’s attorney did not reply to The Intercept’s inquiries about the case.

A Second Investigation

The MWAA’s leak investigation didn’t end with Mbengue.

On February 2, two days after Mbengue’s arrest, a lieutenant notified Silsbee “that an additional suspect was identified in possibly illegally obtaining photos or videos from the airport CCTV computers,” Silsbee wrote in a subsequent report.

Like Mbengue, security footage showed Jonathan Savoy, another MWAA employee, “taking a video on his cell phone” from the dispatch center monitors in the early hours of a shift.

Savoy told Silsbee he had “no nefarious intentions to disseminate or share the videos/pictures he had taken with anyone else,” Silsbee wrote in a report. Savoy consented to a search of his phone, and based on five videos found on the phone, Silsbee obtained a warrant for his arrest for violating Virginia’s “computer trespass” statute.

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On February 3, the MWAA announced both men’s arrests, writing in a press statement that Savoy had been arrested “following further police investigation.”

In May, however, local prosecutors quietly dropped the charges against Savoy, through a filing called a “nolle prosequi,” according to the court docket.

Savoy’s attorney, Robert L. Jenkins Jr., told The Intercept that his client never violated the state law, and charges should never have been filed.

“The statute requires that the actions be done for specific reason,” Jenkins wrote in an emailed statement. “It must also be done in a clandestine manner. Mr. Savoy’s action did not fit the statute.”

The MWAA declined to comment on its investigation into Savoy and Mbengue.

The post How Investigators Tracked Down the D.C. Plane Crash Video Leaker appeared first on The Intercept.

The troubling lack of transparency extended to court battles, too. In the cases of both Öztürk and Mahdawi, an obscure court rule required an in-person visit to a Vermont federal courthouse to review key materials, including the Trump administration’s briefs and exhibits defending their detention.

These cases are critical tests of free speech and the constitutional limits on targeting noncitizens over their dissent. So The Intercept fought to make the full dockets public. So far, we’ve been successful in eight federal courts, six districts, and two federal appellate circuits — and we’re doing the same in other cases across the country.

Here’s how we’re doing it.

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In every case, The Intercept started by reaching out to the plaintiff’s legal team.

The docket access restrictions in these historic court cases come from Rule 5.2(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which aims to protect immigrants’ privacy as they challenge detention and deportation orders in court. This means that the strongest argument in favor of lifting the restrictions is that the plaintiffs themselves want the public to have full access to court filings, or at least don’t oppose it. In some cases, the plaintiffs and their legal teams were already publishing court documents online, although there was often a lag between when a document was filed in court and when it was accessible to the press.

After The Intercept reached out, many plaintiffs filed motions to lift the docket restrictions, including Öztürk and class-action plaintiffs challenging their deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. Judges quickly granted many of these motions. 

In other cases, The Intercept sent letters to the judges and clerks to underscore the importance of court transparency and urge them to lift the restrictions. Some judges and clerks ignored these letters, while others took these concerns quite seriously.

In one pivotal case regarding arbitrary visa revocations, for example, federal district judge Ana Reyes noted The Intercept’s request on the case docket and asked if there was any opposition to making records in the case available to the public. When the plaintiff and the government confirmed there was no objection, Reyes ordered the clerk to lift the docket restrictions.

In May, The Intercept sent similar letters to the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals about the Öztürk and Mahdawi cases. Öztürk had previously asked the trial court to lift the restrictions, but the judge didn’t rule on that request before the Trump administration appealed. The Second Circuit clerk’s office quickly docketed The Intercept’s letters, and within two days the full appellate record was publicly accessible in both cases. Soon after, the trial court judges lifted the restrictions in both cases, too.

Finally, in some cases, opening dockets to the public required The Intercept to file formal court motions.

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In the case of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who is still in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in Texas, The Intercept filed a motion with pro bono representation from the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law. In Massachusetts federal court, The Intercept filed a motion in the case of Efe Ercelik, a Turkish student at Hampshire College, with pro bono representation from Albert Sellars LLP. And most recently, in late June, The Intercept filed a motion in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the case of Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University, with pro bono help from attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

In each case, judges quickly lifted restrictions following The Intercept’s motions.

As the Trump administration continues its historic deportation campaign and targets immigrants for their dissent, new cases are being filed everyday with similar docket restrictions under Rule 5.2(c). And The Intercept is working to ensure the public and other members of the press have full, transparent access to court records in these historic battles over dissent, immigrants’ rights, and state power.

The post How The Intercept Fought to Reveal Key Evidence in Student Deportation Cases appeared first on The Intercept.

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” wrote liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent she read from the bench, calling the ruling “an attack on our system of law.”

The case stems from the Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship via an executive order issued hours after Trump was sworn in. Three different district court judges quickly blocked the executive order as unconstitutional under both the text of the Constitution and more than a century of Supreme Court precedent.

Friday’s decision did not address the merits of the executive order, but instead how the judges went about ensuring the core constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. In a ruling written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court’s six-member conservative wing drastically limited courts’ authority to issue injunctions even in the face of galling illegality affecting millions of people. 

The three judges had issued a “universal” injunction against the birthright citizenship executive order, which meant the Trump administration could not enforce it anywhere in the country. A more limited injunction would have protected just the rights of the specific plaintiffs who sued — leaving the Trump regime free to target anyone who hadn’t gone to court themselves. 

But from today forward, district courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions, which conservatives gleefully sought and obtained during the Biden administration to block student loan forgiveness and other policies.

“Curiously, this same Supreme Court never thought to say all the injunctions it upheld and stays it granted against Biden administration actions were outside its power,” observed Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley on social media. “But now apparently they are.”

Instead, federal courts may only use injunctions to block presidents and their administrations from violating the rights of the specific parties that filed suit. In effect, judges will have no ability to offer immediate relief to however many people outside the courtroom are suffering from illegal actions of the executive branch. The ruling is certain to spur more class-action lawsuits against the federal government, which are still allowed but carry significant procedural hurdles and additional costs.

“Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a fiery dissent. Eliminating universal injunctions “requires judges to shrug and turn their backs to intermittent lawlessness,” Jackson wrote.

