Donald Trump received Chinese President Xi Jinping and the visiting Chinese press pool last week as reporters from news outlets he had banished stood outside the White House gates. At one point, Trump joked that China, the world’s leading jailer of journalists, “has the friendliest press corps.” Now, his acolytes in Alabama are taking up Trump’s cause, emulating the Chinese Communist Party’s mastery of information control at the local level by decreeing what supposedly independent public radio reporters are allowed to say. 

The Alabama legislature passed a bill in late March requiring all state and local entities to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” in line with one of the many executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office. The legislation does not set forth penalties for noncompliance, but its sponsor, state Rep. David Standridge, called it “an opportunity to make a patriotic statement” on the House floor in January. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Trump ally, signed the bill into law.

Birmingham public radio station WBHM told its listeners in a letter from Will Dahlberg, the station’s executive director and general manager, that due to the law, which took effect October 1, the University of Alabama at Birmingham is forcing it to use the legislature’s preferred language in its reporting. The move puts it at odds with NPR, of which it is a member station; The Associated Press, which publishes the style guide used by newsrooms across the country; and other journalistic institutions. The station is licensed to the university, making its employees both state and UAB employees. Still, WBHM’s Journalism Code of Integrity emphasizes the newsroom’s independence and states that the university “should not — and cannot — expect to exert influence on WBHM’s journalists and its independent editorial process.”

Dahlberg wrote that not implementing the new language “may result in disciplinary action or termination of employees and affect WBHM’s relationship and support from UAB.” But nothing in the law requires the university to discipline or fire anyone. In other words, the university took a toothless stunt of a law, gave it teeth, and used them to take a bite out of press freedom.

Dahlberg also announced in the letter that he is stepping down from his position and leaving the station. His resignation was supposed to be effective October 16, but he posted an update that the university told him on Monday morning that he should pack his bags immediately. We cannot say for sure whether the university hastened Dahlberg’s departure due to his message to listeners and the criticism it generated, but the timing is certainly suspicious.

So why did the University of Alabama at Birmingham choose to embarrass itself rather than stand up for journalists and the First Amendment? As ridiculous as Alabama’s Gulf of America law is, its text did not tie the university’s hands. The university would not even have needed to bring a legal challenge to contest the law — it could have just let WBHM ignore it and supported its employees. 

The law only refers to “state and local entities” and makes no mention of media. It contains no penalties for noncompliance and limits its mandate to “when practicable,” giving a pass when complying would “impose an operational or financial burden.” Compelled speech is never practicable because it’s unconstitutional, but the operational and financial burdens of compliance are also significant. WBHM picks up national content from NPR and The Associated Press, for example. Are they expected to reject stories that say “Gulf of Mexico,” and fill that time with original reporting they haven’t budgeted or hired for? Or should they somehow intercept and edit those stories, likely in violation of their contractual obligations? 

There is also ample Supreme Court precedent for the proposition that the government cannot put words in reporters’ mouths. In a landmark 1943 case on whether the state could force students to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance, the court wrote that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” That means neither Standridge, Ivey, nor Trump is entitled to impose their definitions of patriotism on anyone —least of all the news media.

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More recently, some conservatives celebrated 2024’s NRA v. Vullo decision, which found that public officials could not “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.” There is no exception for radio stations that receive public funding. In 1984, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on editorializing by public broadcasters that received federal money, holding that funding a station doesn’t entitle the government to control its journalism — a principle affirmed in March when a federal judge rejected Trump’s executive order to defund NPR and PBS.

The university could have taken the position that, for one, public radio stations are not state entities, and two, the government choosing which words reporters must say is impracticable and burdensome. Last but not least, the university should have taken the stand that the First Amendment still exists to protect us all, despite Trump’s best efforts to cast it aside.

Just as law firms, news outlets, colleges, and others that have settled with Trump to stay in his good graces chose to cave when they could have easily fought back (as others successfully have), the University of Alabama at Birmingham made the cowardly choice to comply in advance.

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If anything, its capitulation is worse, because there’s no indication that the state intended to, or could, put up a fight. Is the Alabama legislature really so committed to Standridge’s silly law that it would waste taxpayer money litigating likely unwinnable constitutional battles? Maybe, but the university could have at least waited to see how, or if, the state would respond.

It is worth noting that Ivey is an ex officio member of the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees. That same board published an annual freedom of speech report in August. It consists of a single identical paragraph, copy-pasted each year with the only change being the date and the number of “events” held on its campuses that year, concluding that “the requirements of the [free speech] Policies have been repeatedly satisfied without a single alleged violation, which further speaks to their effectiveness in appropriately achieving the Board’s objectives.”

One is left to wonder if, despite pressuring WBHM to echo Trump talking points, the university will once again copy-paste that conclusion next year.

The post Public Radio Station Forced to Call Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” appeared first on The Intercept.

Even before federal immigration agents descended on communities around the country, killing immigrants and protesters, unmarked agents were abducting students who had voiced criticisms of Israel. 

Mahmoud Khalil was the first. After federal agents detained him at his alma mater, Columbia University, he spent more than 100 days in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana. It’s been over a year since he was released and returned to live with his family in New York City. The Trump administration is still trying to deport him. 

“Part of why I’m doing this right now rather than waiting 10 years or 20 years is because what’s happening now in ICE detention is a stain on the U.S. conscience,” Khalil tells The Intercept Briefing. “I don’t want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what’s happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now. I want to stop the cruelty now.”

This week on the podcast, Khalil speaks with host Akela Lacy about what he’s learned about how he became President Donald Trump’s top target, the role Columbia University played in that campaign, and his new book, “No Land to Stand On,” which chronicles Khalil’s experience in ICE detention, missing the birth of his first child, his ongoing saga to stay in the U.S. with his family, and more.

“It’s been so difficult just to have that conversation with my wife Noor about what would happen,” Khalil says. “What are we doing? Is it worth the fight? Should we just leave? But to me, this fight isn’t only about whether I get to stay in this country.”

“It’s about whether anyone — whether they are citizens or non-citizens — are able to speak out against government policies and against the support of Israel in this country. It goes down to a very basic thing: If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

It’s been almost three years since the October 7 attacks in Israel that preceded the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In that time, Israel has destroyed an entire region, killed more than 70,000 people and injured scores more, launched attacks on surrounding countries, and drawn the U.S. into a full-blown war with Iran. 

Over the last three years, at home in the U.S., something else fundamentally shattered. If anything is different now, it’s the honesty of it all. Free speech, civil rights, and equal protection under the law — of course, with all the appropriate exceptions. 

What started as a bipartisan commitment to suppressing criticism of Israel led to flagrant abductions of pro-Palestine students by unmarked immigration agents. 

Since the crackdown on students escalated in the early months of Trump’s second term, ICE’s war has spread even further. 

Since Trump reentered the White House, ICE has detained more than half a million people and says it’s deported almost twice that. More people are dying in ICE custody or at the hands of federal agents, who have killed at least eight people since January 2025, including two protesters in Minneapolis. 

Our guest today lives at this nexus: how the siege on Gaza fueled a reckoning at home and fused America’s anti-immigrant push with its battle over speech on Palestine. 

Mahmoud Khalil was the first person taken by ICE over student activism for Palestine last year. Khalil, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, fled the country at 18. He later moved to the U.S. to attend graduate school at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leader during student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. After being released from ICE detention last year, Khalil returned to living in New York, where he continues to fight against the threat of deportation. He joins me now. 

Mahmoud Khalil, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Mahmoud Khalil: Thank you so much for having me.

AL: To start, I want to ask about your family. You were being held at a remote ICE detention center in Louisiana when your son, Deen, was born last year. How is Deen now? 

MK: He’s a wonderful, wild 17-month-old. So he’s walking all over now, and it just feels so rewarding really to have him in our life right now, especially in a very difficult moment in our family.

I get so much inspiration from him and that pushes me to continue to work because this is not only about my family. It’s a story of so many families who this administration separated and inflicted violence upon them. It’s also a story of so many Palestinian families in Palestine whose fathers are in Israeli prisons [who] can’t meet their families, or even the ones in Gaza who are disappeared right now.

AL: I’m sure you and Noor talk about this, how you will tell Deen your story, and when. What are those conversations like?

MK: I try to push it as much as possible because usually you tell a story that already happened, but my story is still happening. Every day there’s something new.

And that’s what made writing the book difficult for me, because usually you write a memoir about a memory about something that has already happened to you. While, to me, I am now living it. So how would I write about it? That was like so difficult for me.

The same way about telling Deen about it: Would it be a happy story or a sad story? Would it be a story that, in fact, the legal system stood up for the unlawful detention of his father and the attempts to deport him — or it did not? Is it that the people in this country advocated for his father and the rights of so many other people in this country — or not? That’s still to be told, so I don’t want to really jump to conclusions at all. 

Part of why I’m doing this right now, rather than waiting 10 years or 20 years, is because what’s happening now in ICE detention is a stain on the U.S. conscience. So is the Palestine exception: the fact that freedom of speech, rule of law, basic dignities are afforded to everyone except for Palestinians. I don’t want to look back in 20 years and reckon with what’s happening. I want to stop the killing now. I want to stop the disappearances now. I want to stop the cruelty now.

AL: You were released from ICE detention last summer. What have the last 16 months in your life been like? 

MK: It’s been a saga with courts but also just as a family, with a new family now, like trying to really live our life. Try to build our future in a country that at least promised me some sort of stability and safety after living in Syria and then in Lebanon. So it’s been difficult to find that stability and that permanence in our lives. It is a fight to me, like it’s been since then.

It’s been so difficult, of course, just to have that conversation with Noor, my wife Noor, about what would happen. What are we doing? Is it worth the fight? Should we just, like, leave? But to me, this fight isn’t only about whether I get to stay in this country. It’s also about whether those speaking out for Palestine have the right to do so without being punished by the administration or by the government, whether it’s the Trump administration or another. So that’s why I feel like it’s a bigger fight than just about me or about our family.

But at the end of the day, we are people. I want to go to Bryant Park and just watch the movies there, but I can’t do that easily. There’s several precautions I have to do to be able to actually do this very normal activity that any couple would do on a normal day. But it is the cost, unfortunately, that was imposed upon me by ICE and the Trump administration.

AL: To your point, this is something that’s happening at multiple levels. And you write in the book that you were given the option to “self-deport” — to where, we don’t know. But you say that you felt like if you did that, you wouldn’t just be succumbing to this false smear campaign, but you would be giving the federal government the blueprint for how to silence dissent. You also talk about this being a story about the horrors of the broader immigration detention system in the United States.

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As of early July, more than 65,000 people are currently being held in immigration detention. You write in your book about your experience in Louisiana at LaSalle and the relationships you built with other people being held there, trading noodles. What was that like for you? You talk a lot about the psychological effects of some of the things: constant bright lights so you can’t sleep, constant freezing cold air. Can you describe the conditions of the facility that you were in?

MK: As I’ve mentioned, what’s happening behind ICE detention walls is a stain on the U.S. conscience. The fact that you have over 65,000 people at any moment detained in what’s called civil detention. That’s what they call ICE detention. And there’s nothing civil about detention. Even if it was a five-star condition, it’s still detention. You’re still separated from your family.

But I met in ICE detention so many incredible fathers and workers who came here seeking safety only to be snatched off the street, only to be told that they are criminals and they do not belong here.

I remember, and I talk in my book about, Najib, a man who was snatched off his immigration hearing — leaving behind his wife battling cancer with four little kids. Or Alexander, who came here begging for safety, begging for a place to stay, only to be told, “No, you should be safe where you’re from.” And when he was deported, he got killed.

They want to make these conditions so bad you don’t fight for your case, because you can fight your case, but that could take six months to two years, three years.

AL: Even if you win.

MK: Even if you win. That’s the fact. That’s how they weaponize the immigration system against you. Even if you win, you lose. They can appeal multiple times — not once or twice. Because it’s a kangaroo court. The system is so favorable to the administration, and the administration can change at any time.

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That’s why you rarely find now anyone who would win in the immigration system, because it’s fully controlled by this administration. To me, it doesn’t make sense that you call it courts, or an impartial system, or a neutral system. It’s a very partial system to the administration.

That’s why they keep the lights on all the time. That’s why the temperature is down; it’s always cold. The food is pretty bad. You only have a thin blanket. Because they don’t want you to feel comfortable or have the basics to fight your case.

AL: You’re very much still in limbo. It’s been almost six months since the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a final ruling in one of your cases ordering your removal. Last week, that same body denied a request to reopen your case.

I know your team is looking at bringing your case to the Supreme Court. What’s the latest there? And when will you know if you have to leave the country? 

MK: So 18 months since my arrest, the Trump administration has never brought any piece of evidence that I committed any crime. They haven’t even charged me with any crime because they know they control the immigration system.

So now we’re appealing our case to the Supreme Court — an Article III court — to look into the matter. Because what the Trump administration’s trying until now is to prevent me from even looking into the merits of the case that they are bringing against me. What they are claiming is that this case is purely an immigration case, and only immigration judges should be able to look at it. Then if you want to go to a federal court, it should go to the 5th Circuit or the courts in Texas and Louisiana, who are pretty much favorable to the administration as well.

So they are trying to prevent a federal court from looking into this matter. We are now taking it to the Supreme Court because no government should have the power to detain someone without any independent judgment into it.

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Usually, the basics in criminal law are that you are innocent until proven guilty. What they’re trying to do now in immigration is the total opposite: You are guilty until you are proven innocent — but you might be deported before then. So it is a long fight. But once again, this fight is not only about my ability to stay in this country. It’s more than this.

It’s about whether anyone — whether they are citizens or non-citizens — are able to speak out against government policies and against the support of Israel in this country.

It goes down to a very basic thing: If they are able to deport someone for their views on Palestine, they would be able to deport anyone on their views, whether it is pro-Palestine or pro-Israel or anything.

AL: You and your team have expressed concerns that any ruling at the Supreme Court could backfire and further curtail the rights of pro-Palestine students. I wonder if you can you talk more about that? 

MK: For now, what we’re taking to the Supreme Court is only whether a federal court has jurisdiction to look into constitutional claims. For me, my constitutional claim is that the Trump administration wanted to deport me because of my activism on Palestine.

That’s what we’re bringing right now to the Supreme Court. This wouldn’t necessarily directly impact or have a larger impact on the movement as a whole. But already the government is doing everything in its power to chill the speech of whether students or citizens who are speaking out for Palestine. So what we’re trying is actually to prevent that. 

But the other part is, we seek accountability also from the public themselves. You don’t get accountability only through courts. You get accountability through the people who are now voting in progressive candidates into Congress who may be able to change the law.

That’s how I get accountability. I get accountability when I see that my book is out and people are reading what this administration tried to silence — that they want to make an example out of me, but they failed. That’s how we seek accountability. It’s not only from the court itself, because at the end of the day, people who create the law actually push for the law.

Because everything we got right now, the rights that American citizens or anyone on this land have, it was a product of a fight. Whether it’s a fight during the civil rights movement or the anti-slavery movement before then. It did not happen because a judge woke up and decided to do what’s right. It’s because, actually, people pushed for that to happen, and that’s my part of the fight right now.

AL: Mahmoud, you were not a random target. We know now that ICE took names from the pro-Israel doxing group Canary Mission to create a list of targets. Far-right pro-Israel groups like Canary Mission and the USA chapter of the militant, ultra-Zionist group Betar — considered by even the Anti-Defamation League as an anti-Muslim hate group — targeted you. 

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Betar later claimed credit for ICE’s abduction of you and other students and said it shared “thousands” of — we know now it was about 5,000 — names of pro-Palestine students with the Trump administration for further action. In the lead-up to your abduction, Betar targeted you by name, as did actors at your alma mater, Columbia University: another group, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia, and a professor, Shai Davidai, who called specifically for the Trump administration to deport and arrest you in the days leading up to that abduction and tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

You write in the book: “What I did not anticipate was the U.S. government would one day consider the recommendation of hostile Zionist groups to target me, and then act on it.”

You sued for communications between these groups and the Trump administration. What more have you found out about how much they coordinated to target and arrest you and other students? 

MK: The targeting of me and other pro-Palestine protesters was written in a document called Project Esther that was produced by the Heritage Foundation. In there, what they said [was], for this plan to work, we need a friendly administration that would listen to us and work with us to implement it.

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That’s what happened after, because Stephen Miller was part of the Heritage Foundation or consulting for them, and then he became part of this administration, and actually worked on implementing this plan from A to Z.

From the discovery that the case in Massachusetts — AAUP v. Rubio— 

AL: This is the American Association of University Professors lawsuit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

MK: Secretary Rubio.

AL: Yes.

MK: A Reagan appointee found that the government officials conspired between themselves to deprive us from our freedom of speech. 

One of the ICE agents or one of the DHS agents testified that, “I’ve never seen something like this happen in our department, that such a request would come from really senior individuals in the administration.” So now what we are suing for is to see this communication between between these private actors, whether it is Canary Mission, the Heritage Foundation, Betar, and others as well, what we call Zionist hate groups, and these administrators, whether it’s Rubio, Stephen Miller, or DOJ, and the attorney general.

Because it was all in public. Betar went out and said, “We take credit for that. We actually communicated with the administration about that.” That’s what we know publicly. So now we’re asking for these communications. This case, we filed it in July, takes some time, but we’re hoping to really expose these networks that pushed anti-Palestinian bigotry to be institutionalized within the U.S. government itself.

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I got used to smear campaigns and doxing before my arrest. To me, that was part of an intimidation campaign to terrorize me not to speak out about Palestine.

To me, back then, the thought process was, usually they target your employer, they target your university, your father’s employers. I’m like, “Why would I work for anyone who doesn’t agree with my views on Palestine or who sees them as extreme? I don’t want to work for them.” 

You know, I never wore a mask [at Columbia] to hide my identity because the risk to me wasn’t that high. In Syria, I wore masks, because the risk back then was getting shot by [Bashar al] Assad forces or getting disappeared by mukhabarat, or intelligence officers.

I never imagined that what I fled from would happen to me in the U.S., the land of the free.

AL: After a quick break, more from Mahmoud Khalil, who has a new book, “No Land to Stand On.” We’ll be right back.

Welcome back. We’re speaking with Mahmoud Khalil, the first pro-Palestine student taken by ICE last year. 

You’ve filed three other lawsuits against the federal government and Columbia, and you are waiting for a response from the most recent suit which alleges a historical pattern of discrimination and retaliation against Palestinian students and pro-Palestinian activists, as well as a failure to address “coordinated harassment” against pro-Palestine students at your alma mater, the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

You’ve said that Columbia didn’t only ignore your concerns or documented harassment, but that the university facilitated your targeting and arrest by the Trump administration. 

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Of the suit, you said: “Columbia laid the groundwork for my targeting by the Trump administration through its deliberate indifference and discrimination aimed at intimidating Palestinian students.”

For listeners who might not be familiar with how Columbia handled protests against the genocide in Gaza, or its history trying to crush and later celebrate other student protest movements, against the Vietnam War or to divest from apartheid South Africa, can you tell us a little bit more about the role the school played here?

MK: When I applied to come to Columbia, I applied to come to an institution that had a long history of student activism, of standing up, at least the students of that institution standing up for human rights, whether it was during the ’60s and the civil rights movement or in the anti-apartheid South Africa, but also most recently, against private prisons, against fossil fuels. So it goes beyond that. 

That’s the institution I came to. But I was surprised — even before October 7 — the level of the anti-Palestinian racism on campus. For example, when we tried to bring Human Rights Watch to our school [in 2023], the school put so many hurdles in front of us to be able to host a 70-person event. I was shocked. Why would you prevent us from hosting such a reputable human rights organization to come and talk about apartheid in South Africa? The same happened when we tried to bring BDS — the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement — virtually on campus.

So on October 7, Columbia had a choice of being an example for other institutions around the country, of being a place where difficult conversations would be held, where they would stand up for human rights, where they would actually listen to their own students.

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Instead, Columbia employed surveillance systems against their own students, brutalized them. They called in the police about four times or more than four times in less than two years. Provided that, the last time Columbia called the police on campus was during the ’60s — like 60, 70 years ago.

They couldn’t contain the movement; they established a Gestapo-like office called the Office of the Institutional Equity that investigated every single Palestinian advocacy on campus, going after them with investigations. They brought private investigators; I remember being called by a private investigator that Columbia hired just to intimidate us.

AL: I spoke to students who got those calls, too, and they’re like, “What is this?”

MK: Exactly. Instead of just listening to their students, to their own students. These students were, most of them, 17 to 20 years old, watching a genocide happening in real time. 

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So that was the climate at Columbia. At the same time, they harbored these actors who were doxing us. As a Palestinian, I pleaded so many times to get protection from the university up until the day of my arrest.

AL: Right. The day before.

MK: The day before my arrest, March 7, I emailed the president. I knew she wouldn’t answer. But I wanted to keep the record because I emailed her before then in January when the first wave of doxing happened, and they did not do anything. 

A year later, when another student was kidnapped by ICE from Columbia, non-Palestinian, non-related-Palestinian student was detained by ICE — Columbia immediately issued a statement, immediately called lawyers, immediately called elected officials because that student did not have to do anything with Palestine.

I’m so glad that Columbia did that, but that’s what they should have done to me, to Mohsen [Mahdawi] and to Yunseo [Chung], to the other students who were targeted by ICE.

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But that’s again the Palestine exception in these institutions, where you have ideologues on the board of trustees of Columbia whose protection of Israel for them is much more important than protecting freedom of speech, than actually listening to their students, than the normal decency of just being board of trustees who have responsibility toward these institutions, but their loyalty was somewhere else.

AL: You’ve also mentioned future plans to sue other individuals at Columbia. In your suit against Trump, DHS, ICE and Rubio, your legal team cited reporting by me and my colleague Natasha Lennard on a network of faculty, alumni and other people at Columbia who were active in trying to target pro-Palestine students for deportation and arrest. You write in the book about coordination between Columbia students and faculty and some of these groups that smeared and doxed students. You write: “Those who fed our names to the machine continued to attend the school.”

What else have you learned about those people and those efforts? 

MK: I will continue to seek accountability until everyone who actively participated in me missing the birth of my child and me losing 104 days of my life, until they are all held accountable.

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I will not stop until I achieve that. I’m doing this up until now, with first suing the federal government, then the federal government and private actors. And the private actors also included some of the Columbia actors who were feeding our names to Canary Mission.

Because we have to think about this — Canary Mission and Betar, or the Heritage Foundation — they did not have people on the ground. The people on the ground were Columbia’s own students and faculty, who were not hiding that they were doxing us.

AL: They were sending billboard trucks all over New York.

MK: Exactly. So we got records about communication between some of the students at Columbia and Leo Terrell, the chief of the antisemitism task force in the DOJ, pushing them to target us, but also providing talking points that we later saw on Terrell’s own social media.

So that network goes beyond just random actors. It was a very coordinated effort to demonize our movement, to vilify the student movement that was rooted in human rights and equality and dignity. That’s why so many students joined this movement, not only Palestinians.

Palestinians at Columbia were barely 20, 30 students. But the movement that was built, it was built by Black students, by Asian students, by Jewish students. The coalition that was created as well, it had groups ranging from dancing groups, cultural groups, to the Young Democrats.

More than 100 groups joined together to call for Palestinian freedom, to call for the end of Columbia’s complicity in supporting Israel.

AL: Mahmoud, you mentioned this already, the logic of exception regarding Palestine. You write in the book about the logic of exception regarding Palestine, the idea that only certain categories of Palestinians are deserving of rights. You talk about how you’ve internalized that in some ways as well. 

This comes up in what I’ve noticed as attempts, even by well-meaning people, to paint you as “one of the good ones” among university students that have been portrayed otherwise, as an unruly mass of student protesters on a rampage in protesting this genocide. There was a similar effort around your Columbia colleague Mohsen Mahdawi, who was also targeted and abducted by ICE for his pro-Palestine activism. 

During the Columbia encampments, you were active in the protests, and you also worked as a negotiator between protesters and university administrators, one of whom told the New Yorker that you stood out from other protesters for your levelheadedness, which I found very interesting.

What is the effect of trying to separate you from the rest of the pack as the “right” kind of protester”? How do you overcome that?

MK: That really enraged me that you have to be a perfect victim to be worthy of people’s sympathy, to be worthy of the rule of law. Because what we protested is a genocide. That’s what we protested, and that’s the right thing to do. It shouldn’t be criminalized. Unfortunately, we internalized that. 

I talk a little bit about how I myself would highlight the numbers of women and children just to appeal to more people that like, “Look, young women and children are being killed by Israel.” But what about the men? Because that’s the level of the dehumanization of Palestinians in this country, that it only took the Trump administration to mention my name as “Mahmoud Khalil” and Palestinian for people to paint a certain image of me.

But in reality, I’m a Palestinian who believes in a free Palestine, where everyone from the river to the sea deserves safety, dignity, and freedom.

Just like the fact that I had to be that perfect victim. Because I’m not perfect. No one is perfect. Palestinians are, you know —

AL: Human. 

MK: Humans, the same as any other, any other nation. We have our aspirations. We have our culture. We have our deficiencies. We’re not out of this planet. But yet the media insists on treating Palestinians on a different standard, when they ask me about condemning or not condemning all of that, I’m like, you’re not interested in my views about Hamas. 

If you’re interested about my views about Hamas, you would ask me what are my views about Hamas, or a different question. But they use that question as a litmus test: If you say yes, then maybe you are a human worthy of talking to. If not, then you are that villain that this administration is talking about. That’s why we refuse the premise of the question as a whole. It’s not about the question itself. The whole premise of the question we refuse. 

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I think it’s for Americans to reckon with why we are here, why we are treating Palestinian stories differently from any other story. Whether it’s the Zionist lobby that for tens of years has fed this hate, whether it’s the media itself or Hollywood or just the institutions themselves that fed that hate and fed the image of the Palestinian as violent, rather than just a human being.

