In the span of a week, prosecutors failed to bring convictions in two high-profile cases in Los Angeles federal court. In the first, a jury acquitted Bobby Nuñez, a tow-truck driver who hooked an ICE vehicle and was charged with stealing government property. In the second, a judge dismissed the case against Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a TikToker who was facing assault and property damage charges after a confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, due to concerns that officials had violated his civil rights. (In the October 21 confrontation, an ICE agent shot him.)

“These arrests are a form of retaliation by the government,” said Matthew Borden, an attorney representing protesters, journalists, and legal observers in a lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stemming from protests in Southern California over the past year. “When you have a real judge and a real jury looking at the evidence, it just falls apart.”

The two cases come on the heels of a spate of failed federal charges prosecutors filed against protesters in Chicago, including one in which Border Patrol agents shot Miramar Martinez during a roadside confrontation in October and later charged her with assault. In November, a protester in Washington D.C. was acquitted after a two-day trial stemming from on assault charges he faced for throwing a sandwich at a border patrol agent.

“They’re moving at a pace that they’re not used to, and they’re not doing the legwork up front,” said Christopher Parente, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago representing Martinez, whose case was dismissed last month.

Federal court is typically not a friendly place for defendants. U.S. Attorneys are known for being choosy about the cases they bring, so cases that make it to a grand jury for indictment are often much more thoroughly vetted than those that might be brought before a state court. And faced with stiff penalties if convicted at trial, the vast majority of defendants opt for a plea deal.

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In the year leading up to September 30, according to numbers published by the federal judiciary September 30, 91 percent of cases— 75,151 out of 82,042 in total — ended with a guilty plea, and less than two percent ended in a guilty verdict at trial. In the same period, just over six percent of cases ended without a conviction, including 5,336 dismissals and 192 acquittals at trial.

“Usually, federal cases are built after long investigations, and then you indict,” Parente told The Intercept. “And this is kind of the opposite: It’s just very quick decisions that are being made on the word of your Border Patrol agents. And if they’re not credible — which in this case they weren’t — that’s going to cause huge problems.”

The Trump administration appears to have upended that practice as it struggles to control the narrative surrounding its unpopular immigration crackdown. In higher-profile confrontations between protesters and federal agents amid aggressive immigration enforcement actions in blue cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C., federal officials have called defendants like Parias and Martinez “domestic terrorists” while seeking lesser charges.

Time and again, their cases have fallen apart.

In Chicago, on November 3, a judge dismissed charges against Cole Sheridan, a protester accused of attacking Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino after new video evidence undercut the government’s claims.

Days later, prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss their case against Martinez and her co-defendant, Anthony Ruiz, following the emergence of damning text messages by the agent who shot Martinez and other facts that might have damaged the state’s case, Parente said.

That same day, in Washington D.C., a jury acquitted Sean Dunn, the man accused of throwing a sandwich at a Border Patrol agent, following a farcical two-day trial in which the agent testified about feeling the impact through his tactical vest and smelling “the onions and mustard” on his clothes.

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The latest cases of Nuñez and Parias in Los Angeles add to the pattern.

In a scathing 28-page decision filed Saturday, Judge Fernando Manzano Olguin blasted the government for making it virtually impossible for his lawyers to meet with him at Adelanto, the privately run ICE facility where Parias was held after being released on bail from pre-trial custody.

“Here, defendant’s detention in Adelanto has effectively denied him access to his counsel for nearly the entire month preceding trial,” Olguin wrote, referring to the detention center at which Parias was held on an ICE detainer. “Mr. Parias is not ‘free’ to communicate with his attorneys by telephone.”

Olguin further ripped prosecutors for their belated production of evidence before affirming the defense team’s request for the charges to be thrown out with prejudice, thus barring the prosecution from refiling the charges.

Overall numbers for federal arrests of anti-ICE protesters were not immediately available, but the number of high-profile dismissals and acquittals of protesters in recent weeks stands in stark contrast to the usual win rate. In an email to The Intercept, a DOJ spokesperson laid the blame at the foot of “activist liberal judges,” and said agents and prosecutors are making quick decisions in the heat of the moment.

“The Department of Justice will continue to seek the most serious available charges against any individual who puts federal agents in harm’s way,” the spokeswoman wrote.

If the brass at the Department of Justice are feeling the heat, they won’t admit it. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles took a similar tack in response to questions regarding the dismissal of the charges against Parias.

“We strongly disagree with the court’s version of the facts as well as its legal conclusions. We are reviewing the court’s decision and we will determine our options for an appeal,” the spokesperson said in an email.

The acquittal of Nuñez, meanwhile, drew the ire of Stephen Miller, the anti-immigration zealot who is seen as the driving force behind the Trump Administration’s hardline policies.

“Another example of jury nullification in a blue city,” Miller wrote on X, referring to the practice of jurors intentionally tanking a criminal case regardless of the evidence. “The justice system depends on a jury of peers with a shared system of interests and values. Mass migration tribalizes the entire system.”

A spokesperson for the L.A. federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on allegations of jury nullification in the tow-truck case, referring The Intercept to a post on X in which Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California appeared to suggest that the true goal of the charges against Nuñez was to keep him off the street amid ongoing immigration enforcement.

“The jury may have acquitted him, but guess what Bobby wasn’t doing the last few months while awaiting trial: obstructing our ICE agents,” Essayli wrote on December 22. “This defendant’s efforts were in vain, as our immigration enforcement operations were successful that day and every day since.”

In the long term, however, Parente warned that the result of such run-and-gun tactics by federal authorities could have ramifications well beyond the failure of a handful of cases.

“This could have a generational impact on the credibility of law enforcement,” Parente said. “They’re creating a culture of distrust.”

The post The Feds Keep Prosecuting Protesters Against ICE — and Losing appeared first on The Intercept.

In November, in the wake of the release of tens of thousands of new documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, New York Times columnist David Brooks announced his intention to sit this one out.

In a column titled “The Epstein Story? Count Me Out,” Brooks, a mainstay of the anti-Trump center-right, dismissed the furor over Epstein as an extension of QAnon, the far-right conspiracy cult that emerged during the first Trump administration and centered around increasingly deranged myths around a pedophile cabal that supposedly ran the world. The case was like catnip to QAnon types, Brooks argued, because it revealed that a powerful, well-connected financier really was engaged in sex-trafficking.

Brooks didn’t mention that he had not only met Epstein in the past, but also attended a dinner alongside the infamous sex trafficker in 2011.

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The connection was only revealed Thursday when photos of Brooks at an event with Epstein emerged as part of a release of a new tranche of documents by the Democratic members of the House Committee on Oversight, which has been investigating the Epstein saga and has access to reams of documents handed over by the estate of the late pedophile.

It was not immediately clear when or where the event took place, but a spokesperson for the Times told The Intercept that it was a “widely-attended dinner” in 2011 that Brooks attended in the normal course of his journalistic duties. Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha wrote. “Mr. Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner.”

Brooks is not the first Timesman to appear prominently in the recent disclosures around Epstein. In November, when the GOP-controlled Oversight Committee dumped thousands of documents gleaned from an email inbox belonging to Epstein, it revealed new depths to the relationship between Epstein and Landon Thomas Jr., a former Times reporter who was fired in 2018 after it emerged that he’d solicited a donation to a charity from Epstein. Thomas, a business reporter, appeared in numerous emails with Epstein in which Epstein teased information he said he had regarding Donald Trump. Those tips were not made public, and neither Thomas nor the Times have commented on why he did not appear to have reported them out.

Thursday’s release of documents also included a number of photos of prominent thinkers and political operatives known to be in Epstein’s orbit in later years, including the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and the right-wing provocateur and erstwhile Trump confidant Steven K. Bannon.

The photos came out just a day ahead of the deadline for the release of the so-called Epstein Files by the Department of Justice, which is mandated by congressional Epstein Files Act to drop documents related to its investigations into Epstein on Friday.

“The Epstein case is precious to the QAnon types because here, in fact, was a part of the American elite that really was running a sex abuse ring,” Brooks wrote in his November column. “So, of course, they leap to the conclusion that Epstein was a typical member of the American establishment, not an outlier. It’s grooming and sex trafficking all the way down.”

A spokesperson for the Democratic members of the Oversight Committee did not immediately respond to a request for clarification about the details of the photos, but according to Politico, the Epstein estate provided the images without context after a subpoena.

The post NY Times’ David Brooks Said There’s Too Much Focus on Jeffrey Epstein. Here He Is Hanging With Epstein. appeared first on The Intercept.

News of the plot surfaced Monday morning in a Fox News report that ran ahead of court filings or official statements. Within minutes, FBI officials amplified the story on social media.

“PROTECT THE HOMELAND and CRUSH VIOLENT CRIME,” wrote FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, a former podcaster. “These words are not slogans, they’re the investigative pillars of this FBI.”

What followed, however, painted a more complicated picture.

The limited details available suggest an investigation that leaned heavily on a paid informant and at least one undercover FBI agent, according to an affidavit filed in federal court. The informant and the undercover agent were involved in nearly every stage of the case, including discussions of operational security and transporting members of the group to the site in the Mojave Desert where federal agents ultimately made the arrests.

The informant, who has worked other cases on the FBI’s payroll since 2021, had been in contact with the group known as the Turtle Island Liberation Front since at least late November, just two months after President Donald Trump designated “antifa” a domestic terrorism organization.

On the morning of December 15, FBI Director Kash Patel announced the arrests, calling the plot “a credible, imminent terrorist threat.”

Yet the case had the familiar markings of FBI terrorism stings that stretch back more than two decades — hundreds of cases that have disproportionately targeted left-wing activists and Muslims, and, less often, right-wing actors.

“Bring Cases, Get Paid”

Since the September 11 attacks, the FBI has relied on informants to identify and build terrorism cases. The structure has created perverse incentives for potential informants. Their cooperation can get them out of criminal cases of their own and lead to handsome monetary compensation. The FBI’s call is simple: Bring cases, get paid.

Rick Smith, a security consultant and former FBI agent, said confidential sources are essential to investigative police work, but cautioned that they come with inherent baggage.

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“They’re sources, they’re not ordinary citizens,” Smith said. “They have either been compromised in some way, or they’re going to be paid. Either way, they’ve got some sort of skin in the game. They’re getting something out of it.”

In the years after 2001 attacks, the FBI created a market for cases involving left-wing activists and Muslims. After the January 6 Capitol riot, the bureau made clear to informants that right-wing extremism was a priority. Now, under the second Trump administration, the federal government’s focus is again turning to perceived left-wing extremism.

In September, days after the terror designation of antifa, Trump outlined his administration’s war on the left in a memo titled National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, which called for the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to coordinate with local offices to investigate alleged federal crimes by political radicals. The head of the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles said on Monday that the Turtle Island Liberation Front arrests stemmed from Trump’s executive order.

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Key questions in the Turtle Island Liberation Front case, however, remain unanswered. It is still unclear how the FBI first identified the group or how long the informant had been embedded before the bomb plot emerged — a period defense attorneys say is central to any serious examination of entrapment, whereby defendants are coerced into crimes they would not otherwise commit, a frequent criticism of stings involving paid informants and undercover agents.

“The question that immediately popped into my mind was that: There’s a reference to a confidential human source, but there’s no indication of how that source came to be,” said Brad Crowder, an activist and union organizer who was convicted in a case of alleged violent protest plans that involved a confidential informant. “It’s not totally out of the realm of possibilities that this idea was planted or floated by whoever this confidential human source might be.”

Turtle Island Case

Despite comments from Attorney General Pam Bondi, Patel, and others characterizing the Turtle Island Liberation Front as a coherent group and a Signal chat called “Black Lotus” as an ultra-radical subset, there’s little evidence that any group by that name exists beyond a small digital footprint and a handful of attempts at organizing community events, including a self-defense workshop and a punk rock benefit show planned for February.

The Instagram page for the Turtle Island Liberation Front cited in the complaint had just over 1,000 followers as of Tuesday morning — after it was widely publicized — and its first post came in late July. The YouTube channel bearing the group’s name, which had just 18 subscribers as of Tuesday morning, was registered on July 17 and contains a single video posted on September 16.

Online, the group styled itself as radical and righteous. Its activists spoke in the language of solidarity with Palestinians and Indigenous people, railing against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and American power. On Instagram, they posted slogans and absolutes:

“Become a revolutionary.”

“America has always been the brutal evil monster that some of you don’t want to face.”

“Resistance is the deepest form of love.”

The informant did not, however, meet with the group on November 26 for its slogans.

