The total number of people killed in the antisemitic Bondi Beach massacre was still not known when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity to blame Australia’s mere recognition of a Palestinian state.

Two gunmen, father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, carried out the shooting, which targeted a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, and left 15 victims dead. People of conscience from all faiths have spoken out to condemn the slaughter, to express solidarity with Jewish communities, and to forcefully denounce antisemitism.

Netanyahu and his cheerleaders, meanwhile, have once again chosen the despicable path of weaponizing antisemitism to ensure and legitimize Palestinian suffering.

Netanyahu’s comments come as no surprise. They are just his latest vile affront to Jewish lives, using threats to our safety to guarantee that Palestinians can have none.

Beyond the clear fact that the Bondi shooters targeted Jews on a Jewish holiday — the very definition of an antisemitic attack — we currently know almost nothing about these men. The idea that their actions justify the continued oppression of Palestinians should be rejected outright.

That didn’t stop Netanyahu’s most ardent American supporters from jumping to reiterate his message.

The first New York Times opinion piece to be published in the massacre’s wake came from Israel apologist Bret Stephens, with a column titled “Bondi Beach is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like.” Stephens wrote that the shooting constitutes the “real-world consequences” of “literalists” responding to chants like “globalize the intifada,” “resistance is justified,” and “by any means necessary.”

The point is obvious: to make sure that Palestinians remain eternally in stateless subjugation and to give Israel a free hand to violate their rights — including by committing a genocide like the one unfolding in Gaza today.

It’s all done in the name of fighting antisemitism by conflating the worst kinds of violent anti-Jewish bigotry, like what we saw in Bondi Beach, with any criticisms of Israel and its actions. To so much as say Palestinians ought to have basic human rights, in this view, becomes a deadly attack on Jewish safety.

There’s a profound irony here. Like many thousands of Jewish people around the world, I do feel less safe precisely because the Israeli government is carrying out a genocide in our names, associating Jewish identity with ethno-nationalist brutality. It is antisemitic to blame all Jews for Israel’s actions; it is therefore also antisemitic — and produces more antisemitism — for Israel to claim to act for all Jews.

As Netanyahu’s response to the Bondi massacre again makes clear, his interest is not in Jewish safety. Jewish fear, directed into anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim animus, is far more useful to his government’s project of ethnic cleansing.

In his Sunday statement, the Israeli prime minister said he had earlier this year told Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” Australia, alongside nations including the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, moved to recognize Palestinian statehood in September at the United Nations; 159 countries now recognize Palestine.

On Monday, Albanese rightly rejected Netanyahu’s effort to link this recognition to the antisemitic attack. “I do not accept this connection,” Albanese said, calling the suggestion “an unfounded and dangerous shortcut.”

Stephens, for his part, begins his New York Times column by praising the bravery of local shopkeeper Ahmed al-Ahmed, who risked his own life to single-handedly disarm one of the Bondi attackers.

“That act of bravery not only saved lives,” Stephens wrote, “it also served as an essential reminder that humanity can always transcend cultural and religious boundaries.”

The columnist then spends the rest of the short article blaming, without grounds, the Palestinian solidarity movement for “Jewish blood.”

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Leaving aside the fact that Stephens knows next to nothing about the shooters, the extreme perniciousness of his conclusion goes beyond an issue of ignorance.

His message is of a piece with Netanyahu’s. He is saying that you cannot call for Palestinian liberation, or the end to Israel’s apartheid regime, without de facto calling for the killing of Jews.

The only option, according to this line of thinking, is to be silent and let Palestinian oppression continue. It’s a disgusting zero sum logic — not to mention an insult to the victims of antisemitism.

The post NY Times’ Bret Stephens Blames Palestine Freedom Movement for Bondi Beach Shooting appeared first on The Intercept.

And yet executions carried out by governmental authorities are expected to reach their highest level in 15 years — nearly doubling over last year’s numbers.

Forty-six people were executed in 2025, according to an annual report released on Monday by the Death Penalty Information Center, which provides comprehensive data on each year’s execution trends. Two more executions — one in Florida and one in Georgia — are scheduled for later this week.

The nearly 50 people who will be executed this year is a steep increase from the 25 people killed by capital punishment in 2024.

“There is a huge disconnect between what the public wants and what elected officials are doing,” Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The Intercept, noting that public polling has found just 52 percent of the public supports executions and opposition to the practice is at the highest level since 1966.

The surge was driven by Florida, which is poised to conduct 19 executions, accounting for 40 percent of the nation’s death sentences in 2025. Only Texas has ever killed as many people on death row in a single year.

“It very much feels political,” said Maria DeLiberato, legal and policy director at the Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “It seems the current Florida administration has really been in lockstep with the Trump administration, and this idea of appearing to be tough on crime.”

In response to an inquiry, Alex Lanfranconi, a spokesperson for far-right Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, said, “My advice to those who are seeking to avoid the death penalty in Florida would be to not murder people.”

Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas each had five executions, meaning just four states accounted for nearly three-quarters of the executions carried out over the past calendar year.

Even as the number of executions surged, the number of new death sentences handed out at trial declined.

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Of the more than 50 capital trials that reached the sentencing phase in 2025, just 22 resulted in a death sentence. Many of the new death sentences came from cases in Florida and Alabama, where a non-unanimous jury can impose capital punishment.

New Pro-Death Penalty Laws

The death penalty is legalized in 27 states, though governors in four of them have paused capital punishment.

Despite steadily growing public disapproval of the practice, elected officials in states that conduct executions have aggressively introduced legislation that would enable them to more easily carry out death sentences. In recent years, states carrying out capital punishment have passed bills to create strict secrecy around executions, expand crimes eligible for the death penalty crimes, and add new methods of killing prisoners.

In 2025, the trend continued. Legislators in 11 states and the U.S. Congress introduced bills to expand the use of capital punishment, according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s tally.

Arkansas, Idaho, and Oklahoma enacted legislation to allow the death penalty for people convicted of non-lethal sex crimes, even though the Supreme Court has banned this punishment in such cases.

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Multiple state governments added new execution protocols, while legislators in other states introduced bills to expand the death penalty in various ways. Florida passed a vague bill authorizing “a method not deemed unconstitutional,” and an Idaho bill made death by firing squad the state’s primary death sentence method. Arkansas approved legislation to use nitrogen in executions, joining Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, which conducted its first gas execution this year.

While these states sought to expand their approved uses and methods of capital punishment, other jurisdictions generated a slew of constitutional concerns as executions appeared to result in prolonged suffering or deviated from outlined protocols.

In Tennessee, executions resumed after a five-year hiatus and a review that found the state had improperly tested execution drugs and failed to follow its own procedures. Byron Black, the second man killed under a subsequently enacted protocol, reportedly groaned and cried out during his execution; an autopsy found he had developed pulmonary edema, a form of lung damage commonly found in people who are executed by lethal injection.

After winning a yearslong court battle over the constitutionality of firing squad executions, South Carolina became the first state in 15 years to carry out a death sentence using the method. Attempts to kill prisoners with this protocol ushered in fresh concerns over whether the executions violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In May, lawyers for Mikal Mahdi, the second man killed by firing squad in the state, filed a lawsuit saying that, though South Carolina’s execution protocol requires executioners to shoot three bullets into the condemned prisoner’s heart, the state’s autopsy found only two bullet wounds in Mahdi’s chest and that both largely missed his heart.

“These facts, drawn from the autopsy commissioned by the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC), explain why witnesses to Mr. Mahdi’s execution heard him scream and groan both when he was shot and nearly a minute afterward,” lawyers wrote in a court filing.

The state said two of the bullets entered Mahdi’s body at the same location — a claim that the forensic pathologist hired by Mahdi’s legal team called “extraordinarily uncommon.” A Department of Corrections spokesperson told The Intercept that the autopsy showed all three bullets hit Mahdi’s heart.

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And in Alabama, nitrogen executions continued to take far longer than the state had said they would. Though state officials had pledged in court that prisoners would lose consciousness within “seconds” of the gas flowing and die in about five minutes, that has not happened.

Anthony Boyd’s October execution took nearly 40 minutes, according to a journalist who witnessed it. Media reports said that the 54-year-old rose off the gurney, shook and gasped for breath more than 225 times.

As he had in other nitrogen executions, Alabama prison commissioner John Hamm maintained that the execution had proceeded according to plan.

“It was within the protocol, but it has been the longest,” Hamm said.

Like many other states, Alabama has never released an unredacted protocol or transparently answered questions about its source of execution materials.

“Experimental, Untested Methods”

Maher, the head of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that this kind of conduct, particularly when problems arise during executions, undermines democratic principles.

“We are seeing that many elected officials are just shamelessly putting out narratives that defy the witness observations of executions that have gone terribly wrong,” she said. “We need to have officials who are willing to tell the truth about the death penalty.”

While the Supreme Court can halt executions over constitutional concerns, it did not grant a single stay in 2025.

“I don’t think we would have seen these experimental, untested methods used 20 years ago,” Maher said. “Part of the explanation is because the United States Supreme Court has signaled very clearly that it does not intend to step in and halt use of these methods.”

The post Despite Declining Support for the Death Penalty, Executions Nearly Doubled in 2025, Report Says appeared first on The Intercept.

He was one of around 130,000 Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank with permits from the Israeli authorities to cross the separation wall into Israeli territory as a laborer. With his lawful employment inside the Green Line, which separates the West Bank from Israel, he was able to go back and forth from his hometown of Iraq Burin, near Nablus in the north, to whichever Israeli city offered work.

Before the Covid pandemic, the 51-year-old Qaddous’s work in Israel sustained his wife and five children.

His brother Qusai said Arafat’s living conditions worsened over the years, as work opportunities dried up during the pandemic, his family’s needs grew, and the West Bank’s economy tanked.

“My brother risked his life because he needed to provide for his family.”

“There are hardly any jobs in the West Bank,” Qusai said, “and prices of food and goods are extremely high.”

Things got even worse after October 7, 2023: Israel indefinitely paused Palestinian workers’ permits after Hamas’s attack, and Qaddous lost his permit. So when an opportunity presented itself — a job in Taybeh, inside Israel — he took a chance.

“My brother risked his life because he needed to provide for his family at a time when the economic situation was difficult,” Qusai said.

The decision to cross the wall would prove deadly for Qaddous.

On April 26, 2024, Qaddous drove to the barrier. Capped with barbed wire, the wall is over 8 meters tall and runs more than 200 kilometers. Qaddous hoped to jump over it and catch a ride from East Jerusalem to Taybeh. He chose a section of the barrier that separates the Palestinian side of the town of Al-Ram from the Israeli section.

Qaddous paid some local Palestinian men 600 shekels, or $186. The men provided the ladder for getting up the wall, a rope for getting down the other side, and transport to the job site. The men served as lookouts throughout the crossing.

Qaddous climbed the ladder, then mayhem broke out. The lookouts spotted an Israeli police jeep. Qaddous fell to the ground.

“The fall did not kill him immediately,” Qusai said. “Israeli police spotted him as he lay on the ground with a serious head injury and prevented an ambulance from reaching him. He bled out. When they were sure he was dead, they allowed paramedics to take his body.”

Shooting Workers

Forty-four Palestinian workers have died trying to cross the wall since October 2023, when Israeli authorities revoked almost all permits, according to the Palestinian Workers’ Union. The deaths, along with serious injuries inflicted by authorities, happened while workers were being chased by Israeli police, beaten, shot at, or fell after jumping off the separation barrier.

The injuries have been growing more serious. Palestinians are increasingly being shot by Israel’s border police, especially in the legs, following an order from far-right Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, according to the Israeli news outlet Walla. Since the start of 2025, at least 106 Palestinians have been shot in the legs by border police at the Israeli separation wall near Jerusalem — including one this week who was shot in the leg when Israeli forces opened fire, according to the Red Crescent.

Israel’s occupation has shaped the West Bank’s economy for nearly six decades, creating a structure in which Palestinians are largely prevented from building a self-sustaining economy and instead pushed into dependency on work in Israel itself or in its illegal settlements.

Before the Gaza genocide got underway in October 2023, almost 20 percent all Palestinian laborers worked in Israel and or its illegal West Bank settlements — mostly in construction and agriculture. That number nosedived to 4 percent immediately after the Hamas-led attack on Israel set off an Israeli onslaught.

Before October 2023, around a quarter million Palestinians, with and without permits, used to commute daily from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including 19,000 from Gaza, according to Shaher Saad, the secretary-general of the Palestinian Workers’ Union.

Today, fewer than 15,000 Palestinian laborers with permits travel to Israel for work with permits. The drastic reduction cut off a vital liquidity lifeline that provided them with wages 4 to 10 times higher than what they would earn in the occupied territories, where unemployment is more than 50 percent nationally — about 80 percent in Gaza and 35 percent in the West Bank.

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Additionally, since October 2023, Israel has staunched the flow of tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority, the home-rule Palestinian government in the West Bank. Israel has withheld and delayed transfers of the revenues back to the Palestinians in contravention of the Oslo Accords, the diplomatic agreement that established the PA and set the stage for a two-state solution whose prospects have all but vanished.

With public salaries hit by the withheld tax revenue and cash running increasingly short, about 40,000 Palestinians with no permits continue to cross into Israel illegally, despite the increased risk of the Israeli crackdown, according to Saad.

For years, Israel has regarded Palestinians — many of whom work in low-skilled positions — as a pool of cheap labor.

Bringing them into the Israeli labor market was presented as a way to boost Palestinian living standards, on the assumption that hardship breeds resistance. Economic gains and financial reliance on Israel, on the other hand, would deter Palestinians from challenging the status quo, helping maintain Israeli dominance.

At the same time, however, Palestinian workers were far from equal in the workforce. With no guaranteed sick leave, no pension, delayed or denied benefits, and with work permits tied to a specific employer, a structure was created wherein any worker can easily be replaced by the thousands desperate for permits. Palestinian laborers were cheap and disposable. And their mistreatment has worsened since October 7, according to Mohammad Blidi, who heads the workers’ union in Tulkarem, a Palestinian city near the separation wall in the northern West Bank.