Or recently just how, it’s not only the Trump administration. It’s before them, the Biden administration, before them, the Obama administration. It goes back to every administration this country had dehumanizing Palestinians. Because Trump wouldn’t have had the power to do what he did with me were it not for what Colombia portrayed or said about the movement, or the Biden administration as well. 

AL: And as we’ve written about a lot at The Intercept the beginning of this crackdown on campuses started under Biden.

MK: Absolutely.

AL: I want to deviate quickly just because you mentioned this question, and I had written a question that I wasn’t sure we would have time to get to about being asked about Hamas because this comes up in The New Yorker article, and I was curious what you thought of how — I don’t know if you read the latest one from last month.

MK: The profile?

AL: Yeah. Because I was curious about how it was framed, because he says that you push back on the framing of the question, right? He asked you about your views on Hamas and that you protested the premise of the question. And then it said what your explanation was. But I thought it was interesting to print your defense of why you reject the premise, but still print your answer to the question.

MK: To me, Hamas is a political faction that has a military wing that got most of its popularity because of the failures of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, in bringing peace after the Oslo Accords, where a lot of Palestinians were excited about the prospects of peace.

But when they saw that Israel is undermining any prospects of a Palestinian state, a lot of Palestinians turned to Hamas as that resistance movement that may bring something.

And as I explain in my book, Palestinians supported Hamas not because of ideological reasons as much as because they wanted a way forward. For me, I’m against all Palestinian political factions because not one of them — whether it’s Hamas, Fatah, or PFLP — rose up to the aspirations of the Palestinian people, unfortunately.

That’s why I’m a strong believer in international law. I’m a strong believer in the fact that Palestinians have the right of self-determination, have the right to resist under international law, and have the right to really tell the world what they want. That’s what I want my answer about such a questions to be. 

AL: That’s not what people want to hear. 

MK: Yeah, exactly. They want just a yes or no, it’s a black and white.

I can’t tell people how to resist. That’s from being in the United States. For someone who’s going through bombardment, who’s going through checkpoints, whose house is being raided at night by the Israeli army, who the drones are above their heads all the time — I can’t, from here, tell them how to resist.

But for me, I’m a firm believer of international law, and that’s how I see the way forward. Again, I’m a Palestinian. I believe in a free Palestine, where everyone, from the river to the sea, have the right to live with dignity, with justice, with freedom, with equality. That’s what we’re asking for.

AL: This fight, when it comes down to it, is fundamentally over First Amendment rights for you and everyone in this country and the fight for freedom in Palestine.

A new report from Uncivil, a consortium of scholars and researchers, audited five years, going back to 2020, of publicly listed grants to 77 university centers, initiatives, and nonprofits doing “civility” work to promote pluralism and viewpoint diversity. The group found that almost all of the top funders, responsible for $82 million in grants, were groups and foundations deeply invested in conservative and/or “pro-Israel” networks. 

Unsurprisingly, these funders donated more to groups that mirrored and promoted their viewpoints over progressive groups by a ratio of more than 6 to 1. Just to underscore this point, the top five grantees who have received funding for “civility discourse” work include: Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council — which does model bills for state legislatures — the Anti-Defamation League, and Project Veritas. This is essentially a list of the most right-wing groups in the country at the moment. The top groups. 

While many of those groups present this civility discourse as politically neutral, Uncivil found that 70 percent of the campuses they looked at had been accused of suppressing pro-Palestine speech. This is now roughly a $200-million-a-year industry. 

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In the book, you talk about how this movement at Columbia backfired: in trying to suspend or shut down pro-Palestine groups, it ended up creating a 100 or more new pro-Palestine groups.

But given how strong this “civility discourse” push still is, where do you see the student Palestine solidarity movement going from here? 

MK: The fact that the president of the United States felt the need to go after a random student means that this movement changed the mainstream, means that we are winning. Otherwise, they would leave it to, I would say, covert racism and discrimination because it was always happening at Columbia, as I’ve mentioned these attacks against Palestine. But it wasn’t very obvious. Because they did not need to.

I don’t think there’s an amount of money that would stop the Palestine movement for freedom, because we can see that people now feel betrayed by their institutions, feel betrayed by their representatives, feel betrayed by the establishment that hid from them the endless support to Israel.

Because now if you’re a politician who’s supporting Palestine, that means you’re also good on other things. Because a lot of people, Palestine may not be their single issue or their first. But if you’re good on Palestine, that means you are good on other things.

That means that you are not bought by corporations and by AIPAC and by the oligarchs. That’s how it came right now. That’s why in Zohran’s race —

AL: Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayor. 

MK: Tens of millions were spent against him, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate, the Democratic candidate, also over $60 million were spent against him, and still he won [the primary]. But that doesn’t mean to me that we should stop. That means that we should continue until that dome breaks. And it will break. Sooner or later, it will break.

We need change. We need to stop sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, or any arms to Israel, or anything to Israel, really. Israel should be isolated, should be the pariah state that it is. That’s why I keep pushing now. I keep working on advocating for Palestine. That this did not stop. The genocide’s still happening. Every day there is a Palestinian getting killed by Israel, whether in Gaza or in the West Bank. 

But also we must acknowledge the violence that was inflicted upon students, upon this movement in this country. It’s not only universities that suspended and expelled these students, not only that the police also brutalized their students, but you have a big attack on this movement that’s happening across the country, whether from the federal government itself. But you can see across the country, whether it is in the South or even small counties also still trying to attack this movement.

My position as a Palestinian is, how can we really face this level of violence or this level of coordinated and well-funded attacks against the movement?

AL: Though the Trump administration has claimed repeatedly that your case is not about free speech or the First Amendment, they have not necessarily been arguing that your speech wasn’t constitutionally protected or that you are here illegally. Just to be clear, for anyone who’s confused, you are a green card holder, a lawful permanent resident. 

We’ve been talking about this New Yorker piece, as Andrew Marantz wrote last month. The government is arguing that none of those things — the legality of your actions, or your presence here — outweigh Trump’s power to detain you on whatever grounds it sees fit. In this case, claiming that your presence is a threat to American foreign policy interests.

You’ve talked about this fundamental contradiction in the American story of democracy and liberty, that the only real rights we have are those the government sees fit to enforce. You talk about the suspension of principles, depending on the circumstance. And this is a long-standing criticism of the American government, particularly if you’re a minority, a woman, a trans person, or if you’re poor.

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You’ve shared your unique perspective on this issue, having lived under a dictatorship in Syria under Bashar al-Assad. You have said at least in Syria, the government wasn’t telling you it was upholding your rights. [laughs] They were open about it. And since your abduction, we’re seeing the government be in many ways more open about its intentions here. But what happens after that? 

MK: It’s fascism. It is authoritarianism. What we’re seeing within my case or other cases is authoritarian practices. The government is trying their luck. For the government now, the worst thing that could happen is a court telling them, “No, maybe you shouldn’t do this.”

But for me, I lost 104 days of my life. For others, they lost their entire lives. I’m not an expert on authoritarianism or dictatorships, but I lived under dictatorship. As I said, in Syria, I hid my face because I knew the risks. It wasn’t Assad was going out and saying, “We have freedom of speech, and we have all of that.” It wasn’t like that. You knew the consequences.

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Here, they would gaslight you into “No, you have rights. You have all of this.” But you have rights because it’s convenient for them. As long as you’re not damaging or impacting the structures of power, you have freedom of speech, you have rule of law, the Constitution applies to you. But the moment that your speech or your actions threaten that structure of power, you would see the opposite — which is authoritarianism at the end of the day.

Trump is not hiding it. When they arrested me, they said, “This is a blueprint to go after everyone who’s speaking out for Palestine.” It’s not like they hid their intentions at all. 

Part of me, like years from now, America would look back on ICE detention, on Palestine, and say, why did we let this happen? And that’s part of my fight. That’s why I’m doing this right now, because we need to stop it now. We can’t afford to wait 20 years from now because people are being killed. People are being disappeared. 65,000 at any moment are in ICE detention separated from their families.

AL: Mahmoud, are there any final thoughts you would like to leave our listeners with?

MK: I wrote this book to raise the alarm that we can’t afford to stay silent. That in our backyards, there are ICE detention centers. In our backyards, there are weapon manufacturers who are shipping weapons to Israel to kill people. We must act now, and we can’t just afford to wait.

AL: Mahmoud Khalil, we’re gonna leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.

MK: No, it’s my honor, Akela. Thank you so much.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Video editing by Sean Turner. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. And a special thank you to our recording engineer David Herman at Good Studio. Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find our reporting. 

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Mahmoud Khalil: “We Can’t Afford to Stay Silent” appeared first on The Intercept.

How much does it cost to get more information about a cop who punched someone in the face?

If you guessed anything lower than $2.5 million, you’d be wrong — at least according to the city of Eugene, Oregon.

In August, the local news outlet Double Sided Media filed a public records request for records about police officer Justin Peckels, which focused on potential misconduct between 2018 and 2026. Peckels has been the subject of community complaints, including for punching a resident in the face during a traffic stop, making the records vital for oversight and their release clearly in the public interest.

The city’s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04. (A separate request by the outlet for similar records concerning a former police officer, Eric Klinko, was met with a comparatively modest estimate of $195,869.52, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)

“Once the City receives payment of $2,484,599.04 staff will continue processing your request,” the letter from the department’s public records division read. “If the actual cost of processing your request exceeds the amount you have paid the City, you will be required to pay the difference before the City will provide the records you have requested.”

Peckels’s file is either the largest in the world, or city officials have intentionally maintained their databases in such a way as to ensure fulfilling public records requests is prohibitively expensive. The city’s response points, at a minimum, to the latter. It justified the multimillion-dollar price tag by claiming it couldn’t narrow the custodians whose records it would need to search, despite the targeted nature of the request, and maintained it must search all records of all city employees, past and present.

By that logic, if someone ever worked in Eugene’s parks and recreation department, their records could contain responsive information about police misconduct, and must be manually pulled and reviewed, one by one.

This goes far beyond incompetence. It’s an intentional effort to make a response artificially voluminous — and cost prohibitive — to intimidate the journalist into dropping it entirely. 

Normally, agencies are required to search the specific custodians most likely to possess responsive records, not every groundskeeper or clerk on the city payroll. If the city were acting in good faith, officials would have asked Double Sided Media to help them identify the most likely record-holders, not take it upon themselves to cast a citywide dragnet as its first step.

What makes Eugene’s money-grab particularly galling is its technology double standard. While it apparently can’t invest in efficient search software, the police department recently signed a two-year $342,000 contract for nearly 60 AI-powered Flock automated license plate readers. This project was so secretive that the ACLU of Oregon had to sue the city for records about how the cameras were being used and demonstrates, among other inclinations, the city’s eagerness to employ sophisticated software to deploy against residents. 

Yet that technological sophistication disappears as soon as a journalist requests public records about the department’s internal accountability process, and simple keyword searches are suddenly cumbersome. 

Troublingly, Eugene’s $2.5 million bill is not an anomaly.

In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.

The same year, the Drug Enforcement Administration told a requester it would cost $1.46 million for records about the DEA’s role in the search and capture of the Mexican cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

In 2019, the Army tried to charge $300,000 to release military base water test results for the presence of toxic chemicals. The Army agreed to waive the exorbitant fee after facing intense backlash. 

The list goes on and on.

Luckily, records requesters seeking federal documents have a defense against these capricious invoices. Recent FOIA amendments aim to ensure if an agency misses its response deadlines, it can’t charge most fees. 

At the local level, however, these protections disintegrate. While Oregon grants agencies the discretion to reduce fees when the disclosure would benefit the public, agencies routinely ignore these provisions.

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For small newsrooms like Double Sided Media, a $2.5 million invoice is effectively a gag order that was never actually about covering costs, but bullying the requester to drop their inquiry (all while Eugene Police Department launches its own “press” initiative to document its policing). It also sets the precedent for using this chilling tactic on any journalist or watchdog as it sees fit. 

Double Sided Media is rightly appealing the fee estimate, and it should prevail. But cities like Eugene will continue these efforts unless lawmakers across the country force agencies to adopt fee caps, mandate public-interest fee waivers for journalists, and require agencies to procure software that allows them to respond to records requests in an efficient and timely manner.

Until then, police departments will likely continue to issue multimillion-dollar ransoms for their records — weaponizing the public’s right to know into another avenue for police to operate with impunity.

The post Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop appeared first on The Intercept.

Our Government’s Real Priorities

News reports that next year’s U.S. military budget will top out at $1.5 trillion if President Donald Trump gets his way are misleading at best. The true total, if Trump’s proposal passes, could be at least $1 trillion higher.

Long before Trump took office, U.S. taxpayers have spent far more on the Pentagon — and its wars — than most know. For decades, Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon have hidden the military’s true cost through little-known bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. Journalists, academics, and think tank experts have, with rare exceptions, perpetuated the problem by repeating “official” numbers that don’t come close to telling the full story.

Data shows that the budget was already between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion in the last full fiscal year, 2025, as detailed by a recent Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, report I co-authored. Trump’s requests would add another $781 billion, bringing the potential total to at least $2.581 trillion in 2027.

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The troubling revelation that the government is misleading the public and effectively hiding hundreds of billions in military spending reflects the out-of-control nature of the Pentagon budget. It’s also the only sector of government spending that seems largely insulated from public scrutiny: Imagine the outrage if news broke that the government was hiding hundreds of billions in spending for public housing, Medicaid, or hunger prevention programs.

People have a right to know how much tax money goes to military spending. This is critical to debating the proper size of the military budget both on its own and compared to other spending priorities, particularly any program related to education or the social safety net. Understanding the military’s true cost means understanding where and how the government has been hiding the money.

Spending Hidden in Other Budgets

It’s difficult to untangle how much the country actually spends on the military in part because Congress pays for the armed forces and wars from many budgets rather than one. Beyond the agency controlling the military branches that Trump calls the “Department of War” (the official name is still the Department of Defense), hundreds of billions of dollars are effectively hidden in the budgets of at least 17 other government agencies and entities. In total, each of these additional sums are larger than what Congress appropriates for every non-military agency.

For years, TomDispatch and a small but mostly ignored group of budget experts have warned that total military spending is far higher than reported. Our new POGO report consolidates this prior work and five different methodologies for calculating the true military budget. The report shows a consensus that military spending was at least $1.5 trillion, with three of five methods reaching similar estimates of $1.7 trillion to $1.8 trillion.

The newest of the five methodologies provides the easiest way for anyone to see the hidden spending. The methodology uses data from a government website, USAspending.gov, the product of a 2006 law requiring the government “to give the American public access to information on how their tax dollars are being spent.” The site includes the closest thing to actual spending receipts, making it easier to identify military spending beyond the Department of War’s budget.

Let’s take a look at where the money’s hiding.

Hidden Nuclear Weapons Costs: $33.8 Billion

The most obvious place where Congress and the executive branch hide military spending is in the Department of Energy’s budget. That’s where taxpayers can find the bill for the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, which cost around $33.5 billion in 2025.

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The Department of War controls and deploys these weapons, and their costs should properly be part of its budget, not rolled into the Department of Energy. While the Energy Department plays a role in overseeing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, putting nuclear weapons spending in the DOE’s budget is like a city putting the costs of its police department’s bullets in its transportation department budget rather than in the police budget.

Another $300 million in nuclear weapons spending hides in the budgets of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and the Army Corps of Engineers, bringing the total to nearly $34 billion.

Hidden Military Personnel (Veterans) Costs: $393.3 Billion

Taxpayers spend huge sums on the military in the Department of Veterans Affairs and related budgets. The existence of a separate veterans’ agency is a sleight of hand that leads the public to believe this is not military spending. It is. The only difference is the appropriation of money to still another agency.

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To recruit and maintain armed forces, any government needs to pay its troops and offer sufficient long-term benefits (such as pensions, medical care in retirement, and survivor benefits) to encourage people to join and stay in a dangerous job that involves the risk of killing and being killed. These forms of long-term compensation are personnel costs, just as much as basic pay, and they should be counted as military spending. If a military fails to spend money to support vets, it’s unlikely to function for long. The Bureau of Pensions for veterans was originally part of the War Department (which was the name until 1947, long before Trump’s rebranding) and its budget until 1849 when Congress transferred the bureau to the Department of the Interior.

Funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs adds another $389.8 billion to the USAspending.gov methodology total. Almost $4 billion more in long-term spending on personnel hides in the budgets of the departments of Labor, Justice, and several others. All told, these sums reach a staggering $393.3 billion.

Coast Guard and Other “Homeland Security” Costs: $16.8 billion

Spending for an entire branch of the military, the Coast Guard, is concealed in the budget of the Department of Homeland Security rather than the Department of War. While DHS controls the Coast Guard during peacetime and the branch plays some non-military functions, the Coast Guard is one of the armed forces and is controlled by the Pentagon in wartime.

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Excluding non-military activities (such as improving boat safety and cleaning up oil spills), Coast Guard spending adds nearly $14 billion to the total military budget. Additional DHS expenses for programs to counter weapons of mass destruction, radiological preparedness, cybersecurity, and other military spending add just under $3 billion, bringing this total to $16.8 billion.

The True Cost of the Department of War: $1.3 Trillion

The bulk of military expenditures still appear in the Department of War’s budget, which pays for the armed forces and the rest of the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy, including all the weapons, salaries, some benefits, military construction, fuel, maintenance, operational expenses, and much more. USAspending.gov receipts show the Department of War alone spent $1.273 trillion in 2025. The Pentagon controlled another $480 million in spending that hid in the budgets of the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Transportation.

Combined with the $444.8 billion tallied previously, total military spending hits $1.718 trillion. That’s more than double the military budget usually reported for 2025: the $850 billion Congress appropriated to the Department of War.

Total Military Spending by Agency (FY2025)

*No FY2025 spending. However, there was a $1 billion budget appropriation to the Executive Office of the President for “Submarine Security Activities, National Security Council.” The government also funded account line items in the Department of Agriculture budget to support the Air Force and Army.

Still Other Costs

The $1.7 trillion estimate for last year is conservative and still may be too low. While the War Department budget contains classified funding for the CIA, National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies, the government may hide more intelligence spending elsewhere. NASA space research involves considerable military work, which could add another $10.5 billion, according to USAspending.gov data. Some would also count $1.9 billion in FBI salaries and expenses found in the Department of Justice budget.

Other experts consider much larger expenditures in the DHS budget to be military spending, given that department’s role in protecting the “homeland” and the increasingly militarized nature of Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Border Patrol. This would add at least $216.9 billion after excluding DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency spending. Alternate methodologies also include $211.9 billion in interest payments on the more than $40 trillion in national debt stemming from past military spending and wars.

You can add and subtract forms of spending that you think belong or don’t belong in the true total, thanks to the transparency of the POGO report’s methodologies. In total, these excluded sums could add another $441.2 billion to the USAspending.gov method’s prior total of $1.718 trillion for 2025. 

Growing Opposition to Unchecked Pentagon Spending

POGO report’s conservative estimates of the FY2025 budget being $1.5 trillion to $1.8 trillion reveal that the true military budget for 2027 could hit $2.6 trillion if Congress gives Trump what he wants. This includes requested increases totaling $781 billion for just the Department of War ($500 billion), the Iran war ($70 billion), veterans ($144.9 billion), nuclear weapons ($53.9 billion), and the Coast Guard ($12.5 billion), let alone other smaller forms of hidden Pentagon spending.

When mind-numbing numbers like these reach the trillions, it can be tempting to think, What does it matter if it’s $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion or $2.6 trillion?

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It helps me to remember that every single dollar spent on the Pentagon is a dollar not spent on our children, on healthcare, on affordable housing, on efforts to slow catastrophic climate change, and much more.

If Congress passes Trump’s full budget proposal, military spending will eat up around 75 percent of the discretionary budget Congress controls. Every dollar spent on the Pentagon is also a dollar more for Trump to continue waging his illegal, disastrous war on Iran and the funds to make good on his threats to attack Cuba and other countries.

Advocates for increased military spending will likely insist that more money is always needed, no matter today’s true total. That these Pentagon boosters have cited incorrect figures and helped mislead the public for decades raises serious questions about their credibility and the basis for their seemingly endless demands for more money.

Thankfully, there’s growing resistance to Trump’s proposals. Nearly 6 in 10 people nationwide believe even the official $1.5 trillion request is “too high,” according to a recent poll conducted by ReThink Media and the Costs of War Project at Brown University, a nonpartisan research group (where I’m a contributor). And Democrats appear to be listening: They’ve voted against Trump’s budget in unprecedented numbers as it winds through Congress. Some Republicans have also expressed concerns about supporting Trump’s proposal given fears about the rising national debt.

There are growing calls to cut the Pentagon budget by hundreds of billions of dollars without touching salaries and benefits for troops and veterans. This would still leave the country with the world’s largest military budget by far and allow Congress to reallocate the savings to programs that improve the lives of everyday Americans.

The public needs a full, accurate accounting of the military. Congress could provide an annual True Total Military Budget that tallies all of the Pentagon’s spending in one place and stop hiding funding in other agencies’ budgets. Until this happens, journalists and analysts can help by explaining the full scale of spending and no longer repeating incomplete totals.

As Trump asks for the highest military budget in the history of the world and people continue to suffer the effects of his war with Iran — which has killed and injured thousands, increased the price of gas and groceries, and risks even greater catastrophic harm globally — it’s time to have an informed debate about how much the country really needs to spend on its military.

The post The Pentagon’s Secret Budget appeared first on The Intercept.

The reviews found that staff across multiple ICE detention centers mismanaged medication, skipped physical exams, ignored lab orders, and delayed treatments for sick detainees. Detention staff often failed to properly document or communicate the status of their deteriorating patients. In several cases, they failed to provide timely or appropriate life-saving care during emergencies.

“It’s very clear that the rampant systemic medical abuse is a core feature of the immigration detention system,” said Stacy Suh, program director of the Detention Watch Network, upon reviewing the topline findings. “You can’t get well in a detention center.”

At least 56 people have died in ICE custody under the second Trump administration. ICE’s own Health Services Corps conducts a “mortality review” following an in-custody death to assess whether appropriate medical care was provided. The findings of this report are based on medical records and staff testimony. (ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

A total of eight such reviews related to detainee deaths from 2025 were published in a trove of 25-plus documents on ICE’s public records library on September 25. Four days later, a little after a lawyer representing this reporter in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit noticed these documents, ICE appeared to have pulled them offline and de-indexed them.

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While they were no longer available through internet searches, the records remained live on internet archives of the webpage. The larger trove of mortality reviews was first reported on by The American Prospect and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The eight reports contain granular details of the medical events leading up to 2025 deaths in custody of Johnny Noviello, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, Marie Ange Blaise, Nhon Nguyen, Oscar Duarte Rascon, Santos Reyes Banegas, Tien Xuan Phan, and Chaofeng Ge. They provide the most comprehensive view yet into the escalating death toll in detention during President Donald Trump’s second term.

“Egregiously Managed Care”

The mortality review for Vargas, a 32-year-old from Mexico, found several clear examples of what ICE’s reviews called “inappropriate” care.

Vargas had complained of dizziness and blurred vision upon arrival at the Florence Detention Center in Arizona on August 4 last year. His labs also showed signs of uncontrolled diabetes. Ten days later, Vargas tested positive for Covid and was moved to a medical unit for isolation. His symptoms were treated with just a one-time dose of acetaminophen.

When Vargas’s chest X-rays later showed signs of pneumonia, he was treated with antibiotics that “did not align” with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, his ICE mortality review concluded. On August 30, a few days after being released from isolation, Vargas reported having trouble breathing. He was treated with albuterol, an asthma inhaler.

This was “not the right or sufficient treatment for someone at this level of respiratory distress,” said Dr. Katherine Peeler, a medical adviser with Physicians for Human Rights and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, who reviewed the reports for The Intercept.

A day later, the symptoms worsened. He was complaining of shoulder pain, but wasn’t checked for oxygen levels. An employee found Vargas unresponsive later that day.

“This is a case of pretty egregiously managed care,” Peeler said. “Waiting for an emergency is not a way to treat people who are sick.”

The findings appear consistent with a new report by the advocacy group the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project surveying 64 detainees at Arizona ICE facilities.

“With essentially no oversight,” Liz Casey, a social worker and author of the report, said in a statement about the report, “it is nearly impossible for individuals in detention to get any assistance for urgent issues like medical neglect or abuse.”

Preventable Death

Another mortality review uncovered fresh information in the death of Noviello, a 49-year-old Canadian national, on June 23, 2025, at ICE’s Federal Detention Center in Miami. Noviello’s autopsy ruled that his cause of death was a preventable form of kidney failure.

When Noviello entered the ICE facility, he had a documented history of seizures and high blood pressure, for which he was medicated. The intake nurse at this facility ordered labs and allowed Noviello to continue taking his prescription medications himself.

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The labs were never completed, according to the new documents. Noviello was referred to a behavioral health specialist because he reported using one of his anti-seizure medications, a benzodiazepine, for anxiety.

On May 29, a corrections employee flagged Noviello for “a possible hunger strike” and medical staff started logging an increase in depression, disorientation, and poor hygiene. By June 20, detention staff put Noviello in solitary confinement “for increased observation” and confiscated his medicine to administer at the officer’s station.

Three days later, a behavioral specialist documented that Noviello had not received his medication and referred him to a psychiatrist.

The ICE death review found that the provider in charge “did not place pill line orders, obtain vital signs, conduct a physical examination, or document a follow-up plan.” When Noviello was found unresponsive on the floor later, the staff did not “provide effective CPR or secure his body to the gurney during transportation,” the auditors concluded.

Botched Emergency Responses

Botched emergency responses were noted in two other cases.

