The review of Kelly’s comments has since blossomed into a full-scale inquiry. “Retired Captain Kelly is currently under investigation for serious allegations of misconduct,” a War Department spokesperson told me.

Kelly issued a statement after Hegseth’s office announced it was escalating its case. “It wasn’t enough for Donald Trump to say I should be hanged, which prompted death threats against me and my family. It wasn’t enough for Pete Hegseth to announce a sham investigation on social media. Now they are threatening everything I fought for and served for over 25 years in the U.S. Navy, all because I repeated something every service member is taught,” said Kelly. “It should send a shiver down the spine of every patriotic American that this President and Secretary of Defense would so corruptly abuse their power to come after me or anyone this way.”

That Hegseth is targeting a sitting senator is all but unheard of. But what most surprised me was his apparent willingness to recall a former member of the military for punishment. I was shocked because, for two decades, the Pentagon has failed to respond to questions about the potential recall of veterans accused of heinous illegality by Army investigators.

In the mid-2000s, I provided the Pentagon with the names of dozens of former service members implicated in crimes against civilians and prisoners during the Vietnam War: massacres, murders, assaults, and other atrocities. The Defense Department never recalled any to active duty. Years later, a defense official laughed when I asked if anyone even looked at the spreadsheet of names that I provided. In the wake of Hegseth’s threats against Kelly, I again asked his office if they want that list.

While working for the Los Angeles Times, I helped expose 320 atrocities that were substantiated by Army investigators, including seven mass killings from the 1960s and 1970s, in which at least 137 civilians died. This tally does not include the 1968 My Lai massacre during which U.S. troops slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. The records chronicled 78 other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded, and 15 sexually assaulted; and 141 instances in which U.S. troops tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war.

Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, and imprisonment without due process were a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American war in Vietnam. But the great majority of atrocities by U.S. troops never came to light — and almost never resulted in criminal investigations, much less courts-martial. These records — compiled in the early 1970s by a secret Pentagon task force known as the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group — represent some of the exceedingly rare instances that resulted in official inquiries.

Army criminal investigators determined that evidence against more than 200 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant charges, according to the records. These “founded” cases were referred to the soldiers’ superior officers for action. Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed, and just 23 were convicted.

Fourteen soldiers received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts against a 13-year-old girl held in detention. He served seven months of a 20-year term, according to the files. Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine, or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.

In the early 2000s, many veterans who had escaped justice were still alive, including members of Company B of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. That unit committed a litany of atrocities, culminating in a massacre in a tiny hamlet in South Vietnam.

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On February 8, 1968, a medic, Jamie Henry, sat down to rest in a Vietnamese home, where he was joined by a radioman. On the radio, he heard 3rd Platoon leader Lt. Johnny Mack Carter report to Capt. Donald Reh that he had rounded up 19 civilians. Carter wanted to know what should be done with them. As Henry later told an army investigator: “The Captain asked him if he remembered the Op Order [Operation Order] that had come down from higher [command] that morning which was to kill anything that moves. The Captain repeated the order. He said that higher said to kill anything that moves.”

Hoping to intervene, Henry headed for Reh’s position. As he neared it, though, the young medic saw members of the unit drag a naked teenage girl out of a house and throw her into the throng of civilians, who had been gathered together in a group. Then, Henry said, four or five men around the civilians “opened fire and shot them. There was a lot of flesh and blood going around because the velocity of an M-16 at that close range does a lot of damage.”

Henry repeatedly reported the massacre, at peril to himself, and spent years attempting to expose the atrocities. Army investigators looked into the allegations for more than three years before closing the case and burying the files. They determined that evidence supported murder charges in five incidents against nine “subjects,” including Carter. Investigators concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge Reh with murder, because of conflicting accounts “as to the actual language” he used in giving the orders. But Reh could be charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the killings, the report said. The military did not court-martial any members of the unit — either in the 1970s or the 2000s. Some are still alive today and could, theoretically, face some modicum of justice.

Hegseth has been on the hot seat since major media outlets picked up on The Intercept’s reporting of a double-tap strike that executed survivors of an attack on a supposed drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean in September. Military legal experts, lawmakers, and confidential sources within the government who spoke with The Intercept say Hegseth’s actions could result in the entire chain of command being investigated for a war crime or outright murder.

Hegseth said Kelly’s “conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately.” I asked Hegseth’s office if the crimes detailed in the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group’s files also brought “discredit upon the armed forces.” A spokesperson acknowledged that and other questions but offered no answers.

“Nick, we received your earlier message and haven’t forgotten about you,” she said last month. “Our response time is going to be delayed due to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.” That response has, weeks later, still yet to arrive.

Hegseth has previously derided “academic rules of engagement which have been tying the hands of our warfighters for too long,” and, during President Donald Trump’s first term — before he became the Pentagon chief — successfully lobbied for pardons on behalf of soldiers convicted of crimes against noncombatants.

“This just shows their total distain for the rule of law,” Todd Huntley, who was an active-duty judge advocate for more than 23 years, serving as a legal adviser to Special Operations forces, said of Hegseth and Trump. “They view the law as a political tool to support their positions and help them get what they want.”

Hegseth took his post focusing on lethality at all costs, while gutting programs designed to protect civilians and firing the Air Force’s and Army’s top judge advocates general, or JAGs, in February to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Military operations under Hegseth have since killed civilians from Yemen to the Caribbean Sea.

The Former JAGs Working Group — an organization made up of former and retired military judge advocates which was founded in February — issued a statement condemning Hegseth’s order and the execution of it “to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.” The group also called out the war secretary for targeting Kelly. “The administration’s retaliation against Senator Kelly violates military law. We are confident the unlawful influence reflected in the press reports will ultimately disqualify all convening authorities except possibly the president himself from actually referring any case to a court-martial,” they wrote in a statement provided to The Intercept.

Huntley said the War Department wasn’t following its typical investigative process in its case against Kelly.

“There was no way that was unlawful. It doesn’t even come close to undermining good order and discipline of the military,” said Huntley. “Under normal circumstances, an investigating officer would be appointed. They’d look into it and then the report would come back, it would be reviewed by a JAG, and it would say there was nothing unlawful, no charges warranted. But these aren’t normal times.”

Huntley also noted that Kelly’s video was likely to sow confusion among low-ranking enlisted personnel and officers concerning determinations about whether an order is lawful.

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Huntley clarified that the Pentagon doesn’t have to bring Kelly back to active duty to charge him under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. “All that’s required is that you get permission of the service secretary. In this case, I’m guessing that Hegseth himself could probably give permission to do that,” he explained. When I asked why the War Department would have announced that it might recall Kelly despite not needing to do so, Huntley had a simple assessment: “Because they don’t know what the law is.”

Hegseth’s office and Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson failed to reply to repeated questions about the Vietnam-era personnel who might still be sanctioned for their crimes against Vietnamese civilians, as well as questions about the jeopardy troops today might be in for following Hegseth’s orders.

A Pentagon spokesperson also seemed to foreclose the release of additional information concerning the War Department’s persecution of Kelly. “Further official comments will be limited to preserve the integrity of the proceedings,” she said.

The post My Quest to Make the Pentagon Care About the Crimes It Covered Up appeared first on The Intercept.

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit best known for backing police facing legal consequences for their actions, plans to ask the federal government to use a provision previously used to probe police violations of civil rights to investigate the office of Fairfax County, Virginia, Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano over his handling of cases involving undocumented immigrants, Fox News reported.

The Trump administration recently put Descano in the spotlight when it attacked his office over claims that he dropped charges against a 23-year-old undocumented immigrant who was accused of killing a man the next day. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has also blamed former President Joe Biden’s administration for dismissing the man’s immigration proceedings and labeling him as “a non-enforcement priority.”

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund is invoking the same provision of federal law that the Biden administration previously used to investigate police in Louisville, Kentucky, after they killed Breonna Taylor in 2020. The law calls for policing to abide by the Constitution and establishes procedures for when police display a “pattern or practice of conduct” that violates civil rights.

Now, the pro-police group wants to argue that prosecutors like Descano are discriminating against the public by favoring undocumented immigrants in prosecutorial decisions. The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund is effectively arguing that a pattern of leniency toward immigrants by Descano constitutes discrimination against American citizens.

“The MO of MAGA groups like LELDF is to partner with the Trump Administration to weaponize the justice system and go after people they don’t like — in this case, reform prosecutors they disagree with philosophically,” said Michael Collins, an independent consultant who works on prosecutorial reform.

“Laws designed to protect people’s rights and curb official misconduct shouldn’t be repurposed to target officials over policy differences or prosecutorial discretion,” Collins said. “This kind of legal warfare erodes trust in our justice system and undermines the very protections these laws were meant to uphold.”

Neither Descano nor the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund immediately responded to a request for comment.

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The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund has made attacking elected prosecutors a cornerstone of its work in recent years. This year, the group released a report focusing on the Wren Collective, an organization that works with progressive prosecutors around the country, and claimed that left-wing donors like George Soros are controlling the group and corrupting the criminal justice system.

In Virginia, the group has been trying to remove Descano and another elected prosecutor in Arlington County, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, since shortly after they first won office, though so far the police group has gotten little traction.

Descano has faced two efforts to launch recall elections against him, both organized by groups headed by Sean Kennedy, who directs policy for the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and leads another group, Virginians for Safe Communities, which tried to launch a recall against Descano in 2021.

The LELDF spends about three-quarters of its program service budget on public and media relations, according to its most recent tax filing. About a quarter of its program service expenses goes toward legal defense for cops.

Republicans have also made Descano a target. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has repeatedly attacked Descano’s office for turning the county “into a safe haven for criminals and a nightmare for law-abiding families” and his handling of cases involving transgender defendants.

The post Cop Group Alleges “Discrimination” by Prosecutor for Being Too Nice to Immigrants appeared first on The Intercept.

“It made me physically nauseous,” said Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, reflecting on the massive sums Democrats raised and spent on the 2024 presidential election, “thinking about how many people could be fed, or how many clinics could be funded, or how much student debt could be paid off.”

So after Abughazaleh announced her candidacy for a highly competitive primary in March, she transformed her campaign headquarters in Rogers Park — a lower-income neighborhood in Chicago’s North Side— into a mutual aid hub.

Situated at the front of her 9th Congressional District campaign office are rows of basics like diapers and winter clothes to medical supplies like Narcan. “We’ve also had people bring in stuff like nail polish,” said Abughazaleh, adding, “everyone deserves good things.” Anyone is welcome to come off the street, she explained, without checking for income or immigration status.