“As an occupying power, Israel is legally obliged to provide work for Palestinians, and to respect international labor laws,” Blidi said. “What is happening in reality is far from it. On a daily basis, Palestinian workers are subject to humiliation and beatings.”

Laborers From Gaza

On the day of the October 7 attacks, Israel detained thousands of Palestinian workers from Gaza who were in working on permits inside Israel. Although they had the necessary Israeli-issued permission, they were held for a month at least, many beaten and interrogated.

That the detained workers were legally in Israel, with permits and the attendant security vetting, according to Blidi, suggests they were detained mainly because they had come from Gaza.

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The arrests were carried out “secretly and illegally,” according to Gisha, an Israeli group that advocates for Palestinians’ right of movement. There was no legal basis for moving the workers into detention centers, the group said, and they were effectively disappeared, with Israel refusing to disclose the workers’ identities and whereabouts.

Many of the workers described being mistreated in detention — left without food, water, medication, a mattress, or toilet access. They endured harsh violence and psychological abuse, reporting torture and degrading treatment. Israeli soldiers seized all cash and mobile phones from the workers, and two died in Israeli custody.

In one case, a 40-year-old Palestinian man from Gaza City who worked in the Israeli city of Ashkelon on the day of the attack had to flee to Hebron when news came out that laborers from Gaza were being targeted by Israeli police.

Since he could not go back to Gaza, he hunkered down with several other workers in the southern West Bank city awaiting his fate, the man, who requested anonymity for fear of his safety, said in an interview. Then he received word that his pregnant wife and four of his children — two boys and two girls — had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. Only one child survived, but the boy’s leg was seriously injured and he lost an eye in the attack.

Just two days into mourning, the worker was awakened by a loud explosion in the pre-dawn hours. Israeli soldiers blew up the door to the house he was staying in and detained him, along with the others.

“They tied our hands behind our backs and blindfolded us before beating us,” he recalled. “They took us to the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba and from there to another prison that they didn’t disclose. For nine days, we endured tortuous interrogations. Every day, they asked different questions about Gaza. I told them I’m just a worker.”

He was once again transferred to another prison for a day — and in the dead of night, he and several other workers were dumped at the border with Gaza. They all entered the Strip by foot.

“I was in the south and couldn’t go back to Gaza City,” he said. “I couldn’t bury my wife and children. I couldn’t say goodbye to them.”

It took 20 days for him to be reunited with his son. They moved into a tattered tent that flooded with the recent winter storms.

He said that, working in Israel, he had been able to save over $10,000.

“It’s all gone now,” the man said. “I only have four shekels” — about $1 — “in my pocket. I used to be able to work and provide for my family. But now, there is no life.”

The post Israel Revoked Palestinians’ Work Permits — Then Launched a Deadly Crackdown on Laborers appeared first on The Intercept.

If Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a site of tension in your family for the last two Thanksgiving holidays, this year should be no different. The so-called ceasefire might seem like a good excuse to bury the hatchet and enjoy a quieter turkey dinner, but when we look at the harrowing status quo for Palestinians in Gaza today, there is no peace to be thankful for — especially not on a day that marks the remembrance of this country’s own genocide against Indigenous Americans.

To be clear, if two years of livestreamed annihilation have failed to shift your loved ones’ support away from the Israeli ethnostate, I doubt there is anything a dinner table argument could do to persuade them. There can be no reasoning with a worldview that forecloses seeing Palestinians as fully human.

I navigate this with pro-Israel members of my own British Jewish family. It’s painful, and I don’t have any good advice. Whatever your approach with your family, there can be no pretense that the genocide in Gaza is over.

Families like mine, divided over Israel, are not the important ones here. For my part, I’ll be thinking instead of another family this Thanksgiving: that of my student from Gaza. He escaped in 2024 after Israel bombed his home, killing two of his immediate family members, including his mother. His surviving family are still there, living in tents. He hasn’t heard from them in over two weeks.

It is for families like my student’s that we cannot simply take it easy this Thanksgiving because of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza.

Unending Destruction

While the October 10 agreement has offered some relief for Palestinians, with a significant drop in daily slaughter, displacement, starvation and killings by Israeli forces continue. Instead of relentless, Israel’s bombings over the last 45 days have been simply ongoing and regular. Israel has killed 345 Palestinians in Gaza, including 120 children, while demolishing over 1,500 structures.

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At the same time, only a fraction of the aid trucks which were supposed to enter Gaza daily under the ceasefire agreement have been permitted entry by Israeli forces. Mass, enforced hunger continues in the Strip, where 50 million tons of rubble sits atop well over 10,000 unrecovered bodies.

In the face of such totalizing and unending destruction, it’s hard to find much solace in the fact that the support for the Palestinian cause has grown internationally; that nearly all major international human rights organizations have recognized Israel’s actions as genocidal; that a major wave of nation-states, including France, Canada, and Britain, moved this year to recognize the state of Palestine. The dead, displaced, and occupied can do little with declarations that carry no concrete consequences.

“What we need is a justice plan,” Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian writer and poet, told a U.N. meeting this week. “It is time to stop accepting the illusion of peace processes that only entrench injustices.”

With the state of the world as it stands, it feels unlikely that Israeli leaders will be held accountable for their war crimes any time soon. Justice for Palestine is hard to imagine, but we can continue to apply pressure in ways that have already seen paradigms shift. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election was a genuine victory against the perverse weaponization of antisemitism against Israel’s critics. Now New Yorkers must push our next mayor to uphold commitments to Palestinian solidarity and international law.

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And there is more those of us living in safety can do. We can send funds and share resources, as so many already do. And we can continue heading and supporting Palestinians’ call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli institutions complicit in occupation and apartheid.

Activist sometimes say, “Solidarity begins at home.” Yet not everyone can choose their home. If you have the great fortune of spending the holidays with loved ones who share your commitments to justice and liberation, I hope your time together is full of joy. Most of the time, though, solidarity actually begins anywhere but home. So if you choose to spend time with your family knowing that it will be fraught, I wish you luck. The weekend will pass, and there’s urgent work to be done.

The post Keep Talking About Gaza at Your Thanksgiving Table appeared first on The Intercept.

Johnson dangled the prospect that one of the children could receive money because, Johnson claimed, he was entitled to $10 million as part of reparations for his January 6 arrest, according to a police report from a Hernando County Sheriff’s Department detective.

Those convicted and later pardoned for involvement in the January 6 riot have not been rewarded any reparations, though Trump and January 6 rioters have floated the idea of a compensation fund.

Johnson said he would put the victim in his will to receive any of the money left after his death. Police believed this was done to keep the child from “exposing what Andrew had done,” according to the arrest report, which was filed in court.

Police believe Johnson offered to put the alleged victim in his will to keep the child quiet.

Johnson faces two criminal cases in county court, one for each child. In one case, he has been charged with lewd or lascivious molestation of a child under the age of 12. In the other case, he faces a charge of lewd or lascivious behavior to a child under the age of 16, transmitting harmful information to minors, and exhibition with a victim under the age of 16.

Johnson has pleaded not guilty, and his trials are set to start early next year. (Johnson’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.)

Though some records, like the redacted arrest affidavits, are public, the indictments and other court filings in Hernando County are not available to the public. Florida law allows authorities to withhold information from public records that would identify victims of child sex crimes.

Two police arrest reports detail Johnson’s alleged crimes, which range from sexual contact with the genitals of an 11-year-old to asking a minor for sex. Johnson’s victims, according to a pair of arrest affidavits, were the child of his now ex-girlfriend and a friend of the first child.

On August 26, eight days after an arrest warrant was issued for the child sex crimes charges, Johnson was arrested in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, according to local media there, which noted his January 6 pardon, and set for extradition to Florida.

Johnson was among the 1,500 people charged in connection with the riots on January 6, 2021, in which supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in Washington in an attempt to overthrow the president’s election loss to Joe Biden. According to an FBI affidavit, authorities found probable cause to charge Johnson for entering the Capitol illegally and trying to interfere with Congress’s certification of Biden’s victory. An FBI affidavit includes photos of Johnson climbing into the building through a broken window.

Johnson, 44, represented himself in court and pleaded guilty in the spring of 2024 to charges of violently entering the Capitol and disorderly conduct, though he unsuccessfully attempted to take back his plea months later.

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In January 2025, after Trump took office for his second term, he pardoned Johnson, who had been charged with violently entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct, and demonstrating inside the Capitol. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

In the 2025 affidavit that details the alleged sex crimes against the younger child, Johnson’s ex-girlfriend told police that she found out he was using Discord to send her child photos of girls. Johnson included sexual comments with the photos. According to the affidavit, she told police she asked the child if Johnson had ever been inappropriate in person, and the child responded that Johnson had molested them three times over a six-month period in 2024.

The abuse started when the child was 11 years old, the child told the mother, according to the affidavit, when Johnson was still living with the family. The police document says the minor described two incidents of falling asleep in the living room and awaking to Johnson touching the child’s genitals.

Another incident, according to the affidavit, occurred in a hotel, with no further detail given. The child told Johnson they knew this was wrong. Johnson apologized, the police document said, and asked the child to not tell anyone, so that he would not get in trouble.

After the third instance, Johnson mailed the child an iPhone 7, which he said to keep a secret. Johnson then used Discord to communicate with the child, without their mother’s knowledge. Photographs on the phone showed Johnson sneaking into the home to spend time with the child, according to the arrest affidavit.

Both children said Johnson showed them lewd photographs and videos of himself, according to both arrest affidavits, and exposed himself to them in person.

The second child, who is under the age of 16, told police Johnson made comments that led them to believe he was a “pedophile,” according to an arrest affidavit in that case, where Johnson was charged with lewd or lascivious behavior.

Johnson, according to the second affidavit, also encouraged children to have sex in his van.

Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioters

Many of those charged in January 6 cases, especially those who went to jail or prison, have formed a loose-knit community that socializes and fights with each other, both online and offline. Johnson has been a fixture within the January 6 online community.

He regularly led Spaces, conversations on X (formerly Twitter), that would sometimes last over nine hours. On both X and his YouTube channel, Johnson positioned himself as a person who exposed perceived bad actors among the January 6 rioters, namely those who, he argued, were federal agents or provocateurs sent to make the Trump supporters at the Capitol that day look bad.

Johnson has been a fixture within the January 6 online community.

Many rioters have spent time defending themselves against Johnson’s allegation or joining him in casting blame on others. Earlier this year, Johnson said he traveled from Florida to Pennsylvania to attend the funeral of fellow January 6 rioter Bart Shively, staying in an Airbnb organized by Jake Lang, a white nationalist rioter who is now running for Congress in Florida.

The right-wing outlet Gateway Pundit ran a story about Johnson in June 2024, ahead of his sentencing, referring to him as a “single father” who was “on the brink of homelessness.”

The Gateway Pundit story, which uncritically offers Johnson’s version of the events of January 6 — including his conspiracy theories about agents provocateurs — encouraged readers to donate money to the defendant. The article was based on an interview of Johnson by Jenn Baker of CondemnedUSA, an organization that raised money for January 6 participants. (“I have had no contact with him since just after his pardon for J6,” Baker told The Intercept. “I’m completely disgusted and horrified at these charges and if he is proven to be guilty I support any punishment he receives.”)

Baker has recently been added to the Pentagon Press Corps for Gateway Pundit. Earlier this year, Baker wrote a sympathetic Gateway Pundit profile of Dillon Herrington, a January 6 defendant who is currently in jail while awaiting trial on a 2023 charge of first-degree rape.

Johnson joins a short list of pardoned rioters who have been convicted or charged with sexual crimes against children, in most cases for conduct before the January 6 riot.

Like Johnson, David Daniel was accused with a child sex crime allegedly committed after the January 6 riot; he was charged in April 2024 of possessing and production of child sexual abuse materials after the FBI raided his home in relation to the riot investigation. In deliberations, Daniel argued that because the raid and search were related to January 6, the evidence was inadmissible. So far, Daniel has not been successful in getting his charges dropped, and his case is ongoing.

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In two other cases, Trump issued second pardons to other January 6 defendants who were charged with crimes related to investigations of their roles in the riots; neither was charged with sex crimes.

One defendant was pardoned this month for an illegal gun charge that arose from a search of his home during the investigation into January 6 related crimes. The second pardon came after courts rejected the man’s attempt to have the charge vacated because of the original pardon.

In another case, Trump this month pardoned another rioter who made online threats to shoot police officers after they sought to question her about January 6.

The post Pardoned Capitol Rioter Tried to Hush Child Sex Victim With Promise of Jan. 6 Reparation Money, Police Say appeared first on The Intercept.

In a landmark ruling last Friday, a federal judge indefinitely barred the Trump administration from fining or cutting funds to the University of California system over the government’s bogus claims of antisemitism and discrimination.

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin was unequivocal that the Trump administration, which has demanded over a $1.2 billion settlement from the UC system and already cut over $600 million in federal funding, was “engaged in a concerted campaign to purge ‘woke,’ ‘left,’ and ‘socialist’ viewpoints from our country’s leading universities.”

The “playbook,” she said, had been repeated by Trump nationwide, “with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.”

The decision, a preliminary injunction, is a win for speech on campus and academic freedom — and a rebuke to the vile weaponization of antisemitism claims to silence dissent.

The case was brought not by administrators, but by workers and students in the UC system, one of the most prestigious public university networks in the country. A coalition of faculty, staff, and student groups and unions from UC schools sued the administration for violating their First Amendment rights to free speech and Fifth Amendment rights to due process.

Not only did the University of California leadership have nothing to do with the case, but the school system leaders remain so cravenly wedded to capitulation that they’re still in settlement discussions with the administration.