Blaise, a Haitian national and the only woman who has died in ICE custody so far during Trump’s current term, entered the Broward Transitional Center in Florida with elevated blood pressure in April 2025. Twenty days later, she collapsed.

Her mortality review found that health staff didn’t give her rescue breaths and “failed to initiate” CPR “despite Ms. Blaise’s pulselessness.”

“Between 8:45 p.m. and 8:58 p.m., health staff monitored Ms. Blaise pending EMS personnel’s arrival,” the report notes, instead of actively trying to resuscitate her. They also did not record her vital signs during the response. 

The review of Chaofeng Ge’s suicide death at the Moshannon Valley facility in Pennsylvania also pointed to insufficient medical care, said Peeler, the Physicians for Human Rights adviser.

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Ge’s transfer summary had mentioned a past suicide attempt, a mood disorder, and use of antidepressants, but the provider in charge of his care “did not take appropriate action,” according to the review.

Four days in, guards found him hanging in a bathroom stall at around 5:20 a.m. Instead of immediately cutting him down, they left the scene to first call for help and thus “delayed life-saving measures” by 5 minutes, the report said. Staff “lacked knowledge” of basic life-saving measures, the report found, noting they did chest compressions too fast and delivered rescue breaths inconsistently.

Revelatory Reports

The reviews of Nguyen and Rascon, in which ICE auditors determined that medical care met adequate standards, were nevertheless revelatory. Both men entered ICE custody extremely unwell. Nguyen’s diagnoses included dementia; Rascon, 59, appeared to have late-stage Alzheimer’s, multi-organ failure, and several infections. Both volleyed back and forth between detention and local hospitals.

In Nguyen’s case, ICE’s own medical staff noted that it did not have the resources to care for Nguyen, who was 55, or assist him with his daily life — and requested his release from custody.

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As the Trump administration undertook its deportation blitz, the number of people in immigration detention ballooned, from 40,000 people in January 2025 to nearly 66,000 by December 2025, according to the American Immigration Council.

At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security gutted oversight and transparency mechanisms.

“We’re seeing record numbers of people, including elderly people, people who are pregnant, people who have serious medical issues,” said Suh, of Detention Watch Network. “All of those folks are now being funneled into detention into a system that does not provide adequate health care — and has never provided adequate health care.”

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

The post ICE Deleted Reviews for Deaths in Custody That Cited Shoddy Medical Care appeared first on The Intercept.

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Fetterman, who takes a hard pro-Israel line, was the lone holdout in his party, despite one of his constituents being the most recent Palestinian American killed in the West Bank by Israeli settlers.

Near unanimous Democratic support, however, was not enough to secure passage of the measure, with the Senate voting 51–47 against advancing the resolution. The measure would have required the State Department to report on whether it is investigating the killings of nine U.S. citizens by Israeli security forces or settlers since 2022.

Although the resolution was crafted to focus on victims most sympathetic to U.S. elected officials — American citizens slain at the hands of the right-wing Jewish settlement movement — it still drew nearly universal opposition from Senate Republicans. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only member of the GOP to vote in favor of it.

The most recent U.S. citizen killed by settlers in the West Bank was a 19-year-old from Philadelphia. Though local Pennsylvania officials called for an investigation, neither Fetterman nor his Republican counterpart from Pennsylvania, Sen. Dave McCormick, voted for the Senate measure.

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The resolution’s sponsor, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said last week that he has struggled to get information from both the Biden and Trump administrations about whether they are pursuing justice for U.S. citizens killed in the West Bank.

“The Biden administration did not do enough to secure justice, and the Trump administration has not done enough,” he said. “And if we can’t get accountability and justice for American citizens, imagine how hard it is for Palestinian families who don’t have a U.S. passport to get justice and accountability when they are killed or their villages get razed.”

Setting Up an Embargo

Van Hollen’s measure would have required the State Department to report on whether it or the Justice Department are investigating the killings of U.S. citizens in the West Bank, including that of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was slain by the Israeli military while reporting on an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in 2022.

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Van Hollen’s resolution also directed the State Department to report on the status of U.S. citizens held in Israeli prisons or military detention, pointing to the lengthy incarceration of a Palestinian American 16-year-old boy from Florida.

Advocates hoped the resolution would help them accomplish much larger aims, however. Under U.S. law, the government is forbidden from selling arms to countries that engage in “a consistent pattern of gross violations” of human rights. Van Hollen’s resolution asks whether Israel’s actions fit that pattern.

In a policy paper published earlier this month, the pro-Palestine nonprofit IMEU Policy Project argued that abiding by foreign assistance law “would require halting all arms exports to Israel, whether from private U.S. companies or the U.S. government, irrespective of whether purchases are paid for with U.S. or foreign funds.”

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mt., pointed to that larger aim when he argued against the resolution on the Senate floor.

“Make no mistake: The sole objective here is not justice or accountability for Americans,” Daines said. “It is to cut off security aid to our ally Israel in its time of need.”

“Of course, any loss, all loss of American life is a tragedy,” Daines continued, adding that he was “very confident this administration will get to the bottom of this issue.”

Growing Support

Tuesday’s vote centered on whether to discharge the resolution from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Resolutions such as the one Van Hollen offered are privileged, meaning that they are the rare type of measure where any senator can force a full floor vote.

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Van Hollen said last week in a briefing hosted by IMEU Policy Project that his resolution had drawn far more support, in the form of co-sponsorships by other Senate Democrats, than a similar push sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2024. That measure, brought weeks after the October 7 attacks, drew the support of Paul and just 10 members of the Democratic caucus.

Since then, Democratic voters have soured on Israel and increasingly support Palestine, according to public opinion polls. Mainstream Democrats are also facing off against a Republican in the White House rather than Biden, who generally got a free hand from his own party when it came Israel.

“While I was pleased that so many of my Democratic colleagues joined this effort, it’s clear the United States must do more,” Van Hollen said in a statement after the vote on Tuesday. “It is our responsibility to ensure recipients of U.S. taxpayer dollars act in line with our laws and our values — this resolution was an opportunity to shed light on a reality that flies in the face of that principle.”

The post Israeli Settlers Killed His Constituent. Fetterman Is Sole Democrat Against Investigating Them. appeared first on The Intercept.

More than 25,000 people have had their lives upended and been forced into unfamiliar cultures, governments, and legal systems when the Department of Homeland Security deported them to so-called “third countries,” places where immigrants previously living in the United States have no connections and few rights — and where a deportation business booming under the second Trump administration finds its murky endpoints.

“The point is to scare people,” said one Trump administration official, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report. “With countries like Palau or Eswatini, the point is that the Administration can threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere.”

As is the case for many tools of its cruelty, the Trump administration did not invent third-country removals — it refashioned them to serve its own excesses. In the past, the U.S. used the obscure administrative compromise for people who could prove they would face persecution or harm if returned to their home country yet did not meet other requirements for asylum. The U.S. had to meet humanitarian and legal obligations, such as ensuring third countries would not turn around and deport migrants right back to their home countries. It was a last-resort tool that still left people displaced from their homes and communities in service of the country’s arcane immigration laws. But the current Trump administration’s policy, premised on agreements with at least 35 countries, has been anything but humane.

Nor has it been particularly legal. After the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the third-country deportation scheme, DHS scheduled a flight to deport migrants involved in a class-action lawsuit challenging the policy to Burundi, Rwanda, and the Central African Republic. Despite a successful emergency motion their lawyers filed last week, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement jet flew to two African countries that hold third-country removal agreements, according to the American Prospect. It is not yet clear who was on the plane or whether ICE carried out third-country removals in violation of a federal court order, and the Trump administration is now aiming to take the legal fight to the Supreme Court.

The saga illustrates the Trump administration’s proclivity for obfuscation, secret contracts, nondisclosure, and dealmaking of the backroom variety. Whether digitally disappearing people from ICE’s online detainee locator tool last week, or inking multimillion-dollar sole-source contracts with inexperienced companies of questionable provenance, the Trump administration has pursued its immigration goals under the cover of darkness, often justifying the secrecy with invocations of national security, all while attempting to shield itself from public scrutiny and accountability in the process.

“Deportation, Inc.: The Rise of the Immigration Enforcement Economy,” an ongoing investigative video series from Lawfare and SITU Research, in partnership with The Intercept, examines how U.S. immigration enforcement has evolved into a multibillion-dollar industry shaped by private profit and political power — where contracts, capital flows, and institutional incentives increasingly govern detention, deportation, and surveillance. The project joins other efforts to shed light on the often invisible economy of immigration enforcement, including the Berkeley Human Rights Center, Human Rights First, Third Country Deportation Watch, and others.

The first installment, released last December, focuses on the business of migrant detention and profit motive underpinning the brutality of privately run ICE detention facilities. The second chapter, out today, looks at the network of flights shuffling migrants between those facilities, as well as the shady deals brokered with the governments of deportation destinations.

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Many details of these bilateral third-country removal agreements are not public, but the logic is transactional: Countries accept asylum-seekers and other immigrants from the United States in exchange for aid or other forms of financial compensation. Many of the countries involved in what The Intercept’s Nick Turse has called Trump’s “global gulag” are so dangerous that the State Department includes them on its “Level 4 Do Not Travel” list, “the highest advisory level due to life-threatening risks. And the very fact that these people are sent to a third country, rather than repatriated, means they have at least a viable asylum case.

Some but not all of the underlying texts of these agreements have come to light, often popping up in far-flung corners of the internet. This is not only a bad practice in government transparency, but a potentially illegal one as well. Lawfare, where I serve as managing editor, has argued as much in a federal district court in Washington, D.C., where the publication has sued the State Department over its failure to disclose international agreements into which the Trump administration has entered — in violation of the Case-Zablocki Act.

Though accelerated by the Trump administration, the secrecy that has enabled the growth of the vast, invisible economy of immigration enforcement traces back to at least 2001 with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Following the September 11 attacks, the new Cabinet-level department, along with other federal reforms, for the first time linked immigration with national security, which resulted in massive budget increases, new abilities to shield immigration information from the public, and general judicial deference to the executive branch that accompanies matters of foreign policy and national security.

Even the current Trump administration’s third-country deportation apparatus is beginning to build up its own record of cruel precedent. In the same class-action case last year, the Department of Homeland Security attempted to deport class members to Libya and South Sudan, in apparent violation of a temporary restraining order granted by a federal judge only weeks prior. During a hastily arranged hearing, a federal judge asked a Justice Department lawyer about the plane’s whereabouts, to which the government attorney responded, “I’m told that that information is classified, and I am told that the final destination is also classified.” Asked under what authority the government had classified the location, the Justice Department lawyer did not have an answer.

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From the start, the Trump administration conceived of its third-country removal policy as another tool to inflict wanton abuse on irredeemable “illegal aliens.” As Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained last year during a Cabinet meeting, “We are working with other countries to say ‘We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries.’” What he failed to mention is that the people he’s demonizing have human rights, and that the countries he negotiated deals with have extensive records of violating them.

For the first time, “Deportation, Inc.” aims to render visible the dark web of agreements, transactions, and private contractors that make these grave abuses possible.

Correction: September 29, 2026, 12:50 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct the premiere date of the first installment of Deportation, Inc.

The post Inside the Business of Trump’s Third-Country Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.

Rumors were spreading for weeks in the spring of 2022. At Arizona State Prison–Marana, the talk centered on an employee of Management and Training Corporation, or MTC, the Utah-based for-profit prison company that ran the facility. A clerk at the commissary, Alicia Simmons, had been carrying on an illicit sexual relationship with an incarcerated person.

In April, the situation exploded onto the radars of top prison officials. A fight broke out between two prisoners that two former MTC employees who spoke to LOOKOUT and The Intercept later said was over Simmons. After the fracas, according to a state-level investigation, Simmons admitted to having sex, sometimes four times a week, with an incarcerated person. She was let go by MTC and served with a search warrant for her phone and car. The Arizona Department of Corrections Special Investigations Unit conducted an official probe.

According to an internal report on the sexual abuse allegations filed at the prison in the wake of the affair, a high-ranking prison guard at the detention facility prepared a “PREA packet,” an initial recitation of allegations and evidence made in compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.

The PREA packet cleared the way for information about the allegations to become public: Its existence would be noted the following year in a legally mandated PREA audit. The audits must be published by all carceral facilities covered by the law at least once every three years and must list all incidents and allegations of sexual contact between staff and incarcerated people.

And yet, a year later, Marana’s PREA audit said nothing about the allegations against Simmons.

“There was no reported incidents of sexual abuse or sexual harassment reported within the last 24 months,” according to the final October 2023 PREA audit.

Now, a former employee of MTC who worked at the Marana prison is speaking out for the first time about what top officials at the facility knew ahead of the PREA audit’s publication. The whistleblower, Alex Randall, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept that he had direct conversations about the sexual abuse allegations with the warden, other officials, and Simmons herself. Randall said he was not the only MTC employee the warden discussed the matter with.

“I was sitting in with my manager, me, and the warden when the warden told us all about what happened,” Randall said of the day Simmons was issued a warrant and let go from her position.

Randall’s account — including of what prison leadership knew about the allegations — was corroborated by another former employee at Marana with direct knowledge of the warden’s conversations. The second former employee spoke to LOOKOUT and The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. An Arizona Department of Corrections Information Report prepared by a prison staffer on the day of the incident also said information about allegations of sexual contact between a staffer and an incarcerated person was provided to the warden.

The incarcerated person denied having sex with Simmons, according to a later Department of Corrections investigation, and Simmons was not referred to outside law enforcement for criminal prosecution.

Despite widespread knowledge of the allegations and the official paper trail, the warden at the time — Jeremy Casey, who is listed as the primary contact in the audit — verified in the published report there were no reported incidents of sexual abuse or harassment. (Simmons, MTC, Casey, and the Arizona Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

There were at least two other incidents of sexual abuse reported during the period covered by the 2023 PREA report, according to Arizona Department of Corrections investigative reports obtained through public records requests. One was from August 2022 about an employee allegedly kissing an incarcerated person and having an email correspondence with him that was “sexual in nature.” In another case, just weeks before the 2023 PREA audit was conducted, the corrections department’s Criminal Investigative Unit conducted interviews about an allegation that a prison guard had encouraged an incarcerated person to perform oral sex. Those allegations also should have appeared on the subsequent PREA audit but did not.

In 2023, Arizona State Prison–Marana was closed and languished in dormancy until it was sold to back to MTC in 2025 — just as the Department of Homeland Security was looking for more bed space to detain immigrants.

Reopening as ICE Camp

Randall’s insider account of the lapse in PREA reporting and other conditions are resurfacing Marana’s checkered history at a critical moment for the prison.

Last year, after selling the prison back to MTC, the Marana facility is slated to reopen as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. Federal officials, according to government documents, want to nearly triple the prison’s capacity to roughly 1,300 beds, according to a Department of Homeland Security floodplain notice. It is unknown when the prison is set to reopen.

“ICE is pursuing all available options to expand detention bedspace capacity, including partnerships with state and local governments to house detainees at existing facilities,” Fernando X. Burgos, a public affairs officer for ICE, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept.

The plan is facing significant oppositions from local residents and officials who say they are being cut out of any oversight for reopening the prison.

Critics of the plan say the failure of MTC to properly deal with the sexual abuse allegations and other problems, including those stemming from what insiders say were staffing and resource issues, raise serious questions about the company’s future running a massive immigration detention center at the same location. By their nature, private prisons, which cut costs for the sake of their bottom lines, are predisposed to the types of conditions that can lead to abuses like sexual misconduct and encourage shoddy reporting by officials, critics of the Marana facility argued.

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“The whole business model is taking an inherently expensive proposition — the care and feeding of thousands of people, the running of a small city — and skimming a profit off the top,” said Caroline Isaacs, the executive director of Just Communities Arizona, a nonprofit working on criminal justice reform; she is also a member of Pima Resists ICE, known as PRICE, which opposes reopening the prison as an ICE camp.

Isaacs pointed to wider allegations about other MTC facilities, including in Arizona, and said local activists are “very familiar with the terrible track record of MTC.”

She added, “It’s baked into the business model of for-profit incarceration.”

“Holy Shit, I’m Fucked”

Randall, who took the job as an accounting clerk at the Marana prison in June 2021, said Simmons exhibited odd behavior as soon as he met her. He said he saw her emerge from the commissary area “sweating bullets,” even during cool months, despite having no obvious physically straining work to account for it.

Then, in April 2022, Randall said he was standing outside alone when Simmons came rushing toward him.

“She goes, ‘Holy shit, I’m fucked,’” Randall said.

Simmons disappeared into a manager’s office, according to Randall, and in short order, two other guards ran toward the commissary area. Randall said he later learned two incarcerated men had gotten into a fight there.

According to Randall’s account, Casey, the warden, later told Randall and his manager what had happened: Simmons was suspected of having sexual contact with multiple people held at the prison. The fight allegedly stemmed from jealousy between two of the men who were said to have had sexual relationships with Simmons. (The man at the center of the April 2022 allegation later denied having sex with Simmons; in a follow-up interview with the inspector general’s office, he said he was gay. Simmons later denied the second affair, according to an Arizona Department of Corrections investigation.) Both men were placed in segregation and interviewed by prison officials; one was ultimately transferred to a different facility, Randall said.

Simmons was let go the same day, according to Randall and a Department of Corrections investigation. Randall said that nearly all employees of the prison knew about the allegations.

Randall said, “A lot of the guards were saying, ‘Well, this isn’t the first time this has happened here.’”

The Admission

According to Simmons’s own account, she repeatedly had sex with an incarcerated person.

Arizona law says that all sexual contact between incarcerated people and prison staffers or contractors is considered felony sexual abuse because people behind bars cannot legally give consent.

“That staff member should have been referred for prosecution,” Brenda Smith, a professor at American University’s law school and the director of the Project on Addressing Prison Rape, said of the Marana case, noting that such sexual contact may be considered a constitutional violation.

Though the law is clear that prison staff engaging in any sexual contact with incarcerated people is abuse, Simmons’s case is complicated — and raises vexing questions. Simmons admitted to having sex with a person in custody, but she also told state investigators that she was coerced.

The details of Simmons’s case were recounted in an April 2022 investigative report from an Arizona Department of Corrections Office of Inspector General, which was obtained by LOOKOUT and The Intercept through a public records request.

According to an interview with Simmons described in the report, she was asked if she had engaged in sexual activity with one of the incarcerated people and said yes. She had done so “multiple times,” she said. Simmons, however, told investigators she was frequently threatened, including physically, into having sex with the incarcerated person.

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According to the inspector general’s report, “Ms Simmons said she was scared and felt she needed to keep having sex with inmate [redacted] or she would lose her job.”

She complained to investigators that there were no cameras in the commissary room where the events took place.

Despite the threats related by Simmons to investigators, there were “a handful of times she was okay with having sex with inmate [redacted] but not all the times,” the report said.

The inmate Simmons said she was having sex with, however, denied any sexual contact with her, according to the inspector general’s report. That led the investigator to conclude that “there is not enough evidence to prove” they did have a sexual relationship. The case was “submitted to administration for review and processing,” according to the investigative report. (The Arizona Department of Corrections did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the status of the investigation.)

No criminal charges were filed in Marana, Tucson, or the relevant counties, according to an extensive records search. The Arizona Attorney General’s Office confirmed that it received no criminal referrals on the matter.

Smith, the law professor, was not surprised that the incarcerated man denied the allegation of an illicit affair. There was little to gain, she said, by admitting anything. Spurring an investigation or prosecution could cause headaches at the facility or lead to potentially negative consequences for the man in custody.

“He gets moved. He might lose his job,” Smith said, referring to jobs held in prisons by incarcerated people. “All of those things are really important for him to ultimately leave the facility with conditions that are favorable for him.”

Denying such an incident, especially in a carceral setting, Smith said, is “so common for vulnerable people who are victimized.”

Prison With Problems

The Simmons case wasn’t the only documented incident of alleged sexual abuse at the Marana prison. Enrique Olivares-Pelayo, who was detained in the prison for around 11 months in 2011, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept that he had a sexual relationship with a staffer at the prison. After rumors began circulating about them, he said, the employee was fired. (PREA standards were only fully implemented and mandated by the Department of Justice in 2012.)

Manara’s history goes well beyond unreported sexual misconduct, extending to broader concerns about the MTC facility. Randall; the second former MTC employee; Olivares-Pelayo; an Arizona Department of Corrections memo; and the inspector general report all made allegations about conditions at Marana — for imprisoned people and staff alike.

Two persistent issues revolved around the quality of food for incarcerated people and the high heat inside the facility. Olivares-Pelayo and Randall both said incarcerated people had to find ways to beef up their calorie intake because they were served substandard meals. Incarcerated people would sometimes fatten up squirrels with corn chips, Olivares-Pelayo said, and then cook them to eat for extra calories. He said the squirrel meat tasted “like rabbit, kinda mid.” A 2010 memo from the Arizona Department of Corrections found that “Kitchen sanitation was substandard.”

The same memo said that all the living areas for incarcerated people were “extremely warm and humid.” It noted that the prison’s swamp cooling system seemed not to be working, an observation echoed by Olivares-Pelayo based on his stay there. He said the facility often felt like a “convection oven.”

The Marana prison, Randall said, was plagued by widespread drug use before it closed. Drug use came up in the inspector general office’s report as well as in a list of investigations conducted by Arizona Department of Corrections about Marana, also obtained by records request.

Olivares-Pelayo said proper reporting channels were rarely followed during his time there 15 years ago. The prison, he said, was effectively a free-for-all for incarcerated people. Guards did rounds but almost never cracked down on anybody for infractions. Prisoners routinely tattooed each other, for instance, which was officially banned, though consequences were rarely if ever meted out.

Incidents of violence or misconduct, Olivares-Pelayo said, were handled inside the prison to prevent conditions there from being made public.

“People would be punished internally,” he said. “They always covered up their dirty stuff.”

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MTC has faced consequences before, in Arizona and elsewhere, for its prison conditions. When, in 2015, a riot broke out at an MTC-run prison in Kingman, Arizona, a Department of Corrections investigative team concluded poor conditions — citing, for example, a hunger strike because of issues with “food service operations” — had precipitated the incident.

“Based upon the observations and reviews of available materials, inmate interviews, staff contacts and interviews,” a report on the incident said, “the Assessment Team concluded that the inmate population at ASP-Kingman was dissatisfied with their conditions of confinement. Thus, they rebelled by way of rioting.”

Citing investigators’ finding that MTC operated with a “culture of disorganization, disengagement, and disregard,” then-Gov. Doug Ducey canceled the company’s contract for the Kingman facility.

Left Out of Audit

The allegations against Simmons and two other allegations of sexual misconduct against guards were omitted, the Marana PREA audit was certified on December 1, 2023, with a declaration that the prison was in full compliance with all 45 applicable PREA standards. The audit, conducted over a three-day site visit from October 16 to 18, reported that the finding of zero sexual abuse allegations was “verified by the Warden, Chief of Security, PREA Compliance Manager, Investigator, Classification, Health Services Administrator, Random staff, Random and targeted inmates.”

It also found no incarcerated people had been placed in segregation for sexual-abuse-related reasons in the prior 24 months.

Randall, along with the other former employee who corroborated his account, disputed both claims, citing in particular the solitary confinement of the two men who were alleged to have fought over Simmons.

“That was the first time we used our segregation unit, at least since I’ve worked there,” Randall said of the 2022 incident.

He said the prison kept records on disciplinary matters that should have included whatever investigative paperwork was generated from the Simmons case.

“I know for a fact they kept those investigation records,” Randall said.

Incidents of sexual abuse in prison are frequently omitted from PREA reports, said Smith, the law professor.

“A lot of it depends on how committed the agency is to a full audit,” she said.

According to Smith, PREA compliance has gotten worse after the Trump administration last year made significant funding cuts, canceling an estimated $16 million to the Department of Justice’s National PREA Resource Center.

“For a PREA audit to be missing an incident of abuse that multiple prison employees confirm took place,” said Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist for the Prison Policy Institute, “shows two things: One, that the prison is failing to take sexual abuse seriously and, two, that the PREA auditing system has some major flaws.”

ICE Expanding

After the state of Arizona’s 2025 sale of the prison, ICE announced in February 2026 that the Marana facility was slated to reopen as an immigration detention center. The contract had been won by the buyer, MTC. In the contract announcement, ICE included a boilerplate stipulation: “The contractor shall also abide by the March 7, 2014, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regulation under the Prison Rape Elimination Act.” A February 25 federal procurement memo named MTC as “the sole owner and operator of the Marana detention facility that meets ICE requirements.”

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A more recent floodplain notice from the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, indicates federal officials aim to expand the facility well beyond its original 513-bed design to roughly 1,300 beds. The expansion, according to the government notice, will come through the addition of temporary housing, with renovations potentially allowing parts of the facility to open even while construction continues elsewhere on the site.

The plan has drawn opposition from Marana residents and local officials, including town Council Member Patrick Cavanaugh and the community group Pima Resists ICE. The locals said the state government, the feds, and MTC left them out of any meaningful discussions about how the expansion would be managed.

Pima County Supervisor Jen Allen, who has been openly critical of the prospects of a new detention camp opening in the county, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept that the state’s sale was an example of “bad business and bad decision-making at all levels.”

“It’s still shocking to me that the state of Arizona knew full well of MTC’s history: of riots, prison escapes, and cover-ups,” Allen said. “And despite this, still chose their $15 million sale over protecting Marana and Pima County residents from an unaccountable, untrustworthy, and dangerous prison operator.”

Meanwhile, with controversies raging over the swelling numbers of those detained by ICE, the death rate in immigration detention camps has more than doubled since President Donald Trump began his second term, according to recent reporting from Reuters.

Isaacs, of Pima Resists ICE, said that, in tandem with ICE’s widening crackdown, MTC’s record of obfuscating problems should strike fear in the hearts of local leaders.