According to the affidavit, the informant met up with Audrey Illeene Carroll, who went by the nickname Asiginaak. At the meeting, Carroll handed over eight pages covered with handwriting in blue ink. The document was titled “Operation Midnight Sun,” and laid out a plan to detonate backpack bombs at five separate locations on New Year’s Eve, when fireworks would mask the sound of explosions. The plan was unfinished. Beneath the list of targets were blank lines, marked: “add more if enough comrades.” (Carroll’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Over the following weeks, the plot advanced, according to court filings. A Signal group was created for, in the participants’ words, “everything radical,” including the bomb plan itself. On December 7, the supposed bomb plot expanded to include an undercover FBI agent. At that meeting, Carroll distributed pages describing how to build the bombs. She said she already had 13 PVC pipes cut to size and had ordered two five-pound bags of potassium nitrate from Amazon, believing naively that a burner account she set up was keeping her anonymous. Delivery was scheduled for December 11.

The FBI had visibility into nearly every part of the supply chain: chemicals ordered online and pistol primers purchased at a retail store. Agents could have intervened at any stage. They didn’t. Instead, the bureau allowed the plan to continue, with both an informant and an undercover agent actively participating in the conspiracy.

On December 12, the group drove into the desert with an aim of testing the bombs. They took two vehicles: the informant in one, the undercover agent in the other. Riding with the undercover agent was Zachary Aaron Page, who went by the nickname AK. He suggested using cigarettes as a delayed fuse. In the other car, Carroll told another member that the desert exercise was a dry run for the New Year’s Eve attack.

“What we’re doing will be considered a terrorist act,” she said, according to the affidavit.

At the site, they pitched tents and set up tables. They laid out PVC pipes, charcoal, sulfur, gasoline, string, cloth, and protective gear. As they began assembling the devices, the FBI moved in. Overhead, an FBI surveillance plane recorded the scene as agents took into custody four alleged members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front including Carroll and Page, along with Tina Lai and Dante Gaffield. (An attorney for Page declined to comment, and lawyers for Gaffield and Lai did not immediately respond.)

“Nonpartisan Incentive Structure”

Terrorism prosecutions built around confidential informants have long drawn criticism, particularly over the risk of entrapment.

For more than a decade, legal scholars have argued that while these cases often resemble classic government inducement, they rarely meet the legal standard for entrapment. Courts define predisposition so broadly that ideological sympathy or recorded rhetoric is treated as evidence of a preexisting willingness to commit violence — a framework that effectively shields government-manufactured plots from meaningful judicial scrutiny.

That concern surfaced starkly in a previous sting operation involving the so-called Newburgh Four, in which an aggressive and prolific FBI informant steered four poor Black men into a scheme to bomb synagogues and attack an Air Force base. Years later, a federal judge granted the men compassionate release, describing the case as an “FBI-orchestrated conspiracy.”

Because informants can be so instrumental in building cases, their use can be leveraged by authorities to focus resources on investigations with more political overtones.

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At times, the right has criticized the political nature of some cases. Among them was the case in which the FBI encouraged a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — a sting that the FBI’s Patel and Bongino harshly criticized back when they spent their days attached to the microphones of right-wing podcasts.

“There is a nonpartisan incentive structure that has become overly reliant on these kinds of confidential human sources,” said Crowder.

Crowder knows better than most. In 2008, he and fellow activist David McKay were arrested and charged with plotting to use Molotov cocktails at the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Despite deciding not to follow through with the plan, both ultimately pleaded guilty, with Crowder sentenced to two years in prison and McKay to four.

The case against Crowder and McKay case hinged on the work of an FBI informant, Brandon Darby, who had been a prominent activist in anarchist circles in Texas and Louisiana. Crowder and McKay looked up to Darby, viewing him as a mentor and someone they hoped to impress or convince of their radical bona fides. In interviews over the years, they’ve alleged that Darby — who now works at Breitbart — was instrumental to their decision to cross the line from protest to discussing something more violent.

Part of the playbook, Crowder said, is for an informant to exploit their targets’ “righteous anger” — in the case of the Turtle Bay Liberation Front, rights violations in Palestine and ICE actions in Los Angeles. From there, authorities take advantage of the allege plotters’ political immaturity, walking hand in hand with them as they cross the line from legal dissent into illegal conspiracy.

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The informant gets paid, the FBI gets a good headline that justifies their anti-terrorism budget, and the defendants are left to face the consequences, often without ever posing a real threat to public safety, Crowder said.

“On both sides you have a sort of momentum that develops,” Crowder said. “This ICE repression is crazy, and that feeds into a sort of hopelessness that drives a sort of nihilistic response that you see from people who have immature politics. And then that heartfelt but immature and irresponsible response plays into the incentive structure of the FBI.”

The post Longtime Paid FBI Informant Was Instrumental in Terror Case Against “Turtle Island Liberation Front” appeared first on The Intercept.

The letters, which were sent on October 14 to the presidents and provosts of Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Minnesota State, and Tufts universities, called out school officials and U.S. law enforcement agencies for cracking down on student protesters and subsequently using immigration authorities to single out foreign students for detention and deportation.

“We are highly concerned over reports that students were arrested, suspended, and expelled, and lost their university accommodation, campus access, and their immigration status merely because of assembling peacefully to express their solidarity with victims of the conflict in Gaza,” wrote the group of U.N. special rapporteurs, independent experts who monitor human rights violations. “We fear that such pressure and public attacks on scholars and institutions can result in repression of free expression and in self-censorship, thus damaging academic freedom and the autonomy of universities.”

The letters suggest the international body has taken notice of domestic protest repression on U.S. campuses. Since President Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has weaponized immigration authorities against international students and investigations over alleged antisemitism at universities across the country — ratcheting up a crackdown on student protests for Palestine that began under former President Joe Biden.

The letter to Columbia highlighted the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Leqaa Kordia, as well as the attempted arrest of Yunseo Chung. (Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Khalil and Mahdawi both spent months in detention earlier this year. Kordia, a Palestinian student who was arrested on March 8, was still in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as recently as December 8, according to a report by Drop Site News.

“It has been reported that the conditions of Ms. Kordia’s detention are particularly severe. Due to overcrowding, she sleeps on the floor where cockroaches and other bugs abound, and many showers and sinks do not work,” the authors wrote. “She is also not given materials her faith requires to have to pray, and she is not allowed to wear a hijab in the presence of men as her religion requires.”

The authors of the letter include Mary Lawlor, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; Farida Shaheed, the special rapporteur on the right to education; Irene Khan, the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression; Gina Romero, the special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association; and Gehad Madi, the special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants. Representatives of the U.N. rapporteurs who drafted the letters did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

The U.N. letter also highlighted the cases of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts who was snatched by masked ICE agents on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25; Badar Khan Suri, the Indian-born researcher at Georgetown arrested on March 17; Momodou Taal, a Cornell grad student with dual citizenship from the United Kingdom and Gambia who was ordered to turn himself in to ICE agents on March 22; and Mohammed Hoque, a Minnesota State student arrested at his home on March 28. (Cornell, Minnesota State, and Tufts did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

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In the letter, the authors singled out Columbia for bowing to pressure from the Trump administration, which they said set a standard that chilled speech nationwide.

“The restrictive measures at Columbia University reflect nationwide structural changes at universities to suppress Palestine solidarity movements,” the authors wrote.

In each letter, the authors asked the universities to provide information on the allegations of mistreatment, any measures taken by the schools to protect the rights of its students and scholars, and details on how the schools plan to safeguard the rights to freedom of expression and assembly.

“Students report self-censoring political expression, and particularly international students are withdrawing from activism due to deportation fears,” the authors wrote. “Campus organizing has diminished significantly, with activists reporting less attendance from international students who had to quit their activism because of the potential risk of repercussions. This intimidating effect extends beyond issues concerning Israel and Palestine, with students reporting reluctance to engage in any political activism.”

The post U.N. Experts Blast U.S. Universities for Human Rights Violations Against Gaza Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.

The report, titled “Draining Defense,” took aim at the Trump administration for what it described as prioritizing hard-line border initiatives and political stunts at the expense of the military’s ability to protect the nation and respond to emergencies.

“It’s an insult to our service members that Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem are using the defense budget as a slush fund for political stunts. Stripping military resources to promote a wasteful political agenda doesn’t make our military stronger or Americans safer,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., one of the lawmakers who prepared the report, told The Intercept. “Congress needs to step in and hold the Trump Administration accountable for mishandling billions of taxpayer dollars.”

The report noted that the Pentagon’s requested budget for 2026 indicates that the Defense Department plans to spend at least $5 billion for operations on the southern border alone.

President Donald Trump has made a crackdown on immigration and closed borders the key policy of his second term, and has argued that decreasing immigration and deporting immigrants is a cornerstone of sovereignty and safety. But the lawmakers argued that the level of commitment of Pentagon funds and troops on immigration matters has passed any reasonable standard, hampering the overall readiness of the nation’s armed forces and contributing to wasteful spending in lieu of more efficient allocation of resources by civilian agencies.

“When the military is tasked with immigration enforcement — a role that is not consistent with DoD’s mission, and that servicemembers have neither signed up nor been trained for — those operations often cost several times more than when the same function is performed by civilian authorities,” the lawmakers wrote.

The report found that the Pentagon had allocated at least $1.3 billion for resources and troop deployment to the border; at least $420.9 million for the detention of immigrants at military installations at home and abroad; at least $258 million for the deployment of troops American cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago; and at least $40.3 million for military deportation flights.

“As of July 2025, there were roughly 8,500 troops deployed to the southern border, with additional combat units in the process of relieving the troops who were deployed to the border earlier in the year,” the lawmakers wrote. “This deployment has meant making combat-certified units no longer available for their normal functions because they are assisting DHS with immigration enforcement — raising serious concerns about the implications for military readiness.”

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The report also singled out the cost of Trump’s deployments to U.S. cities over the past year and cited reporting by The Intercept on the steep cost of those deployments.

The lawmakers also raised concerns that, in addition to the financial costs, the Pentagon’s focus on anti-immigration policies has resulted in military service members “being pulled from their homes, families, and civilian jobs for indefinite periods of time to support legally questionable political stunts.”

They criticized the administration’s failure to adequately inform Congress and the public about the diversion of Pentagon funds. “The Trump administration’s secrecy leaves many questions unanswered,” they wrote. “The administration has failed to provide clarity on basic questions about DoD’s role in supporting DHS.”

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The White House responded that “spending allocated money on one mission does not mean other missions become depleted,” and said the use of Pentagon funds on immigration matters should be blamed on political adversaries.

“Operations with the Department of Homeland Security wouldn’t be necessary if Joe Biden didn’t turn the Southern Border into a national security threat, but this administration is proud to fix the problem Democrats started,” said Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson in an emailed statement.

The post Trump Administration Diverted $2 Billion in Pentagon Funds to Target Immigrants, Lawmakers Say appeared first on The Intercept.

In a post on X trumpeting the deployment of troops to the Caribbean, U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, shared an image that prominently displayed a so-called Jerusalem cross on the helmet of a masked commando.

The Jerusalem cross, also dubbed the “Crusader cross” for its roots in Medieval Christians’ holy wars in the Middle East, is not inherently a symbol of extremism. It has, however, become popular on the right to symbolize the march of Christian civilization, with anti-Muslim roots that made it into something of a logo for the U.S. war on terror.

Tattoos of the cross, a squared-off symbol with a pattern of repeating crosses, have appeared on the bodies of people ranging from mercenaries hired by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to Hegseth himself.

Now, the symbol has reared its head again to advertise President Donald Trump’s military buildup against Venezuela — an overwhelmingly Catholic country — and boat strikes in the Caribbean.

“As with all things Trump, it’s a continuation, with some escalation, and then a transformation into spectacle,” said Yale University historian Greg Grandin, whose work focuses on U.S. empire in Latin America.

The social media post came amid rising controversy over a series of strikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, dubbed Operation Southern Spear.

Hegseth is alleged to have ordered a so-called “double-tap” strike, a follow-up attack against a debilitated boat that killed survivors clinging to the wreckage for around 45 minutes. The U.S. has carried out 22 strikes since the campaign began in September, killing a total of 87 people.

The Pentagon’s press office declined to comment on the use of the Jerusalem cross, referring questions to SOUTHCOM. But in a reply to the X post on Monday, Hegseth’s deputy press secretary Joel Valdez signaled his approval with emojis of a salute and the American flag. In a statement to the Intercept, SOUTHCOM spokesperson Steven McLoud denied that the post implied any religious or far-right message.

“The graphic you’re referring to was an illustration of service members in a ready posture during Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR,” McLoud told The Intercept. “There is no other communication intent for this image.”

The original image of the masked service member appears to have come from an album published online by the Pentagon that depicts a training exercise by Marines aboard the USS Iwo Jima in the Caribbean Sea in October. The photo depicting the cross, however, was removed from the album after commentators on social media pointed out its origins.