There are lessons to be learned from this victory — and from the absence of UC leadership in it.

We know who we need to support: Over the last two years, the struggle to keep universities and colleges alive as sites of intellectual interrogation and learning have been fought by faculty, staff, and students. And we know who to be wary of: Again and again, school administrators have been complicit in the dismantling and undermining of the communities they are supposed to serve.

These dynamics are present nationwide; UC administrations are not alone in their willingness to throw their faculty and students under the bus for speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

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How Columbia’s Leadership Refashioned the University in Trump’s Image

Schools including Columbia University, Brown University, and the University of Virginia, among others, have all made deals with Trump to pay tens of millions of dollars in cowardly settlements to restore federal funding. They have agreed to egregious conditions, like targeting anti-racist admissions efforts, entrenching pro-Israel alignments, harming trans students and faculty, and policing speech and programs disfavored by the Trumpian right.

Harvard University earned praise for suing rather than settling with the Trump administration. In that case, too, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s attempt to freeze more than $2 billion in federal research grants was illegal. The judge lambasted the government for using “antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

Yet Harvard’s apparent resistance was belied by the school “quietly complying with Trump’s agenda” anyway, as two Harvard Ph.D. students noted. The university fired Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies director and associate director, among other attacks on scholars and programs with apparent Palestine solidarity connections. The university also renamed its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging in alignment with Trump’s anti-DEI campaign.

Who Will Save Universities?

It would be nice if we could unreservedly celebrate Friday’s ruling as proof of the movement dictum that “when we fight, we win!” There’s little cause for optimism, though, about the future of higher education in the face of a government hellbent on its destruction, and universities led by people who have imperilled their institutions with four decades of neoliberal austerity, corporatization, and adjunctification.

Higher education today is a charnel house. Even the wealthiest schools are freezing Ph.D. admissions and cutting whole programs under unprecedented economic pressures, accelerated by Trump’s attacks.

Yet the political nature of American academia’s remaking cannot be reduced to fiscal necessity or Trumpian animus alone.

Top-heavy administrative offices are choosing their austerity measures in specific ways. In schools around the country, humanities and social research departments in particular face the chop, while bloated administrator salaries and other corporate overheads go untouched. Faculty governance has been reduced to a fig leaf.

“Simply put, universities have reached a point where executive power—the President, with the invisible hand of the Board above—is absolute, except where there are unions,” wrote Adam Rzepka, an English professor at New Jersey’s Montclair State University, in a recent American Association of University Professors blog post.

He added that even unions “are often unable to act beyond what is currently subject to negotiation,” such that department closures, academic oversight, and disciplinary issues are taken out of academic workers’ hands.

“Not that faculty here haven’t tried to steer the ship away from this iceberg, but faculty everywhere know how that goes these days,” Rzepka wrote.

It is a grim prospect indeed — and an extraordinary amount of bullshit work — to have to try to prove the value of intellectual education and research within the logic of a management consultant’s report.

Such is the nature of corporatized higher education, made starkly clear and worse under Trump.

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Friday’s ruling against the Trump administration is a reminder of who will lead the fight for higher education.

The only way to save universities in this country will be to end the unaccountable executive governance and corporate oversight, which has left schools of every size, both private and public, vulnerable to authoritarian attacks.

Decision-making should truly be in the hands of professors, workers, and students willing to fight for robust academic freedom, scholarly integrity, and an antifascist future for education.

If the UC schools, collectively the second largest employer in the state, are saved, it is thanks to the community of workers and scholars alone.

The post Judge Rules Trump Can’t Cut UC Funding — but UC Leaders Are Still Negotiating a Settlement appeared first on The Intercept.

The personal identification information became visible to other users who were viewing real estate listings. The information would appear momentarily when a contact information form popped up on a listing; the form would be pre-filled with details from past users, which would quickly vanish.

The contact information of past users, however, would remain visible when viewing the listing while disabling JavaScript, a programming language used to make interactive websites that can, in many browsers, be turned off in general or for specific sites.

Past users’ email addresses or phone numbers, and sometimes both, were displayed.

“We recently identified a technical error on the website that temporarily made it possible for the e-mail address and/or phone number of a previous visitor to be visible to another user on a rental listing page,” said Alina Ptaszynski, a Redfin spokesperson. “This error was active for less than a week and was remediated as soon as we were made aware of it.”

After The Intercept initially contacted Redfin, the company changed the way its website contact form is displayed for desktop web browsers, but the vulnerability persisted on mobile listings. After a subsequent inquiry from The Intercept, the mobile listings’ contact form was updated as well.

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Redfin, a giant brokerage house that pioneered map-based online real estate listings, claims to have 50 million monthly users, according to Rocket, its parent company.

The data vulnerability only displayed one user’s contact information at a time, but data could have been collected en masse by someone making repeated visits to property listings and serially gathering available information. (Redfin did not respond to question about whether there was any evidence the vulnerability had been exploited to collect bulk user information.)

Using reverse phone number and email search databases, The Intercept confirmed that the email addresses and phone numbers are valid contact information belonging to real people, not just dummy data that developers sometimes use when testing their code.

Inadvertently revealing user information is a problem which has plagued web services for years.

Redfin’s privacy policy says the company may share private information, but only when the prompt to provide that data is accompanied by a disclosure. The property contact form, however, does not provide a disclaimer that a user’s contact information might be shared, let alone with subsequent users.

The post Real Estate Giant Redfin Exposed Users’ Personal Info on Listing Contact Forms appeared first on The Intercept.

Protesters had accused HRC of “pinkwashing,” a term used to describe the use of Israel’s publicly pro-LGBTQ+ stance to distract from its violations of Palestinians’ human rights.

“Organizations like HRC can no longer prioritize proximity to power over the well-being of our people.”

“Organizations like HRC can no longer prioritize proximity to power over the well-being of our people, nor center inclusion in the very systems that are killing us,” said the statement from the Gender Liberation Movement and Adalah Justice Project. “Freedom, equality, and justice for our queer and trans siblings here can only be achieved when we collectively confront the systems that are harming communities everywhere.”

(Neither Northrop Grumman nor Raytheon, which rebranded as RTX in 2023, immediately responded to requests for comment.)

Both weapon-makers have been seen as profiting off Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Raytheon and Northrop Grumman’s stock prices spiked after October 7, 2023, as Israel ramped up its attacks.

Since Israel’s assault on Gaza, HRC’s sponsorships had increasingly come in for criticisms from sympathetic celebrities speaking out on Gaza.

At a February 2024 protest outside HRC’s annual gala, protesters condemned the groups’ sponsorship by Northrop Grumman. 

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“[HRC’s] initiatives that are meant to benefit us are being funded by a weapons manufacturer. Not cute, not queer,” actor Indya Moore told the crowd of protesters. “Their bullets, their bombs, and their missiles are massacring Palestinians who are also queer and trans and deserving of a human rights campaign.” 

While accepting HRC’s own “Visibility Award” for LGBTQ+ representation in March 2025, actor Hannah Einbinder condemned the silencing of the Palestinian struggle and the ongoing genocidal war and called out oil companies like Shell and BP for their role in the climate crisis. Investigations have shown that BP’s oil supply is deeply involved in Israel’s war machine.

Einbinder has repeatedly called attention to Palestine and boycotting Israel’s warfare. In September 2025, she made headlines for calling for a free Palestine during her Emmy acceptance speech, and the same month she joined a boycott organized by Film Workers for Palestine against Israeli film institutions implicated in the Gaza war and “apartheid against the Palestinian people.”

A statement provided to The Intercept from HRC said Raytheon and Northrop Grumman no longer sponsored the group, but didn’t directly address when or how the relationships ended. The statement cast the changes as of a piece with the group’s long-held stances against extremism.

“While our focus is on LGBTQ+ equality in the United States, we have spoken out about the crisis, the rising cost of extremism in the United States and around the globe and how Islamophobia, anti-semitism and anti-LGBTQ hatred are globally linked,” a spokesperson for HRC said. “We have also championed the right to protest here in the United States, as it and other pro-democratic principles are being undermined and threatened by this administration.”

Adalah and Gender Liberation Movement said that pro-Palestine groups including No Pride in Genocide and Writers Against the War on Gaza had pushed for this move since at least October 7, 2023.

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Highlighting Northrop Grumman in particular for its production of weapons used in Israel’s genocide against Gaza, the Adalah and the Gender Liberation Movement statement says, “These are tools of state-sanctioned destruction and death, not of human rights or equality, and they do not distinguish between queer and straight lives.” 

The two groups also noted in their statement that HRC did not commit to permanently rejecting cash from any weapons manufacturers, nor did it adhere to organizers’ demands to call for an arms embargo on Israel.

The statement says, “Our work is not finished, and we remain committed to the struggle.”

The post Human Rights Campaign Rejects Weapons Company Sponsorships After Pressure Around Israel Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

On the night of October 12, Wafi and her five children could barely sleep. It had been an all-too-common problem in the two years of unrelenting Israeli attacks on Gaza since the October 7 attacks. But that night, it wasn’t the Israeli bombs keeping them awake.

Now, it was because they believed that the next day their husband and father, Anis al-Astal, would be one of thousands of Palestinians freed from Israeli prisons as part of the new ceasefire deal.

“We were discussing what we should do when Baba comes. What will he look like? What would we feed him, and what would we offer him to drink?” she recounted to The Intercept. “I woke up early, and I was planning to go to the market and buy clothes and food for him. It’s just a matter of hours, God willing, after two years of detention, in a few hours he’ll be with us.”

She hadn’t seen her husband for nearly the entire war. On December 2, 2023, al-Astal, the director of ambulance services in southern Gaza, had been on a mission to evacuate patients from the north when he and three other colleagues were detained by Israeli forces at the Netzarim Junction, a major intersection in central Gaza. Since then, Wafi and her children have been waiting for him to return — and now the moment was finally here.

Or so she thought.

On October 13, when dozens of detained Palestinians were freed and brought back to Gaza, a call came from one of her husband’s colleagues: Al-Astal was nowhere to be seen. 

“It was an indescribable feeling,” she said. “My sons are young, young men, and I have my only daughter, and we were bawling like little kids. My little boy, who is 7 years old, was crying his heart out. There are things that words and phrases can’t explain.”

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Al-Astal is one of at least 95 Palestinian medical workers, 80 of whom are from Gaza, still being held without charge in Israeli prisons, according to Healthcare Workers Watch, a group formed by Palestinian and international medical workers to track attacks on health care in Palestine. Among those who remain imprisoned is Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the north, who was taken after a brutal attack on the hospital in December 2024.

According to Healthcare Workers Watch, more than 400 Palestinian medical workers had been detained by Israeli authorities since October 7, 2023.

“The majority of them have been taken from their place of work while working to try and save patients. So that includes people who’ve been taken from their ambulance, during their work, or from hospitals,” said Rebecca Inglis from Healthcare Workers Watch. “And so these are health care workers who are supposed to be specifically protected under international humanitarian law.” 

Since October 7, the Israeli military has repeatedly attacked Gaza’s hospitals from the north to the south, and blocked medicine and crucial supplies. More than 1,700 health workers have been killed. The United Nations has described the attacks as the “targeted destruction” of the health care system — a “medicide.”

Palestinians from Gaza like Anis al-Astal have been held under Israel’s Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows for prisoners to be held without charge, for an unlimited time, and without access to an attorney for over two months. Amnesty International has said the law is being used to “arbitrarily round up Palestinian civilians from Gaza” with little or no accountability.

The indefinite detentions leave families in Gaza like Wafi’s to fight for any scrap of information about their loved ones. Some released detainees told Wafi that her husband had been moved between Israeli prisons, but she does not know with any certainty right now. 

“He and the medical staff were about to be released,” she said. “What happened? What took place? Were they stopped? No one knows.”

A Doctor Returns

Nearly 2,000 Palestinians were freed on October 13 as part of the ceasefire agreement, 1,700 of them from Gaza who returned to what little of what was left of their homes. Among them was Dr. Ahmed Mhanna, who previously worked as the director of Al-Awda Hospital. Like al-Astal, it had been nearly two years since he last set foot in Gaza. When he finally came back, he was greeted by dozens of colleagues who hugged him and lifted him up on their shoulders. 

The physical toll of his detention was immediately visible. Mhanna had grown gaunt, much thinner than when he was taken. 

“During the whole time which I spent in the prison, one year and 10 months, I lost 30 kilograms” — around 66 pounds — “of total body weight,” he told The Intercept. 

Mhanna was at Al-Awda Hospital in the north when he, along with other staff, was taken by Israeli forces on December 17, 2023, after a nearly two-week long siege on the facility. The first place they were taken, he said, was Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman military prison, where Israeli forces have been accused by detainees and human rights groups of torture, rape, and abuse. Mhanna said that he and others were regularly interrogated for up to eight hours. 

“Prisoners were kept there in extremely degrading conditions. Small cages, exposed to cold, dirt, and humiliation,” he said. 

“Many detainees were forced to stay in painful positions for long hours, often blindfolded and handcuffed,” he said, describing his and others’ treatment. “Soldiers used intimidation and psychological abuse as part of daily routine treatment. It was a deliberate effort to break our spirit and dignity.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the Israeli military, which oversees Sde Teiman, said that it “thoroughly examines concrete allegations concerning the abuse of detainees” and says no systematic abuse takes place.

Mhanna said that the harsh treatment continued after he was moved to Ketziot Prison, where he was held until he was released. There, he said, 40 people were held in a room that was around 500 square feet, and that showers and medical care was regularly denied. 

“They developed skin diseases and abscesses. We lost two guys, one of them, a friend of mine, due to a chest infection,” he said. “They didn’t respond to my requests to give him antibiotics. And we lost him.” 

The mistreatment continued until the very last day of his imprisonment, he said, when the detainees were bound and beaten by guards before being released back to Gaza. His testimony reflects wider human rights violations documented by human rights groups of how Palestinians are treated in the Israeli prison network. 