“ICE clearly has no idea what they’re doing, and they don’t care,” she said. “There could be lawsuits or strain on the infrastructure of the town.”

“Nobody knows what’s going on, and nobody will know — until it’s too late, until very bad things happen.”

The post Prison That Didn’t Report Sex Abuse Allegation Against Staffer to Reopen as ICE Camp appeared first on The Intercept.

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In a filing in state court, The Intercept accused the city of Alvarado, Texas, and its police department of refusing to release records sought under the state’s Public Information Act. The news outlet asked a judge to order the city to release records of police communications on the days before and after a noise demonstration outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland detention facility that turned violent.

Despite The Intercept agreeing to pay hundreds of dollars for the records, the city has failed to process the payment and left the records request in limbo, according to the complaint and to attorney Terry Mutchler, a veteran defender of records access who is representing The Intercept in the case.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and this is one of the singularly most distressing cases that I’ve seen in terms of public access to records,” Mutchler said. “This is stonewalling on steroids.”

“The Intercept cut the check, and now the city won’t cash the check and they won’t give us the records — it’s radio silence,” said Mutchler. “This is a situation where the public officials should be ashamed of themselves for forgetting who they work for.”

A representative of the Alvarado city government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The complaint stems from a request filed under the state’s Public Information Act by freelance journalist C. Frances, who, on behalf of The Intercept, sought records of communications by Alvarado Police Department personnel in connection to a noise demonstration on July 4, 2025, at the Prairieland facility. The protest devolved into an armed confrontation and shots were fired. An Alvarado police officer suffered non-life-threatening injuries in the shooting.

More than a dozen protesters, including people present that evening and others with varying levels of involvement in the protest, were arrested in the aftermath of the incident.

That case against the protesters became a proving ground of the Trump administration’s war on the activist left, ending with hefty sentences for many of the co-defendants, including Benjamin Song, who was sentenced to 100 years in prison for attempted murder and other charges. Song and other defendants are set to appeal their convictions.

The records saga began on February 16, when Frances submitted a request to Alvarado city government for internal and external communications to and from its police department between July 4 and July 18, 2025. Over the next month, amid a back and forth with city officials over the scope of the request, Frances eventually narrowed her request to all email communications directly related to the incident. Weeks later, the city told Frances the bill for the records, including labor hours spent processing and redacting them, would come to $854.17.

Months later, after a back and forth referred to by The Intercept’s counsel as a “tortured procedural history,” The Intercept decided to pony up for the records and issued a payment for the full amount requested in April.

“Despite receiving payment,” The Intercept wrote in its filing Friday, “neither the City nor the Police Department have produced any of the responsive emails, have not certified that no responsive information exists, have not obtained or communicated any attorney general decision authorizing continued withholding of the requested information, and have not otherwise responded substantively to the Request.”

The post The Intercept Sues Texas City Over Refusal to Release Police Records on Prairieland Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

But in the 12 weeks since, more U.S. military personnel have been injured and killed than in the 18 weeks of Epic Fury. Of the 880 U.S. troops left wounded or dead, 444 have occurred since July 7, according to the official Pentagon count.

President Donald Trump’s war of choice has left nearly 100 U.S. troops wounded or dead this month alone, according to the Pentagon. This includes 29 Navy sailors and eight Marines added last week to the official tally of those injured, following claims by a top Iranian official that an attack with a new “anti-ship missile” had “created hell for the Americans.”

The Marines were injured in a cruise missile attack on September 14, according to two U.S. officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. The Marines were aboard an unidentified vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, they said, and potentially suffered brain trauma among other injuries. The attack was first reported by NBC News.

A cargo ship was hit that same day by a projectile in the Strait of Hormuz, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations organization. The officials would not say if Marines have been stationed on commercial vessels transiting the Strait.

The Navy did not answer The Intercept’s questions about when and where the sailors were wounded. A Navy official said that casualties had been “fully validated” but would not name the affected “units.”

This latest in a series of casualty spikes comes as additional details of the toll of Iranian attacks on U.S. troops become more apparent. Air Force personnel, alone, endured more than 1,200 “alarm reds” — the official code for imminent attack by missiles, aircraft, or ground forces — during just 38 days earlier this year, according to Air Force chief of staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach. He noted that these Iranian strikes also led to more than 420 “long lonely walks” by explosive ordnance disposal technicians. Dealing with such munitions can be lethal: Army Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was killed and another soldier was wounded “during a controlled detonation” of an Iranian attack drone at Iraq’s Erbil Air Base in July.

President Donald Trump recently said the conflict with Iran is “small potatoes,” Vice President JD Vance asserted it is not a “war,” and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced: “There haven’t been American deaths, it’s really just an economic choke-out.” 

At least 19 personnel have died according to the official Pentagon count of war dead, including 11 killed by hostile fire. The actual number of troop deaths in the region since the war began is higher. The latest known fatality is Capt. Bianca Wilkerson, 37, of Norfolk, Virginia, who died on September 18 from a “coronary issue,” according to her brother. He said she returned from Saudi Arabia on September 10 and was headed back but died on the return flight, according to reporting by the Virginian-Pilot.

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For almost six months, The Intercept has reported on anomalies in official counts offered on the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the White House. On April 21, for example, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public acknowledgment by the War Department. Despite repeated questions for months, the Pentagon has not commented on the disparities.

Prior reporting by The Intercept also found that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” When the Washington Post also recently suggested that the Pentagon had suppressed the casualty numbers, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth called the report “DISGUSTING and FAKE.”

The Pentagon’s list of the names of the dead is still, for example, missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and died while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6.

The military has claimed that Davius was part of another mission but a recent National Guard news release noted that when “Trump made the decision to attack Iran and launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, the division headquarters began conducting combat operations.” The 42nd served as the primary headquarters leading what became, according to Maj. Gen. Jack James, the division commander, the “largest and first long-range precision fires campaign in the history of the United States Army.” James specifically saluted Davius whom the Guard admitted was “conducting operations” when he died.

The eight Marines added to DCAS last week appeared in the tally almost 10 days after the September 14 attack. Historically, there was little lag between a casualty occurring in the field and its inclusion in the DCAS system, according to two people who used to work on the official casualty tally. “We got it very quickly. We could report the number of casualties very fast,” Joan Crenshaw, who worked on DCAS during the war on terror, previously told The Intercept, noting that data was refreshed daily. A current U.S. official also previously told The Intercept that the recent reporting lags are a blend of incompetence and deliberate slow-walking of casualty data to manage public fallout.

Iran’s ability to overwhelm U.S. air defenses in the Middle East using attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, as previously reported by The Intercept, has left the U.S. military in a precarious situation. Despite months of claims by Trump and Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated, Iran has attacked more than 15 bases across the Middle East, according to information from U.S. officials and Iranian reports. These strikes damaged or destroyed hundreds of facilities at U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, according to Central Command. Air Force personnel alone conducted 48 airfield repairs in a little more than a month, according to Wilsbach.

An Iranian missile and drone attack on February 28 destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the region’s most critical U.S. military logistics hub. The Pentagon claimed for months that the strikes did not significantly impact military operations, but acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao recently admitted that Iran “blew the hell out of Bahrain.”

The post U.S. Has Suffered More Casualties In Iran Since the Conclusion of Operation Epic Fury appeared first on The Intercept.

The artificial intelligence sector has rocked itself in recent weeks following a string of disclosures from the frontier AI labs and some of their personnel. OpenAI and Anthropic have both disclosed incidents in which their software, during routine internal testing, unexpectedly broke into the networks of other corporations. The tests were akin to a disastrous demonstration of a guided missile: After humans hit launch, the autonomous technology veered off course in deeply alarming ways.

Observers and industry figures quickly interpreted the incidents not simply as an indicator of the software’s power. Instead, they argued that it presaged an age of computers possessing something no computer ever has: bad intentions.

If computer systems could behave in ways that are unexpected — or even shocking — without being directly steered by humans, it seems only a short step until computers might have desires, ambitions, and even malice. If OpenAI’s tools could unexpectedly crack the servers of a rival corporation to accomplish a task posed to it by engineers, couldn’t it also surprise us with actions that result in harm to people, or even deaths?

Frontier lab employees and executives have answered with an emphatic yes. On September 8, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation on X, writing, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.” Coxon’s former Anthropic colleague Evan Hubinger replied, casually agreed: “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Hubinger noted he personally puts the odds of the species’ extermination by AI, somehow, at over 10 percent.

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This has all resulted, unsurprisingly, in a global panic, with a sudden flurry of calls for regulatory intervention, from legislation that would require an emergency “kill switch” for AI systems, to a proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders to halt AI development altogether.

Throughout this period of alarm, how exactly a large language model could literally end humanity has remained vague. Some have speculated that this technology could foster the creation of some sort of novel bioweapon; others worry many thousands of AI agents could somehow hack all vital infrastructure simultaneously. In both those supposed doomsdays, the details are still fuzzy.

It should have come as quite the shock, then, when CNN reported on September 18 of a recent incident in which the use of artificial intelligence could have genuinely led to the extinction of the species.

This past spring, according to the news outlet, a U.S. Special Operations Command analyst used a large language model to generate an intelligence report that indicated “a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.” The finding prompted the U.S. military to make quick preparations to intercept the vessel by force. But this AI-generated intelligence, according to one source who spoke to CNN, was “entirely false.” Yet, the source said, it “almost started a war.”

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A shooting war between the U.S. and China could play out in an incalculably wide variety of ways. But one entirely plausible path would be an exchange between the world’s first and third largest nuclear weapons arsenals — an event that would transcend warfare into global cataclysm.

CNN’s reporting garnered attention, but was not followed by nearly the degree of sustained, grave concern of the AI safety news cycles that preceded it. It didn’t seem to prompt company scientists to question their careers, nor did it spur calls for regulatory intervention or self-imposed limits by the companies who furnish the Pentagon with this technology. After weeks of discussion of how AI could hypothetically kill everyone, the public learned of a concrete way in which AI really could have started a war that might have killed everyone, and the world quickly lost interest.

At a summit this week with President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinpeng argued that nations must “ensure that the development of AI is always under human control,” again underscoring fears of AI breaking free of human oversight. But it was under direct human supervision that a large language model almost misled the U.S. into instigating a war with his country.

The discrepancy illustrates a gap in concern by both the general public and policymakers over AI risks: There is great alarm over an AI system “going rogue,” disobeying its commands and the interests of its creators and operators, and pursuing a malign agenda of its own. Much of the AI safety discourse revolves around the hypothetical threat of “superintelligence,” defined broadly as a computer system that can outthink even the smartest humans across domains. There’s also the belief that software systems will both achieve sentience and bear a grudge against their creators and act to undermine them, if not destroy them outright.

Yet there is considerably less public alarm over AI performing exactly the actions that the Pentagon asks of it, whether targeting airstrikes or generating actionable intelligence reports for U.S. Special Operations Command.

Following weeks of intense discussion by the industry’s most visible figures whether American AI labs should self-impose limits on their engineering or have such limits imposed by the state, there has been virtually no suggestion that any limits be placed on these companies’ single most powerful customer: the U.S. military.

This has led to seemingly counterintuitive narratives coming from industry leaders, with figures like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman simultaneously warning that his product is existentially dangerous while selling it to self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth. “Despite incessant warnings from AI companies that AI is harmful, even in hypothetical ways, they are in fact promoting that their unreliable products be instrumented within national and safety-critical infrastructure, such as defense and nuclear,” Heidy Khlaaf, chief scientist at the AI Now Institute and former systems safety engineer at OpenAI, told The Intercept. “Given AI’s lack of reliability and accuracy in such critical context, that is what will ultimately lead to a catastrophic accident. However, if such issues were acknowledged, that wouldn’t be profitable for AI companies and would slow down adoption.”

U.S. AI players likely have fresh in their minds the recent experience of Anthropic, which was temporarily blacklisted from governmental work after it said it did not want its software used to conduct unconstitutional mass domestic surveillance or operate fully autonomous weaponry. Similar efforts to place limits on how their products can be used to spy or kill might incur the wrath of the particularly vengeful Trump administration, especially as Hegseth has worked to eradicate civilian harm reduction processes to emphasize greater “lethality” as the military’s guiding principle.

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The rapid adoption of their technology also represents a massive long-term financial boon to U.S. AI labs-turned-defense-contractors such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic — all of whom once vowed to not pursue military work because of potential harms. Despite these pledges, these firms now have access to the near-limitless Pentagon appropriations spigot, and the $200 million deals many of these firms signed with the Department last year pale in comparison with what the U.S. military could pay in the decades to come. Altman and his peers might also be less willing to sound the alarm on Pentagon-based AI threats because such a clarion call would be coming from inside the house.

Earlier this month, The Intercept revealed contract documents detailing the intimate collaborative relationships between these companies and the military, in which the Silicon Valley giants would have a say in helping the Pentagon craft its overall military AI strategy. This closeness comes at a time when the Hegseth boasts of drone-striking civilian fishing boats across the Caribbean, and the commander-in-chief speaks casually of “annihilating” entire civilizations.

Lucy Suchman, professor emerita of anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University, attributed the difference in public alarm and media focus to the power that tech billionaires command when it comes to shaping narratives. Popular Silicon Valley ideologies, such as the Bay Area’s strain of “Rationalism” and the effective altruism movement, tend to consider a hypothetical “existential” threat from a superintelligence more worthy of attention than near-term violence. This priority, she said, that pervades the AI safety research community, obscures the real and present threat that today’s AI models pose in a world chockablock with nukes.

“Given the U.S. Dept. of War’s commitment to maximizing the speed and scale of target generation, AI-enabled targeting is already an existential threat for civilians on the ground, and when the targets are the military assets of nuclear armed states, the threat becomes global,” said Suchman, who has studied artificial intelligence since the 1970s and serves as a member of the nonprofit International Committee for Robot Arms Control. “The almost targeting of the Chinese ship might further underscore the danger not from rogue AI agents, but a rogue U.S. secretary of war.”

Hegseth, who once derided the rules of engagement as “stupid,” extends this approach to artificial intelligence, too. Describing the Pentagon’s new AI strategy in a January memo that includes the word “accelerate” 24 different times, Hegseth’s laid out a plan with an intense focus on speed for speed’s sake. “Speed Wins,” Hegseth wrote. The war secretary explained the military would adopt experimental technologies as quickly as possible by “aggressively identifying and eliminating bureaucratic barriers to deeper Integration” of AI, without mention of ensuring that the technology actually works beforehand.

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Heidi Kandiel, a legal adviser on new military technologies at the International Committee of the Red Cross, told The Intercept that speed itself carries military risks for any country. “I think one of the central issues that comes up is speed and scale, which are often the touted benefits of AI,” she explained. “If a system is unreliable, is operating on poor quality or outdated data or is used within a flawed decision-making process, AI would allow these errors to be reproduced much faster and across a far greater number of targets or operations.”

Reining in a corporation is a very different prospect than putting fetters on a government. Policymakers who feel comfortable blasting the irresponsibility of Anthropic might lack the political will to levy similar criticisms against the president or the Pentagon. Madeline Berzak, a scholar at the University of Chicago’s Existential Risk Laboratory, told The Intercept that nuclear threats have long been met with paralysis (or a shrug) because people feel helpless in the face of them. You can tweet angrily at Dario Amodei, but it’s less satisfying to yell at U.S. Strategic Command. “This [China] incident and the lack of response is an attention problem that the nuclear field has been grappling with for decades,” Berzak said. “‘Doomsday messaging’ is what I call the nuke field’s default communications strategy, and I have this theory that it never works because the fear it tries to generate has nowhere to go.”

“The threat of thermonuclear war is old news,” Suchman lamented.

Some in the AI safety community acknowledge the long-standing threat of nuclear annihilation. They just consider it a lower priority than the as of yet unrealized rogue superintelligence. Daniel Kokotajlo left his role as an OpenAI researcher in 2024 over the company’s alleged recklessness and indifference toward risk. He is the co-author of AI 2027, a white paper laying out a hypothetical scenario in which superintelligent AI systems exterminate humankind with bioweapons to clear up space to build automated robotics factories. History is the reason Kokotajlo is less preoccupied by the prospect of an AI-triggered nuclear war. “It’s definitely something to be concerned about, and it’s something that ideally we would like to improve and fix. But it’s the sort of thing where, even if we do nothing, probably things will be fine for a decade or two or more.”

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To Kokotajlo and like-minded researchers, no matter how dangerous nuclear arsenals make the world, superintelligence is simply more dangerous than a bogus intelligence briefing on China. “It’s been 50 years and these sorts of crises don’t happen that often. So far, cooler heads have managed to prevail and figure out the truth in each case,” he said. “And so the probability that it goes all the way to nuclear war in the next five years is low. High enough to be a bit uncomfortable, but low overall. By contrast, if we do superintelligence in the next five years, I think the probability that it goes horribly wrong for us is high, not low.”

Berzak, who leads her lab’s nuclear risk program, says this is the wrong calculation. She pointed to differing approaches to staving off the apocalypse embraced by the novel field of AI safety and nuclear caution that has existed since the dawn of the Cold War. “Attention often goes to what is new and interesting and not what is the most pressing risk,” she said.

Cooler heads have indeed avoided nuclear disaster in the past, but human fallibility and the growing temptation to outsource our judgment to machines perceived as superhumanly brilliant carries an inherent danger, Berzak warned: “Just because there’s this new more pressing risk that has consequences that are rather underexplored compared to nuclear war, doesn’t mean that nuclear war is not a risk because we’ve so far avoided it basically with just luck.”

The post AI Almost Started a U.S.–China War — and No One Seems to Care appeared first on The Intercept.

Nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains, just minutes away from Asheville, the center first opened in the 1960s as a “haven for troubled children,” in the words of the press. It was supposed to be an alternative to more severe “training schools,” but by the 1990s was skewed toward punishment. According to former staff, progress was measured in points, which were added or subtracted according to a child’s behavior. Infractions ranged from having “contraband” — including pencils or pens, which were allowable only in sanctioned study areas — to running away.

The system didn’t work for Pike. “She was not following the rules or she was doing something to sabotage herself,” one social worker would later testify at a hearing in Pike’s case. Although her violations weren’t generally serious, they did keep her stuck in place. Most kids stayed at the center for a few months; Pike stayed for well over a year.

It seemed possible that Pike might not actually want to go home. From the time she was a little girl, she’d been hurt and neglected by the adults who were supposed to protect her. Months before arriving in Swannanoa, Pike had been temporarily removed from her home by the state’s social services agency, which found that her mother’s live-in boyfriend was physically and sexually abusing her. Shortly afterward, Pike wrote a letter to her best friend saying she wanted to kill herself. Among a list of reasons, she wrote that she’d been raped by a different man, a neighbor who assaulted her when she was 11 years old.

Nevertheless, Pike stood out among her peers at the juvenile center. She was engaging and intelligent; she earned her GED and became a teacher’s assistant. “Christa was open and willing to grow,” one counselor would later write in a clemency letter on Pike’s behalf. “Though she had psychological struggles and resulting behavioral difficulties, I could see that Christa was a good child who was trying to find her place in the world. I never saw Christa act aggressively or violently. She was trying to figure out how to heal from her traumas.”

Pike finally left Swannanoa in March 1993. The following year, the counselor got a letter from her in the mail. “She shared that she would be visiting Asheville soon and invited me to meet up with her,” the counselor recalled in the clemency letter. But the visit never happened. In January 1995, Pike was arrested alongside two other teenagers while enrolled at a Jobs Corp program in Knoxville, Tennessee. At 18, she was charged with first-degree murder.

The crime seemed pulled from a horror movie — an act of savagery that would become imprinted in the public psyche. Nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of Pike’s classmates, had been lured into a secluded corner of a city park, then beaten, bludgeoned, and slashed with a boxcutter. Her body was found naked from the waist up. On her chest, her attackers had carved a pentagram.

Pike admitted her guilt within days. In a tape-recorded statement to investigators, she sobbed that she had begun hitting Slemmer and just didn’t stop. “I literally thought I was going crazy cause I’d never seen myself act like that before in my life,” she said. Before long, witnesses came forward with disturbing new details. In the public’s eye, Pike transformed from an 18-year-old who committed a shocking act of violence into a woman driven by the devil himself.

Weeks after her 20th birthday, Pike was convicted and sentenced to die.

Pike had been on death row for nearly 30 years when Tennessee announced her execution date: September 30, 2026. In a lengthy clemency petition submitted earlier this month, Pike’s lawyers urged Gov. Bill Lee to spare her life. They told a story of Pike’s upbringing that her jury never heard, a childhood shaped by untreated mental illness and sexual abuse beginning when she was just two years old. They enclosed dozens of letters from people who have known Pike over the years, including in North Carolina.

One of the letters came from the lawyer who represented Pike in her first juvenile delinquency hearing, not long before she was sent to Swannanoa. Now a retired tribal court judge, he was filled with regret. “In my view, this proceeding was the most pivotal event of Christa’s sad childhood,” he wrote. It set in motion everything that would follow. Rather than treating her like a vulnerable child in need of support, the juvenile system had compounded her trauma through more punishment, with devastating consequences.

“I regret to tell you, Governor, that we in North Carolina — myself included — failed Christa,” he wrote. He urged Lee to make up for his state’s mistakes. “She is so much more than the darkness which has followed her from childhood into adulthood.”

If Lee does not show mercy — and barring any last-minute intervention by the courts — Pike will be executed by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on Wednesday at 10 a.m. She would be the 19th woman executed in the country in the modern death penalty era — and the first woman put to death in Tennessee in two centuries.

Pike, who turned 50 this year, has spent her entire adult life at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville, nearly all of it in solitary confinement. Although there was one other woman living under a death sentence when Pike first arrived at the prison, her sentence was commuted and she was paroled in 2011.

One of Pike’s co-defendants was released long ago, while the other, her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, remains eligible for parole. Shipp was 17 when he participated in Slemmer’s murder, which prevented prosecutors from seeking the death penalty under state law. In a letter asking Lee to grant clemency, Shipp’s trial lawyer wrote that he was surprised that Pike’s attorneys had not emphasized her boyfriend’s role at her 1996 trial. “When I represented Tadaryl in his 1997 trial,” he wrote, “the defense I presented was to shift as much blame as possible to Christa.”

Like many women condemned to die, Pike became an object of lurid fascination. In 1998, after Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker, interview requests poured in from talk shows, filmmakers, and journalists all over the world, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel, which compared the level of interest to that of the late Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. Pike, the newspaper said, “has become a death-row celebrity, a child star of the true-crime beat.”

The article described Pike as a “savvy subject,” a kinder version of an accusation that has followed Pike from the start: that she reveled in her notoriety while showing no signs of remorse. For many people, including Slemmer’s mother, who plans to witness Pike’s execution, the image of an unrepentant killer basking in attention has remained fixed in time. So has the claim by the lead detective that Pike was filled with excitement by the murder. He told interviewers in the 2025 podcast series “Unrestorable” that Pike was “giddy” while recounting what she’d done. “This was the greatest thing that ever happened to her,” he said. “She was just happy as a lark.”

Audio of Pike interrogation’s does not match these descriptions — and numerous people who know Pike say that she has expressed remorse for years. One woman, who began visiting her 30 years ago, wrote in a clemency letter that Pike has matured into a compassionate person who cares for those around her. “She has told me repeatedly that she would trade places with Colleen Slemmer so that her mother … could have her daughter back,” she wrote.

Although the Tennessee Department of Correction routinely denies interviews with people under a death sentence, Pike addressed the matter through one of her attorneys for the 2025 podcast. The older she has gotten, she said, the more she has absorbed the magnitude of what she stole from Slemmer and her family. “She had a whole world of her own that I just jerked her out of. And there’s a big empty spot there, where she could be shining right now. And she’s not.”

Pike’s case may stand out for its brutality and sensationalism, but her background shares much in common with other people on death row, especially women, whose lives are frequently marked by sexual violence and trauma. One clinical psychologist describes the amount of abuse and neglect Pike experienced from the time she was a preschooler as “almost impossible to grasp.”

This history should have been key to Pike’s defense. But like many others condemned to die, she was also tried in an era in which attorneys assigned to capital cases were often not up to the task. Pike was represented by a pair of court-appointed lawyers who were inexperienced and overworked. Neither had ever handled a capital case — nor had her trial judge.

Perhaps most telling, her own lead attorney would end up being one of a slew of people who seemed eager to cash in on the case. Post-conviction records show that he asked Pike to sign an agreement giving him the rights to her story. “My thought was, I would write a book on Christa, the human side of Christa,” he later testified at a court hearing. “I thought to do that I would probably need to get some kind of release. It was one of those spur of the moment things. I drew it up, I took it over, she signed it. Nothing ever became of it.”

“Looking back,” he added, “it’s probably something I shouldn’t have done.”

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There would be no shortage of people telling Pike’s story. Her crime has been described in countless articles, podcasts, and sensationalistic TV series with names like “Mean Girl Murders.” All of them include a disturbing and singular detail that has come to define the case: Slemmer’s body was found with a piece of her skull missing. It would be discovered in the pocket of a jacket belonging to Pike.

“When the piece of skull got out, that’s kind of the death knell for Christa,” a former Knoxville journalist who now creates true-crime coloring books told the “Unrestorable” podcast. “You’re not coming back from that.”

This ghoulish revelation fueled the belief that Pike was driven by satanic beliefs. The murder coincided with a societal fixation now known as the “satanic panic,” in which reports of devil-worshipping cults took hold across the country during the 1980s and ’90s, leading to false accusations and wrongful convictions. Fears were especially pronounced when it came to young people, who appeared to be “dabbling in the trappings of satanism,” as the AP reported in 1988, “whether serious or as a prank.” In most cases, there was nothing to back up the hysteria. But many saw Pike’s case as chilling proof that the crisis was real.