“This decision is devastating for U.S. families who are not protected by the limited injunction the Supreme Court left in place,” said Monica, a pregnant mother, asylum-seeker, and named plaintiff challenging the birthright citizenship executive order, in an emailed statement. “Hundreds of thousands of other U.S.-born children are in danger of not receiving U.S. citizenship. I know that every pregnant mother cannot file a lawsuit to make sure their children have U.S. citizenship — that is why I filed this lawsuit to not only protect my child’s rights, but the constitutional rights of all U.S.-born children of immigrants.”

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The conservative supermajority framed the ruling as grounded in history and ancient principles about the limits of judicial authority. Jackson called this “legalese” a “smokescreen” that “obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?”

The court’s three liberal dissenters — Justices Elena Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor — framed the decision in catastrophic terms.

“Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway,” wrote Jackson. “But this Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.”

Michael C. Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell University, wrote that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court failed to recognize that the “current administration is a unique threat to the rule of law,” and that it was disastrous to remove such “a useful tool for the judiciary to constrain the president at this particular moment.” 

“It’s such a threat because it empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law,” Dorf wrote.

The plaintiffs challenging the birthright citizenship order vowed to continue fighting the Trump administration. In one of the cases, the plaintiffs quickly filed a motion in Maryland district court to certify their lawsuit as a class action.

“Even without a universal injunction, we will continue to litigate this case to ensure that every child born in the United States receives the citizenship that the Fourteenth Amendment promises them, regardless of their parents’ immigration status,” said William Powell, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, in an emailed statement. “The Executive Order is unconstitutional, and nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision today calls that ultimate conclusion into question.”

The post “No Right Is Safe”: SCOTUS Bars Judges From Reining in Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

The judge had previously ruled that Khalil could not be held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement based on a vague federal statute focused on potential “adverse foreign policy consequences” of his presence in the country. The latest ruling rejected the government’s arguments that Khalil, who missed the birth of his son while in detention, posed a flight risk, much less a danger to the community.

“No one should fear being jailed for speaking out in this country,” said Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law, who represented Khalil in court, in an emailed statement. “We are overjoyed that Mr. Khalil will finally be reunited with his family while we continue to fight his case in court.”

Khalil’s case is just the latest instance in which federal courts have ruled against the Trump administration’s dogged efforts to detain and deport noncitizens who protested Israel’s war in Gaza, many of them students who are in the U.S. on visas or green cards.

One under-scrutinized federal agency has been crucial to this effort: Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which markets itself as an elite force that targets human traffickers, drug smugglers, and war criminals. But under the second Trump administration, HSI has turned its surveillance apparatus on a different kind of target: noncitizens on college campuses with critical views of Israel.

As it built dossiers on Khalil and others, HSI deployed its full suite of investigative tools and techniques to “identify individuals within the parameters” of President Donald Trump’s executive orders about rooting out purported antisemitism, as one HSI agent explained in an affidavit.

For each target, HSI agents used surveillance tools to build a dossier, which was then passed to the State Department to confirm that the target was, in the eyes of the U.S. government, sufficiently antisemitic to be deported.

To track down protesters for arrest, HSI agents conducted “pattern of life” surveillance, The Intercept found, which meant monitoring targets’ movements and associates. HSI agents executed search warrants on college dorms based on flimsy affidavits, issued subpoenas for financial records and other data, and even put a trace on one target’s WhatsApp account.

“It’s notable that these components, which purportedly focus on threats to national security and public safety, are spending their time hunting down student protesters for their protected speech,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which is suing the Trump administration for targeting pro-Palestinian campus activists. “From what I’ve seen, the government hasn’t made a plausible argument that these students actually pose a threat to the national security of the United States.”

For years, watchdogs have warned that Congress needs to rein in HSI. During the first Trump administration, HSI monitored protest plans, called in aerial surveillance of the George Floyd demonstrations, and helped compile a database of journalists and immigration advocates to target at the border.

When Trump returned to the White House in January, HSI wasted little time in using its broad, fuzzy authority to target and track down critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.

“HSI has a really broad, often unchecked authority that in moments like these can allow them to turn it into a weapon,” said Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, who previously worked as senior intelligence counsel in the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department does little to promote oversight and accountability of its operations,” Reynolds said of HSI, pointing to the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate or defang DHS’s civil liberties office as amplifying the risks of abuse.

“We’ve seen this happen in the past,” Reynolds said, “and it can result in abusive targeting.”

ICE did not respond to The Intercept’s questions for this story.

HSI sprang into action in late January, after Trump issued an executive order purportedly aimed at antisemitism, according to an affidavit filed by a high-ranking HSI official in the case of Momodou Taal, a Cornell University grad student.

HSI investigators launched a “proactive” review of “open-source information to identify individuals subject to the Executive Order,” wrote Roy M. Stanley III, who leads the counterterrorism unit within HSI’s Office of Intelligence. As part of this review, HSI conducted “targeted analysis to substantiate aliens’ alleged engagement of antisemitic activities.”

In the Knight Institute’s lawsuit, another official, Andre Watson, who leads HSI’s national security division, explained that “HSI Office of Intelligence proactively reviews open-source information to identify individuals within the parameters of” Trump’s executive order.

“The HSI Office of Intelligence is typically focused on identifying actual security threats,” said DeCell of the Knight Institute.

And just because the underlying information is open source, meaning available on the public internet, DeCell explained, “doesn’t mean the government isn’t using more advanced tech as part of its “boil the ocean” approach to surveillance.”

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In fact, ICE officials’ references to “open-source” searches potentially refer to HSI’s massive database, called RAVEn, said Reynolds, of the Brennan Center. RAVEn uses large-language models to collate material from across ICE’s systems and the public internet, including social media posts and news stories.

For Taal, HSI’s open-source trawl turned up online articles about his participation in Gaza protests and run-ins with the Cornell administration. In mid-March, HSI referred its findings to the State Department, which revoked Taal’s visa the same day, according to other court filings.

After initially filing suit to challenge the revocation of his visa, Taal decided to leave the U.S. in late March rather than risk being detained like Khalil.

Court records across multiple cases reflect this general workflow: HSI agents use surveillance tools to build a dossier — an “HSI Subject Profile,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to them in memos.

“There seems to be a two-way street here” between HSI and the State Department, DeCell noted, by which HSI agents provide reports that “support the State Department’s decision to revoke a visa.”