“In Sde Teiman, dozens of Palestinian detainees have died — killed actually, some of them. Some of the testimonies talk about people getting beat to death in Sde Teiman,” Naji Abbas, director of the Prisoners Department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, said. Earlier this year, the group released an investigation into the detainment of Palestinian medical workers and documented severe abuse across Israeli prisons, including denial of medical care. “People are dying. They suffered from a medical condition that can be treated very easily if they at least saw a doctor.”

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Compounding the physical brutality was the psychological abuse, Mhanna said. News from Gaza was scarce, with only some information coming from newly arrived detainees and from lawyers, though they were limited in what they could divulge on their very rare meetings or calls. Mhanna only met with a lawyer three times during his 22 months of detention. He had no idea of how his family were doing — or if they were even alive. 

Guards would taunt Palestinians, he told me, by saying what places had been attacked. 

“’Now we destroy Deir al Balah, and we destroy Nuseirat,’” he recalled the Israeli guards saying. “Can you imagine how we are feeling when I know that my family is living in Deir al Balah, and I have no news about them?”

Abbas said that lawyers have been banned for months from visiting again for trying to give detainees letters from loved ones in Gaza or simply relaying word that prisoners’ families are OK.

“The ideology behind their policies,” he said, “is using the conditions of the detention itself as a punishment, as a tool of torture.” 

“He Knows He’s Clean”

That void of knowledge about their loved ones, being unaware if they are alive or dead, is mirrored by Palestinian families in Gaza. Maha Wafi and her children have experienced it for nearly two years since Anis al-Astal and his colleagues were taken. 

On December 2, 2023, two weeks before the attack on Al-Awda Hospital when Mhanna was taken, al-Astal and three of his colleagues set out on a mission from Khan Younis in southern Gaza to the north. They hoped to evacuate patients there as Israeli forces spread further into the enclave and attacked the north’s hospitals without reprieve. 

“It wasn’t his first coordinated mission. He had evacuated injured patients several times,” Wafi said. “So, if he knew that, God forbid, there was anything against him, he would have refused to go. But he knows he’s clean.”

The last time she spoke to her husband, it was on the morning he was abducted. The day began in chaos. Wafi, a paramedic like her husband, was at work when she received a phone call from her children saying that their home was under a displacement order from the Israeli military. Shortly thereafter, she phoned al-Astal. 

“I reached out to him to help me pack important things like documents and clothes. He told me he was on his way to evacuate patients,” she said. “Once he was done, he would come to help us evacuate.”

“If he knew that, God forbid, there was anything against him, he would have refused to go.”

It was a few hours later, as she was packing their family’s belongings away, that she received a confusing call from one of al-Astal colleagues expressing condolences. She assumed it was about the displacement order in Khan Younis.

“He said, ‘No, I’m talking about Anis!’” Wafi recalled. When she questioned what he meant, he went on to say that al-Astal had been detained evacuating patients in the north. 

“Two blows at once: I lost both my support and my safety,” she said. “My support, which is my husband, and my safety, which is my home.”

Granted Safe Passage by Israel

The ambulance mission to the north led by al-Astal had been approved by Israel, according to one of his colleagues, Mohammed Abu Samak, who was with him when they were taken by Israeli forces. 

“We had prior coordination with the Israeli side through the relevant authorities,” Abu Samak, who was released two weeks after they were taken, told The Intercept. “However, we do not know what happened that day, as we were surprised when we reached the Netzarim checkpoint and the Israeli army detained us.”

“We had prior coordination with the Israeli side through the relevant authorities.”

Abu Samak said that they were held in a detention center made up of barracks. “They interrogated us at the location and then transferred us to another place with a group of detainees,” he said. “We were subjected to a great deal of beatings, torture, and humiliation.” 

While Abu Samak and another colleague were released two weeks after they were taken, al-Astal and another colleague, Hamdan Anaba, were kept in detention. Since then, Wafi has tried to find out any information she can and to have him released. 

A lawyer for the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has been able to see al-Astal only a handful of times. During one of the visits, the group told The Intercept, al-Astal said that he had been beaten four times in a single week and “described a complete disconnection from the outside world to the extent that detainees lose all sense of time and date.” 

Al-Astal had been “subjected to strip searches, verbal abuse, offensive language, and threats,” the group said. He’s had court appearances but without legal representation, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and has not been given any reason for his arrest or detention.

For Hamdan Anaba, the colleague who was detained with al-Astal, the one detail that has emerged about his detention is the worst kind of information: He died or was killed while in Israeli custody. 

There were reports in September 2024 of his death, but it was only officially confirmed by the Israeli government in early 2025, according to GISHA, an Israeli human rights organization working on behalf of Anaba’s family. His body has not been released, and the circumstances of his death are still a mystery due to obstruction by Israeli authorities.

“Israeli authorities have continuously tried to conceal information. Although approved to attend the autopsy, the family’s physician was required to sign a confidentiality agreement, and every motion we filed to lift this restriction was denied,” Tania Hary, GISHA’s executive director, told The Intercept in a statement. “The state’s conduct makes a mockery of due process and raises serious concerns under international law, particularly regarding the prohibition on enforced disappearance, the duty to investigate deaths in custody effectively, and the obligation to uphold the basic rights and dignity of detainees and their families.”

Anaba is one of at least 75 Palestinians, including four other medical workers, who have died or been killed in Israeli detention since October 7.

The Israel Prison Service did not respond to questions from The Intercept, and in its statement in response to this story, the Israeli military did not address questions about al-Astal or Anaba.

“Everything Is Destroyed”

For Palestinians who survive the Israeli prison system, returning to Gaza marks the end of one horrific chapter. Coming back to a destroyed homeland, however, presents new challenges.

When he was returned to Gaza on October 13, Mhanna, the former Al-Awad Hospital director, said he was completely shocked to see Gaza’s post-apocalyptic landscape.

“No Rafah, no Khan Younis, no Gaza City — everything is destroyed,” he said. “No university, no schools, no medical centers, no hospitals. Nothing is here now.”

“I have to continue my job. I have to forget all this hard period that I was in prison. I have to.”

Part of the loss he’s returned to is not just the total physical destruction, but also the lives taken with it, including hundreds of his medical colleagues who were killed during his imprisonment. The resulting lack of doctors in Gaza is one of the reasons Mhanna is so eager to get back to work, even as he must deal with trying to figure out his family’s future and begin the process of healing from his traumatic experience.

“I’m better, but still I have complaints and I’m not feeling well 100 percent,” Mhanna said. “But tomorrow I will return to my work, and I have to continue my job. I have to forget all this hard period that I was in prison. I have to.”

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During the previous ceasefire, detainees would be released every Saturday. Maha Wafi would search the crowds of released Palestinians, looking for any sign of al-Astal. Now all she can do is wait, after more than two years trying to keep her family alive, along with the civilians she tends to on the job.

“My husband and I entered this field and studied together before we got married,” she said. “We love our work, so for us, it’s not just a job.”

Her husband’s dedication to helping people as a medic makes it even more difficult for her to understand why he was taken.

Even as an unstable ceasefire continues, she said it’s hard to find any hope when her husband remains stolen from his family. 

“I can’t taste the feeling of joy while the pillar of the house is not with us. The father of my children is not with us. I mean, every family in the camp, their father shows them love and brings them stuff and this and that,” she said. “But not my children. An incomplete, broken joy in an unreal way. Some things cannot be expressed with words.”

The post Dozens of Gaza Medical Workers Are Still Disappeared in Israeli Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

Serious injuries went untreated, medications were denied or scaled back, and needed medical appointments were delayed at the ICE detention center, the state’s largest, located near Buffalo.

In one case, a Nigerian migrant arrived in February at the Batavia ICE detention facility suffering frostbite. A doctor who provided emergency care ordered that he see a specialist within a week before releasing him into ICE’s custody. Agents in Batavia never took him to the appointment. By the time he saw a doctor, it was too late to save his fingers; parts of six were later amputated.

In another case, a Gambian man with numerous heart issues was detained by ICE in February after he showed up for a routine check-in appointment. The man went two weeks without his medications. He suffered a stroke-like syndrome as a result, according to a doctor.

“It certainly appears to be a violation of ICE’s own detention standards.”

Attorneys and other detainee advocates said in interviews that the cases documented by this reporting are indicative of a wider problem. And a 2023 investigation by NPR found similar problems across ICE’s network of detention centers.

Sophie Dalsimer, an attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest who has studied medical treatment in ICE facilities in New York, said the agency’s treatment of detainees amounts to “medical neglect in a legal sense.”

“The lack of medical care, and with ICE being deliberately indifferent to people’s medical needs, could, in many of these instances, rise to the level of a constitutional violation,” she said. “It certainly appears to be a violation of ICE’s own detention standards.”

Those standards include providing prescribed medications, timely responses to medical complaints, and hospitalization as needed.

The Batavia facility, officially called the Buffalo (Batavia) Service Processing Center, lacks a doctor and dentist working on-site, this investigation found. That’s for a 650-bed detention center that has been overcapacity for months due to the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants.

A Department of Homeland Security inspector general report published in June noted that “staffing shortages caused delays in dental and off-site specialty care.” Between September 2024 and February 2025, the report said, ICE had a 150-person backlog of detainees who required outside medical treatment and were waiting for appointments.

That problem was noted previously in a 2018 Civil Rights and Civil Liberties investigation into medical care at Batavia. That audit gave the facility a passing grade but also found “several examples of detainees waiting for various specialty health care services for more than a month.” In one case, a detainee waited 168 days for an endocrinology appointment. In another case, the auditor found that a detainee requested an outside doctor appointment for blood in his stool, but that ICE deleted the request from its internal system.

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“It’s just freak luck that no one has died in Batavia in the last two years,” said Aaron Krupp, the regional coordinator at Justice for Migrant Families. “But the way that they have treated people, people really easily could have died.”

This story is based on a review of nearly 600 pages of court filings from seven lawsuits, medical records, and other documents, as well as interviews with a dozen people including detainees, attorneys, and other experts. Neither ICE nor DHS, its parent agency, responded to detailed questions and requests for about each case in this story.

Injuries Go Untreated

Chidi Nwagbo moved from Nigeria to the U.S. in 1988, living for 37 years as a “model resident” with no criminal history, according to his attorney. When Donald Trump took office in January, he said in a July interview, “things just went helter-skelter, like raids everywhere, and I didn’t know what to do.”

He made a plan to move to Canada to live with his brother and paid a smuggler $2,000 to shepherd him and three other migrants into Quebec. The final leg of the journey required them to cross the border on foot, but Nwagbo said he was unprepared for freezing temperatures and waist-deep snow. He and a woman in his party eventually called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to rescue them.

After a hospital stint, he was released into federal immigration custody on February 10 with orders from a doctor that he see a specialist at Kessler Burn and Trauma Center in Rochester, New York, to treat his frostbitten fingers within a week. Nwagbo’s medical records, which he shared for this investigation, show the physician made a referral to a specific specialist. ICE never took him to the appointment, according to Nwagbo’s medical records. By the time he saw a different doctor at a different practice 16 days later, his fingers were too far gone. Amputations would be necessary, the doctor told him. He’s now missing portions of six fingers.

“I shouldn’t have lost my fingers,” he said.

The case of Tim, another Nigerian, is similar.

In April this year, Tim, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution against his family, was days away from finishing a federal prison sentence for a fraud conviction when he fell down a set of stairs. He suffered a major concussion and was taken to a Massachusetts hospital. Upon discharge, he was prescribed nine drugs, ordered to attend inpatient physical therapy, and transferred to the Batavia detention center. Once at the detention center, he went at least a month without medication and received only one physical therapy session before being deported this summer. By that point, Tim required a walker.

“I suffer a lot of mental health issues. I cannot sleep. I am on zero medications.”

“I’m very traumatized at the moment,” he said during an interview in May, several weeks after his injury. “I suffer a lot of mental health issues. I cannot sleep. I am on zero medications.”

Reached recently by email, Tim said his condition has only deteriorated since his return to Nigeria.

He wrote, “I am dire need of a comprehensive mental health/neurological treatment in order to get my life back to where it used to be before my detention in the United States.”

Medications Denied

ICE, in some cases, denied detainees access to needed medications. In other cases, the agency allowed lapses in their medication schedules.

That was the case with Sering Ceesay, the Gambian man with heart conditions. He was detained by ICE in New York City on February 19 after what he expected to be a routine immigration appointment.

Instead, ICE placed him in shackles and chains and transported him to Batavia. He went two weeks without his medications. On March 4, he attended a legal clinic hosted by attorneys from the legal advocates at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, who quickly realized Ceesay needed medical attention, according to court filings from a later lawsuit by Ceesay alleging he was being held in violation of his rights.

“I was feeling very weak, and my entire body just hurt,” Ceesay said in a filing. “I felt like when I had my heart attacks.”

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo later ordered Ceesay released, but not before he was diagnosed with a stroke-like syndrome because he had missed so many days of his medicine.

“Without … strict adherence to these medications, [Ceesay] is likely to suffer from recurrent heart attacks, worsening peripheral artery disease and strokes and increasing his risk of further disability and avoidable premature death,” Dr. Joseph Shin, a physician and professor with Weill Cornell Medicine, wrote in a letter submitted as part of Ceesay’s lawsuit.

In Owen Simms’s case, ICE provided him with medication but lowered his dosages, he said, leaving him at risk of a seizure.

An extensive immigration and criminal history landed Simms in the Batavia detention center last March, where he remained until he was transferred to an out-of-state facility earlier this month. During a previous deportation to his home country, Jamaica, Simms was struck in the head with a machete, he and his wife testified in immigration court filings, which left him suffering from seizures. An immigration judge later ruled that he should not be deported due to the likelihood he’d be attacked again if he returned to Jamaica.