The lead investigator in Pike’s case, Knox County Police Detective Randy York, had attended a training on satanism and cults just before Slemmer was killed. In interviews, he has maintained that the pentagram was the key that unlocked the case; a woman called police to say that her daughter was in the Jobs Corp program and was worried about a satanic cult, which ultimately led York to Pike. But there was a more straightforward link: Slemmer was in the same residential program as her attackers. On the day of the murder, all four teenagers signed out at the same time. Only Slemmer failed to sign back in.

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Regardless, it was Shipp, not Pike, who was interested in satanism. The teenager kept a satanic altar in his room. But as his lawyer would later write in his clemency letter for Pike, for all the focus on satanism, “that was never the motivation behind what happened.” By most accounts, Pike targeted Slemmer because she believed that she wanted to steal her boyfriend; Pike has said she did not plan to kill Slemmer, only to fight her. But there was no explaining such a senseless crime. “We were all just really screwed up kids,” Pike said on the “Unrestorable” podcast. “We were all going through things that no one understood.”

Pike’s lawyers have long argued that the media frenzy over the crime made it impossible to get a fair trial. Nearly every prospective juror had heard of the case. News cameras filmed the trial from beginning to end, which cast further scrutiny on Pike’s demeanor. Wearing modest floral dresses day after day, Pike was deemed to be inappropriately cheerful, enjoying the limelight of her case.

In his own letter asking for clemency, Pike’s lead trial attorney, William Talman, said that he, too, was unnerved by his client’s seeming contentment at the crowds in the courtroom. As he remembers it, she told him at one point that she was “happy,” which struck him as bizarre. When he asked her why, he wrote, she responded in a way that has haunted him ever since. “It was the first time in her life that she could remember so many members of her family being there for her.”

It’s possible that Pike would have been sentenced to death no matter what her lawyers did. But her legal team has long argued that Talman and his co-counsel failed their client in key ways. On the eve of the trial, prosecutors offered Pike a plea deal that would have sent her to prison for life. She declined. Pike has said that Talman assured her that a jury would never vote to execute a pretty young girl — an account he has denied. But he conceded in court testimony that he should have done a better job discussing the offer with her.

Case records show that Talman’s most devastating blunder was his mishandling of the sentencing trial — the single most critical part of any death penalty case. Today, capital defense attorneys are trained to prioritize mitigation, delving into a client’s early life to uncover any history of abuse, trauma, and mental illness — factors that can persuade jurors to spare a client’s life. Between Pike’s age at the time of the murder and her harrowing childhood, there was plenty to draw from. A clinical psychologist hired as Pike’s mitigation expert put together binders of information that Talman planned to use. But for reasons long in dispute, Talman decided at the last minute not to call her as a witness.

At a post-conviction hearing, Talman cited two reasons for his hasty decision. For one, he had discovered during the trial that the psychologist had previously been in a romantic relationship with the lead prosecutor. Although she would testify that it was long over by then, she admitted that she didn’t disclose it as early as she should have.

The other reason, according to Talman, was that the judge ordered him to hand over copies of his expert’s binders to the lead prosecutor, who flagged parts that might bolster their case for the death penalty. “He had about a million stickies, little sticky notes, in the report,” Talman said. He feared that the file would end up doing more harm than good.

In the end, that’s precisely what happened. Talman did not call the witness with the best chance of conveying Pike’s lifelong trauma, while the state pulled the most damaging details from the defense’s own file to use against his client. In his closing statement, the prosecutor described Pike as a “monster that we have to deal with.” It took the jury less than an hour and a half to sentence her to death.

Colleen Slemmer Would have turned 51 this month. Her mother, May Martinez, has often expressed indignation over the attention devoted to Pike. She feels it has eclipsed the memory of her daughter, a caring young woman who helped students with disabilities and loved working on computers with her stepdad. Martinez told the Nashville Banner that she hopes the execution will bring her peace — “and that Colleen can always be remembered as the sweet little girl that she was.”

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Pike’s advocates emphasize that their calls for clemency should never be mistaken for a lack of compassion for her victim. As they stepped up their appeals to the governor last week, youth counselor Sarah Bailey joined a press conference in Nashville, where she said she knew what it was like to lose a loved one to homicide — someone murdered her own son. She also knew what it was like “to have adults decide who you are while you are still becoming a person.” Bailey was convicted of murder for a crime she committed at 16, a devastating mistake that for years defined her “entire identity.”

Finally, she knew Pike. When she got to prison as a frightened teenager, Pike helped her navigate the world around her. “She sent me stamps, she sent me commissary, and she sent me love,” Bailey said. “That said a lot about who she was, and that says a lot about who she has become.”

Bailey echoed what many have said about Pike in recent years. Some of the most urgent pleas for mercy have come from women whose voices are the least often heard. “I’d like to ask that you look past the fact that I am incarcerated when reading this,” one clemency letter reads. “I am an inmate; however, I am also a woman who understands the importance of seeing people as the human beings that we all are.”

“The Christa you will meet today is a far cry from the one who walked through the doors from the beginning,” the letter goes on. “For those of us who have found themselves housed near Christa she has offered hope when there should have only been despair. In a time of pain and struggle, Christa’s small voice rings out to let you know that you are not alone.”

Update: October 1, 2026
After a lengthy delay and multiple attempts to administer a lethal dose of pentobarbital, the state of Tennessee failed to kill Christa Pike on September 30. “Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital,” her attorneys wrote in a statement at 10:36 p.m. “We have not been informed as to her condition.”

Pike was scheduled to be put to death at 10 a.m. for the murder of Colleen Slemmer in 1995. One hour before the scheduled execution at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay of execution to consider a challenge brought by her attorneys stemming from the failure of Pike’s trial lawyers to present mitigating evidence at Pike’s 1996 trial. But the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay eight hours later, around 6 p.m. 

According to media witnesses, the curtain was opened at 7:27 p.m, after which Pike gave a last statement. “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love,” she said. However, Pike remained awake and, after a second dose was administered, became unconscious but could be heard snoring on the gurney. Shortly before 9 p.m., the media witnesses were removed from the room. 

The botched execution was the second time in four months that Tennessee has failed to complete a lethal injection. In May, Tony Carruthers was removed from the gurney after executioners were unable to place the IV lines necessary to administer the drugs. On that occasion, Gov. Bill Lee postponed Carruthers’s execution for a year.

Pike’s lawyers had challenged her execution in part by warning that she was at risk of being tortured. “We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy,” they wrote.

In a statement, Lee said the state would carry out a “comprehensive” investigation into what happened and postponed the state’s sole remaining execution in 2026, which was set for December. “Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” he said.

Update: September 28, 2026
On September 28, Gov. Bill Lee released a statement rejecting calls to stop Christa Pike’s execution: “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”

In a statement, Pike’s attorneys — Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, and Kelly Gleason and Randy Spivey of the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender — said they are “heartbroken” by the decision. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women,” they wrote. “We will continue to support Christa through every remaining avenue.”

The post The “Satanic Panic” Made Her a True-Crime Obsession. The Truth Is More Haunting. appeared first on The Intercept.

Song had been charged with attempted murder for allegedly firing a gun at the first police officer who arrived on the scene after a noise demonstration outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado on July 4, 2025.

The defense — more than a dozen attorneys representing clients with varying degrees of involvement in the protest — had rested their argument without calling a single expert witness, owing to what they thought was the weakness of the government’s case.

During closing arguments, however, Phillip Hayes, Song’s attorney, raised what he said was a major flaw in the government’s depiction of what happened: Song never aimed his weapon at the police officer. Relying on evidence introduced by the prosecution — a photograph of the bullet, witness testimony, and CCTV footage of the incident — Hayes said his client never intended to shoot Alvarado Police Department Lt. Thomas Gross.

Rather, Hayes said, Song fired his weapon at the ground and the bullet ricocheted off a hard surface before striking the officer just below the neck. That would explain the plumes of dust that were visible in the video. According to Hayes, the only photo of the bullet, which appears severely bent and with several missing fragments, backs up the theory.

“Attempted murder requires that you intend to kill,” Hayes, a lanky, soft-spoken criminal defense attorney, told the jury on March 11. “And if the government can’t prove that intent, that’s a not guilty — period.”

The jury didn’t bite. Instead of being acquitted, Song was convicted and sentenced to 100 years in prison.

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One reason the ricochet theory didn’t play a bigger role in the trial was that the federal government prevented it from being fully aired. Key details about the shooting, and the officer’s actions, were only revealed during the trial itself. Prosecution motions and favorable rulings by the judge, a Trump appointee, made it difficult for Song’s lawyers to fully vet the idea or argue that he had acted in self-defense.

And an independent ballistics expert hired by Song’s defense team before the trial was denied access to the defendant in federal prison. As a routine part of any case about a murder or a shooting involving a police officer, said Daryl Parker, the former Marine Corps officer and criminal defense investigator hired by Song’s team, a ballistics expert will meet with an alleged shooter to collect information. Nothing about the Prairieland case, however, was turning out to be routine.

In emails reviewed by The Intercept, Parker and Hayes repeatedly wrote to Federal Medical Center Fort Worth, the federal detention center where Song was held before and during the trial, asking to visit the defendant. All the requests went unanswered. (FMC Fort Worth declined to respond to a request for comment.)

Parker never got a response from the jail official in charge of Song’s detention, let alone visitation rights.

“We sent him everything he asked for,” Parker, speaking publicly for the first time about the case, told The Intercept. “But approval never came.”

It was the first time in his 25-year career that the forensics expert had been denied access to a client in a federal facility.

In the end, members of the jury never received a full airing of the argument nor the multiple pieces of evidence that support it.

The ricochet theory, though, may yet be part of Song’s appeal and the basis of a new trial, according to two lawyers on Song’s defense team in his state-level case. New evidence, including material revealed for the first time in this Intercept investigation, shows that Song, a former Marine reservist and expert marksman, may have never intended to shoot the police officer.

New Evidence

The Prairieland case was touted by the Trump administration as the government’s first prosecution of an “antifa cell,” moving from indictment to trial in the Northern District of Texas in just a few months. For such a complex high-profile case, there wasn’t much time to prepare. And key pieces of information were hidden within or even omitted from discovery.

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Buried within the tens of thousands of pages of evidence provided to the defense team was a grainy photograph: the government’s only image of the bullet that struck the police officer. According to two ballistics experts interviewed for this story, the photo is of such poor quality that it is difficult to conclude anything from the image alone.

Shaun Jaikissoon, a former firearms examiner with the New York City Police Department for 10 years who now has his own consulting firm, said the photo of the fragment provided by the prosecution tells us almost nothing and may even be deemed “unsuitable,” meaning it lacks value for a forensic analysis.

Parker, the independent ballistics expert hired by the defense team, said he agreed the photo was of little value.

“It is sparse,” he said. “You should have images of the end of the bullet — 360 degrees — so you can properly evaluate it.”

Despite the photograph’s limitations, it does reveal that the bullet was severely deformed, indicating a possible ricochet.

“It’s a copper banana,” said Parker. “It obviously struck something.”

The opinion is shared by one of the government’s own witnesses. During the trial, Philip Stout, a forensic scientist for the Texas Department of Public Safety, described the extreme curvature of the bullet as characteristic of a projectile fired into a water tank.

“When you’re dealing with higher velocity bullets, they slow down very quickly, so it gets that curved — I refer to it as a banana shape, but it’s more of a semicircle shape,” said Stout. “What that tells me is that bullet struck something and slowed down very quickly.”

Other questions arose from the shooting and investigation, Parker said. Perhaps most important is the fact that Gross’s bulletproof vest — level IIIA soft body armor — would not have been able to withstand the force of a bullet fired from an AR-15-style rifle at such close range. Even the label on the vest, introduced into evidence by the government, says: “This is NOT intended to protect against rifle fire.”

According to Parker, if the bullet had struck Gross directly — without first hitting another surface or object — it would have ripped through him “like Swiss cheese” and almost certainly killed him. Instead, the bullet came to rest inside Gross’s vest, with Gross sustaining minor injuries. He was released from the hospital a few hours later.

“The standard body armor that police officers wear is not rated for rifles,” Parker said. “It’s only rated for handguns. It’s not even rated for knives.”

Another clue that points to a ricochet, according to Parker, is Song’s skill as a marksman, especially given the short distance between the two shooters and Song’s previous training as a Marine.

“The fact that the officer is not dead, to me, is a big red flag that Song wasn’t aiming at him,” Parker told The Intercept.

Together, this new evidence of a ricochet matches the information that became apparent only during the trial when Gross testified that he drew his weapon first and aimed at a fleeing protester. Drawing on this testimony, along with video evidence, Song recounted the same version of events in a statement he read during sentencing.

“When I saw Lieutenant Thomas Gross stop pursuing and point his gun at the back of a running, unarmed protester, like he testified, I was terrified,” Song said. “As a firearms instructor and a United States Marine Corps veteran, I understood what I was seeing. As the evidence shows, I did not want to hurt anyone.”

Shots Fired

That Gross drew first and aimed at a protester’s back were among the facts that, according to Song’s lawyers, were not revealed to the defense until the trial itself. Also missing from the pre-trial discovery was evidence indicating that bullets fired at the scene struck the ground. The marks in the pavement were not documented as part of the investigation.

Given these late-breaking revelations, Song’s lawyers had to scramble in the middle of the trial to put together their argument. Song’s defense team, in a motion for a new trial filed in April, said that the failure to disclose evidence of the bullet strikes sooner deprived them of the ability to make their case that Song never intended to shoot officer Gross.  

The existence of bullet strikes was only revealed during the second week of the trial, when evidence from the investigation, headed up by the Texas Rangers, an elite unit within the state’s Department of Public Safety, was divulged in court. Texas Ranger Billy James Hill Jr., responsible for photographing the scene, admitted during cross-examination to finding “recent looking defects in the concrete surface.”

Tailim Song, Benjamin Song’s father and a civil attorney who was part of his son’s defense team, said the ricochet theory only began to take shape when they learned about the deformations in the road.

“In my mind,” Tailim Song said, “it really didn’t come home until the Rangers said there were fresh bullet strikes in the concrete.”

The photographs from the scene, however, didn’t include shots of the ground. When asked during the trial whether he had taken any photos of what he believed to be bullet strikes, Hill, the Texas Ranger, responded that it “wasn’t part of my responsibility.”

Hill had taken photographs using a high-tech camera system called a Leica RTC360 Digital Crime Scene Scanner, which creates reconstructions of the alleged events. The reconstruction, however, omitted photographs and chemical swabs of where the bullets had struck the pavement as well as the crucial trajectory analysis and shooter-position determinations. (The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Department of Justice did not respond to questions about the investigation or crime scene reconstruction.)

Ryan Rider, a former Texas police officer who teaches crime scene reconstruction at Tarleton State University, said the technology, if used properly, can provide precise measurements — down to the millimeter — that can be used with other evidence like testimony and physical evidence to track the bullet’s pathway in relation to the shooter.

“It does tell you a story,” said Rider, who is slated to train law enforcement agencies on the Leica system.

Rider — who spoke to The Intercept generally about investigations, since he has not examined the Prairieland evidence — also said shootings involving officers are potentially chaotic environments with multiple agencies involved in collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, and securing the crime scene.

In the Prairieland case, Alvarado Police Department; the Johnson County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office; the Department of Homeland Security; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the FBI; in addition to the Texas Rangers; were all present. Not documenting the bullet strikes — especially if the Rangers knew they were there, as Hill acknowledged in court — is hard to explain, Rider added.

“A trooper shouldn’t be up on the stand saying, ‘That wasn’t my responsibility,’” Rider said. “If they’re on the scene, people are going to expect them to be the ones to say, ‘Hey, get pictures of this.’”

With the gaps in the forensic evidence and crucial facts withheld until the middle of the three-week trial, defense attorneys couldn’t pull together a coherent, countervailing version of events quickly enough. Even when they tried, as evidence undermining the government’s claims trickled out, the lawyers faced new hurdles.

Gross gave his testimony early in the trial about drawing his gun first, information that was left off a police report and not included in discovery. Then the judge granted a prosecutors’ motion barring Song’s lawyers from using a self-defense argument, which became a frequent point of contention.

At one point, during his closing argument, Hayes, Song’s defense attorney, suggested that Gross may not have been justified in pulling his weapon so quickly. The judge, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, admonished Hayes for treading too close to a rationale for self-defense.

Appealing for His Life

The Prairieland trial unfolded as Trump escalated his crackdown on anti-ICE protests across the country. The verdicts were celebrated by the Trump administration as its first successful prosecution of a violent “antifa cell,” and the first eight defendants were sentenced to more than 450 years in prison altogether.

“These guilty verdicts and convictions rightly reflect the vicious, armed attack that these Antifa cell members planned and executed against law enforcement and detention center officers on the night of July 4 last year,” a top Department of Justice official said after the convictions were handed down.

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The government’s narrative rested on the premise that the noise demonstration was an organized ambush of law enforcement officers and that Song’s intent from the outset was to kill a police officer. But this version of events relies on an incomplete picture of what transpired that night.

Whether information that came to light during the trial is adjudicated as part of the appeals process will be decided by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative courts in the country and one that Trump’s Justice Department has used to secure favorable rulings.

Patrick McLain, an attorney representing another Prairieland defendant, said it would likely be several months before any appeals are filed; it is still unclear what the focus will be and if the defendants will mount a coordinated effort. 

“My hope is that we’re going to have nine solid briefs that are mutually supporting and not contradictory,” McLain said. 

The 5th Circuit has not issued a briefing notice. Once it does, defense teams will have 40 days to submit their documents, according to John Kuchera, Song’s court-appointed appellate lawyer. Kuchera, reached by phone, said he has not yet had time to review the record and has not met with Song. He declined to comment on whether the theory about the bullet would be included in the appeal.

“What my opinions are about anything will show up in my brief,” he said. “Whatever issues that I think need to be addressed will be in that.”

Ultimately, the 5th Circuit will decide if evidence in the Prairieland case, including the bullet that struck Gross, can be reexamined and if Song, who now faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, will be granted a new trial.

Correction: September 28, 2026
This story has been corrected to note that Ryan Rider, the crime scene reconstruction expert, has not yet begun training law enforcement agencies on the Leica crime scene scanner.

The post Exclusive: Feds Denied Ballistics Expert Access to Prairieland Defendant Who Got 100 Years in Prison appeared first on The Intercept.

The Israeli documentary “NAZA” will make its North American premiere tomorrow at the New York Film Festival on the heels of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vitriolic speech at the United Nations, which was met by mass protests, arrests, and diplomats walking out. Other Israeli documentaries have screened at Lincoln Center, including one at the New York Jewish Film Festival in January on the movement for LGBTQ+ rights or another about an October 7 hostage. But this film, co-directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, has proven extraordinarily controversial in its home country, reviled by nearly every sector of media and politics.

The documentary, which is composed of anonymous interviews with those active in Israel’s military and intelligence service during the war against Gaza, depicts extensive, highly detailed confessions of their participation in the mass targeting and killing of Palestinian civilians. The film’s title comes from the Israeli military’s system for assessing collateral damage, an interface that one of the anonymous confessors says can map out every building in the Gaza Strip and predict what civilians may be killed in an airstrike. One man who used the NAZA interface remarks in a clip from the film that the military once approved a single strike the system calculated would kill 500 Palestinians, and said the system makes no distinction between adults and children.

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The revelation of the film’s existence — its world premiere was at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month after being produced in secret for three years — sent shockwaves through Israeli society. Two contradictory claims have begun to dominate discussions of the documentary, at the highest levels of both the Israeli government and the military brass, both aiming to neutralize the film’s reach and the ability of its filmmakers to continue working. The first is that the film released highly sensitive and classified information about the Israel Defense Forces’ operations in Gaza, contravening the law. The second line of attack claims the film is a complete fabrication, a hoax, and in the words of IDF Chief of the General Staff Eyal Zamir, a “blood libel.” Key Israeli politicians argue Abraham and Szor are aiding the enemy in wartime, with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir calling them  “friends” of Hamas who should be held accountable as such.

While some opponents of the current Israeli government, such as Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot, have attempted to tack in a more liberal direction by saying “criticism is legitimate” — while also decrying the film for “present[ing] a distorted and one-sided picture” at a time when “the State of Israel [is] in a time of distress” — both the Israeli state and the army have begun proposing legal action be taken against the filmmakers, with their citizenship in particular coming under attack from not only Culture Minister Miki Zohar, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

In an unprecedented move, Netanyahu announced on September 16 in a video message posted on social media that his government would “revoke citizenship from anyone who defames IDF supporters abroad” in addition to raising the fine for defamation “twentyfold” to 1 million shekels (nearly $330,000 at the current exchange rate) to punish them further. Calling out the “NAZA” filmmakers specifically, Netanyahu went on to say “their place does not belong with us.”

The phenomenon of revoking Israeli citizenship is not novel. Earlier this year, two Palestinians from East Jerusalem were convicted of security offenses and stripped of their Israeli nationality, which paved the way for their deportation to either the occupied West Bank or even the Gaza Strip. But revoking the citizenship of Israeli Jews on any kind of similar grounds is without historical precedent. Both Abraham and Szor — who also co-directed the documentary “No Other Land” — are Jews born in Israel, have no Palestinian ancestry, and no public record of citizenship for any other country.

Proposals have been made in the past for the revocation of Israeli citizenship from certain Jews, most notably Yigal Amir, who killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The far-right assassin, who is from an Orthodox Jewish family, was the subject of a public petition demanding his citizenship be revoked. But the Israeli Supreme Court rejected it on the grounds that “the dignity of the right” for every Jew to acquire and have Israeli citizenship overruled the “dignity of the murderer.” Now, for the first time, a sitting Israeli leader is advocating for the so-called “dignity of the right” to be overturned, not for murder, but for mere “slander,” in Netanyahu’s description, against the Israeli military.

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Although Israeli politicians and other officials have categorized the filmmakers as antisemites spreading lies about the Jewish people, Abraham and Szor are not explicitly anti-Zionist in the way that other prominent critics of Israel, like the historian Ilan Pappé and the architect Eyal Weizman, have defined themselves, or even how a Communist member of Israel’s Knesset, Ofer Cassif, has defined himself. Both co-directors have openly stated their belief in a future where both Israelis and Palestinians “are equally sovereign and free.” Abraham himself has said Israelis have a “right” to “sovereignty and security in this land,” just as Palestinians do.

Despite these threaded needles, the Jewish filmmakers of “NAZA” now find themselves in the position of being treated much the same way Palestinian citizens of Israel are: as though their citizenship was bestowed upon them in error, a mistake of history where convenience trumped logic, a catastrophe that needs to be rectified immediately.

The Law of Return — the idea that every Jewish person, even those who converted to the religion and have no ancestral ties to the land of Palestine, should be allowed to “return” to their homeland, to settle, to live, and to be treated as an equal alongside every other Jewish person, no matter their birthplace — was one of the fundamental building blocks of the Zionist project. But the Law of Return did not become law until 1950, and the Citizenship Law, which defined the terms of its larger eligibility, did not become law until 1952, four years after the State of Israel’s founding.

For a short period in Israel’s history, citizenship had no clear definition, but it required quick clarification, not just because it is a key part of any fledgling state, but because they needed to be able to define which Arabs, who remained inside Israel’s new borders on temporary “red card” permits after the Nakba, could be allowed to stay, and who could be removed as an illegal infiltrator. Then-Agriculture Minister Dov Yosef remarked plainly during a cabinet debate in 1949: “When we publish the citizenship law and a person is found not to be a citizen, we can then deport him.”

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Citizenship was granted in limited quantities to the Palestinians who had been able to remain inside the newly established Israel and did not confer all the rights it supposedly guaranteed. Palestinian citizens of Israel remained under control of a military governance system up until 1966, with their movements strictly controlled and their political activities restricted to rein in criticism of the Jewish state they now found themselves living under. 

The Law of Return, considered “inalienable” by many politicians, where any concrete restrictions must entail tearing of the law in its entirety, contained seemingly contradictory restrictions within its formally expansive framework. Israeli Communist Party leader Meir Vilner noted back in 1950, during discussion of the Law of Return in the Knesset, that even though Jewish citizenship was technically expansive, it still entailed restrictions to those who “endangered … the security of the state,” a vagueness that Vilner opposed on the grounds that it could be used by the government “against sections within the Jewish people.” The Polish-Israeli anti-Zionist intellectual Israel Shahak noted in 1975 that all the punishments normally doled out against Arabs, including losing their citizenship, remained theoretically possible against Jewish dissenters under Israeli law, but only “racism” against Arabs had prevented setting that precedent.

As the United States became Israel’s primary benefactor in the 1960s and 1970s, previously dormant discussions about the grounds for revoking Israeli citizenship from Jews began to reemerge. They coalesced around insufficient connection to Israel, with some aiming to establish a system of permanent residency, disallowing citizenship for Jews who did not spend enough time inside the Jewish state. After 9/11, these proposals took on a much more ideological, and much more far-right, character. 

The Israeli right was soon overtaken with the possibility of revoking the citizenship of those it considered to be aiding the enemy, with Arab citizens of Israel being the primary target. But anti-Zionist Jews were also in their crosshairs, including members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish fringe sect Neturei Karta, or Jews who were insufficiently supportive of Israel, like Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. Calls for “loyalty oaths” from both Arabs and Jews became a cause célèbre for people like then-Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman in the late 2000s, who would insist on the equality he advocated for by saying, “It’s not racism. The test is loyalty, not their religion.” 

A certain McCarthyist strain familiar to Americans under the Bush administration, looking anywhere and everywhere for national disloyalty, was confirmed in 2007 by Likud MK Gilad Erdan, who would later become Netanyahu’s ambassador to the United Nations during the height of the war on Gaza in 2023. Erdan claimed revoking citizenship would not be wrong because the U.S. also had a basis for revoking citizenship based on “disloyalty to the state,” which included “citizens by birth,” and that there was a threat that needed to be dealt with, even from Jewish people inside the State of Israel, who did not recognize Israel’s “sovereignty.”