Amanda Saunders, a spokesperson for the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, the Pentagon-run photo agency, said she was unable to comment directly but forwarded the request to the Marine unit involved in the exercise.

“Content on DVIDS is published and archived directly by the registered units,” she said, “so we don’t have control over what is posted or removed, nor are we able to comment on those decisions.”

Hegseth and the Cross

The Jerusalem cross’s popularity on the right has surged in part thanks to featuring in various media, including the 2005 Ridley Scott film “Kingdom of Heaven” and video games, according to Matthew Gabriele, a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech and a scholar of Crusader iconography.

“It supports the rhetoric of ‘defense of homeland,’” Gabriele told The Intercept, “because the crusaders, in the right’s understanding, were waging a defensive war against enemies trying to invade Christian lands.”

The symbol’s position of prominence in official military communications is just the latest example of a trollish extremism by the Trump administration’s press teams, which have made a point of reveling in the cruelty wrought on its perceived enemies at home and abroad, or “owning the libs.”

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Monday’s post may also be intended as Hegseth putting his thumb in the eye of the Pentagon’s old guard. Hegseth’s embrace of the symbol — in the form of a gawdy chest tattoo — once stymied, however temporarily, his ambitions in the military.

Folling the January 6 insurrection, according to Hegseth and reporting by the Washington Post, Hegseth was ordered to stand down rather than deploy with his National Guard unit ahead of the 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden. The decision to treat Hegseth as a possible “insider threat” came after a someone flagged a photo of a shirtless Hegseth to military brass, according to the Washington Post.

“I joined the Army in 2001 because I wanted to serve my country. Extremists attacked us on 9/11, and we went to war,” Hegseth wrote “The War on Warriors,” his 2024 memoir. “Twenty years later, I was deemed an ‘extremist’ by that very same Army.”

Hegseth was hardly chastened by the episode and has since gotten more tattoos with more overt anti-Muslim resonance, including the Arabic word word for “infidel,” which appeared on his bicep sometime in the past several years. It’s accompanied by another bicep tattoo of the Latin words “Deus vult,” or “God wills it,” yet another slogan associated with the Crusades and repurposed by extremist groups.

The use of the image to advertise aggressive posturing in a majority-Christian region like Latin America may seem odd at first glance. In the context of renewed U.S. focus on Latin America, however, it’s a potent symbol of the move of military action from the Middle East to the Western Hemisphere.

The post comes on the heels of the release of the Trump’s National Security Strategy, a 33-page document outlining the administration’s foreign-policy priorities that explicitly compared Trump’s stance to the Monroe Doctrine, the turn-of-the-century policy of U.S. dominance in Latin America in opposition to colonialism by other foreign powers. Grandin, the Yale historian, described the document as a “vision of global dominance” based on a model of great-powers competition that can lead to immense instability.

“They’re globalizing the Monroe Doctrine,” Grandin said. “I’m no fan of the hypocrisy and arrogance of the old liberal international order, but there’s something to be said for starting from a first principle of shared interests, which does keep great conflict at bay to some degree.”

The post Official Propaganda for Caribbean Military Buildup Includes “Crusader Cross” appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s not just immigrants, however, worried over ICE’s presence. The rhetoric behind the operation — notably racist rants from Donald Trump about Somalis at large — prompted legal residents of Somali descent to reel from fear.

“I’ve had a number of people reach out to me who are actually U.S. citizens who are wondering if they can have their citizenship revoked for a traffic ticket, or asking how they can prove their citizenship,” said Linus Chan, the faculty director of the University of Minnesota Law School’s Detainee Rights Clinic. “People are worried about their family and friends and neighbors, but even citizens are worried for themselves.”

The operation, announced this week amid a rising tide of vitriol aimed at Minnesota’s Somali diaspora, isn’t likely to result in booming deportations from Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The Somali community is largely made up of American citizens and permanent residents.

“Ultimately this isn’t going to yield results in terms of numbers of arrests or removal of people,” said Ana Pottratz Acosta, who leads the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School. “This is absolutely a racist weaponization of ICE against an entire community.”

Though many Somali residents cannot be legally deported, some community members are at risk. In some cases, however, the number of potential immigrants with issues doesn’t accord with the scale of the crackdown.

Take temporary protected status, or TPS, which is bestowed on some refugees in the country. The ICE raids came on the heels of a decision by Trump last month to rescind TPS for Somali residents, effectively depriving them of legal status in the country. While previous moves to rescind TPS for refugee communities have affected hundreds of thousands of refugees from Haiti and Venezuela, the number of Somalis with TPS stood at just 705, according to a congressional report earlier this year. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said about 300 Somalis previously receiving protected status are living in Minnesota.

Still, things are tense as reports of ICE raids pop up across the city, according to Luis Argueta, a spokesperson for Monarca Rapid Response, a community group that tracks ICE.

“We’re really feeling it,” Argueta said. “We have cases where ICE is showing up at three or four locations across our Twin Cities.”

Argueta said an observer with Monarca Rapid Response had witnessed an incident in which federal agents grappled with a man of East African descent in front of a house, telling onlookers they were trying to identify the man. In a video of that incident posted to TikTok by MPR, the local NPR affiliate, agents can be heard saying they will release the man if he gives them the information they’re looking for.

“We are identifying who he is,” an agent is heard saying. “We will let you know if there is a warrant.”

Argueta said, “They literally just profiled an East African man.”

According to MPR, the agents left the scene shortly thereafter without anyone in custody. In video captured by a local Fox affiliate showing a similar scene, two men from Somalia were questioned by masked ICE agents before showing their papers and being let go.

And with a dearth of deportable Somalis to detain, ICE agents have been going after Latino immigrants in their stead, Argueta said.

“The rest of the immigrant community in the Twin Cities is on alert,” Argueta said. “It really feels like this administration is going to use whatever narrative that it wants to spin up to justify the damage and the hurt.”

Targeting All Somalis

Minnesota is home to the largest Somali diaspora community in the country, with steady growth since the 1990s, when a civil war drove refugees to the state as part of resettlement programs. In the decades since, Somalis have become a significant minority and a political force, with Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar as their most visible face.

Omar has been a constant thorn in the side of Trump, who singled her out by name in comments this week justifying the crackdown.

The remarks about Omar were part of escalating rhetoric from the right against Somalis. Last week, Trump made baseless claims in a social media post that “Somalian gangs” were “roving the streets looking for ‘prey.’”

He continued his tirade at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, at which he reportedly awoke after dozing off to rage against Somalis, whom he described as “garbage.” Trump spoke of immigrants but also showed little compunction about addressing Somalis at large. Even the New York Times, usually hesitant to directly ascribe bias to right-wing rhetoric, said the “outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry.”

The racist rhetoric from the president and his allies has prompted a sense of “continual pain” in the Somali diaspora, said one community activist, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“The response from families in the community is one of overwhelming fear, based on what the president is saying,” the activist told The Intercept. “What did our families run to safety for if we’re just going to be attacked in our new home?”

Even in nearby states with significantly smaller Somali populations, the rhetoric has played out in real life, the activist said.

“I was speaking to one young brother in Omaha, Nebraska, who said that the energy had really shifted in that state,” they said. “Even at the local grocery store, he said, people don’t treat him the same. It’s just bias.”

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Trump has made anti-immigrant language a centerpiece of his platform since he announced his first run for the White House in 2015. His comments against the Somali community of Minnesota may have been the most specific broadside against a single ethnic group, said Chan.

“I can’t think of a time in recent U.S. history that a sitting U.S. president has called the people from an entire country ‘garbage,’” Chan said. “Even where there is a historical precedent, it’s one that we thought we were beyond.”

Twelve Arrests?

It’s unclear how many arrests have been made so far. ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, have refused to give specifics.

In one press release on Thursday, however, Homeland Security officials said that at least 12 people had been arrested so far. As with other recent immigration sweeps across the country, Homeland Security labeled the detainees as the “worst of the worst,” saying the arrestees included people with convictions for sexual assault of a minor.

Many, however, had minor criminal infractions, including driving while intoxicated. And others still had checkered pasts that they had long since made amends for.

Among the detainees picked up this week by ICE was Abdulkadir Sharif Abdi, whom the agency described in a press release as a gang member.

Abdi’s wife, Rhoda Christenson, told The Intercept that she was driving to pick up a prescription for her mother on Monday when she received a call from a neighbor telling her that Abdi had been arrested by ICE.

Christenson acknowledged her husband’s criminal past — which led to a deportation order during the first Trump administration — and his struggles with addiction, but said he’s been sober for more than 15 years. He now works at a homeless shelter and has become a staple of the local recovery community.

“He’s such a light in the community,” Christenson said in an interview Friday morning. “He has so much to offer and shows so much love and respect for the homeless population he works with.”

Christenson was sent reeling again Thursday when she saw the allegations from Homeland Security that her husband was an active gang member, something she categorically denied.

“How can they just lie like that?” she asked. “I know social media is crazy, but a government website is something we have to be able to rely on for accurate information. It’s really disheartening and it makes me worried for how they will treat him.”

The post U.S. Citizens With Somali Roots Are Carrying Their Passports Amid Minnesota ICE Crackdown appeared first on The Intercept.

It wasn’t Nicolás Maduro — though the Venezuelan president had likewise been indicted in the Southern District of New York. It was Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who, as U.S. prosecutors said in their closing arguments in 2024, “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States. In a monthlong trial we covered from New York that winter, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons charges, earning him a 45-year prison sentence.

Now, as B-52s plow the skies near Caracas and U.S. President Donald Trump announces the closure of Venezuelan airspace via social media, Hernández is poised to have his conviction erased. A key asset likely working in his favor is something Maduro pointedly lacks: a long-running allyship with the United States. Before his prosecution, Hernández spent years promoting Washington’s goals of militarization and migrant crackdowns as a friend of Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, and Trump.

Trump announced on Truth Social on Friday that he would grant a “full and complete pardon” to Hernández, “who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.” The message doubled as an endorsement of Honduran presidential candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a member of Hernández’s conservative National Party, who as of Monday afternoon was effectively tied with another conservative candidate after Sunday’s election. (In his endorsement-and-pardon announcement, Trump threw in a threat to cut off aid to the country if Hondurans elected a rival candidate.)

“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He claimed to have spoken to Hondurans, who “said it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”

Hernández was released from a federal prison in West Virginia on Monday, according to Bureau of Prisons records.

Hernández was first directly named as a potential co-conspirator during the drug trafficking trial of his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, in 2019. Emil Bove, a deputy attorney general for the Trump administration until September, worked on both their prosecutions in the Southern District.

“There are a lot of reasons this administration might want to curry favor with Juan Orlando Hernández and people close to him, but none of them point to the fight against drugs,” said Todd Robinson, a retired diplomat who served most recently as assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs under former President Joe Biden. News of the impending pardon came as a shock to civil servants with knowledge of Hernández’s case, Robinson said. But with Trump, he added, “if you get in his ear and there’s some kind of benefit to him or someone close to him, then your case will be heard. It is not hard to put two and two together and get four.”

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While Hernández walks free, the U.S. has taken to extrajudicially executing civilians accused vaguely of being low-level drug runners leaving Venezuela — including, as first reported by The Intercept, striking the same boat twice in September in an apparent war crime known as a “double tap.” Beyond killing at least 80 people this fall, the U.S. is positioning military equipment around Venezuela ostensibly, according to the Trump administration, to dismantle Maduro’s “narco-state.” In a November 16 statement designating the “Cártel de los Soles” — which doesn’t appear to formally exist — as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Rubio alleged that the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”

The language could have come from the mouth of U.S. prosecutors as they condemned Hernández. In fact, as Hernández’s trial revealed, the same institutionalized collusion between state forces and criminals that Rubio attributes with exclusive ideological fervor to Maduro has been well documented by U.S. investigators among U.S.-tied government officials in Honduras.

When Hernández took the stand last year, he cited his ties to U.S. officials so frequently, the prosecution objected at least 43 times. “We get it,” the judge said at one point, exasperated. “The defendant has visited the White House and met several Presidents.”

Making sense of Hernández’s journey from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to a prison cell in Manhattan alongside Sam Bankman-Fried requires going back 16 years, to June 28, 2009, when a military coup ousted center-left President Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya under the passive watch of U.S. officials and turned the already violent Central American country into the bloodiest on the planet.

As wars between gangs, drug traffickers, and corrupt security forces set fire to a crisis of undocumented migration, Hernández, known by his initials “JOH,” presented himself as a savior. Before El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele rose to power and incarcerated nearly 2 percent of his country’s population, Hernández promised iron-fist ruthlessness and made a constellation of military–police special forces units with the help of the FBI while granting ever more power to the Honduran military. The U.S. welcomed him as an ally not just for his collaboration in drug war militarization, but for his willingness to help crack down on migrants as well as business-friendly neoliberal policies.