HSI drafted “subject profiles” on Khalil and at least two other Columbia students targeted for their ties to Gaza protests, court records show: Yunseo Chung and Mohsen Mahdawi.

In many cases, Rubio quickly ratified HSI’s findings and ordered the targets should be deported under a rarely used provision for “adverse policy interests.” As in Taal’s case, Rubio signed off on the deportations of Khalil, Chung, and Mahdawi within 24 hours. He even did so in a single letter that gave ICE the green light to detain both Khalil and Chung.

But in some cases, HSI’s intel was a stretch even for Rubio’s staff.

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HSI’s dossier on Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student, quoted from an op-ed she co-wrote calling on Tufts to “disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel,” the Washington Post reported. The State Department pushed back somewhat, determining the op-ed wasn’t sufficient evidence of antisemitic activity or support for a terrorism organization.

The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about whether Rubio’s staff had disagreed with HSI’s determinations as to any other targets beside Öztürk.

All the same, based on HSI’s threadbare findings, Öztürk’s visa could still be revoked at Rubio’s discretion, the State Department wrote in a reply memo later filed in court. “Due to ongoing ICE operational security, this revocation will be silent,” wrote John Armstrong of the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs to Watson on March 21. “The Department of State will not notify the subject of the revocation.”

Four days later, as Öztürk walked to a Ramadan dinner, six plain-clothed ICE agents surrounded her, placed her under arrest, and whisked her out of Massachusetts and ultimately to a detention center in Louisiana, where she was held for several weeks before a federal judge ordered her release in early May. 

Mahdawi also won his release in late April, which the federal government has appealed in tandem with Öztürk’s case. Despite HSI agents’ best efforts, Chung has never been detained, and earlier this month a federal judge issued an injunction that prohibits ICE from taking her into custody.

HSI has not just taken lead on flagging people who criticized Israel on university campuses, but also in tracking down and arresting them through various surveillance tactics.

In Khalil’s case, even before Rubio signed off on their findings, HSI placed Khalil under “pattern of life” surveillance, according to an immigration court filing. As an ICE attorney explained, this meant gathering information about Khalil’s “frequent locations, people he associates with, and various other information essential to law enforcement activities.”

When Rubio gave the go-ahead, HSI agents were already parked outside Khalil’s campus apartment in New York City. Despite not having an arrest warrant, they took him into custody and quickly hustled him to a facility in Louisiana.

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HSI special agents also staked out and arrested Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University, after Rubio determined he should be deported in mid-March. In May, a federal judge ordered his release.

When HSI struggled to locate targets, they used legal processes like subpoenas and search warrants to try to track them down.

In Chung’s case, ICE surveilled her campus apartment for five days and visited her parents’ home in Virginia but still couldn’t find her. So HSI agents sent administrative subpoenas to Columbia — seeking video footage from her dorm building and data showing when Chung swiped in and out of the building over an eight-day period, court records show.

Citing student privacy laws, a Columbia spokesperson would not answer whether the university complied with ICE’s administrative subpoenas, which would not be legally enforceable without a separate court order. “The University seeks legal advice for any type of warrant or subpoena, judicial or administrative,” the spokesperson wrote by email to The Intercept, adding that decisions about compliance “are made by the University after legal review to ensure there is a lawful requirement and, if so, the University must then comply.”

HSI agents also obtained and executed judicial search warrants for the dorm rooms of Chung and another Columbia student on the theory that Columbia was “harboring” them in violation of federal law.

The search warrant application materials, which were unsealed in mid-May, showed an assistant special agent in charge of HSI’s New York office filed a wildly inaccurate affidavit.

The affidavit misstated basic facts and federal law, attorneys told The Intercept, including that Chung, a lawful permanent resident with a green card, was in the country unlawfully.

When Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who grew up in the West Bank, was arrested by New York City cops last spring at a Gaza demonstration at Columbia University, she was not a prominent activist or a recognizable leader in the student pro-Palestine movement like Khalil or Mahdawi.

She wasn’t even a Columbia student or otherwise affiliated with the school. Kordia had gone into the city for the day from her home in Paterson, New Jersey, she says in a lawsuit challenging her detention at an ICE facility in Texas.

Kordia was one of dozens of people arrested the same day in April 2024 that NYPD stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. Kordia was not part of the contingent of students who occupied the hall, but was arrested outside the closed campus gates after police told the crowd to disperse.

All charges against Kordia were later dropped without any court appearances. Her case was sealed, and her name did not make it into news coverage of the protest or onto lists by pro-Israel groups like Betar.

But her low profile didn’t stop Kordia, whose student visa had expired while her green card application was in process, from being targeted by HSI.

Early in March, HSI began investigating Kordia for “national security violations,” according to court records. And agents in HSI’s Newark office threw considerable investigative resources into profiling Kordia.

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HSI agents subpoenaed her financial records, put a trace on her WhatsApp account, and asked NYPD for records about her arrest. They interviewed Kordia’s mother, who is an American citizen; several of her acquaintances; and even the tenants of an apartment Kordia once rented.

In mid-March, the week after HSI agents arrested Khalil at his apartment on Columbia’s campus, they detained Kordia in New Jersey and flew her to the Texas detention center.

After the Department of Homeland Security put out a gleeful statement, Kordia quickly became known as the “second Columbia student” arrested by ICE over Gaza protests — even as Columbia made clear she was never enrolled. It’s a basic error that ICE still can’t keep straight, claiming in a recent press release that Kordia is “another Columbia Student who actively participated in anti-American, pro-terrorist activities on campus.”

Kordia remains in ICE detention thousands of miles from her family. Together with others targeted by HSI because of their ties to protests over Gaza, her case underscores the Trump administration’s commitment to targeting dissent with advanced surveillance tools and federal manpower.

“The government is deploying resources that are purportedly focused on identifying threats” but instead “rounding up students protesting on their own college campuses,” summarized the Knight Institute’s DeCell. “That raises significant First Amendment concerns, and it raises a chilling effect for anyone here in the U.S. on a visa.”

Correction: June 26, 2025
The story was updated to correct that Mohsen Mahdawi was released in late April, not May.

The post Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom Despite the Best Efforts of ICE’s Intelligence Unit appeared first on The Intercept.

