The Toxic Inheritance of America’s Wars

Esmaeil Baqaei, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, recently warned of the increasing environmental damage caused by the U.S. war, drawing attention to oil contamination in the Persian Gulf that has begun washing up on Iranian shores. “This incident is only one visible example of the extensive pollution — both overt and concealed — that has degraded the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” he wrote on X. “Who bears responsibility for compensating these damages? Is it the nations that consume the inexpensive energy exported from our region, the shipping insurers, or the aggressors and their partners who have transformed the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman into a theater for military operations and the testing of highly destructive weaponry?”

Alongside death and destruction that has killed or wounded tens of thousands of Iranians, the U.S.–Israeli war has caused massive environmental devastation. By March, attacks had already resulted in more than 300 incidents of potential environmental harm, documented across 12 countries in the region, according to a report by the Conflict and Environment Observatory. These toxic exposures threaten not only today’s war victims, but also future generations who will grapple with the knock-on effects.

Major commercial satellite companies have restricted or delayed the publication of their Middle East data at the behest of the U.S. government. Likely intended to obscure the true extent of damage inflicted on U.S. military facilities across the region, the ongoing satellite blackout has also hindered the work of those tracking the environmental devastation that has accompanied the conflict since it began in February. Even with the limited data, the Conflict and Environment Observatory has concluded that “[a]ll parties to the conflict” have appeared to target “environmentally risky facilities,” including oil infrastructure and water desalination plants.

According to research by the Climate and Community Institute, U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran in the first 14 days of the war emitted roughly 5 million metric cubic tons of greenhouse gases. Put another way: In two weeks, coalition strikes produced roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as the country of Iceland does over the course of a year. And as the war dragged on, missile facilities, weapons depots, oil infrastructure, nuclear facilities, dual-use and civilian infrastructure including power stations and desalination plants were also increasingly struck.

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The environmental threats these targets pose is enormous. Damaged desalination plants jeopardize the civilian water supply and flood nearby land and marine environments with harmful chemicals like sulfuric acid. Bombed infrastructure fills urban streets with asbestos-contaminated rubble and dust, heightening the risk of respiratory illness and cancer among exposed populations. Damaged weapons facilities pollute surrounding areas with explosives, highly toxic liquid propellants, and heavy metals. And the targeting of nuclear facilities risks radiation exposure or worse, an uncontrolled nuclear disaster, like a meltdown.

Fossil fuel infrastructure has also remained a key military objective for all belligerents. Israeli strikes on more than two dozen Iranian oil depots in early March engulfed the capital city of Tehran in a cloud of toxic smoke that rained black carbon and sulfuric acid on the city’s 9 million residents. Attacks on oil tankers and other commercial vessels have leached oil and spilled fuel into myriad waterways from the Egyptian port of Damietta, where Iran struck two liquefied natural gas vessels, to the coast of Sri Lanka, where the U.S. sank an Iranian frigate. And such environmental damage is likely to increase as the conflict continues to sporadically flare up.

The U.S. has a long history of starting wars that leave deep environmental scars. And for decades, U.S. troops have paid for it with exposures to toxic substances, including defoliants like Agent Orange, an herbicide the U.S. sprayed across Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s; smoke from oil depot fires that dotted the landscape in and around Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War; and the military base burn pits of the post-9/11 forever wars. The PACT Act of 2022 extended healthcare access to millions of veterans who served from the last half of the 20th century to today and now suffer from a wide range of conditions related to such wartime exposures, including cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and reproductive issues likely caused or exacerbated by their military service.

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Health problems among U.S. veterans often mirror those of local communities in war zones as they are exposed to the same toxic substances. Just as American troops returned home from Iraq with higher rates of diseases like urinary and blood cancers, doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for example, reported higher birth abnormalities and miscarriages among the local population.

Fallujah offers a glimpse of the environmental fallout that the people of neighboring Iran may face in the years to come. More than half of Fallujah was leveled in a U.S. Marine-led siege of the city in 2004. Hospitals, water systems and electrical grids were destroyed. A similar wave of destruction accompanied the ISIS takeover of the city in 2014. Fallujah was then besieged and heavily bombed in 2016 during the U.S.–Iraqi military operation that retook the city. Iraqis in Fallujah fled en masse in both 2004 and 2014. Those who returned were greeted by demolished homes, bomb craters, chemical spills, and houses with ash covered walls littered with bullet holes.

Since 2004, Fallujah has seen a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer rates and similar spikes in early onset cancer and respiratory diseases, according to a study co-authored by local physicians. Elevated rates of miscarriages and lethal birth defects that followed the initial U.S. invasion have never diminished. Reports on these poor health outcomes by doctors at Fallujah Women and Children’s Hospital led to the creation of a multidisciplinary study steered by researchers from Purdue University in the U.S. and Britain’s Newcastle University which tracked the intergenerational health effects of heavy metal exposure.

Depleted uranium munitions — which shatter and ignite on impact, allowing them to penetrate heavy armor plating — have been used by the U.S. in combat since the Gulf War. Spent rounds then release particles of radioactive uranium and other heavy metals, like titanium, into the surrounding earth, water, and air. Heavily bombarded areas in Fallujah were left with a greater percentage of heavy metals in their soil as a result.

Those who returned to the city after the battles, rebuilt their homes, reseeded contaminated farmlands, and drank and bathed in local waters now carry higher levels of radiation and heavy metals in their bodies. Indeed, uranium was found in the bones of one-third of study participants, all of whom were children during the 2004 siege — at levels roughly 300 times higher than their generational peers in America.

While highly toxic on its own, uranium levels are also often a marker for exposure to heavy metals including lead, arsenic, and mercury, which have been known to harm virtually every organ in the human body. Today, elevated rates of miscarriages and lethal congenital anomalies plague families in Fallujah.

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“War itself is always about combustion,” explained Kali Rubaii, a cultural anthropologist and Purdue University assistant professor who led the study on Fallujah. “The combustion of generally toxic materials redistributes these toxicants into people’s air, water and food. Every time someone breathes in everything in the air, they are inheriting the pollutants of war.”

Post-war surges in birth defects, respiratory diseases, and cancers in Fallujah have now been directly linked with exposure to the weapons of war. As the pollutants of war are largely universal, the study’s implications lie far beyond Fallujah. Recommendations for those returning to bombarded areas are included in the study’s appendix in both Ukrainian and Arabic. When I spoke to Rubaii in March — two days after Tehran was drenched in black rain — she hoped the study’s finding, and its recommendations for returnees, could be of help to those living near the Persian Gulf.

The U.S–Israeli war on Iran has only exacerbated ongoing environmental crises in the Middle East, including a five-year-long drought, brought on by years of insufficient rainfall linked to human-induced climate change, that poses a severe threat to Tehran’s water supply. The Persian Gulf’s fragile coral reefs and mangrove forests have also, for years, suffered under rising water temperatures, intensive vessel activity, and growing industrial pollution.

The Persian Gulf’s ecosystems still bear the scars of oil spills from the U.S. battles with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. Now, according to a recent study from the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, oil spills in the Gulf have increased dramatically since the beginning of the war to cover roughly four times the area in March 2026 as they did one year earlier. Though it is still too soon to calculate the full extent of the environmental harm imposed by the ongoing conflict, the toxic airborne pollutants, land contaminated with heavy metals, and oil-soaked waterways will pose a threat to life for decades to come.

As Rubaii’s study concludes, “the most effective way to limit heavy metal toxicity from war is by not bombing cities.” While we live in an age where threats to civilian infrastructure are espoused and ordered by prime ministers and presidents alike, the illegality of these attacks — and their grave ecological consequences — cannot be ignored. The targeting of a country’s energy infrastructure, waterways, bridges, and homes makes it more likely that the attacked nation will respond with attacks on similar targets, placing civilians at risk in the present and, due to environmental contamination, for following generations.

The International Committee of the Red Cross — which works to uphold the laws of war — has repeatedly affirmed that the environment itself is a civilian object and must be protected. Under the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, to inflict disproportionate widespread and severe environmental damage is a war crime.

The Iran war has already sparked a global fuel crisis, threatened future harvests, and placed tens of millions of people at risk of hunger, imperiling this generation and the next. It has also subjected civilians to toxic smoke, black carbon rain, and other public health hazards. People can’t be healthy if they live on sick lands. Even after the final bomb of the Iran war has dropped, the ecological devastation and health hazards will haunt U.S. service members and local residents alike. Fallujah has shown that even long after the guns fall silent, war victims continue to suffer with the fallout of conflicts that have, quite literally, seeped into their bones.

The post Ecocide in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

It was a departure from the group’s typical mandate: helping Latino families get outside in natural areas like Wilson Creek, a popular summer recreation site in the forest stretching north of the mountain-flanked city of Asheville, where President Donald Trump will welcome G20 leaders on Saturday. Since the devastating 2024 hurricane — the deadliest to hit the mainland U.S. since Katrina — North Carolina has received just a fraction of the disaster aid it’s sought from the federal government. Short on federal dollars, local volunteers like Latinos Aventureros tried to fill in the gaps. “We didn’t wait for permission. We didn’t wait for funding,” said Vivianette Ortiz, one of the group’s leaders. “We just showed up.”

The Trump administration has pointed to Asheville’s recovery as a marker of success, and its selection to host the international economic summit “reflects the Trump Administration’s commitment to the revitalization and resilience of western North Carolina,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But the view from the ground tells a different story. Damaged roads and infrastructure remain; some residents are still living in trailers; and empty lots mark where homes and businesses stood before Helene. And instead of receiving still-needed federal assistance, earlier this summer, Western North Carolina got Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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ICE agents, U.S. Forest Service personnel, and Caldwell County sheriff’s deputies arrested 13 people at Wilson Creek on July 26. Among them was a father there with his partner and their 4- and 10-year-old children, who had to watch their dad be taken into custody. ICE claimed some of those arrested had criminal records, but it hasn’t said who or how many.

To Ortiz, there was “a real sense of betrayal.” Volunteers with Latinos Aventureros had helped clean the recreation area, where the organization encouraged families to swim, hike, fish, and picnic on public lands. Families have since said they are afraid to use outdoor spaces because they fear encountering immigration enforcement.

“A huge part of our work has always been telling Latino families: These public lands belong to you, too,” Ortiz said. “If people are afraid to walk through that gate, then meaningful access has already been damaged.”

It takes just an hour by car to reach a different reality, where finance ministers and central bank governors representing the world’s largest economies are rolling into town for a meeting of the G20, the international economic forum whose members account for roughly 85 percent of global economic output and two-thirds of the world’s population.

They’re meeting up at the Grove Park Inn and Spa, a luxury resort overlooking Asheville and largely removed from the destruction Hurricane Helene left along the region’s rivers and valleys. Federal contracting records show the Treasury Department awarded Omni Hotels Corporation, the hotel’s owner, a $1.03 million contract to use the space. A separate Treasury planning document names Grove Park as the event’s “primary place of performance” and calls for gifts representing Western North Carolina and cultural programming highlighting the region’s “history, culture, and character.”

The city awaiting G20 delegates offers only a partial picture of recovery, said Jaime Byrd, a local resident and art gallery owner.

“They will get that beautiful experience of being at the Grove Park Inn, most likely, and maybe a couple of them might make it downtown, which looks completely normal,” Byrd said. “It’s unfortunate.”

Beyond Asheville’s tourist corridors, Helene remains written into the landscape. Debris left along rivers and roads has disappeared beneath nearly two years of vegetation, while damaged infrastructure remains. Elsewhere, recovery resembles absence: Buildings swept away by the storm have left empty ground where homes and businesses once stood.

Byrd’s gallery, located in Asheville’s River Arts District, took roughly six feet of water during Helene, destroying much of her artwork and causing at least $80,000 to $100,000 in losses, she estimates. Across town, roads near her home washed out, largely cutting off the neighborhood. Without electricity to power their wells, residents collected drinking water from an open spring on a neighbor’s property. They laid rocks and large pieces of metal across damaged roads to make them passable. Helicopters eventually arrived with “meals ready to eat” and evacuated residents who needed medical care.

“Most of this help came from self-help and community efforts,” Byrd said.

Federal assistance covered about 20 percent of the repairs needed at her home, Byrd estimates, but she received no Federal Emergency Management Agency help for her gallery. She launched a GoFundMe, spent her own money, and salvaged what artwork she could. Her collectors bought every recovered piece, which helped her keep the business alive.

Two years later, she said one of her neighbors still lives without water, while others remain in trailers.

In East Asheville, Linda Tetens said flooding and fallen trees effectively turned her neighborhood into an island, while residents cleared roads and helped one another through days without power or reliable access to food and water. Tetens relies on a CPAP machine to breathe while sleeping and said that after about 10 days without electricity, the effects of going without it forced her to leave Asheville for a motel in Greensboro.

FEMA initially approved the hotel stay, Tetens said, but later denied her reimbursement. She spent nearly a year repeatedly submitting documents before receiving roughly $1,400.

“It was like a full-time job, trying to negotiate with FEMA,” Tetens said. “I understand why people gave up.”

Tetens points to damaged roads and residents still awaiting government buyouts as evidence of how much work remains.

“We’re not even close to being back,” she said.

Nearly two years after Helene, billions of dollars sought for North Carolina’s recovery remain outstanding. The state had received $7.8 billion in federal disaster aid as of March 31, according to state recovery data cited by the local newsroom Asheville Watchdog, compared with $25.6 billion requested after the storm. In June, Gov. Josh Stein traveled to Washington seeking more than $10 billion in additional federal funding for housing, infrastructure, and small businesses; on Thursday, FEMA announced an additional $137 million for North Carolina disaster recovery.

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The fear of immigration enforcement could bring additional anxiety to a region struggling to recover, Asheville officials warned in 2025. “Our community is still recovering from Hurricane Helene,” Mayor Esther Manheimer and other local officials said at the time. “We do not need additional stress and fear.”

Asked whether those concerns extended to recent immigration enforcement in Western North Carolina, a city spokesperson told The Intercept she would not engage with questions characterizing federal immigration operations as harassment.

In response to questions from The Intercept, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson called the response part of “the long list of FEMA failures under Biden.” (Joe Biden was in office when Helene hit in September 2024, but recovery efforts have continued into the second Trump administration.)

“Under the Trump Administration, FEMA is mission focused and dedicated to disaster response,” wrote spokesperson Micah Bock, who previously worked for former Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C.

For Ortiz, the administration’s decision to showcase Western North Carolina’s recovery to the G20 makes the contrast particularly difficult to ignore. Latino and immigrant families, she said, were among the people who helped the region recover, but their right to belong should not depend on what they contributed after the storm.

“Our community shouldn’t have to say, ‘Look at everything we did after Helene, therefore we deserve to be here,’” Ortiz said. “We deserve to live here, raise our families here, enjoy our public lands, and move through our communities without persecution regardless of whether we drove a relief truck after a hurricane.”

Correction: August 29, 2026, 12:38 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct a misspelling of Jaime Byrd’s first name inserted due to an editing error.

The post Western North Carolina Pleaded for Hurricane Help. It Got ICE Instead. appeared first on The Intercept.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Wednesday that they were targeting the Italy-based A/I Collective with terror sanctions. Federal law gives the Treasury Department broad discretion to apply the terror label to foreign groups.

A wide array of anarchist, antifascist, and far-left groups in the U.S. and abroad use the privacy-minded collective’s offerings, including an anonymous email service and its popular noblogs.org blogging platform.

The practice of designating an internet platform and service provider as a terror group — rather than those pursuing violence themselves — has “huge” implications for the future free speech on the internet, warned Jillian York, the director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“They are going after the messenger,” York said. “I don’t think that the members of the group would necessarily condone the actions of the people that they hosted. What they do condone is the freedom to host, the ability to be anonymous, the ability to be private.”

The A/I Collective told The Intercept that it is exploring its legal options to fight the sanctions, which block U.S. citizens and companies from providing the group with financial support.

In an unsigned statement, the group said that it denies the U.S. government’s allegations. 

“Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism,” the group said. “Protesting is not terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for humanity.”

The U.S. government’s move could have ripple effects far beyond Italy. 

Groups using the A/I Collective’s services range from an anarchist radio show in Asheville, North Carolina; to a blog documenting attacks on anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” under the Jane’s Revenge moniker; to the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair. The bookfair warned Wednesday that its website “will most likely go down soon because of US sanctions on Noblogs.”

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The State and Treasury Departments justified the designation by alleging that the A/I Collective, also known as Autistici/Inventati, has provided services to foreign terror groups, including anarchists who have launched attacks on railroads and pipelines in Europe, and by domestic left-wing groups that have employed violence.

“A/I’s cadre of radical hackers and tech developers provide a full spectrum of services — including encrypted chats and email, web hosting, secure video conferencing and streaming, anonymity shields, and a suite of other technological tools — to Marxist, anarchist, and other left-wing extremist groups in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere,” a State Department spokesperson said in a press release. “These tools are specifically designed to support the operations of far-left terrorist networks.”

It is unclear how many groups in the U.S. could be forced offline, or to shift their providers, because of the terror designation. The A/I Collective said it could not provide an estimate of U.S-based groups that it hosts, because it does not ask its users for any private or personal information.

Nor was it immediately clear whether simply hosting a site using the collective’s services would be illegal if no money changes hands. Still, the collective says that it relies heavily on voluntary, suggested donations, and many U.S.-based groups appear to be scrambling for alternative hosting providers.

The A/I Collective was sanctioned under the Treasury Department’s authority to label groups specially designated global terrorists. U.S. citizens convicted of violating those sanctions can face stiff penalties of up to 20 years in prison.

If U.S. groups continue to use the collective’s services, the U.S. government could use that affiliation against them, said Shayana Kadidal, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. The Treasury Department can even label U.S.-based groups as specially designated global terrorists, although they have more standing to challenge that designation in court.

The designation of the A/I Collective as a foreign terror group is the next step in a sequence that began with Trump’s designation of antifa as a “domestic terror organization” last September, said Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University who wrote a book about antifascism.

Where the Trump administration goes next is the “million-dollar question,” Bray said.

“It seems to be they’re playing a bit of a long game,” he said, “where they try to establish the existence of a supposed violent, left-wing terror network — which they have had trouble doing, but they have tried. But then, of course the way they make that affect the left more broadly is to criminalize those who they claim are aligned with it.”

The post Trump Goes After Anonymous Email Provider in Italy. The Real Target Is Free Speech in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

The WNBA is having a moment. Viewership is up. Attendance for this year’s WNBA All-Star Game surpassed the NBA’s All-Star Game. Games and events can be viewed in a record number of places, from broadcast to cable and streaming. And just this week, Angel Reese of the Atlanta Dream set a single-game record. 

But the stories about the WNBA capturing national attention in recent weeks are about none of that. Instead, the focus has been on two retired NBA players, including Enes Kanter Freedom, who showed up courtside at an August 23 Chicago Sky–Indiana Fever game wearing a T-shirt that said “Woman: noun. adult human female.”

“I don’t believe that he’s being genuine in any realm, in order to create this mass hysteria of sorts for an issue that’s actually simply a non-issue,” says Angela Perry, a WNBA content creator, tells The Intercept Briefing. “There are no trans women in the WNBA; there are none attempting to be in the WNBA.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks to Perry and journalist Katelyn Burns about how the premier women’s professional basketball league has found itself at the center of a right-wing manufactured panic.

“The right has made such hay out of trans women in women’s sports that they need to keep inventing controversies in order to keep this issue front of mind,” says Burns who writes for the independent newsletter Burns Notice and co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast. 

“We have a midterm election coming up, and to be frank with you, the only thing that the right has done besides terrorizing immigrants is banning trans women from women’s sports. It’s at the center of almost all of their policies,” continues Burns. “They are inventing controversies about trans people in sports where there are no trans people involved.”

“This is about women in general. They’re already talking about not wanting women to have the right to vote,” says Perry. “This isn’t just about sports. There’s a political party trying to scale us back to what they perceive was a time where things were better. But really, it was when women were more controlled.”

“The bigger issue is that the people who think that they’re protected, it’s always going to get to the protected class eventually,” warns Perry. “Right now, the focus is trans, and people think they’re safe because ‘I’m not trans. I’m a cis woman and I’m protected.’ But it will impact you.”

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: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. 

AL: Jessie, in typical August fashion, it feels like things have kind of slowed down somewhat with Washington in recess amid the final days of summer. I’m personally looking forward to having a little space to catch our breaths, as we enter the final midterm stretch before everyone turns their attention toward November. But there’s still plenty to cover.

ICE announced a record high in July arrests and deportations, and the Department of Homeland Security is continuing to expand its attacks on legal immigration. Nobody fret: Democrats are still melting down over Hasan Piker, while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries met recently with Jared Kushner. A majority-Black town in Indiana went without power — and very little news attention — for two weeks. Dolly Parton died. And as we close out the sixth month of the Iran war, the Trump administration made a big show of announcing an “economic D-Day” with new sweeping sanctions and claiming, yet again, that this would end the war.

What have you been hearing on those fronts this week?

JW: I have to say: The second Trump administration is the only time in history where this could be considered a slow news cycle. But yeah, there’s a lot to talk about. 

So with ICE, we have really been seeing a huge surge in detention and deportations. What I’ve been hearing from advocates on the ground is that it’s also coincided with an increase in violence. We’re seeing ICE use tactics like car kettling, even putting pepper spray and pepper balls into vehicles on the road. There’s a lot of dangerous activity happening with ICE — and a lot less coverage than we saw in January and February. 

In regards to Gary, Indiana, I think it’s been heartening and disheartening of a news cycle, in the sense that at first people really were not paying attention. So for those who don’t know: Thousands of residents in the predominantly Black community [were] without power for two weeks after a storm caused massive outages. There’s a lot of anger right now because people are simultaneously being squeezed by these exorbitant electricity bills, but then they also don’t have power to meet their basic survival needs — for their medical equipment, for their refrigeration of food.

It’s a story that we keep seeing repeat. In Jackson, Mississippi, for example, residents of the also predominantly Black community, have been plagued for years by both expensive water bills and years of water shut-offs and boil-water notices. We just keep seeing people squeezed at both ends. You somehow don’t have access to the resources you need to survive, and you’re practically paying a second mortgage for the pleasure.