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Corruption and violence flourished in Hernández’s Honduras, where political and economic elites in the shadow of one of the largest U.S. military bases in Latin America, for decades, have systematically weaponized the state to protect both criminal networks and transnational corporate interests. In 2017, Hernández claimed a second presidential “reelection” — which the Organization of American States denounced for widespread irregularities — sparking protests that were squashed with murderous crackdown as dozens were killed by security forces. Human rights abuses abounded. Land and water defenders organizing their villages against mining, agribusiness, and tourism megaprojects were assassinated, disappeared, and incarcerated on trumped up charges. The same military police units he created were implicated in widespread accusations of torture and extrajudicial killings as well as collusion with organized crime. A year later, his brother Tony, a congressional deputy for the conservative National Party, was arrested in the U.S. (He was convicted on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to life in prison in 2021.) Many Hondurans, now fleeing in caravans, took to referring to his government as a “narco-dictatorship.”

According to allegations first presented in the trial of the drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes, Hernández promised to “shove drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”

He was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa in February 2022, less than a month after he left office from his contested second term, leaving the reins of the violence-plagued state to left-leaning Xiomara Castro. Two months later, the former drug war hawk was escorted to a plane in shackles and extradited to the U.S., where his defense team argued that convicted criminals tied to the drug trade were unreliable witnesses, “depraved people” and “psychopaths” who wanted to punish Hernández for “working with the US to take down cartels.”

The U.S. government countered that the meticulous detail of their workings with Hernández and his brother was itself indicative they had participated in the president’s racket, one that “directed heavily-armed members of the Honduran National Police and Honduran military to protect drug shipments as they transited Honduras.” It was implausible, they argued, to believe that Hernández was oblivious to the conspicuous criminality of his younger brother Tony, already in jail for drug trafficking charges.

The Biden administration celebrated Hernández’s conviction as a triumph — and Robinson, the former assistant secretary of state, pointed to declining opioid deaths in recent years as the fruit of the administration’s efforts to attack root causes of the drug trade, including limiting traffickers’ abilities to move money.

“We started to move the needle on synthetic opioid deaths in those four years and it was precisely because we worked with countries on a global level,” he said. “If these networks can’t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems. We were doing the diplomatic spadework to get those people sanctioned by international financial networks.”

In a statement to The Intercept sent after publication, a State Department official mounted a pointed attack on the prosecution’s case against Hernández. Quoting at times from defense filings, the spokesperson argued that witnesses against Hernández were not credible and that Hernández’s court-appointed attorney, Renato C. Stabile, had not been given adequate time to mount a defense.

“JOH has highlighted that there was ‘virtually no independent evidence’ presented – ‘no video, no audio, no financial records…no dates of meetings, bribes, or assistance, no text messages or phone records…’ Instead, the jury heard from ‘cooperating witnesses and notoriously violent drug cartel leaders,’” the spokesperson wrote.

The quotations were lifted directly from a document Stabile filed on June 21, 2024, ahead of his client’s sentencing hearing — and after Judge P. Kevin Castel denied a motion for a new trial. Castel dismissed many of the points Stabile raised at the time, which the State Department spokesperson repeated in the email to The Intercept.

Stabile did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Intercept.

Over the course of the trial, which reached a fever pitch during his testimony, the former president had been eager to underscore his anti-drug collaboration with Obama and Trump, as well as officials like John Kelly, then head of U.S. Southern Command and later adviser to Trump, who he claimed to have met with “15 to 20 times.” His administration organized U.S. training and funding for the TIGRES, an elite police force later accused of hunting down anti-election fraud protesters at the beginning Hernández’s second term; the Maya Chorti Interagency Task Force, a binational group of soldiers and police charged with stemming drug and migrant flows between Honduras and Guatemala; and the FNAMP, an FBI-trained military unit that was later accused of extrajudicial killings.

“We’re stopping drugs like never before,” Trump said with Hernández at a gala in Miami in 2019. In October 2020, publicity emails show U.S. Southern Command Adm. Craig Faller meeting Hernández and underscoring that U.S. and Honduran drug war efforts were “successful because of the trust of both of us working together.”

In 2019, when damning revelations emerged in the trial of his brother implicating JOH as a probable co-conspirator in the drug trade, the then-president paid over half a million dollars to a lobbying firm to wipe his cocaine-tarnished image in Washington. The lobbyists, known as BGR Group, set off on an aggressive publicity campaign to assure journalists and congressional staffers of Hernández’s anti-drug record. The firm had also hosted campaign fundraisers and contributed $34,000 to then-Sen. Marco Rubio.

It’s not hard to find traces on the internet of Rubio, already one of the most powerful forces of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, meeting with Hernández in the years during which he was accused of organizing a high-level drug ring. From his influential position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio advocated for weapons shipments to Hernández.

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Corruption, undoubtedly, is rampant in Venezuela, where the military has selectively colluded with drug traffickers since the 1990s and where security forces under Maduro, whose last election was denounced as fraudulent, have been implicated in widespread crimes against humanity. Though it’s a myth that fentanyl comes from Venezuela, cocaine is flown from the Caribbean nation to clandestine landing strips in Honduras, where they have been received by drug clans operating under protection from Hernández. (The statement designating Cártel de los Soles as an FTO, coincidentally, accused it of being tied to the Sinaloa Cartel, another designated FTO accused of funneling money to Hernández’s 2013 presidential campaign).

The 2020 indictment of the Honduran drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes asserts he had “received support from the highest levels of the Honduran military,” an institution long trained by the Pentagon, whose officials provided the drug lord with weapons, uniforms, intelligence and protection. Testimonies in the trial against Hernández made frequent mention of military forces deployed to grease the skids of cocaine smuggling operations, providing security for drug shipments, and murdering traffickers who had fallen afoul of the president. Police corruption was no less damning: The 2016 testimony of Ludwig Criss Zelaya Romero, a former member of the Honduran National Police who turned himself in to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, indicated systematic pacts between police officials and drug traffickers, including the claim that a U.S. trained police special forces unit worked with the Grillos, one of the many paramilitary gangs roving Honduras. A top cop and U.S. ally, Juan Carlos Bonilla — who was denounced for orchestrating a system of social cleansing death squads in the 2000s and 2010s — was indicted by U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan in 2020 for “conspiracy to import cocaine” while also being named in the Hernández trial.

Critics have argued that the idea of “cartels” offers an insufficient framework for understanding complex criminal networks, and the “Cartel of the Suns” is little different: an agglomeration of interconnected drug networks, systematic though disperse, working outside and through state institutions.

“This is a case about power, corruption, and massive cocaine trafficking,” the prosecutors said in their 2024 opening arguments against Hernández, “and one man who stood at the center of it all.” Yet the person at the “center” doesn’t always get the worst treatment. The lowest members of the trade — or unaffiliated fishermen whom the U.S. deems criminal — are obliterated, burned alive, or left to drown. Maduro could face assassination or exile, while the people of Venezuela are left to fear a U.S. invasion. Hernández is free.

Update: December 2, 2025

This story has been updated with news that Juan Orlando Hernández was released from prison and with a statement from a State Department spokesperson sent after publication.

The post Trump Frees Ex-President of Honduras, Right-Wing “Narco-Dictator” Convicted of Drug Trafficking appeared first on The Intercept.

“What I saw during that election was that so many young people were hungry for a change and that they have a clear-eyed view of the problems we face and how to fix them,” Velázquez, D-N.Y., told The Intercept. “That helped convince me that this was the right time to pass the torch.”

Velázquez, a native of Puerto Rico who has served in Congress for more than 30 years, announced her retirement Thursday, in the early days of what is sure to be a frenzied 2026 midterm season across the country and in several solidly Democratic New York districts. She was not facing a notable primary challenger, unlike her House colleagues Hakeem Jeffries, Ritchie Torres, and Adriano Espaillat: three younger New York congressmen who are all considered firmly in line with the Democratic establishment, and all facing challenges from their left.

“She could be in that seat as long as she wants,” said Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, a longtime ally whom Velázquez once described as one of her “children.” “Nydia is at her peak. So that she would go out like that — it’s so Nydia.”

Velázquez is known as something of a den mother for a generation of younger progressive politicians in Brooklyn. She is overwhelmingly popular in her district but made few friends in the local establishment’s clubby machine politics. As Brooklyn’s electorate shifted left over the decades, she built up a formidable stable of protégés in key roles.

“My goal was never to build a machine,” she said. “My goal was to build a bench of strong, independent, progressive public servants who understood who they work for.”

That will likely set up a competitive race to succeed Velázquez in her left-leaning 7th Congressional District, which includes Mamdani’s home base of Astoria, Queens, and solidly progressive Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Clinton Hill. The district’s progressive profile means it’s poised to become a hot contest for candidates on the left — and may distract from the controversial candidacy of City Council Member Chi Ossé, who’s waging a long-shot challenge against Jeffries that has mired the city’s Democratic Socialists of America in debate.

Velázquez declined to say who, if anyone, she favored to become her replacement.

“I could leave today and know that the district will be in good hands,” she said.

Velázquez is bowing out at a moment when the “G word” — gerontocracy — can be heard frequently on cable news, and not just on the lips of younger political hopefuls frustrated by an aging party leadership. She joins fellow Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, who announced his decision to retire in September and who has already kicked off a wild, 10-way primary fight in his Upper West Side district.

“She told me she wanted to send a message to Democrats across the country that it is time for the next generation,” said City Council Member Lincoln Restler, a protégé. “Still, every elected official I’ve spoken to is just sad that we’re losing this remarkable moral leader.”

Velázquez saw Mamdani’s promise so early in the mayoral race that she was predicting his win well before many of her younger acolytes did, Reynoso told The Intercept.

“Nydia was always like ‘Zohran is the one, and I think he can win,’” Reynoso said.

At Mamdani’s victory celebration on November 4, Velázquez was happy to flaunt her prediction. When one supporter joyfully asked if she could believe it, she replied: “I believed it a year ago.”

Velázquez, 72, was first elected in 1992, unseating a nine-term incumbent in the Democratic primary to become the first Puerto Rican woman to serve in Congress. At the time of her primary victory, the New York Times offered readers a guide to the phonetic pronunciation of her name.

“When Nydia Velázquez was first elected to Congress, it was her against the world,” said Restler. “She took on the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and the entrenched political power in Brooklyn was entirely against her.”

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In 2010, Restler said, “she told me she felt genuinely lonely in Brooklyn, that she had so few allies that she could count on. Fifteen years later, essentially every single person in local and state elected office across her district is there because of her validation, her legitimization, and her support.”

In the wake of her announcement on Thursday, praise for Velázquez poured in not just from her mentors and close ideological allies, but also from establishment figures closer to the center as well. On X, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called the outgoing congresswoman a “trailblazer” — a hint perhaps at the stable of potential left-wing contenders Velázquez has helped take the playing field over the years.

The post Nydia Velázquez Hears Calls for Generational Change, Setting Up a Fight on the Left in New York appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday, the FBI put out the call to potential vendors of AI and machine learning technology to be used in unmanned aerial systems in a so-called “request for information,” where government agencies request companies submit initial information for a forthcoming contract opportunity.

“It’s essentially technology tailor-made for political retribution and harassment.”

The FBI is in search of technology that could enable drones to conduct facial recognition, license plate recognition, and detection of weapons, among other uses, according to the document.

The pitch from the FBI immediately raised concerns among civil libertarians, who warned that enabling FBI drones with artificial intelligence could exacerbate the chilling effect of surveillance of activities protected by the First Amendment.

“By their very nature, these technologies are not built to spy on a specific person who is under criminal investigation,” said Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They are built to do indiscriminate mass surveillance of all people, leaving people that are politically involved and marginalized even more vulnerable to state harassment.”

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Law enforcement agencies at local, state, and federal levels have increasingly turned to drone technology in efforts to combat crime, respond to emergencies, and patrol areas along the border.

The use of drones to surveil protesters and others taking part in activities ostensibly protected under the Constitution frequently raises concerns.

In New York City, the use of drones by the New York Police Department soared in recent years, with little oversight to ensure that their use falls within constitutional limits, according to a report released this week by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

In May 2020, as protests raged in Minneapolis over the murder of George Floyd, the Department of Homeland Security deployed unmanned vehicles to record footage of protesters and later expanded drone surveillance to at least 15 cities, according to the New York Times. When protests spread, the U.S. Marshals Service also used drones to surveil protesters in Washington, D.C., according to documents obtained by The Intercept in 2021.

“Technically speaking, police are not supposed to conduct surveillance of people based solely on their legal political activities, including attending protests,” Guariglia said, “but as we have seen, police and the federal government have always been willing to ignore that.”