The bill passed by the House of Representatives last month along party lines included a provision that would limit judges’ ability to hold government officials in contempt for violating court orders. Some Republicans who voted to approve the bill later expressed regret over the contempt provision, and Senate Democrats vowed to fight it. 

Draft bill text released last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee shows Republicans in the upper chamber are taking a slightly different approach. Instead of focusing on courts’ contempt power, Senate Republicans revised the provision to limit judges’ authority to issue injunctions and restraining orders against the U.S. government in the first place.

“At a time when the President is violating the Constitution as never before seen in American history, it makes no sense to make it harder for courts to issue injunctions,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley School of Law, by email. Last month, Chemerinsky decried the House provision as unconstitutional.

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“Republicans are targeting nationwide injunctions because they’re beholden to a President who is breaking the law — but the courts are not,” said Josh Sorbe, spokesperson for Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., by email. Durbin, who spoke against the House contempt provision on the Senate floor last week, is the Democratic whip and ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Their newfound frustration is ironic, given they cheered and even asked for nationwide injunctions themselves during the Biden Administration.”

The Senate version would prohibit judges from blocking the White House via a preliminary injunction or restraining order unless the plaintiffs can put down money as a security bond in case the court order is later reversed as “wrongful.”

Plaintiffs would have to put down “an amount proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by the Federal Government” under the proposed provision, and courts could not consider if the plaintiff — whether an individual challenging their unlawful deportation or a civil liberty group challenging a broader policy — has sufficient funds.

“This would preclude many asserting constitutional violations from getting injunctions,” Chemerinsky wrote.

Chemerinsky noted that the Senate bill was a slight improvement over the House contempt provision, which was retroactive and would have affected an untold number of court cases. The Senate Republicans’ proposal would only apply prospectively and to cases involving the federal government.

But Chemerinsky and other legal scholars across the ideological spectrum warned against restricting courts’ discretion to block executive abuses and tying legal remedies to plaintiffs’ financial means, particularly under the current administration.

“If this provision passes, the government could impose even blatantly illegal and unconstitutional policies for long periods of time, unless and until litigation reaches a final conclusion,” explained George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin. “That could inflict grave harm on the victims of illegality. Consider media subject to illegal censorship during a crucial news cycle, illegally deported immigrants, people imprisoned without due process, and more.”

Like many provisions floated by Republicans, the Senate budget bill’s proposed restriction on federal courts is vulnerable to procedural challenge because of its tenuous link to fiscal matters. Under the so-called Byrd rule, named for the late Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia and applied by the Senate’s parliamentarian, Congress cannot use the budget reconciliation mechanism to legislate about matters that are “extraneous” to the budget.

In text released Monday evening, the Senate Finance Committee advanced another budget bill provision with likely Byrd issues, which would drastically increase the maximum fines and prison sentence for those who leak tax return data.

Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress who has studied reconciliation and the Byrd rule, told The Intercept that both provisions face long odds under the Senate parliamentarian’s review.

“I would be deeply surprised if this makes it past Byrd,” Kogan wrote in an emailed statement about the draft provision to limit judicial authority.

“I don’t see how this has anything to do with revenue, so it would not be a proper provision in a budget reconciliation bill,” wrote Chemerinsky.

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Following passage of the House bill last month, a spokesperson for Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, implicitly conceded there were Byrd rule issues with its contempt provision. Grassley’s office did not respond to questions about how the Senate version fares any better.

Senate Democrats vowed to “work to remove these unnecessary provisions from the Big, Ugly Bill,” as Durbin’s spokesperson put it.

Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who is also on the Judiciary Committee, also has “serious concerns on the substance of the bill, particularly the provision that strips courts’ power inappropriately, disrupts the separation of powers, and tries to put the administration above the law,” according to an emailed statement from Padilla’s office to The Intercept.

“The Senator strongly believes that the updated bill text released by the Senate Judiciary Committee does not follow the Byrd rule and will get removed,” Padilla’s spokesperson wrote.

The post Under GOP Budget Bill, You’d Have to Be Rich to Sue the Trump Administration appeared first on The Intercept.

The FBI and federal prosecutors sought a sweeping warrant, the records show, that would have identified the people who ran the account along with every user who had interacted with it since January 2024.

Between March 15 and April 14, the FBI and the Department of Justice filed multiple search warrant applications and appeared numerous times before two different judges in Manhattan federal court as part of an investigation into Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD, a student group. A magistrate judge denied the application three times in March, a decision which a district court judge later affirmed in April.

“The government is trying to criminalize constitutionally protected political expression.”

“The government is trying to criminalize constitutionally protected political expression associated with the pro-Palestine protest movement,” said Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.

It’s rare for judges to deny a search warrant application, civil liberties watchdogs told The Intercept, much less to deny it multiple times.

“It is unusual for a magistrate judge to reject a search warrant application from the government,” said F. Mario Trujillo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an emailed statement. “And it is even more unusual for the government to try and appeal that decision to a district court judge, who again rejected it. That speaks to the lack probable cause in the warrant application.”

The records — which include transcripts of hearings with the judges as well as the government’s filings — provide a rare blow-by-blow of the search warrant application process, which, in line with normal procedure, was initially conducted under seal. The materials were unsealed on Tuesday as part of a court action originally filed by the New York Times in May, which The Intercept supported.

Columbia University declined to comment for this story and CUAD did not immediately respond to an inquiry.

The government first sought a search warrant on March 15, the records show. The Times previously reported that the Department of Justice sought the search warrant after a top official, Emil Bove, ordered the department’s civil rights division to find a list of CUAD’s members.

For a month, the government argued to judges that a March 14 post on Instagram from @cuapartheiddivest — the group was banned from Instagram in late March for violating community standards — was a “true threat” against the university’s then-interim president Katrina Armstrong in violation of federal law. The post referred to the university’s use of the New York Police Department to break up campus demonstrations and the targeting of student activists by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“The people will not stand for Columbia University’s shameless complicity in genocide!” reads the post, in part, next to a photo of graffiti spray-painted onto a Manhattan mansion used as the president’s housing at Columbia. “The University’s repression has only bred more resistance and Columbia has lit a flame it can’t control. Katrina Armstrong you will not be allowed peace as you sic NYPD officers and ICE agents on your own students for opposing the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

“FREE THEM ALL” reads the graffiti in the photo, alongside an inverted triangle, a much-disputed symbol that pro-Palestine protesters in the U.S. and around the world have used. Hamas, the militant group that ruled the occupied Gaza Strip, has also used the inverted triangle to identify bombing targets, the FBI agent — whose name was redacted — wrote in an affidavit accompanying the search warrant application.