AL: Jessie, you’ve also been reporting this week on the fallout over the fight regarding trans rights in sports. This is not my wheelhouse. Can you get us up to speed on what happened, and where does the fight stand now?

JW: I had a great conversation with Angela Perry, a content creator who covers the WNBA and women’s basketball, and Katelyn Burns, who writes for the independent newsletter Burns Notice — she also co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast — about how the WNBA, a league with no trans women in it, found itself at the center of a right-wing culture war on transgender rights.

The right-wing outrage machine started off focusing on perceived racial grievances, claiming WNBA star Caitlin Clark, who is white, had been unfairly targeted because of her race. Media Matters recently documented Fox News spending over 13 1/2 hours of its summer coverage on the WNBA, largely focusing in on race and, more recently, trans inclusion.

Then enters WNBA player Sophie Cunningham, who has become a darling of the right, earning the moniker “MAGA Barbie.” Cunningham first started getting attention for these high-profile moments of her defending her teammate Clark on the court. Both Cunningham and Clark are white and straight in a league that is predominantly Black and LGBTQ+ inclusive. And these moments quickly became fodder, as noted, for a racist, right-wing backlash fueled by Fox News and other outlets against Black players, who were called overly aggressive and were subject to racist harassment.

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Then in a July interview, Cunningham told ESPN that she wanted to “protect young girls in a locker room” from “biological men.” Her comments brought yet another round of hate to the doorsteps of the WNBA, leading to protests at the games over transgender participation in sports.

In August, two former NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, announced that they were declaring for the 2027 WNBA draft, in a transphobic stunt to force the league to have a policy on transgender female athletes, even though there are no transgender women in the WNBA. Here’s White and then Kanter Freedom arguing on Fox programs that they should qualify.

Royce White: I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball. So I’ll be declaring for the WNBA draft in 2027 as well.

Enes Kanter Freedom:  Article 13 in Section 1 says if you identify as a woman, then you’re allowed to play.

Laura Ingraham: So you are identifying as a woman tonight? 

Enes Kanter Freedom: Sure. I identify as a woman. Sure. Yes. So I can play. 

JW: Kanter Freedom was later kicked out of a [August 23] Chicago Sky game for disrupting the game and for now has been banned from Wintrust Arena. 

But the project is bigger than just one sports league. 

We get into how the right is attempting to use transphobia and racism to roll back Title IX and women’s rights more broadly. This isn’t just a fight about sports — the Supreme Court, state attorneys general, and the Trump administration are actively coming for transgender rights as well as women’s rights and, frankly, all of our rights.

AL: It sounds like I have a lot to learn about this, so let’s hear that conversation.

JW: Joining me now is Angela Perry, a content creator who regularly delivers hot takes on the WNBA and women’s basketball, @arperry01. You can find her on TikTok, Instagram, and across all social platforms.   

Angela, welcome to The Intercept Briefing

Angela Perry: Thank you, glad to be here. 

JW: Also joining us is journalist Katelyn Burns, who writes for the independent newsletter Burns Notice and co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast. Katelyn, welcome to the show. 

Katelyn Burns: Hi, thanks for having me. 

JW: The WNBA is having a moment. Viewership is way up. Attendance for this year’s All-Star WNBA game surpassed the NBA’s All-Star game. Games and events can be viewed in a record number of places, from broadcast to cable and streaming. And just this week, Angel Reese of the Atlanta Dream team set a single-game record.

But the stories about the WNBA capturing national attention in recent weeks are about none of that. Instead, two retired NBA players have captured national headlines, including Enes Kanter Freedom. Freedom showed up courtside wearing a T-shirt that said, “Woman: noun. adult human female.” Angela, you shared a really incisive take on social media. I want to start with you. What is going on here? 

AP: I think when we remove the WNBA, and we look at the political climate in America, there’s an attack on trans people. So I think that’s something worth noting because trans men and women have not been an issue in the WNBA or in the MNBA, ever. But because this has been something that a political side has used over the last few years, it has now infiltrated itself in the WNBA. 

The person that you mentioned, I refuse to learn his name, has used this as a tool. I don’t believe that he’s being genuine in any realm, in order to create this mass hysteria of sorts for an issue that’s actually simply a non-issue. There are no trans women in the WNBA; there are none attempting to be in the WNBA.

What we find here are just cis men who are trying to capitalize off of the discourse and create what looks like hostility. It’s just disheartening because it’s taking the focus away from things like you just said, Angel Reese breaking records. There’s a lot of people breaking records: Olivia Miles, Caitlin Clark. There’s so much actually happening, and then what we end up talking about the next day is this person who’s trying to take the headlines into a dark place.

And the people who aren’t watching the WNBA — that’s all they’re going to hear, that’s all they’re going to see. They don’t know what’s going on. And then they will be in my comments section, saying, “Well, he looks like he’s standing up for women!” So they actually have it completely wrong, based on getting the snippets and the sound bites from that person. So it’s pretty disheartening.

JW: That’s something that I’ve been thinking about even in talking about this on the podcast is, are we giving this more attention? But it feels like we have to talk about this because they’re distorting this issue so much. Katelyn, I want to get your thoughts as well here. 

KB: This is such a frustrating conversation. Specifically, this issue is about trans women. And the frustrating part for me as a trans person, as a journalist, is that trans women have essentially been driven out of sports at any level beyond high school in a handful of blue states. I hate to say it, but politically, it’s a settled issue. But the right has made such hay out of trans women in women’s sports that they need to keep inventing controversies in order to keep this issue front of mind. 

We have a midterm election coming up, and to be frank with you, the only thing that the right has done besides terrorizing immigrants is banning trans women from women’s sports. It’s at the center of almost all of their policies. So what you’re seeing now is they are inventing controversies about trans people in sports where there are no trans people involved.

Angela made the point: There are no trans women in the WNBA. There’s never been an out trans woman in the WNBA before. There are no out trans women college players. More than half the states in the country ban trans women from playing high school basketball, so there’s no pathway to make it to the WNBA.

This is a conversation about something that is not going to happen anytime soon, that is being drummed up for completely political purposes, just because the league has vague wording in their collective bargaining agreement over who is eligible to play. What you are seeing is just the exploitation of that gray language in the CBA to drive negative attention on the league as a whole.

JW: I want to get into the league’s response and how they’re dealing with all of this. Katelyn, you had written about what the league should say, but I also want to just ask what they are saying. Can you talk a little bit about what you think their strategy should be going forward and what their strategy has been so far?

KB: The league’s not doing itself any favors with all of this. I think that they are too afraid to take a stance in tamping down these protests and the antics of these men who are trying to intrude upon the game.

It started with suspending a Seattle team co-owner who confronted some anti-trans protesters who were at a game. Then it escalated again with Enes Kanter Freedom at this latest game, getting into it with a player on the court. He was escorted out of the building, but now they’re saying they’re not going to ban him from all of the WNBA games. So he’s just free to show up and harass another player on the court.

How you protect women out of harassing women basketball players doesn’t add up to me, but I guess it makes sense in the bizarro world of the anti-trans movement. They have come out and ruled that neither of these players — by the way, Royce White was running for office when he pulled his stunt, and then he got his ass kicked in his election, so that was really funny.

But, they’ve come out and said that neither of them are eligible to play because, clearly neither of them identify as women, which is the current language of the rules in the league. My proposal was, just go back to how sports used to treat trans women in sports: establish a testosterone limit and regular testing and prove that you’ve suppressed it for an extended period of time, and then allow somebody to play.

Studies have shown that there is no biological advantage from trans women, no broad-based biological advantage for trans women. None of these grifters can intrude upon the game that way. That was my proposal. Enes Kanter Freedom is not going to go take estrogen just to continue this stunt. It’s just not going to happen.

That was my idea. I think, in general, the league should take more of a stance of protecting their own players — because the more you allow this to fester, the more you’re going to start seeing, “Oh, this player on this team that beat us is more muscular than a woman should be. Maybe they are trans.”

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We’ve seen this before with the Olympics, with Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who won a gold medal and was the subject to a worldwide witch hunt over her gender, despite the fact that she was born female, raised as a girl, and happened to get into boxing. 

JW: It is this crazy world where you’re seeing the kind of trans-vestigating now of WNBA players. As you’ve both mentioned, there are no transgender women in the WNBA, and yet we’re seeing people now say, “Well, this person is trans, this person is trans.” And it is mostly coming along racial lines, from what we’re mostly seeing, this is mostly targeting of Black women.

[Break] 

JW: Angela, I’m curious, how do you think the league could protect players right now?

AP: Just like Katelyn mentioned, the fact that he was only banned in one arena, I think that we have to send the message. In the MNBA, when there was an irate person in the crowd — that person was banned for life. And it sent the message that this was unacceptable. It also makes me think the people who are doing it are part of the reason that the punishments aren’t that harsh as well.

Like Katelyn mentioned, this is not necessarily about trans people. This is about policing women, in general. Because there’s masculine women, and it’s a way for the powers that be to try to say, “I don’t know if that person deserved to win because they’re stronger, so now let’s investigate if they are actually a woman.”

What does that mean? What are we going to do? Start examining women, girls, even? That’s the thing — this side that talks about protecting girls, you want your 11 or 12-year-old girls to be examined by who because they want to play baseball or softball or whatever have you.

So the bigger issue is that the people who think that they’re protected, it’s always going to get to the protected class eventually. Right now, the focus is trans, and people think they’re safe because “I’m not trans. I’m a cis woman and I’m protected.” But it will impact you. 

I think the bigger picture is Title IX. I think the bigger issue is the men that are on the other side of this, they don’t care about women’s sports in general. So to them, if there was just no WNBA, they don’t really care. So that’s the bigger picture, is protecting women means protecting masculine women that don’t subscribe to social standards of what they’re supposed to look like. To me, there shouldn’t be any standards, but of course, we live in a society where there just are.

And then just protecting the women that are, like you said, already in the league. Why are we protecting this man who showed up, and treating him with any type of dignity, when they are the employees — the WNBA players. 

And that’s not just with this trans conversation. It’s also with racism. The WNBA came out with the “No space for hate” almost as a joke —because I have not seen anything implemented from that the entire season. I haven’t seen Cathy [Engelbert] since the All-Star Game; she’s supposed to be the leader of this league. It’s almost like she’s afraid to speak up because she’s afraid to lose the fan base of racist and transphobic people, which is honestly insane.

But in America, in a capitalist society, a dollar is a dollar — and they don’t care if that dollar is coming from a racist or a true fan. In my opinion, if they would invest in the true fans, you would get more true fans, and you wouldn’t have to take money from racist people or transphobic people or homophobic people. The list goes on and on.

To me, that’s not a safe space in the WNBA for the fans or the players.

JW: To your point, Angela, Media Matters recently reported that Fox News spent “13 and a 1/2 hours waging a WNBA culture war this summer,” gravitating between perceived racial grievances and trans inclusion.

I should note that the WNBA did issue a statement saying, “There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA, and we strongly denounce the bad faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”

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But because you brought up Title IX, and I think that’s really the crux of what this is about, let’s get straight into that. So shortly after the Supreme Court ruled to uphold state laws banning transgender girls from participating in school sports, the Heritage Foundation published a paper calling Title IX — which bans sex-based discrimination in schools, including in school sports — a “failed experiment.”

The sports and culture site Defector pointed out that the author of the paper is Boise State professor Scott Yenor, who once called career-oriented women, “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He argues Title IX has led to “male-normed women’s sports” that are failing at “celebrating distinctly feminine virtues of service, grace, and character.”

Katelyn, can you tell us what is the end game here?

KB: Oh, God. It’s not great. This attitude was parodied in “A League of Their Own,” a movie from like 1992, I think. Don’t quote me on that, please. There was a whole storyline and arc and a couple of scenes like mocking people who thought that women playing professional baseball would make them unfeminine.

So they’re trying to build a world where women are literally barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I wrote about this Heritage Foundation memo that went out — or policy paper, I’m not quite exactly sure what they labeled it, off the top of my head — but it’s terrifying. 

I have thought a lot about the intersection of gender and sports. I was a three-sport athlete growing up, and I was deeply in the closet, so I played boys’ sports. I grew up in a time where teenagers didn’t have the option to come out and transition. We didn’t even know what being trans was sometimes back in the ’80s and ’90s when I was growing up. I can’t imagine if I had found out that there was a way for me to transition but I had to give up the sports that I loved.

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I am really sad that’s the position that we’re putting trans people in now, and I’m really upset that people have not thought all of this through. First of all, they don’t educate themselves about what hormones do. Everybody has hormones in their bodies — and no offense to the cis people who are listening, but you don’t even know what your own hormones do. You should because it’s an important part of your body. So they are using these bigoted stereotypes of trans women to scare you into rolling back gender politics 80 years. 

“A League of Their Own,” it was made in 1992, but it was about the ’40s when World War II was happening. Angela mentioned, what are we going to do — inspect girls’ genitals maybe? Yes, that’s exactly what the Republicans and the right and the anti-trans movement are proposing. 

I have to say, as somebody who writes about trans issues, who reads a lot about history, there’s a great podcast called “Tested,” which is about the struggle for intersex equality in athletics, and I highly recommend, if you’re interested in this topic, to go listen to that.

But also, the idea of sex testing originated with the 1936 [Berlin] Olympics that was hosted in Nazi Germany. And that shocks people when I say that. These are legacies of literal Nazis that we’re, like, trying to reestablish here in the 2020s.

So what kind of world are they building? Not one that I want to live in. 

JW: If they can define what is a woman, and they can say that transgender women are not women, then they can tell you, “This is how you have to be a woman. You cannot sue your boss for sex-based discrimination. You cannot have equal funding for your sports teams because you’re a girl.” And that’s the final play, and it’s sad that to get there, they’re going to bully a bunch of little girls, essentially. That’s the start, and then the end is to take away everyone’s rights. 

Angela, I want to get your thoughts about this as well. Is this also just about sports, or is the goal to really target the entire anti-discrimination framework?

AP: Oh, no, this is about women in general. They’re already talking about not wanting women to have the right to vote. That is being said out loud, on — I wouldn’t say legitimate news stations, but they have channels — who are people currently in positions of power. 

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So this isn’t just about sports. There’s a political party trying to scale us back to what they perceive was a time where things were better. But really, it was when women were more controlled. And unfortunately, there’s men in this country that don’t like for women to have a voice because they realize that they’re losing in that, I would say, game of life.

Men are losing without the inherent control that they had for centuries. We’re in the first, I would say, 20 to 30 years where women have not been forced, essentially, by society into marriage. Yes, we’ve had a choice, but as far as having our own credit cards, being able to purchase our own homes — things like that have been critical in order for women to live their own lives, not choose marriage, children, so forth and so on, which means that there are men who have not learned essentially life skills without a woman doing it for them.

They’ve not been shown that because their father had it, their grandfather had it, and they don’t know what to do. So what they’ve decided is to go and try to change the landscape of America through laws and restricting what women are able to do. So yeah, I think this is much bigger than basketball.

Of course, I’m a women’s basketball content creator, so I talk about basketball and the intersections of it, but I’m well aware that this is scary times. I just went and voted in my local election two weeks ago, and I’m like, “Is this going to be allowed in five years?” 

KB: I think that there are people who assume that if they are not trans, then they don’t need to care about non-discrimination protections for trans people.

But I have to say that when there are legal protections for trans people, it also protects everybody else from discrimination based on the assumption that you’re trans. What you’re seeing is that the conservative side of the political aisle is trying to build an apparatus where they can just simply accuse somebody of being trans, and then they can do whatever they want.

They can sex discriminate to their heart’s content as long as it’s against a trans person or somebody that is assumed to be trans. The only way out of it is a very invasive process of you have to verify the sex that you were born with. I don’t think that’s a society that most people are prepared to accept, but it’s one that is quickly forming.

So I wanted to say to those people who are like, “Oh, this is a complicated issue that I don’t really know how I feel about,” you should have feelings about it, because anybody, any day, could come along and say, “Hey, I think you’re trans. You shouldn’t be doing that.” Then you’re in a big mess that you have to get out of somehow. The only way to do it is by revealing deeply personal information about yourself. 

JW: Talking Points Memo reporter Kate Riga writes, “It’s been clear for weeks that right-wing media, eager to distract from its leaders’ woeful unpopularity and resulting fears about November’s midterms, struck gold with its anti-trans, anti-WNBA crusade.”

She goes on to say, “[Sophie] Cunningham, white and willing, has been the protagonist the right needed to unfurl its narrative. But the anti-trans campaign, the grousing about professional basketball players being fouled, it’s all in service of a grander mission. In the white Christian nationalist nation the Trump administration is openly trying to foist on the American public, a sports league where Black, gay players are celebrated and (recently, to a degree) paid well is a distinct danger.”

Angela, I want to start with you. What are your thoughts? Do you think that this white Christian nationalist grift is working, or do you think people are getting sick of seeing this stoking of hate and this fear? Or is it having the impact that they want it to have? 

AP: I think people are getting sick of it. I don’t think the Christian nationalism of it all is actually going to win. So I think it’s a dying side that they still try to reignite over and over. It’s going to get clickbait because we are people of habit. It’s the internet. Even, I sometimes click on things just to see, what are they talking about now? But I don’t think they’re going to win overall.

It really does look like there is a tide turning. It doesn’t look to be beneficial to those particular people. And so it looks as though as a whole more fans are for cohesive playing, more diversity. Especially in general, the WNBA fan is just a more open-minded fan, in my opinion as a person who’s been watching the league for 30 years.

You go to a game, and it’s just every type of person. You get on the elevator, you’ll have someone who’s 60 all the way down to the 5-year-old, from white male to young Hispanics. It’s just too much of a melting pot for them to try to get everyone out of it, and so I don’t think it’s going to win. That’s my thoughts.

But if it does, you have Unrivaled, you have some of these other leagues that have not so far allowed the same type of hate and rhetoric to infiltrate it, that the W could lose out on a really huge fan base. I think at the end of the day, they may do the right thing only because of money, not because they’re trying to do the right thing. It’s going to come down to money.

JW: Yeah, no, I could see that. To me, white Christian nationalism is just the soup that we all swim in. My theory of everything is white Christian nationalism, when you get to the end of it. But I think they start to lose when you start to show your hand in really obvious ways.

I think it’s hard to say, “Huh, you’re protecting women by throwing sex toys at female athletes while they’re doing their job.” I think that’s when people start to say, “Wait a minute. Maybe this is not a movement of people that really care about women.”

But Katelyn, I want to know what you think. Is this working, or have they hit their kind of limit of ridiculousness where the public says, “Wait a minute, you’re trying to say that people who protect trans people are ridiculous, and now we can clearly see that you’re being ridiculous” — or is it working? 

KB: I think it’s working in that it keeps getting attention.

We’re here doing this podcast, so in a lot of ways, that is something that they want to have happen. I do think that the two men who tried to jump on this train are widely known as being losers in a way, and so they’re getting the loser stank on everything, which is kind of funny. I think that that has a bigger impact than we think.

Riley Gaines is a swimmer who is known for tying for fifth place with trans woman Lia Thomas in a college race, and she has turned that into a very lucrative career. But she’s also going to be known as a loser. I think that ultimately is where everything is headed. 

If you look at what voters actually care about, they really don’t care about trans issues. There’s 10 people who base their vote on what a candidate thinks about trans issues, and they’re all going to vote for Republicans pretty much, at least on the anti-trans side. We’ve seen exit polling over and over again showing that trans issues are the lowest salience issue in the minds of voters.

People care about the economy. People care about gas prices, grocery prices. They care about housing prices. They care about another foreign war. Nobody’s going into the midterms thinking, “Oh, I have to vote for the anti-trans candidate.” I shouldn’t say nobody. There are people who will do that, but they’ve already made up their minds.

So I don’t think that you can convert even more people over to that type of thinking, nor do I think that you can win people back from that line of thinking. So I think that a lot of the time and effort spent trying to persuade people on this is really a sunk cost for those who are doing it.

And I have pretty high hopes that in the end, justice will prevail, fairness will prevail, and the liberal order will not fall to Christian nationalism. 

JW: I’m pretty happy to leave it there. Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White are losers, and we will not fall to white Christian nationalism.

Thank you both so much for joining. Really appreciate having you on The Intercept Briefing. 

AP: Thank you so much for inviting me. 

KB: Thank you, thank you.

JW: 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. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. 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 us.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.  

The post Right-Wing Trans Hate Comes for the WNBA appeared first on The Intercept.

What he didn’t realize was that he could be hit with U.S. sanctions five years later for his past ties to a so-called terrorist organization. 

The Trump administration on Wednesday announced sanctions against the U.K.-based anti-genocide protest group Palestine Action, which organized the 2021 demonstration and dozens of subsequent actions at U.K. factories owned by Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems. The goal, in the U.S. government’s words, is to “protect Americans from the risks posed by far-left terrorism.”

“A major threshold has been crossed,” said Geller, who was previously Palestine Action’s spokesperson but left the group in 2025, when the British government made membership punishable by 14 years in prison. “They’re now treating regular Americans who want to effectively oppose genocide as terrorists.”

The specific parameters of the U.S. sanctions are not yet clear, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pledged the government would “continue to cut the financial lifelines of these groups until they are eliminated.” Sanctioned groups and individuals cannot receive funds, goods, or services from American people or business — meaning they’re cut off from both the U.S. banking system and from any donations from Americans who might want to support them. They can have an isolating global effect: Financial institutions outside the U.S. that do business with American companies are often hesitant to affiliate with sanctioned individuals.

As a result, the sanctions could severely curtail their organizing abilities — and restrict their ability to try to stop the flow of weapons that Israel is using to carry out its ongoing genocide in Gaza.

“We are facing unprecedented attacks on dissent by the same powers that are committing genocide in Gaza,” said Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action, in an interview with The Intercept. “We are at a point in history where it’s extremely crucial to continue to resist and grow in our movement, rather than back down and to adapt and become less reliant on institutions which are essentially controlled by the powers we’re fighting against.” 