“One of our biggest fears in the emergence of this technology has been that police will be able to fly a face recognition drone over a protest and in a few passes have a list of everyone who attended. It’s essentially technology tailor-made for political retribution and harassment,” he said.

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In addition to the First Amendment concerns, the use of AI-enabled drones to identify weapons could exacerbate standoffs between police and civilians and other delicate situations. In that scenario, the danger would come not from the effectiveness of AI tech but from its limitations, Guariglia said. Government agencies like school districts have forked over cash to companies running AI weapons detection systems — one of the specific uses cited in the FBI’s request for information — but the products have been riddled with problems and dogged by criticisms of ineffectiveness.

“No company has yet proven that AI firearm detection is a viable technology,” Guariglia told The Intercept. “On a drone whirling around the sky at an awkward angle, I would be even more nervous that armed police will respond quickly and violently to what would obviously be false reports of a detected weapon.”

The post The FBI Wants AI Surveillance Drones With Facial Recognition appeared first on The Intercept.

In a statement Sunday, Rubio described an organized cabal of Venezuelan military officers and politicians working hand in glove with drug traffickers to oversee the shipment of massive quantities of cocaine to American shores, all overseen and managed by President Nicolás Maduro.

“Based in Venezuela, the Cartel de los Soles is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary,” Rubio said.

The announcement came months after the Treasury Department issued its own sanctions against the group, known in English as the Cartel of the Suns, which it accused in July of “using the flood of illegal narcotics as a weapon against the United States.”

It’s a troubling image: a state captured by ideologically motivated drug lords hell-bent on the destruction of the American way of life.

Rubio’s push to label Maduro and his allies as terrorists, though, is just the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s fusion of America’s two forever wars: the war on drugs and the war on terror.

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Since February, the State Department has slapped the foreign terror organization label on more nearly a dozen street gangs and drug-trafficking networks across Latin America, and Trump has used the highly fungible phrase “narcoterrorists” to justify a series of dubiously legal strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela.

There’s just one giant problem: There is little evidence that Cartel of the Suns exists. The organized communist plot to poison Americans with drugs doesn’t remotely resemble the reality of Venezuelan corruption or the country’s drug trade.

“The idea that this is a narcoterrorist cartel, and that Maduro is directing the traffic and sending drugs and dangerous criminals to the U.S. to undermine the U.S. government — that’s really wide of the mark,” said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst with the International Crisis Group.

To critics of American drug policy abroad, the move against Cartel of the Suns is the latest display of how the U.S. uses anti-drug policies as a smokescreen to bully its neighbors.

“The war on drugs is not really about drugs,” said Alexander Aviña, a professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University. “It’s a way of extending the U.S.’s geopolitical interests and a way to hit at governments deemed to be antithetical to imperial designs.”

How Corruption Works

References to the Cártel de los Soles date back to the 1990s, when local reporters used the term to refer to a handful of generals in the Venezuelan National Guard accused of collusion in the drug trade, according to Gunson, who has lived and worked in the country since 1999.

A former journalist, Gunson also happens to be a co-author of a 2005 Miami Herald article that appears to be one of the earliest English-language reports to use the name.

“It was kind of a jokey label,” said Gunson. “The press started calling it ‘Cártel de los Soles’ because of the sun insignias on their epaulets.”

Like many countries around the world, corruption runs rampant in Venezuela.

“It’s pretty well known and accepted in Venezuela that the government has been collaborating with drug traffickers and other criminal organizations in the country,” said José De Bastos, a Venezuelan journalist based in Washington.

That corruption took on a new intensity during the reign of Maduro, who was elected in 2013 as the handpicked successor to Hugo Chavez, the left-wing populist whose 15-year rule transformed the country. When falling oil prices, capital flight, and U.S. sanctions tanked the economy, however, government involvement with criminal rackets emerged as a form of patronage, revenue, and control.

“Since before the beginning of Chavismo there’s been corruption in the military — accepting bribes and allowing criminal groups to move in certain areas,” De Bastos said. “Basically the government needed other sources of income, and illicit activities gained importance. It’s not just drug trafficking. It’s minerals, it’s oil, you know, a lot of things are moved illicitly.”

Rubio and other officials’ notion of a unified government-cartel conspiracy that can be sanctioned, however, is a far cry from the way these interactions function. A 2022 report by the research outlet Insight Crime describes a “fluid and loose knit network of trafficking cells embedded within the Venezuelan security forces, facilitated, protected, and sometimes directed by political actors.”

“The government plays a key role,” De Bastos said, “but it’s more like a patchwork of networks that take advantage of having the government as an ally in their illicit activities.”

Gunning for Maduro

The effort by the U.S. to position Maduro as Venezuela’s drug lord-in-chief began in earnest during Trump’s first term in office when, in 2020, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York unveiled an indictment naming Maduro as the leader of the Cartel of the Suns.

One of the prosecutors on that team was Emil Bove, a right-wing Trump loyalist who, before becoming a federal judge in September, served as the acting deputy attorney general. During his recent stint at the Justice Department, Bove said he was uninterested in arresting drug traffickers, urging the U.S. to instead “just sink the boats,” according to a report by NPR.

Maduro has denied any connection to drug trafficking and has cited United Nations data showing that only a tiny fraction of the global cocaine supply passes through Venezuela.

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Venezuela has never been a major producer of cocaine, the majority of which is grown and produced in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Nor does Venezuela rank as a particularly significant transshipment point for the drug, about 74 percent of which is estimated to make its way north through smuggling routes in the Pacific, according to one Drug Enforcement Administration report.

By the mid-2000s, after Chavez expelled the DEA, U.S. officials estimated that around 250 metric tons of cocaine were smuggled through Venezuela each year — small in comparison with its neighbors, but enough to generate significant income for officials paid to protect the shipments.

In the years after his 2013 election, Maduro’s rule was marked by several drug-related scandals.

The State Department and the Pentagon, however, have long been happy to look the other way when state-allied drug traffickers happen to align with their foreign policy and security priorities.

U.S.-backed warlords churned out record amounts of opium and heroin in Afghanistan throughout the U.S. war there. And, closer to home, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who cooperated with Trump’s efforts to staunch the flow of migrants to the U.S., was left largely alone as he turned Honduras into a haven of drug traffickers. (Hernandez was eventually convicted on drug trafficking charges in the same federal court where Maduro was indicted, but the U.S. did not move against him until he was out of office.)

Neither the announcement by Rubio nor the State Department sanctions against the cartel in July name specific members beyond its alleged leader, Maduro. That lack of a defined structure, however, may be exactly why it makes it useful as the latest pressure point in the Trump administration’s campaign to unseat Maduro, according to Gunson.

“It’s this sort of vaporous thing that floats in the ether with no domicile, no email address,” he said. “They don’t have board meetings or present quarterly reports, so you can’t pin them down — but you can accuse almost anyone of being part of it.”

The post Rubio Says Maduro is Terrorist-in-Chief of Venezuela’s “Cártel de los Soles.” Is It Even a Real Group? appeared first on The Intercept.

Epstein’s influential friends, however, weren’t all household names. The documents also reveal details of Epstein’s unusually close relationships with scientists, academics, and philanthropists — and how he had a cozy arrangement with members of the media who got juicy tips from Epstein and did little critical work about him.

One reporter with whom Epstein connected frequently was Landon Thomas Jr., a financial journalist at the New York Times. Thomas exchanged dozens of emails with Epstein between 2015 and 2018, years after the financier’s conviction for soliciting a minor.

Epstein fed information to Thomas about Donald Trump’s allegedly lecherous behavior.

In the emails, Thomas tipped off Epstein about inquiries by other reporters and claimed to have vouched for Epstein, whom he said he called “one hell of a guy.” In one exchange, Thomas coached Epstein on how to repair his reputation.

The relationship was a two-way street. Epstein, who died in a Manhattan federal jail in 2019 awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking, was reportedly a valued source for Thomas. In the emails released Wednesday, one of the topics Epstein fed information to Thomas was about Donald Trump’s allegedly lecherous behavior. In the exchanges — through his trademark style of lowercase letters and abundant typos — Epstein alludes to Trump’s predilection for young women.

“read the [BuzzFeed story] re my airplane logs and hawain tropic contest,” Epstein wrote in one email on December 8, 2015, alluding the Trump’s frequent travel on the financier’s private plane. “have them ask my houseman about donad almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.”

No reply or follow-up from Thomas appeared in the documents released Wednesday.

On one occasion, Thomas attempted to convince Epstein to speak out about Trump. Thomas had reportedly told his editors he solicited information from Epstein but would not write about Epstein himself. In the newly released email exchange, Thomas offered Epstein to pass any information about Trump to other journalists.

“I would not do it myself, but would pass on to a political reporter.”

“I am serious man — for the good of the nation why not try to get some of this out there,” Landon wrote in an exchange the same day. “I would not do it myself, but would pass on to a political reporter.”

Epstein deflected, sending a link to a story about a Norwegian heiress.

“my 20 year old girlfriend in 93„ that after two years i gave to donald,” Epstein replied.

“Amazing!” Thomas wrote back. “When did you last talk to him?”

Like the other exchange, the message is cryptic and no follow-up was recorded in the files released Wednesday to provide context. The Norwegian heiress has previously been linked to both Trump and Epstein, though she has denied being romantically involved with Epstein. Epstein’s claim that he “gave” the heiress to Trump had not previously surfaced.

Little Came to Light

In total, the exchanges about Trump between Thomas and Epstein amount to a series of tips about the president’s behavior. And these tips came from a known associate of the president, a convicted pedophile. Little of the information given to Thomas, however, ever saw the light of day — not in Thomas’s reporting, not in the New York Times, and not in any other outlets. The details are only now emerging with the release of Thomas’s cozy emails with Epstein.

“It would be useful for readers who have become aware of this to know more from the Times about who knew what, when,” said Margaret Sullivan, a media critic and a former public editor at The New York Times. “I think it’s really important for reporters to have their main constituency in mind, and that is the public.”

“Reporters have sources and some sources are unsavory or worse. But it’s really important to have the public interest at heart,” Sullivan said.

The Intercept made multiple attempts to contact Thomas at an address listed under his name, but was unable to speak with him for comment. In an interview with the Times on Wednesday, Thomas referred to Epstein as a “longstanding and very productive source.”

Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the New York Times, declined to respond to questions on the tips about Trump passed from Epstein to Thomas.

The White House said in a statement that the Epstein emails about Trump were a distraction.

“These emails prove literally nothing,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told The Intercept. “Liberal outlets are desperately trying to use this Democrat distraction to talk about anything other than Democrats getting utterly defeated by President Trump in the shutdown fight. We won’t be distracted.”

Wednesday’s dump came amid a monthslong furor over the so-called “Epstein Files,” the moniker for documents held by the government that could shed further light on the late financier and pedophile.

Epstein’s criminal activities, close ties to the rich and powerful, and mysterious death — which was ruled a suicide — have given rise to investigations, conspiracy theories, and a raft of memes. Despite his personal ties to Epstein, Trump and his supporters brandished Epstein’s relationships with powerful Democrats as a political cudgel.

Now, the administration’s failure to provide full transparency on the case has become a political liability for the president, fueling disaffection among some of his staunchest supporters. The attention on the case triggered an investigation by the House Oversight Committee, which released the trove of emails on Wednesday in two batches: a small one from the Democrats, followed by a massive dump by Republicans.

If the GOP was hoping to extinguish the controversy surrounding Epstein, it may have doused the fire with gasoline instead — and the newly revealed exchanges between Thomas and Epstein are fanning the flames.

“Juicy Info”

When Trump launched his bid for the White House in 2015, his past relationship with Epstein — the men were even neighbors in Palm Beach, Florida — brought fresh scrutiny. One of the focuses was Thomas’s 2002 New York Magazine profile of Epstein, the first recorded interaction between the journalist and the pedophile.

The New York Magazine story is written in a glamorous, gossipy style that cast Epstein as an “international moneyman of mystery,” and is held up by Trump’s critics as evidence that the president knew a thing or two about Epstein’s obsession with underage girls. The innuendo flowed from a now-infamous quote where Trump spoke winkingly of Epstein’s predilection for younger women.

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Thomas quoted Trump as saying. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Citing the future president’s “terrific guy” quote, Thomas wrote in a December 2015 email that he was fielding inquiries about Epstein and Trump.

“Now everyone coming to me thinking I have juicy info on you and Trump,” Thomas wrote. “Because of this.”

Two minutes later, Epstein replied.

“would you like photso of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen”

“would you like photso of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” he asked.

“Yes!!!” Thomas wrote back.

Epstein continued the exchange without following through on his offer.