The FBI agent wrote that the photograph of the graffiti and message in the Instagram post were sufficient probable cause of an “interstate communication of a threat to injure, in violation of” the law.

The argument, made in multiple hearings over the following weeks, failed to convince two judges.

Reviewing the initial application, Chief Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn determined it was a “close call” and asked for more information about the “symbolism and context of the posting,” according to a letter from the government. On March 16, Netburn denied the search warrant application, finding the post “seemed like protected speech” under the First Amendment, the government letter said.

The Justice Department quickly appealed the rare denial of a search warrant application.

“Because Judge Netburn’s ruling significantly impedes an ongoing investigation into credible threats of violence against an individual, prompt reversal is necessary,” wrote Alec C. Ward, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, in a March 20 letter to a district court judge.

Following hearings on March 24 and March 25, which largely concerned the Justice Department’s procedural missteps, District Court Judge John Koeltl referred the search application back to Netburn. During a March 28 hearing, Netburn denied the request for a search warrant application once again.

Netburn criticized the government for failing to “clearly represent what the case law is” around the First Amendment and threats.

“Words that may reflect heated rhetoric, in the context in which they are made would not reasonably engender fear, do not constitute a true threat,” Netburn said, ruling that the government hadn’t met its burden to establish that the triangle symbol “in the context here and in the context of the statement that the president of Columbia University will not have peace, is a true threat, as the law identifies.”

The government also hadn’t indicated whether Armstrong, the interim Columbia president, herself actually interpreted the statements as threatening. Under binding precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court, for a message to be a “true threat” outside the First Amendment’s protection, a reasonable person must interpret the statement as threatening, and the speaker must have some awareness that the recipient would take it as such.

“We have not had an opportunity to put that question directly to Ms. Armstrong at this point,” Ward told Netburn. The FBI had flagged the post to Armstrong’s office, Ward said at the hearing, “conveying its belief that the threat should be taken seriously from a security standpoint.”

Ward compared the Instagram post to burning a cross outside a residence, which is not protected speech under the First Amendment when done to intimidate. He said the graffiti and cross burning were not “exactly equivalent,” but still comparable as “symbolic threats.”

After denying the application, Netburn ordered that, if the government ever tried to get another court to authorize a search warrant for CUAD’s account, they had to include a transcript of the hearing before her.

“Unlike cross burning, there is no evidence that the inverted triangle is being used to designate targets for violence.”

“Magistrate Judge Netburn’s analysis is spot on,” said Hauss, the ACLU lawyer, in an emailed statement to The Intercept. “A true threat is a serious expression of an intent to commit violence. Unlike cross burning, there is no evidence that the inverted triangle is being used to designate targets for violence in the United States. And there is no evidence that President Armstrong or members of the Columbia community understood CUAD’s Instagram message to convey an intent to commit violence.”

The government appealed Netburn’s third denial of the search warrant application. At an April 14 hearing, Koeltl agreed with Netburn’s ruling.

“Context matters,” Koeltl said at the hearing. “There were no such explicit threats in the Instagram post about what was written on the wall on then-President Armstrong’s residence.”

“As for the explicit message on the wall—’FREE THEM ALL’—that phrase does not convey a threat,” Koeltl said, “nor is there any reason to conclude that the red paint was intended to convey a purported threat.”

“The accompanying text also does not contain an explicit or implicit threat of violence,” he ruled. “It contains political opposition to Columbia’s policy.”

In a final bizarre twist to the search warrant saga, when the New York Times sought to unseal the materials last month, the government did not oppose the request. On Tuesday evening, the Justice Department filed copies with minimal redactions.

“The government sought to unmask an anonymous Instagram poster based largely on the poster’s political speech on the theory that it might uncover evidence of the poster’s subjective intent to communicate a threat,” said Gabe Walters, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, by email.

“It’s important that judges, reviewing a search warrant based on speech, provide the breathing space for free speech that the First Amendment requires, even where the speech at issue arguably communicates a threat,” Walters wrote. “By holding the government to its burden on the subjective intent element, these multiple judges performed that essential gatekeeping function.”

Update: June 4, 2025, 2:08 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include quotes from attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Correction: June 13, 2025
The story has been updated to correct a summary of U.S. Supreme Court “true threats” precedent.

The post How the FBI Sought a Warrant to Search Instagram of Columbia Student Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.

The database, which is fueled by administrative subpoenas issued by the Arizona attorney general’s office, offers an intimate glimpse into the financial lives of millions of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. Over the years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has played an outsized role in TRAC, not just as a top user of the wire transfer data but also as another data pipeline, via subpoenas that alarmed civil liberties watchdogs. 

“The public has the right to know about mass government surveillance of its citizens,” said Heather E. Murray, associate director of Cornell Law School’s First Amendment Clinic, which is representing The Intercept in the lawsuit, in an emailed statement. “Because TRAC is indisputably performing a core governmental function, the records that The Intercept seeks must be released by the AGO and TRAC to fulfill their transparency obligations under the Arizona Public Records Law.”

Ben Rundall, a partner at Zwillinger Wulkan in Phoenix, is also representing The Intercept in the case, which was filed in Maricopa County Superior Court.

In response to The Intercept’s records request last year, TRAC claimed it is not subject to public records disclosure requirements because of its nonprofit structure.

But TRAC was established by the attorney general’s office in 2014, and records show close coordination over the years between agency officials and TRAC staff — who sometimes used official government email addresses. For years, one TRAC staff member even helped draft the administrative subpoenas, which she sent to the attorney general’s office for official signature before they were served on Western Union and the other money transfer businesses.   

The attorney general’s office previously released hundreds of documents about TRAC’s structure and operations to the American Civil Liberties Union. But under Attorney General Kris Mayes, the office now claims it has no obligation to release similar materials because they are in TRAC’s possession.

“Stated directly, the AGO and TRAC are engaging in gamesmanship to avoid providing records about their public functions,” reads The Intercept’s court filing. “When a request is made to the AGO, it claims TRAC has the record. When a request is made to TRAC, it claims the AGO has the record. This completely defies the spirit and purpose of the [Arizona public records law].”