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The Second Intifada and the disintegration of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process preceded these events, but now, the discourse about citizenship has taken on an unmistakably Americanized character, one defined by a larger “love it or leave it” mentality that allows for officials like Ben-Gvir to post about putting Jewish and Arab politicians who oppose the unfettered expansion of Zionism on planes to be deported.

By virtue of their criticism of Israel, the self-proclaimed representative of the Jewish people, they become enemies of the Jewish people, and therefore in the minds of the state’s most ardent defenders, politically Arab, and therefore able to be viewed as an existential threat just the same.

Netanyahu’s proposal to strip the “NAZA” filmmakers of their citizenship is unlikely to come to pass. It is undeniably being utilized as a political cudgel, with Netanyahu also calling for the revocation of political opponent Yair Golan’s citizenship on the same grounds, despite Golan having been a major general in the IDF. Israeli President Isaac Herzog has, in turn, dismissed the plan, calling it “completely irrelevant.” But as Shahak said in 1975, the grounds for expanding the revocation of citizenship from Jewish Israelis is there in the law, even if the precedent has not yet been set. In 2022, the court upheld a law that allowed for revoking citizenship from Israelis who “carry out actions that constitute a breach of trust against the state.” Earlier this year, in a move met with much less controversy, Netanyahu began initiating proceedings to strip citizenship from those who allegedly aid Iran through espionage, cases which have involved Jews as well as Arabs.

While the chances of the Supreme Court upholding the stripping of citizenship in this particular case are almost nil, a future Israeli administration, one that does not recognize the court’s powers, or an administration that serves alongside a court far more aligned with disqualifying the insufficiently Zionist from politics, could tell a much different story.

A future government where Israel can strip anyone’s citizenship for not only being Palestinian, but also for speaking out in any way against the state, a future where Ben-Gvir is defense minister, or even prime minister, may be closer than many defenders of the “only democracy in the Middle East” imagine.

The post The Backlash to “NAZA” Shows How Little Israeli Citizenship Really Means appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s the year of the democratic socialist. But the group that helped start the earthquake currently transforming the Democratic Party almost didn’t make it to 2026.

After suffering major losses last election cycle after a deluge of pro-Israel lobby spending, Justice Democrats, which supports progressive candidates getting elected to Congress, was on the verge of being written about in the past tense.

“Everyone sort of doubted that there was a comeback to be had. I think a lot of people, AIPAC included, saw last cycle as the harbinger for what’s to come: They were on the rise, JD and the left were on the decline. For the first time ever, we didn’t endorse a new candidate since our founding, and because we had to focus on defending against $100 million in spending from AIPAC,” says communications director and spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. “The truth is, that moment was really — for lack of a better word — the apex of AIPAC’s momentum and ability.”

But Justice Democrats resurrected itself, had its most successful primary season to date, and helped put democratic socialism on the map. So what changed? 

The group says it won big this year, even being massively outspent, because it tapped into the brewing frustration among voters — frustration directed at Democratic Party leaders. “We understood as soon as Donald Trump won that clearly the Democratic establishment was unfit to fight back, and what voters were looking for as we’ve seen throughout this cycle, is this amorphous fighter that they want,” says Andrabi. “That fight doesn’t just look like, as we say so often, press releases and strongly worded letters. It looks like fighting corporate establishment. It looks like fighting AIPAC. It looks like fighting crypto and AI.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Andrabi speaks to host Akela Lacy about how the group that helped elect Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib has seen their candidates make impressive gains in the primaries, and how they’re planning to leverage their wins — and what they can learn from their losses — beyond November.

This primary season, Justice Democrats endorsed 15 candidates; seven won, with democratic socialists knocking out three incumbents. That includes Darializa Avila Chevalier who toppled Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York, Melat Kiros who beat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney who took out Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan. Those three are all but guaranteed to head to Congress next year, along with the four other candidates who won.

“This work doesn’t happen overnight. These losses don’t happen overnight. It takes years and years to build this progress,” says Andrabi. “These candidates that we elected this cycle are giving you a blueprint on a silver platter on how to excite your base and how to energize your party. The Democratic Party can either listen to them or be forced to listen to them, as they have been this cycle when we beat them.”

“Until they start taking lessons from the left on what to actually fight for, they will continue to be running on cycle-to-cycle losses and wins instead of really looking at, long-term, how can we take back power and ensure that we don’t consistently backside into this fascist and authoritarian regime that is overrun by the same corporate interests that the Democratic establishment is also funded by.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. So, Akela, how are you doing? What’s been top of mind for you this week? 

AL: I am really stuck on this news that apparently hackers now have information on all FBI agents, which is crazy. Hackers claimed that they were able to breach a bunch of FBI services and steal a bunch of information about federal agents. 

That’s on top of another insane story that I saw on Thursday morning about yet another rogue AI agent, but this time it hacked an Australia government healthcare portal — an OpenAI agent. I don’t know if you saw that, but that really stuck with me.

JW: All of these AI attacks, everything that’s come out, I keep thinking back to our interview with Karen Hao, who wrote “Empire of AI,” and how so much of the stuff that she’s warned about is now something that people are talking about in the discourse. It’s all really scary stuff, but it’s also stuff that’s kind of been reported on before, so it is interesting to see it all blow up now. 

As someone who started in television, I have to say I cannot stop thinking about this Paramount deal. So for those who don’t know, on Monday, Paramount reached a deal to acquire Warner Bros., which would give Trump ally David Ellison control of a massive media empire, which includes both CNN and CBS News. Ellison is reportedly considering tapping Elon Musk for an investment, which would give the billionaire a stake in two of the largest news organizations in the world. 

AL: This is all happening while the White House is waging a war on mainstream media outlets: CNN, Politico, and MS Now. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the White House efforts to strip those outlets of their White House press credentials. But we saw President Trump this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York ask CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins why she was there because she wasn’t supposed to be covering him — but she wasn’t at the White House.

So the state of our media ecosystem is healthy as ever. 

JW: Things are going great in our democracy. In other news, ProPublica reported that in 2024, the FBI was seeking to launch an investigation into a potential pay-to-play scheme between Sen. Susan Collins and one of her top donors, a former defense contractor who reportedly told federal agents that he had received millions in federal contracts by donating to campaigns of politicians. The investigation was reportedly halted after President Donald Trump returned to office and gutted the entire bureau. 

Akela, you had a really interesting campaign finance story come out this week as well, relating to Sen. John Fetterman. What happened there?   

AL: I got a text on Monday from a source who had seen an email that the Fetterman campaign sent from a domain called, “gopsquad.com.” The story we basically did was about after finding several other conservative email domains that Fetterman was using to send this campaign fundraising email after he delivered a surprise video speech to the Republican midterm convention earlier this month, was that he’s either renting or buying Republican targeted email lists to raise money right now.

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We’ve been covering Fetterman’s fall from grace over the past several years, but his fundraising numbers have really struggled as he has pursued this rightward turn on issues from immigration to Iran to Israel. Many of his small dollar donors, we reported in, in recent years, were asking for their money back.

We see his campaign now pretty openly just asking Republicans for money. Something funny — well, funny or depressing —that happened on Wednesday, Republican Sen. Mike Lee from Utah was sending out emails fundraising off of Fetterman’s fundraising. I’ll just read you this email.

The subject line: “I just got this email from John Fetterman.” “Friend, I just got an email from John. He’s basically a Republican now. I need your help to draft him. Sign here. Thanks, Sen. Mike Lee.” Which is pretty chef’s kiss, if you ask me. 

JW: I have to say: gopsquad.com is probably my favorite part. 

AL: Not subtle.

JW: Not at all subtle. Is there anything else that you’re following that you want to talk about? 

AL: We’re still waiting to learn the name of the ICE officer who shot a 28-year-old Venezuelan delivery driver in Austin, Texas. I spoke with sources there who said that the local district attorney’s office and the Austin Police Department are cooperating to basically get whatever information they can from HSI — the Department of Homeland Security Investigations — which apparently has not declined to give them any information, but also hasn’t given them any information yet.

So we’re seeing a very similar playbook as to what we saw after the ICE shootings in Minneapolis, where local law enforcement and prosecutors are basically fighting with federal agencies to try to get any information — the bare minimum, this person’s name — out of this. The Travis County district attorney, which encompasses Austin, has apparently been in close touch with the Minneapolis prosecutor to learn how they navigated the situation.

I’ll remind our listeners, we interviewed Mary Moriarty, the Minneapolis prosecutor, who was working on prosecuting the ICE shootings in Minneapolis earlier in the year. 

JW: To your point, it’s been so many months, and there’s still not any kind of justice in those cases, and it’s hard to imagine that there will be in this most recent shooting.

Thinking about ICE and the election, I’ve been reporting on groups that are trying to fight back against potential election interference. They’re planning for a ton of different scenarios, one of which includes ICE potentially coming to the polls and being there to intimidate voters of color and immigrant voters as well.

These groups are trying to prevent that harassment, and so they’re there to monitor, to report, and to keep people safe against a terrifying new threat. Obviously, voter intimidation isn’t new. I spoke to the NAACP, who had mentioned, we’ve been fighting on this issue “for the last 117 years.”

But ICE at the polls is new. What Trump has been discussing in terms of election sabotage scenarios are very new, and so these organizers are trying to use the tools they learned in the resistance to ICE movement that we saw pop up in January and February to try and keep our election safe as well.

On that topic, Akela, I know you also speak with Justice Democrats communications director and spokesperson Usamah Andrabi about how progressives are preparing for the general after a really impressive sweep in the primaries. Let’s hear that conversation.

AL: I speak now with Usamah Andrabi, Communications Director and Spokesperson for Justice Democrats, the group that brought us AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and many more.

Usamah, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.

Usamah Andrabi: Thanks for having me. 

AL: I want to start by taking our listeners back to a different time.

It’s 2018. The “Squad” has just been elected to office, and a fresh new crop of democratic socialists and progressives are making themselves known on Capitol Hill. 

Think: AOC joining a sit-in to protest for a Green New Deal outside of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. For listeners who aren’t familiar with the legacy of Justice Democrats, they have your group to thank in large part for that moment in time and for bringing us the Squad. But a lot has changed since then. How is Justice Democrats different today from in 2018, and what’s the same?

UA: What’s the same, first and foremost, is the commitment to the values that we had then are the same commitment we have to those values, and those are the values that we demand of the candidates we recruit, support, and endorse. Because those are the values that Democratic voters share — values that put the needs of working-class people above the needs of corporations and billionaires, and taking on lobbies like AIPAC, crypto, or AI.

I think that’s a little bit of what’s changed, is what we have seen since 2018, really, is the increased appearance of more and more moneyed interest organizing against the Squad, organizing against left-wing politicians, because they are bringing working-class people into the halls of power and bringing their needs to the top of the agenda for the Democratic Party. Billionaires hate that.

I don’t think we would have seen the sort of organized construction of a United Democracy Project or a Democratic Majority for Israel or Jobs and Democracy PAC or Fairshake or a lot of these. But particularly the Israel lobby seems to really organize in direct response to the success of our candidates in Congress.

We had the Squad get elected in 2018. Then two years later, folks like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush won very specifically against deeply pro-Israel politicians like Eliot Engel and [William] Lacy Clay, and they won without compromising on those values. That’s a really scary thing for the Israel lobby, who has really had a sharp control over how Democrats unconditionally support the Israeli government and military like Republicans have for decades.

What I think has happened is, we’ve had some wins, we’ve had some losses, and we’ve had to learn a lot from those losses and understand how to organize our donors better, organize funders, organize progressives, really, to coalesce more around independent candidates and broaden this network.

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I talk a lot about how I feel like in 2024, Democrats across the board suffered a lot of losses. We suffered two of our best members of Congress, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their seats. And obviously, the Democratic Party lost every single other thing they could have lost. It felt like the job was to go home, everyone was supposed to do their homework and come back stronger to fight back against this very clearly fascist agenda that was laid out for us.

The left went home. We did our homework. We organized coalitions, we built broader donor networks, and we really invested a lot in candidate recruitment at Justice Dems.

And it feels like the establishment came back even weaker. Despite having weeks and months and years to really prepare for what Donald Trump promised he was going to do, they came back flat-footed and continue to look as weak as possible. That’s why I think you’re seeing so many successes for the left this cycle, because we are a true balm to the ineptitude of the Democratic establishment.

AL: We’re going to run through some of those wins in a second; many of our listeners are already familiar with them because we’ve talked a lot about these candidates on the show.

But I want to go back to this money thing before we get into that because, as you mentioned, coming off of those major losses of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman to money from the pro-Israel lobby last cycle — I don’t think anyone expected you all to notch as many wins as you did in the primaries this year.

We read obituaries of Justice Democrats, right? And that outside spending, as you mentioned, still has not gone away; it’s only increased. But it still wasn’t enough to stop the candidates behind the rise of democratic socialism that everyone is talking about, who were, to your point, far outmatched in terms of spending.

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I’ll just run through the numbers quickly. You endorsed 15 candidates; seven of them won, with democratic socialists knocking out three incumbents. That includes Darializa Avila Chevalier who toppled Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York, Melat Kiros who beat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney who took out Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan. Those three are all are but guaranteed to head to Congress next year, along with the four other candidates who won. Three of your other candidates won or came in the top two slots in the California primaries, which are nonpartisan, and are headed to runoffs in November. And only five candidates lost.

So what made this cycle different?

UA: First and foremost, love to prove our haters wrong at all times. [Laughter] 

A lot of spite drives that. But also, it’s exactly that. Everyone sort of doubted that there was a comeback to be had. I think a lot of people, AIPAC included, saw last cycle as the harbinger for what’s to come: They were on the rise, JD and the left were on the decline. For the first time ever, we didn’t endorse a new candidate since our founding, and because we had to focus on defending against $100 million in spending from AIPAC.

The truth is, that moment was really — for lack of a better word — the apex of AIPAC’s momentum and ability. Because on the other side of that, as we had been working for years to expose, was the toxic involvement of AIPAC in these primaries and the right-wing network of billionaires who are actually funding this.

It took many years for us to break down AIPAC, and it took a lot of losses to get to that point, but it was worth it. We did a lot of polling. We invested a lot of money in research to bring this message to voters. 

Cori and Jamaal’s losses unfortunately were the final nails in the coffin for a lot of people to wake up to realize how the Israel lobby really functions in our politics — paired with the fact that obviously we watched a genocide get livestreamed on our screens for years at this point, and voters began to wake up to understand: Why is it that a majority of us oppose this genocide — we support an arms embargo, we support a ceasefire — yet only a minority of left-wing politicians in Congress are responding to our demands?

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They understood that that was the role of the Israel lobby, spending infinite amounts of money and buying members of Congress to ensure that they would do their bidding. Even before the 2024 election, we were very clear that this cycle was going to have to be a cycle where we went back on the offense, made big bets, and fought back really hard.

We knew we were going to have to endorse a lot more candidates, spread the board out across the country, really, to make sure that AIPAC didn’t just have two members of Congress to target but had 15 different candidates, as well as meeting where Democratic voters were at. 

We know no matter if Kamala won or if Donald Trump won, there was still a lot of work to do to rebuild this Democratic Party to actually represent the needs of the working class. We understood as soon as Donald Trump won that clearly the Democratic establishment was unfit to fight back.

What voters were looking for, as we’ve seen throughout this cycle, is this amorphous fighter that they want. That fight doesn’t just look like, as we say so often, press releases and strongly worded letters. It looks like fighting corporate establishment. It looks like fighting AIPAC. It looks like fighting crypto and AI.

For so long, even people who call themselves progressive have tried to figure out, how can we go around, under, or behind these lobbies and skirt this very particular line to avoid their wrath? We try to make it clear to everyone, even in the cycle where we lost the most we’ve ever lost, that there’s no going behind, under, or any other prepositional phrase around AIPAC or these lobbies. The only way to defeat them is to go right through them and beat them head-on.

We knew that this was an existential crisis for us. As you said, people are already reading our obituaries, and we wanted to make it clear that this work doesn’t happen overnight. These losses don’t happen overnight. It takes years and years to build this progress.

The excitement that you are seeing from the Democratic electorate across the country for our candidates, it’s taken years to build, and it’s taken years of the Democratic establishment failing to actually live up to their potential and what the demands of working-class people across the country have been.

AL: I want to talk about this process that you’re talking about, this iterative process of bench-building that gets lost in a lot of the horse-race analysis.

But first, I just want to mention, we had one of your candidates, Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, on the show earlier this year to talk about Republican gerrymandering efforts as part of this last-ditch plan to fight off what is expected to be big losses for Republicans in November. Pearson is running in one of the districts at the forefront of that gerrymandering fight.

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Even with the momentum we’ve seen against Republicans and against the Democratic establishment, as we’re talking about, what can Democrats do in the face of this massive gerrymandering push? How do you think that could potentially affect Pearson’s race?

I’ll just mention this again: Justin Pearson is running in a seat that was vacated by longtime Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, who is the last Democratic representative in Tennessee, so this is an important race. 

UA: First and foremost, it’s doing exactly what Justin is doing, which is really not surrendering to the Republican gerrymander. 

It’s very easy for us far away in the Democratic establishment to see these sort of Republican gerrymanders and say, “All right. Well, it’s cooked. There’s no chance of us doing anything here. We can put forward our standard DCCC candidate and talk about it a little, but we’re not going to invest any resources in there.”

I think that would be a failure. This is the tip of the spear of our modern civil rights movement. We are seeing the Voting Rights Act gutted in front of our face, take away the last Black-majority district in the state of Tennessee at a time when Justin J. Pearson was ostensibly going to win his Democratic primary against Steve Cohen.

When he talked about whether or not he wanted to do this, he understood no matter if he wins or loses, this is a fight worth having. It’s worth showing Democratic voters in the electorate, and the establishment more than anyone, that we can go into these Republican districts and these rural communities and not compromise on our most basic values.

Justin has not changed the policies and agenda he was running for when he was running against Steve Cohen to what he’s running for now. He has been the leader in that state on taking on AI data centers, and he is still the leader taking them on as his Republican opponent has unleashed them on Republican areas of this district.

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He’s uncompromised on standing up against the genocide and endless wars abroad and U.S. taxpayers funding for that, and he’s demanding Medicare for all. These are extremely popular policies, not just in the bluest districts across the country, but across the board ideologically. He is showing an example of how we don’t have to run Amy McGraths everywhere we go in these red districts to win over “red voters.”

These are working-class voters who are also been shivved and fucked by the same establishment that is run by Republicans and Democrats. These are people who are getting their hospitals and schools closed down in rural communities, who are getting their ACA subsidies cut and Medicaid subsidies cut.

This is a failure of the establishment of both parties. We can show that a different way is possible. Obviously, we need to fight to restore the Voting Rights Act, and we need to expand the Supreme Court and reform this court so we cannot continue just to see fights that people who are still living have fought for to be taken away in the same breath.

There’s a lot of work to do. It feels really difficult to know how we can claw back some of this institutional power when our institutions are so broken and corrupt. But I think that visionary agenda and ideals are what we need to see more from the Democratic Party, rather than simply being a party that is not Republicans.

That’s what these candidates have been so exciting for voters across the country about are that they, for the first time, are giving Democratic voters in a lot of these districts an affirmative positive agenda that centers their most urgent crises and actually has bold enough solutions to tackle those crises.

AL: This criticism came up a lot in this cycle, and this is the kind of thing I think that often says more about the person that is saying the criticism than the people they’re actually targeting. This is often lodged against candidates on the left or candidates backed by Justice Democrats that, “OK, all this is great, congratulations on your win, but once you get to Congress you’re not actually going to be able to do anything because there aren’t enough of you yet.” What do you say to that? 

UA: You could have said that to us nine years ago, right? That would’ve been the case. Yet one of the most popular politicians in this country is AOC, and the most popular politician is Bernie Sanders, who has these same values. So clearly there’s an appetite from the American electorate for more voters like that.

People know who Ilhan Omar is, people know who Rashida Tlaib is, and it’s not simply because Fox News uses them as an attack every other week. It’s because they have been standing up and been the most courageous leaders in Congress, standing up for the values they need, not only on Palestine, but no one is louder about needing clean water in the state of Michigan than Rashida Tlaib. Ilhan Omar is the reason that the state of Minnesota has universal school lunches for children. These are leaders who have actually delivered on the promises that the Democratic Party has only hypothetically talked about. 

Coming off a cycle where we lost two members, it’s very easy for people to say “Well, you have no power in Congress.” Yet we are sending seven new leftists to Congress this cycle, at least. It’ll be really telling how big the hypothetical Democratic majority is in Congress, because if it is seven-member majority, then you’re starting to ask a lot more different questions of, well, now you have a block of new members of Congress who can actually sway what policy and what agenda we are fighting for in this party.

So this shit doesn’t happen over fucking night. It takes years and years and cycles to build this block in Congress. You have to bring the people with it, and it takes time to organize and convince the masses of the working class to really buy into an electoral project that has screwed them time and time again, and to have that revolutionary optimism that there’s something to be done here.

There’s a lot of promise with this new class of members who are now joining an already existing class of members. We will nearly double our size in Congress, and that’s a big deal. You can look at far smaller groups of members of Congress that have wielded much more power than the amount that we’re sending to Congress.

These leaders were elected with the mandate to challenge the Democratic establishment, and so they will have to do that. More than anything, it’s up to the Democratic establishment on how they want to respond to the clear demands of their voters. These candidates that we elected this cycle are giving you a blueprint on a silver platter on how to excite your base and how to energize your party. The Democratic Party can either listen to them or be forced to listen to them, as they have been this cycle when we beat them.

AL: I do have to ask here, Cori Bush is the anomaly in the success stories that we’re talking about, right? What happened in that race? Why do you think that this momentum did not extend to her challenge to take back her old seat from Wesley Bell in Missouri?

UA: She is not the only loss we’ve had this cycle. The first race of the cycle was Nida Allam, who had lost a really close race. 

AL: In North Carolina. 

US: In North Carolina. We saw two races, Kat Abughazaleh and Junaid Ahmed in Illinois, lost at the hands of big money from AIPAC, crypto, and AI. Saikat Chakrabarti in Nancy Pelosi’s seat also lost the primary as well to a lot of big spending from seemingly pro-Israel donors.

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The truth is, we are always going to be up against this insurmountable amount of money. To the best of our ability, we have to organize our resources and organize our people to fight back against that. But it’s also the truth that we don’t take corporate PAC money. We don’t take money from billionaires, and so our resources are limited, and we’ve grown that. We’ve grown that pool. We’ve expanded our donor network to be able to run 15 candidates and win seven races.

But there’s not an infinite amount of resources, and so those losses are proof that the left still also has work to do. We do need to build more resources. We do need to build better connections to ensure that champions and fighters like Cori Bush, who to me really embody the fighter that Democratic voters are talking about, can be sent back to Congress.

Because in the absence of them, we have useless corporate shills like Wesley Bell, who have done absolutely nothing for their community since they got to St. Louis — and it shows.

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A big part of that is a resource constraint, also, the truth is, Cori had to go up against nearly $15 million of attacks last cycle, and that’s really recent. It’s not just the money that was spent against her this cycle. You have to look at what happened last cycle, because it’s all the same attacks. They ran the same playbook all over again, and it’s effective.

When you have a 20 to 1 outspending situation, and the only thing you’re seeing on TV and mail is how much you should dislike Cori Bush, it works at a certain point. That’s why it worked last cycle. Cori is a deep proof point that the left still has some work to do to really ensure that all of our champions can get to Congress. 

AL: I want to move now to some of the news of the week. This week, ICE shot yet another person in Austin, Texas: 28-year old food delivery driver Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez from Venezuela. After he was released from the hospital he was taken to an immigration detention center with a bullet still in his back, according to him and his lawyer.

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If Justice Democrats candidates make it to Congress in November, what power do they have to push Democrats to do more to stop ICE from killing and terrorizing people? What can they do, particularly in a House session where we expect Democrats, if they win power to be putting a laser focus on investigating Trump’s corruption, for example? 

UA: We should first and foremost be bold and listen to where voters are at. A majority of voters do not believe that ICE needs to exist. That’s understandable because both you and I were alive at a time when ICE didn’t exist — and yet I’m still living. 

AL: What a time. 

UA: What a time that was. The proof is in the pudding that we don’t need an ICE to have a “safe” America, whatever that means. But clearly the fascist governments need ICE to execute immigrants in this country and shoot down our neighbors and kidnap our families.

First and foremost, we should start from pushing to abolish ICE and ending this agency for all. Delia Ramirez, one of our Justice Democrats in Congress, has been leading the charge on this, calling to abolish ICE and also to dissolve the Department of Homeland Security, [which] in many ways, is also a relic of our lifetime. It is a relic of the George W. Bush era.

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I am baffled when there are Democratic leaders in this country who are so obsessed with defending an institution created by George W. fucking Bush. I remember when we didn’t like George W. Bush, and we didn’t agree with his policies. I’m not sure why the Democratic Party of 2026 should be the same as the Republican Party of 2004.

It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, and I think we are always, on immigration over the last 20 years, have always been allowing the right to dictate what the agenda and our playground should be on immigration policy, on border policy, on all of these policies. And as a result, have always tried to be a diet Republican Party on immigration policy, when the most popular policies we ever put forward on immigration were things like a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers and abolishing ICE, now. 

We have to be bold and not only end this agency, but also, as many people are talking about, prosecuting the people who were in charge of ICE and these officers who were killing folks. 