In addition to offering supplies while the office is open, the campaign also helps stock a community fridge available any time of day and hosts drives to collect specific supplies. A request for tampons for Chicago’s Period Collective, for example, resulted in a massive outpouring of support. “We ended up getting over 5,600, and my campaign manager’s car was just filled with tampons,” said Abughazaleh through laughter. “I wanted him to get pulled over so bad.”

The point here is to “show” the campaign’s values through providing for the community, rather than simply telling people why they should vote for her, said Abughazaleh.

“I grew up Republican,” she said, “and I can’t think of anything that would have made me be a Democrat faster — especially if it were today, when people have lost all faith in the political system — than people showing their values rather than just saying them.”

Abughazaleh faces off against a competitive field to replace retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. As of early November, 21 candidates had filed to run in Illinois’s 9th Congressional District — including a whopping 17 Democrats and four Republicans. The Democratic primary race will be held in March.

Abughazaleh, a former journalist with a large social media following, is ahead of the pack in conventional fundraising, and hopes that her “experimental” approach to campaigning will help pull her over the finish line. In fact, she thinks the Democratic establishment could learn a thing or two from her.

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In November, with SNAP benefits paused due to the government shutdown, Abughazaleh’s campaign donated $2,500 to the Niles Township Food Pantry.

“I can’t think of anything more convincing for voters, but also just the right thing to do during that period, and during all of this, than the Democratic Party using its immense resources to — with no strings attached — stock food banks, fund clinics, and make sure people have what they need,” she said.

“We don’t need to spend $20 million to make lefty Joe Rogan in a lab,” Abughazaleh added, in a nod to a strategic pitch Democratic operatives offered earlier this year. “We can spend $20 million on making sure kids have enough to eat, or making sure that parents have baby formula, or making sure that older folks are having meals actually delivered.”

Abughazaleh’s approach has not been without its detractors. On social media, some people have accused the campaign of attempting to buy votes by offering free food, water, and clothes, in the same place as advertisements for the candidate.

Accusations of “vote buying” are a serious risk for candidates implementing strategies like Abughazaleh’s, said Jessica Byrd, a political strategist who served as chief of staff for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. “One accusation of buying votes, and your entire campaign is under a microscope. It slows you down, it makes you less effective, and then you have to spend money to defend yourself,” explained Byrd. “So it really is a risk.”

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Abughazaleh has already faced significant scrutiny in her race. In October, she was indicted along with five other activists on federal conspiracy charges over an Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest. She and her co-defendants are pleading not guilty.

“It’s incredible” that the Abughazaleh campaign is going ahead with its mutual aid efforts despite the reputational risks and associated costs, Byrd said. The Abrams campaign instituted a similar strategy in 2022, forming a program to connect Georgians with existing services, from legal support to food assistance. “We were barely out of COVID, and it was really clear that we couldn’t just ask for people’s votes,” said Byrd. “We actually needed to ask how everybody was doing.”

Byrd said she appreciated seeing another campaign focus on how they can help their constituents before coming into office.

“People are suffering deeply, deeply suffering,” said Byrd. “Every single person running, their constituents are looking at them saying, ‘How are you helping me right this moment, right now, not in the future, not when you get it through the legislature? How are you a hero right now?’ And it’s on all of us to figure out how we can serve people right this moment.”

From a political perspective, it’s hard to know whether this type of strategy will pay off in more votes. Andre Martin, who serves as Abughazaleh’s deputy campaign manager and runs the mutual aid operation, said while most of the items are donated, there’s still a cost associated with pulling something like this off.

“It’s really, really taxing. It’s not an easy thing. It takes a lot of our resources,” he said. “It’s not something that comes without cost to our ability to do more conventional organizing. We spend a lot of time helping folks.”

Part of that cost is spending a significant amount of time on compliance with campaign finance regulations. Abughazaleh told The Intercept that the campaign works with a compliance firm that carefully monitors the pools of resources being donated to, or by, the campaign’s mutual aid arm.

According to Martin, the purpose of the hub isn’t to actively campaign to people coming in for resources. “Sometimes people will ask because they see the signs,” he said, adding, “We are mostly just asking people if they need help, like, finding things on the shelves, navigating our sorting system, things like that. That’s the only information we solicit from them.”

However, Abughazaleh said canvassing isn’t the goal here. “I wanted to figure out the best way to use our funds to not just run a race, but also help the community,” she said, “because if every campaign did something like that, then every election would be a net benefit to the community, win or lose.”

The post Kat Abughazaleh Thinks Campaign Funds Should Help Feed People appeared first on The Intercept.

News coverage ranged from practical explainers on California’s death penalty to vulgar punditry casting more heat than light. True crime celebrity Nancy Grace fumed that Reiner showed “no remorse” during his brief courtroom appearance. Megyn Kelly mused, without shame or evidence, that Reiner might deploy the same “sympathy card” as the Menendez brothers, who, after killing their parents, accused their father of sexually abusing them as children.

If there was one thing most people seemed to agree on, however, it was that a death sentence is highly unlikely.

Reiner’s reported mental illness has already raised questions over his competency to stand trial. His lifelong struggle with addiction, which led to homelessness and more than a dozen stints in rehab, is the kind of mitigating evidence that could persuade a jury to show mercy — if not convince prosecutors to take death off the table altogether.

Then there’s the Reiner family, which has barely begun to grieve. The Reiners’ adult children — who have asked “for speculation to be tempered with compassion and humanity” — may likely push back against a decision to seek death, whether out of opposition to the death penalty, a desire to avoid the trauma and spectacle of a capital trial, or because they do not wish to lose another beloved family member to homicide, no matter how devastating his alleged actions.

So why did the Los Angeles County district attorney raise the possibility of a death sentence for Nick Reiner at a press conference just two days after his parents’ bodies were found?

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In a state that has not carried out an execution in 20 years, decisions to seek the death penalty amount to little more than political posturing. While nearly 600 people remain under a death sentence in the Golden State, a return to executions has never seemed more far-fetched. After Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium in 2019, the death chamber at San Quentin was dismantled, and the condemned population transferred to prisons across the state.

While a new governor could conceivably lift the moratorium, any push to restart executions would take years. As one federal judge put it more than a decade ago, California’s death penalty remains a punishment “no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

Yet there was District Attorney Nathan Hochman on December 16, standing somberly before the cameras in downtown LA to announce the charges that would make Reiner eligible for the ultimate punishment.

“No decision at this point has been made with respect to the death penalty,” Hochman added gravely, cautioning against speculation or rumor.

His decision would rely on the evidence and, at least in part, on input from the family of the victims.

He said, “We owe it to their memory to pursue justice and accountability for the lives that were taken.”

Reiners’ Activism

It is not overly speculative to say that Rob and Michele Reiner would have recoiled at the thought of the state seeking a death sentence in their name — let alone against their own son.

Their famed support of social justice causes included advocating for people in prison. Friends of Singer Reiner have recalled her recent focus on wrongful convictions and her regular conversations with Nanon Williams, a Texas man who faced the death penalty as a teenager before his sentence was reduced to life. One of Rob Reiner’s last production credits, “Lyrics From Lockdown,” a one-man show by the formerly incarcerated artist Bryonn Bain, centers in part on Williams’s story.

In a 2023 interview discussing the show, Reiner pointed to the racism at the heart of the criminal justice system, a topic he’d grappled with in his film “Ghosts of Mississippi.” He had brainstormed a potential documentary series, “Injustice for All,” he said, which would depict the ugly reality of the system: “It’s prosecutorial misconduct. It’s profiling.”

It was this very kind of systemic critique — rooted in decades of research and data — that had led former LA District Attorney George Gascón to halt death penalty prosecutions in Reiner’s home county a few years earlier. At a time when the death penalty had been on a long, slow decline, Los Angeles remained an outlier in sending people to death row — overwhelmingly people of color.

“The reality is the death penalty does not make us safer, it is racist, it’s morally untenable, it’s irreversible and expensive, and, beginning today, it’s off the table in LA County,” Gascón said at the time.

But electoral politics are quick to punish such attempts at reform — especially when they coincide with any uptick in crime.

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Gascón’s tenure overlapped with a rise in violent crime nationwide, a phenomenon tied to the pandemic but swiftly blamed on reform-minded prosecutors. While Gascón survived two recall attempts, the era of reform he sought to implement was short-lived. A crowded field of challengers lined up to replace him in 2024.

Hochman would win out by running a classic tough-on-crime campaign. Promising to rescue the city from a descent into crime-ridden dystopia, he vowed to revive the death penalty in LA as part of his “blueprint for justice,” a set of priorities primarily aimed at reversing his predecessor’s reforms. Never mind that the death penalty remained a failed public policy that did nothing to stop crime — and which California taxpayers had paid billions of dollars to maintain with little to show for it.

“Effective immediately,” Hochman declared months after taking office, “the prior administration’s extreme and categorical policy forbidding prosecutors from seeking the death penalty in any case is rescinded.”

It is against this backdrop that Hochman will now handle the prosecution of Nick Reiner.

Victims’ Families?

Just two weeks before the Reiners’ horrific murders, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California released a report assessing Hochman’s first year in office, decrying his “pattern of extreme and debunked approaches to crime.” At the top of the list was his decision to bring back the death penalty to LA County.

The report quoted a recent op-ed by veteran anti-death penalty activist and actor Mike Farrell, the board president of the California-based abolitionist group Death Penalty Focus.

“It’s incomprehensible that D.A. Hochman is once again pursuing the death penalty in Los Angeles, the county that has sent more people to California’s now-defunct death row than any other in the state,” Farrell wrote. Although Hochman often pointed to a pair of unsuccessful ballot initiatives that twice failed to repeal California’s death penalty, Angelenos voted in favor of the measures.

“So why,” Farrell asked, “would a responsible district attorney ignore the demonstrated will of the voters in the county he serves?”

Farrell also called out Hochman for refusing to meet with victims’ family members who oppose capital punishment. Although Hochman vowed to give families a voice in matters of crime and punishment, his conduct has left some families feeling betrayed.

Perhaps no family has been more vocal than the relatives of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who filed multiple complaints against Hochman for his conduct while he fought to block the brothers’ recent bid for release. Prior to Hochman’s election, the Menendez case had been reviewed by Gascón’s Resentencing Unit, ultimately persuading the DA to recommend that the brothers be resentenced after 35 years behind bars.

Hochman swiftly intervened, taking aggressive steps to keep the brothers in prison. In one subsequent letter, sent to the U.S. Attorney’s Civil Rights Division, a family member described a meeting between Hochman and more than 20 relatives, who urged the DA to reconsider his stance.