In an interview, Simms said his detention by ICE caused him to miss several days of his anti-seizure medication. He said the agency then lowered his daily dosage from 1,500 mg to 1,000 mg. He now worries he’ll suffer another seizure, which in the past has put him in a coma.

“My seizures come on to me when I’m sleeping, and if you’re not next to me, you can’t even know that I am having a seizure,” he said. “It’s scary, like it’s really scary.”

Five other detainees have claimed that ICE denied or delayed them receiving prescribed medication. ICE’s standards call for all detainees to be provided prescribed medications, including a week’s supply before a deportation.

• In March 2024, an ICE transfer from Florida to Batavia caused Raheem Fulton, a Jamaican immigrant suffering from end-stage renal disease, to miss a regularly scheduled dialysis appointment. He went five days without the treatment and had to be rushed to Buffalo’s Erie County Medical Center. A spokesperson for RFK Human Rights said ICE caused additional lapses in his dialysis treatment in the past and delayed other medical appointments too. Attorneys for the group are currently suing ICE and have alleged the agency has delayed other treatments Fulton needs, including a cardiology appointment. (Fulton’s lawyers are appealing to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after a Buffalo judge dismissed it in January, agreeing with the government’s argument that the court lacked jurisdiction.)
• In October 2024, ICE attempted, unsuccessfully, to deport Naim Qasemi to his native Afghanistan. Against its protocols, ICE failed to provide Qasemi with medications for his diagnosed bipolar disorder, his attorneys allege in a lawsuit to stop his deportation. Qasemi, they wrote, “was unmedicated and was not receiving any kind of therapeutic treatment in advance of his removal.” In court filings, Justice Department officials did not address Qasemi’s claim. (A judge dismissed the case last month after Afghanistan cleared Qasemi’s return, paving the way for his deportation.)
• In a July letter to ICE officials in Batavia, advocates with Justice for Migrant Families wrote that a Honduran man was not receiving a prescribed medical cream to treat a skin condition. The man also suffers from chronic pain, and ibuprofen was no longer working, Jennifer Connor, the organization’s executive director, and Krupp wrote. They demanded ICE take the man to a specialist and administer a different pain medication. Krupp said that hasn’t happened.
• Arzou Hami, an Iranian woman suffering from “serious mental health issues” was detained in June, as part of a sweep of Iranian migrants shortly after the U.S. bombed Iran. Matthew Borowski, her attorney, alleged in court filings that her detention has prevented her from receiving medications. She was detained by Buffalo ICE agents at the Niagara County Jail before being transferred to Texas where “she is being denied adequate mental health care,” Borowski wrote in a court filing. In an interview, he said his client has now gotten “some medication, but it’s not the same thing that she was on before.” (Officials have not responded to those claims in court yet; the case was transferred to Texas last month.)
• In a fifth case, a detainee known only as K.U. in court filings alleged he has not received proper medical care for “numerous life-threatening health conditions.” His lawsuit states an independent physician reviewed the man’s case and “expressed extreme concern that he is ‘not receiving the standard of appropriate medical care.’” (Officials have yet to address his medical claims in court, and a judge ordered him released in August.)

In yet another case, a Jordanian man named Mohammed Saleh had treatment for a massive brain tumor and a chronic eye condition delayed by ICE between the fall of 2023 and 2024, when he was deported.

He arrived in Batavia in September 2023 following a federal prison sentence for his involvement in a failed bombing plot and began complaining of “tingling sensations in his fingers and toes” several weeks later. An MRI and a CT scan revealed the tumor. Krupp, of Justice for Migrant Families, said Saleh eventually attended follow-up appointments for his tumor but was only given ibuprofen and Tylenol as treatment. Saleh also had a prescribed injection for his eye condition delayed by three months.

Harmed While in Custody

Some detainees were not properly treated for an injury or illness they suffered while detained, this investigation found.

Lansine Sidibe, a Malian man, alleged he was beaten by seven guards at the Batavia facility in February 2024 after he refused to sign some paperwork. According to a human rights complaint his attorneys filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in December, he alleged the guards broke his fingers, a claim an ICE doctor denied, according to the complaint. Nonetheless, it took a month before the agency agreed to X-ray his fingers.

“The abuses are consistent across all the facilities.”

Renny Arcaya-Ventura, a Venezuelan man, said in an interview that he suffered a severe allergic reaction and body pains after he was booked into the ICE facility and didn’t receive adequate medical care.

“I am in intense pain every day,” he said. “Every day I have a fever, pains in my body [and] I can’t even walk. I have even lost a lot of weight.”

His attorney, Guanlin Yang, shared photos of Arcaya-Ventura that appear to show swelling in his hands and rashes on his arms. (Arcaya-Ventura was deported in August.)

Dalsimer, of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, has studied medical care at the Orange County Jail — the second largest ICE detention facility in New York. Through her research and legal work, she’s concluded that medical care offered by ICE is “almost always subpar.”

“The abuses are consistent,” she said, “across all the facilities.”

The post New York’s Largest ICE Prison Dogged by Allegations of Shoddy Medical Care appeared first on The Intercept.

On Friday night, early votes had already been cast in their many thousands for Mayor-elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, who leads the prominent Central Synagogue in Manhattan, took the occasion to slander the democratic socialist candidate, purportedly in the name of Jewish New Yorkers.

“Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism,” Buchdahl said.

Mamdani’s alleged antisemitism? Pointing out, in 2023, the established fact that the Israeli military has trained hundreds of members of the New York Police Department, and that the NYPD and Israeli forces have intelligence sharing agreements. The rabbi also decried Mamdani’s “false claims of genocide” in Gaza — claims shared by leading genocide scholars, and every major international human rights organization.

That is, Buchdahl didn’t — and couldn’t — cite any actual antisemitism on the newly elected mayor’s part. Her problem, as was the case for the array of establishment Jewish voices who spoke out against Mamdani, was his criticism of Israel.

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Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City is a victory — or at least offers promise — for so many of the city’s working-class constituents. For our immigrant neighbors, trans siblings, and every New Yorker struggling to pay rent, eat, and access care in this punishingly expensive, brutally unequal place.

It is a particular bright relief that base Islamophobia — entrenched since the September 11 attacks, supercharged during the Gaza genocide, and drenching every campaign against Mamdani — did not prevail.

Antisemitism Smears

Mamdani’s win marks a rejection of the consistently Islamophobic weaponization of antisemitism. I hope it is a turning point, from which other New York institutions learn. Diehard support for the Zionist project is, finally, not a sine qua non of New York City leadership.

If Mamdani’s victory was a victory over Islamophobia and false antisemitism allegations, it was not quite a total one. The significant support for the attacks against the mayor-elect, and the purchase they found with converts to disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was jarring.

It was depressing for this Jewish writer to see significant numbers of particularly older Jewish voters back the slanders against Mamdani. The explanation, however, is simple enough: The very same Jewish figures and groups have been organizing their political lives around support for a genocidal ethnostate.

With the genocide in Gaza raging, weaponized claims of antisemitism, launched by pro-Israel forces have won the day in this city for over two years. Students, workers, and other protesters stood up to decry their institutions’ complicity in Israel’s onslaught.

At every turn, Democratic leaders bolstered and enforced calls for expressions of Palestinian solidarity to be censured and punished. Mayor Eric Adams sent police to raid Columbia University campus protests at the direct behest of pro-Israel business leaders. Baseless accusations of antisemitism went wholly unchecked.

It was a lesson in cowardice and complicity, which has only served President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim immigration crackdowns.

Setting an Example

The fact that the majority of young Jewish New Yorkers expressed support for Mamdani, as did some of the most powerful Jewish politicians in the city and the country, should have long ago served to mute the attacks against him. Yet there will be no reasoning with a worldview that treats support for Palestinian freedom, and criticism of Israel, as a threat to Jewish life.

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Mamdani, however, did not have to sacrifice Palestinian solidarity to win this election. He did not have to pander to the endless false claims of antisemitism directed at him at every debate and most every mainstream press interview.

Mamdani did not have to sacrifice Palestinian solidarity to win this election.

And, when he is the mayor, there is every reason to demand that he uphold commitments to Palestinian solidarity, including ending municipal partnerships with the state of Israel as it continues its campaign of mass slaughter, displacement, occupation, and apartheid.

I have no doubt that Mamdani will live up to his vows to support and protect New York’s Jewish communities; there were never any justified grounds to believe otherwise. His mayorship, among so many other things, should set an example of how supporting Jewish New Yorkers can be paired with a refusal to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

“No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election,” said Mamdani Tuesday night, addressing his supporters in Brooklyn, after being declared the next mayor of New York City.

The post They Tried to Smear Zohran Mamdani as an Antisemite. Voters Saw Right Through It. appeared first on The Intercept.

Gabriele Nunziati, a Brussels-based reporter who covered the EU for Rome’s Nova news agency, told The Intercept he received a notice that he would lose his job barely a month after he became a correspondent.

“I received an email from my news agency telling me that they intended to stop our collaboration.”

The move, which was first reported by the Italian news website Fanpage, came after he asked Paula Pinho, the European Commission’s chief spokesperson, about Gaza’s reconstruction on October 13.

“You’ve been repeating several times that Russia should pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine,” Nunziati, who is a contractor with Nova, said at a press conference. “Do you believe that Israel should pay for the reconstruction of Gaza since they have destroyed almost all its civilian infrastructure?”

Pinho replied that it was “definitely an interesting question, on which I would not have any comment.”

A clip of the exchange went viral — not a frequent occurrence for European Commission press conferences — and Nunziati found himself in demand.

“It was republished by several media outlets, and it got really huge,” he said. “I was even contacted by several people saying, ‘I saw you on Insta!’ Two weeks later — on October 27 — I received an email from my news agency telling me that they intended to stop our collaboration.”

The agency often uses “collaboration” contracts with limited protections that include nondisclosure agreements, according to staff sources.

Nunziati said that he received two “tense” phone calls from his superiors at Nova in the two weeks between his question and the notice that his contract would end, but declined to comment further.

Francesco Civita, a spokesperson for Nova, confirmed that the news agency had ended its relationship with Nunziati over his Gaza question. Civita said that Nunziati had been let go for asking a question that was “technically incorrect” because Russia had invaded a sovereign country unprovoked, whereas Israel was responding to an attack.

The difference between Russia’s and Israel’s positions had been “repeatedly explained” to Nunziati, Civita said, “but he had “completely failed to grasp the substantial and formal difference in the situations.”

“Indeed, he insisted that the question was correct, thus demonstrating his ignorance of the fundamental principles of international law,” Civita said. “Worse still, the video related to his question was picked up and reposted by Russian nationalist Telegram channels and media outlets linked to political Islam with an anti-European agenda, causing embarrassment to the agency.”

“Uncomfortable Question”

Speaking to an Italian newspaper, Anna Laura Orrico, a member of Italian Parliament from the Five Star Movement, denounced the decision to let Nunziati go.

“If the story corresponds to the facts, it would be simply shameful for a media outlet to make such a decision,” she said.

Another Nova journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood, told The Intercept that Nunziati’s case was “the tip of the iceberg of Italian censorship to which journalists are subjected” on Israel. 

“Gabriele was fired because he asked an uncomfortable question to the European Commission,” the journalist said. “In the days that followed, the atmosphere was very tense.”

The Nova agency journalist said that, after Nunziati’s dismissal, “all the journalists in the editorial office became silent.”

Several Western journalists have lost their jobs after asking tough questions or making critical comments about Israel’s war in Gaza. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 240 journalists have been killed in Gaza, with scores injured and nearly 100 imprisoned by Israel.

The post A Journalist Asked Why Israel Isn’t Paying to Rebuild Gaza. It Cost Him His Job. appeared first on The Intercept.

A group of local volunteers monitoring ICE activity noticed something new on July 30. Vehicles from the Federal Protective Service, a law enforcement agency that secures federal facilities, were parked outside. Behind the barbed-wire fence, a long, white bus with tinted windows idled behind the gates with the words “GEO Transport Inc.” emblazoned on its side.

Grace Warner, a volunteer who just arrived that morning to spot at the ICE facility, was immediately concerned.

“We’d never seen a bus like that there before,” she said. If GEO Group, a major private prison and ICE contractor was there, then immigration agents must be too.

Five miles away, she soon learned, federal, state, and local law enforcement, led by the Drug Enforcement Administration, were raiding cannabis farms. She drove to one of the farms, owned by a company called HempNova Lifetech Corp.

Outside, Warner was immediately approached by a spokesperson from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, which is barred from participating in most federal immigration enforcement by Oregon sanctuary laws.

“This is not an ICE raid,” Warner recalled the officer saying. “This is just a drug bust.”

That explanation would be echoed by spokespeople for other law enforcement agencies.

By the end of the operation, however, activists monitoring the facility saw federal agents loading people onto the GEO bus. Seventeen workers from the raids were detained and, as night fell, hurtled north toward the Northwest ICE Processing Center, in Tacoma, Washington, an ICE detention center owned by GEO Group. (GEO Group referred a request for comment to ICE, which did not respond.)

According to emails obtained by local researchers at Information for Public Use and shared with The Intercept, local and state police were involved the raids at many levels: According to an internal sheriff’s office email ahead of the operation, seven of the locations raided had Jackson County sheriff’s deputies listed as the “primary” officials; a local police official was the “primary” at another site; a state trooper on a ninth site; and an official from the DEA on the 10th.

When asked by The Intercept, however, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office denied knowing of any ICE activity that day.

“The DEA was the lead agency for this investigation,” Sheriff Nathan Sickler said. “The focus of this case was not immigration violations. While there were individuals taken into custody by ICE, we had no part in those activities.”

“We did not detain anybody for immigration purposes.”

Who Knew What When?

Oregon’s sanctuary laws, which prevent local coordination on federal immigration enforcement without a signed judicial warrant, are a point of pride.