More than a year later, Thomas was apparently still fielding questions about Epstein, this time from John Connolly, the former New York cop-turned-journalist who published a book on Epstein in 2017. On June 1, 2016, Thomas emailed Epstein to tip him off about the fresh round of questions.

“Keep getting calls from that guy doing a book on you — John Connolly. He seems very interested in your relationship with the news media,” Thomas wrote.

According to Thomas, Connolly had doubts about the veracity of Trump’s “terrific guy” quote from 2002.

“One oddity: he said he had been told that that quote from Trump about you in the original NY Mag story had been manufactured ie, that I did not actually speak to Donald,” Thomas wrote. “Which is bull shit of course.”

Later in the thread, Landon asked Epstein if he too had been questioned about his relationship to the GOP presidential hopeful.

“are you still getting calls from reporters re Trump?” Thomas asked.

“everyone except the NYT it seems :)” Epstein replied.

“How Are You Holding Up?”

Thomas’s relationship with Epstein helped precipitate the journalist’s downfall at the New York Times, according to NPR’s 2019 investigation into the pedophile financier’s relationship to the press. According to the story, Thomas had been asked to interview Epstein for the newspaper in 2018 and disclosed to his editors a friendship with Epstein — including Thomas’s solicitation of a $30,000 donation for a local uptown New York charity.

Thomas told his editors, according to NPR, that he pumped Epstein for information but did not report on him — though on several occasions in past years Thomas had. Thomas was barred from professional contact with Epstein, NPR reported, and within six months he was gone from the New York Times.

Rhoades Ha, the Times spokesperson, said Thomas had left the paper after ethical lapses were uncovered.

“Landon Thomas Jr. has not worked at The Times since early 2019,” she wrote in an email to The Intercept on Wednesday, “after editors discovered his failure to abide by our ethical standards.”

“You have moved on! People don’t know that and cant accept that unless you say as much.”

In 2008, on the eve of Epstein turning himself into Florida authorities, Thomas wrote one of his New York Times stories about the financier. Thomas traveled to Epstein’s now-notorious Caribbean island lair, Little Saint James. The story, critics said, soft-pedaled the offenses Epstein had pleaded guilty to, largely framing the charges around soliciting sex work rather than the alleged child victims, whose stories had by then become well known thanks to ongoing legal cases.

After his 2008 plea — now widely panned as a sweetheart deal by a Florida prosecutor who would later become political appointee in Trump’s first administration — Epstein led a comparatively low-profile life, even as he maneuvered behind the scenes to connect powerful players on a global stage.

The emails in Wednesday’s dump from the House don’t include any conversations between Thomas and Epstein until January 2015, when Thomas reached out to check up on Epstein.

“How are you holding up?” Thomas wrote in the subject line of an email sent on January 16.

It’s unclear what prompted the question, but it came just after a judge had heard arguments in Manhattan federal court over whether to unseal documents from the 2008 plea deal and allegations had emerged recently linking Epstein and Britain’s Prince Andrew to horrific acts of sexual violence.

If Epstein was worried, however, he didn’t show it.

“very well, my reputation has admittedly taken a hit,” Epstein replied. “however, again, more calls re currency than i can handle.”

Epstein proceeded to defend his conduct and cast aspersions on the character and motives of his accusers.

Thomas replied with some advice.

“I think the big issue is separating yourself from Andrew,” Thomas wrote. “I mean I can see why a statement might help in some way — but its Andrew (not clinton and the rest) that is keeping the story alive.”

“Until you are able to come forward and address that the story lives on,” Thomas continued. “You have moved on! People don’t know that and cant accept that unless you say as much.”

Thomas then asked Epstein for his thoughts on global currencies.

The post Epstein Gave NY Times Journalist Tips About Trump. Why Did They Never Get Reported? appeared first on The Intercept.

Mamdani defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by eight points, drawing 50 to his 42 percent of the vote with 98 percent of ballots reported. Guardian Angels founder and perennial gadfly Curtis Sliwa came in a distant third at seven percent.

“We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible,” Mamdani told a crowded room at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn on Tuesday. “And we won because politics is no longer something that is done to us — now it is something that we do.”

“Years from now,” he said, “let our only regret be that this day took so long to come.”

Campaigning on a core platform of affordability, Mamdani went from little-known assembly member to household name as he criss-crossed the city, popping in at churches and nightclubs, supported by an army of volunteer canvassers.

The race has been unlike any other in recent memory in New York. Minutes before polls closed, the New York City Board of Elections announced that 2 million people had cast ballots — the highest number since 1969.

When the AP called the race for the democratic socialist, the Paramount exploded in cheers.

Mamdani press chief Andrew Epstein gave another man a bear hug, while New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who easily won his reelection race Tuesday night, jumped up and down.

“We shook up the world baby!” Williams yelled before wrapping New York Attorney General Letitia James in a hug.

“Unreal,” James said.

Cuomo, who lost the primary to Mamdani in a stunning upset in June, billed himself as the best man to stand up to Donald Trump — an argument that was complicated Monday when the president endorsed him, pledging to slash federal funding to the city if Mamdani were to win.

Trump’s endorsement was by then effectively a formality: The right had already coalesced around New York’s former Democratic governor, with the president and other members of his party pushing Sliwa, the Republican candidate, to drop out and let Cuomo face Mamdani head-on. On social media, Trump warned: “A vote for Curtis Sliwa (who looks much better without the beret!) is a vote for Mamdani.”

New York City comptroller and former mayoral candidate Brad Lander, a key Mamdani ally since the primary, rebuked Trump at the Paramount for a recent social media post in which the president said that any Jew voting for Mamdani was “stupid.”

“When Andrew Cuomo earlier in the race tried to tell Jews how to vote I cursed at him in Yiddish, so I guess I’ll do the same,” Lander said. “Gay kaken ofn yam — Go shit in the ocean, Donald Trump!”

In addition to making history as an avowed socialist, Mamdani — who is of Indian descent and was born in Uganda — will be the city’s first Muslim American mayor. For many Muslims in New York who lived through the Islamophobia, racism, and pervasive NYPD surveillance of the post-9/11 years, Mamdani’s success on the campaign trail has been deeply personal, urban historian Asad Dandia told The Intercept.

“It means a great deal to me as a Muslim New Yorker, but also as a native New Yorker who doesn’t know how to live anywhere else,” said Dandia, who was involved in a lawsuit over the NYPD’s targeting of Muslim communities. “To see someone who looks like he could be my brother or my cousin, that’s a powerful testament to the possibility of New York and to people’s power.”

In the June primary, South Asian voter turnout surged by 40 percent from the 2021 primary, thanks in part to a surge in new voters, according to the New York Times.

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But Mamdani’s identity as a Muslim and his committed support for Palestine came into play in an ugly fashion too. Cuomo’s allies repeatedly attacked Mamdani with claims that he did not sufficiently denounce the Palestinian liberation protest cry “globalize the intifada,” which Cuomo translated, inaccurately, as “kill all Jews.” As the general election drew closer, Mamdani’s opponents engaged in naked Islamophobia by calling him a “jihadist” and a “terrorist sympathizer,” while congressional Republicans mused about having his citizenship revoked.

Despite efforts to tar him as an extremist outsider, Mamdani proved immensely popular, both in polls and on the street, where videos show him routinely being stopped by enthusiastic passersby.

Mamdani’s success was not limited to Muslim or South Asian communities, or to the so-called “Commie Corridor” of progressive, college-educated voters in north Brooklyn and Queens who have made up the primary basis of support for candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.

In the primary and in the months that followed, his campaign worked aggressively to build a coalition of support that cut across ethnic and class lines. According to a recent poll published by the Hispanic Federation, 48 percent of Latino voters favored Mamdani — 36 percent indicating “strong support” — with just 24 percent of Latinos supporting Cuomo and 14 percent picking Sliwa.

Cuomo’s hopes laid with the traditional Democratic base of Black voters in the city, but Mamdani had been making headway on that front as well, with weekly visits to Black churches and a recent appearance with Al Sharpton.

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Ultimately, Dandia said, it was Mamdani’s core message of affordability that broadened his support far beyond committed leftists and South Asian and Muslim voters.

“He wasn’t running on his identity — he was running on a platform that appealed across so many communities,” Dandia said. “His success has shown the value of embodying what it means to be a humanistic person, justice-oriented person, and that’s equally as important if not more so than his identity.”

Those who worked on the Mamdani campaign weren’t surprised that voters came out in historic numbers to back their candidate. “For those of us who have been on ground, it’s amazing but it’s not really shocking when you’ve been out there knocking on doors, hearing how people are feeling,” said Annaliese Estes, a campaign field lead since April.

Celebrating Mamdani’s win, an attendee at his party asked Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y.: “Can you believe it?”

“I believed it a year ago,” she said.

This story has been updated with additional information.

The post Zohran Mamdani Beats Andrew Cuomo in Victory for the Left in NYC Mayoral Race appeared first on The Intercept.

Caraballo, 26, had arrived in the U.S. in 2023 after fleeing persecution in Venezuela, lived with his wife in Dallas, and had no criminal record, his immigration attorney Martin Rosenow told The Intercept. He’d checked in with ICE regularly while waiting on his asylum claim. But when an agent took special interest in his tattoos, they detained him and put him on a bus to the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas — and eventually on a plane to CECOT.

For Caraballo and at least half a dozen other men, U.S. officials’ assumptions about their body art played a significant role in classifying them as gang members and disappearing them to the notorious prison in El Salvador. The Intercept found that a very different standard applies for the federal agents tasked with keeping migrants out of the country and rounding up those targeted by President Donald Trump’s deportation obsession.

On a public “grooming standards” webpage aimed at prospective Customs and Border Protection agents, the agency advises that any tattoos and brandings must be concealed if they are “obscene or gang-related.” In other words, agents are allowed to have the very markings for which Caraballo and others were disappeared into a Salvadoran gulag — as long as they keep them out of sight.

“It’s like saying ‘our gangsters are okay,’” Rosenow said. “But a young man fleeing persecution from his home country, a father of two little girls who likes to have ink on his body to commemorate his daughters, he is going to be subjected to this kind of horrifying shit?”

One of the tattoos for which Caraballo was targeted showed a watch face, which Rosenow said depicted the hour of his daughter’s birth. Neither Rosenow nor Caraballo’s wife has been able to speak to him since he was sent to CECOT in March.

Like Caraballo’s pocket watch tattoo, many of the markings U.S. officials have singled out as evidence of gang affiliation strain credulity. Jerce Reyes Barrios, a 36-year-old former professional soccer player and coach from Venezuela, was held without bond pending his asylum application and later whisked out of the country to indefinite detention in CECOT over a tattoo of a soccer ball with a crown — a nod to his support for Real Madrid.

“It’s the height of hypocrisy,” said Linette Tobin, an immigration attorney in San Diego who was representing Reyes in his asylum claim. “According to this administration, if you have tattoos it’s proof-positive that you’re a gang member, yet CBP is authorized to hire people with these tattoos as long as they cover them up?”

CBP officials did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

The grooming standard does not necessarily imply that active or ex-gang members are welcome in federal agencies, which employ rigorous background checks and have a clear incentive to weed out prospective employees with problematic histories or conflicting loyalties. CBP, which draws many recruits from areas along the U.S.–Mexico border, has itself recognized an uncomfortable pattern of corrupt agents who work with family members and associates in criminal operations to assist in the smuggling of people and drugs and other contraband.

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But the guidance appears to indicate a gang tattoo would not in itself be disqualifying.

Gang experts have repeatedly argued that tattoos are an ineffective way to identify members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang to which U.S. officials assumed Caraballo, Reyes, and other men sent to CECOT belong. The trait is more associated with MS-13 and other Central American gangs.

Gang tattoos have a sordid history in some law enforcement agencies, most notably the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where deputy gangs have long shown their loyalty — or notch their belt after killing someone — with body ink.

Tattoos on federal agents have also raised the possibility of infiltration by white nationalists and other extremists. On Martha’s Vineyard, controversy erupted in June when an ICE agent was photographed with a tattoo on his arm of a Valknut, a Nordic and Germanic symbol that has been appropriated by white nationalists. (At the time, a DHS spokesperson objected to allegations that the tattoo was a marker of extremism on the part of the agent, claiming that it symbolized “warrior culture.”)

Other federal agencies have their own standards for tattoos. The U.S. Marshals Service does not allow any face, hand, neck, or scalp tattoos, and stipulates that any tattoos that are “vulgar, sexist, racist, offensive” or could be “otherwise inappropriate, disruptive, or bring embarrassment or disrepute” must be concealed while on duty.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has drawn criticism for his tattoos, including one in Arabic that spells out “infidel,” and another that reads “Deus Vult,” a Latin slogan that means “God Wills It” and has been used by right-wing Christian extremists as a call to arms.