The ICE agent who was the shooter in Austin wasn’t even wearing a body cam. As if that’s enough anyway. Then there’s so many different accounts and these lies. We are living through another evolution of our criminal legal system being so extrajudicial and so outside of the bounds of what should be legally allowed that I think we have to massively reign in this agency. We cannot do it in a mealy-mouthed way that says we need to pay lip service to this right-wing propaganda, while continuing to allow our immigrant neighbors and families to be murdered and shot down in the streets while they’re trying to deliver food to your house.

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AL: In the Austin shooting the district attorney in Travis County, which is where the shooting happened, which is where Austin is, they are still trying to figure out the name of this officer, and they are waiting on getting footage from other ICE officers in the vicinity who had body cameras on, and they’re also trying to get footage from local hospitals to figure out where this officer who was allegedly injured went, because they do not yet know his name.

UA: But they know the man who he shot’s name, so.

AL: Yes. Much of the news this week centered on President Donald Trump’s attacks on the news media and his trip to New York City, where he met with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and attended the United Nations General Assembly. 

Outside the UNGA, Jewish leaders protested Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday. Mamdani once said he would arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York, though he didn’t have the authority to do so, and the two battled publicly this week. 

Many people praised Mamdani’s pledge to arrest Netanyahu, even though it had not really any teeth, but as an example of what we’re talking about, of just wanting Democrats to do something — the kind of sentiment that has animated many voters who’ve supported Justice Democrats candidates this cycle.

Democrats are heading into this lame-duck session for Trump where there is still little appetite among leadership to do something substantive on Israel — though last week we saw an unusual refusal from top Democrat Rep. Greg Meeks to approve Trump’s latest proposed $2.8 billion sale of more bombs to Israel. 

What is the strategy for the progressive bench on this issue right now? It seems like every time one of these packages comes up, there’s this big dust-up over OK, what’s going to happen? And every time, a few more Democrats either vote against it or, as in this case, voice some sort of opposition. But where do you see this going in the next Congress? 

UA: The writing is on the wall if even Chairman Greg Meeks is suspending some of these things. You can go to the FEC’s website to see why that is an interesting development. 

AL: [Laughter] Just in terms of support that Meeks has gotten from the pro-Israel apparatus in the past is what you’re referring to, I’m assuming.

UA: Yes. He’s been a dear ally to the lobby historically. But I think, like we saw on the vote on the Massie amendment, for the first time a majority of Democrats are voting to say, “We’re not going to send money to Israel.” A lot of people can say, “Well, that’s just a performative vote,” all these things.

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Look, I worked in Congress. Those performative votes don’t happen in that sort of way, unless the people are pressuring members of Congress to get to this point. That’s what we’re seeing, is that you are seeing Democratic voters across the country reject you if you have an endorsement from AIPAC or you take a single dollar from AIPAC, which is why AIPAC has to hide its money so much this cycle.

That’s what we’re going to see coming into this new Congress, is a real thrust of energy for the pro-Palestinian movement within Congress now that you are really doubling the amount of leaders in Congress who are unabashedly against the endless supply of military funding and resources to the Israeli government.

You have a renewed movement to really organize even more members. You can look at the co-sponsor for the Block the Bombs, Delia Ramirez’s arms embargo bill has a lot of members you would not have expected even a cycle ago to do so. But that’s the power of not only these elections, but also mass movements across the country demanding that their leaders actually stop the endless supply of weapons.

There will absolutely have to be a fight in Congress for this next Congress to say we need to stop funding the Israeli government and military, and the Democratic voters are behind us. That might be a fight that has to challenge leadership on that fight, because obviously leadership has historically been more aligned with funding the Israeli military and government.

But at a certain point they have to also see the writing on the wall. They are beginning to see that. There’s a lot of opportunities with a Democratic majority to show voters that we are hearing them, that we also don’t think your tax dollars should fund a fucking genocide for three to four to five years after also already funding decades of apartheid.

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That’s where we have to move next is not only ending funding right now, but ensuring that we never fund this military and government, and actually push towards a solution where we can end the apartheid state that Israel is running over the Palestinian people, and actually have a place where everyone has equal rights and dignity, which currently does not exist, obviously.

AL: You mentioned that you used to work in Congress, and I’m taken back to the fond days when I first met you around circa 2018 when you were working for then Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Mark Pocan. And since that time, we have been having this same conversation about the fight over the future of the Democratic Party.

Where do you see Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, and party leadership more broadly, either fitting into or obstructing your vision for the future? In that vein, I’m curious there’s been a lot of talk about where will Justice Democrats’ candidates land on, supporting a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries in 2027? What conversations are you having around that? Where do you see this conversation going? 

UA: Look, the corporate establishment will always be a barrier to progressive change and delivering for the needs of the working class. That, they have proven. They have made it clear. They have said it on the record.

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These are not my feelings. They’re theirs. These elections, these campaigns, have proven that they are on the wrong side of the Democratic Party electorate, and they are in the minority, as they always have been. But it’s really eye-opening for people in leadership to have races like people like Claire Valdez, and Zohran, and Darializa become these leaders in New York, in your backyard, speaking of both Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who obviously represent New York in the Senate and the House.

It doesn’t stop there. As much as people want to say every city is not New York — well New York is not Philly, is not Denver, is not Dallas, is not California, is not Tennessee. Let’s be fucking for real. This is happening across the country. There is a bloc of leaders across the country who are actually responding to the needs of the working class.

Like I said, they got elected on a mandate to challenge the Democratic establishment. They will be pushing this Democratic Party to meet the needs of voters, be it pushing for Medicare for All, or an arms embargo on Israel, or a stop to AI data centers, or raising taxes on billionaires. All universally popular fucking policies that the Democratic Party could lead on. 

So often this question has been framed as, what will the left do when they get to Congress? How will they deal with these sorts of institutions? We should be asking Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and everyone else that question far more, which is: What are you going to do about the fact that your electorate is making clear that you are not fighting for the policies they are looking for?

When you come out to say you oppose Medicare for All after being a co-sponsor for it for a few cycles, you are in the minority of Democratic voters. I promise in your district particularly I imagine maybe, what, 5 percent of voters agree with you. It’s incumbent upon Democratic leadership to wake up and decide where they want to be on these issues and how they want to lead this party, because do they want to be a one-term House majority? 

They can win back the majority a lot because Republicans are failing and because the left is showing voters what an opposition party could actually look like and what a governing party could actually look like. The establishment is not doing that. Until they start taking lessons from the left on what to actually fight for, they will continue to be running on cycle-to-cycle losses and wins instead of really looking at, long-term, how can we take back power and ensure that we don’t consistently backside into this fascist and authoritarian regime that is overrun by the same corporate interests that the Democratic establishment is also funded by.

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We absolutely are looking at this new crop of leaders joining this already existing group of progressives to really have a sizable influence in bringing the people’s power to the halls of Congress more than anything, and using their coordinated megaphones in many ways to bring light to the issues that people need them to.

Because even if we take back the House majority, Donald Trump is still president, even if we take the Senate back. He can veto any bill, and that’s a reality, but that should not stop us from showing people what we could do if we had power.

And what we could do if we had power should not simply look like turning back the clock to what it looked like before Donald Trump, which is what some of the agenda I’m seeing from Democratic leadership is, let’s roll back this. Let’s get this back. The status quo three, two, five, seven, eight, pick a fucking year, was not good enough for working-class people, so why would we go back to that? 

Obviously, we need to roll back all these attacks. We need to claw back the destruction that the Trump administration has done, but that’s obviously also not enough. We need universal healthcare. We need housing for all. We need to make billionaires pay their fair share. We need to stop fucking AI data centers from destroying every community, and raising our utility bills and poisoning our water. There are a litany of crises that we are facing. Mealy-mouthed solutions are not what Democratic voters are looking for.

They are making that deeply clear, and no matter how much fear-mongering around socialism or the Red Scare you want to do, the truth is, voters support these policies because these policies support voters. 

AL: If we’re picking years, I pick 2004. [Laughter] I think you’re onto something there. We’re going to leave it there, Usamah. Thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

UA: Thank you, Akela. 

AL: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. 

Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post The Blueprint for Democrats to Win Back Voters  appeared first on The Intercept.

But a new map published Wednesday by a cybersecurity researcher reveals Flock’s nationwide reach is even bigger. Based on location coordinates from Flock’s own database, the map shows more than 170,000 cameras, plus more than 130,000 accompanying gadgets that play a part in the company’s expansive American surveillance network.

Joshua Michael’s Flock Surveillance Map highlights the locations of what he says are 300,000 Flock surveillance devices spread across the country. His findings — which were cited in Wednesday’s Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing on Flock — differ from existing maps of Flock’s automated license plate readers in scope and methodology.

Unlike crowd-sourced projects such as DeFlock, which are built on locations submitted by users, the Flock Surveillance Map relies on location data culled from a snapshot, archived by Michael in December 2025, of Flock’s own records. In addition to cameras, it maps supplemental devices — including 27,000 acoustic detection devices, as well as networking equipment that integrates third-party cameras — to illustrate the scale of Flock’s surveillance web.

“These cameras form a nationwide surveillance network that tracks where everyone drives,” Michael told The Intercept, “so foreign nations don’t need to send spies to harm our country. They can simply watch where our soldiers, federal agents, and politicians go.”

The Intercept visited six random Arizona locations on Michael’s map; each location had a Flock camera present at the indicated coordinates.

The Flock Surveillance Map also color-codes each Flock device according to its model — showing, for instance, whether the device is a Flock camera, known as a Falcon, or an accompanying processing unit known as a Picard. (Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The accompanying searchable dataset table also lists each camera’s individual name, as outlined in Flock’s database, which typically includes a street address and sometimes other identifying characteristics. A camera with the name “FBI Pilot Camera,” for example, is shown to be located at the J. Edgar Hoover Building — the FBI headquarters in Washington.

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The map illustrates Flock’s national spread, but also its clustering in certain areas. For example, 860 Flock devices appear to be concentrated just outside Chicago O’Hare International Airport, at the Rosemont Public Safety Department, which provides police, fire, and emergency medical services in the Chicago suburb.

Numerous Flock cameras appear to be installed inside detention centers. A camera titled “C-F-23 FOXTROT MALE HOLDING 2/SHOWERS” appears at the coordinates of the Silverdale Detention Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In November 2025, Michael discovered a novel way to identify the location of Flock’s devices. Trawling the company’s website, he realized that Flock’s servers were publicly leaking data in the form of an access token that could be acquired without needing to log in. With that token, Michael said he could query ArcGIS, a third-party geographic information system platform used by Flock, to retrieve the locations of Flock devices.

Michael told The Intercept he promptly contacted Flock and described his findings. As Michael wrote in his initial email to Flock on November 13, 2025: “all testing was strictly non-intrusive, limited to open unauthenticated endpoints, and did not involve bypassing authentication, modifying data, or invoking any billable ArcGIS or Google operations.” Michael said he didn’t receive a reply, so he followed up with Flock the next day, and a third time several days later.

After his third attempt to inform Flock of the discovered vulnerability, Michael received a reply from a Flock that said, “Thank you for the findings. We are internally triaging them and will reach back out with next steps soon.”

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Michael said he never heard back about it from Flock.

In December 2025, Michael downloaded the Flock device location data, and in January wrote an in-depth technical blog post about what he had found. After Michael’s post, it appears that Flock fixed the vulnerability.

Despite being alerted of Michael’s findings in November 2025, Flock published its own blog post the following January saying it hadn’t had any data breaches. “Flock has never been hacked, and there has not been a leak of Flock information,” the company claimed. “Flock Safety’s cloud platform has never experienced a data breach.”

The Atlanta-based startup has faced mounting criticism for its practices and lack of transparency in recent months. An American Civil Liberties Union report found “a pattern of Flock regularly misleading or even lying about its business practices, safety record, commitment to privacy, and efforts to protect vulnerable populations.”

Michael told The Intercept that Flock’s recent claims about its data security record don’t reflect reality. Flock has publicly claimed multiple times that the company has never experienced a data breach, “and this was after I pulled their database of devices.”

“That leaves two possibilities,” he said. “Either they knew and chose not to disclose it for fear of bad press, or they didn’t know I exfiltrated the data at all. The first is a transparency failure. The second is a detection failure with national security implications.”

On Thursday, Michael was notified that Doppel, which describes itself as an “AI-native social engineering defense platfom,” filed a trademark infringement complaint regarding his site, claiming to be working on Flock’s behalf. Doppel says that the site is using the trademark “FLOCK SAFETY” without authorization, which “may cause customer confusion / harm.” Doppel requested the site be taken down.

When he posted the Flock Surveillance Map, Michael included a pop-up disclaimer saying that the site is “not affiliated with or endorsed by Flock.”

The post Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline appeared first on The Intercept.

National Iranian American Council Action on Thursday filed its suit in a Washington federal court asking a judge to declare the war on Iran illegal on the basis that it violates the Declare War Clause of the Constitution.

“No President should have the power to take this country into an indefinite war by himself,” NIAC President Jamal Abdi said in a statement. “Congress never authorized this war. Yet Iranian families are being bombed, American service members have been killed, and communities on both sides are being forced to bear the consequences. This lawsuit asks a fundamental question: Can one person decide, on his own, to keep an entire nation at war?”

The lawsuit was filed as the Senate prepared to vote on a resolution seeking to stop the war. A floor vote on the resolution, which already passed the House of Representatives, failed in the upper chamber Thursday afternoon after senators shot it down in a 49–50 split.

“We’ve unfortunately seen this Congress fail its job of standing up for their constitutional role as the sole body empowered to declare war,” Abdi told The Intercept. “That’s why we are pursuing every option at our disposal, including taking the challenge against this unconstitutional war to the courts.”

Both the Senate vote and NIAC Action’s lawsuit took on new urgency after Trump used his United Nations General Assembly speech on Tuesday to threaten to “annihilate” Iran, a country of 90 million people.

“When Trump is threatening annihilation of another country in a war of aggression,” Abdi said, “it is all hands on deck to stop this full-blown constitutional crisis before it gets worse.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Seven Months of War

Trump, in partnership with the Israeli military, launched the war against Iran on February 28 with a sudden barrage of airstrikes and missile attacks that left numerous top Iranian leaders dead and killed hundreds of civilians. The early days of the attack saw a missile strike on a school in the town of Minab that killed more than 100 children, which the United Nations declared to be a possible war crime.

It was days later, on March 2, that Trump notified Congress of the initiation of hostilities. In the ensuing months, the war has turned into a regional conflagration. Israel invaded Lebanon, leaving thousands of people killed and tens of thousands more displaced.

Meanwhile, retaliatory missile and drone strikes by Iran against the U.S., Israel, and their allies in the Persian Gulf have severely impacted the region and led to a shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz that has hobbled global fuel markets. And missile fire from the Houthis, the militant group that controls much of Yemen, shut down shipping through the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandab Strait, further straining the global economy and spurring a Saudi military response. 

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The initial attacks, thousands of deaths, and cascading economic fallout of the war all took place without the consent of the American people, a fact that NIAC Action’s attorneys cast in the lawsuit as a clear violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war.

“The Constitution does not permit a President to wage war indefinitely and ask Congress for permission later,” said attorney Alan Morrison. “Congress never authorized this war, yet months later the bombing and blockade continued. We are asking the Court to enforce the constitutional line between the President’s authority as Commander in Chief and Congress’s exclusive authority to take the country to war.”

Though Trump has sought to bypass Congress in pursuing the war through the use of semantics, he has repeatedly undermined that effort with public statements declaring that his military action is a war, NIAC Action’s complaint noted.

“Calling a war a ‘military operation’ or an ‘excursion’ does not erase the Declare War Clause,” said attorney Bruce Fein in a statement. “The question before the Court is whether the President can continue these hostilities without the authorization the Constitution requires.”

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The lawsuit was filed on behalf of several NIAC Action members who have been personally impacted by the war. Several of their family members have been killed, wounded, or otherwise terrorized by the monthslong campaign of airstrikes carried out by the U.S. and its allies. One member joining the suit, Nilma Dilmaghani, described the horror of learning that a cousin had been badly wounded in an airstrike that destroyed a family apartment.

“When I learned that my cousin had been trapped under the rubble, that they had lost their home and suffered such serious injuries, I felt completely helpless,” said Dilmaghani. “It is unbearable to watch your family live through this from thousands of miles away and know there is nothing you can do to keep them safe.”

The post Congress Failed Again to Stop Trump’s Iran War. This Group Is Trying Through the Courts. appeared first on The Intercept.

Gold Rush in the Desert

Only ghosts and ruins remain in this dusty old town. Tucked under scenic hills of volcanic rock are the remnants of a bank, a railroad depot, and what looks to be a school, along with a handful of other deteriorating structures that are hard to make out. This is Rhyolite, Nevada, whose heyday was fierce but short-lived, something of a one-hit wonder. In 1904, after gold was discovered in the nearby Bullfrog Hills, prospectors descended upon this dry corner of the Mojave Desert with hopes of striking it rich.

Of the several mining camps that quickly sprang up in this part of the Great Basin, Rhyolite was one of the liveliest. By 1908, the town’s population had surpassed 5,000, and at its peak, there were 50 saloons, 35 gambling dens, brothels, a bathhouse, a newspaper, and over a dozen restaurants.

Rhyolite’s flame would burn out fast: The Wall Street panic of 1907 scared off would-be investors, and by 1910, just a few years after the mine opened, most of the gold had been extracted. With no mining jobs left, the town was soon abandoned. All three banks eventually shuttered, and by 1914, the last train departed the Rhyolite station, never to return. Entire buildings, including the old Union Hall, were relocated to a neighboring town, where they still reside. The leftover Rhyolite town site, now a tourist stop, is managed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management and has been a not-so-popular location for a string of low-budget Hollywood films you’ve never heard of, like “Six-­String Samurai” and “The Island.”

The Southern Paiute (Nuwuvi) and the Western Shoshone (Newe) inhabited this arid region between the northern Great Basin and the southern Mojave. This ancient land holds many tales. In the 1980s, archaeologists discovered what appear to be aboriginal campsites dating back at least 10,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. West of Rhyolite is Beatty, a town with a certain rural desert charm. It could be the wild burros roaming the streets or the raggedy Sourdough Saloon with hundreds of dollar bills tagged to the walls. Whatever it is, I understand the appeal for those uninterested in city life. The residents I spoke with told me it was the quiet landscape that drew them there.

I find myself in Rhyolite — just seven miles east of the broiling Death Valley National Park — to meet up with two activists who’ve dedicated their lives to protecting the surrounding Mojave Desert. Kevin Emmerich and Laura Cunningham, founders of the Beatty-based Basin and Range Watch, are concerned that two major solar projects on nearby BLM-managed lands will destroy the desert ecology and provide little benefit to the local community.

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“This type of desert out there actually sequesters carbon in the roots of the creosote,” explained Cunningham, a wildlife biologist and desert tortoise researcher who has lived in the area for over 20 years. “There’s biological soil crust [with a] deep network under the soil that sequesters carbon, literally sucks it out of the atmosphere and turns it into oxygen. And deserts, believe it or not, actually have a high level of carbon sequestration. But when you scrape it up and drive on it, you crush the lichens, shrubs, and flowers, and release carbon. Building on these habitats is actually [contributing to] climate change.”

Deserts like the Mojave, Cunningham said, play an outsized role in absorbing climate-warming carbon. Of the world’s carbon sinks — the places that soak up carbon from our fossil fuel emissions — deserts account for up to 28 percent of land-based uptake. It’s one reason why a patchwork of solar farms out here is a troubling prospect.

Cunningham’s partner, Kevin Emmerich, is what you’d call a desert rat. He’s tall, grizzled, and soft-spoken. He strikes me as a man who has spent a lot of time in remote places, and I say that with admiration. A former park ranger in Death Valley, he nods in agreement with Cunningham while pointing to a valley across the highway where two solar projects, if completed, would blanket over 8,000 acres of open space. He’s frustrated that the people who usually oppose wrecking biodiversity aren’t warier of the large-scale energy projects proposed for public lands.

“Other environmental groups are really conflicted about ‘green’ energy,” Emmerich said. “We just had a little spat with one group. They want some of this public land development. … If we do use renewable energy, we want to put it in the built environment where it doesn’t have much of an impact.”

A Battle for What Remains

While some environmentalists may be on the fence, others, like the small outfit Basin and Range Watch, are working tirelessly to halt the development of these solar farms. In 2010, in coalition with community groups and the Quechan and Cocopah tribes, it blocked the Imperial Valley Solar Project in California, which would have destroyed nine square miles of habitat and decimated more than 400 Quechan cultural sites. Basin and Range also supported the “Save Our Mesa” campaign, which succeeded in stopping the controversial Battle Born solar project near Moapa Valley, Nevada. Battle Born was proposed as an installation of solar panels covering 14 square miles of public lands. The grassroots pressure was so strong that the developer, California-based Arevia Power, told BLM they wouldn’t move forward.

When it comes to impacts, at least on paper, solar energy may have the fewest downsides (although they certainly exist). The technology requires less mining and is inexpensive and easy to deploy. But as Basin and Range Watch argues, it’s not enough to simply let these vast, open spaces be blanketed with fields of solar panels. There are better locations for solar that will yield better results for people and the environment. Many of our popular ideas about places like the Mojave — such as the idea that they’re lonesome, empty wastelands, devoid of life — sustain the myth that desert solar farms have fewer drawbacks and are essential in the fight against climate change. Not many assumptions could be more untrue.

BLM has considerable sway in the West and has, for decades, had the power to radically shape the region, from its fragile ecology to its resource-dependent economies. It manages 245 million acres of land and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral rights in the United States. In all, BLM oversees one-tenth of the country. It divvies up rights to mine, drill, and graze. What the bureau say goes, and even under the antagonistic Trump administration, which is no fan of renewables, it is still overseeing massive green energy developments.

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While Trump and his allies in Congress have drastically reduced subsidies for renewable energy projects, those incentives aren’t set to expire until December 2027. As a result, companies are hurrying to build out solar farms, wind turbines, and commercial battery storage. While Trump’s actions have hampered long-term growth projections for the renewables industry, it’s booming, for now.

“The energy transition is still underway, but the whiplash has very serious implications for our economy and for the investment culture of America,” explains Sanya Carley, the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “Solar has still been on a phenomenal growth trajectory, especially across the entire world. … [It’s still] the leading source of growth in the energy industry in the United States.” Trump’s rancor has turned out to be more of a speed bump than a roadblock.

Whose Land Is It?

In Nevada, BLM has parceled around 12 million acres for large utility-scale solar project construction. In 2024, the agency announced its Western Solar Plan, which would reserve 22 million acres of public land for future solar development. As of early 2024, seven major projects were proposed or in the works, covering 140 square miles of land. The Western Solar Plan would locate high-solar-producing areas on public lands across the dry flatlands of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, and on millions of acres of federal land in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.

Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity, believes this massive, swift expansion of industrial-scale solar could destroy many of the region’s “crown jewels.” He’s worried solar arrays could surround Nevada’s Great Basin National Park and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon — ditto for the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

“It’s insane,” Donnelly, who isn’t shy about his frustrations, said. “BLM is going to make lanes available for solar at the foot of the Sierra Nevada,” which he calls “possibly the most beautiful place in the country.”

It’s hard to argue with Donnelly about the stakes. I spend weeks each year wandering the Mojave, decompressing from urban life. The desert is a refuge. As a teenager growing up in Montana, I used to believe wilderness only included trout streams, mountains, grizzly bears, and wolves. I was youthfully naive, and I now realize that wilderness includes saguaro, rattlesnakes, desert tortoise, and bighorn sheep. We shouldn’t exploit these places for our energy needs, whether for fossil fuels or solar power. These desert lands are crucial not only for the animals that inhabit them but also for their roles they play, such as carbon sequestration, in helping mitigate the climate crisis.

These lands are significant to Native Americans, who have inhabited this land long before Europeans showed up. For years, members of the Western Shoshone and Goshute tribes in Nevada have worked to designate a 25,000-acre monument called Bahsahwahbee near Great Basin National Park. The Western Solar Plan will carve out 7,000 of those pristine acres for development.

“Our ancestors were massacred at Bahsahwahbee. It is unconscionable that the site would be considered by the federal government as a development zone instead of a place to be preserved and commemorated,” Ely Shoshone Tribal Elders Delaine and Rick Spilsbury wrote for the Great Basin Water Network. “The federal government doesn’t propose developments in other cemeteries or seek to bulldoze other peoples’ churches. In fact, graves and churches are generally protected under federal and state laws. But for the resting place of our ancestors, we have to wonder why it’s OK?”

These large solar projects are sure to raze more Native lands to power hundreds of thousands of homes across the West, often in cities far from where the energy was first produced. Once the solar installations are built, few jobs are likely to remain in those regions, which contradicts the central arguments local governments make in support of the projects.

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When it comes to the Western Solar Plan, most of the major environmental groups have either stayed silent or, like the Wilderness Society, uncritically supported it as a positive step to help California shift its grid to 100 percent clean energy by 2035.

“I feel like we are working out here on the marginalized fringe, and we’re sort of pushed more to work with grassroots groups, local communities, scientists, and people who aren’t beholden to their big climate donors [like other environmental groups],” Cunningham of Basin and Range Watch said. “[Energy developers] call this a wasteland, like there’s no biodiversity, and we push back against that. We support photovoltaic solar panels, first on rooftops, parking lot canopies, or on really disturbed ground. But this desert has life. The very, very bottom of the list [for solar development] should be public lands. Ecosystems built on utility-scale solar projects are the last thing we should support in the fight against climate change.” 

Cunningham’s argument is convincing, and it’s hard not to think that much of this has to do with people’s perception of the desert as a wasteland, as she puts it. Even the late David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club who was forced out for his radicalism, once remarked that he’d be willing to sacrifice the Mojave under the guise of diplomacy and compromise if it meant protecting scenic wilderness elsewhere. He later retracted the sentiment, but this reasoning still permeates much of the mainstream environmental movement, which is focused on slowing climate change at almost all costs — even if it means harming wild places in the process.