“In a tear-filled meeting, numerous family members shared the ongoing trauma and suffering we have endured for more than 30 years,” it read. “Instead of responding with compassion, acknowledgment, and support, DA Hochman proceeded to verbally and emotionally retraumatize the family by shaming us for allegedly not listening to his public press briefings.”

The Anti-Reformer

The ACLU report also shed light on Hochman’s disturbing attempts to undermine the Racial Justice Act, a landmark piece of criminal justice legislation allowing courts to reexamine death sentences rooted in racial bias. The law explicitly barred prosecutors from using animal imagery against defendants, a dehumanizing practice that has historically served as a racist dog whistle.

Yet Hochman went out of his way to defend a case where the prosecutor compared a defendant to a “Bengal tiger.” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who defeated Hochman for the top statewide office in 2022, had acknowledged that the tiger reference was wrong and that the death sentence should be vacated. Hochman, though, wrote in an amicus brief to the court that Bonta’s “concession was not well taken, and this Court should reject it.”

It would be hard to imagine a more retrograde position than defending racist imagery in capital trials. Hochman not only vowed to uphold the Racial Justice Act upon taking office, but also used its existence as political cover to justify his pro-death penalty stance.

As the ACLU wrote, “D.A. Hochman’s arguments against the RJA attempt to weaken the very law he claims would safeguard his death penalty decisions from racial bias.”

One could argue that none of this is relevant to the case of Nick Reiner. As a white man from a wealthy family who has secured one of the country’s most high-profile defense attorneys, he has had privileges that are unheard of compared to most defendants who end up on death row.

And while mental illness or addiction may ultimately spare Reiner from a death sentence, the same cannot be said for countless people whose crimes were driven by demons like his.

This, of course, is precisely the problem. Reiner is still somebody’s son. The others are the “worst of the worst.”

Given their advocacy, Reiner’s parents would likely have been the first to acknowledge this. Prosecutors like Hochman, however, cannot afford to be so honest.

Whether or not he decides to seek a death sentence against Reiner, Hochman’s narrative about the death penalty is one of the oldest in electoral politics — a story cloaked in the language of justice, told for political gain.

The post Prosecutor Floating Death Penalty for Nick Reiner Knows It’s an Empty Threat appeared first on The Intercept.

In November, ICE launched a process to get private sector “skip tracing” services, where corporate investigators use digital snooping tools and on-the-ground surveillance to track immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses. ICE procurement records indicate the agency will be targeting as many as 1.5 million immigrants in the U.S.

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Taken together, records show the 10 companies have made over $1 million to date — and stand to make over $1 billion by the contract’s end in 2027. Some of the companies’ roles in the bounty hunting program have been previously reported, including by The Intercept, but others — such as Bluehawk, EnProVera, and Gravitas — are being revealed here for the first time. (None of the 10 companies commented for this story.)

The bonanza for federal contractors comes as the Trump administration’s focus on deportations has led to a massive increase in ICE’s budget. The companies range from those with extensive experience doing intelligence work to those with more mundane government contracting experience, like finding janitors for federal agencies.

Among the companies poised to cash in on the bounty hunting program, the largest potential haul — over $365 million — could go to Capgemini Government Solutions, a McLean, Virginia-based federal consultancy that has a long track record working for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, including providing intelligence services for ICE.

Florida-based Bluehawk LLC stands to reap the second largest payout from bounty hunting, at over $200 million. Bluehawk is a longtime contractor for the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, providing intelligence collection and analysis, as well as counterintelligence services.

In September, Bluehawk announced it was beginning counterintelligence work for the Department of Homeland Security. Like some of the other contractors tapped by ICE, the company is focusing on immigration after honing its capabilities doing war on terror-era military and intelligence operations. The company’s advisers include former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Ronald Burgess and Dell Dailey, a retired Army lieutenant general who ran U.S. Joint Special Operations Command following the September 11 attacks.

Government Support Services, a contractor that helps staff roles for janitors, groundskeepers, and security guards at agencies across the federal government, could make upward of $55 million on the bounty hunting program.

EnProVera, another company signed up for a contract on the bounty hunting program, also boasts a broad range of federal contracts. The company advertises a variety of intelligence-gathering and investigative services on its website, promoting its work with Customs and Border Protection.

EnProVera CEO Larry Grant’s past work experience includes “conducting clandestine overseas operations, authoring a highly classified study of a foreign nation’s technical capabilities,” and “architecting intelligence systems support to combat operations,” according to his biography page.

EnProVera could make nearly $3 million by the contract’s end.

Constellation Inc., which has previously landed administrative contracts across the Department of Homeland Security, is looking at a potential $58 million payday from bounty hunting.

SOS International, or SOSi, another experienced military contractor, landed a bounty hunting contract around when the program was revealed in November. SOSI’s skip-tracing work for the program, which was first reported by The Lever, could earn the firm up to $123 million. The company is a longtime military contractor whose past work spans operating a major military base in Iraq to operating overseas propaganda campaigns. SOSi’s website notes the company uses large language models in its government work.

Other firms have more traditional private investigative backgrounds.

Gravitas Investigations, which could make over $32 million through the bounty hunting contract, says it offers “comprehensive surveillance operations.” The company touts its skill at locating anyone using a combination of digital sleuthing and real-world tracking.

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“We go where your Subject goes,” its website says. “We follow on foot, in a vehicle, onto public property, and anywhere legal. Our surveillance operatives covertly document your Subject’s activities with a handheld, high-definition camcorders, and covert cameras.”

Gravitas says it makes extensive use of social media and other online data to pinpoint individuals on its customers’ behalf.

The company Fraud Inc. “strives to validate our clients’ suspicions,” according to its website, using a variety of public and private databases, social media digging, and video surveillance. “We also can obtain legally high-altitude video,” it boasts.

Among the more novel firms on the bounty hunting contract is AI Solutions 87, whose role was recently reported by 404 Media. The company is providing “AI agents” to ICE that it says can autonomously track “people of interest and map out their family and other associates more quickly.”

Perhaps the most provocative bounty hunting firm is BI Incorporated, an immigrant-tracking subsidiary of GEO Group, the for-profit prison giant whose fortunes have rapidly climbed following Trump’s reelection and the funding boom for deportation operations. With lucrative contracts for both hunting and imprisoning immigrants — its bounty hunting work could net $121 million by 2027 — GEO Group now stands to generate revenue through multiple stages of the administration’s ongoing deportation campaign.

The post 10 Companies Have Already Made $1 Million as ICE Bounty Hunters. We Found Them. appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE has secured a deal with surveillance firm BI Incorporated as part of a new program, first reported in October by The Intercept, to use private bounty hunters to determine the locations of immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses.

BI, which was acquired by the GEO Group in 2011, is one of several firms hired by ICE to provide “skip tracing” services, in which its teams of corporate investigators will use surveillance to track immigrants across the country to their homes and places of work so federal agents can easily swoop in and make arrests.

Records show ICE has already paid BI $1.6 million, with the potential for the contract to grow to as much as $121 million by the time it concludes in 2027.

ICE’s push to privatize its hunt for immigrants has drawn the scrutiny of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., who warned it “invites the very abuses, secrecy, and corruption our founders sought to prevent.”

Neither BI Incorporated nor GEO Group immediately responded to a request for comment.

The deal illustrates a strategy of vertical integration within GEO Group, which has found a growing line of business operating for-profit immigration detention centers under the second Trump administration. In this case, the corporation stands to be paid by the federal government to both find immigrants and then to imprison them.

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Shares of GEO Group, which donated to both Trump’s reelection campaign and his inaugural fund, spiked following his 2024 victory. Trump’s return to office has proven fortuitous for GEO Group: The president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” earmarked $45 billion for jailing immigrants. “This is a unique moment in our company’s history,” GEO Group CEO J. David Donahue told investors in May, “and we believe we are well-positioned to meet this unprecedented opportunity.”

GEO Group has faced decades of criticism over alleged mismanagement of its facilities and claims of rampant abuse of inmates. In August, The Intercept reported the suicide of a Chinese immigrant held at a GEO Group-operated prison in Pennsylvania. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal complaint over the facility in July, criticizing “horrific conditions” at the prison, including repeated instances of medical neglect.

In 2023, GEO Group was hit by a class-action lawsuit alleging the “months-long poisoning” from a chemical disinfectant of more than 1,300 inmates at a California immigration detention center. In May, Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, jailed for her criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, alleged her GEO Group-managed jail delayed treatment while she experienced an asthma attack.

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The ICE contract record does not say whether BI would provide on-the-ground bounty hunting services, software-based investigative services, or a combination of both. ICE has previously told potential bounty hunting contractors, “It is dependent upon the vendor to complete the work required by contract,” but “Should a vendor choose to subcontract, that is at their discretion,” according to procurement correspondence reviewed by The Intercept.

BI has a long history in immigrant surveillance, having received hundreds of millions of dollars from the government to date through past contracts for ankle monitor-based tracking. The company specializes in remote surveillance and person-monitoring services, including sales of GPS bracelets and other tracking devices. “Location tracking enables individuals to work and live in the community while being monitored closely for curfews, movement, and more,” according to the company’s website. “BI offers ankle bracelet, wrist-worn, and mobile tracking solutions to meet the needs of varying risk levels.”

BI also touts its suite of software products, including case management applications for monitoring the movements of immigrants and other targets, as well as tools that allow agencies to chart a target’s “geographic and spatial location data” across Google Maps. It is unknown if the company has access to commercial mobile device locational data, or relies solely on body-mounted trackers.

But with many years of detailed GPS data pertaining to the every movement of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, BI and GEO Group hold a trove of locational information that would be of obvious value to the bounty hunting initiative.

In a November contracting document pertaining to the skip tracing effort, ICE told potential bounty hunting vendors they are “expected to provide their own internal skip tracing tools,” providing contractors with a great deal of latitude to employ surveillance products and techniques of their choosing. The document further noted that private ICE bounty hunters will not be provided credentials to identify them as agents of the government.

404 Media reported Thursday that ICE had also contracted with AI Solutions 87, “a company that makes ‘AI agents’ to rapidly track down targets.”

The post ICE Hires Immigrant Bounty Hunters From Private Prison Company GEO Group appeared first on The Intercept.

The new member was Kim McCoy, previously a victims’ advocate at the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office. As the head of the Victim Witness Unit for 25 years, she offered dedicated support to victims’ family members “in capital cases and select high-profile cases,” according to her official bio.

One of those cases was Humphreys’s.

Humphreys was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for the notorious double murder of 21-year-old Lori Brown and 33-year-old Cyndi Williams. The two women were killed northwest of Atlanta; the shocking crime generated so much pretrial publicity that Humphreys’s trial was moved from Cobb County to Glynn County, nearly 300 miles away.