Though local agencies denied any direct cooperation with ICE — and, in case of the sheriff’s office, denied knowing about ICE’s involvement — federal authorities appeared to have pre-planned immigration enforcement as part of the raids in the Medford area. Under Donald Trump’s administration, situations like this are raising concerns about how Oregon’s sanctuary laws are being upheld.

“When collaborating with federal agencies, it is not good enough to trust things to be business as usual without verifying,” said Kelly Simon, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. “We know the agenda, and it’s on our local leaders to take no part in it.”

Asked if local law enforcement detained workers during raids, Jackson County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Aaron Lewis said it was “not outside the realm of possibility.”

The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office was assisting with a large, ongoing federal drug investigation through a regional “Illegal Marijuana Enforcement Team,” said Sickler, the sheriff.

“We follow the Oregon laws,” Sickler said. “We don’t communicate with ICE for those purposes.“

Capt. Kyle Kennedy, a spokesperson for the Oregon State Police, didn’t comment on whether the agency had any knowledge of ICE involvement or planning before the raid but said State Police had seized one of the raided properties and arrested people there, then handed over control to the DEA.

“OSP did not have a role at the off-site location where the presumed transfer of DEA custodies to ICE may have occurred,” Kennedy said. (The DEA declined to comment.)

In the Medford area raids, however, federal agents had anticipated ICE’s involvement ahead of time. Not only was the GEO bus staged in Medford before the raid, the Federal Protective Service had also been called in beforehand to provide extra security.

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A Federal Protective Service official wrote in an incident report obtained by The Intercept that the support was necessary because of the potential for “collateral” detainees — the term used for undocumented immigrants who are not the targets of criminal enforcement, but are swept up in raids. The federal security was there, according to the official writing the report, to ensure ICE could carry out its activities in the event of demonstrations. (The Federal Protective Service declined to comment.)

The DEA has been ramping up its role in immigration enforcement. In January, Benjamine Huffman, then-acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, wrote a memo authorizing the DEA to carry out the “functions” of an immigration officer. Since then, collaboration has been close. A raid at a rural Kentucky restaurant in May, led by the DEA, was also shrouded in the language of “active investigation” and led to immigration detentions with no explanation of how it happened.

For three months, no further information was released about the July 30 raids and the ICE detentions, including the role played by local police.

Regional media has yet to cover the raids and detentions, and communication from government officials has remained opaque, leaving community members without answers.

“Oregon has one of the longest standing and strongest sanctuary laws in the country,” said Simon from the ACLU of Oregon. “It is imperative that our local law enforcement agencies are taking great care to protect local resources from being commandeered and used for this administration’s cruel deportation machine.”

ICE Detentions

The raids near Medford were part of a DEA-led federal drug investigation into psychoactive products sold at smoke shops around the country. Local, state, and federal agencies were serving a warrant targeting a licensed cannabis company called HempNova Lifetech Corp., according to a copy of the warrant shared with The Intercept.

Sickler, the Jackson County sheriff, said the raids were part of an investigation into, among other things, illegal trade of cannabis vape cartridges. (HempNova did not respond to a request for comment.)

According to a list of seized items from one raid, the DEA found cannabis products packaged for brands that sell gummies and vape cartridges online and across the country.

The list of “primary” officials for each of the raids came in an email from Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy Jesus Murillo-Garcia ahead of the operation. Out of 10 raid locations connected to the investigation, Jackson County Sheriff’s deputies are listed as the “primary” officials on seven. Central Point Police Department, from a nearby city, had an officer in charge of one, and the Oregon State Police brought in their SWAT team to lead operations on one location. (Central Point Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

Sickler described his office’s involvement as “area liaisons” to help “out of area” agents.

The authorities seized videotapes, tested and destroyed plants, and broke into safe boxes. Three people connected to the HempNova farms were booked at the Jackson County jail and later extradited on undisclosed federal charges to North Carolina, which has been a focus of the nationwide DEA investigation.

Seventeen other workers were loaded into unmarked vans, according to activist observers on site, and eventually transferred to ICE.

Detainees’ families scrambled to locate their loved ones. At one raid led by the Jackson County sheriff, an immigrant worker sent a video to his family that showed him being zip-tied. The family went to the sheriff’s office to locate the worker and got no answers: The officials at the office said they couldn’t discuss the case.

The family then called 911 to file a missing person report. Dispatch records obtained by local researchers reveal confusion at his whereabouts.

“That doesn’t make sense,” the dispatcher says at one point when confronted about the disappeared family member. “I am not seeing anything here.”

The emergency dispatcher called the Jackson County jail with the family on the line, but the administrator there was perplexed. Neither was certain where the workers went.

“He never came to the jail,” the jail administrator said in a recording of the call shared with The Intercept. “I think they took a group up to Washington — I don’t know.”

According to activists, who monitored the raids and the federal facility in Medford, the agents loaded two groups of people from the vans onto the idle bus at the federal facility, which set out for Washington shortly thereafter.

One protester was arrested at the Medford facility for laying down in front of the bus.

For weeks, it was unclear how many — let alone who — was detained by ICE and sent to Washington. Eventually, Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, which runs a statewide hotline, confirmed that a detainee arrested during the July 30 raids arrived at the Washington ICE facility.

Only two months later was The Intercept able to confirm the number of the people bused across state lines to ICE’s detention facility.

Blurring the Mission

In the past, federal law enforcement officials working on issues surrounding Oregon’s cannabis industry said their focus was on “human trafficking.”

Since the Huffman memo expanded the purview of DEA operations, however, the line between drug and immigration enforcement is blurring.

“I think it’s fair to say that ICE is doing whatever it can to raise its arrest numbers,” said David Hausman, co-director of the Deportation Data Project and a law professor at University of California, Berkeley. “Overall, that is sweeping in more people who would never have been priorities for enforcement in the past.”

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In Oregon, cannabis farms often operate outside established legal markets. Oversupply and cratering prices left farmers to turn to more profitable gray and black markets. Inconsistent regulation across the country created loopholes for businesses to sell psychoactive products — marketed as hemp-derived — across state lines.

In a recent statewide report in Oregon, all “hemp“ flowers bought and tested by the Oregon and Cannabis Commission were in excess of legal limits on THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis that is banned in some state, complicating interstate trade.

Why the DEA picked the raid at HempNova is unclear. Federal enforcement in southern Oregon’s cannabis industry is rare, and raids and investigations are handled largely by local law enforcement agencies.

Simon, of the ACLU of Oregon, warned of the consequences of the blurring missions of local and federal law enforcement agencies.

“What we have seen from this administration is the emphasis on crime as a pretext to make immigration arrests,” she said. “It would be twisting the intent of Oregon sanctuary law to rely on the pretext of some other purpose being present to justify participating in immigration enforcement.”

Correction: November 3, 2025, 1:34 p.m. ET
This story has been corrected to remove an errant reference to a business adjacent to the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement field office in Medford, Oregon.

The post Local Cops Aren’t Allowed to Help ICE. Did the Feds Dupe Them Into Raids That Rounded Up Immigrants? appeared first on The Intercept.

“There’s often a fair debate to be had over China’s influence,” said James Czerniawski, head of emerging technology policy at Consumer Choice Center. “But my bigger concern is that states are greenlighting a second Red Scare.”

“My bigger concern is that states are greenlighting a second Red Scare.”

Nebraska, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas have now passed sweeping state-level foreign influence registries. Nebraska’s bill, called the Foreign Adversary and Terrorist Agent Registration Act, creates a state registry for agents working on behalf of entities in “adversary” countries, a list which includes China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.

A pair of nonprofits with opaque funding streams, State Shield and State Armor, are helping fuel the legislative frenzy. Both of the dark-money organizations are newly arrived players, founded in 2024 and 2023 respectively.

The two organizations have been showing up to statehouses across the country testifying in favor of state-level foreign agent registries that go far beyond the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA.

The new law in Nebraska contains none of the exemptions seen in FARA, the federal law that regulates influence peddling, known for famously uneven enforcement.

Instead, the state-level legislation has expansive requirements. Businesses, universities, and humanitarian organizations must register as foreign agents if they conduct “activities that involve advocacy on behalf of a foreign principal,” meaning an organization or company that is at least 20 percent owned by a foreign entity.

“A Nebraska university that set up a public talk at the ‘request’ of a Cuban dissident could seemingly have to register,” said Nick Robinson, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Non-for-Profit Law. “So could a Nebraskan farmer who was just selling their crop to a company with 25 percent Chinese ownership as the Nebraska law covers purely economic transactions.”

Many employees of large household companies would be required to register under the rule. U.S.-based workers of firms owned or partially owned by Chinese companies — for instance, Smithfield, General Electric, Epic Games, Motorola, Lenovo, and Waldorf Astoria — will likely have to register.

Facing a $50,000 penalty and, for noncitizens, deportation, the law could have a chilling effect for citizens across states that have passed such laws.

Democratic Nebraska state Sen. John Cavanaugh posed the question bluntly during a floor debate on the bill: “What’s the appropriate amount of intrusion into our citizens’ privacy to crack down on China?”

Dark Money

Just who is funding State Shield and State Armor, both based in Austin, Texas, is unknown.

Michael Lucci, the founder of State Armor, has said that State Armor’s donors do not have financial interests in the work, though does not disclose their names. A Wall Street Journal profile of Lucci in May noted that several wealthy China critics close to him could stand to gain from hawkish state policies. (State Armor and State Shield did not respond to the Intercept’s questions about their funding.)

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The State Armor founder used to be a fellow at a think tank funded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who now leads a defense contractor-oriented consultancy firm called American Global Strategies, sits on State Armor’s board.

“Resilience is the key topic for states to address — being ready for potential conflict, being ready to counter political warfare — this is a part of resilience,” Lucci said of the Nebraska law in a press release from the governor’s office touting the bill’s passage.

Lucci and Tom Rawlings, the policy director of State Shield, both point to New York as evidence that states need to combat China’s strategy of influencing states. Former New York state official Linda Sun allegedly worked for China in exchange for millions of dollars in gifts, including a Hawaii apartment and a 2024 Ferrari. Sun was indicted by the Department of Justice on visa fraud, money laundering, and charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent.

In addition to representatives from State Armor and State Shield, several other organizations parachuted into Nebraska to testify in favor of the bill. A research fellow at the Washington-based Global Taiwan Institute, which has received several “generous” grants from a Taiwanese government-affiliated organization, also testified in favor of the anti-China bill. Alexander Gray, CEO of American Global Strategies, also testified. Gray sits on the board of State Armor alongside O’Brien.

Towards the end of the public hearing, Republican state Sen. Rita Sanders had become accustomed to the routine, at one point asking a witness, “Are you local or are you from Washington, D.C.?”

More to Come

Anti-China efforts are popular for state and federal lawmakers alike who are eager to prove their flag-waving zeal. Congress has launched probes into universities that collaborate with Chinese researchers or travel to China to attend a conference.

“China is the magic word these days,” explained Czerniawski.

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In late September, the Trump administration also signed a national security directive called NSPM-7 which, among other things, gives the FBI authorization to investigate Americans with close ties to foreign governments and citizens that support domestic terrorism. Antifa was designated a terrorist organization days earlier, suggesting that the directive will be used to investigate left-leaning groups.

“China is the magic word these days.”

“ This would be like if George W. Bush had said Code Pink was Al Qaeda, or people protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were associated with the Islamic State,” said Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security, of NSPM-7.

Last week, Lucci singled out the left-wing anti-war group Code Pink on X, saying “Code Pink = Code Red,” adding a Chinese flag emoji.

In July, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has dubbed “the most effective organization” at spreading conservatism to state lawmakers, published a draft model policy bill that mirrored the Nebraska bill. ALEC will likely consider whether to approve the legislation or not during its winter conference in December. If they do, many red states may follow suit.

Who Registers?

ALEC’s model legislation would require every nonprofit and business to attest that they are cognizant of and in compliance with the bill.

“A lot of everyday businesses will be stumped when they have to attest to this question: Are you in compliance with the Foreign Adversary and Terrorist Agent Registration Act?” said Spike Eickholt, a government liaison at the ACLU of Nebraska. “And they might say ‘Look, I don’t know, I just make donuts.’”

Nebraska’s newly created “FATARA unit,” set up to administer and enforce their new law, doesn’t provide many concrete answers as to how Nebraskans can remain Foreign Adversary and Terrorist Agent Registration Act-compliant.

The state’s FATARA unit has been vague in answering questions about who must register. When probed by The Intercept by phone, an official at the FATARA unit said, “There’s been a lot of questions about this, you’re not the first.”

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A three-sentence statement posted by the FATARA unit online said, in part, “Educational, charitable, entertainment, and public relation activities that promote or intend to influence political or policy views are subject to registration.”

In the absence of clarity, state governments wield discretion as to how to enforce these laws.

“There is a real concern that since these laws are so broad and vague that they will be enforced in a politicized manner, only targeting those with which the government disagrees,” said Robinson, of the International Center for Non-for-Profit Law.

With a $50,000 penalty in both ALEC’s proposed model legislation and the Nebraska bill, the stakes are enough to bankrupt a small business or nonprofit.

Eickholt said, “This bill is going to have a chilling effect on the basic rights of citizens.”

The post Dark Money Drives Anti-China Crackdown Across State Legislatures appeared first on The Intercept.

In yet another overreaching and nakedly political prosecution, the Justice Department on Wednesday indicted Democratic Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh on federal charges for taking part in a nonviolent protest outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Chicago.

The government claims that Abughazaleh, alongside five other protesters, “impeded and interfered with an officer of the United States.” All six protesters are also charged together as alleged members of a “conspiracy” to prevent the officer from discharging his duties.

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Let’s be clear: If six people nonviolently protesting outside a government facility constitutes a criminal conspiracy, all First Amendment-protected activity is at risk.

The particular conspiracy charge the Chicago protesters face — conspiracy to impede a United States officer — “was one of the main charges used against January 6th insurrection defendants,” noted civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo on Bluesky. The attempted coup that day had been marked by serious violence: An estimated 140 police officers were injured at the Capitol.