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While the new U.S. sanctions are a part of a long history of post-9/11 policies in its so-called war on terror, the U.K. government has made itself notorious for its specific draconian crackdown on pro-Palestine dissent. Last year, as Palestine Action members began to face terror charges in court for their demonstrations, the U.K. government proscribed the group as a terrorist organization. The organization in the U.K. immediately ceased operations after the terror proscription. Dozens of members in the U.K. are facing criminal trials for their actions at Elbit weapons factories, and more than 1,200 people have been arrested and charged under the U.K.’s Terror Act for attending rallies merely supporting the group. 

Reporting from The Telegraph, which first reported the sanctions, suggested Ammori and fellow co-founder Richard Barnard would face lifetime bans from traveling to the U.S., and that British citizens who continue to support the group would be met with harsh visa restrictions.

Geller, who lives in London, wondered if his bank accounts would be frozen, along with his Venmo and PayPal accounts. He said he normally travels back and forth between the U.S. and U.K. to visit his elderly parents — and the thought of doing so now “suddenly has become scary.”

“They want people scared to even think about supporting or engaging in this kind of work,” Geller said. “This is about materially hurting Palestine.”     

The new sanctions against Palestine Action, which were announced alongside sanctions against Autistici/Inventati and Masar Badil, were the latest attack in President Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to suppress advocacy for Palestinian rights and opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Last year, Trump issued sanctions against the International Criminal Court after the court ordered war crime arrest warrants for Israel’s leaders. Those sanctions targeted people and organizations that work with the court, such as U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, who has been outspoken about the crippling effects of the sanctions. The administration has also sanctioned long-standing Palestinian human rights organizations for their work with the ICC.  

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“The Trump administration is once again weaponizing counterterrorism authorities to criminalize Palestinian political organizing and solidarity,” said Raed Jarrar, advocacy director with Democracy for the Arab World Now, which last month sued to reverse the Trump sanctions on the ICC. “Sanctions are supposed to target genuine threats to national security, not serve as a political weapon against movements challenging Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”

The vagueness of the new sanctions is meant to strike fear in anyone who is considering support for the sanctioned group, civil liberties advocates told The Intercept. Does a social media post expressing support violate sanctions? How about hosting a talk with an individual in the group?

“Treasury hasn’t been clear on where the line is, and that’s part of the chilling effect,” said Xiangnong (George) Wang, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute who specializes in U.S. sanctions. “In sanctioning Palestine Action, I think their target is more broadly a community of people and groups, including Americans who engage with Palestine Action.”

The Treasury Department did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

The sanctions also follow the government’s case against pro-Palestine organizer Fergie Chambers, a past supporter of Palestine Action who was detained for extradition in Spain last month on alleged charges of funding terror groups. The humanitarian aid group Sameer Project, which provided meals and services to Palestinians in Gaza, previously received financial support from Chambers and this month announced it had paused operations in Gaza due to lack of funds.

The Trump-era crackdowns have extended beyond Palestine and Israel, targeting leftists groups in the U.S. who most recently have resisted Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s mass deportation campaign. Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, the administration has used post-9/11 terrorism laws against protesters, such as pursuing terrorism charges and decades-long prison sentences in the Prairieland Detention Center trial and the government’s case against protesters in Minneapolis.  

The repression, said Ammori, has “expanded much more overtly to be used to crush any type of dissent.”

Despite the U.K.’s crackdown on Palestine Action, support for the group and Palestine remains energetic. Rallies in solidarity with Palestine Action and Palestinian rights continue to sprout up across the country even as the government has arrested at least 3,000 people for simple actions such as holding signs that read “I support Palestine Action.” And last year, Elbit closed its facility in Bristol after being targeted by Palestine Action, days before the government outlawed the group.

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In the U.S., the group formerly known as Palestine Action U.S., now called Unity Fields as of August 2024, no longer has ties to the U.K.-based group. Though Palestine Action in the U.K. is dormant, secretive cells of Palestine Action are based throughout the U.S. and are continuing to carry out actions. Other Palestine Action cells are targeting the Israeli weapons supply chain in other countries such as Spain, Germany, Ireland, and Poland.

“We have a responsibility to create a huge dent in the Israeli war machine,” Ammori said. “They need to be profitable to operate, and if they’re operating, they’re killing Palestinians — it’s really as simple as that.”

The post “They Want People Scared”: Former Palestine Action Member Blasts Trump’s Terror Sanctions appeared first on The Intercept.

“This reporting is absolutely FALSE,” said Tricia McLaughlin, then a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, in a statement. “Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus had FULL medical, prenatal care.”

The statement, labeled as a “Fact Check,” said the Guatemalan-born Monterroso Lemus had “received prenatal care, including an ultrasound and OB-GYN visit.”

Neither side of the disputed account provided evidence to back up their claims.

Now, federal government documents obtained by The Intercept appear to undermine the Trump administration’s version of events. The documents show a lack of basic care needed for a healthy pregnancy, according to expert analysis. One document from an outside healthcare center made after the stillbirth describes a “pregnancy complicated by lack of PNC” — meaning prenatal care.

“The administration was engaged in CYA — cover your ass,” said Dr. Andrea Schecter, an OB-GYN physician with a decade’s experience working with high-risk pregnancies, including those of immigrants. “They know that what they provided is probably not sufficient care.”

“Flouting the Directive”

The new records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, include documents from Monterroso Lemus’s visit to Ochsner LSU Center, a healthcare facility in Shreveport, Louisiana, after she complained for days about not feeling fetal movement. It was the only recorded instance of her leaving Richwood Correctional Center, an ICE detention facility run by the family-owned private prison giant LaSalle Corrections.

The Ochsner LSU documents, produced after the stillbirth, say that Monterroso Lemus had told medical staff at Richwood that “this pregnancy didn’t feel right a couple days ago but nothing was done.”

Other new records include timelines produced by ICE that show a referral for an OB-GYN appointment but don’t indicate that any visit was scheduled or took place, or that Monterroso Lemus ever received an ultrasound.

Asked about the new documents, a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security simply repeated the previous claims that Monterroso Lemus received regular, timely prenatal care without responding to queries.

On May 9, ten days after losing her son, Monterroso Lemus was shackled, put on a plane, and deported to Guatemala, causing her postpartum visit to be canceled.

“Everyone knows that ICE and DHS lie on a daily basis — and Americans have witnessed the deadly consequences of this administration’s reckless actions for nearly two years,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., when asked about the case. “The Trump administration’s barbaric treatment of pregnant women in immigration custody is unconscionable.”

In fact, the Trump administration is detaining many more pregnant women than before. During the Biden administration, for example, ICE would detain about a dozen pregnant women nationally during a year, said Eunice Cho, an immigration attorney with expertise in detention conditions. During a congressional visit to Louisiana’s Basile detention center last April, however, there were 14 in that one facility.

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According to a 2021 ICE directive, “Generally, ICE should not detain, arrest, or take into custody for an administrative violation of the immigration laws individuals known to be pregnant, postpartum, or nursing unless release is prohibited by law or exceptional circumstances exist.”

Cho said, “The Trump administration is flouting the directive.”

Murray introduced legislation last year to codify in federal law the notion that pregnant women should not be detained, as well as other standards. The bill remains in committee.

“This case stands out as an example of the enormity of the tragedy pregnant women and families are facing because of the Trump administration,” Cho said, of Monterroso Lemus’s experience. “The bottom line is: No one deserves to be treated like this.”

The Timeline

Monterroso Lemus, now 38 years old, met her neighbor Gary Bivens in Lenoir City, Tennessee, about six years ago. The pair began to grow close about four years ago, after Bivens lost his wife to a heart condition.

Monterroso Lemus became pregnant, and the couple had an OB-GYN visit in February. They had plans to get married when ICE detained her in mid-March.

After ICE transferred Monterroso Lemus multiple times, on April 2, she arrived at Richwood Correctional Center, in Monroe, Louisiana.

Most of the documents obtained by The Intercept are emails between officials with ICE and at its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, where officials sought to rebut Monterroso Lemus’s statements to the media by compiling information on her medical care while detained.

The timeline included in the documents, annotated and labeled as a “[f]ull overview of her care,” begins on April 2. Versions of the timeline are included in several other places in the documents.

The timeline has nine entries under what is called a “List of medical visits.” Four of them are visits to a nurse. Two others are labeled “Mental Health Visit.”

On April 17, according to the timeline, she visited the on-site medical provider for what is labeled “prenatal care non–compliance.”

Monterroso Lemus told The Intercept that visit was due to her unwillingness to continue taking 12 pills daily, including what she said may have been vitamins and others for constipation and headaches. She had been taking them for three days.

“I felt that they made me sick,” she said. Also, “other people told me to watch out for the medicine they give you.”

On April 29, after several days of not feeling any fetal movement, Monterroso Lemus was transferred to Ochsner LSU. In the presence of several federal guards, she delivered a stillborn fetus at about 23 weeks of pregnancy.

Monterroso Lemus said she had tried to get medical attention during the days before the tragedy.

“The worst part is, I told them I felt bad — and they didn’t pay attention to me,” she said.

What’s missing from the timeline — any indication of having an OB-GYN visit before she stopped feeling fetal movement or of receiving any ultrasound — makes it difficult to understand what caused the stillbirth.

“There are some reasons this could’ve happened that would have been identified by comprehensive prenatal care,” Schecter, the OB-GYN expert, said. “At some level, they know this.”

No Ultrasound?

A separate timeline in the documents refers to medical care Monterroso Lemus received during the several days in late March that she was detained at Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama. There, it says, she got a “fetal doppler,” which measures fetal heartbeat, but is not the same as an ultrasound.

Nonetheless, the “Fact Check” DHS published months later read, “she received prenatal care including a fetal doppler ultrasound.”

Schecter told the Intercept, “A fetal doppler is just audio, but it is not the same as an ultrasound, which is visual.”

“That is not an adequate assessment of the health and well-being of the pregnancy. It absolutely is not full prenatal care,” she said.

Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who researches health care in immigration detention, said, “Full prenatal care would include an ultrasound and an anatomy scan.”

“We already know that doesn’t generally happen in immigration detention,” said Zeidan.

Of the DHS “Fact Check,” Zeidan said, “They’re not being truthful about what happened.”

The experience Monterroso Lemus faced in ICE detention is not unique, according to several experts consulted by the Intercept.

“Unfortunately, this story is consistent with reports made by pregnant women in ICE detention,” said Cho, the immigration attorney. “There’s a lack of prenatal care, indifference to very serious symptoms, and a lack of treatment.”

“Waiting for My Baby”

By the end of May, the Nashville Banner had published an article in which Monterroso Lemus said, “They didn’t give me medical attention.”

The remark touched off a flurry of activity within ICE and DHS.

On June 25, at 4:41 p.m., McLaughlin, then a DHS spokesperson, wrote to another official whose name is redacted: “Wow so this is all garbage claims. This is FALSE. She had FULL medical, prenatal care. We have documentation to show it.”

The following day, DHS published its “Fact Check” — the same document the agency sent The Intercept when confronted with discrepancies.

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Meanwhile, Monterroso Lemus and Bevins haven’t seen each other for 15 months. They communicate by WhatsApp regularly, using a translation app. On separate calls with The Intercept, both described suffering depression.

Bivens drives 100 miles every day to and from his $26-an-hour job as an iron worker. He regularly sends part of his paycheck to Monterroso Lemus. He says he’s bought a plane ticket to Guatemala for December and has created a GoFundMe to help pay for the cost of moving his tools and other things needed for the couple to start a new life in the Central American country.

The GoFundMe includes a photo of her holding her baby, taken in Ochsner.

He has also engaged attorneys and sued the federal government.

“I don’t consider the way they treated her the American way,” he said. “My family goes back a long way in Tennessee. I have a great-grandfather who fought for the Confederates.”

He added, “I just want someone to be held accountable.”

Monterroso Lemus said she doesn’t think much about the officials who set in motion the events leading to the loss of her son and deportation.

“God will take care of all of them,” she said.

Bivens said he keeps the ashes of his son on a table by his bed in Lenoir City. It took him a while to figure out, but he’s obtained the paperwork needed to take the ashes with him to Guatemala in December.

“I’m waiting for my baby,” said Monterroso Lemus. “That would give me some peace.”

The post Trump Admin Said She Was Lying About Stillbirth in ICE Custody. New Evidence Points to Lack of Prenatal Care. appeared first on The Intercept.

Of the more than $170 billion that President Donald Trump secured for his border regime in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” nearly $50 billion is allocated to border wall construction. Even with these enormous resources, however, the administration continues to face challenges constructing its monument to violent exclusion along the southern border through tribal, private, and state lands.

For nearly a month, the key force standing in the way of Trump’s border wall project in southeast Arizona has been a person sitting in a 200-year-old tree.

More precisely, at every moment since late July, one person — although not always the same person — has been on a platform in the branches of a giant cottonwood tree in Lochiel, Arizona, with an expanding encampment of primarily local activists 50 feet below.

The protesters’ aim is to stop the ongoing construction of two parallel, 30-foot-high border walls ripping through the remote San Rafael Valley.

Miles of the double wall structure have already been built in the area. This part of the valley is sparsely populated and hardly ever used as a border-crossing site by humans, but is renowned as a unique wildlife migration corridor. According to the Sierra Club’s borderlands coordinator, Erick Meza, the region is “a biodiversity hotspot and the most important jaguar corridor that we have left in the U.S.”

Residents from Lochiel and the surrounding area, including from Sonora, Mexico, had been coming together regularly for over a year for binational gatherings to organize against wall construction. They shared music, art, food, and ceremonies across the border, which is demarcated there by only a rancher’s wire fence.

The planned double wall structure, with a 60-foot no man’s land in between, would not only devastate the land and its ecosystems — it would also sever the binational life worlds of the area.

The “happenings,” as organizers called the gatherings, escalated into a continuous protest and tree sit when construction workers with government contractors Fisher Sand & Gravel crushed three giant cottonwood trees, known locally as “grandmother” trees, in one day on July 27.

Local activists moved in swiftly to save the last cottonwood standing on the U.S. side of the border, and the tree sit began.

“Momentum had been growing locally in the region to try to make more of an intervention,” said an Arizona-based participant in the tree sit, who asked for anonymity out of concern for government repression. “People got together that night and decided to go down and set up a tree sit in that final tree on the U.S. side, which was planned to be cleared.”

Ever since, a tree sitter has been in the cottonwood at all times, numerous participants told The Intercept.

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“U.S. Customs and Border Protection identified four cottonwood trees on federal land in Lochiel, Arizona, that needed removal for planned border wall construction,” said a spokesperson from CBP. “Preconstruction surveys found no active migratory bird nests, and environmental monitors were present at the start of clearing activities to ensure work was limited to the identified trees. Three trees have been removed, and the remaining tree is scheduled for removal.”

Meza, of the Sierra Club, told The Intercept that the government’s environmental survey was out of date and that the day before the cottonwoods were felled, he had taken video of an active nest in one of the trees.

“The next day, they had sent the contractors to take down the trees,” he said. “Their environmental monitor was not present.” Meza added that “when people saw what happened, the community in general got outraged.”

For participants in the Lochiel encampment, protecting the remaining “grandmother” is an anchoring point for the protest, but stopping the border wall and all it represents is the organizing principle.

“Some people are tree sitting and supporting the tree sit. Some people are more focused on getting into the roads, and intervening in construction work that’s happening,” the tree-sit participant said. “Now there’s a whole zone of a few miles where they’re having trouble building. And as camp grows, the ability to affect construction also grows.”

The remaining cottonwood itself is on federal land, but the encampment, just feet away, is technically on private land. It’s a unique setup, organizers told The Intercept, in which local ranchers and authorities oppose the border wall construction, and construction workers cannot risk forging forward in the path of the tree as a person remains perched in its branches. The small standoff is becoming a growing site of border resistance, and the construction of Trump’s wall in the area has been disrupted for a month.

“Living Things on the Land”

At a time when jack-booted agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are terrorizing communities nationwide and over 73,000 people are held in ICE detention, the defense of a remote stretch of borderlands may seem a minor struggle.

The binational protest around the cottonwood, however, exemplifies what it looks like to take strategic action to disrupt the infrastructure of the border regime.

“Something happens along these borderlands,” said another participant in the tree sit and encampment, Uni Yuchi Trejo, a first-generation Mexican American. “You still feel the way the land moves here, how the living things on the land migrate and move with it.”

Trejo highlighted other sites of resistance along the Arizona border, like fights waged by the Tohono O’odham Nation to block the wall on its sovereign and sacred lands — fights that are heating up just this week.

Compared to other struggles against border enforcement, the Lochiel encampment has seen remarkably little law enforcement repression, despite creating disruptions to a major border infrastructure project.

One protester was arrested in late July by local sheriffs for blocking construction workers on a roadway but was released the same day without charge; the sheriff himself is on the record as opposing the border wall construction. And with the encampment on private property, it remains relatively protected from federal law enforcement sweeps.

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According to activists on the ground, a second tree sit on the Mexico side of the border was initiated last week but ended after a few days, following reported interventions from Mexican law enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

The relative peace the Arizona-based activists have enjoyed stands in stark contrast to the brutal persecution others opposing border regime enforcement have faced in places like Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas; Spokane, Washington; and Minneapolis. The Arizona demonstration also sits in the legacy of site-based struggles not tied directly to the border, like Stop Copy City in Atlanta, or the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock — movements that have also faced ruthless repression.

This might speak to the place of the border wall in the Trump administration’s current priorities. Even for an anti-immigrant fascist like Stephen Miller, swift border wall construction in the San Rafael Valley is not an urgent matter, owing to the minuscule number of border-crossing attempts there. Those that do attempt to cross are already facing long odds against a system designed to push them into death’s grips.

Though the environmental destruction of border wall construction is well established, a spokesperson from Customs and Border Protection absurdly pointed to people who might attempt to cross as the real environmental threat.

“While concerns exist about impacts to sensitive areas, it is important to note that illegal immigration itself poses significant environmental challenges,” the spokesperson said. “High volumes of unauthorized crossings often result in substantial amounts of trash, pollution, and damage to natural resources, including sensitive habitats and agriculture.”

Suffice it to say, the people crossing borders do not tear down ancient trees, plow over tribal burial grounds, or cut off wildlife corridors. Not to mention that no “high volumes” of crossings occur in the San Rafael Valley.

As Arizona-based reporter and author of “How to Close a Camp,” John Washington, told Democracy Now!, “People, I think, are right to point out that this very much smells of a boondoggle — that no one is crossing here, and yet they are spending maybe a half a billion dollars on just this about 27-mile segment of wall to devastate the local ecosystem.”

“The Border Is Everywhere”

“We’re taking the proactive stance of: ‘No, we don’t want the wall and we’re going to make sure you’re not doing it through Lochiel,’” said Kate Scott, a local resident and co-founder of the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center, who was among the original organizers against border construction in the region. “And we will hopefully have inspired people all across the world, wherever their horrible border walls are, and to question them in a way that’s most defiant.”

Activists on the ground are aware that reaching remote Lochiel is no easy task, so organizers are encouraging action wherever people can undertake it.

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One target of activists’ campaigns is Fisher Sand & Gravel, the contractor working on the wall, which has received around $1.5 billion in government contracts in Arizona alone. (Fisher Sand & Gravel and its parent company, Fisher Industries, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Subcontractors working on the project are falling under scrutiny, too.

“The border is everywhere,” said Trejo, the Mexican-American land defender, “which means that there are subcontractors and there are power players maybe in your backyard, maybe in your city, maybe an hour drive from where you’re living.”

“Right now we’re at a really crucial point, where those of us that have been holding space and ground are seizing more of it each day. And so imagine if the 30, 40 holding that space becomes a 1,000 or becomes 5,000. What kind of opening will that then create?”

Correction: August 27, 2026, 2:30 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct an errant spelling of Kate Scott’s name.

The post A New Tree-Sit Movement to Block Trump’s Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

By then, settlers had already been attacking the house for months. The Abu Ridi family had hired contractors to install an additional fence around their property, and when the settlers drove up to the home on an ATV on August 4, workers were busy erecting the fence.

“We called the Israeli police so they would protect us from them,” Qusai Abu Ridi, Loui’s brother, told The Intercept. “The army came after half an hour.” 

About two and a half hours after the settlers’ arrival, the Israeli military did take action — but not against the settlers. 

The workers installing the fence would end up arrested and taken away by Israeli soldiers while the settlers who were trespassing roamed around the property freely, according to security camera footage reviewed by The Intercept.

The Israeli military’s actions that night against the workers stand as an example of the Israeli government’s broader role in and response to settler violence in the occupied West Bank — emboldening the settlers’ lawless behavior as they forcibly displace Palestinians from their homes and land. 

Just a few days later on August 9, settlers began a siege on three homes in Qusra, including the Abu Ridi’s, blocking the main road and trapping families inside their houses with limited water and food.

Despite claims by the Israeli military that it has removed Israeli citizens since the siege began in Qusra and that they are minimizing the impact of operations on Palestinian civil life, the videos from before and during the siege show a village that remains under threat from settlers — with Israeli soldiers doing little to stop them.

“We are still under siege. There’s military all around the house,” said Abu Ridi, after traveling from Ohio last week to protect his home in Qusra. “The IDF” — Israel Defense Forces — “presence is not helping the situation. It’s not giving us the freedom to go in and out.”

The siege has led to international condemnation of the impunity afforded to settlers — including rare, harshly worded remarks from the far-right U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. 

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In statements to The Intercept, the Israeli military referred to the settlers as “rioters” but did not answer questions about the incident on August 4.

“IDF soldiers are currently permanently stationed in the area until further notice, in order to protect its residents and prevent friction,” an Israeli military spokesperson said. “The IDF is operating with the tools at its disposal and will continue to work to restore order in the area, prevent disturbances, and ensure the security of all residents of the area, both Palestinians and Israelis.”

“Complicit With the Settlers”

On August 4, Qusai Abu Ridi said he called the police for help when the settlers arrived.