McCoy provided logistical and moral support to the victims’ families throughout the monthlong trial. Members of Humphreys’s defense team would later recall in affidavits that McCoy was extremely protective of them, blocking the legal team’s efforts to introduce themselves. “She was a pitbull,” one said.

The families were grateful for McCoy’s support. In a profile published in McCoy’s alma mater magazine the year after the trial, they praised her care and compassion. “Sometimes you see people who are tailor-made for a specific job,” one said. McCoy was that person.

But her appointment to the pardon board on December 1 was another matter. Where Humphreys’s case was concerned, McCoy had a glaring conflict of interest. Although parole boards are often stacked with former prosecutors and law enforcement officials, making many clemency decisions little more than a rubber stamp, McCoy was a member of the very team that sent Humphreys to death row — one with an especially deep connection to his victims. As the lawyers would later write in a court filing, “it is hard to imagine a greater conflict of interest in a clemency case.”

McCoy was not the only board member with a connection to Humphreys’s case. Vice Chair Wayne Bennett was the Glynn County sheriff at the time of the trial, tasked with overseeing security and transportation for the sequestered jury — as well as Humphreys himself. To Humphreys’s attorneys, Bennett’s proximity to the victims, jurors, and defendant throughout the trial was too close for comfort. Under the board’s ethics rules, members are obligated to avoid even the appearance of bias. It was obvious to the lawyers that both McCoy and Bennett should recuse themselves from the clemency hearing. Yet there was no sign they planned to to so.

On December 4, Assistant Federal Defender Nathan Potek emailed the board’s legal counsel, La’Quandra Smith. “It has come to our attention that two of the current Board members, Mr. Bennett and Ms. McCoy, have conflicts in Mr Humphreys’ case arising from their respective roles at his trial,” he wrote. “Could you please let me know how the Board plans to address this issue and ensure that Mr. Humphreys has five conflict-free Board members to consider his clemency application?”

Smith wrote back five days later. “Mr. Bennett and Ms. McCoy were duly appointed to the Board by Governor Kemp,” she said. “As it is currently constituted, this Board plans to give due consideration to any clemency request made by Mr. Humphreys.”

In other words, the board planned to move forward with McCoy and Bennett’s participation.

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Georgia’s pardon and parole board is uniquely powerful. While many death penalty states leave it to the governor to be the last word on clemency, in Georgia, the board acts alone. It also has the power to grant stays of execution, something ordinarily done by the courts. And while some states open clemency hearings to the public, Georgia’s board members make decisions behind closed doors, with their votes classified as “confidential state secrets.”

With the execution less than a week away, Humphreys’s legal team filed an emergency motion in Fulton County Superior Court. It asked the court to direct McCoy and Bennett to recuse themselves and to order the board to grant a 90-day stay to allow time for two replacements. They also asked the court to block the Department of Corrections from executing their client until his clemency appeal had been considered by “a five member board free from conflict.” If a judge did not intervene, they wrote, “Mr. Humphreys’s final request for mercy — his last chance to have his case heard — will be ruled upon by two people predisposed to vote against him.”

A judge scheduled a hearing in Atlanta for December 15, the eve of Humphreys’s clemency hearing. That morning, the Georgia Attorney General’s Office filed a response to the emergency motion. McCoy would “abstain” from voting, it said. But it denied that Bennett should do the same. “The allegations concerning him do not come close to constituting a conflict of interest,” the state lawyers wrote.

The hearing was still an hour away when lawyers on both sides learned that the board had temporarily suspended the execution. Its decision was delivered via paper copy, complete with a gold seal. The board did not give a reason for its decision. Nor did anyone — including the judge — know how long the stay of execution would remain in place. “I don’t have any information as to how long the suspension will last,” the board’s legal counsel told the judge. In Georgia, execution warrants are valid for a week. Humphreys could be killed anytime between noon on December 17 and noon on Christmas Eve.

This was not the first time Humphreys’s case had raised concerns about bias.

His death sentence was rooted in an ugly confrontation between jurors at his trial. As members of the jury later told Humphreys’s legal team, jurors had initially decided to vote to impose a sentence of life without parole. But one woman instead voted for death, leaving the jury split 11 to 1. The holdout juror “snapped,” as one person put it, screaming and throwing photos of the victims’ bodies at the others. When the forewoman notified the court that the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision, the judge instructed them to keep deliberating.

According to the forewoman, she and the other jurors got the mistaken impression that they had to unanimously vote on a sentence or Humphreys would walk free. They changed their votes to death. “I cried the entire time,” she said.

The holdout juror had also revealed during the trial deliberations that she’d been a victim of violent crime. A man had broken into her apartment and attacked her — a fact that she withheld during jury selection. While she said during voir dire that she escaped before the man entered, she told fellow jurors that the intruder actually attacked her in her bed. The juror’s actions amounted to “extreme misconduct,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider Humphreys’s case. In a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor wrote that the juror “appears to have singlehandedly changed the verdict from life without parole to death.”

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In their motion, Humphreys’s lawyers explained that they planned to discuss the juror misconduct at the clemency hearing. The clash between jurors had escalated to the point where it became violent: One juror punched a wall. This loss of control implicated Bennett, the former sheriff, who had been in charge of security — and whose experience would inevitably color his view of this evidence. At the hearing in Atlanta, where he testified via Zoom, Bennett said he’d only just learned about the episode. “The trial is more important for us to control,” he said. His participation in the trial “was minimal at best.”

McCoy also testified via Zoom. She said that she’d decided to abstain the night before. But it was not exactly clear what this meant. The state’s brief suggested that McCoy would not participate in the hearing apart from voting to abstain. But Smith, the board’s lawyer, said that McCoy would also be able to ask questions — an opportunity to influence the clemency discussion. Neither option fulfilled her ethical and legal obligations, Jessica Cino, a lawyer with the firm Krevolin & Horst who is representing Humphreys, told the judge. “Abstention does not fix the problem.”

In fact, it put Humphreys at a distinct disadvantage, since he needed three votes for clemency to avoid execution. “A vote to abstain is effectively the same exact thing as a vote to deny, from Mr. Humphreys’s perspective, correct?” Cino’s colleague asked Smith when she took the stand. “Correct,” she replied.

Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney clearly grasped the problem with McCoy, whose conflicts “kind of hit you in the face,” as he put it. But the solution to the larger problem was less obvious. While the attorney general’s office argued that the board did not necessarily need five members to preside over a clemency hearing, Georgia law said otherwise. And Smith testified that she’d never seen such a hearing proceed with fewer than five board members.

It was unclear by the end of the hearing how or when McBurney would rule. Humphreys’s attorneys urged him to impose a temporary restraining order to prevent the board from moving forward with a rescheduled clemency hearing and execution date. After all, the board “could unsuspend [the execution] the minute we walk out of this courtroom,” one lawyer said. This would immediately restart the clock.

Although Smith had said that the board “would provide at least 24 hours’ notice” before a new clemency hearing, this was not reassuring. Humphreys’s legal team, who only learned of the warrant on December 1, had already scrambled to get witnesses organized in time for the original clemency hearing. “It is right before Christmas which has made things incredibly difficult,” one lawyer said.

In a statement to The Intercept, Humphreys’s attorneys said that the situation remains tenuous. “While we are grateful that the Parole Board has decided to press pause,” they wrote, the suspension remains temporary. And it does not resolve “the serious ethical and legal deficiencies we raised in court.”

Meanwhile, the board’s director of communications replied to an email from The Intercept. “The board is waiting on a decision by the court,” he wrote. Asked if it was still possible for the execution to happen before Christmas Eve, he did not answer.

The post Secretive Georgia Clemency Board Suspends Execution After Its Conflicts of Interest Are Exposed 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 total number of people killed in the antisemitic Bondi Beach massacre was still not known when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity to blame Australia’s mere recognition of a Palestinian state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Alabama Begs Supreme Court to Make It Easier to Execute People With Intellectual Disabilities

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

New Pro-Death Penalty Laws

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

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

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

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

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“Agony” and “Suffering” as Alabama Experiments With Nitrogen Executions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lethal Illusion: Understanding the Death Penalty Apparatus

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

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

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

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

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

“Experimental, Untested Methods”

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

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

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

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

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

Never mind the two-day evidentiary hearing years earlier, which convinced a federal district judge that Smith had an intellectual disability — and that executing him would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Never mind the three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that agreed. And never mind the decades of Supreme Court precedent contradicting Alabama’s position. Today’s Supreme Court was no longer bound by its own case law.

“Nothing in the Eighth Amendment bars the sentence Joseph Smith received for murdering Durk Van Dam nearly 30 years ago,” Overing began. Although the landmark 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities, Smith did not qualify. “He didn’t come close to proving an IQ of 70 or below.”

An IQ score of 70 has traditionally been considered a threshold for intellectual disability. Smith’s scores hovered above that, ranging from 72 to 78. But under well-established clinical standards, this makes him a “borderline” case. Experts — and the Supreme Court itself — have long recognized that IQ tests have an inherent margin of error. And they have relied on an array of additional evidence to assess whether a person is intellectually disabled. As now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote over a decade ago in Hall v. Florida, which explicitly struck down a rigid IQ requirement of 70, “intellectual disability is a condition, not a number.”

Under Atkins — and under Alabama law — decision-makers are bound by a three-part test: whether a person has limited intellectual functioning (determined in part by IQ); whether they struggle with “adaptive” functioning (the social and practical skills that make up day-to-day life); and whether those struggles manifested before the age of 18. The federal judges who ruled in Smith’s favor had applied this very test. But Overing discounted this. He had an alternative narrative: The judges had gone rogue.

To help Smith escape execution, he argued, the judges plucked his lowest score and rounded down in his favor, then leaned on lesser evidence as proof of his intellectual limitations. “The sentence ‘Smith’s IQ is below 70’ doesn’t appear in the District Court’s opinion, nor in the Court of Appeals opinion,” he said. The courts “changed the standard.”

“It seems to me that you are actually changing the standard,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cut in. The court opinions didn’t include “IQ is below 70” because that isn’t the law. The first prong of the three-part test requires “a showing of ‘significant subaverage general intellectual functioning,’” she said. “I think what you’ve done is shift this to be all about the IQ test in a way that is not supported by our caselaw.”

“I’m having a really hard time with this case,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. Overing was accusing the lower courts of violating a standard that does not actually exist. The record showed that the federal judges adhered to Supreme Court precedent. Hall invalidated the strict 70 IQ requirement. And a subsequent case, Moore v. Texas, emphasized that states could not rely on outdated medical standards to reject intellectual disability claims.

The lower federal courts followed the law. “It’s exactly what we told people to do in Hall, it’s exactly what we told people to do in Moore,” Sotomayor said.