The alleged conspiracy in Abughazaleh’s case?

All six people facing charges were part of a September protest outside ICE’s Broadview Processing Center. At the demonstration, a federal agent was “forced to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed,” the indictment said, so as not to mow down protesters. The vehicle reportedly incurred minor damage.

A federal agent was “forced to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed,” the indictment said.

Now the protesters are facing a possible six-year prison sentence for it.

Footage from that day showed federal agents firing pepper balls and tear gas at demonstrators. One officer grabbed Abughazaleh and threw her hard to the ground.

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Evidence abounds of ICE and other federal agents’ brutality as the deportation machine escalates in Chicago and nationwide. Agents are tear-gassing residential areas in order to kidnap immigrant neighbors, regularly assaulting protesters, violently raiding whole apartment buildings among other indiscriminate, racist sweeps, and chasing immigrant workers to their deaths.

Whatever comes to pass in the case against Abughazaleh and the other protesters, to impede such inhumanity is to stand on the right side of history.

Trump’s Brute Force Lawfare

Meritless, malicious prosecutions aimed at collective punishment and the chilling of dissent are now standard practice for Donald Trump’s Justice Department. It is a brute force approach to lawfare, with ample likelihood of pushback in the courts.

Indeed, the federal charges facing Abughazaleh come as no surprise from a loyalist Justice Department openly engaged in targeting the president’s political opponents.

The groundless effort to frame a typical demonstration as a conspiracy is also part of an ongoing regime project to criminalize opposition protest, tout court. The point is to further normalize treating protesters as criminals.

Trump has been unabashed about his desire to weaponize conspiracy charges against his perceived enemies. With a mixture of cynicism and delusion, Trump and his Cabinet have embraced a worldview in which all protesters and opposition candidates form a well-funded criminal — if not terrorist — network, deserving of prosecution as such.

After protesters interrupted the president during a dinner in Washington, Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into bringing RICO charges — originally designed to pursue organized mafia crime — against one of the demonstrators; repeating a now common refrain, Trump said the protester was a “paid agitator.”

The president’s absurd designation of antifa as a terrorist organization, not to mention his antisemitic obsession with targeting billionaire George Soros for supposedly funding all left-wing protest activity, all follow the same authoritarian, conspiratorial logic.

As I’ve noted, from the mass prosecution of Trump’s first inauguration protesters to racketeering charges against the Stop Cop City movement, government attempts to collectively criminalize protesters have consistently failed to win convictions. The prosecutions themselves have nonetheless drained movement resources and spread fear.

“We now have legal fees on top of our campaign expenses,” noted Abughazaleh, who entered the congressional race as a long-shot candidate with a grassroots campaign, but is currently polling in a close second place to Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss.

“This administration has resorted to weaponizing the federal justice system to scare us into silence,” she said. “There are plenty of reasons to be afraid right now, but we have to overcome that fear.”

The post Feds Say Kat Abughazaleh “Impeded” ICE Agents. That Would Put Her on the Right Side of History. appeared first on The Intercept.

Fteiha, supported by the European Legal Support Center, accused the publisher in court of violating his constitutional rights by falsely depicting him as a Hamas propagandist in BILD, Germany’s largest tabloid.

The court dismissed the motion on formal grounds, ruling that Fteiha’s lawyer, Ingrid Yeboah, failed to submit a valid power of attorney in its original form — a document signed by Fteiha — or in an electronically certified version, a requirement under procedural codes.

The judges acknowledged that obtaining an original document by Fteiha from Gaza posed an exceptional challenge. They found, however, that these circumstances did not justify waiving procedural requirements and that Yeboah had not sufficiently demonstrated the impossibility of submitting the original form.

The court also noted inconsistencies in the materials submitted as substitutes, including photos that showed different-looking signatures and variations in transliterations of Fteiha’s family name. Videos and scans showing Fteiha in Gaza signing the documents, the judges said, did not convincingly prove authorization.

A spokesperson for BILD said the paper stood by the story in question.

“The Frankfurt Regional Court’s decision is clear and leaves nothing to add,” BILD’s spokesperson Christian Senft told The Intercept. “Beyond that, our portrayal constitutes a permissible expression of opinion and cannot be prohibited.”

Procedural hurdles complicated the case from the start. German law requires submission of an original, signed power of attorney. Fteiha’s lawyers had instead submitted videos showing him displaying his press ID and signing the authorization on camera, along with a digital signature.

Another issue was the requirement of a valid address. Fteiha has been repeatedly displaced by Israeli airstrikes in recent years. Yeboah provided an alternative address. Springer formally objected to both the missing original document and Fteiha’s missing address.

Ahead of the ruling, Yeboah criticized the court’s rigid approach.

“The applicant is in a war zone with closed borders and no functioning infrastructure,” she told The Intercept. “Under such conditions, meeting the procedural hurdles of an expedited proceeding was nearly impossible.”

Debunked Allegations

Fteiha accused BILD of endangering his life by falsely portraying him as a Hamas propagandist in an article published on August 5. In a military campaign with record levels of journalists killed, Israel has justified its targeting of media workers in Gaza by alleging they are involved with Hamas.

The story put Fteiha’s job title — “journalist” — in quotation marks and gave the story a headline that said, “This Gaza Photographer Stages Hamas Propaganda.”

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A Newspaper Called His Gaza Photos “Hamas Propaganda.” He’s Fighting Back.

Fteiha asked the court to force the removal of sections of the story that suggested he staged images of hunger and exaggerated the scale of Gaza’s hunger crisis to serve Hamas’s interests. His legal action argued that the piece violated German press law by spreading falsehoods and breaching the legal standards of “suspicion reporting.” The Intercept first reported on his filing in September.

Axel Springer rejected Fteiha’s filing as baseless. During a hearing on October 9, Axel Springer’s attorney, Anika Kruse, argued that the term “staging” in the BILD article did not in and of itself suggest that Gaza’s crisis was fabricated, but that Fteiha’s images were framed in a way that served Hamas’s interests.

In their written response to Fteiha’s filing, Axel Springer attorneys described Fteiha’s profession in quotation marks and said they “lacked knowledge” as to whether he had or did not have connections to Hamas.

During the October 9 hearing, presiding judge Ina Frost appeared skeptical of Axel Springer’s legal defense. She noted that statements implying Fteiha promoted Hamas propaganda could be unlawful and described BILD’s use of the word “staging” as indeed problematic.

Frost encouraged Axel Springer twice to settle by taking the article offline — in exchange for the plaintiff covering legal costs. The publisher declined both times.

The case followed an investigation by Spiegel, a rival German news outlet, that debunked BILD’s claim that Fteiha had staged photos of food distribution in Gaza. While BILD suggested he withheld images to manipulate the narrative, Spiegel found that Fteiha had in fact posted multiple photos from the shoot on his personal Instagram account.

Fteiha’s filing argued that BILD deliberately omitted this fact from its coverage.

“Overblown” Formality

Yeboah, who was ordered to pay the costs of the proceedings, told The Intercept that while she understood the legal reasoning behind the ruling, parts of it struck her as excessive.

“Some of the remarks — such as the criticism over the missing original document or the differing signatures and name variations — felt overblown,” she said. It was “unfortunate,” she said, that the court chose not to address the substance of the case, noting the judges’ earlier suggestion of a settlement involving of the article in question.

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Fteiha is now weighing whether to appeal to a higher court. Another option would be to skip the expedited process and initiate normal proceedings before the same court, which would delay the case.

“That way, we’d no longer be bound by the urgency of the interim procedure,” Yeboah told The Intercept, “and could correct formal deficiencies.”

The post Court Asked Gaza Journalist to Do Something “Nearly Impossible” to Keep His Case Against Axel Springer Alive appeared first on The Intercept.

Federal prosecutors are making good on the Trump administration’s threat to treat antifa-related activity as terrorism.

On Thursday afternoon, prosecutors in Texas announced that terrorism charges had been filed against two people for alleged involvement in a shooting during a July 4 protest against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, in which a local police officer was injured.

This is the first time federal terrorism charges have been deployed in association with the “antifa” label, just a month after President Donald Trump announced that he was designating antifa a “major terrorist organization” — a designation that does not exist under law for domestic groups.

The Prairieland case is setting a chilling example for how the government will use so-called counterterrorism efforts to crush anti-fascist dissent. Neither of the people named in the indictment are accused of shooting the gun. Instead, Zachary Evetts and Autumn Hill are accused of “providing material support to terrorists” and having “aided and abetted” the alleged attempted murder of government officers.

“The framing of the case by the federal government should worry all of us.”

The federal indictment accuses Hill, who prosecutors dead-named, and Evetts as being part of an “antifa cell.”

The terrorism charges are an escalation of government efforts to criminalize protest movements by attempting to attribute collective guilt.

With tactics like using RICO laws built to combat organized crime, the government has made a habit of mass-prosecuting activists for individual, individuated crimes alleged to have taken place in the context of legal protest activity — even when there is no direct link between those charged and the alleged crimes. Though such charges frequently don’t stick, the lengthy prosecutions hamper protest movements and chill dissent.

“The framing of the case by the federal government should worry all of us,” a support committee for arrested protesters said in a statement on its website. “The glaring inconsistencies in the official narrative and the alarmist accusations are a clear attempt to bolster the Trump administration’s claims that the United States is on the verge of chaos, and to excuse a dramatic increase in militarized police action.”

“Investigation by Proclamation”

On the night of July 4, protesters from Dallas-Fort Worth held a noise demonstration and set off fireworks outside the ICE facility. Federal officers called local police to the scene. There was an exchange of gunfire between an Alvarado police officer and one other person, in which the officer was injured. The cop was taken to a hospital and released within a few hours.

In a lengthy preliminary federal hearing in September, an FBI official told the court that he could not say for certain whether or not the police officer shot first.

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Trump Wants to Label Antifa a Terror Group. His Real Target Might Be a Lot Bigger.

Nine people were arrested that night in the area, and numerous others were arrested in the days that followed, including during aggressive multiagency raids on homes and community spaces. Seventeen people in all now face a mixture of state and federal charges relating to the event, including state terrorism charges.

Neither of the two people now charged with federal material support for terrorism were arrested at the detention center. Members of a support committee for friends and loved ones of the arrestees fear that further federal terrorism and other hefty charges are in the pipeline.

While there is no such thing as a terrorism designation for domestic organizations, and while there is no centralized formal organization known as “antifa,” by associating the antifa label and anti-fascist activism with terrorism, Trump’s administration can marshal and direct vast law enforcement powers and resources into investigating and targeting networks of left-wing activists.

Even though there are no designated domestic terrorism organizations, only “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” there are domestic terrorist offenses under U.S. law. The government is attempting to portray the Prairieland Detention Center shooting as one such act.

The “terrorism” label has, after all, always been a tool for the government to categorize ideological enemies and deploy extraordinary resources to target them. At another preliminary hearing in July, prosecutors said that as many as 200 FBI agents were working on the Prairieland case — a massive overreach for a singular shooting incident leading to a minor injury in the context of a protest.

“This appears to be investigation by proclamation instead of investigation by sound intelligence,” Thomas Brzozowski, a former Justice Department lawyer working on domestic terrorism, told the New York Times on Thursday in reference to the government’s treatment of the Texas defendants as an “enterprise.”

“That’s what happens,” he said of Trump’s targeting of antifa, “when you open such a broad investigation into what is essentially an idea.”

Testing Ground for Repression

The Prairieland case has so far provided a convenient testing ground for state repression.

Gunshots were fired, and a police officer was injured. The government has pitched the activists as “heavily armed” even though, aside from a small number of guns found near the detention center, the guns found were in the cars or homes of the defendants — in Texas!

The case, however, has not been lifted up as a national cause célèbre against Trumpian overreach, possibly because a gun was indeed fired and acts of vandalism were reportedly carried out against ICE property.

Yet the Texas case reveals precisely the strategies the Trump administration will use, with the assistance of state forces, to target whole movements and communities with prosecutorial overreach and a logic of guilt by association. Government action here has been extreme in its treatment of an array of normal First Amendment-protected activity as evidence of terrorism; the blunt force effort to treat anti-fascism as terrorism should worry us all, even those who may want to distance themselves from any notion of protest militancy.

“What happened July 4th was a normal protest,” the support committee noted. “Regardless of what transpired that night, it’s clear that the scale and aggression of the police response is a fear tactic to send a message not only to DFW” — the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area — “but across the country of how this administration will treat anyone standing against their rising authoritarianism.”

During preliminary hearings, prosecutors have pointed to the flimsiest of grounds to describe organizers as a terroristic enterprise, including references to typical and legal activist activities like making zines and using encrypted messaging apps.

Thursday’s indictment explicitly cites the use of encrypted, disappearing messages — a practice that is common for activists and gossiping friend groups alike.

The prosecutors also note that activists discussed bringing firearms to the scene, which is completely legal in Texas. According to the indictment, one message described the plan to bring rifles to the protest as a way to have police “back off” — that is, a defensive tactic. According to the support committee, “the state has provided no evidence that there was coordination to fire at police.”

Draining Resources

Thus far, other significant efforts to collectively prosecute activists have failed. Overreaching RICO charges against 61 participants in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement charges were dismissed by a judge last month; the government’s efforts in Trump’s first term to mass prosecute over 200 “J20” protesters with hefty felony riot charges also fell apart.

As I’ve noted, both these recent examples of failed mass prosecutions illustrate that malicious cases don’t need to be successful to drain movement energies and resources, and spread fear. The Atlanta and J20 examples also highlighted the need for collective defense campaigns.

The same is true for the now grimly precedent-setting North Texas case.

The post “Antifa” Protesters Charged With Terrorism for Constitutionally Protected Activity appeared first on The Intercept.

It was almost exactly a year ago that Jonathan Chait claimed that Kamala Harris’s moderate turn was a winning strategy. 