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The attorney general’s office also previously disclosed to the ACLU more than 100 copies of subpoenas the agency has sent under the state’s racketeering law to more than two dozen companies since 2014. But in response to The Intercept’s request, the agency said releasing any more subpoenas would violate the racketeering law itself. 

“We are correcting the previous administration’s error and following the law,” wrote Richie Taylor, communications director for Mayes’s office, in an email last year.

An ACLU attorney, Nate Freed Wessler, previously called the agency’s argument about disclosing the subpoenas “wrong and borderline frivolous.”

The racketeering law “has nothing to do with the AGO’s responsibility to disclose records,” The Intercept argues in its filing. “Withholding these records does not comport with any exception to public access provided in Arizona law.”

The post The Intercept Sues for Records About Arizona’s Financial Surveillance Dragnet appeared first on The Intercept.

In the immediate aftermath, as the Trump administration scrambled to blame the tragedy on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, authorities took swift action against two men they accused of leaking dramatic footage of the crash to CNN, which aired videos that appeared to come from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport’s security cameras.

The charges, filed by local authorities in Virginia, came as President Donald Trump and his allies vowed to crack down on journalists and their sources.

But on Wednesday, local prosecutors in Virginia dropped charges entirely against one of the men, Jonathan Savoy, who worked at the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. The second MWAA employee, Mohamed Mbengue, indicated he would not contest the charges, according to court records, reportedly as part of a pretrial diversion agreement with prosecutors.

In early February, the MWAA announced that Mbengue and Savoy had been charged with “computer trespass,” a misdemeanor under a Virginia law, for making an “unauthorized copy” of airport records. An MWAA press statement issued on February 4 specified that Savoy was charged “following further police investigation” of the leak.

Weeks after both men were arraigned in Arlington County court, prosecutors dropped the charge against Savoy through a filing called a “nolle prosequi,” according to the court docket.

“Mr. Savoy is grateful for the complete dismissal of the criminal charge filed against him,” his attorney, Robert L. Jenkins Jr., wrote in an emailed statement to The Intercept. “It was clear from the facts that he never violated the law.”

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The Arlington County Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about why charges were dropped against Savoy.

Also on Wednesday, Mbengue entered a plea of no contest, which local media reported was part of a pretrial diversion agreement that will expunge the charge after a year of good behavior.

Mbengue’s attorney did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Since February, The Intercept has been trying to get arrest reports for both Savoy and Mbengue. The MWAA denied a public records request on the grounds that the records might interfere with the ongoing court proceedings against them.

On Thursday, the MWAA notified The Intercept that, since charges were dropped against Savoy, its “basis for withholding the records in full is no longer applicable,” and withheld records about Savoy would be processed.

“It appears that the case against Mr. Mbengue may also be concluded early next week, which would similarly affect the basis for withholding them in full,” an attorney for the MWAA wrote by email.

The post Prosecutors Quietly Drop Charge Over Leaked Video of D.C. Plane Crash appeared first on The Intercept.

The looming showdown over the judiciary’s power to issue contempt orders stems from a single sentence tucked into the 1,000-page budget bill, which passed the House of Representatives by a single vote on Thursday.

“This is a slap in the face to the concept of separation of powers,” said a spokesperson for Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.

If enacted, the provision — found on page 544 out of 1,082 — would restrict how federal judges can hold government officials or other litigants in contempt if they defy court-issued injunctions and restraining orders. Contempt is the primary enforcement mechanism available to courts, and in cases around the country, judges have weighed whether to issue contempt findings against President Donald Trump’s deputies.

In April, one judge found there was probable cause for contempt after the administration transported dozens of Venezuelan men to a notorious prison in El Salvador despite an order temporarily blocking such deportations — a ruling that’s paused while a federal appellate court considers the issue.

Contempt is also on the table against White House officials in the fight to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, and just this week another judge floated possible contempt charges over deportation flights to South Sudan.

Frustrated at such judges’ gall and the proliferation of injunctions against the Trump administration’s actions on everything from immigration to transgender rights to federal staffing, Republicans now hope to use the budget bill to curb judicial power.

The provision passed by the House would prohibit judges from enforcing contempt orders unless they also require the litigants that sought the injunction in the first place to put up a security bond. Essentially this means requiring plaintiffs — whether individuals like Abrego Garcia or the unions, civil liberties advocates, and watchdog groups that have filed suits challenging broader policies — to put down money in case an injunction is later found to be “wrongful.”

“It would make no sense to require the plaintiffs in these suits to pay bonds to be able to have access to the federal courts,” explained Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley School of Law, “and insisting on it would immunize unconstitutional government conduct from judicial review.” The relevant federal rule about security bonds and injunctions is generally relaxed when the lawsuit alleges illegal conduct by the government.  

As written, the provision would be retroactive, which Chemerinsky warned would mean “hundreds and hundreds of court orders — in cases ranging from antitrust to protection of private tax information, to safeguarding the social security administration, to school desegregation to police reform — would be rendered unenforceable.” 

Chemerinsky considers the provision in the budget bill fundamentally “anti-democratic” and also “unconstitutional as violating separation of powers.”

Before the bill went to the House floor, Democrats tried to take the provision out, but the Rules Committee voted along party lines to keep it.

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Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee see the contempt provision as mere pretense to dilute judges’ authority, and they vowed to fight to remove it from the budget bill.   

“As written, it would authorize outright defiance of every single injunction in effect across the country — not just nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said in an emailed statement.

“Republicans are once again seeking to twist the rules to avoid accountability and advance their overtly political interests by attempting to shut down federal courts’ enforcement mechanism,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., in an emailed statement.

“This move is a disingenuous and dangerous effort to shield the Trump administration from legal challenges and consequences by attempting to make court orders unenforceable,” wrote Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., by email. “I’ll fight against this Republican power grab bent on destroying our democracy.”

Like many provisions in the bill sent to the Senate this week, the contempt restriction has no apparent link to fiscal matters, which makes it vulnerable to procedural challenge. Under the so-called “Byrd rule,” named for the late Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Congress cannot use the budget reconciliation mechanism to legislate about matters that are “extraneous” to the budget.