She then cut to the heart of the matter: “What you’re asking us to do is to undo those cases.”

On paper, the question in Hamm v. Smith is narrow: “Whether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores” in deciding whether a condemned prisoner has an intellectual disability.

This question has never been explicitly answered by the Supreme Court. But while Alabama insisted that judges nationwide are yearning for guidance, its appeal to the court was rooted less in questions of law than in political opportunism. In the Trump era, the court has become a friendly forum for right-wing ideologues, with conservatives eagerly asking its supermajority to dismantle any pesky legal precedents obstructing their agenda.

Before Wednesday’s oral argument, it seemed likely the justices would find a way to give the state of Alabama what it wants. The only question was how far they might go. Some conservatives hoped they might take aim at the Eighth Amendment itself — specifically the long-standing principle that criminal punishments must be guided by “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” One amicus brief, submitted on behalf of 18 Republican attorneys general, insisted that this framework must be dismantled. “The Court should never have told judges to chase after the country’s ‘evolving standards of decency,’” they wrote.

It is no secret that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito agree with this sentiment. But the scene at the court suggested that Hamm may not be the case where they tear it all down. The two-hour oral argument was mired in confusion over what, exactly, Alabama was talking about. “I’m confused,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett told Overing at one point, echoing Sotomayor. “It doesn’t seem like Alabama prohibits” what the district court did in Smith’s case.

When it came to the supposed question at hand — how to reconcile multiple IQ scores — Overing’s proposed solutions were not exactly subtle. One option, he said, was to simply adopt the highest IQ score, “because there are many ways that an IQ test can underestimate IQ if the offender is distracted, fatigued, ill or because of the incentive to avoid the death penalty.”

“You can see why that might be regarded as a little results-oriented,” Chief Justice John Roberts replied.

With a ruling not expected until next summer, Smith’s life hangs in the balance. After decades facing execution, his journey to Washington shows how case law that evolved to reflect scientific understandings is now under siege at the court. It is also emblematic of the way in which conservatives are exploiting the high court’s growing disregard for its own precedents and for federal courts trying to follow the law.

Joseph Clifton Smith had just gotten out of prison in November 1997 when he met a man named Larry Reid at a highway motel outside Mobile. The pair encountered a third man, Michigan carpenter Durk Van Dam, and decided to rob him. They lured him to a secluded spot and fatally beat him with his carpentry tools, some of which Smith later tried to sell at a pawn shop.

Smith was quickly arrested and gave two tape-recorded statements to police. At first he denied participating in the attack. But in a second interview, Smith implicated himself in the murder.

His 1998 trial was swift and stacked against him. The presiding judge was Chris Galanos, a former Mobile County prosecutor who had prosecuted Smith for burglary just a few years earlier. Smith’s defense lawyers called no witnesses during the guilt phase and largely conceded the version of events presented by the state. This was due, at least in part, to the paltry pay and meager investigative resources provided to court-appointed lawyers.

The jury convicted Smith in less than an hour.

At the time of Smith’s trial, there was no prohibition on executing people with intellectual disabilities. The Supreme Court had refused to impose such a ban in its 1987 ruling in Penry v. Lynaugh. But it ruled that a diagnosed intellectual disability could be used as mitigating evidence to persuade a jury to spare a defendant’s life.

Smith’s lawyers called Dr. James Chudy to testify at the sentencing phase. The psychologist traced Smith’s struggles to the first grade, when Smith was described as a “slow learner.” In seventh grade, he was labeled “educable mentally retarded.” Soon thereafter, Smith dropped out of school.

Chudy gave Smith an IQ test, which yielded a result of 72. According to Chudy, this placed Smith in the bottom 3 percent of the population intellectually. But he also explained that he had to consider “a standard error of measurement of about three or four points.” Thus, Smith’s true IQ “could be as high as maybe a 75,” Chudy testified. “On the other hand he could be as low as a 69.”

Smith’s disability was exacerbated by his harrowing family life, which was marked by severe poverty and abuse. The environment denied him the extra care he needed. As his trial lawyers later argued in a plea for mercy, “He came into the world with a very, very limited IQ. … He had no family support in that respect and that’s how he came to be where he is.”

But prosecutors urged jurors to apply “common sense.” “There are folks out there with marginal IQs who are street wise,” one prosecutor said. “This man’s been in prison, this man’s been around.” If jurors did not sentence Smith to die, he argued, they were saying the victim did not matter. “There was no value in his life and there was no meaning in his death.”

Jurors recommended a death sentence by a vote of 11 to 1.

Smith had been on death row for three years when the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would reconsider its decision in Penry. In the intervening years, numerous states had passed bans on executing people with intellectual disabilities. As the oral argument in Atkins approached, the Birmingham News ran a special report declaring that Alabama led the nation in the “shameful practice.” Defendants with intellectual disabilities were not only less culpable for their actions, they could be “easily misled and eager to win investigators’ approval.”

The following year, the Supreme Court handed down Atkins, officially prohibiting the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Reacting to the decision, Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor said he would follow the law. “But we will also be vigilant against those who would deceive the courts by claiming they are [intellectually disabled] when they’re not.”

The protections of Atkins have never been guaranteed. The court left it to the states to decide how to enforce its ruling, prompting efforts to circumvent the decision altogether.

While to date Atkins has led some 144 people to be removed from death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, others have been put to death despite evidence that their executions were unconstitutional. In 2025 alone, three men have been executed despite diagnoses of intellectual disability. One, Byron Black, was executed in Tennessee, even after the current district attorney acknowledged that killing him would violate the law.

Related

Tennessee Is About to Execute Byron Black — Despite His Intellectual Disability

Since Atkins, Alabama has executed at least four people despite evidence of intellectual disability. All of them were represented by court-appointed attorneys who were denied the resources to properly defend their clients — and whose decisions sometimes made matters worse. In the case of Michael Brandon Samra, who was executed in 2019, trial lawyers did not hire an expert to evaluate him. Instead, they told jurors the murder was rooted in his membership in a Satan-worshipping gang.

Smith spent years trying to challenge his death sentence under Atkins. After losing in state court, he was appointed lawyers with the Federal Defenders for the Middle District of Alabama, who filed a challenge in federal court arguing that Smith “suffers from significant intellectual and adaptive limitations,” only some of which were presented at trial. But they were up against onerous procedural barriers. Alabama’s Criminal Court of Appeals had rejected the evidence of Smith’s intellectual disability — and a federal judge could only reverse the decision if it clearly violated the law. In 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Callie Granade ruled against Smith.

But that same year, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hall v. Florida, which would strengthen the ruling in Atkins. The case centered on a man whose IQ scores ranged from 71 to 80. Because Florida law required a strict cutoff of 70, his appeals were rejected.

Famed Supreme Court litigator Seth Waxman delivered the oral argument in Hall. He began by reiterating the three-part definition of intellectual disability used by experts and established in Atkins: a “significantly subaverage intellectual function concurrent with deficits in adaptive behavior with an onset before the age of 18.” Because of the “standard error of measurement” inherent in IQ tests, he said, “it is universally accepted that persons with obtained scores of 71 to 75 can and often do have [an intellectual disability].”

The argument grappled with the challenge of multiple IQ scores. There were no easy answers. When Florida’s solicitor general argued that “the best measure of your true IQ is your obtained IQ test score,” Justice Elena Kagan pushed back. “The ultimate determination here is whether somebody is [intellectually disabled],” she said. IQ tests were not even a full piece of the three-part puzzle. “What your cutoff does is it essentially says the inquiry has to stop there.”

In 2014, the court struck down Florida’s law by a vote of 5 to 4.

The next year, the 11th Circuit reversed the District Court’s decision in Smith’s case. The judges found that Alabama’s Court of Criminal Appeals had improperly relied on Smith’s unadjusted IQ scores to conclude that there was no evidence of intellectual disability. The court sent the case back to Granade, who granted an evidentiary hearing.

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Texas Can No Longer Fabricate Its Own Medical Standards to Justify Executions

Two months before the hearing, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down yet another decision bolstering Smith’s case. The ruling in Moore v. Texas struck down Texas’s peculiar method for determining intellectual disability, which was rooted more in stereotypes than science. “In line with Hall,” it read, “we require that courts … consider other evidence of intellectual disability where an individual’s IQ score, adjusted for the test’s standard error, falls within the clinically established range for intellectual-functioning deficits.”

In May 2017, Granade presided over an evidentiary hearing in Montgomery. Over two days of testimony, experts shed light on modern understandings of intellectual disability and how it was reflected in Smith’s life. Because he’d spent much of his adult life incarcerated, it was hard to evaluate his ability to live independently. But he’d struggled in the outside world, living in hotels, following others, and behaving recklessly and impulsively.

The hearing also highlighted the very stereotypes that often prevent lay people from recognizing intellectual disabilities. A state lawyer asked one of Smith’s experts if he was aware that Smith had been paid to mow lawns at 14 and later worked as a roofer and painter. None of these jobs were inconsistent with a mild intellectual disability, the expert replied. Was he aware that Smith claimed he “always had money in his pocket and he always worked full time?” the lawyer asked. The expert replied that, while this may have been true, people with intellectual disabilities often try to downplay their struggles; some “exaggerate their competencies and what they can do.”

Granade ultimately vacated his death sentence. “This is a close case,” she wrote. “At best Smith’s intelligence falls at the low end of the borderline range of intelligence and at worst at the high end of the required significantly subaverage intellectual functioning.” Given the ambiguity as to the first of Atkins’s three-prong test, she turned to the second and third prongs. “Whether Smith is intellectually disabled will fall largely on whether Smith suffers from significant or substantial deficits in adaptive behavior, as well as whether his problems occurred during Smith’s developmental years,” she wrote. The evidence showed that the answer to both questions were yes.

After 23 years on death row, Smith was no longer facing execution.

It would not take long for Alabama to fight back. In February 2023, the case landed back at the 11th Circuit for an oral argument. Speaking before a three-judge panel, a lawyer for the state attorney general’s office disregarded Granade’s careful consideration of the evidence, accusing her of simply cherry-picking “the lowest, least reliable score” in order to vacate Smith’s death sentence.

The judges were skeptical. The state’s briefs ignored the Supreme Court’s rulings in Hall and Moore. “It seems to me like they are the controlling precedent here,” one judge said. Yet the only time the state acknowledged the rulings was to cite the dissents.

Another judge had been on the panel that sent the case back to the district court in 2015. “What we concluded in that opinion was that other pieces of evidence should be considered, together with the IQ scores, to determine whether or not Smith is intellectually disabled,” he said. Granade did precisely this. In fact, he pointed out, not doing so would have violated the law.