“The centrism is working,” Chait wrote at New York Magazine. Her success in the polls compared to President Joe Biden, he added, should be “attributed to the cleverness and unsentimental courtship of the center her campaign has followed.”

Fast forward a year. 

For Chait, the problem with the Democratic Party in the last ten years is that it’s been run by the far left.

Chait now says that it was progressives who controlled Harris’s campaign — and lost the election. The leftward tilt doomed her.

For Chait, the problem with the Democratic Party in the last 10 years is that it’s been run by the far left, and now, finally, that the centrist moderates he’s a part of are reclaiming power. Mystifyingly, he seems to think they’re finally winning. 

“After almost a decade of nearly unchallenged supremacy, the progressive movement’s hold on the party is no longer certain,” Chait wrote this week at The Atlantic. 

Is the progressive dominance of the Democratic Party in the room with us right now? 

The last 10 years have been a near nonstop assault on the Democratic Party’s left from an establishment that wants to crush it at all costs. One of the prime attackers has been one Jonathan Chait.

His assertion today, however, is striking in its detachment from reality. And it relies on making an appeal to the Democratic Party that’s rooted not in a return to centrist politics, but in an embrace of Trump’s demagogic narrative.

Centrists Weren’t Winning?

Over the past decade, Democrats have submitted three nominees to voters for the White House. Two of them, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, explicitly ran against the insurgent left-wing campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Harris focused more on finding opportunities to appear onstage with Liz Cheney than on appealing to progressives.

Since then they’ve stayed the moderate course. Clinton continues to advocate for a continuation of the center-right politics that worked for her husband over 30 years ago. Chait’s ally in aggressive centrism Matt Yglesias was one of the most read pundits among the Biden transition team.

The third Democratic presidential candidate in the last decade, Harris, was picked as Biden’s vice president and ran an abbreviated general election campaign after the incumbent dropped out. On the trail, she focused more on finding opportunities to appear onstage with Liz Cheney than on appealing to progressives. 

Perhaps she should have pivoted to the left instead of embracing the centrism that Chait once celebrated. In 2020, Biden won after an explosion in liberal activism, from Black Lives Matter protests to advocating for civil rights — often referred to with the derogatory catchall “woke” by Chait and others in the centrism cohort, though they seldom if ever acknowledge the usefulness of motivating the base to come out for elections.

Four years later, registered Democrats sat out the 2024 election at a 2:1 margin over Republicans, researchers found in April. 

The case in point here is the Gaza war. The Democratic National Committee refused to even allow a Palestinian-American Democratic state lawmaker to speak at the convention — a sign that the presidential hopeful wouldn’t break from the continuing, morally repugnant Biden policy on the war in Gaza. 

The stance on Gaza was one of the things that alienated Harris’s base and drove away enthusiastic young Democrats that had served as the foundations for successful Democratic ground games, young Democrats who were against unconditional support for Israel’s war.

A Convenient Excuse

In an election as close as the 2024 race, it’s hard to pinpoint just one cause for the outcome. 

The pivotal moment, to Chait, was an ad cut by the Trump campaign using an answer Harris gave in 2019 to a question from the American Civil Liberties Union on the rights of trans incarcerated people, an example of what the pundit called an “edgy, leftist policy commitment in a campaign that consisted of little else.” 

By citing the answer on trans prisoners, Chait is not talking about a tack to the center; he is instead making an appeal for the party to move right — the far right.

The idea that Harris’s position on trans rights was even a left-wing stance is a Trump campaign talking point, one hammered home by Fox News pundits day in and day out. It ignored that Harris was simply repeating established legal practice for the rights of those prisoners, policy that was in place at the time under the Trump administration. Chait bought it all hook, line, and sinker: making a case not for centrism, but for anti-trans demagoguery.

Choosing the position that Harris took on trans rights in prisons in 2020 as the defining issue of the campaign conveniently lets the party off the hook for having nothing of substance to offer an angry electorate. As evidence, Chait refers to an unconvincing data point from an analysis by Future Forward, the Harris team’s polling firm, as evidence it shifted voter preference by 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor. 

In reality, as in Gaza, Harris didn’t take any positions on trans rights for incarcerated people that hadn’t been in place for successive presidents. Her stand that all prisoners are entitled to care deemed to be medically necessary — including care for transition — was the policy of the Biden administration and, before that, the Trump administration too. 

In 2024, Harris continued to affirm this policy but, instead of jumping headlong into a fight over an era-defining, life-and-death civil rights issue, she softened her rhetoric. In other words, she tacked to the center.

What Could She Have Done?

Though soft-pedaling trans rights at a time when trans teens are attemping suicide at increasing rates was moral cowardice, it may be true that it wasn’t a winning electoral strategy. 

So what could Harris have done? Almost nothing that Chait would have approved of.

Americans were unusually united in their dour view of the economy, but rather than turn away from consolidating wealth that had left the working class scrambling to keep up, Harris catered to billionaires. She ran a campaign that seemed not like it was for the left of the party, but for its well-heeled donor classes. She had long since eschewed the economic populism of the Sanders-style Democrat. 

And this is exactly where Chait is too: The only mentions of an economic message are swipes at Sanders and progressives for championing economic justice. Inflation goes unmentioned.

For Chait, though, Palestine might as well not exist at all.

And what would Chait have thought about a pivot away from Biden on Gaza to excite her base? Under a quarter of Democrats expressed support for Israel’s war in October 2024, but Harris refused to break with the president.

For Chait, though, Palestine might as well not exist at all.

What Chait is doing now is a typical strategy for moderates interested in avoiding blame for their ideology in another losing effort on the national stage. Rather than look inward, they fixate on an easy target to punch down at and place blame on a marginalized community to scapegoat the loss. 

The DNC’s 2024 autopsy is expected to be more of the same, focusing on groups aligned with the party rather than any decisions made by the Biden or Harris campaigns or the Biden White House. 

Centrists can try to rewrite history, but they’ve been winning the battle over the Democratic Party for years. If that’s translating into losses at the ballot box, maybe it’s time to actually try something new.

The post Jon Chait Thinks Kamala Harris Went Too Far Left. He’s Just Falling for Trump’s Demagoguery. appeared first on The Intercept.

A prominent face on the daily Palestinian solidarity demonstrations outside the Bourse, a major city square, Farajalah had been arrested three months ago for lacking legal immigration status after a failed attempt to get asylum, activists and a fellow detainee said.

Farajalah’s mother had recently died in Gaza, but he had been denied permission to leave the detention facility to mourn her, according four sources with knowledge of the situation, including Anas Hamam, a Moroccan detainee who had met Farajalah in the “127 Bis” detention center but was transferred to another facility a month ago.

Hamam told The Intercept by phone, “He was such an incredible person, the kindest and the most thoughtful person who I ever met in that center.”

According to Hamam, Farajah was reeling from another asylum rejection when he learned of his mother’s death.

“His brother told him over the phone that his mother had died — apparently in an airstrike,” Hamam said. “He thought that his father had also died as his brother wouldn’t pass the phone to his father. His psychological state was very affected by that.”

Eight detainees in Belgium’s migration detention camps have now begun hunger strikes, including five in “127 Bis,” one in Vottem, and one in Merksplatz, according to Hamam. 

Many Palestinians are thought to have been held in Belgium’s detention camps, according to activists. At least three were arrested by plainclothes police officers after Bourse demonstrations, according to Hamam.

Last week, Amnesty International called for an investigation into Belgium’s harsh crackdowns on the protesters. Riot police had used tear gas and water cannons on demonstrators in Brussels against Israel’s interdiction of an aid flotilla to Gaza last week.

Belgium’s migration and asylum service confirmed Farajalah’s death, but spokesperson Dominique Ernould declined any further comment citing confidentiality and the privacy of the family.

“The situation is calm in the center,” Ernould said. “The necessary support is being provided to the center’s residents and staff members.”

Asylum Denied

Two sources, including Hamam and a pro-Palestine activist who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said that Farajalah had recently had an asylum claim turned down. He was arrested on the way to a second immigration hearing, Hamam said.

Farajalah got news about his mother the day after his latest asylum rejection.

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Hamam says he helped Farajalah draft a letter to the detention center’s director asking for a short period of release so he could mourn. The request was turned down and Hamam was moved to another detention center, keeping in touch with Farajalah through Instagram messages.  

“He didn’t have papers,” the activist said. “Belgium denied him access to international protection.”

As word of Farajalah’s death spread, Palestine solidarity organizers called for a protest of “fire, rage, noise” outside the detention center on Saturday.

“He had lost his mother,” organizers wrote on an Instagram post. “He had asked to be released so he could mourn. He had written. He had pleaded. The administration ignored him. The system crushed him. Silence killed him.”

A group calling itself “Getting the Voice Out” sent The Intercept a statement saying that other detainees in the facility were outraged by the death.  

“They are starting a hunger strike at the center and have made a flag with his name on it,” the statement said. “They tell us, ‘Today it’s Mahmoud, tomorrow it’s someone else. Security is laughing at us. We have to do something.’”

Activists and a former detainee at “127 Bis” said people held there were routinely denied phone calls and internet access, among other charges.

Ernould, the migration authority spokesperson, denied claims by activists and Palestinian detainees — one of whom has talked to The Intercept — of mistreatment in the detention camps.

“Residents in closed centers are not mistreated,” she said. “They receive all the necessary care: medical and psychological. Residents have the option of receiving phone calls or making phone calls to their loved ones and families outside the facility.”

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing difficulties or those close to them, by chat or by telephone at 988.

Correction: October 7, 2025, 4:23 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to remove an errant reference to Farajalah’s arrest after a protest. He was arrested on his way to an immigration hearing.

The post Prominent Palestinian Protester in Brussels Dies in Custody appeared first on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump teased a dangerous escalation on Monday afternoon, threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces to U.S. cities, should pesky judges and state leaders continue to thwart his ambitions to assault and occupy blue states.

“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “If I had to enact it, I’d do it, if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

His comments make clear the shape of Trump’s authoritarian plans to dispatch the military to American cities.

Trump noted that he did not see an immediate need to invoke the federal law. His comments, though, make clear the shape of his authoritarian plans to dispatch the military to liberal American cities after a federal judge blocked him from sending troops to Portland, Oregon.

Like so many of the Trump regime’s power grabs, the threat is both shocking and predictable.

He Badly Wants to Use It

Trump’s interest in the Insurrection Act is hardly new. He toyed with invoking the law in his first term.

He was itching to use it to send in the military to crush the 2020 George Floyd uprisings but faced opposition at the time from then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper. No such problem for the president with loyalist goon Pete Hegseth in the so-called secretary of war position.

And Trump allies called on the president to invoke the law to illegally hold onto power after the 2020 election. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to use the Insurrection Act to suppress unrest and dissent.

In his second term, Trump’s aides and advisers have been clearly setting up a justification for invoking the law — softening up MAGA adherents to accept yet another shockingly dictatorial move from the president.

It’s no accident, after all, that members of Trump’s Cabinet have repeatedly used the term “insurrection” and “insurrectionists” to describe the protesters standing up to U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Gestapo-style operations. And Stephen Miller, the ghoulish architect of Trump’s deportation machine, described the Oregon judge’s ruling as “legal insurrection.”

Like an incantation, they call the notion of insurrection into being to justify the Insurrection Act’s invocation when no such justification exists in material reality.

“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, where Trump’s storm troopers already wreaking havoc in Chicago, said on Monday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”

Ripe for Abuse

Then there is the law itself, which could not be better tailored for abuse by exactly the kind of brazen authoritarian like Trump. Legal experts have long warned that the two-century-old statute is dangerously broad and in desperate need of updating for the exact reasons it’s such an appealing tool for Trump.

First, the law gives extraordinary discretion to the president alone to declare a domestic “insurrection” is underway and deploy U.S. military forces against the American people. And it’s one of the few key exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal military forces from engaging in civilian law enforcement operations.

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If there is “a reason” we have an Insurrection Act, as Trump said on Monday, then it is a historic one, with little bearing on current conditions. With its roots in the 1792 Militia Act and first enacted in 1807, the Insurrection Act “has not been meaningfully updated in over 150 years, is dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse,” wrote Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center for Justice.

The language of the law is vague — a gift to a president with dictatorial aims. It grants the federal executive power to deploy troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”

“Nothing in the text of the Insurrection Act defines ‘insurrection,’ ‘rebellion,’ ‘domestic violence,’ or any of the other key terms used in setting forth the prerequisites for deployment,” noted Nunn. “Absent statutory guidance, the Supreme Court decided early on that this question is for the president alone to decide.”

“Create the Pretext”

Concern that Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act to take control of Democratic-led cities is by no means far-fetched. Our cities are already occupied by a federal army of thugs — ICE — directed to kidnap and cage our neighbors atop regular police violence. And Trump has already federalized and deployed National Guard troops in Los Angeles and Washington, overreaches that are already facing their own legal challenges.

Things can, of course, get much worse. Invoking the Insurrection Act would not, however, be a flip switch moving us from a functional democracy into fascism; rather, it would be an expansion of already existent fascist action, and another tool that the president can use to continue to crackdown on dissent.

In the face of such a threat, it is tempting to urge protesters to be placid, to avoid giving the Trump administration pretext for further escalation. That would be a grave mistake.

Even Pritzker’s statement recognized that it is the president’s regime that will “create the pretext,” regardless of how peaceful the protesters are.

In the Trumpist imagination — committed to the lie and/or delusion of a well-funded network of criminal leftists — no real pretext is required for a further collapsing of the police and military state.

By ruling that the administration’s notion of a grave threat to federal agents was unmoored from reality, Immergut, the federal judge, was saying that Trump cannot ignore facts on the ground.

Trump’s flirtations with the Insurrection Act on Monday, though, made clear that he wholly intends to do so.

The post The Sinister Reason Trump Is Itching to Invoke the Insurrection Act appeared first on The Intercept.