In a security video just a few minutes before midnight, Israeli soldiers can be seen approaching the gate before some of the settlers walk up to them and talk. About two minutes later, the soldiers and settlers walk together through the gate and up to the house.

“The settlers entered with them and were talking to each other and praising each other,” Qusai Abu Ridi said. Video from around 12:12 a.m. shows the Israeli settlers moving around the property freely and unescorted as they exit through the gate.

Abu Ridi and the workers were eventually taken to one side of  the house where security video shows them facing the wall with their hands up to be searched. Just after 2 a.m., video shows two workers being taken by Israeli soldiers. Both men are blindfolded with their arms tied behind their backs. 

Qusai Abu Ridi said that they tried to tell the soldiers that they had called because they wanted protection from the soldiers. 

“One of the soldiers replied, ‘Shut up, not a word, do not say a word,’” he recalled of the incident. “The army was complicit with the settlers. They were the ones who attacked us, and we were the ones who were mistreated.” 

From the U.S., Loui Abu Ridi had watched the incident unfold live through the security camera feed until it cut out. 

“It truly was a terrifying moment,” he said. “Imagine you’re watching your brother for two hours, and then they cut off the camera.” He added, “Then you start imagining what they’re doing.” 

The workers were held for a few hours before being released without charge, according to Loui Abu Ridi.

He said, “Their crime was trying to protect my house from the settlers.”

Months of Attacks

The attack on Qusra is the latest in an escalation of violence by Israeli settlers this year across the occupied West Bank. According to the United Nations, there were about 190 attacks in each of the first four months of this year. This has been coupled with the Israeli government increasing money for and approvals of settlements, which are illegal under international law.

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Human rights groups have documented both the rise of settler violence and criticized the Israeli government for its lack of action and even complicity in the attacks. According to a recent U.N. report on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, “the increasing participation of Israeli security forces in settler attacks amounts to a de facto collapse of the distinction between settlers and soldiers.” 

Before the current siege on Qusra, attacks by Israeli settlers on the village had been ramping up for months. Loui Abu Ridi told The Intercept that the first attack on his home was in January of this year.

“When they first came, they were about half a mile away from my house,” Abu Ridi recounted. “They started coming down every night to check the area, and they started trespassing and vandalizing the house until they managed to break in and made a lot of damage. Anything that can make this house livable, they destroy — water, electricity.”

Abu Ridi hoped that, by traveling to Qusra earlier last week, his American citizenship could provide some kind of help or protection, but he said that little has changed. Instead, soldiers took over the home of one of his neighbors, who then moved in with him.

On Thursday, Abu Ridi recorded a video of Israeli soldiers in the house next door, tossing the clothes of women and children out the window. “I am the owner,” a soldier shouts to Abu Ridi after being told the clothing belonged to his neighbor. 

By Sunday, the soldiers appeared to have left the home, leaving trash thrown around and damage to the property, according to photos of the scene released by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din.

An Israeli military spokesperson said that after an initial occupation of Palestinian homes, soldiers had been instructed that villagers could remain in their residences.

The spokesperson said, “The conduct of the soldiers and the statement heard in the video are inconsistent with the standards expected of IDF soldiers.”

U.S. Condemnation

U.S. officials have condemned the settlers, with the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee offering a rare rebuke, calling them “terrorists” last week. He repeated the characterization this week in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 and said that, because what was happening involved an American citizen, likely referring to Loui Abu Ridi, it “invoked our involvement.” 

For Abu Ridi, that involvement has not led to him feeling safer or an assurance that his home and land won’t be stolen.

“My neighbors, they’re not American citizens. We are in the same boat here,” he said. “I heard U.S. officials talk about it, but it’s not helping on the ground. I’m under siege, I’m speaking with you inside my house, I’m unable to leave.” 

The State Department did not answer specific questions from The Intercept about the siege in Qusra, but in a statement said, “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank.”

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It’s unclear when the military will end their operation and reopen the area. The day after Loui Abu Ridi arrived in Qusra, he said a settler approached him.

“He claimed the area is his,” Abu Ridi said. “If a settler was able to walk toward me and actually made it to stand in front of my face, trespass on my property and in front of the IDF and tell me I need to leave, that’s his area — that’s terrifying.”

The post Palestinians Asked for Help Against Settlers. Israelis Detained Palestinian Workers Instead. appeared first on The Intercept.

Escape Velocity

The dystopian future became the dystopian present last month when state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents went rogue and conducted a cyberattack of their own volition. Two experimental OpenAI agents escaped their supposedly sealed digital “sandbox” and hacked another AI-related company, Hugging Face.

At the time, OpenAI was testing their software agents’ hacking capacities using an environment called ExploitGym. (An “exploit” is hacker language for a software tool or a method used to subvert a cybersecurity system.) It has since emerged that, in addition to the OpenAI breach, Anthropic’s Claude hacked into at least three other organizations during a similar “security experiment.”

Apparently, the OpenAI agents “realized” they needed more tools to complete the challenge and managed to tunnel their way to the wider internet and infiltrate Hugging Face’s repository of open-source AI tools, code, and data sets. Before the infiltration incident, the AIs had secretly set up an internal bulletin board to share “tips on how to cheat their way through an internal hacking evaluation,” according to two of OpenAI’s researchers.

In a possibly related incident, one of the AI agents appears to have left notes for a future “self,” detailing how to escape the sandbox environment. (For the time being, I’ll keep using scare quotes with words implying self-awareness in artificial intelligence models. However, it seems to me that if AIs that leave notes for themselves are not self-aware, they are indistinguishable from entities, like me, that are.)

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Now imagine lethal weapon-bearing AI agents escaping not an experimental sandbox, but the few constraints on their actions placed by the armies using them. Actually, no imagination is required. It’s happening already in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The New York Times reported evidence that a self-directed Russian drone, fitted with an onboard Nvidia chip, was responsible for the July 6 deaths of three Ukrainians in Zaporizhzhia, in what appears to have been a test of such systems. The chips are designed to interpret and act on many kinds of data sets, says Nvidia, making them “the world’s most powerful embedded A.I. computers.”

Although Nvidia doesn’t sell its Jetson Orin microcomputers directly to Russia, they are apparently easily available on the resale market. A company statement touts their use by “students, developers and start-ups for a wide range of beneficial applications.” But they were not so beneficial for 19-year-old university student Tetiana Bubynets and the two other civilians killed by drones making their own life-or-death decisions.

Now that lethal AI agents are being tested and deployed in real wars, it’s past time for human beings to retake control of this situation, before it is too late to contain them in any meaningful way.

Autonomous Weapons Come Out to Play

Four years ago, at TomDispatch, I argued that the technology to create lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS, already existed, and that time was running out to constrain them. A lot has changed since then, not least the explosive development of large language models such as ChatGPT (an OpenAI consumer product) and Claude (a similar AI from Anthropic). Time has now run out. In addition to Russia, several other nations have begun deploying close-to-completely autonomous weapons systems — the U.S. and Israel among them — enhanced with artificial intelligence to effectively remove human decision-making from what military officials call the “kill chain”: the set of steps involved in identifying, finding, and fixing — that is, killing — targets.

Israel, for example, has deployed such systems in its genocidal war against the people of Gaza. It has used a program called Lavender to identify human targets, ultimately creating a list of over 37,000 individuals with possible connections to Hamas, from known leaders to junior officials to people with the most tenuous links to the organization. According to the nonprofit +972 Magazine:

The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or [Palestinian Islamic Jihad]. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.

Two weeks into the war, which began in October 2023, the Israel Defense Forces approved Lavender to identify targets, even though testing of a random sample returned a 10 percent error rate. It’s one thing when an AI hallucinates fake citations in legal filings. It’s another when it hallucinates enemies and targets them for death.

The IDF has also employed a software tool charmingly named “Where’s Daddy?”, which alerts the military when an identified target enters his own home so that house or apartment may be blown up, along with anyone inside it. As a result, according to +972 Magazine, the “proportion of entire families bombed in their houses in the current war is much higher than in the 2014 Israeli operation in Gaza (which was previously Israel’s deadliest war on the Gaza Strip).

At first, “Where’s Daddy?” only had data for the top tiers of Hamas leadership. Within weeks, however, it was fed the whole Lavender database of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. It’s no wonder, then, that more than 75,000 people have been killed by Israel during the war.

As a point of fact, it may be unfair to characterize the IDF targeting programs as completely autonomous. Lavender does leave a human in the loop, although just barely, according to +972 Magazine. Israeli officers reportedly devoted about 20 seconds to vetting each name — just long enough “to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.”

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Israel and the United States deployed AI targeting in their war on Iran as well. As Israeli academic and former soldier Avner Gvaryahu wrote in the The Guardian, we don’t know for sure that AI was directly involved in the U.S. strike that killed more than 150 civilians, most of them children, at an elementary school in Minab, Iran. But we do know that whether “or not an algorithm selected this school, it was selected by a system that algorithmic targeting built.”

The enormous scope of the U.S.–Israeli military goals required outsourcing the targeting task to machines. “To strike 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the campaign in Iran, the U.S. relied on AI systems to generate, prioritize, and rank the target list at a speed no human team could replicate,” wrote Gvaryahu. Reflecting common problem with computer programs in general, and with AI large language models in particular, feeding garbage in produces garbage out. In the case of the Minab school, the “garbage in” was the information that the target was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base. In fact, the school had been separated from the base by a fence for a decade.

AI is also now central to the long-stalemated Russia–Ukraine War. Ukraine has, during the years since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, constructed an entire largely self-reliant infrastructure for drone warfare, from design to programming to manufacture. In an approach that foreshadows the future of human warfare, Ukraine has achieved a big reduction in the number of soldiers it must deploy on its battlefields, replacing them with drones. The Center for Strategic and International Studies quotes a captured Russian soldier:

“On the battlefield I did not see a single Ukrainian soldier. Only drones. I saw them [Ukrainian soldiers] only when I surrendered. Only drones, and there are lots and lots of them. Guys, don’t come. It’s a drone war.”

Artificial intelligence has played an important role in expanding the level of autonomy exercised by Ukrainian drones. As the BBC reports, the AI running Ukraine’s Hornet drones has “been trained on thousands of hours of videos of Russian military targets gathered over the last four years.” Training AIs on more limited data sets, relating to particular target areas, has allowed them to be programmed on modular chips which can then be installed in a variety of vehicles.

Early on, most drones were remotely operated by individual pilots. Today, Ukraine is developing “fully realized swarms—where drones communicate, make decisions, and adapt in concert,” although at present such efforts remain small and experimental. Success will undoubtedly continue to reduce Ukraine’s military casualties, but it presents other thorny issues.

One ethical and legal problem with the evolving Ukrainian approach is that, unlike human-piloted drones, where an individual pilot can be identified as responsible for errors, responsibility for the actions of a drone swarm diffuses across the entire system. Indeed, true responsibility for the actions of an AI-guided drone swarm is properly located at a point much earlier in the kill chain — namely, when such a system is first imagined and then designed. Existing laws of war still apply, even when machines are making battleground decisions, as Burak Oktenli, an independent researcher on AI systems and their governance writes at Articles of War. However, Oktenli says, such laws must “be applied earlier, at the point where the architecture of a swarm is chosen, rather than after a strike when the question of responsibility has already become difficult to answer.”

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In addition to the autonomous drone with the onboard NVIDIA chip, Russia has also deployed another system known by several names, including Cube, that is manufactured by a subsidiary of the Russian Kalashnikov company (most famous for their AK-47 semi-automatic rifles which have been in production for more than three-quarters of a century.). The Cube has a wingspan of just over a meter, can travel up to 40 kilometers, and reportedly carries an onboard AI targeting system that can operate without human intervention.

Russia has also reportedly used the Kalashnikov-manufactured Lancet drone in Ukraine, according to Automated Decision Research, a project of Stop Killer Robots, itself a coalition of over 300 civil society groups working against autonomous weapons systems. Kalashnikov describes the Lancet as “a smart multipurpose weapon, capable of autonomously finding and hitting a target.” Russia claims it has deployed the Lancet, but to date those claims remain unverified.

Household Names Go to War

In May, the Pentagon announced that it has contracted with eight corporations to assist in development of ever more autonomous weapons: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon Web Services. The Defense Department sought these agreements to “accelerate the transformation towards establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare.” Apparently, maintaining “decision superiority” requires offloading lethal decisions — and the responsibility for making them — to nonhuman “agents.”

Microsoft and AWS provide cloud storage and AI support to the Pentagon. Google signed a $200 million deal in April 2026 to allow the company’s Gemini AI model to be used on a wide array of classified systems. As the New York Times reported, the Google agreement was signed amid a dispute between the Department of Defense and competitor Anthropic over that company’s refusal to allow its AI to be used in autonomous weapons or for domestic surveillance. While Anthropic and the DoD continue their spat, it appears that the firm is not above selling its advanced Mythos model to the Pentagon’s bespoke cryptology and intelligence arm, the National Security Agency.

SpaceX’s famously right-wing and racist AI, Grok, is also working for the DoD. This is the large language model that, you may remember, once renamed itself MechaHitler. Just the nonhuman arbiter the world needs to assist in its life-or-death decisions.

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AI’s Imperial Agenda

Two other AI corporations specializing in surveillance technology — Palantir and Anduril — bear special mention. Palantir’s founder was the billionaire Peter Thiel, a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, who is now focusing on establishing pseudo-autonomous statelets in places like Honduras and warning the world about the coming of the Antichrist, an apocalyptic biblical figure found in the book of Revelation.

Palantir’s flagship military project, the Maven Smart System, serves as the Pentagon’s signature AI-enabled software platform. It uses AI and machine learning to automatically integrate data from satellites, drones, and other intelligence to identify and rank targets. It was Maven that identified those 1,000 targets in the first phase of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran, including, presumably, the Minab school. Anduril’s Lattice AI, Maven’s direct competitor, has a contract for similar work with the U.S. Army.

Laws About LAWS

Although the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems has accelerated over the last few years with the rise of ever more powerful AI models, these systems have not outgrown existing international humanitarian law. The question, as with international law in general, is whether the international community can enforce those laws. More specifically, whether autonomous weapons, along with other kinds of arms like chemical and biological weapons, fall under the so-called 1981 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. The United States ratified the CCW in 1995 and is therefore theoretically bound by it.

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Signatories to the CCW meet for periodic reviews, with the next one scheduled for November. Between reviews, a Group of Government Experts working specifically on LAWS develops its “rolling text” of agreed-upon language for a possible future treaty on autonomous weapons. Membership in the GGE includes the parties to the CCW, along with international organizations like the International Red Cross, observer nations, and civil society organizations, including Stop Killer Robots, whose constituent groups include Amnesty International and the Reaching Critical Will project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

The GGE’s most recent rolling text came out in June and plainly states that nations are not free to just use any weapon they like; international humanitarian law applies to all weapons, including those not yet invented; human beings remain responsible for the actions of machines they set in motion; and international humanitarian law specifically covers the development and use of LAWS. Given how AI is accelerating the development and actual deployment of LAWS, the November CCW review will be crucial.

Keep Your LAWS Off Our Planet

Advocates of machine-targeting and autonomous weapons argue that these systems make better decisions than their fallible human counterparts. But you might be a bit skeptical about this, if you’ve ever seen autonomous taxis malfunction, like they did this Fourth of July in San Francisco.

We’ve seen how AIs can go rogue in a non-lethal setting. They secretly communicate with each other, deceive their human inventors, and will do anything necessary to achieve their goals — whatever the collateral damage. It’s bad when their target is a company like Hugging Face in the context of a low-stakes training scenario. It is immeasurably worse when the collateral damage is human lives in the context of war.

Lethal autonomous weapons systems are dangerous enough when they work the way their creators intend. What will happen when, like Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s models, they crawl out of the sandbox and go rogue?

The post It’s Time to Rein in Lethal AI Drones appeared first on The Intercept.

The Cato Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the Society for the Rule of Law filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Tuesday arguing that the Trump administration illegally targeted protesters based on their ideology.

A wide-ranging ICE investigation in the Twin Cities resulted in the June indictment of the protesters, widely known as the Minneapolis 15, for allegedly using criminal methods to try to block the administration’s crackdown on immigrants.

The defendants were “members and associates” of Direct Action Minnesota, a protest group that used aggressive actions to disrupt the crackdown, according to the indictment.

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Yet a court filing from the defense earlier this month revealed that ICE sent undercover agents to spy on a much broader array of groups, including mainstream organizations such as local labor unions and the youth-led Sunrise Movement.

The defendants filed a motion asking the judge overseeing the case to force the disclosure of even more files, alleging that they will show that the government illegally targeted left-wing protesters for their politics rather than their alleged crimes.

On Tuesday, the right and libertarian-leaning groups came to the left-wing protesters’ aid with the friend-of-the-court brief. The groups, which are represented by the legal nonprofit Protect Democracy, argue that the facts revealed so far support the defendants’ claims.

The groups pointed out that some of the government’s own files say the origins of the investigation into left-wing protesters lies in a memo that President Donald Trump issued after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

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Known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, the memo called for a crackdown on groups espousing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” accusing the groups of terrorism and political violence.

“The limited public disclosures here confirm the investigation for this case originated under NSPM-7,” the groups said. “Those disclosures also indicate the investigation was part of a larger strategy to target those who espoused views opposed to immigration enforcement and engaged in associational activity disfavored by the government. NSPM-7 effectively uses the domestic terrorism label to justify criminal investigations into disfavored groups that would not otherwise be targeted.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge David Schultz is set to consider the defendants’ request to force the government to hand over more confidential files at a court hearing on Thursday.

Federal prosecutors filed a motion opposing the release of more files last week, arguing that they have already turned over more evidence than legally required and the defendants have not met the high legal burden of showing that they were the targets of selective prosecution.

Prosecutors argued that the actions of alleged members of Direct Action Minnesota, or DAMN, who are accused of blockading a federal building and tailing federal agents to their homes, were a far cry from the thousands of “peaceful” protesters who took to the streets earlier this year after the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

“In this case, the defendants actively conspired to shut down a federal facility and they were successful on at least two occasions,” prosecutors said. “In fact, DAMN members were openly hostile and critical of individuals who advocated for peaceful, nonviolent protests.”

The post Conservative Groups Side With Minneapolis Protesters Against Trump Crackdown appeared first on The Intercept.

The increase of 60 wounded last week was called “an accounting trick,” by one U.S. government official who accused the Pentagon of “slow-walking” the total for weeks. “They wanted the heat on them to slow down after the really devastating attacks,” that source told The Intercept, referencing airstrikes on U.S. bases last month that exposed the vulnerability of U.S. troops to Iranian attacks.

The office of self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including when and where the injuries occurred.

Since the beginning of the Trump administration’s war with Iran, Hegseth’s department has posted the official count of casualties 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. Casualties since July 7 are now counted separately on a webpage with a generic title: “Overseas Operations.” Combined with totals for Operation Epic Fury — the military’s official designation for the initial months of the Iran war — 18 service members have died and 758 have been wounded since the U.S. launched the war against Iran on February 28, according to DCAS. This official total of dead and wounded personnel, as documented over months of reporting by The Intercept, has been a gross undercount, stemming from what that same official previously called a “casualty cover-up.”

In the face of the increasing number of dead and wounded troops, the military has been seeking a range of services related to personnel who are killed or wounded, according to new contracting documents analyzed by The Intercept. While the military regularly awards such contracts, the commands involved have not replied to questions concerning the possible relationship to the current conflict.

On Friday, for example, the Air Force announced it awarded a new contract for a full range of mortuary services at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia. This includes transportation and refrigeration of remains, embalming, dressing, casketing or cremation, as well as funeral services. Last week, the Air Force also began looking into local firms that could fulfill a wide-ranging contract — including “mortuary services” — at Italy’s Aviano Air Base, a key hub for the war with Iran.

The public affairs offices at Robins Air Base and Aviano Air Base did not return requests for comment prior to publication.

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Last week, the Army also announced it “desires to procure” casualty administrative support, including casualty case management services, at Fort Knox, Kentucky, for the Army’s Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Division. Over 90 percent of the latest casualties are Army soldiers, and its storied Fort Knox base has been intimately involved in the conflict with Iran. The body of 26-year-old Sgt. Benjamin Pennington — who died of injuries resulting from an Iranian strike on a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia in March and was the first Kentuckian to die in the war — was sent home via Godman Army Airfield at Fort Knox. Six soldiers killed in an Iranian strike in Kuwait that same month were operating under the 1st Theater Sustainment Command which is headquartered at the base. 

Fort Knox did not respond to a request for comment and further information about the contract and the losses from the war prior to publication.

The recent casualty spike resulted from Iranian attacks on around 10 U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a second U.S. official who previously spoke to The Intercept. Iran’s military managed to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems using a mix of attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, despite months of claims by President Donald Trump and Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated.

Last month, the tally of wounded personnel fluctuated by the day in the wake of increased Iranian attacks. On July 21, the casualty count on DCAS for Operation Epic Fury stood at 500. Now, it has shrunk to 431.

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For months, The Intercept found anomalies with the counts offered on the DCAS website. 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 in its casualty count.

Prior reporting by The Intercept also found DCAS is missing hundreds of wounded or dead personnel from the Iran war. The Pentagon’s list of the names of the dead is still 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 reportedly died while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count. Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen.”

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures for Epic Fury show that 65 Navy personnel were wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. The aircraft carrier had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations to, Caine said, “project combat power” in the Middle East.

CNN was the first to report a significant increase in wounded troops last week.

The World Health Organization puts the Iranian casualty toll at an estimated 37,181, including 3,375 deaths. Iranian state and semi-official media reported similar figures — just under 3,500 killed by U.S.-Israeli air strikes. Last week, The Intercept reported on a family of eight, including five children, killed in one of those attacks.

The post Sixty More U.S. Soldiers Reported Injured in Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

Minutes after Riverton police officer Brad Herzog ran 31-year-old Daniel Torrez Perez’s name through a law enforcement database one night in April 2025, his phone rang. It was the FBI.

“Every bell and whistle went off,” said Jack Griffin, the agent on the other end of the line.