The 11th Circuit ruled in Smith’s favor.

By then, the U.S. Supreme Court was a vastly different court from the one that decided Hall and Moore. The power was now firmly entrenched in a conservative supermajority that was dramatically reshaping — and in many cases, eviscerating — the rule of law. In a petition to the justices, Alabama accused the lower federal courts of “placing a thumb on the scale in favor of capital offenders.”

Lawyers for Smith countered that the state was distorting the facts and the law. Alabama continued to insist that the lower courts had manipulated a single IQ score to reach its conclusions. In reality, Smith’s attorneys argued, their opinions were rooted in expert testimony, Supreme Court precedent, and a “thorough review of the evidence.”

Nevertheless, in 2024, the Supreme Court vacated the 11th Circuit’s ruling. Before agreeing to hear the case, however, it sent the case back for an explanation. The 11th Circuit’s decision could “be read in two ways,” the justices said. Either it gave “conclusive weight” to Smith’s lowest IQ score, or it took “a more holistic approach to multiple IQ scores that considers the relevant evidence.”

The 11th Circuit replied that it had done the latter, firmly rejecting Alabama’s claim that it relied on a single score. But the narrative had already opened the door for Alabama, teeing up the case for argument. The Supreme Court put Hamm v. Smith on its 2025 docket.

By the time Overing stepped down from the podium on Wednesday, Sotomayor was fed up. “Show me one case in Alabama that has followed your rule,” she demanded to no avail. She pointed out that the state expert who testified at Smith’s evidentiary hearing had himself relied on information beyond his IQ scores. “Your own expert did exactly what you say is wrong.”

She also pushed back on the claim that states were confused about how to handle Atkins claims. “Although you try to reap some confusion,” she said, “they all seem to be following the method the district court here followed.” A rigid new rule was bound to create new complications.

Even the lawyer representing the Trump administration, who argued in support of Alabama, didn’t quite align with Overing’s argument. A judge was free to consider evidence apart from IQ, he conceded. But “you still need to circle back” and decide whether the other evidence is “strong enough to drag down the collective weight of IQ.” The problem remained how, exactly, to calculate this.

The conservatives seemed open to trying. Justice Brett Kavanaugh went through Alabama’s proposals, from identifying the median score to an “overlap approach” considering each score’s error range, to simply calculating the average. They all seemed to favor the state.

But as Jackson pointed out, none of these methods have been adopted by Alabama. She still did not see how the justices could reverse the District Court. “I’m trying — trying — to understand how and to what extent the District Court erred in this case given the law as it existed at the time … as opposed to the law Alabama wishes it had enacted.”

Alito, too, seemed frustrated, albeit for different reasons. Shouldn’t there be “some concrete standard” for a person claiming to be intellectually disabled as opposed to a situation where “everything is up for grabs”? But the same question had been raised in Hall more than a decade earlier, only for the court to conclude that the matter was too complex for hard rules. At the end of the day, the science still mattered. IQ was not enough. And where the death penalty is concerned, courts still have a unique obligation to consider people’s cases individually.

The third and last lawyer to face the justices was Seth Waxman — the same litigator who successfully argued Hall. Forced to relitigate issues that had been decided more than 10 years earlier, he found some common ground with his adversaries. Replying to a dubious theoretical from Alito — What if the IQ scores were five 100s and one 71? — Waxman said a judge could probably safely decide that such a person was not intellectually disabled without too much attention to additional factors.

But by the end, they were going in circles. “So in just about every case then, IQs and testimony about IQs can never be sufficient?” Alito asked.

“I don’t know how to —” Waxman began, before interrupting himself. “I have given you every possible answer that I have.”

The post Alabama Begs Supreme Court to Make It Easier to Execute People With Intellectual Disabilities appeared first on The Intercept.

The operator tells the employee at Stewart Detention Center that there are no ambulances available.

“It’s already out — on the last patient y’all called us with,” the operator says.

“Is there any way you can get one from another county?” the caller asks.

“I can try,” the operator says. “I can’t make any promises, but I can try.”

The call was one of dozens from the ICE detention facility seeking help with medical emergencies during the first 10 months of the second Trump administration, a sustained period of high call volume from the jail not seen since 2018.

Emergency calls were made to 911 at least 15 times a month from Stewart Detention Center for six months in a row as of November 1.

Like the call concerning a detainee’s head trauma from April 1, emergency dispatch records show that the ambulance service in Stewart County, Georgia, where the detention center is located, has had to seek help outside the county more than any time in at least five years — including three instances in November alone.

The burden on rural Stewart County’s health care system is “unsustainable,” said Dr. Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who researches health care in immigration detention.

“People are going to die if they don’t get medical care,” said Zeidan. “All it takes is one person who needs a life-saving intervention and doesn’t have access to it.”

This continuous barrage of calls for help with acute medical needs reflects increased detainee populations without changes to medical staffing and capacities, experts told The Intercept. Shifting detainee populations, they said, may also be exacerbating the situation: Older immigrants and those with disabilities or severe health issues used to be more frequently let out on bond as their cases were resolved, but ICE’s mass deportation push has led to an increase in their detention.

With the number of people in immigration detention ballooning nationwide, health care behind bars has become an issue in local and state politics. In Washington state, for instance, legislators passed a law last year giving state-level authorities more oversight of detention facilities. A recent court ruling granted state health department officials access to a privately operated ICE detention center to do health inspections. (A spokesperson from Georgia’s health department did not answer questions about the high volume and types of calls at Stewart.)

911 calls from Stewart included several for “head trauma,” such as one case where an inmate was “beating his head against the wall” and another following a fight.

Impacts of the situation are hard to measure in the absence of comprehensive, detailed data, but they extend both to Stewart’s detainee population — which has increased from about 1,500 to about 1,900 during the Trump administration — and to the surrounding, rural county. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

The data on 911 calls represent what Dr. Marc Stern, a consultant on health care for the incarcerated, called “a red flag.”

Illness and Injuries

Data obtained by The Intercept through open records requests shows that the top four reasons for 911 calls since the onset of the second Trump administration have been chest pains and seizures, with the same number of calls, followed by stomach pains and head injuries.

Neither written call records nor recordings of the calls themselves offer much insight into the causes of injuries. One cause of head traumas, though, could be fights between detainees, said Amilcar Valencia, the executive director of El Refugio, a Georgia-based organization that works with people held at Stewart and their families and loved ones.

“It’s not a secret that Stewart detention center is overcrowded,” he said. “This creates tension.”

Issues such as access to phones for calls to attorneys or loved ones can lead to fights, he said.

Another issue may be self-harm, suggested testimony from Rodney Scott, a Liberian-born Georgia resident of four decades who has been detained in Stewart since January. One day in September, Scott, who is a double amputee and suffers high blood pressure and other health issues, said he saw a fellow detainee climb about 20 stairs across a hall from him and jump over a railing, landing several stories below.

“He hit his head,” Scott said. “It was shocking to see someone risk his life like that.”

He doesn’t know what happened to the man.

On another day, about a month earlier, Scott saw a man try to kill himself with razors.

“He went in, cut himself with blades, after breakfast,” Scott said. “There was a pool of blood,” he said. “It looked like a murder scene.”

In addition to interpersonal tensions, large numbers of detainees in crowded conditions can strain a facility’s medical capacities.

“There’s a mismatch between the number of people and health workers,” said Joseph Nwadiuko, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who researches the immigration detention system. “People are becoming sicker than what the system can handle. The complexity of patients is above and beyond what Stewart is prepared for.”

CoreCivic, the company that operates Stewart, is currently advertising to hire a psychiatrist, a dental assistant, and two licensed practical nurses at the detention center.

In response to a request for comment, Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, said, “We are grateful to the emergency responders who provide medical assistance when deemed necessary by the health care professionals at SDC, however, we have no control over the local EMS staffing levels, and their decisions to refer calls to outside jurisdictions.”

The company did not respond to questions about medical staffing at Stewart.

“A Lack of Accountability”

The situation at hand also potentially impacts the residents of Stewart County, a sprawling tract of about 450 square miles in southwest Georgia. About 28 percent of the county’s nearly 5,000 residents, two-thirds of whom are Black, live below the poverty line.

The county has two ambulances, and there are no hospitals. The nearest facilities equipped to handle calls coming from the ICE detention center are in neighboring counties about 45 minutes to the east or nearly an hour north. County Manager Mac Moye, though, was nonplussed when presented with the data on the sustained high volume of 911 calls from the detention center.

“We are in a very rural, poor county, with very low population density,” he said. “We’ve always had slow responses compared to, let’s say, Columbus” — the city of 200,000 nearly 45 miles north where one of the nearest hospitals is located.

“We run two ambulances; most surrounding counties have one,” he continued. “We have more money, because of Stewart” — the detention center.

The ICE facility paid nearly $600,000 in fees in fiscal year 2022, the latest year for which data is available, or about 13 percent of the county’s general fund of $4.4 million.

Moye, who worked at the detention center before taking his current job, also called into question whether 911 calls were always made for legitimate reasons. The county manager did not comment on whether his own constituents are increasingly more at risk in situations like the one on April 1, when no ambulance was available to answer a call from the detention center.

“It’s still faster than if we had one ambulance,” he said. “We wish we would never have to call another county, and deal with every call on our own.”

As for the conditions facing detainees, particularly given the types of emergencies the detention center calls 911 about, Moye said, “It’s difficult to comment on what’s happening over there, because we don’t have any control over it.”

That points to a larger problem reflected in the increased calls.

“Obviously, a prison is a prison — it’s blind to the rest of the world,” said Nwadiuko, the Penn professor. “There’s a moral hazard for conditions that don’t occur elsewhere, a lack of accountability.”

“Do No Harm”?

“Seizures, chest pains — are they preventable? Why is it happening?” said Stern, the doctor who consults on carceral health care, commenting on the high volume and types of calls. “Could mean that access or the quality of care is poor. It’s a red flag if the number is high or increasing, and it indicates that investigation is required.”

In September, Democratic Georgia Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons expressing concern over the 14 deaths in ICE custody this year, including Jesus Molina-Veya, whose June 7 death at Stewart has been reported as a suicide.

The letter sought answers to a series of detailed questions by October 31 about the care Stewart and other ICE detention centers are providing to detainees. Warnock and Ossoff’s offices said they have not received a reply. Ossoff also released an investigation in October called “Medical Neglect and Denial of Adequate Food or Water in U.S. Immigration Detention” that included information gathered at Stewart.

Zeidan, the Emory professor, noted that there’s little information about what happens to ICE detainees once they reach a hospital.