The contempt provision “clearly violates the Byrd rule,” Whitehouse wrote in his statement, and a Democratic committee aide similarly told The Intercept that there was a plan in the works “to challenge the provision as a violation of the Byrd rule.”

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“This is about telling courts what to do, not about the budget,” said Bobby Kogan, senior director for federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, who has studied reconciliation and the Byrd rule, which is applied by the Senate’s parliamentarian. “Very unlikely to make it past Byrd.”

A spokesperson for Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, implicitly conceded that the provision faces significant parliamentary hurdles in its current form.

“Chairman Grassley is considering approaches to address universal injunctions through reconciliation that comply with the Senate’s Byrd rule,” Grassley’s press secretary, David Bader, wrote in an email to The Intercept on Friday.

The post GOP Budget Would Make It Even Harder to Hold Trump Administration in Contempt appeared first on The Intercept.

A provision tucked near the end of the GOP’s massive budget bill — at page 1,081 of the 1,082-page text circulated late Sunday — would double the maximum prison sentence for leaking tax returns to 10 years and increase possible fines from $5,000 to $250,000 per violation.

Boosting penalties for leakers may seem an odd fit for a budget bill, much like the “nonprofit killer” provision that was recently nixed without explanation. Because of their tenuous relationship to fiscal matters, the provisions potentially aren’t allowed under the rules for Congress’s budget reconciliation process.

Just don’t ask the main proponent of increasing the penalties for tax return leaks, Republican Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, if these provisions were appropriate to include.

“Wish I could be helpful, but that’s a question for the Senate parliamentarian,” replied Smith’s communications director, J.P. Freire, by email.

Last session, Smith sponsored a stand-alone bill with identical proposed changes to the tax code that passed the House of Representatives last year but failed to advance in the Senate. Smith is one of President Donald Trump’s main surrogates on Capitol Hill for the budget bill and is also chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, which included his proposal about tax record leaks in its section of the budget bill.

Critics wonder whether increasing prison sentences for journalists’ sources is the best use of legislators’ time as the White House works with House Republicans to push the budget toward the Senate. The proposal would also increase criminal penalties for those who “print or publish in any manner” leaked tax return information, although prosecutors looking to go after journalists and outlets directly would face constitutional hurdles under the Supreme Court’s First Amendment precedent.

“Of course, tax information is highly sensitive and there are legitimate reasons to protect financial privacy,” wrote Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, in an email. “But there are also times when it’s highly newsworthy — for example, when a president keeps secrets about his finances and business dealings abroad, or when powerful politicians and billionaires evade taxation.”

“There is no need to drastically heighten existing penalties, which, as far as I know, have been largely effective deterrents aside from cases where whistleblowers felt compelled by their consciences to expose impropriety.”

Republicans’ fixation on tax return leaks focuses on one person: Charles Littlejohn, who pleaded guilty in January 2024 to leaking Trump’s tax returns to the New York Times and a cache of tax return data for thousands of wealthy individuals to ProPublica.

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In its report advancing Smith’s bill last summer, the Ways and Means Committee made Littlejohn the main character and Trump a pitiful victim. During Littlejohn’s trial, Republican members of the committee wrote to the federal judge to demand that he spend five years in prison, the maximum under the current statute, instead of 10 months as recommended by the federal sentencing guidelines.

Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden nominee, did as Republicans suggested and sentenced Littlejohn to the five-year maximum, which he is currently appealing.

But for many Republicans, Littlejohn got off too easy.  

“Given the lack of deterrence created by the law as is, as well as the concern that such an unprecedented data breach could result in such a disproportionate charge and sentence, the Committee felt it was necessary to increase the penalties,” reads the committee report about Smith’s bill.

But 10 years is the kind of prison sentence beyond that given to many people convicted of crimes, like possessing child sexual abuse material and certain firearms offenses, said Christopher A. Wellborn, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“Do we really need to have imprisonment for up to 10 years on something like this?” Wellborn asked.

During his sentencing, Littlejohn’s attorneys argued that he leaked the tax return data “out of a deep, moral belief that the American people had a right to know the information and sharing it was the only way to effect change.” But just like the Espionage Act, the tax code’s leak provisions have no public interest defense.

“Leakers’ motives, and whether their disclosures serve the public good, should at least be a mitigating factor,” Stern said. “Whistleblowers should not be treated the same as malicious actors. Lawmakers and judges should focus on stopping tax evasion by the rich and powerful, not on disproportionate punishments for whistleblowers who expose how existing law is failing Americans.” 

The proposals to stiffen penalties for tax return leakers are part of Republicans’ budget bill, which is currently advancing through the reconciliation mechanism. Under the so-called “Byrd rule,” named for the late Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, matters that are “extraneous” to the budget and fiscal matters cannot be enacted via reconciliation.

Earlier this month, the leaker provision was scored as having “negligible” impact on revenue by the Joint Committee on Taxation.

“That will hurt Republicans’ arguments” under the Byrd rule, predicted Bobby Kogan, senior director for federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, who has studied reconciliation and the Byrd rule, which is applied by the Senate’s parliamentarian.  

In 2021, for example, the parliamentarian nixed Democrats’ attempt to increase the federal minimum wage in a reconciliation bill, ruling that any impact of the change on the federal budget was “merely incidental” to the underlying policy intent, which violates the Byrd rule.

All of the Republican budget bill’s proposals regarding tax leaks — to increase the maximum sentence, increase the maximum fine, and a third proposal that “clarifies” that each leak is a separate violation for each taxpayer whose information is disclosed — are likely “Byrdable,” according to Kogan, especially the increase in prison sentence.

“Slapping on a jail sentence is about punishment for offenses, not about changing dollars and cents coming in or out of the government,” Kogan wrote. “Of the three parts, I feel that this is least defensible under Byrd.”

“But if I were the Parliamentarian and doing my best to advise based on precedent, I would nix all three of these.”

The post Why Does GOP Budget Bill Focus on Punishing People Who Leak Tax Returns? appeared first on The Intercept.

The affidavit misstated basic facts and federal law, attorneys told The Intercept, but the judge nonetheless signed off and authorized ICE to search two students’ dorm rooms based on the assertion that Columbia might be “harboring” them in violation of federal law.