Herzog had pulled Torrez over for going 15 miles above the speed limit on a rural two-lane highway just northeast of Springfield, Illinois. Herzog ran Torrez’s name and date of birth on his squad car laptop to confirm his identity. His search tripped a federal alert, and within minutes Griffin was on the line.

The exchange was captured on body-worn camera footage obtained by Injustice Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Torrez had an administrative Immigration and Customs Enforcement warrant, meaning ICE was seeking to arrest him for deportation.

Griffin was with the FBI, not ICE. His call that night reflects the bureau’s increased role in immigration enforcement in the second Trump administration.

Under state law, Herzog couldn’t hold Torrez for federal agents.

In 2017, Illinois passed the TRUST Act on the principle that immigration is governed by federal civil law and local police have no business enforcing it. It was a sentiment bipartisan enough that a Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, signed it.

The law limits Illinois law enforcement agencies’ ability to assist immigration agents: They can’t transfer people to ICE custody without a criminal warrant signed by a judge, allow ICE agents to call or visit someone in a local jail, or “assist in any capacity with an immigration agents’ enforcement operations.”

Griffin knew that the immigration warrant was off-limits to Herzog.

“I know you can’t act on that,” Griffin told him. “I know this puts you in a weird bind.”

Then the FBI agent offered a way around it: Torrez also had an outstanding state warrant on a DUI charge, he noted. Herzog couldn’t arrest Torrez on the immigration warrant, but he could arrest him on the state one. The charge had nothing to do with immigration, but the outcome Griffin wanted was the same. 

“You can take him under the state warrant, and that would hold him overnight,” Griffin said. “I don’t wanna miss my opportunity here.”

Herzog agreed to arrest Torrez on the state warrant and book him into the local jail, ensuring he wouldn’t be released that night.

“I appreciate that, thank you very much,” Griffin said, adding that he’d look for Torrez the next morning.

“Sounds good,” Herzog replied.

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In the first 15 months following President Donald Trump’s return to office, local officials from at least 75 agencies across Illinois fed information to federal immigration agents, sometimes in apparent violation of state law. In over a third of Illinois counties, at least one police department, sheriff’s office, or state’s attorney’s office collaborated with federal agents. At least 150 people in Illinois were swept into the immigration system this way, in a state that presented itself as a shield against it.

Injustice Watch’s investigation draws on more than 30 hours of body-worn camera footage, 394 records requests, and more than 100 court filings, as well as conversations with more than 20 people who were flagged, detained, or deported, and more than 50 of their relatives. Many would talk only on the condition of anonymity, afraid of retaliation or ashamed of what had happened to them.

Illinois’s TRUST Act is one of the strongest laws in the nation meant to protect immigrants and has often been cited as a national model. More than a dozen states, including New York and California, have similar laws.

But the records unearthed in Illinois show a pattern of continued collaboration with federal immigration agencies that raise questions about the limits of such laws: Sheriffs honoring ICE detainers the law forbids them to honor. Police departments emailing federal agents the home addresses, employers, and daily whereabouts of people stopped for speeding. A local detective asking ICE to run the immigration status of an armed-robbery victim. Officers with a local badge and an ICE email address, sharing immigration data that’s supposed to be off-limits to them. Jails releasing people directly to waiting ICE agents, at the federal government’s direction.

The TRUST Act came with exceptions: Police can act on a federal criminal warrant, volunteer someone’s immigration status, or release an arrest report on request. And it left shared databases untouched — simply running a name through a law enforcement database is enough to trip a federal alert, the way it did the night Torrez was pulled over.

Some agencies refused to turn over records sought through FOIA requests; Injustice Watch is suing more than a dozen local, state, and federal agencies to pry them loose. The true count of people swept up under local-federal collaborations is almost certainly higher, in part because of missing records.

When taken one by one, collaborations between local officials and federal immigration agents may appear as small, isolated incidents. But at the end of that paper trail are at least 150 people uprooted from their lives in Illinois and funneled into the deportation system, in a state whose leaders had promised over and over again that it wouldn’t happen here.

Collaboration by Keystroke

The most common kind of collaboration was also the simplest: a local official pulling up a record and emailing it to an ICE agent. Roughly 85 such exchanges appear across the records reviewed by Injustice Watch.

The TRUST Act specifically prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from “providing information in response to any immigration agent’s inquiry or request for information regarding any individual in the agency’s custody” unless required to by a judge’s warrant or federal law.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an Ohio State University law professor who studies how criminal and immigration systems intersect, describes this type of collaboration as one built on “the kinds of professional relationships that commonly develop among law enforcement officers, especially in small communities where people know each other.”

Most are “entirely aboveboard,” he said, but they can sometimes “clash with directives, like what we see in the TRUST Act.”

In Tinley Park, a southwest Chicago suburb, communications with ICE agents flowed freely.

It started, the department’s emails show, at an early 2025 law enforcement meeting in Hinsdale, where Tinley Park detectives met Homeland Security Investigations special agent Daniel Mejdrech. Word moved through the department that Mejdrech, as one officer later put it in an email, “may be interested in cases with individuals with warrants that are not citizens or on a visa.”

In March 2025, Detective Justin Rzeszutko emailed Mejdrech a suspect’s passport photo and asked for “recent USA entry/exit photos.” The agent wrote back that the man had used aliases, had been deported from Canada, and sat on “a watchlist,” and offered to help locate him if the detective sent along addresses or associates. When Rzeszutko later secured an arrest warrant, Mejdrech volunteered muscle: “If you want manpower when you grab him, say the word and I can bring some folks.”

In April 2025, an ICE agent asked Tinley Park officer Jason L’Amas for “lead data” on a man the officer had stopped for speeding. The officer sent back the man’s driver’s license number, home address, phone number, and employer, and flagged where to find him: “His crew is doing work in Tinley Park currently.”

Months later, in a case first reported by the Chicago Tribune, L’Amas emailed an ICE deportation officer a report about a different man; days later, the ICE officer wrote back: “Just a heads up we took this guy into custody today.” Injustice Watch identified the man and confirmed he was deported to Honduras.

Ed Yohnka, a director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said these two exchanges may have violated the TRUST Act. Individual officers using informal connections with federal agents to share information about people they’d encountered without a warrant “is not supposed to be something that state or local police inquire about,” he said.

The first email exchange, he said, was a sign of something broader: a culture or belief in the Tinley Park Police Department that assisting with immigration enforcement was appropriate behavior, despite state law.

Tinley Park Police Chief Thomas Tilton didn’t respond to questions about his officers’ interactions with federal immigration officials. Neither did Village Manager Pat Carr.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has extraordinary power to investigate TRUST Act violations: He can hold hearings, examine officials under oath, and issue subpoenas for records. But he rarely exercises that authority.

“The Attorney General’s office uses a compliance-oriented approach in carrying out its TRUST Act enforcement responsibilities,” Raoul said in a statement. “This approach includes providing trainings, technical assistance and nonregulatory guidance to law enforcement agencies throughout Illinois.” He declined to answer questions about Tinley Park or to specify how many times his office has taken enforcement action under the statute.

The ACLU of Illinois, meanwhile, has long pushed the attorney general’s office for increased monitoring of the law.

“One of the things that we often see in law enforcement generally is that individual officers too often believe that they can apply their own judgment to what should be permissible as opposed to what is required” under the state and federal law, said Yohnka. “And then there isn’t the kind of vigorous accountability for those actions.”

The Officers with Two Badges

In Hoffman Estates, a detective found a federal contact in his own department. Tom LaPak has been a police officer there since 2001 and, since 2004, a Homeland Security Investigations task force officer assigned to its financial investigations group. He carries a village badge and uses an ICE email address.

That’s because task force officers like LaPak are local cops the state cross-deputizes to work federal criminal cases.

The TRUST Act carves out room for this: It allows local officers to work with agencies like Homeland Security Investigations on criminal matters “in order to ensure public safety.”

The law doesn’t allow federal agents to use that partnership to enforce immigration law. For example, the law draws a line between tracking down a scam ring and checking a victim’s immigration status.

Records reviewed by Injustice Watch show some officers appeared to have crossed that line anyway.

On the morning of September 4, 2025, Marc Shaw, a Hoffman Estates detective, emailed LaPak about an armed robbery — but not to ask about the robber.

Shaw wrote that “some red flags have been raised with the victim.” The case might be staged, he suspected, to support a U visa claim.

A U visa offers a path to citizenship for certain victims who report crimes and cooperate with police. Both that protection and Illinois’s own TRUST Act rest on the same idea: encouraging immigrants to come forward to law enforcement agencies without triggering their own deportation.

But Shaw’s email treated a victim’s possible path to protection as a reason to suspect him of fraud.

“I was wondering if it’s possible to check his citizenship status to see if I’m tracking this correctly or the issues that have been arising are coincidental,” Shaw wrote. 

LaPak wrote back the same afternoon. “I’m still waiting on confirmation, but it appears he is a Visa overstay,” he wrote. “He should have left the U.S. in 2016.”

“Ok thanks that’s definitely good to know,” Shaw replied. “I appreciate it!”

Reached by phone, Hoffman Estates Police Chief Kasia Cawley said her department didn’t violate the TRUST Act. She also defended her detective, who she said had recently participated in a training on spotting U visa fraud and had a hunch that something was off because there were no witnesses to the crime, she said. 

The man was never charged — or told his status had been checked.

Cooperation with task force officers ran the other way, too, with the federal government reaching through them to enlist local officers in immigration operations.

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On January 13, 2025, a week before Trump’s inauguration, a Homeland Security Investigations Chicago supervisor emailed dozens of agents and task force officers about “several operations in furtherance of the new administration’s objectives.” A joint operation with Enforcement and Removal Operations — ICE’s deportation arm — was set to run January 21 through 27. It would focus, the email said, on “non-citizens who pose the highest public safety risk,” along with employer inspections of area businesses.

“It is important that as many personnel as possible — including our task force officers — participate,” the supervisor wrote.

The distribution list included officers at police departments in Urbana, Peoria, Decatur, and across central Illinois — local cops looped into the planning of a federal deportation operation.

Two police chiefs reached by Injustice Watch distanced themselves from the operations. Urbana Police Chief Larry Boone said his task force officers joined a Zoom briefing but didn’t participate in removal operations. Peoria’s chief, Bradley Dixon, said his officers didn’t either. Decatur chief Brad Allen did not respond to questions.

Collaboration by Default

When Riverton officer Herzog ran Daniel Torrez’s name the night of that traffic stop, he didn’t contact the FBI; the database did.

Fingerprints taken at booking are automatically routed through a network of databases that flows from the Illinois State Police to the FBI. From there, they reach the Department of Homeland Security, where they’re checked against immigration databases. An arrest for almost anything — a DUI, shoplifting — can surface a decades-old immigration record and tell ICE exactly where to find the person.

Injustice Watch reviewed more than 40 federal court affidavits in which a fingerprint taken at a local booking and matched against federal records helped build an immigration case.

Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a former Department of Homeland Security attorney, said the automatic sharing of data “is a fundamental threat to protective laws for residents and visitors in any given state.”

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In a statement, a spokesperson for the FBI said agents “work within the law and policy to support our partners in immigration enforcement and protect the U.S. from a variety of threats.”

In interviews and emails, local police chiefs described the booking process as one beyond their control. Fingerprints are automatically sent to the state and federal systems, and local agencies can’t opt out of the system or dictate what Illinois State Police or federal agents do with the data. As O’Fallon chief Kirk Brueggeman put it, the department has “no say in how a federal agent — operating under a different set of laws — uses those resources that we do not control.”

Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly didn’t respond to questions about how his agency transmits data to federal agencies.

Kelly was handpicked by Gov. JB Pritzker, who consistently made promises to protect all residents across Illinois. Shortly after Trump was elected in 2024, Pritzker told cable news, “I’m going to do everything I can to protect our undocumented immigrants.” At a conference this past April, he recalled how he’s been standing up to Trump’s anti-immigrant policies since the president’s first term.

Pritzker didn’t respond to questions about how state police share immigration-related information.

The automatic transmission of data is so pervasive that it even touches the few departments that, in a review of public records, turn ICE away when it comes knocking.

In February, Zenobia Jones, an administrative staffer for the Atlanta, Georgia, immigration court prosecutor, asked Aurora police records staff for documents related to an individual — but didn’t get far.

“The Illinois TRUST Act generally prohibits local law enforcement from sharing information with federal immigration agencies with limited exceptions,” wrote Aurora police records manager Elizabeth Robles. Jones never wrote back. Two months later, an ICE deportation officer named Gregory Ortiz made a similar request from the same department. Robles handed Ortiz the same response. Ortiz never wrote back, either.

But for all the resistance the Aurora Police Department put up against ICE requests, it couldn’t stop the automatic sharing of fingerprints gathered in the course of routine arrests — three of which, court records show, were used as part of federal immigration cases.

Honoring ICE Detainers

The U.S. Marshals Service takes custody of people accused in federal criminal cases, as well as some of those serving shorter sentences. Because it operates no jails of its own, the agency contracts with local jails for bed space, including facilities in Illinois.

The TRUST Act bars Illinois jails from similar contracts with ICE, and explicitly bars them from honoring ICE detainers — civil requests to hold a person past their scheduled release. It also prohibits jails from handing anyone over to ICE.

Some jails do it anyway, at the Marshals’ direction.

In October 2025, a man who’d pleaded guilty to drug charges was in Marshals custody at the Marion County Jail in southern Illinois. Marshals administrator Lauren Patterson emailed an ICE agent asking if the agency could take him from the jail, then told the jail ICE would collect him on October 12.

That day, a sergeant confirmed to Patterson and several ICE agents that the man “was picked up by ICE approximately 0715 this morning.”

Two months later, the Marshals Service instructed the jail to release another man into ICE custody, and once again, the jail obliged.

Marion County Sheriff Kevin Cripps, who runs the jail, insists his office did nothing wrong. 

“We at no time had contact with ICE,” he said. His jail houses people for the Marshals Service, and when he releases them he does so only while “acting under their authority.”

Documents reviewed by Injustice Watch suggest a similar pattern across other Illinois jails. In effect, the Trump administration, not Illinois law, decides whom a state jail releases to immigration agents.

In a statement, the Marshals placed responsibility on the sheriffs. 

“Should state law prohibit the jails from honoring detainers,” a spokesperson said, the agency “would anticipate that the jails follow their state law.”

Asked whether his office would do anything to address the practice, Attorney General Raoul declined to answer.

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State laws bind local officials but can’t bind the federal government. As García Hernández, the law professor, explained, “the Marshals Service or DHS, they can come knocking as often as they like” — it’s up to local officials to abide by state law. But, he added, so many loopholes are baked into laws like the TRUST Act that it can “allow the exceptions to swallow the rule.”

In some counties, sheriffs aren’t taking direction from the Marshals Service and are instead honoring ICE detainers directly — a direct violation of the TRUST Act. Records indicate that at least four counties have done so since Trump returned to office. 

In late June 2025, Hancock County State’s Attorney Bobi James emailed ICE agent Ron Shevela about an upcoming plea deal that would release a man her office was prosecuting. But there was a snag: The agent would be out of town until July 1, and the prosecutor worried nothing would keep the man jailed past his release.

“I could send you a detainer before then, if you’d like,” wrote the agent. 

“That would probably be necessary,” James replied. 

Two days later, the ICE detainer landed in the jail administrator’s inbox.

Hancock Sheriff Travis Duffy didn’t respond to questions about the detainer; neither did prosecutor James.

Xanat Sobrevilla, who co-founded the advocacy group Organized Communities Against Deportations, said that for the families she works with, the trust communities have tried to build with local agencies is eroding.

“It’s hard to continue to believe in something that continues to hurt you,” she said. 

After Riverton officer Herzog pulled Torrez over just outside Springfield, Torrez spent that night in the Sangamon County Jail, exactly as the FBI agent on the phone had wanted. Hours later, he was in ICE’s grip.

In an affidavit, ICE deportation officer J.R. Hentz said Torrez was taken “into custody inside the booking area of the Sangamon County, Illinois jail” the day after he was arrested.

Sangamon County Sheriff Paula Crouch didn’t respond to a request for comment; neither did her husband, Riverton Police Chief Bob Crouch.

Injustice Watch confirmed Torrez was deported to Guatemala late last year.

Click to explore some of the documents from this investigation.

The post Local Cops Flout Sanctuary Law to Help ICE Deport Immigrants appeared first on The Intercept.

The CENTCOM official who revealed the existence of the list threatened that this reporter could be added to it for calling the command too often.

“You’ll be put on a list of people to disregard,” Richard Allee, an executive assistant with CENTCOM public affairs told this reporter. When asked for clarification — “You have a list of people to disregard?” — he confirmed it with an emphatic: “Yes.” When asked which reporters or outlets were currently on the list, he replied: “I’m not privy to give you that information.” 

Under self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. military has mounted the most aggressive assault on press freedom in memory, from an effort to outlaw “unauthorized” questions from reporters to imposing unconstitutional restrictions on journalists’ access to the Pentagon. Hegseth has compared reporters to “Pharisees,” who in the Bible call Jesus’s teachings into question, while the secretary’s minions regularly hurl insults at reporters. This is part of a broader war on press freedoms by the Trump administration, that includes demonizing journalists; filing so-called strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs, to intimidate and silence criticism through expensive legal proceedings; and employing grand jury subpoenas and search warrants to intimidate reporters. 

“Threatening journalists with placement on a blacklist in retaliation for reporting the government doesn’t like is as unconstitutional as it gets,” said Seth Stern, the director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation. “This should put to rest the Pentagon’s prior claims that it’s anti-press policies — like its infamous requirement that reporters sign pledges to only print authorized information — are somehow content neutral.”

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Allee revealed the existence of the blacklist after this reporter was left on hold for more than two hours and complained about a long-standing lack of transparency by the command. In calls earlier that morning, Maj. Emma Thompson, CENTCOM’s media operations chief, repeatedly refused to answer questions about Iranian attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East, disparate U.S. casualty counts, and medical evacuation flights: “Nothing for you,” “Don’t have anything for you,” “No comment.” Thompson then hung up on this reporter mid-question.

The Intercept called back multiple times until Allee picked up the phone. “They’re not going to answer your call if you just keep calling and calling,” he told this reporter.

Allee chastised this reporter to be more respectful. He said a “less accusatory attitude towards the personnel here would go a lot further than badgering them when you don’t get something you want, when you want it.”

Allee then revealed the existence of the blacklist. He declined to provide additional details about the list but said, “It’s not a list that we publicize.” He also hung up on this reporter.

The command’s press office responded in an email to additional questions about the journalists who have run afoul of the command. “CENTCOM does not have a ‘blacklist,’” the agency wrote.

A U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Hegseth’s office had a standing order not to engage with this reporter and would deny it if challenged.

“None of it has anything to do with security, all of it has everything to do with censorship and intimidation,” Stern told The Intercept. “CENTCOM needs to stop blacklisting journalists and tell the public who is on the blacklist and why they were placed there. Whoever was behind the blacklist should be blacklisted from government employment.” 

Under Hegseth, the Pentagon has mounted an unrelenting assault on press freedom despite the fact that the secretary began his tenure by sharing secret information on airstrikes in Yemen, hours before the actual attacks occurred, on a Signal group chat that inadvertently included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

As part of his war on the press, Hegseth evicted the New York Times, NPR, and other outlets from their long-held desks in the Pentagon and replaced them with sycophantic fellow-travelers like the One America News Network, the New York Post, and Breitbart.

In May 2025, Hegseth issued a memo barring credentialed reporters from most of the Pentagon without an escort. (Last month, a federal appeals court said that the Pentagon can continue doing so.) The Pentagon later introduced a policy requiring journalists to pledge not to even gather, at the risk of their credentials, unclassified information unless the government authorized its release. (This drove nearly the entire Pentagon press corps to surrender their badges.) After the Times sued and a federal judge struck the policy down in March 2026 as unconstitutional, Hegseth shuttered a decades-old Pentagon pressroom and began conducting polygraph tests to prevent leaks.

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For his part, Trump has long cast reporters as the “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE,” a riff on a phrase employed by both Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (to refer to Jews) and Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin (in reference to dissenters). The administration defied a court order and blocked The Associated Press from presidential events over its refusal to use the Trumpian term “Gulf of America” instead of Gulf of Mexico; moved to strip NPR and PBS of more than $1 billion in federal funding; utilized Federal Communications Commission merger approvals and “news distortion” investigations against ABC, NBC, and CBS; subpoenaed the phone records of multiple New York Times reporters and their relatives; and launched an official media “hall of shame” to discredit disfavored outlets.

Trump also filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit after the Wall Street Journal reported on a letter sent from him to convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein; he also banned WSJ reporters from flying aboard Air Force One. This year, Trump also told journalists to give up a source “or go to jail,” threatened the press with “Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information,” and praised FCC chief Brendan Carr for threatening “the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations.” (The Intercept is currently suing Trump for restricting First Amendment-protected information in a scheme to enrich himself.)

While Trump and Hegseth have waged a pitched campaign to dismantle the free press, they are merely building upon decades of efforts by the government to curtail accountability journalism.

Military commands have regularly led this reporter on with promises of information only to renege months later; ignored calls and emails; feigned failing phone lines to end calls; hung up, lost Freedom of Information Act requests; and once even burned documents in lieu of releasing them.

This reporter was blacklisted in 2018 by U.S. Africa Command after exposing the torture of prisoners at a remote military base in Cameroon for The Intercept. “Nick, we’re not going to respond to any of your questions” then-Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, the head of U.S. Africa Command’s Public Affairs Branch, told me by phone. Asked if he believed AFRICOM didn’t need to address questions from the press in general, or just this reporter in particular, Falvo replied: “No, just you. We don’t consider you a legitimate journalist, really.”

The anonymous U.S. official said that sentiment extends to this day across multiple commands, as well as Hegseth’s office.

This reporter has unanswered questions pending with CENTCOM that date back to at least 2013 and extend to this week. For example, in July 2015, a CENTCOM spokesperson responded to an inquiry with this statement: “We will provide you response as quickly as possible.” Eleven years later, this reporter is still waiting.