Grooming standards for ICE agents do not appear to be publicly available, but while agents often cover their faces, visible tattoos are commonplace. On a recent day at New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza, where ICE agents have spent nearly two months making daily arrests of people outside immigration court, The Intercept saw multiple heavily tattooed agents, including at least one with markings on his hands and neck.

For those on the other side of the equation, the nightmare shows little sign of ending. Caraballo, Reyes, and other immigrants banished to CECOT for their tattoos continue to be held essentially incommunicado. Only through the intervention of the Red Cross do their families know they are alive, their attorneys said.

“Franco’s wife to this day barely makes ends meet,” Rosenow said, referring to Caraballo. “Her big concern now is that they’re going to detain and deport her simply because she’s his wife and he has those tattoos.”

The post CBP Agents Can Have Gang Tattoos — as Long as They Cover Them Up appeared first on The Intercept.

A wave of detentions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has sparked fear in Iranian communities across the country, amid heightened international tensions spurred by President Donald Trump’s decision to join Israel’s bombardment of Iran.

Among those recently detained are avowed foes of the current Iranian government, including Christian asylum-seekers; former protesters who fled repression; and aging immigrants who have called the U.S. their home for over 40 years, according to news reports, immigration advocates, and attorneys who spoke with The Intercept.

More than 130 Iranian nationals have been arrested or detained in the three weeks since Israel launched its 12-day war with Iran on June 13. The Trump administration has justified this sudden surge by invoking fears of “sleeper cells” plotting attacks on behalf of the Islamic Republic, according to reporting by Fox News.

“We’re seeing Iranians with varying immigration statuses, including green cards, being detained across the country,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition. “They’re targeting folks who have followed the process, who have done what the government told them to do in navigating the immigration system.”

In the three-year period between October 2021 and November 2024, ICE arrested just 165 Iranian nationals, according to the most recent available statistics.

According to Fox News, the total number of Iranians in ICE custody stood at 670 late last month, including the 130 new detainees. Multiple advocates and attorneys who spoke with The Intercept said they expect that number has only increased in the past week. ICE did not respond to a request for comment, nor to a question about the number of Iranians currently in government detention.

The Department of Homeland Security last week trumpeted the arrest of 11 Iranian nationals whose only unifying factor was their shared national heritage. Some had criminal charges — decades-old, in some cases — and others had irregularities in their immigration status that ICE claimed made them eligible for deportation. DHS claimed one of the detainees admitted having ties to Hezbollah, but the department did not elaborate on what those ties entailed.

The wave of arrests came as first Israel and later the United States carried out airstrikes on military and scientific targets linked to Iran’s nuclear program. Israel also carried out targeted assassination strikes and car bombings in dense residential neighborhoods across Iran over the course of the conflict. Iran retaliated with ballistic missile attacks on Israel.

Though Fox News noted that the administration was conducting the raids in hopes of disrupting “sleeper cells,” there has been no evidence to back up those claims. There was no indication from DHS and ICE that any of the detainees were picked up due to any actual intelligence on plots against the United States.

“What ICE has done is essentially look at the geopolitical situation and say, ‘OK, we need to go after Iranians,’” said Ryan Costello, policy director of the National Iranian American Council. “And how they’re doing that is essentially sorting by national origin and then looking for cases of individuals where there’s some uncertainty on their status.”

“It’s basically, ‘The national heritage of Iranians means you’re guilty of something, and we’ll figure out what that is later,’” Costello said.

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The detentions have kindled fear among Iranian immigrants and Iranian Americans that they could be next, according to Curtis Morrison, an attorney in California who works extensively with Iranian clients. Speaking with The Intercept on Tuesday afternoon, Morrison said he had just moments ago gotten off the phone with an Iranian client calling in a panic, despite having been granted asylum.

“He’s asking, ‘Are we at risk?’ And I was like, ‘Yes,’” Morrison said. “It’s a really awkward conversation to have.”

A number of the people recently detained by ICE had previously been released by ICE after passing a so-called “credible fear” interview, a stage in the asylum application process in which immigration authorities assess the basis for a claim, according to Jonathan Aftalion, an attorney based in Los Angeles.

Aftalion said he has at least one client currently in detention who fears for his life if the Trump administration makes good on its intention to deport him back to Iran.

“This is a guy who is about to be sent back to a regime that is in turmoil, and he is very clearly a political dissident,” Aftalion said. “If you’re clearly a political dissident, and [the Iranian government] has knowledge of that — this is a very harsh regime, and you’re essentially going back to your death.”

During the Biden administration, approximately 1,200 Iranian nationals were taken into immigration custody then released, according to Trump border czar Tom Homan. Many of those people could now face deportation. Now that Trump is ramping up attempts to send deportees to countries other than their nation of origin, their possible destinations are uncertain.

While the timing of the recent uptick in detentions coincides with U.S. tensions with Tehran, it comes after years during which the U.S. government placed additional burdens on Iranians hoping to immigrate to the United States, according to Aftalion. Under the first Trump administration, and during the later part of the Biden administration, Iranians had to jump through extra hoops to enter the United States or to prove their credible-fear claims, Aftalion said.

“There has been a lot that the Iranian community has had to go through, and it didn’t just start with Trump and the tensions between Israel, Iran, and the U.S.,” Aftalion said. “Iranians have not been getting a fair shake for years now, and it’s just been amplified at this time.”

For many, however, that amplification has been sudden, and severe.

In Louisiana, masked ICE agents arrived on the doorstep of Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian, 64, and took her into custody. Kashanian came to the United States in 1978 and, despite losing an asylum claim, was given a stay of removal. She has lived here ever since and checked in regularly with immigration authorities, and she has a spouse and a daughter who are both U.S. citizens.

In Los Angeles, ICE called a family of Christian asylum-seekers in for a meeting, then took them into custody and transferred them to a detention center in Texas, ICE records show. The family’s lawyer, Kaveh Aradalan, told NBC that he has another five clients seeking asylum who have been detained recently.

And in Buffalo, unidentified agents have been camping out near the home of an Iranian dissident, prompting neighbors to organize to protect the man against deportation, according to a report in the Investigative Post, a local news site. Speaking with the Investigative Post, the dissident, who was not named, said he feared being sent back to Iran after fleeing in the wake of protests that broke out in 2022 after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman arrested for failing to wear a hijab.

“These are people who are seeking safety here,” said Awawdeh, of the New York Immigration Coalition. The Trump administration and ICE authorities “are creating a stereotype, and then weaponizing that stereotype, and then targeting people because of that.”

The post “Are We At Risk?” Wave of ICE Arrests Strikes Fear in Iranian Communities appeared first on The Intercept.

Now, with an amended version of the longer bill inching toward approval, the push to target nonprofits appeared to suffer a major setback.

“For now it’s not in the text of the bill, and that’s an improvement from where we were at last week.”

The latest draft of the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” which passed the House Budget Committee on Sunday night, no longer includes a provision that critics have dubbed the “nonprofit killer.”

The measure, which has surfaced in several different forms over the past two years, would grant the secretary of the Treasury Department broad powers to strip nonprofits’ tax-exempt status by labeling them as a “terrorist supporting organization” — with little in the way of due process or evidentiary standards.

It was not immediately clear why the provision was absent from the latest draft of the bill, but a Democratic congressional aide said the removal was indeed a deliberate move by the GOP.

“Apparently Republican staffers removed it after hearing about it from stakeholders and working with leadership on a solution, but I’m not sure what the solution is,” the source told The Intercept.

The removal of the clause prompted cautious optimism from civil society advocates, according to Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

“It’s possible they took it out to rewrite it in some way, because we know that this package is going to be amended,” Hamadanchy told The Intercept. “But for now it’s not in the text of the bill, and that’s an improvement from where we were at last week.”

Fits and Starts

The latest push to get the nonprofit-killer clause into law appeared on page 380 of a 389-page bundle of amendments put forward by the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee last week and passed out of committee intact.

After far-right Republicans opposed to government spending stalled the megabill, the section on nonprofits appears to have been removed from an updated version put out Monday by the House Committee on Rules.

Proponents of the provision have been trying for well over a year to make it law, an effort that critics have described as an assault on free speech aimed in particular at pro-Palestine groups. First introduced in late 2023, an initial version of the bill passed the House with overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans alike.

In the wake of Trump’s reelection victory, however, and in the face of a concerted campaign by the ACLU and other civil society groups, many Democrats changed their tune.

When the last version of the bill, H.R. 9495, was introduced in November, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, marshaled opposition to the measure and even managed to vote it down in one floor vote.

The Republican-controlled House, however, pressed on and the bill eventually passed with near-unanimous GOP support — and with the help of a handful of Democrats — but ultimately stalled in the Senate without becoming law.

The Big, Beautiful Bill passed a major hurdle over the weekend after an initial attempt by four hardline conservatives to block the package.

Opponents of the nonprofit killer clause are not counting it out just yet, Hamadanchy said.

“We are continuing to track things,” he said, “in case this thing comes back from the dead as it has numerous times.”

The post Nonprofit Killer Provision Quietly Disappears From Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” appeared first on The Intercept.

The House Ways and Means Committee will meet Tuesday for a mark-up session of the 389-page draft plan, a massive bundle of draft amendments central to the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” that aims to cut trillions of dollars in government spending.

Among those amendments, buried on page 380 of the draft, is a section that would enable Trump’s secretary of the Treasury to denounce any nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip it of its tax-exempt status.

“This seems to just give the president a tool to go after his political enemies and fulfill some of the darker elements of the Project 2025 agenda,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council.

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A previous version of the clause — dubbed the “nonprofit killer bill” — was introduced in 2023. Critics viewed that legislation as a bipartisan expression of pro-Israel policy and opposition to pro-Palestinian speech.

The first version of the bill passed the House easily, before languishing in the Senate. But when it reappeared in November — following Trump’s reelection — many Democrats who had backed the bill dropped their support in the face of reporting from The Intercept and a flurry of anger from the party’s base.

At the time, the ACLU and other civil liberties groups warned that the bill would be used by Trump to make good on his campaign promise to crush his political enemies.

Among House Democrats, opposition was marshaled by Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas.

“Authoritarianism is not born overnight — it creeps in,” Doggett said during a discussion on the House floor on November 21. “A tyrant tightens his grip not just by seizing power, but when he demands new powers and when those who can stop him willingly cede and bend to his will.”

That bill, known as H.R. 9495, or the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, ultimately passed the House 219 to 184, with just 15 Democrats voting in favor. The bill moved on to the Senate, then under Democratic control, where it sat until the end of the lame-duck term.

The language included in the House Republicans’ tax package closely mirrors H.R. 9495.

In the months since inauguration, Trump and his Cabinet have found other means of cracking down on political speech — particularly speech in favor of Palestinians — by deporting student activists and revoking hundreds of student visas. He has already threatened to attempt to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, part of his larger quest to discipline and punish colleges.

But the nonprofit clause of the tax bill would give the president wider power to go after organizations that stand in his way.

Republicans control the House and hold the Senate by a narrow margin. Democrats will have the opportunity to attach amendments in committee, giving them a shot to nix the nonprofit clause. But so long as the Republicans remain unified in supporting Trump’s tax plan, they can strike down objections from the opposition.

The reconciliation process is often used as a vehicle for bringing to life policy objectives and previously stalled zombie legislation while sidestepping a potential filibuster in the Senate. The current draft includes a number of clauses intended to offset tax cuts while also securing key policy objectives, such as a provision allowing the taxation of the endowments of private universities and a rollback of access to tax breaks by undocumented immigrants.

Once the Ways and Means Committee settles on an amended version of the current draft, it will move on to the House for debate, further amendment, and a vote, before heading to the Senate.

The post Republicans Sneak Nonprofit Killer Bill Into the Tail End of Trump’s 389-Page Tax Plan appeared first on The Intercept.

On Friday morning at around 9:30 a.m., federal agents in unmarked cars and bearing no agency insignia pulled over a bus in Albion, New York, about 35 miles west of Rochester, and took 14 people of Lynn-Ette & Sons Farms into custody. All of the detainees, who hailed from Mexico and Guatemala, were year-round employees of Lynn-Ette & Sons Farms, a family-owned business in nearby Kent, New York, which has been locked in a multiyear battle to prevent workers from unionizing.

The company is one of five agricultural businesses that, together with a state growers’ association, have tried for years to overturn or chip away at New York’s 2019 farm labor law. The law enshrined protections for the right of farmworkers — whether seasonal or year-round — to seek union representation. 

“This was strange because they actually had a list of most of the workers on the bus.”