“What happens after detainees are admitted?” Zeidan said. “Are they discharged? Are they getting comprehensive, follow-up care?”

Nwadiuko echoed the concern.

“Are doctors and hospitals using good judgment regarding when going back to a detention facility doesn’t mean ‘a safe discharge’?” he said. “We have an oath: ‘Do no harm.’ That may conflict with an institution’s desire to minimize a detainee’s time outside the gates of the detention center.”

Update: December 15, 2025
This story has been updated to include a statement from CoreCivic received after publication.

The post ICE Prison’s 911 Calls Overwhelm a Rural Georgia Emergency System appeared first on The Intercept.

Pressed repeatedly by a top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee about antifa’s size and location, the operations director of the FBI’s national security division didn’t have answers.

At one point, the FBI’s Michael Glasheen fumbled with his hands as he tried to find an answer for the question from Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

“Well, the investigations are active,” Glasheen said.

Glasheen’s comments came three months after President Donald Trump proclaimed that antifa is a “major terror organization,” even though it the broad political movement does not have a hierarchy or leadership.

Trump followed his designation with a presidential memo on September 25 directing the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate and prosecute antifascists and other adherents of “anti-Americanism.”

The formless nature of the antifascist movement, however, appears to have flummoxed the FBI as it attempts to carry out Trump’s orders.

Glasheen called antifa “our primary concern right now” and called it “the most immediate, violent threat” from domestic terrorists. That led Thompson to ask him where antifa is located and how many members it has.

“We are building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen said.

“So what does that mean?” Thompson shot back. “I’m just — we’re trying to get the information. You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that? Where do they exist? How many members do they have in the United States as of right now?”

“Well, that’s very fluid,” Glasheen said. “It’s ongoing for us to understand that. The same, no different than Al Qaeda or ISIS.”

Glasheen visibly struggled to answer the question before saying that the FBI’s investigations were “active.”

Glasheen is a veteran FBI official who was appointed to serve as the Terrorist Screening Center director under the Biden administration in 2023 and selected by current FBI Director Kash Patel as one of the agency’s five operations directors earlier this year.

The FBI’s shift to focusing on alleged left-wing violence comes despite researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies finding that despite an increase this year, it remains “much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”

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Trump has long obsessed over the “threat” that antifa poses to the U.S. His fixation appears to have been supercharged by the September 10 slaying of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Utah, allegedly by a shooter who engraved one unused bullet with the words “Hey fascist! catch!”

That helped spur Trump administration officials to launch an extensive search for links between the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, and domestic or foreign groups that so far has produced no arrests.

The post How Many Members Does Antifa Have? Where Is Its Headquarters? The FBI Has No Answers. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luigi Mangione’s legal defense fund has swelled to more than $1.3 million and is still growing daily. As the December 4 Legal Committee, we created that fund — but it would mean nothing without the donations, prayers, and support of people from around the world. As corporate social media platforms censored support for Luigi, the fundraiser page became a place for people to share stories of senseless death and suffering at the hands of the for-profit health insurance industry in this country.

There is a deep irony in the widespread support for Luigi. People celebrate an alleged murderer not because they hate reasonable debate or lust for political violence, but out of respect for themselves and love for others. Across the political spectrum, Americans experience the corporate bureaucracies of our health care system as cruel, exploitative, and maddening. They feel powerless in the face of the unnecessary dehumanization, death, and financial ruin of their neighbors and loved ones.

One year ago, the December 4 killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson temporarily suspended the usually intractable left vs. right polarization of America. Ben Shapiro’s audience revolted when he accused Luigi supporters of being “evil leftists.” Donors to Luigi’s fund come from across the political spectrum, and a common theme among them is their acute realization that the political differences of the culture war are largely manufactured to benefit the powerful. This was a crucial difference between Mangione’s alleged act and, for example, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. While the latter intensified existing political divides, the former seemed to strike upon the common ground of a different political landscape: from red vs. blue, or left vs. right, to down vs. up.

But a year on, it is clear that even bipartisan public support for killing a health care CEO on the street and the endless stories of suffering and death as a result of insurance claim denials are not enough to depose the for-profit health care system. Today, Medicare for All looks even more politically unrealistic than when Bernie Sanders made it the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.

This fact poses a challenge for Luigi’s supporters: Will his alleged act be remembered as nothing more than a salacious contribution to the true crime genre? Will we settle for him being installed as an edgy icon of celebrity culture, used to market fast-fashion brands and who knows what next?

We do not think his supporters, or anyone else who believes that health care is a human right, should accept that. But what would it take to make the events of last December 4 into a movement to build a more humane health care system in America?

For the last year, we have been asking this question of medical professionals, community organizers, scholars, and ourselves.

In our forthcoming book, “Depose: Luigi Mangione and the Right to Health,” we offer the beginnings of an answer: The history of the struggle for the right to health in America shows that it is indeed politically unrealistic to expect politicians to deliver it from above — but our own dignity and intelligence demands that this right be asserted by all of us from below. The widespread support for Luigi shows that the time has come for the long struggle for the right to health care to make a strategic shift from protest to political direct action.

Consider the sit-in movements to end Jim Crow laws and desegregate American cities. These were protests, insofar as participants drew attention to unjust laws — but they were also political direct actions. Organizers were collectively breaking those laws, and in doing so, were enacting desegregation. Activists organized themselves to support and protect each other in collectively nullifying laws that had no moral authority and, in the process, acted as if they were already free. This is what we mean by a shift from protest to direct action.

Less well known is the role of direct action in winning the eight-hour workday. For half a century, industrial workers had been struggling to shorten their hours so they could have some rest and joy in their lives. One decisive moment in this struggle came in 1884, when the American Federation of Labor resolved that two years later, on May 1, their workers would enact the eight-hour day. After eight hours, they would go on strike and walk off the job together. They called on other unions around the country to do the same and a number did — including in Chicago, where police deployed political violence to attack striking workers, killing two. While this action did not immediately win the struggle everywhere, it did succeed in beginning to normalize the 8-hour day and raised the bar for everywhere else to eventually do the same. The key is that this could only happen when workers stopped demanding something politically unrealistic and started changing political reality themselves.

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The struggle for the right to health care has been ongoing in the United States for at least a century. At every turn, it has been thwarted by industry lobbyists and the politicians they control. But what would it look like to strategically shift the struggle for the right to health care in the U.S.? How would health care providers go on strike or engage in direct action without harming patients?

We found the beginning of an answer from Dr. Michael Fine, who has called on his fellow physicians to organize for a different kind of strike: not halting all their labor, but stopping the aspects of their work that are unrelated to their responsibility as healers. Fine writes, “We need to refuse, together, to use the electronic medical records until they change the software so that those computers free us to look at and listen to patients instead of looking at and listening to computer screens.”

A strike by health care workers could mean not the cessation of care, but liberating this critical work from the restraints imposed by profit-seeking companies. Beginning from this idea, all of us could organize to free the labor of health care from the corporate bureaucracies that act as parasites on the relationship between caregiver and patient.

If we step outside of our usual political bubbles and into a direct action movement to assert the universal right to health care, we might find that the common ground that Luigi’s alleged actions exposed is the precise point from which the wider political landscape may be remade.

The post Luigi, a Year Later: How to Build a Movement Against Parasitic Health Insurance Giants appeared first on The Intercept.

On the day before Thanksgiving, he was released without warning or explanation. He walked out to a jail parking lot relishing the fresh air — and watching over his shoulder.

During the week that followed, Sanchez Estrada savored his time with family members and worried that his release might have been an accident. Apparently, he was right.

On Thursday, Sanchez Estrada turned himself in to await a trial that could be months away.

It was another swerve in the case of a man who has been demonized by the federal government for actions he took after a protest against Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Civil liberties advocates have decried the case against him as “guilt by literature.” (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas declined to comment and the Federal Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request.)

In a Wednesday night interview during his final hours of freedom, Sanchez Estrada said the decision to voluntarily surrender himself was gut-wrenching.

“As scary as it is, I’m innocent,” he said. “I just have to go through this process. It’s necessary to show that I’m not the person they say I am. I’m not fleeing. I’m not hiding. Because I’m innocent. I haven’t done anything.”

Sanchez Estrada spoke to The Intercept outside an ice cream shop in an upscale shopping mall in Fort Worth, Texas. He was set to turn himself back into jail 16 hours after the interview — but before that, he was treating his 12-year-old stepdaughter to sweets during his first meeting with her as a free man since his arrest in July.

Prairieview Protest

Prosecutors allege that Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, attended a chaotic protest outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center on July 4 that ended with a police officer wounded by gunfire. A separate defendant is the sole person accused of firing a gun at the officer.

The gathering outside the Alvarado, Texas, detention center happened in the context of huge rise in the number of immigrants detained under Trump, from 39,000 in January to 65,000 in November, which has been accompanied by reports of dire conditions inside.

Supporters of the Prairieland defendants say the protesters hoped to cause a ruckus with fireworks in a show of solidarity. The government has accused members of what it dubs the “North Texas antifa cell” of rioting and attempted murder.

No one claims that Sanchez Estrada was present at the protest. Instead, he is accused of moving anarchist zines from his parents’ house to another residence near Dallas on July 6 after Rueda called him from jail. Sanchez Estrada was arrested when the move was spotted by an FBI surveillance team, according to the government.

Prosecutors said the zines contained “anti-law enforcement, anti-government and anti-Trump sentiments.” In a statement made outside of his interview, Sanchez Estrada said that possession of such items is clearly protected by the First Amendment.

“My charge is allegedly having a box containing magazine ‘zines,’ books, and artwork,” Sanchez Estrada said. “Items that should be protected under the First Amendment ‘freedom of speech.’ If this is happening to me now, it’s only a matter of time before it happens to you.”

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Civil liberties groups such as the Freedom of the Press Foundation have denounced his case as “guilt by literature.” They warn that his could be the first of many such prosecutions in the wake of a presidential memo from Trump targeting “antifa” and other forms of “anti-Americanism.”

The purported “North Texas antifa cell” has been cited by FBI Director Kash Patel and others as a prime example of a supposed surge in the number of attacks on ICE officers — although a recent Los Angeles Times analysis found that unlike the incident in Texas, most of those alleged attacks resulted in no injury.

Sanchez Estrada faces up to 20 years on counts of corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents. The stakes are higher for him than other defendants because he is a green card holder, which ICE spotlighted in a social media post that included his picture and immigration history.

“I Did Not Participate”

Sanchez Estrada also worries about the fate of his wife, who faces life imprisonment if convicted. She pleaded not guilty in an arraignment Wednesday. The case is currently set for trial on January 20.