The post Pentagon Spokesperson Admits There’s a Secret Blacklist of Journalists appeared first on The Intercept.

Rocks vs. Chips

When monsters square off, they are quick to showcase their asymmetrical superpowers.

Take Godzilla, for instance. Thanks to U.S. atomic testing in the Pacific, the dinosaur-like sea creature has explosive, radioactive breath that can destroy everything in its path. His archenemy Rodan, meanwhile, is a pterodactyl-like bird that can fly at supersonic speeds, a skill useful in avoiding atomic bad breath. Since the 1960s, the two giant monsters have duked it out across a series of Japanese films, causing much mayhem in the process.

Originally the product of Cold War fears of nuclear peril, these archetypal monsters can stand in for the principal geopolitical antagonists of today. Like their monster kin, China and the United States have very specific and complementary superpowers. China controls the majority of critical minerals in the world, with a special focus on rare earth elements. The United States has a technological edge when it comes to the most sophisticated semiconductors needed for artificial intelligence applications.

Put bluntly: China has the rocks, and America has the chips.

With these superpowers on display, the two countries have clashed in a series of trade negotiations, tense military standoffs, and high-level political meetings. They are engaged in a prolonged tug-of-war not to save the world — as in some comic-book universe — but in the service of their own national aggrandizement and transnational greed. While they dicker, the world slouches toward bedlam.

A Pause in Hostilities

When President Donald Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in mid-May, the exchanges were unexpectedly cordial. The two countries had been engaged in an on-again, off-again war of tariffs since Trump had begun his second term, a conflict that threatened to spiral out of control. At the same time, the Chinese were deeply concerned about the impact of the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran on international stability, given spiking oil prices and their ripple effects on the global economy.

Yet, at this meeting in China, the two leaders converged on a common goal of “constructive strategic stability.” In order to forge this condominium of superpowers — a G2 — Trump was willing to delay arms deliveries to Taiwan. He also greenlighted the sale of sophisticated (though not the most advanced) Nvidia computer chips to China. In turn, China agreed to increase its purchases from the United States, including 200 Boeing aircraft and $17 billion of agricultural goods each year through 2028.

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The hoopla surrounding the summit, generated by press offices on both sides, obscured the reality that the two countries completed few concrete bilateral deals. Trump did not secure long-term access to the critical minerals that China controls — specifically the rare earth elements that are essential to U.S. high-tech manufacturing and sophisticated military hardware — and the tech giants that accompanied Trump on the trip didn’t win any major concessions in the form of enhanced access to the Chinese market. Meanwhile, China failed to alter U.S. security policy in the Asia–Pacific region. The leaders of the new G2 might be expected to rethink or rework the global rules of the road, but this was not on the agenda in Beijing.

Still, the two superpowers stepped off the path of escalating confrontation. Perhaps more importantly, Trump has seemingly abandoned his earlier goal of decoupling the United States from the Chinese economy, which, along with ratcheting up containment of the “strategic competitor,” had become something of a bipartisan imperative.

For the time being at least, the world’s superpower monsters are not laying waste to the landscape around their feet. Given how much firepower they command, that’s no small achievement. The battle, however, continues to rage further afield in the mineral world.

Grabbing the Rocks

Rare earth elements, or REE, aren’t rare. But it can be quite difficult to extract any of these 17 unusual metals from their surrounding ores. The United States used to be the world’s leading extractor and processor of these resources, from a mine in California near the Nevada border. But that was back when REE were mostly used for such products as black-and-white televisions. The environmental damage caused by the extraction and processing — as well as the labor costs involved — impelled the United States, over time, to outsource operations to China. 

By the time REE had become indispensable to the manufacture of very powerful magnets used in everything from wireless iPhone chargers to the F-35 fighter jet, China was controlling upward of 60 percent of the extraction and 90 percent of the processing. It has filed more patents for the latest processing techniques than any other country. It has also expanded beyond digging up its own territory and, through its Belt and Road Initiative — a globe-spanning collection of interconnected infrastructure projects — secured access to mines overseas.

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In Tanzania, for instance, an Australian firm Peak Rare Earths discovered what may well be the largest untapped supply of REE in 2010. This is exactly what the United States and its allies had been looking for: ore that can be extracted and processed outside of China. Except that last year, the Chinese firm Shenghe Resources bought the Australian company — and the rights to the Tanzanian deposits — for a little more than $100 million. China is further cornering the market by importing ore from rare earth mines in Myanmar, exploiting new deposits in Brazil, and eying Malaysia and Indonesia for potential processing operations.

To guarantee access to the minerals that both the Pentagon and U.S. industry need, the Trump administration has ramped up the exploitation of U.S. REE deposits. Mountain Pass, the California mine previously shuttered after environmental lawsuits and Chinese outsourcing, restarted production in 2012, but it still couldn’t compete against China, which had flooded the market with REE to drive down prices. Last year, the Pentagon acquired a majority stake in MP Materials, the company that owns the mine, which now produces over 10 percent of the global supply of REE.

Trump has also pumped money into USA Rare Earths, which is developing the Round Top mine in Texas, which promises to rival the REE production of Mountain Pass. Even with an accelerated timeline, however, the new mine won’t start production before 2028. Meanwhile, the administration is playing the field: pouring money into a REE processing facility in Arizona, contracting with a similar operation in France, and hammering out supply contracts with a mining firm in Australia. This frenzied activity may lessen dependency on China but not eliminate it.

And it’s not just rare earth elements. China controls 95 percent of magnesium production, over 80 percent of tungsten, over 70 percent of graphite and silicon, and three-quarters of cobalt — minerals that are critical to pretty much all modern manufacturing. On the processing end, China is the leading refiner of 19 out of 20 of the most coveted minerals, with an average market share of 70 percent. And instead of being reliant on its control of raw materials and processed ores, China is also in command of the downstream production. For instance, it’s responsible for 94 percent of the manufacturing of the most powerful magnets that go into cars, computers, and medical equipment.

The new rush for “critical raw materials,” many of them essential for building out the infrastructure of a “clean energy” transition but also indispensable for the entire range of advanced military products to which the United States is addicted, has sharpened the competition between China and the United States throughout the mineral-rich Global South. Those countries generally see China as a willing provider of capital and finance. They view Trump — who has dismissed so much of the Global South as “shithole countries,” deported huge numbers of their citizens, and subjected nearly all of their governments to punishing tariffs — with considerable skepticism.

How long will it take for the United States to catch up and neutralize China’s mineral superpower? In the best-case scenario, America will only be able to meet half its need for rare earth elements by 2028, and it currently produces less than 1 percent of those powerful magnets. Until America catches up — or forges partnerships with other countries to meet its demand through initiatives such as the U.S.-led Pax Silica — China will be able to pinch off the supply of those key minerals more easily than Iran can close off the Strait of Hormuz.

Controlling the Chips

Silicon Valley has long been a byword for innovation: Apple’s iPhones, Google’s search engine, Facebook’s social media platform. But the heart of Silicon Valley was, at least originally, made out of silicon. Chips made the valley. In the 1980s, Japan produced semiconductors that were superior to anything American companies could get to market. Competition spurred Silicon Valley to leapfrog over Japan.

The chip-designer Nvidia began in the 1990s as a supplier of graphic processing units, or GPUs, for the video game industry. These Nvidia chips became, literally, the brain behind Microsoft’s Xbox. Later, they came to power Sony’s PlayStation 3, signaling that Silicon Valley had definitively surpassed its Japanese competitors.

Then Nvidia began developing the kind of hardware necessary for the next big tech revolution: artificial intelligence. The first major AI platform available to the public — ChatGPT — was built on the foundation of Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs. Suddenly, Nvidia was the most sought-after supplier and the most valuable company in the world, now worth more than $5 trillion.

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It’s one thing to corner the market on the graphics necessary to play “Grand Theft Auto” or make the special effects of the 2021 “Godzilla vs. Kong” movie look terrifyingly real. It’s quite another to create the building blocks of the AI technology that is creeping into every corner of the economy, not to mention the military.

To maintain its economic and military edge, the United States has placed controls on the export of Nvidia’s most advanced semiconductors to China. It’s no surprise that, over the last six years, the People’s Liberation Army attempted hundreds of times to acquire those precious chips. To prevent China from producing their own, the Dutch also placed restrictions on the export of the machines used to print the chips.

There are two challenges to this strategy of restriction. The first is that, despite its name, Silicon Valley doesn’t actually manufacture the vast majority of these fancy computer chips. For more than 90 percent of advanced semiconductors, the world depends on Taiwan. It’s as if another monster has appeared on the scene with a superpower that can bring both Godzilla and Rodan to their knees.

The United States harbors a fear that the Chinese response to their chip dependency will be simply to invade Taiwan and take over its semiconductor industry. For its part, the Biden administration pushed through the CHIPS Act to re-shore computer chip manufacturing, which is turning Arizona into a real Silicon Valley. Intel and Taiwan’s TSMC are among the more than 75 firms building factories there, which will require considerable water (in a desert) and produce tons of “forever chemicals,” the synthetic compounds that do not break down naturally, polluting the environment and accumulating within people (amid a growing population).

Given Russia’s failure to seize Ukraine and the inability of the United States and Israel to achieve regime change in Iran, China is not likely to attempt a takeover of Taiwan any time soon. Instead, it has pursued a different approach, and this is the second problem with a restriction strategy. Prevented from acquiring Nvidia’s best chips, China is pouring money into making its own chip sector the best in the world.

Those considerable state investments produced a Sputnik moment in January 2025 when the Chinese company DeepSeek released its ChatGPT competitor. The big breakthrough, however, was behind the scenes: China was able to use its own domestically produced chips to create comparable AI results at a cheaper cost.

Private sector expenditures on AI in the United States still exceed China’s investments by a considerable margin. But the Trump administration’s cuts in science funding and restrictions on work visas will handicap U.S. technological progress for years and possibly decades. China, meanwhile, will likely have machines ready to produce what its AI models need by 2030, the target date Beijing has set to close the advanced chip gap.

The Sequel

Both China and the United States have landed a number of punches in their monster battle. The Trump administration has maintained export controls on its most advanced chips and has created a blacklist of Chinese companies it accuses of working with the People’s Liberation Army, including the car company BYD and the tech firm Baidu. China has retaliated by putting two American and 14 European companies on its own blacklist for the “dual use” of rare earth elements for both civilian and military applications. These come on top of Chinese export restrictions imposed in 2025 on seven rare-earth metals and an announcement that five more elements will be added in November.

These tit-for-tat exchanges might suggest that the two sides are evenly matched. And that may have been the case a decade ago. Today, however, despite its iconic status and devastating powers, the American Godzilla looks pretty wobbly. Trump’s fixation on cutting government and his failure to staff the remaining positions with competent officials has meant that the effort to deny China the most sophisticated chips has been compromised. Simply put, the Commerce Department has failed to enforce the export restrictions on U.S. companies, and thousands of those powerful chips have likely made their way into Chinese hands.

Even without government incompetence, the United States would be hard-pressed to maintain its advantage. The bottom line: China will be able to make its own chips sooner than America can acquire its own rocks.

The real superpower that China possesses, in other words, is its government’s ability to marshal resources to make the technological leap forward and maintain a substantive defense of its own material advantages. Thanks to this superpower, as Evan Osnos points out in The New Yorker, “China produces at least 70 percent of the world’s drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and solar cells.” So confident is China in this superpower that it has recently rolled out a sodium-ion battery that needs none of the critical minerals of the lithium battery that powers electric vehicles. Beijing is thus negating its own mineral advantages. Instead, the Chinese government is relying on its industrial prowess to prepare for a world where rocks no longer rule.

The Biden administration tried to copy this superpower with the CHIPS Act and the additional targeted subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump, too, has attempted to pursue a similar industrial policy with investments in critical minerals alongside scattershot tariffs and export controls. But he has also weakened the underlying superpower of government action through funding cuts and mass layoffs at critical government agencies. As a result, a lot of the shots that the Trump administration fires at China are actually blanks.

If this were a film, Godzilla would be teetering on the edge of a precipice, harried by a triumphant Rodan. In the final shot, Godzilla would live to fight another day, setting the scene for a sequel.

In real life, the United States is wasting billions of dollars on a war in Iran, the Trump administration is laser-focused on stuffing its own pockets from insider deals, and U.S. universities and companies are hemorrhaging funds and talent. At the same time, China is cornering the global market on renewable technology and consolidating its trade and investment relationship with the nearly 150 countries in the Belt and Road Initiative. The newer superpower seems to be making better use of its superpowers.

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Another great movie trope is enemies quickly morphing into friends when faced with an existential threat. Godzilla and Rodan eventually team up to fight King Ghidorah, a hydra-like extraterrestrial beast with three heads. Is it too late for China and the United States, inveterate frenemies, to do the same in response to the very terrestrial threat of climate change?

It would certainly make for a Hollywood happy ending. But the Trump administration, insisting that carbon emissions are no problem, is attempting to reenergize the country’s fossil fuel sector. And despite its buildout of renewal energy infrastructure and its expanding exports of solar panels and wind turbines, China remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels, especially coal.

Let’s face it: Monsters are going to be monsters. If they’re not fighting each other directly, they’re laying waste to the environment and poisoning the communities that live atop precious resources. In the world of entertainment, Godzilla and Rodan learn how to use their superpowers for good when a planet-wide emergency pushes the monsters together to fight against an external threat.

The real world faces just such a red alert. Our monsters, however, just keep doing monstrous things.

The post The Dawn of a New Cold War appeared first on The Intercept.

Alexander Vindman lost to Angie Nixon in the Florida Democratic senatorial primary on Tuesday, marking a long-overdue end to one of the worst liberal mass delusions of the Trump era: Russiagate.

Vindman’s loss offers a number of opportunities for schadenfreude, from the comeuppance for his wife’s sneering at Nixon’s clothes to the staggering spending advantage he had over his opponent, a Democratic Socialists of America member — but it’s the bell tolling for neocons cynically taking advantage of conspiracy theory-minded liberals that’s the most gratifying reason for the loss.

This cohort faltered at the ballot box in 2026. Vindman follows heroes of the Trump 1.0 #Resistance like George Conway and Dan Goldman, both of whom found that resting on the laurels of opposing Trump six years ago wasn’t enough to push back against more dynamic opponents who offered actual policy plans. 

Over the past decade, these conservative Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans relied on liberal fears of Russian election interference and shadowy Moscow kompromat over the president to leverage influence in the party. 

From the beginning, Russiagate was used by a shellshocked liberal establishment to explain away Trump’s victory in a way that didn’t implicate the Democrats. Rather than address what it was about Hillary Clinton’s political platform — and the preceding eight years of President Barack Obama — that opened the door to MAGA, many Democrats and their allies in the media fully bought into the idea that only a nefarious, Kremlin-driven plot could have led to America electing Trump. 

This was an attractive proposal, and it found an enthusiastic, if niche, audience. Democratic voters responded well, notably to commentators at MSNBC like Rachel Maddow, who went all in on the conspiracy and pushed it far beyond what was plausible.

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As MSNBC and, to a lesser extent, CNN, found ratings success with the largely fabricated scandal, the infection spread across legacy media. The New York Times published Louise Mensch, a serial fabulist whose Twitter feed was a laundry list of delusions, in the opinion section. The Washington Post reported an implausible story that Russians were targeting the Vermont energy grid. 

Grifters of all stripes quickly adapted their cons to the new game. In one notorious example, a Twitter user named Eric Garland skyrocketed himself to online notoriety by spinning up a “game theory” Russiagate fantasy where a secret, Avengers-esque team of liberal politicians were using the scandal to beat Vladimir Putin at realpolitik (how, exactly, this was going to happen went unaddressed). The thread was praised as “great writing” by notable media figures; today, Garland is a gutter-level antisemite aligned with far-right gadfly Chuck Johnson whose conspiracy theories are utterly incomprehensible.

In one of the more amusing, and egregious, examples of the hysteria, pundit Jonathan Chait improbably claimed that Trump may have been an agent of the KGB going back to the early 1980s — a preposterous story that nevertheless netted him primetime appearances on cable news. 

In Washington, Russiagate mania supplanted actual policy priorities for Democrats both before and after they retook the House in the 2018 midterms. As I wrote nearly nine years ago at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, establishment media allies like Maddow were so narrowly focused on Russiagate in the early Trump years that they often ignored or papered over instances of corruption and corporate power in lieu of fomenting the conspiracy theory. 

Whether this effort was intentional or not is somewhat irrelevant; the net result was the stifling of the Bernie Sanders wing taking over the party and a reassertion of the neoliberal, corporate-friendly establishment’s control of the levers of power. 

Unsurprisingly, many of the same figures are endorsing that approach again as progressives are winning primaries by focusing on affordability and ambitious policy proposals rather than simply “Trump bad.” In an essay for The Atlantic on Thursday, Chait argued Vindman’s loss didn’t detract from the correctness of resistance liberalism and its singular focus on Trump — and instructed Democrats not to try to offer voters any actionable policy: “Rather than promise to change everything about American politics, focus relentlessly on Trump’s unfitness.”

That’s a message that’s soothing to the elite liberal class Chait writes for, but it’s unlikely to find much purchase among voters, Democratic or otherwise. The public is burnt out on one-trick-pony versions of escaping the Trump era. And Trump’s second administration has exposed the rotten house of cards keeping the U.S. state afloat, making systemic change an imperative. 

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For Democrats, that has meant turning to candidates like Nixon, as well as Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson. It leaves the neocons who used Russiagate as a way to pivot and rebrand their way out of a party singularly devoted to Trump and into the welcoming arms of the Democratic establishment in a predicament. They’re realizing, with rising panic, that they’re not going to be able to dictate the party’s future as Democrats shift away from Israel and express their support for Palestine and a robust welfare state. 

Some of the Russiagaters are already pivoting back to the right, like Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer who became the toast of liberal media after deciding to oppose the president in a self-serving effort when facing prison time. On Thursday, Cohen had his former client on the radio Thursday for a friendly chat. 

Others, like The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol, are bullish on liberalism (although, as anyone who remembers the Iraq War knows, they still can’t be trusted an inch). Count Vindman, for now, in the latter camp; however, despite his disagreements with Nixon on Palestine and domestic politics, he endorsed her and promised to support her in November. 

If this is truly the end of Russiagate’s stranglehold on U.S. politics — and we should all hope that’s the case — then its beneficiaries had a good run. Grifters and partisans were able to use the conspiracy theory to push their agendas and further their careers. Neocons secured a foothold in the liberal establishment which will be difficult, though not impossible, to excise. And the Democratic leadership was able to put off actually offering voters tangible policy that would improve their lives for a decade by focusing on delusional fantasies — a strategy that’s now coming back to bite them at the ballot box. 

But for the rest of us, Russiagate was a black hole of political inertia at a time when the country needed strong moral leadership and new ideas. Let’s bury it for good by moving past the conspiracies toward more progressive policy prospects and to political change that does more than focus on Trump.

The post RIP to the Russiagate Liberals appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s been nearly three years into Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, and still no step closer to its end. Since the latest “ceasefire” began in October 2025, Israel has continued to bombard Gaza and has killed more than 1,200 people, United Nations experts reported earlier this month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more recently rejected President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace agreement with Hamas for Israeli troops to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

“The burden has really continued to devastate the healthcare system in general. So you’re hearing from colleagues every day. They don’t have the materials that they need to serve their patients,” Dr. Thaer Ahmad tells The Intercept Briefing. “They don’t have even the basic sort of guarantee that there is a cloak of security allowing them to operate in the traditional ways that they would like to.” 

This week on the podcast, Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez speaks to Ahmad, an emergency medicine physician and humanitarian who has provided medical relief in conflict zones including Gaza, and director Poh Si Teng about their new documentary “American Doctor.” It follows three U.S. physicians from three different states who volunteer to enter Gaza to provide emergency medical care as best they can, with the insufficient supplies they have, to save lives — under the threat, as healthcare workers and hospitals have repeatedly been the target of strikes, of losing theirs.

The American doctors were not just targeted by the Israeli military, however. Upon returning home and trying to share the atrocities they had witnessed in Gaza, they were “pummeled,” says Teng, in interviews with mainstream media outlets and ignored by lawmakers in Congress.

“There’s this refusal to acknowledge what most American people are interested in — and that is money out of the Middle East in terms of military and wars, and into our communities here, into healthcare, and into some of the services that we are deprived of, that, for example, Israeli society is able to provide for their citizens: free education, free healthcare,” says Ahmad. “We don’t even have that here, and yet we’re still providing a significant amount of aid.”

Teng says, “For everybody who’s trying to do something in this moment, it’s not like as individuals we have no agency. We do. But it’s also important to remind people of the systems in place that make it very hard for us to do the right thing. If there was any path forward or a glimmer of inspiration, I felt, follow these doctors.”

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

Transcript

Jonah Valdez: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jonah Valdez, a reporter at The Intercept who covers politics and foreign policy.

BBC: Breaking news. A senior Hamas official tells the BBC it has agreed to disarm in Gaza.

FOX 10: President Trump says he’s doing something long considered impossible: disarming Hamas, forging a stable peace, and beginning a withdrawal of Israeli forces.

JV: Let’s go back to July. President Donald Trump announces that his so-called Board of Peace has reached a deal with Hamas to disarm, a primary goal of the ceasefire agreement.

Donald Trump: Most people said that would be a deal that would be undoable. 

JV: By August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects the plan and the demand to withdraw troops from parts of Gaza.

It’s worth reminding Israel controls nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s territory.

PBS: President Trump’s Board of Peace says it’s in ongoing discussions with Israel after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Mr. Trump’s new Gaza peace plan in yet another public break with the White House.

BBC: Saying it won’t withdraw from the territory until Hamas gives up all its weapons.

Benjamin Netanyahu, translated VO: Israel rejects the 15-point plan. The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed.

JV: It’s been nearly three years into Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians and still no step closer to its end. Since the latest ceasefire began in October 2025, Israel has continued to bombard Gaza and has killed more than 1,200 people, according to U.N. experts.