Pointing to decisions of the State Department to revoke one student’s visa and the other’s green card, ICE argued they were in the U.S. unlawfully. But neither ICE nor the State Department have the authority to determine whether someone is in the U.S. lawfully; they need an order from an immigration judge first. On top of that, ICE’s affidavit didn’t offer evidence that Columbia took any concrete steps to hide the students, only that university officials refused to let agents on campus to arrest them without judicial warrants.

“This affidavit is seriously problematic, and it’s extremely troubling that it would be offered to a federal court,” said David Leopold, an immigration attorney uninvolved in the case who reviewed the materials, in an emailed statement.

“The entire basis for the criminal warrant was wrong,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council also uninvolved in the case, in a social media post.

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The affidavit was unsealed in federal court on Tuesday as part of a lawsuit by Columbia student Yunseo Chung, a lawful permanent resident whose green card the Trump administration is trying to revoke based on her arrest at a campus Gaza protest earlier this year. In a March 7 order, Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked an arcane legal provision he has used against other students with critical views of Israel, determining that Chung’s presence in the U.S. would “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Chung, 21, who is originally from South Korea and has lived in the U.S. since she was 7 years old, alleges she has been targeted in violation of her First Amendment and due process rights, and that ICE obtained the warrant to search her dorm room under “false pretenses.”

“The agent’s sworn statement confirms that, under the guise of investigating Columbia, ICE’s goal all along was to arrest Yunseo, a permanent resident whose only apparent offense was participating in a protest related to Palestinian human rights,” said Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York and co-director of CLEAR, a legal nonprofit and clinic that represents Chung. “Even the minor protest-related charges that ICE cites in its affidavit have since been dismissed.”

ICE and Columbia did not reply to The Intercept’s request for comment about the search warrants. 

A Judicial Fig Leaf

The unsealed materials confirm that the federal anti-harboring statute was the sole legal justification that ICE offered to support probable cause of a federal crime. The ICE agent alleged that Columbia was “concealing, harboring, or shielding from detection removable aliens.”

“Secretly and unconstitutionally, the government supposedly revoked Yunseo’s green card and then told a judge it needed to search her apartment for ‘fruits and instrumentalities’ of Columbia University’s alleged ‘harboring’ of her,” said Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, an attorney at Human Rights First who also represents Chung. “In other words, the government wanted a judicial fig leaf to enter Yunseo’s apartment and unconstitutionally arrest her.”

In his March 13 affidavit, George Ioannidis, an assistant special agent in charge of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations in New York, wrote that he expected the searches to yield evidence that Columbia had “harbored” Chung and another student, Ranjani Srinivasan, whose student visa the State Department had revoked a week earlier.

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But Srinivasan, originally from India, had already left the country by the time ICE sought a warrant to search her room, as the Department of Homeland Security blared in a triumphant press release and Ioannidis himself noted in his affidavit.

“Obviously, Columbia was not harboring someone who had left the country,” attorney Nathan Yaffe, who represents both Srinivasan and Chung, told The Intercept. “This is essentially saber-rattling by ICE, a warning shot meant to send a message to people who protest and members of their community.” 

More fundamentally, the anti-harboring statute requires that the “harbored” person must actually be in the country unlawfully and that the alleged “harborer” must take active steps to conceal that person from authorities.

ICE’s claim that revoking Srinivasan’s student visa made her presence in the country unlawful was “flat out false,” Leopold said. “Only an immigration judge can make that ruling if the person has been lawfully admitted to the U.S.”

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“Revoking a visa does NOT make someone immediately present without lawful status,” Reichlin-Melnick summarized. “That is absolutely false and ICE misrepresented this to the court.”

Similarly, until an immigration judge ordered otherwise, Chung was in the country entirely lawfully as a permanent resident. 

“The statute is clear that if a person has legal status in the US, it is impossible to harbor them. ICE’s affidavit confirms that Ms. Chung is a permanent resident — meaning she has legal status,” Yaffe said. “Thus by ICE’s own admission, there’s no good faith basis for ICE to have sought a harboring warrant related to Ms. Chung.”

“By definition,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote, “Columbia can’t have been ‘harboring’ them.”

Columbia’s Refusal to Comply

Ioannidis also did not provide facts to indicate Columbia had taken any active steps to conceal either student.

His affidavit recounts the Trump administration’s efforts to convince the university to allow ICE agents to come onto its property to arrest Chung and Srinivasan. By policy, Columbia only allows immigration agents into nonpublic areas of campus if they have a judicial warrant, which ICE did not yet have.

The government sent Columbia demands and administrative warrants regarding both students, but the university “refused, and continues to refuse, to permit immigration officers to locate and arrest” them, Ioannidis wrote in his affidavit.

Columbia’s refusal was the sole basis that Ioannidis offered, under penalty of perjury, as probable cause that its actions constituted “harboring.”

“Refusing to comply with an administrative warrant to conduct a search of one’s private property is not and cannot be a criminal offense,” wrote Columbia Law School professor Jamal Greene in a social media post about the search warrant materials.

Leopold explained, “Compliance with an administrative warrant is not mandatory. The law provides no consequences for failure to comply. Penalties may only be issued if a federal court orders compliance and the subject fails to comply.”

After the materials were unsealed, there was widespread concern at how Magistrate Judge Robert Lehrburger could have signed off on such a flimsy search warrant application.

Given the government’s “essentially unprecedented” basis revoking Chung’s green card, wrote Colangelo-Bryan, “One would think a court would have wanted to drill down on that more before signing off on the warrant.”

Chung first asked the district court judge overseeing her lawsuit to unseal the search warrant materials in early April. After Chung’s request went unanswered for weeks, The Intercept filed a letter emphasizing the public’s interest in the materials, which the New York Times also supported. On May 5, District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ordered the government to begin the unsealing process.

“The affidavit in support of the warrant is yet another example of the administration making clear that it won’t let details like legality and facts stand in the way of its campaign of political repression,” Yaffe said. “As we continue to get more information through discovery about the administration’s misconduct here, we’re confident Ms. Chung’s legal claims will continue to be vindicated.”

Unlike others targeted for their ties to Gaza protests, Chung has not been detained despite ICE’s efforts, and Buchwald issued an order in March prohibiting the Trump administration from arresting her. Oral argument in her case is currently scheduled for May 29.

The post ICE Duped a Federal Judge Into Allowing Raid on Columbia Student Dorms appeared first on The Intercept.