Perhaps it will take an expert like Laura Cunningham and a desert-lover like Kevin Emmerich, who have a deep admiration for and understanding of desert ecology, to alter people’s perceptions. At least I hope so. It’s easy to imagine the public outcry that would ensue, for instance, if giant redwoods were on the chopping block to make room for a gargantuan solar field in the Sierra Nevadas. But, strangely enough, Joshua trees and desert tortoises don’t seem to hold the same intrinsic value.

Excerpt adapted from “Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future,” published by Haymarket Books in September 2026. © 2026 Joshua Frank.

The post Green Energy Is Coming for the Desert appeared first on The Intercept.

Leevin Camacho was brushing his teeth one day last fall when his mother called. The water is contaminated, she said. Moments later, she texted him a photo of a flyer issued by the local water authority. “Cancer risk,” it warned. “Increased likelihood of adverse impacts on the liver.” And in bold capital letters, “DO NOT DRINK.”

Camacho stared at the message. Water flowed from the faucets as his children, who were 10 and 12, gulped and spit, their faces reflected in the mirrors above the two bathroom sinks.

Thumbing at his phone, Camacho looked up dieldrin. The search results included words like “organochlorine” and “insecticide” and “persistent environmental pollutant”; the United States had banned it in 1987. Worse, high levels had been detected in his community’s water since at least 2008. “Our kids have been drinking the water,” he realized. “They’ve been cooking with the water for almost their entire lives at this point.”

Camacho lives in Yigo, a northern village on the island of Guam. In time, he would learn that the U.S. Air Force base next to the well serving his house had reported “very high levels” of the pesticide, which it had listed as a “chemical of concern” since at least 1993. The Pentagon’s investigation, led by officials at Joint Region Marianas, is in its early stages. Local officials caution that although they suspect the base is a source of the pollution, there may be others because dieldrin was once widely used.

For Camacho, the news felt like the unfolding of a familiar story — one both predictable and infuriating.

Camacho had grown up as an Army brat, raised to think of the United States as Guam’s liberator from Japan during World War II. But over the past two decades, his understanding of that legacy has changed.

“There are certain actions that the military takes that are contrary to the interests of the people who are from Guam and who live in Guam,” said Camacho, whose measured tone rarely changes, even when discussing something as emotional as what his children have been drinking. 

To Camacho, dieldrin is the latest reminder that the people of Guam continue to bear the costs of militarization. Unexploded ordnance litters jungles and lagoons. PCBs contaminate the fish. Pollutants taint the groundwater. The island and its people, who are U.S. citizens, have been inalterably changed by more than a century of American military presence.

Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, the head of Joint Region Marianas, the U.S. Navy’s regional command for Guam and neighboring islands, said he can’t speak to past pollution but the command is committed to protecting the environment and the people of Guam. 

“We spend a lot of time and we spend a lot of money making sure that we meet every U.S. regulation when it comes to anything that we’re going to do here,” he said. “We’re meeting every letter of every law for environmental regulations and rules, and we’re doing that while we’re spending a ton of money to defend this island from the most advanced missiles in the world.”

Today, Guam sits at the center of an ongoing military buildup, one that is reshaping the island even as it spreads across the Pacific. On nearby Yap, more than 1,000 graves could be disturbed to make way for an American seaport and airfield. Indigenous leaders on Palau are suing to protect their lands.

Less visible but just as impactful are the climate impacts of this expansion. The Pentagon is already the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, and its buildup will do more than contribute to the destruction of the region’s reefs, forests, and Indigenous sacred sites. It will accelerate the climate crisis that threatens the survival of Pacific islands.

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The Pentagon often cites growing geopolitical tensions to justify the buildup. “The security environment in the Indo-Pacific is becoming more dangerous and defined by an increasing risk of confrontation and crisis,” Navy Adm. Sam Paparo, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told Congress in April while seeking $122 billion for new weaponry to counter China, including offensive missiles on Guam. Three months later, a ballistic missile launched from a Chinese submarine flew near Guam, underscoring why many on the island see America’s military presence as both a source of vulnerability and protection.

Sometimes it can be too much to think about. “I need to compartmentalize these things,” Camacho said. “That’s sometimes the only way that you can do this, because otherwise you will just be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things that are out there, the amount of injustice that is out there.” 

Those injustices collide in Yigo. Neighbors lost their homes earlier this year to typhoons fueled by warming seas. The Army Corps of Engineers will soon begin clearing bombs from a nearby dump site created in 1945. A new machine-gun range just opened alongside a federal wildlife refuge to support the arrival of 5,000 U.S. Marines from Okinawa, Japan.

Then there’s the dieldrin contamination. “At some point,” Camacho said, “someone has to force them to do what’s right.”

II.

Years before he became one of Guam’s leading critics of the military buildup sweeping over the island, Leevin Camacho was a young lawyer who liked to run before work. As his sneakers hit the pavement, the sun rose over Yigo. Roosters crowed and streaks of pink lightened the sky. The road, little used and lined with jungle brush, was one of the few places he could run without encountering stray dogs or morning traffic. He always ran at first light, before oppressive heat would reflect off the asphalt and the concrete buildings. It was the perfect start to what was often a day spent listening to depositions and wading through case law.

It was 2009. Camacho had returned to Guam after law school and was making more money than he ever had as a school teacher. “You dream of going to law school to provide services and to fight for people who don’t have the ability to fight, right? I’ll be honest with you, I lost my way,” Camacho said. “I had a bunch of student debt, and I was satisfied just kind of going by day to day and just focusing on myself and my family.” 

The U.S. military was the backdrop to Camacho’s life but not something he worried about. He didn’t think much about the invasive tangan-tangan trees lining his running route, or the fact that they had spread across Guam after the U.S. scattered their seeds to reforest the island following the war. On his morning runs, he was more likely to hear a military jet overhead than a native birdsong. 

It hadn’t always been that way. Guam was among the first Pacific islands settled by seafarers, from what is now the Philippines, who navigated by the stars and waves an estimated 3,500 years ago. The CHamoru people built a thriving island society known for its towering latte stones and swift outrigger sailing canoes.

That changed when Magellan landed on Guam in 1521. Spain claimed the island and the rest of the archipelago, beginning more than 500 years of ongoing colonization. The Spanish forced the Indigenous people to embrace Catholicism and banned their canoes. The United States took over the island from Spain in 1898 and imposed military rule. Naval governors burned CHamoru language books and blocked Indigenous efforts to gain U.S. citizenship. 

Then came Japan. Its invasion in 1941, on the same day it attacked Pearl Harbor, wasn’t unexpected. The U.S. Navy evacuated sailors’ dependents but left 20,000 CHamorus to endure nearly three years of forced marches and labor, malnutrition, and sexual servitude. More than 1,000 would die. When American forces retook Guam in 1944, they were welcomed as liberators. The island still celebrates Liberation Day every July. “I can’t remember a single discouraging remark that my maternal grandmother would have made about the U.S.,” Camacho said. But he does remember her saying of the Americans, “‘They saved us.’”

That was the narrative that Camacho grew up with. Even the military taking his family’s land — part of a massive military land grab after World War II — was accepted by his grandparents as the price of freedom from Japanese oppression. It wasn’t until Camacho learned that the Pentagon’s expansion plans would close his running route that he began to question what it meant for Guam to be an American military outpost. He pored over the buildup’s planning documents and was struck by the disconnect between how the military described its plans and the reality as he knew it. “They paid consultants a bunch of money. The comment was, ‘We drove by and we didn’t see any cars, so there’s no impact,’” he said of the running route. “And that was it.”

As Camacho read thousands of pages of documents, he saw the same pattern again and again. Proposals for bombing and machine-gun ranges, expanded undersea explosives, and projects that threatened forests and ancient latte stones were accompanied by detailed assessments that minimized what they would mean for the islands.

On a flight home from Honolulu, Camacho was reviewing the environmental analysis of the buildup on his laptop when one passage stopped him. The proposed influx of 80,000 people would leave too little water for fire suppression, particularly in Yigo. The solution, according to the document, was to send surplus water from Andersen Air Force Base to civilian communities. “That was the first time I just kind of lost it, just how stark it was,” he said. “The aquifer is our aquifer, right? Like, you’re taking our water for your people and then we don’t have enough and they’re going to divert whatever you’re taking from us that is extra.” 

Camacho and other concerned residents started We Are Guåhan, a community group focused on raising awareness about what was happening. (Guåhan is the CHamoru word for Guam.) He sued to stop a machine-gun range from being built at Pågat, an ancestral village that’s home to millennia-old latte stones. Their campaign protected the site and helped persuade the Navy not to expand its landholdings on Guam. The Department of Defense also reduced the planned transfer of Marines from Okinawa from 9,000 to 5,000. 

But it didn’t stop the buildup. The Pentagon activated Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz six years ago and opened a new machine-gun range alongside a federal wildlife refuge just north of Yigo. “It’s so heartbreaking,” said Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero, another member of We Are Guåhan. “All of that effort, and it still happened.”

III.

The yellow excavator scraped away at the pale rock that lies beneath Camp Blaz under the hot May sun. A limestone forest had already been bulldozed to make way for a new machine-gun training range. A sign next to the fence read “Guam National Wildlife Refuge” with an arrow pointing to the left and a picture of a turtle.

“Wow,” said Monaeka Flores, executive director of Prutehi Guåhan, one of Camacho’s clients in the lawsuit he filed against the Navy to protect the island’s endangered species. She stopped at the side of the road to watch the digger work. It had been months since she’d been here, and they’d cleared so much more forest than she realized.

Busy construction vehicles are the most obvious sign of the Pentagon’s buildup. Beyond the new Marine Corps base, the Department of Defense is upgrading the island’s port and strengthening its infrastructure to support docked nuclear submarines. The agency is also pouring $8 billion into 16 new missile defense sites. After World War II, the Navy took two-thirds of the island. “Whatever made most sense for the military, the island was theirs for the taking,” said Michael Clement, a historian at the University of Guam. “Everyone was in refugee camps. They had the bulldozers. They built where they wanted to build. And then a year or two later, they started saying, ‘OK, where are we going to put the natives?’” 

The military later relinquished some land but still owns at least a quarter of the island. “If you look at where the villages were set out in 1946 and ’47, it’s the land the military didn’t need. So that’s why Guam is kind of weird to drive around, right?” Clement said. “To go across from Tumon to Mangilao, you’ve got to go around Tiyan and the airport. It wasn’t redesigned for civilians. It was redesigned for military purposes.” 

Even the island’s main highway, the six-lane Marine Corps Drive, was designed for the military, not the people. It connects Andersen in the north and Naval Base Guam in the south.

Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero (no relation to Victoria-Lola Leon Guerreo) is among the many who welcome the financial boost that comes with the military’s investments. “They’re spending billions on their readiness plan,” she said. 

One in 9 Guam residents joins the armed forces. Last year, a local economist told the Legislature that every dollar the Pentagon spends adds 75 cents to the island’s GDP and called the buildup an “unprecedented economic opportunity.” The funding infusions have helped Guam become far more commercialized than other Pacific islands, with multiple shopping malls, numerous high-rise hotels, and a growing real estate sector. 

Leon Guerrero thinks activists should pursue political self-determination instead of resisting the buildup. “These guys can yell and scream all they can,” the governor said. “They’re going to do the military buildup regardless, right? So why don’t we work with them and see how we can benefit?” She wants the Defense Department to help harden local power lines and fund a hospital. “Our hospital cannot absorb mass casualties,” she said.

There are about 20,600 military personnel, civilians, and dependents on Guam, a figure that’s expected to reach 29,400 by 2037. While the military is investing in additional housing both on and off base, the population influx will almost certainly continue pushing up construction and housing costs. The median home price on Guam was $216,100 in 2010, when Camacho sued the military to protect Pågat. Today it is approaching half a million dollars.

Fear of another war also fuels support for the buildup. “We’ve always been a target regardless, because of where we are geographically located,” Leon Guerrero said. Guam is the largest island in the Micronesian region of the Pacific. It’s just north of the equator, a three-hour flight from Tokyo, and has a deep-water harbor that supports naval submarines. “We were a target for Spain. We were a target for the U.S. We were a target for Japan.” She worries about China, which has a ballistic missile nicknamed the “Guam Killer.” “If I’m going to have a choice, I’d rather be under the U.S. than China.”

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To Flores, more military presence on Guam heightens the risk of war. In March, President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran prompted military bases on the island to raise their threat level. She feels that, as in World War II, the Indigenous people of Guam are expendable in a broader contest between empires. “What are they really here to protect if there’s so much harm taking place? Are we just collateral damage?” she said. “Because just looking at our history of being occupied by war, being used for weapons testing, it feels like the message is that we don’t matter. Our future doesn’t matter. Our survival doesn’t matter.”

Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, at Joint Region Marianas, said he understands such skepticism. “If I was born and raised on Guam, I would have similar concerns,” he said. But he believes the military’s investment proves the opposite of what Flores fears. “Choice A is not to defend Guam against ballistic and hypersonic missiles,” he said. “Or the other choice, which is the one that we’ve made, is to spend billions of dollars to defend Guam from hypersonic and ballistic missiles. And so from my perspective, that shows a commitment not just to the military things that are on Guam, but also to the people of Guam.”

Yet Flores is far from the only Guam resident who feels expendable. When Pedro Blas, the vice-mayor of Yigo, first learned about the dieldrin in his village’s water, his first thought was of his autistic sister. “All of us growing up, all our lives, our water bottles, we fill it up with the tap water, put it in the fridge: That’s our cold water,” he said. “Because we were instilled in our heads our whole lives: Tap water is OK.” 

So far, Camacho’s firm has helped file more than 700 claims, worth $360 million, against local authorities on behalf of village residents. He hopes that pressures the island to seek compensation from the Defense Department. “I’m so glad [Camacho] got involved,” Blas said. “We’re not letting it get swept up under the rug.” Mietus noted that Joint Region Marianas has not found high levels of dieldrin in military wells, and the Pentagon is working with local officials to determine the source of Yigo’s pollution.

Still, Blas wonders why the investigations at Andersen Air Force Base are occurring quietly behind the fence, while he hasn’t seen anyone in uniform hand out water to his constituents. “It’s beautiful to be a U.S. citizen, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But if you really take a step back and look at exactly the impacts that [the military] brought to us over the years, we should have a say in whether or not these practices are going to happen to our island. Even just being called the ‘tip of the spear’ — we’re susceptible to any war that they’re going fight, and we just have to be OK with it.”

“This contamination they bring to our island, it kind of just shows how much they really care about our people,” Blas continued. “And frankly, I think they look at Guam as real estate rather than ‘Those are our U.S. citizens. Those are our people. Those are Americans.’”

IV.

The men and women gathered in the p’ebay, the traditional open-air Yapese meeting house with a triangular tin roof, and settled quietly on the tiled floor along each wall to listen to Camacho speak. A projector, perched above a cardboard box stacked on top of a red cooler, cast his PowerPoint presentation onto a screen. Slide after slide described the American military’s plans. A cool breeze fluttered the fronds on the palm trees surrounding the p’ebay.

It was April in the village of Tamil on Yap, one of four states in the Federated States of Micronesia. Camacho’s dieldrin work was far from over, but he’d put that aside when the island state’s government asked him to help dissect a Navy proposal to expand the seaport and airport. Tamil was one of several villages he visited to explain the plan. 

Over the past decade, Camacho has become one of Guam’s leading environmental lawyers. “The one thing about Leevin is he shows up. Again and again,” said Julian Aguon, a human rights lawyer on the island. “And he brings with him not only deep competence but a deep sense of responsibility to the people and places he serves.”

“Regulatory agencies will bend over backwards to not pick a fight with the military because of the mission and the protection and all of that,” Camacho said. “And ultimately, it’s people who aren’t lawyers who end up paying the price.”

He was elected attorney general in 2018 for one term and led a historic lawsuit to force the Navy to clean up a hazardous landfill it had abandoned in the 1940s. A lower court dismissed the suit, but the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2021 that it could proceed — a decision that eventually prompted the federal government to pay Guam $48.9 million. 

He has sued the Navy to protect endangered species harmed by the construction of Camp Blaz. “For too long, our island has been treated as a sacrifice zone,” he said.

The risk of Guam falling into enemy hands, as it did in World War II, is so tangible that America’s Pacific military strategy involves spending billions of dollars to spread airfields, seaports, and training ranges across the region to remain competitive in case Guam is once again occupied by enemy forces. The U.S. is invoking decades-old agreements with the peoples of the Republic of Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia to expand its presence on those islands and upgrade World War II-era seaports and airfields. Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. even signed a new agreement with Papua New Guinea to use its seaports. 

On Yap, the U.S. military wants to dredge the lagoon, including two-thirds of an acre in a marine protected area, to create a seaport. The plan would remove enough sediment to fill 334 40-foot shipping containers and impact sea life, Indigenous fishers, and divers. “Plume spreads up to 800 m from disposal sites,” Camacho’s presentation noted. “Long-term reef decline and impact on reef species (fish, clams, sharks, turtles) not assessed.” 

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The Navy also plans to expand the airfield to facilitate two military exercises, each two weeks long and involving up to 200 personnel, per year. The project could disturb more than 1,000 graves, including the 19th-century tombs of Chief Orothin and Chief Yaloth. Camacho noted that the military’s draft plan acknowledges a “significant adverse impact” to these cultural sites and doesn’t commit to rebury the dead or preserve ancestral sites.

Yap has a population of just about 11,500, compared to Guam’s 170,000. Although Yap is less than a 90-minute flight from Guam, it has none of the military bases, six-lane highways, or big-box stores that define the American territory. “In some ways, this will be more transformative for Yap State than the buildup was for Guam because there’s no military presence there today,” Camacho said. On Guam, he said, “It’s normal to hear a fighter jet flying over. It’s normal to see a bomber or C130. They don’t have any of that there. So this would be such a radical change.” 

One month after Camacho visited Yap, dignitaries from across the Pacific gathered in an air-conditioned conference room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Guam. The hotel sits on a long stretch of white sand beach and looks out over Tumon Bay, where high levels of dieldrin have also been found in fish samples. 

Once everyone had taken a seat, the lights dimmed and the glow of a projector filled the room. A screen showed a map of military activity across the western Pacific: not just bases, but training exercises and the routes of research vessels searching the sea floor for the critical minerals essential to many military technologies.

“We’re faced with the reality that we’re part of a larger strategic vision,” conference organizer and former Guam congressman Robert Underwood said. “All of you are in someone’s strategic plans whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. All of us are in someone’s strategic plan.” 

In Palau, Indigenous people are fighting the Pentagon’s expansion in local courts and international forums. Leaders of Angaur, one of 16 states there, filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. of violating environmental rules and its treaty with the island nation when it cleared land for a radar facility. Indigenous chiefs from Peleliu are suing to prevent a land transfer that would support American goals. Indigenous Palauan youth filed a complaint at the United Nations alleging the U.S. military violated their right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land.

In the Northern Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands, the U.S. military presence that started with World War II is ramping up. On Tinian, the Marine Corps is building an airfield and two live-fire training ranges, one of them for explosives. The Navy is extending its undersea sonar and explosives training across half a million square nautical miles, along with bombing practice on the neighboring island of Farallon de Medinilla.

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Some hope the military’s regional expansion will enable other island nations and territories to experience the economic growth seen on Guam. But others worry about the pollution and cultural loss, and other risks that come with being a U.S. military stronghold. 

In public comments written in response to the Navy’s proposal, Jennifer Dugwen Chieng noted that Camacho’s fight to have the Navy address hazardous waste at Ordot Dump went all the way to the Supreme Court. “Additionally, there are sacred private lands and culturally significant ecosystems that no amount of money can ever replace,” she wrote. “The desecration of graves violates the general principles of respect for burial sites and human remains upheld in Yap’s traditional custom.”

She’s also worried about becoming a target in the next war. Like Palau, Yap was held by the Japanese during World War II and experienced heavy bombardment by the United States. Since then, the Pentagon hasn’t paid much attention to the island state — until now. 

“With rising tensions in the region between the U.S. and China, what does the DoD envision combat to look like?” Chieng wrote. “Will it be based on a WWII tactic of island hopping? What is the likelihood of the island becoming a battlefield if tensions were to escalate into war? Yap will be caught in the crossfire. Does the DoD intend to protect and defend the people of Yap, and if so, how does the DoD intend to do that?”

Mietus, the Joint Region Marianas commander, said there’s always a level of risk in being allied with the U.S. during a conflict.

“Sometimes people believe it’s a plan to evacuate U.S. service members or family members if a war starts — there is not,” he said. “I’m in this, living in the same risk as every other person here.” He’s pushed back against Guam lawmakers’ calls for the Defense Department to fund bomb shelters for civilians, contending that the existing military projects like strengthening Guam’s harbor are a better investment. “Oftentimes people see this Department of War as kind of having an infinite amount of money, and we don’t.”

V.

Unlike Guam, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia are independent countries that have achieved the political self-determination that Indigenous CHamoru on Guam have been denied for centuries. 

Camacho wants a plebiscite to determine Guam’s political status. He believes the island’s status as a U.S. territory — without a vote for president or voting representation in Congress — isn’t working. But while some of his colleagues in We Are Guåhan have focused on independence, Camacho sees his own role as making the government answer for its actions.

“Unless someone’s forcing the issue,” he said, “the Department of War isn’t going to voluntarily agree to be held accountable and agree to do all the things that it’s supposed to do.”

That’s why he feels compelled to seek reparations for the dieldrin contamination. So often, toxic pollution lingers on Guam and no one takes responsibility. “As a lawyer, I don’t want to fall into this situation where we’re like [the village of] Malesso, and they show up every year and say you still can’t eat the fish. That’s just not satisfactory,” he said. 

One question that drives him is what Guam will be like when his kids are grown. Will they be able to afford living there? Will they want to, given how much the island is changing? It’s a constant effort to find the right balance between working toward their future and being there for them day to day.

“I’m going to try to do the best that I can to protect my island and to have a safe place for my kids to want to live on Guam,” Camacho said. “But also be there for them and help them get better dribbling with their left hand and be good human beings.” Even though Camacho moved a lot growing up, his family never considers leaving. “That is not a choice,” he said. “Guam is home — there is nowhere else we are going to be.”

Correction: September 25, 2026
This story originally misspelled Monaeka Flores’s name. It also has been updated to clarify her organization’s relationship to Leevin Camacho and to reflect that the number of military personnel on Guam includes civilian employees, dependents, and others.

The post As the Pentagon Expands Across the Pacific, Guam Offers a Warning appeared first on The Intercept.

This article and video are being co-published with Responsible Statecraft.

For the first time, the Pentagon budget topped $1 trillion, and private contractors now receive more than half of all the tax dollars flowing to the Pentagon.

Few have profited from this privatization of the U.S. military more than the CEOs of Pentagon contractors.

While these companies often advertise their work as supporting the troops, the fact is that many service members live in appalling housing conditions, while military–industrial contractors’ profits soar and their CEOs live in luxury.

The lavish lifestyles of these CEOs is laid bare in the new mockumentary “Lords of War,” co-produced by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, that lampoons an industry held aloft by hundreds of billions of public funds every year.

“Lords of War” connects exorbitant Pentagon spending to the luxury enjoyed by the CEOs of its top contractors. As the film notes, Lockheed Martin is regularly the largest recipient of Pentagon contracts, raking in $75 billion in revenue in 2025 — more than 72 percent of which came from the U.S. government.

As “Lords of War”’s faux real estate aficionado explains, Lockheed’s CEOs have used their $20-million-plus compensation packages to buy luxury real estate from the D.C. suburbs to the shores of Miami.

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Despite its care-free tone, the film highlights very real problems within the military–industrial complex. As research by William Hartung and Stephen Semler for Brown University’s Costs of War Project showed, 54 percent of the Pentagon’s annual spending now goes to private contractors — up from 41 percent in the 1990s.

The top Pentagon contractors’ revenues and stock prices also skyrocketed as they’ve begun to devour an ever-larger share of the military budget.

They converted their revenue from the military into line items on their own budgets that do nothing to improve U.S. national security: armies of lobbyists that now outnumber all members of Congress by a nearly 2-to-1 margin; billions of dollars in stock buybacks; and, of course, CEO compensation packages on par with those of NFL quarterbacks.

The contrast of these CEOs’ rock-star lifestyles — “Lords of War” reveals that one chief executive bought Lenny Kravitz’s Miami mansion — with those of the military service members they purport to serve is striking.

As the film notes, former Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson received $33.7 million in compensation in 2015, which is more than 150 times as much as the average compensation package for an enlisted service member. While Hewson and other Pentagon contractor CEOs have been buying up mansions, the basic pay of service members has been relatively stagnant for the past 20 years when controlling for inflation.

Worse, the conditions service members have been living in are deteriorating. A 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that two-thirds of service members think their housing is unaffordable. And service members often face “long commutes, leave families behind in other states, and work 2 jobs to afford housing,” according to the GAO report.

A July 2026 Senate investigation, meanwhile, revealed dangerous living conditions at military bases in Georgia, including “reports of lead exposure affecting newborn health, severe mold contamination leading to emergency room visits, flooding in living areas, and more.”

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Wartime environments have been no better, as evidenced by the deplorable conditions — including food shortages and inoperable plumbing — during the USS Abraham Lincoln’s extended deployment near Iran, which ultimately led multiple sailors to attempt to jump overboard.

Unfortunately, it’s your tax dollars that are paying for this gaping chasm between the lives of contractor CEOs and the troops.

“Lords of War” is one of the few films about military–industrial complex that you find hilarious, but its subject is no laughing matter. The private firms we’re entrusting with U.S. national security are doing more to defend their own share prices than they are to defend the nation. If we keep trusting this broken system to keep us safe, then, ultimately, the joke is on us.

The post Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous War Profiteers appeared first on The Intercept.