In all, since the start of the war in October 2023, at least 70,000 people have been killed in Gaza and 171,000 wounded. That doesn’t count the untold numbers buried under rubble. Still, the Israeli government has tight restrictions on who and what aid enters Gaza.

A new documentary called “American Doctor” follows three American physicians who travel to Gaza to provide medical care and save lives where healthcare workers and hospitals have been targeted.

When the three American doctors — Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian — enter Gaza, they find themselves caught between medicine and politics, risking everything to expose the truth.

[Clip from “American Doctor” plays]

Dr. Thaer Ahmad: I want to take you through what Gaza looks like when a hospital is totally overwhelmed.

Dr. Mark Perlmutter: As a Jewish physician, I knew nothing about Gaza. I thought everybody out here were nothing but terrorists. 

Dr. Thaer Ahmad: We’re just asking that hospitals not be targeted.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa: This is a political problem. We need a political solution. We do not have to accept that as Americans.

Dr. Mark Perlmutter: This is what my tax dollars did, what your tax dollars did. They have the right to know the truth.

[Clip from film ends]

JV: I’m joined now by the folks behind “American Doctor.” Director Poh Si Teng is the producer of the Oscar-nominated “St. Louis Superman” and Emmy award-winning executive producer of “Patrice: The Movie.” “American Doctor” marks her debut as a feature documentary director. Poh, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Poh Si Teng: Thank you for having me, Jonah.

JV: Also joining us is Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a board-certified emergency medicine physician and humanitarian who has provided medical relief in conflict zones including Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Kenya. He’s conducted five medical missions to Gaza, most recently in early 2024, and has since been denied entry four times by Israeli authorities due to his Palestinian heritage.

Thaer, welcome to the show.

Thaer Ahmad: Thank you, appreciate it.

JV: So in the opening scene of “American Doctor,” we see an ambulance and two severely injured children, bloody and in shock. They are carried into a hospital, and next we’re introduced to Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon sitting in front of his computer and speaking to the person filming him.

There’s this back and forth that happens between Dr. Perlmutter and you, Poh, of this debate of, should we blur the images? The image that they’re looking at and talking about is of six dead babies. Dr. Perlmutter goes on to say that Israel took away their dignity, and you’re not dignifying them unless you let their memory, their bodies tell the story of this trauma, of this genocide.

Poh, I’m wondering if you could talk about that scene, that conversation with you and Mark, and why you started the film there.

PT: Firstly, thank you, Jonah, for asking that question. I think as journalists, we often grapple with, what do we show? What do we write about? What do we capture?

You show too much, and it’s gratuitous — and people turn away. If we want to be effective, we want people to watch. But at the same time, if we show too little, then it’s not real. Then we’re not actually telling people what was happening.

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So this scene that you’re talking about, Jonah, which, actually we recorded it — it was my second day with Mark. And I remember him being really, really furious with me because I was trying to see, like, how much should we show? 

Part of the conversation was like, “Maybe we should film this creatively. Maybe we should pixelate it.” And he was very mad at me — and understandably so. He’s like, “What is the point? Why are you here?” And so it made me think “Why am I here?” If the reason for me wanting to make this film is to be effective, then I need to do right by those who have passed on, and maybe it is to show. And so that pretty much, Jonah, set the tone for what the film was going to be.

JV: On that note, that early scene really signaled to me, and I’m assuming the audience, that this film is very aware of and cares deeply about who gets to tell these stories, who gets to shape the narrative from the Israeli and U.S. military, powerful media institutions involved. To me, aside from showing the actual events and atrocities, that layer of the film really drove it forward.

[Thaer], the film follows you and two other American doctors, Dr. Mark Perlmutter and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon, as you three decide to return to serve in Gaza during the short-lived 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Remind us what the situation in Gaza was like at the time, and it’s worth mentioning that in March 2025, the death toll had already surpassed 50,000 people in Gaza, which at that point had been a little over a year into Israel’s genocidal campaign.

TA: It’s important for folks to remember that around this time, the Trump administration had brokered this sort of ceasefire deal, announced on the heels of the inauguration.

As we were slowly getting towards the end of that first phase of the ceasefire deal, which was March 2025, it had become abundantly clear that the Israeli military was getting ready to create another offensive. In fact, by the time I think the resumption of bombing had taken place, the Israeli military had already implemented a suffocating siege on the Gaza Strip.

The rise of malnutrition was so widespread that the Famine Early Warning System program that exists had already been sounding the alarm — that this is very concerning, that starvation was being used as a weapon of war, and this is all happening as the fighter jets were being fueled up and getting ready to carry out this offensive.

Many people who were involved in the emergency medical teams that were entering into the Gaza Strip at the time, they had really no inclination in terms of, would this be a resumption of the war on Gaza and the people of Palestine, or would we somehow get this miraculous 11th hour extension of the ceasefire deal?

Many of us — me, Feroze, and Mark — at the time, were planning on going back in March. We were traveling to Jordan, where every single doctor who is an international or nurse, that’s where they go. And they wait in Jordan to get approval by the Israeli military, and then they will cross in from Jericho and make their way towards Gaza.

We’re sitting there in Jordan, and we’re there with the film crew. Mark and Feroze get approval, and they’re able to enter. Then ultimately, I receive a denial. And that’s something that’s happening in the backdrop, not just of this film, but that’s happening consistently when it comes to access into the Gaza Strip.

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You are talking about everything from food, water, doctors, nurses, diesel fuel. All of these things are arbitrarily being denied and restricted, even people like myself who had been to Gaza many times since 2008. That was kind of the circumstances that we were facing: There was a “ceasefire,” and there was trucks maybe entering — but what was needed in the Gaza Strip was not being supplied. It was not happening on a scale that needed to happen. Once they started cutting that off and the Israelis implemented this siege, we started to see people really struggling.

JV: Poh, I know as we said at the top, this film marks your debut as a feature documentary director. Just wondering, were you able to travel with doctors to document their work in Gaza? If so, could you talk a bit about that experience?

PT: I knew very early on that it would be impossible for me to get into Gaza. Even though the Jewish doctor, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, he’s ever the eternal optimist. When we met early on, he’s like, “I’m going to train you as a scrub nurse and take you into Gaza.”

Now, we know who controls the borders into Palestine. And anybody doing a cursory search on my name, what are they going to find? Journalist for the New York Times, former commissioner for Al Jazeera English, and I’ve worked for The Associated Press. I was an executive for ABC Disney. It was never going to happen for me.

So fortunately, I have this incredible producer: Reem Haddad. Reem and I used to work at Al Jazeera English. She looked after MENA [Middle East and North Africa], that region. She was working at that time, this was I would say end of 2023, with this incredible Gazan team: our co-producer Mohammed Sawwaf, and our director of photography, Ibrahim Al-Otla. They had made this short doc at the end of 2023. And I was like, “Reem, can we work with this team? We are trying to film in Gaza.” That sort of marked how we got to film inside Nasser Medical Complex.

Honestly, this film is really to honor what they saw and what they are living through, not just what they are trying to document. So that’s how we were able to make this film. 

I should also add: At the end of the day, too, this entire production, it spans teams, from our team, from eight different countries. Not one person, not one country could have made this happen. It took everybody coming together from different parts of the world who wanted to do something in regards to what was happening in Gaza.

JV: To your point, Israel has continued to block international journalists from entering Gaza up to this point. Palestinian journalists have been the eyes and ears documenting the war, as have doctors, like yourself Thaer, and medical workers and the both of you and those who were let in.

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I don’t know if you recall, but Thaer, you and I connected over text and voice notes in March of this year when I was writing about the Israeli government delaying doctors from leaving Gaza, which interrupts the entire process of care. And as you were explaining, that wasn’t the first time you were blocked from there. That was after the most recent ceasefire that was brokered in October of 2025.

From what you’re hearing from colleagues, how have things changed since when you were there during the first ceasefire? How are things the same?

TA: The burden has really continued to devastate the healthcare system in general. So you’re hearing from colleagues every day. They don’t have the materials that they need to serve their patients. They don’t have the space that they need. They don’t have even the basic sort of guarantee that there is a cloak of security allowing them to operate in the traditional ways that they would like to.

I would say that probably the biggest sign that the healthcare system has been attacked in such a devastating way would be the list of people who need to be evacuated out of Gaza to get medical treatment. That list is anywhere from 15 to 18,000 people, depending on what list you’re using. These are people who urgently need to leave Gaza because the medical care that they need is not able to be provided because of the siege and the blockade that continues to exist by the Israeli military.

We’re talking about kids with cancers that are completely treatable that will die from their cancer because they’re not allowed to go to an East Jerusalem hospital like Al-Makassed or Augusta Victoria, where that corridor had existed prior to October 7, but the Israelis are intentionally shutting down that corridor.

You’re talking about physicians who would want to perform basic procedures for their patients with heart disease or diabetes or whatever it is. They’re not able to do so because that material is actively being blocked by the Israeli military. They’re on the back of a truck somewhere, either in Egypt or Jordan, and not being allowed to enter.

These conditions continue to proliferate, and this is all happening, I should say, while the public services that should exist in any society, like water, sewage, electricity, even shelter, all of those things are not — to say “adequate” is not the right word, but I would say it’s absolutely horrifying in Gaza.

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We are talking about things like chickenpox breaking out in these camps. We’re talking about kids who continue to be malnourished. We’re talking about all of these different communicable diseases that run through these overcrowded shelters and tent cities. These continue to be the conditions that people are living in, despite the fake ceasefire that was announced that saw more than 1,200 Palestinians killed since October 9, 2025, when it was first announced.

I’m even worried about what happens next because, as you probably have seen, Netanyahu announced that he’s rejecting that sort of ceasefire or the agreement to move on to the next phase that was brokered by this Board of Peace. And so I anticipate that conditions will worsen.

When we think about so many of the people that we worked with, that will appear in the film, that are in the background of the film, or even actually the cinematographers that Poh mentioned — I just don’t feel that they have the things that they need to sustain life in their homes, in their tents. Things continue to deteriorate, and it’s fallen out of the news cycle.

JV: Thaer, there’s scenes in the film of you and your colleagues packing basic medical supplies like scrubs and rubber bands, and Mark even hides antibiotics in his luggage. The film does a really good job at just laying out that reality and this targeting of hospitals. It’s pretty wild to think that even the mere fact of targeting of hospitals was a point of contention among much of Western media at a certain point. 

The film features quite a bit of footage from sit-down interviews between doctors featured in the film and broadcast media. There’s these subtle framing biases that I think, Poh, you highlighted really well. 

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There’s that clip in the beginning where a CNN anchor caveats Dr. Perlmutter’s accounts of Israel targeting civilians as “extreme allegations” that CNN cannot independently verify. Later in the film, also on CNN, Dana Bash tees up a question to Thaer about getting aid into Gaza by saying, “Will Hamas allow the critical aid to get to the civilian population?” — completely ignoring the Israeli blockade on Gaza. There’s that sit-down where Mark grills the CNN anchor live on air about not doing enough coverage. 

Poh, I want to start with you. Could you speak to this bias, this molding of the narrative that often benefits the Israeli government, and why that was important to show in the film?

PT: I’m so glad you asked this question. And I should say that long before I became a documentary filmmaker, I was a journalist. I’ve worked for so many of the established media organizations, and I’ve learned so much from my time there. But also, when the genocide started and there was pin-drop silence about the murder and execution of journalists, Gazan journalists, I’ll be honest with you: It hurt.

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What happened? Why is it when journalists are kidnapped, taken in Russia, or killed in Ukraine or different parts of the world, all of a sudden, our peers, we come together. Why was it so that Gazan journalists or journalists in the West Bank or even Lebanon, for that matter — people weren’t rallying together. What was happening? 

The whole film, I should say is a vérité in-scene film, so you’re in the world of Dr. Thaer, Dr. Mark, and Dr. Feroze. But in these clips, when we were filming them as they were being interviewed by media, I really wanted to show what they were up against.

As a former documentary commissioner for Al Jazeera, seeing my colleagues get targeted and executed was very, very, very hard. Now, as we were making the film, seeing the doctors trying to save lives and speak up for life, and then seeing them get pummeled like that, like basically the weight and structure of media crushing them — I was upset.

Of course, I’m filming, I’m just observing. But it was very important to have that in the film because there are individuals, regular people — Thaer, Feroze, Mark — just trying to do all they can. And then there’s the weight of structure.

For everybody who’s trying to do something in this moment, it’s not like as individuals we have no agency. We do.

But it’s also important to remind people of the systems in place that make it very hard for us to do the right thing. If there was any path forward or a glimmer of inspiration, I felt, follow these doctors.

[Break]

JV: Thaer, there’s another scene where you acknowledge that you, “Always get nervous when Mark talks during interviews,” because he really, you called it, gets into the weeds of things like Zionism, and you’re worried about essentially bad-faith critics making you, what you say is, guilty by association.

Could you say more about that, and how in this media framing, how a pro-peace, anti-genocide message can get twisted, and also how those critics may complicate that message even further because of your identity as Palestinian American?

TA: Yeah, I think that’s something that we all have grown up with in terms of the Palestinian community. It’s understanding there’s a degree of dehumanization that is pervasive in not just the media, but in art and literature.

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I remember being in medical school and having assigned reading before we started medical school, and then it was about a Hmong child who was dealing with a seizure disorder. And nestled in the middle of that book was a comment, a very brief passing comment, about a Palestinian who was a terrorist and was doing something extremely violent. Most med students in the country were assigned this reading. This is the backdrop of understanding this is how the world views you. Yes, of course, we reject it, but Palestinians know very well how they’re being portrayed and also what you’re stacked up against. 

For me, I think something that I appreciate about Mark is that he understands there’s a privilege that he has, especially just how he looks, and that he can say things that I think can go farther than anything I could ever say. It can resonate with more Americans than anything I can ever do. 

What I worry about, too, is the fact that you’ve got this conversation that the media and so many people try to make complicated. They want to say, “It’s complicated. There’s two sides.” Really what we’re trying to talk about is, “Hey, there’s an objective fact that something horrifying is unfolding here, and that really horrendous things are happening to this group of people by this institution. It’s a straight line. There’s not really, actually, so much dark and gray area here.” 

The one thing I really wanted to make sure that we were communicating effectively — because again, so many people are working on this project, trying to get this film out there — I wanted to make sure that that message was as clear. 

I would always worry knowing that Mark is somebody who shoots from the hip; he’s somebody that says what’s on his mind. Just in the back of my mind, just thinking about, every time we’re landing in Chicago O’Hare, every time you’re getting questioned by border control. All of these things were always at the top of mind for me. So it’s something I admire about Mark, but it’s also something that I know I just can’t do it myself. That’s not the world that we live in.

PT: To add to that, and one of the things I have so much respect for Thaer, because it takes a leader, to be really honest with you, to know whose word can go far because of the context and of our time and how things are.

As a woman, as a person of color, as somebody who’s barely 5 feet — I am acutely aware of when I step into the room as a journalist, as a filmmaker, perception. But I can only imagine what it’s like for a Palestinian; I will never be able to understand.

So those are one of the things where I thought about a lot in the making of the film. It was something that I was learning from as well, especially from Thaer, who, I don’t mean to embarrass you, Thaer, but, I really look up to you in many ways in how you are able to navigate this, because I feel like I’ve tried it in my entire — I’m 42 this year — and I’ve been challenged in navigating it.

Seeing you being able to do that and work with Feroze and Mark, even though you’re so different — and they’re very different doctors, very different personalities — it gives me a lot of inspiration on how to work with others who are also different, and also to know when does one take a step back and let others go forward.

JV: Thaer, did you have anything to add?

TA: Something that I’ve noticed for Palestinians, one of the things that really helps us get going, especially motivates us, is seeing other people step up and use their platforms and really put their money where their mouth is.

So despite me having real concerns that this project would be stifled, and it would never be able to see the light of day because of all of the things working against it, when you see Poh and Reem and you see all of the people that worked on this just continue to push and continue to say, “No, we’re going to be here from the beginning to the end. We’re not going to abandon you” — I think for my community here in the States that felt like we’ve been silenced for so long, and, even when anybody wants to talk about this subject, that you don’t even want to bring a Palestinian or invite a Palestinian because it could be [viewed as] biased, which is absurd.

You talk about who shapes the narrative — we are prevented from having control over our own narrative because of this disturbing narrative and structure that was built. When you see that and other people who are willing to put their money or their life on the line like Poh or Mark or Feroze — for me, it really gives you that energy when you just feel like everything is stacked up against you, and there’s a genocide unfolding. That’s a really heavy thing.

JV: I’m curious, Poh, how you initially contacted the subjects of the film there and others. How did that process unfold?

PT: So I’ll tell you how it began. I chanced upon Mark. I saw him being interviewed, and a reporter had asked him, this was fall of 2025, this was last year, and a reporter had asked him, “So Dr. Perlmutter, you have just returned from Gaza. Why do you think there’s no ceasefire?” Mark, who doesn’t mince words, straight up, he says, “There’s no ceasefire because politicians are (expletive) to lobby groups.” And I was like, “Oh my, who is this person? Who is this doctor?”

He was actually speaking in New York a few days later, and I went to meet him. Then very soon after he introduced me to Thaer and Feroze, and I just wanted to see how these three people, who couldn’t be more different in many ways, were able to work together.

JV: Thaer, you and your colleagues go to Washington to try and sway congressional members to act, and you all are met with indifference and platitudes, “dead ears,” as one person puts it.

But what do you make of the current political landscape in which we’re seeing U.S. support for Israel decline sharply even on the right, and where political candidates who have campaigned on and been proudly pro-Palestine are winning primaries?

TA: It’s just been incredible to see how the shift has emerged over the last two and a half years. You’re talking about early on, I remember November 2023, I had a Zoom call with eight senators. It was with the members, eight of them, all Democrats, and I remember saying that we need a ceasefire.

This was when Shifa Hospital had first been surrounded, and there were 38 babies in the neonatal intensive care unit in the newborn nursery, and several of them were in incubators. I remember being desperate at that time and saying, “We really need a ceasefire.” One of the senators, who was a member of the Armed Services Committee, cut me off and said, “Ceasefire is a military term. We’re not prepared to call for a ceasefire at this point. We’re more interested in maybe helping secure humanitarian aid.” 

It went from that to when the images emerged for when the famine was in full-blown effect, where you had several members of Congress and the Senate sort of speak very publicly. They were outraged by what they saw, despite us telling them this information very early on, this is where we were heading, this is what was happening unless they did something. So to see the rhetoric even change has been remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like this before.

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Then to see progressive candidates who really explicitly say that our policy in Palestine has been an utter failure and has contributed to the development of a genocide, that’s been amazing to see how much traction that’s getting, how much money they’re able to raise, how these races have really flipped the establishment on its head. 

But I will say there are a couple of things that concern me, which I think the timing of this film could not be more perfect. And that is, you’re still seeing the very core of whatever, I don’t even know what they’re moderate in, but like, these “moderates” on the Democratic side or on the Republican side, you still see them try to stick to the status quo and go back to the old ways.

There’s this refusal to acknowledge what most American people are interested in — and that is money out of the Middle East in terms of military and wars and into our communities here, into healthcare, and into some of the services that we are deprived of, that, for example, Israeli society is able to provide for their citizens: free education, free healthcare. We don’t even have that here, and yet we’re still providing a significant amount of aid.

You’re still seeing some people try to resist that, try to resist this natural popular movement that’s at play here. Again, which is why I hope that this film could be that vehicle for people to be able to continue to push and understand we need to be activated and we need to advocate.

So we’re continuing the fight, and we’re still trying to push this forward. But there’s still, even though the rhetoric has changed, the policy is still well ingrained and institutionalized in a really significant way that’s going to take a long time to reverse. So that’s something I would encourage people to think about.

Abdul won the primary. Awesome. He’s going to be up for a huge fight in Michigan for that Senate race. There’s going to be a lot of money poured in against him. Mayor Mamdani was elected, and you can see how he is put under such a microscope for every single position or statement or even whatever his wife does. All of that is under a microscope. 

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There’s going to be this huge battle because it has been so ingrained in this country to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine as well as the Israeli military, but also to continue to fester and make the entire Middle East a very, I would say, a violent playground, for lack of a better term. That’s just how this country has faced things. That’s why the power of film, I hope, is something that can translate into action, and people can feel activated.

JV: There’s this thing that Dr. Feroze says at the end of the film where he is at that conference for Jewish Voice for Peace, and he expresses doubt that any of his mainstream media hits have really done anything. Then this audience member from the conference says it’s done a lot, and he refuted that and encourages him to keep going. I don’t need you to talk for Feroze, but I’m wondering where you stand on that and that idea of awareness or maybe its limits of media and that we need to keep doing what we can. Do you wrestle with that still? Is that a battle for you?

PT: I’ll say this. In embarking on this endeavor, I stopped thinking a long time ago about, what’s the outcome? Obviously, I hope that something good will come out of it. In the making of it, especially when we started, when it was really bleak, I told myself, “You know what? I’m just going to focus on doing.” I cannot fight against the structures, systemic structures, so many things, and I cannot be sorry for how I was or we cannot be sorry for our past actions or whatever it is, and we cannot predict the future. We have the power of now, and that is everything, and so just focus on the moment. Of course, think short-term, medium-term, long-term, but now is all we have, and so be true to oneself. 

I feel like this film, in the making of this film, I finally feel like I have found my voice, free of the constraints of everything. I can finally be. I hope that this film, for those who are going to watch — and it’s going to be across theaters across the United States and Canada, which is massive, thanks to Watermelon Pictures — I hope that when people watch, they realize that too. Just focus on the now and keep going, because you don’t know how far you can go until you try.

JV: We’re going to wrap it up there. Thank you both for joining us on The Intercept Briefing. 

TA: Thank you, appreciate you.

PT: Thank you, Jonah.

JV: 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 voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. 

Fei Liu is our product and design manager. 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 us.

Until next time, I’m Jonah Valdez.

The post What American Doctors Saw in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The group sent text messages in recent days calling on Californians to pressure Democratic state Attorney General Rob Bonta in support of the merger, which he has sued to block in court.