“I want to be very clear. I did not participate. I was not aware nor did I have any knowledge about the events that transpired on July 4 outside the Prairieland Detention Center,” Sanchez Estrada said in his statement. “My feeling is that I was only arrested because I’m married to Mari Rueda, who is being accused of being at the noise demo showing support to migrants who are facing deportation under deplorable conditions.”

Sanchez Estrada said that he spent his months in jail anguishing over how his stepdaughter would be affected and how his parents, for whom he is the primary supporter, would make ends meet.

A nature lover who peppers his speech with references to “the creator,” for Sanchez Estrada one of the toughest things about being in jail was not being able to breathe fresh air or watch the sun set.

He said he was immediately suspicious when jail officers told him that he was being released.

“You normally would assume the worst when you’re in there. I just did not believe them. I thought they would be waiting in the parking lot to arrest me,” he said.

Soon, however, Sanchez Estrada was eating vegan tacos and spending time with friends and family.

“It is something just beautiful to see — everyone rooting for you,” he said.

He fears what could happen when he returns to custody. Still, he will have a reminder of his brief return to life on the outside: freshly inked tattoos of a raccoon and an opossum.

“They’ve been here even before people,” he said. “They’re wild animals, and they’re beautiful.”

Update: December 4, 2025, 12:58 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to reflect that, after publication, the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas declined to comment.

The post “I’m Not Fleeing” — Alleged Antifa Cell Member Says He Was Accidentally Released From Jail appeared first on The Intercept.

On a chilly evening in mid-November, about 135 people gathered along a highway in Boone, North Carolina, a small Appalachian college town not known as a hotbed of leftist protest. They held signs reading “Nazis were just following orders too” and “Time to melt the ICE,” and chanted profane rebukes at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rumored to be in the area. “They came here thinking they wouldn’t be bothered,” one Appalachian State University student told The Appalachian at the impromptu rally. “Boone is a small, southern, white, mountain town. We need to let them know they’ll be bothered anywhere they go.” In a region often stereotyped as silently conservative, this flash of defiance was a startling sign that the battle lines of American politics are shifting in unexpected ways.

For the past several weeks, the Trump administration has been rolling out a mass deportation campaign of unprecedented scope — one that is now reaching deep into Appalachia. Branded “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a deployment of hundreds of Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents descended on North Carolina in mid-November, making sweeping arrests in and around Charlotte and into the state’s rural mountain counties.

Officials billed the effort as targeting the “worst of the worst” criminal aliens, but the numbers tell a different story: More than 370 people were arrested, only 44 of whom had any prior criminal record, according to DHS. The vast majority were ordinary undocumented residents — people going to work or school, not “violent criminals” — which underscores that the crackdown is less about public safety than meeting political quotas.

Indeed, Trump campaigned on conducting the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, vowing to round up 15 to 20 million people (which is more than the estimated 14 million undocumented people living in the U.S.) and pressuring ICE to triple its arrest rates to 3,000 per day. The federal dragnet has already driven ICE arrests to levels not seen in years; immigrants without criminal convictions now make up the largest share of detainees. But the administration is also facing widespread resistance to its policy of indiscriminate arrests and mass deportations, not as the exception, but as the rule — and among everyday, fed-up Americans across the country.

Kicking the Hornets’ Nest

What officials didn’t seem to anticipate was that this crackdown would face fierce pushback not only in liberal hubs with large immigrant communities like Los Angeles or Chicago, but in predominantly white, working-class communities.

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In Charlotte, a city on the edge of the Blue Ridge foothills, activists scrambled to implement a broad early-warning network to track federal agents. Thousands of local volunteers — many of them outside the city’s political establishment — mobilized to monitor convoys and alert vulnerable families in real time. They patrolled neighborhoods, followed unmarked vehicles, and honked their car horns to warn others when Customs and Border Protection or ICE agents were spotted: acts of quiet guerrilla resistance that Border Patrol’s local commander derided as “cult behavior.” The effort spanned from downtown Charlotte into the rural western counties, with observers checking hotels and Walmart parking lots in mountain towns for staging areas and relaying tips across the region.

By the time the sheriff announced the feds had pulled out — and video showed a convoy hightailing it down the highway — locals were already hailing it as a “hornet’s nest” victory, comparing the retreat to British Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s abrupt withdrawal from the area during the Revolutionary War after being met with unexpectedly fierce resistance.

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Charlotte’s mostly quiet, semi-official resistance — dubbed the “bless your heart” approach for its polite-but-pointed Southern style — was notable. But the open rebellion brewing in coal country may be even more significant. In Harlan County, Kentucky — a storied epicenter of the Appalachian labor wars — residents recently got an alarming preview of the deportation machine’s reach. Back in May, a convoy of black SUVs rolled into the town of Harlan, and armed agents in tactical gear stormed two Mexican restaurants. At first, the operation was framed as a drug bust; Kentucky State Police on the scene told bystanders it was part of an “ongoing drug investigation.” But despite being carried out by DEA agents, it was an immigration raid, and local reporter Jennifer McDaniels noted that of the people arrested and jailed, their cases were listed as “immigration,” without a single drug-related offense.

Once the shock wore off, residents were livid. “We took it personal here,” McDaniels, who witnessed the raid, told n+1 magazine. Watching their neighbors being whisked away in an unmarked van — with no real explanation from authorities — rattled this tight-knit community. “I don’t like what [these raids] are doing to our community,” McDaniels continued. “Our local leaders don’t like what it’s doing to our community. … We just really want to know what’s happening, and nobody’s telling us.” It turned out at least 13 people from Harlan were disappeared that day, quietly transferred to a detention center 70 miles away. In Harlan – immortalized in song and history as “Bloody Harlan” for its coal miner uprisings — the sight of government agents snatching low-wage workers off the job struck a deep nerve of betrayal and anger. This is a place that knows what class war looks like, and many residents see shades of it in the federal government’s high-handed raids.

Blood in the Hills

For decades, Appalachia has lived with the same lesson carved into the hills like coal seams: When Washington shows up, it’s rarely to help. When the mining ended and industry dried up and when opioids ripped through these communities, the federal response was always too little, too late. When hurricanes and floods drowned eastern North Carolina — Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 — thousands of homes sat unrepaired a decade later, with families still sleeping in FEMA trailers long after the rest of the country had moved on. After Helene floods smashed the western mountains in 2024, relief trickled in like rusted pipe water — with just $1.3 billion delivered to address an estimated $60 billion in damage. A year later, survivors were living in tents and sheds waiting for their government to step in.

But the federal government’s priority is a parade of bodies — arrest numbers, detention quotas, a spectacle of force — and so suddenly, these forgotten communities are lit up with floodlights and convoys. Operation Charlotte’s Web saw hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed overnight. Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored. It only reinforces the oldest mountain wisdom: Never trust the government.

It’s a paradoxical arrangement that to many working Appalachians is simply untenable. “It’s a rural area with low crime,” one organizer in Boone pointed out, calling ICE’s authoritarian sweep “disgusting and inhumane.” The organizer also said, “That’s the number one conservative tactic: being tough on crime even when that crime doesn’t exist.” In other words, the narrative about dangerous criminals doesn’t match what people are actually seeing as their friends, classmates, and co-workers are being carted off.

To be sure, public opinion in Appalachia isn’t monolithic; plenty of folks still cheer any crackdown on “illegals” as a restoration of law and order. But the growing resistance in these communities suggests a profound shift: Class solidarity is beginning to trouble the traditional partisan lines. The old playbook of stoking rural white fears about immigrants begins to lose its potency when those same immigrants have become neighbors, co-workers, or fellow parishioners — and when federal agents descend like an occupying army, indiscriminately disrupting everyone’s lives.

“Abducting a so-called violent gang member at their place of employment is a contradiction,” a local Boone resident scoffed. It doesn’t take a Marxist to see the underlying reality: This isn’t about protecting rural communities, it’s about using them for political ends. For many who’ve been told they’re the “forgotten America,” the only time Washington remembers them is to enlist them as pawns — or body counts — in someone else’s culture war. And increasingly, they are saying no.

Appalachia has a long, if overlooked, tradition of rebellion from below. A century ago, West Virginia coal miners fought the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history at Blair Mountain, where thousands of impoverished workers (immigrants and native-born alike) took up arms together against corrupt coal barons. In the 1960s, poor white migrants from Appalachia’s hills living in Chicago formed the Young Patriots Organization: Confederate-flag-wearing “hillbillies” who shocked the establishment by allying with the Black Panthers and Young Lords in a multiracial fight against police brutality and poverty.

That spirit of solidarity across color lines, born of shared class struggle, is reappearing in today’s mountain towns. You can see it in the way Charlotte activists borrowed tactics from Chicago’s immigrant rights movement, setting up rapid-response networks and legal support. You can see it in how North Carolina organizers are sharing resistance blueprints with communities in Louisiana and Mississippi ahead of “Swamp Sweep,” the next phase of Trump’s crackdown, slated to deploy as many 250 agents to the Gulf South on December 1 with the goal of arresting 5,000 people. And you can certainly see it each time a rural Southern church offers protection to an undocumented family, or when local volunteers protest Border Patrol outside their hotels.

No Southern Comfort for Feds

This all puts the Trump administration — and any future administration tempted to wage war on Trump-labeled “sanctuary cities” — in an uncomfortable position. It was easy enough for politicians to paint resistance to immigration raids as the province of big-city liberals or communities of color. But what happens when predominantly white, working-class towns start throwing sand in the gears of the deportation machine? In North Carolina, activists note that their state is not Illinois — the partisan landscape is different, and authorities have been cautious — but ordinary people are still finding creative ways to fight back. They are finding common cause with those they were told to blame for their economic woes. In doing so, they threaten to upend the narrative that Appalachia — and perhaps the rest of working-class, grit-ridden, forgotten America — will forever serve as obedient foot soldiers for someone else’s crusade.

The resistance unfolding now in places like Boone and Harlan is not noise — it’s a signal. It suggests that America’s political fault lines are shifting beneath our feet. The coming deportation raids were supposed to be a mop-up operation executed in the heart of “real America,” far from the sanctuary cities that have defied Trump. Instead, they are turning into a slog, met with a thousand cuts of small-town rebellions. This is hardly the passive or supportive response that hard-liners in Washington might have expected from the red-state USA.

On the contrary, as the enforcement regime trickles out into broader white America, it is encountering the same unruly spirit that has long defined its deepest hills, valleys, and backwoods. The message to Washington is clear: If you thought Appalachia would applaud or simply acquiesce while you turn their hometowns into staging grounds for mass round-ups, bless your heart.

The post “Real” America Is Turning Against Trump’s Mass Deportation Regime appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Disappeared”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Years in Trump’s Sights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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