Several of the workers taken into custody on Friday have been active in efforts to unionize year-round employees, including at least one who has spoken publicly in favor of joining the United Farm Workers of America, according to Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for UFW, the storied labor union. 

“We are concerned at the appearance of targeting publicly pro-union worker leaders,” said Strater. 

Most of the workers detained on Friday hail from Mexico or Guatemala.

The raid did not appear to be a broad sweep but rather a targeted enforcement aimed at specific people, according to sources who have been in contact with the families and spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity to candidly discuss a sensitive legal situation.

“At first we thought they were enforcing a deportation order, that they had one person that they’re looking for and then everyone else got dragged in — that’s kind of standard,” said one of the people with knowledge of the raid. “But this was strange because they actually had a list of most of the workers on the bus.”

“A Different Level of Fear”

In video of the raid posted to social media, the agents could be seen dressed in civilian clothes and wearing tactical vests with patches that said “Police,” as is common in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.

The agents did not identify themselves, said a source close to the families of the detained workers, but a spokesperson for ICE later confirmed that its agents had made the arrests.

According to the spokesperson, all 14 were in the country without authorization, and three of the individuals had pending removal orders.

Following an inquiry from The Intercept, Lynn-Ette — which grows green beans, cabbage, squash, and other vegetables and foodstuffs — issued a statement on Monday morning expressing concern for their employees.

“We are deeply troubled by the manner in which this enforcement action was carried out and the impact it has had on our team and their families. Lynn-Ette & Sons had no prior knowledge of the raid and had no contact with ICE beforehand,” the company wrote in the statement, which appeared as a sponsored post on a local news site. “We call on elected officials and community leaders to ensure that all enforcement actions are conducted with transparency, due process, and human dignity.”

As of Monday evening, more than 72 hours after the raid, the location of most of the detainees was not yet clear. ICE detention records show that at least one man is being held at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia, New York, and two women are being held at Niagara County Jail in Lockport, New York. 

Sources close to the families said that at least two of the other men are also being held at Batavia but have not yet been logged in the system and have not spoken with lawyers. The remaining nine detainees are unaccounted for.

An ICE spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about the location of the detainees or the reason for the raid.

“ICE does not conduct raids as part of its routine daily immigration law enforcement efforts,” the spokesperson wrote. “Instead, ICE’s enforcement resources are based on intelligence-driven leads and ICE officers do not target persons indiscriminately.”

For its part, Lynn-Ette forcefully rejected any notion that the company had any role in the raid.

“We strongly reject the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) irresponsible and self-serving public claims suggesting that these workers were targeted in retaliation for union activity,” the company said in its statement. “These claims are categorically false.”

The detained workers are not part of a bargaining unit themselves — a fact highlighted prominently in the Lynn-Ette statement. The company made no mention that the detained workers were part of a group actively seeking representation with the UFW.

“They’re avoiding simple stuff like going to the grocery store as a family. They’re scared.”

As families scrambled to locate their loved ones, the arrests have cast a pall over the community, Strater said.

“Workers and organizers alike are on really high alert,” she said. “They are used to working hard and they’re used to needing to be resilient, but this is a different level of fear.”

Even prior to the raid on Friday, families have been changing up their routines to avoid the worst-case scenario of both parents getting snatched at once, Strater said.

“They’re avoiding simple stuff like going to the grocery store as a family,” she said. “They’re scared.”

The Battle Over a Union

The detentions in Albion are just the latest raid to shake immigrant communities in the region in recent months.

In March, a mother and her three children were swept up in a raid on a farm in Sackets Harbor, New York, and whisked to a detention center in Texas, before being released more than a week later amid a local outcry. And, in Buffalo last week, ICE arrested a man whose only previous wrongdoing on file was a traffic ticket.

The arrests have highlighted a contradiction in the region, where many counties voted solidly for President Donald Trump even as the local agricultural and dairy industries, economic pillars of the region, rely heavily on immigrant labor.

The raid in Albion comes amid a contentious union battle at Lynn-Ette, which has included worker allegations of union-busting and intimidation by owner Darren Roberts.

In 2023, Roberts allegedly drove a UFW organizer off farm property and berated an employee with whom the organizer had been speaking, according to an unfair labor practice complaint filed by the union. In 2024, the union agreed to drop the complaint in exchange for guarantees from the company that it would not interfere with, surveil, or interrogate workers about meeting with UFW.

“A lot of New York growers have viciously fought against the concept of farm workers having labor rights,” said Strater, the UFW official.

The faceoff between Lynn-Ette and the union is just one front in a broader effort to beat back the progress of agricultural labor rights in the state in response to New York’s 2019 passage of the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act.

Since 2019, the New York State Vegetable Growers Association and several businesses including Lynn-Ette have launched state and federal lawsuits challenging portions of the law, but those efforts have been largely unsuccessful. In 2021, a judge ruled against the growers’ suit, and an appeal filed in the 2nd Circuit earlier this year failed to move forward.

In 2022, a majority of workers at Lynn-Ette signed union cards agreeing to representation by the UFW. Along with other farm businesses, Lynn-Ette scored an early victory when they successfully argued that temporary seasonal workers — whose H-2A visas are dictated by federal oversight — and year-round workers should not be in the same bargaining unit.

However, an effort by those companies to persuade the state’s Public Employment Relations Board to dismiss the right of seasonal workers to unionize failed, and in August of last year, the board ordered Lynn-Ette and two other farms to begin negotiating.

“A lot of New York growers have viciously fought against the concept of farm workers having labor rights.”

According to Strater, the farm has made little effort to do so.

“It seems like they have not yet found their good faith,” Strater said. “We’re ready to sit down with them. We’ve been ready.”

In the meantime, the UFW has been working with laborers at Lynn-Ette and other farms to secure representation for a separate bargaining unit for year-round workers. At Lynn-Ette, that consisted of just under 20 year-round workers.

On Friday, 14 of those workers were swept up by ICE, leaving the future of the union effort for year-round workers at Lynn-Ette deeply uncertain.

Amid the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign of mass deportations, there have already been examples of apparent targeting of union organizers, including the detention of a worker organizer in Washington state in March. 

Strater declined to comment on whether the workers in Albion were specifically targeted or who may have given their names to ICE. Speaking generally, however, she said that anti-labor immigration enforcement usually occurs in two ways.

“There is the idea of an individual or company using ICE by sending in tips, and then there is a different concept of the agency itself taking initiative to target workers who are organizing,” Strater told The Intercept. “In this case there is still a lot we need to learn but I’d be alarmed about either of those options, or anything in between.”

The post “They Actually Had a List”: ICE Arrests Workers Involved in Landmark Labor Rights Case appeared first on The Intercept.

The release of the family was confirmed Monday by immigration activists working on the family’s behalf and by Jennifer Gaffney, the superintendent of the Sackets Harbor Central School District, where the three children are enrolled.

“My colleagues and I are relieved and grateful to share that, after eleven days of uncertainty, our students and their mother are returning home,” Gaffney said in a statement.

“In the midst of this difficult time, the strength, compassion, and resilience of our community have shone through. We are very thankful to everyone who has reached out with kindness and offered support.”

The family was taken into custody in a March 27 raid at a large dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, New York. Customs and Border Protection agents say the target of their operation was a South African national charged with trafficking in child sexual abuse material, who they apprehended. But authorities also detained the family as well as three other immigrants without documentation. By March 30, the family had been whisked away to the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, a privately run detention facility in Texas.

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The response in Sackets Harbor and the surrounding Jefferson County, located on the shores of Lake Ontario on the western edge of New York’s North Country Region, was one of disbelief and anger — not least because Homan hails from the area and owns a home in Sackets Harbor.

In initial statements about the detention of the family, a CBP spokesperson indicated the family was in the process of deportation. But amid the backlash, Homan told a local news channel last week that the family was merely being questioned for their own safety, due to the nature of the allegations against the man targeted in the raid.

On Saturday, as many as 1,000 people attended a rally in Sackets Harbor, demanding the return of the family and marching past Homan’s house, according to local news reports. It was that pressure that ensured the family’s return, according to Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition.

“The Sackets Harbor community’s steadfast concern, care and love for their neighbors is what brought this family home,” Awawdeh said in a statement Monday. “However, this incident will cause lasting trauma for the family, school and community affected. Donald Trump, Tom Homan and ICE must stop this campaign of cruelty, and the harm they are causing our local communities.”

A CBP spokesperson referred questions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A spokesperson for ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Family Detained in Immigration Raid in Tom Homan’s Hometown Is Released appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection took the family and three others into custody on March 27 in an early-morning raid on a dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, a small hamlet on the shores of Lake Ontario, on the western edge of New York’s North Country region. Within days, the mother and her children had been whisked away to Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, a privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas that accommodates families, according to people familiar with the family’s case.

Jefferson County, which includes Sackets Harbor and nearby West Carthage, where Homan grew up, is a deep-red bastion of support for President Donald Trump. Homan has been a prominent and enthusiastic face of Trump’s hard-line border policies, which he kicked off in January with an edict commanding immigration-enforcement agencies like CBP and ICE to ramp up deportations. But now, with that enforcement landing close to home, locals are organizing a rally in support of the family and are planning to march past Homan’s house in Sackets Harbor, according to Corey DeCillis, who chairs the Jefferson County chapter of the New York State Democratic Party.

“People are upset about this,” DeCillis told The Intercept Wednesday. “This is the United States of America, and there’s no kid — or anybody for that matter — that should be treated the way those kids are treated.”

With three students enrolled at the local K-12 school suddenly taken by law enforcement, news of the raid spread rapidly, according to Jennifer Gaffney, superintendent of the Sackets Harbor Central School District.

“The reaction of our students is that they have been traumatized by this,” Gaffney told The Intercept. “Three of their classmates were taken, and they don’t know where they are and they don’t know if they’re going to come back.”

“We’re talking about elementary school, middle school, and high school kids who are all impacted by the absence of their classmates who are detained,” she said.

Gaffney said she learned of the detention of the three students and their mother early on the morning of March 27 and immediately began reaching out to local elected officials to try and locate them, but for several days their whereabouts were uncertain. It was not until Sunday that it emerged that they had been moved to a detention center in Texas that accommodates families.

“It’s been a very, very difficult few days for teachers and staff and students,” Gaffney said. “We’re trying to remain hopeful, but it remains to be seen at this point.”

Neither Gaffney nor CBP provided the names of the family members, citing privacy concerns.

According to a CBP spokesperson, the family was not the target of the raid, which the spokesperson said was an interagency effort to apprehend a South African national living in Sackets Harbor and suspected of trafficking in child sexual abuse materials. The others — including the family — were detained incidentally.

“These individuals were not part of the original investigation … but were taken into custody, processed and subsequently turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

“All individuals have since been transferred out of New York State and are currently awaiting removal proceedings.”

Based on CBP statements, the raid fit the profile of a tactic known as collateral detention, in which a warrant targeting specific individuals is used as a pretext to sweep up any undocumented people the agents can find. In an unrelated incident last week, ICE agents arrived at a home in Texas looking for one man, but instead took into custody a 50-year-old mom who had been in the country for nearly four decades, according to Newsweek.

With pressure from Washington bearing down on immigration officials to ramp up deportations, collateral detention appears to be on the rise as agents scramble to meet the demands of the Trump administration, according to Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition.

“What we have been seeing is ICE at random detaining people who are not the people they’re looking for,” Awawdeh said. “They go in allegedly looking for someone else and then they’ll take whoever they can find just so they can meet their quota numbers that Donald Trump has put in place.”

Awawdeh, whose organization has been coordinating with the family to help bring them home, told The Intercept that despite being in the country without documentation, the mother had been awaiting a scheduled hearing on her immigration status and that of her children, which typically should have made them not subject to deportation. But that didn’t stop her removal.

“They were actually following the process, right, so that’s why we’re saying they were unjustly detained and demanding that they be returned to their community,” Awawdeh said.

Speaking for the first time about the incident on Wednesday, Homan told a local news outlet in western New York that the mom and her kids had indeed been taken into custody and flown across the country, but that it was done for their own good, citing the alleged crimes of the man agents had been sent to apprehend.

“During investigations like that, we have to ensure that any children within that area are safe,” Homan told WWNY–7News. “Once that’s done, then the ICE agents will make a decision [of] what’s the best course of action in the future.”

Homan said a decision could be made in the next few days on whether the family will remain in deportation proceedings or be returned home to Jefferson County.

DeCillis, the county Democratic Party chair, said he will be more than happy to cancel the rally if the family is home before Saturday.

“I’m hopeful that before Saturday we can have a totally different conversation — that these kids are on their way back home,” he said. “That’s our ultimate goal.”

The post Trump’s Border Czar Faces Backlash in His Hometown for Locking Up a Local Family appeared first on The Intercept.