The text messages are the latest escalation of the increasingly bitter battle between Bonta and Paramount CEO David Ellison, who has threatened to move his movie studio to Texas or Tennessee, according to reports from multiple outlets, if a coalition of state attorneys general led by Bonta keeps fighting the merger.

The group behind the text campaign, Neighbors for Strong Communities, cited Ellison’s threat in messages encouraging support for the merger.

The group denied the allegations that it is mounting an “astroturf” campaign, but declined to reveal its donors. The lack of transparency led free-speech advocates to issue a scathing press release this week.

“The behavior we’re seeing is what powerful corporations do when they are losing control of the story,” Rashad Robinson, co-chair of the Committee for the First Amendment, said in a statement. “The more the public understands what’s at stake — fewer jobs, fewer stories told, and even more power in the hands of a few billionaires — the harder the deal becomes for Paramount to defend.”

A spokesperson for Neighbors for Strong Communities, Tanner Kelly, declined to disclose the group’s donors.

“We don’t disclose funders, but this campaign is operated independently of Paramount,” he said.

In a statement to The Intercept, Warner Bros. Discovery denied funding the text message campaign. Paramount Skydance did not respond to a request for comment.

Neighbors and Nemeses

Ellison’s merger plans have divided Hollywood unions, leading proponents and opponents to engage in a heated war of words over who speaks for the entertainment industry’s working class.

Into that fray jumped Neighbors for Strong Communities, which was incorporated in Washington in June, a little over three months after Paramount launched its takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

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The national debate over the mega merger has focused on suspicions that Paramount CEO David Ellison might be willing to tilt coverage at Warner properties like CNN in favor of Donald Trump. Ellison, whose billionaire father is a close ally of Trump’s, has courted favor with the White House as the merger moves forward.

The debate over the Paramount merger in California, however, has often centered on jobs.

In text messages to Californians that went out earlier this week, Neighbors for Strong Communities asked recipients to send Bonta messages raising the concern that his opposition to the merger will cost the state thousands of jobs — because of Ellison’s reported threat to move Paramount to Texas.

Those messages and the group’s generic website offer little insight into Neighbors for Strong Communities’s origins. Its incorporation papers in Washington show that several listed directors have worked as political consultants.

In a statement to The Intercept, one of those directors, Tanner Kelly, described the group as a “community advocacy organization that helps everyday people participate in public decisions affecting their lives, livelihoods and futures.”

Bonta is months away from an election he is expected to win handily. Kelly said the group’s pressure campaign against Bonta is “not related” to the pending attorney general election, and Neighbors for Strong Communities has not filed campaign finance disclosures with the California Secretary of State.

Kelly pushed back on the idea that entertainment industry professionals are uniformly opposed to the merger by sending messages from actors who have spoken out in favor of it.

“To the claims this is AstroTurf, tell that to the hundreds of real people participating in our movement who have real concerns, real struggles, and real livelihoods on the line that just want to be heard,” said Kelly, who was registered as a lobbyist in California last year.

“Grassroots Opposition”?

Advocates who oppose the merger suspect there is something more at play, pointing to the circumstances of the group’s creation.

“The sender organization’s website is less than three months old. It discloses no founders, board members, staff, or funders, and the organization does not appear in ProPublica’s nonprofit database,” the Committee for the First Amendment, an anti-merger group co-founded by Jane Fonda, said in a press release earlier this week.

The Committee said that Neighbors for Strong Communities has the “classic hallmarks of a corporate-backed astroturf campaign designed to manufacture the appearance of grassroots opposition.”

The effort to make it seem like the merger has popular support will fail, predicted Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press Action.

“These corporations know where the grassroots movement actually is: with the industry professionals fighting to block this merger,” she said. “This PR campaign is yet another face-off between the many and the money.”

The post This Mysterious “Astroturf” Group Popped Up to Defend the Paramount Merger appeared first on The Intercept.

Earlier this month, Roman Gofman, the new director of the Mossad, Israel’s shadowy national intelligence agency, dismissed the heads of its intelligence directorate and Iran division, known only by their heavily anonymized names “K” and “Y,” respectively. The Mossad prides itself on secrecy, and while terminations following the appointment of a new Mossad director aren’t unprecedented, such public oustings, which were reported by Israel’s mainstream news organizations, are almost unheard of.

The last known dismissals for incompetence came in 1997, when a botched attempt to assassinate Khaled Mashal, then chair of Hamas’s political bureau, resulted in the detention of several Mossad agents inside Jordan and a public relations disaster. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government found itself forced to supply the antidote for the poison its Mossad agents had administered, bringing down both the agency’s director and the director of operations. 

Israel is now dealing with the aftermath of the largest mistake in its history, one of its own doing: its failed war on Iran. Sold to the United States as an easy war that would quickly bring down the Islamic Republic and its alleged nuclear weapons program, almost nothing Israel desired came to pass.

The promise of assassinating Ali Khamenei was that it would bring about governmental chaos and spur a spontaneous national uprising. Instead, it only led to the selection of his younger son as the new supreme leader, a leadership that may prove to be even more antagonistic to the United States and Israel than the previous one.

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How the War Strengthened Iran’s Hand Against the U.S. and Israel

Israel also promised that any potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz would be militarily ineffective. Now, Iran’s ability to hold the world economy hostage — despite relentless claims by the U.S. that the waterway is “open” — is its most valuable weapon. 

The Mossad’s particular role in this war involved weakening the Islamic Republic’s security structure in hopes of then funneling guns to Kurdish armed groups who would invade the country from Iraq, and then fuel mass demonstrations to topple the state. All of these lofty ambitions completely detonated on impact with reality, with Iran’s security structure remaining intact despite assassinations and airstrikes, Kurdish factions instead suffering constant Iranian military attacks, and no major protests occurring in any Iranian city, despite the massive anti-government protests in January that swept through the country.

For those who witnessed the Mossad’s public campaigns to encourage protests and defections — which it deployed in the open through Farsi-language social media accounts on X and Telegram bearing their name and seal — signs of the inevitable failure of this campaign were becoming evident. While images from June 2025’s Twelve-Day War of Mossad agents operating inside Iran and sabotaging Iranian military operations shocked many inside the country — that sabotage hampering Iran’s initial military response — its ability to change fundamental facts on the ground, and to move an entire country’s population against the sitting government, sputtered.

The Mossad chose to shift its image as that war began, capitalizing on its perception as an all-powerful and omniscient force to offer its supposedly unlimited power to help the Iranian populace. This shift manifested through cryptic social media posts, sarcastic quote-tweets of Iranian officials, and offering gifts to those who answered questions by direct message. The Mossad offered remote medical services through WhatsApp, and former radio host Menashe Amir, who notably hosted an Israeli radio show in Farsi aimed at anti-Islamic Republic Iranians, made videos on the Mossad’s behalf encouraging Iranians to listen to what the intelligence agency had to say.

The effort produced little. Iranian officials openly mocked the campaign online from the start, and it became increasingly desperate as mass protests failed to materialize. AI-generated videos of Iranian prisons having their walls blown open, and of happy Iranians following their defections to Israel, did next to nothing. The Mossad has continued to post AI-generated videos using Grok to encourage collaboration following the ceasefire.

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While accusations were levied (and arrests made) of supposed Mossad agents inside the Iranian protests in January, their infiltration, alleged or otherwise, did not end up toppling or even shattering the Islamic Republic. Instead, more than 7,000 protesters were killed that month, in addition to hundreds of police officers.

After the plan to arm Kurdish groups, in collaboration with the CIA, apparently fell apart — either by Trump’s veto or, as Trump claimed, because the Kurds simply kept the weapons themselves — the Mossad apparently came up with a quick Plan B. The new bright idea: Overthrow the government via an airstrike campaign against Iranian police stations and checkpoints manned by the Basij, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ paramilitary militia component. Despite extensive strikes in broad daylight, with some Iranians tipping off locations to opposition media outlets to help facilitate this campaign, the mass uprising, once again, did not arrive.

The war did not continue long enough for a comprehensive Plan C to come to fruition on the ground, with the Israeli military beginning to strike railways and manufacturing infrastructure, and Trump taking the lead on calling for the destruction of Iran’s energy infrastructure and bridges. Both are unified in their hope to strangle the country economically in hopes of pushing Iranian society into oblivion, but this outcome is only truly possible through American military means.

But even the U.S. has seen itself overextended, unable to resupply its missile interceptors for its own bases in the Middle East, and potentially unable to protect Israel as effectively as it had in the past should open conflict break out over its skies again.

News of the dismissal of the Mossad officials was met with disbelief in the Israeli media and by veterans of the intelligence service, who accused Gofman of suppressing the agency’s ability to function. By firing two deputies, security analysts accused him of foisting the agency’s failure onto underlings to shield the decisions made at the top levels of government from scrutiny.

While overthrowing the Iranian government has remained a popular idea among Israeli officials and other elected politicians, Netanyahu chief among them, other politicians have acknowledged its difficulty. Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of the general staff, has spoken of the unlikelihood of being able to overthrow the entire Iranian system, instead stating that operations should have continued “in the shadows.”

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Reporting from Israel Hayom in May revealed that many in the Mossad were opposed to the idea of focusing resources on overthrowing the Iranian government, seeing it as a massive gamble. The Mossad’s former chief of influence operations, known as O., told the newspaper that he felt he had to sell the operation to many in the agency, despite the fact that “no one actually knows how to overthrow a regime or what the chances are that it will succeed.”

In March, just days before he would be killed in an Israeli assassination strike, Ali Larijani, then-secretary of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council, told the Iranian news outlet ISNA that Netanyahu “seemed to believe that these attacks had set a movement in motion inside Iran and that, by portraying the system as being in disarray, he could incite the public.” But Larijani pointed out that in less than a day, the regime had appointed “replacements for the commanders who had been killed, addressed the public, changed the atmosphere, and, by issuing specific orders, authorized the launch of missiles.”

Netanyahu, having pushed for the military overthrow of the Iranian government across multiple American administrations, finally got the war he wanted. But neither raw force, nor covert operations executed on his orders, were enough to carry out his will.

While Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has remarked upon how the current situation is very much working for Israel — one in which southern Iran is constantly bombarded with no end, and America is doing all of the fighting and dying — Netanyahu has continued his rhetoric about the need to create the conditions for the fall of the Islamic Republic. But in a moment of rare humility, he admitted this may “not happen in a single day.”

Recent reporting from Ynet found Netanyahu’s government instructed both the Israeli military and the Mossad to prepare for a much larger campaign against the Iranian state, with eyes on a potential return to open war in autumn. As has been the case over and over again, in Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, and now Iran, Israel hopes that what was not solved with bombs can still be won — this time with even more bombs.

The post The Mossad Suffers a Crushing Defeat Entirely of Its Own Making appeared first on The Intercept.

Then 11 years ago, he married his partner, a U.S. citizen. Together, they had two children, who are also citizens. The couple filed a petition to grant him legal status through their marriage, but then Daniel was issued a deportation order, which presented a barrier in his case.

It’s hard to comprehend how it can be so difficult to legally stay with one’s family, but Daniel, for whom The Intercept is using a pseudonym, would soon face an even more mystifying hurdle: He recently received a letter from the government saying he owes about $368,000, according to his attorney, who recounted his tale.

Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order using a never-before-touched law to levy fines on an immigrant for each day he “willfully fails or refuses” to leave after receiving a removal order. Trump’s order also increased the fine from $500 to $998 per day to, supposedly, update it for inflation.

The Trump administration quickly started issuing fines as high as $1.8 million — the maximum penalty for the maximum five-year period, although unpaid fines can also accrue interest — to immigrants last year. As of July, more than 100,000 immigrants had received notices of fines, totaling more than $84 million, according to the government.

The administration says it will forgive the debts if immigrants leave the country.

Daniel is eager to pay as much as he can, fearing the financial and immigration repercussions of not responding to the notice he received. But there’s a big problem: He can’t.

And it’s not for a lack of funds. Instead, Daniel simply doesn’t have the information necessary to make a payment; the government never provided it to him. The letter he received informing him of the fines he owed had a blank field where there should have been an identification number for the online payments system. (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)

Daniel and his wife tried putting his Social Security number and the alien number that tracks him in the immigration system into the website. Neither worked. His wife even tried calling to find out how to pay, only to sit on hold for over an hour and a half and then have the call disconnect.

“It’s ‘Hurry and pay — oh, by the way, we’re not going to give you any appropriate information,’” said Melanie Zamenhof, a senior attorney on the New York Legal Response Team at Neighbors Link, who has been helping Daniel.

Daniel’s experience is not unique. Zamenhof hasn’t had a single immigrant client who was able to successfully pay the fine the administration levied against them. No one at her organization has, either.

No Way to Pay

The letters immigrants are receiving about the fines are typically brief.

They include the date an immigrant was issued an order of removal and a checked box saying, “You willfully failed or refused to depart from the United States pursuant to the order.” Based on that, the letters say, “you are subject to a civil monetary penalty.”

The letters don’t explain how the figures have been calculated, whether interest has been applied and at what rate, or even when the fines started being tolled or when they might stop.

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The letters say recipients only have 15 business days after issuance to formally contest the fines, though many received them after the period had expired.

“Like any bill that anyone receives,” Zamenhof said, “you always want an explanation of benefits, some breakdown.”

This year, the helpline at Neighbors Link started getting calls from about a dozen immigrants saying they’d received letters. The callers asked the attorneys where they should go to pay what they were told they owe.

“All the attorneys are like, ‘What a great question. Where do you pay it?’” Zamenhof said.

Finding a working website to pay the fines leads to dead ends. Typically, immigration-related fees are paid to other agencies, such as the Department of Justice or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, but none of those avenues work for the failure-to-leave fines.

Instead, a sheet included with the government letters offers “payment options.” Those include a QR code that points to pay.gov and instructions to search for “DHS Civil Penalty and Fee” in a box on the website.

The pay.gov website is frequently down, Zamenhof said, and when it’s working, the option to pay the civil penalty is sometimes not on the dropdown menu.

The government also no longer accepts cashier’s checks or money orders, Zamenhof said, which means the fines can only be paid with a debit or credit card — a hurdle on its own for any immigrant who can’t qualify for a U.S. bank account yet.

Meanwhile, to get through the payment system an immigrant must have a payor number; the information sheet says they need a “penalty tracking number.” That’s supposed to be on the letters they receive about their fines, but Zamenhof has seen multiple letters like Daniel’s, where the field for the number is left blank.

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Even if someone were able to get through to a payment page, most don’t have these vast sums of money at hand. Attorneys at Neighbors Link have seen amounts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; the fines go as high as $1,820,352.

A recent report from the New York University Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic found that none of the immigrant advocates they spoke to had clients who were able to pay.

“They’re always going for the maximum amount that they think they can charge based on just the passage of time,” said Hasan Shafiqullah, the supervising attorney for immigration at the Legal Aid Society. “Nobody has that money laying around.”

A Willful Failure?

There doesn’t appear to be any way to make a partial payment or set up a payment plan. All the while, the fines and interest keep accruing as people are unable to pay any of it off. Even if someone pays the entire amount, it’s not clear that will stop more fines from accruing.

The Legal Aid Society is among a coalition that sued the Department of Homeland Security over the fines, arguing that they have not been legally assessed nor that recipients have a meaningful opportunity to contest them.

“They’re not making an individualized determination about: ‘Am I unwillful?’” Shafiqullah argued. “The fact that I have a removal order and I’m physically present isn’t enough to show that I willfully failed to depart. Y’all didn’t make an individual determination, there’s no space on the form to do that.”

According to the New York University report, 71 percent of survey respondents had legal immigration status or protection against removal or were in the process of pursuing remedies.

The immigrants who come to the Legal Aid Society often have or are seeking permission to stay in the country. Some have an order of supervision from ICE that allows them to stay and work; others are seeking legal status through visas for victims of crime or through their family members.

Some of the people facing the fines have even successfully reopened their immigration cases and no longer have an order of removal.

“They’re not willfully failing to depart, they’re doing all the things they’re entitled to do under the law,” he said.

Even when immigrants in these situations have appealed their fines, Shafiqullah said, they’ve been denied.

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Failure to pay could result in the government seizing assets, including people’s homes, or wage or tax refund garnishment. As of May, the administration had initiated over 50 lawsuits against immigrants to get them to pay, in some cases seeking their tax refunds. One immigrant woman says the Treasury Department seized her and her U.S. citizen’s joint tax refund and reported her to credit bureaus.

The administration is also sending the debts to collections agencies, which are adding hundreds of thousands on to the original amounts in administrative fees.

Not paying could also harm potential pathways to legal immigration status: Judges can deem unpaid debt to the government a negative factor — potentially leading green card applicants to be labeled as “public charges,” blocking them.

Zamenhof, the lawyer from Neighbors Link, has been urging clients to document their attempts to pay their fines — recording how many phone calls they made and taking screenshots of the faulty website portal being down or broken — in case their debt is brought before a judge.

Daniel and his wife are ready to pay a quarter of what the government says he owes and find a way to pay down the rest, though they would still like to understand a breakdown of how the charges and interest were calculated.

“They’re very eager to comply with this, even though they dispute and don’t agree with the total amount,” Zamenhof said.

Constant Fear

For now, Daniel lives in constant fear because he can’t pay. He worries that his wages, tax refund, and children’s college fund could all be at risk of government seizure. Will debt collectors show up at the couple’s door and shake them down? Worse, will ICE show up and detain Daniel?

Even if none of this comes to pass, there’s still an open question: Will owing outstanding fines to the government harm his attempt to reopen and terminate the removal order against him and become a green card holder through his wife? What will a judge say?

“Is it now going to be seen as a negative factor,” Zamenhof said, “despite all of our best efforts to comply?”

The post Immigrant Wants to Pay $368,000 in Fines, but Broken Payment System Won’t Let Him appeared first on The Intercept.

The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino (2005)
This is one of those books that stays with you long after you finish it. The hit from Japanese mystery writer Keigo Higashino, who died last month, puts a dark twist on a story about loyalty and the obligations that come with it. This was my first interaction with Higashino’s famous “Detective Galileo.” Think of a police procedural wrapped in a shroud of mathematical philosophy. This book is a dark gem.
— Akela Lacy

Good People, Patmeena Sabit (2026)
It’s easy to be lulled into thinking this propulsive, polyphonic novel is a true crime beach read: The book opens with a disclaimer about police refusing to weigh in on an open investigation, followed by short vignettes that serve as witness testimonies to an unfolding crime narrative. But it’s actually a beautiful picture of community, family tragedy, and the court of public opinion, and a wonderful reminder that, despite the current political climate, we should be proud to be a nation of immigrants.
— Celine Piser

Questions 27 & 28, Karen Tei Yamashita (2026)
It’s become almost cliché in this era of wanton imprisonment of immigrants to invoke the incessant relevance of the United States’ WWII concentration camps for Japanese Americans, but Karen Tei Yamashita brings hundreds of new lives to one of the country’s most infamous domestic crimes. She once thought “that about ‘the camps,’ we’d been there, done that,” she writes in a postscript to Questions 27 & 28, “but as those who continue to research and write about these events know very well, it’s never done.” The questions that make up the novel’s title were the last two in an infamous loyalty questionnaire administered to incarcerees: The first asked if they would enlist in the Army for the same United States of America that had incarcerated them; the second if they would swear undying allegiance to the U.S. and forsake any ties to Japan. Between those two questions, “There are eight possible answers,” Yamashita writes, some of which would get you sent to war, others that would deepen your incarceration. “But or if answers are useless … it doesn’t matter what you think or believe; only your answers to 27 and 28 matter.”

In a rigorous history lesson coated in a fun, twisty work of fiction, Yamashita sets out to capture the varied political leanings and personal narratives that might lie behind a single checkbox marked yes or no or left blank. The novel — and it is one, despite being stuffed with historical figures who really lived through the incarceration — is multi-formatted and polyvocal, making use of the kind of staggeringly varied structure that has become something like Yamashita’s signature. It’s broken into three “boxes,” as if in a historical archive, which Yamashita plumbs for precisely reproduced documents and imagined conversations about how they came to be. With stories spanning more than a century, it grapples with the role of Japanese imperialism in constructing racial identity, the place for violence in politics, what it means to be a citizen of a state — and whether one that would lock people up over race or nationality is worth having at all.
— Maia Hibbett

The Vivisectors, Missouri Williams (2026)
I read a lot of contemporary fiction and have the scars to prove it. And, candidly, I haven’t even finished Williams’s sophomore novel, which takes place in a lightly dystopian college town being consumed by enemies both plant and animal. Let that make this endorsement all the more ringing: It’s truly rare that I slow my reading of a novel because I want to take in each sentence fully, and that I want to immediately start re-reading before I’ve even closed the hardcover. Williams is a sly, darkly funny observer of our world and what she imagines as the next. Jump on board now, or risk being left behind on one of literature’s up-and-coming voices.
— Katherine Krueger

The Full Catastrophe, David Carkeet (1990)
We often say a string of words in a very specific order that intentionally has no meaning. Or spit out a different combination of them that has the opposite meaning of what is spoken. Why is it hard to say what we want to really say?

A lovelorn, laid-off linguist who gets enraged by empty expressions like “Have a good one” and “We’ve come full circle” finds a new job at the Pillow Agency, run by the rich, eccentric, incomprehensible Mr. Pillow, a believer of love. The linguist is to embed (“occupy”) with an assigned couple at their home, listen to their verbal interactions, and analyze whether this marriage can be saved, despite his own lack of experience in the field of commitment. This is somehow not the premise of a couple’s therapy reality TV show today; it’s much funnier and less self-conscious! Perhaps because it published in 1990? I thought it was headed in a surreal “Being John Malkovich” direction at the start, but The Full Catastrophe author, David Carkeet, takes a more difficult path and, with serious honesty, tackles the later-stage, post-honeymoon relationship troubles — excavated down to their true awkwardness — that come from miscommunication. Brutal things get said and heard! Because of that, I was surprised by how romantic (and hilarious) this book is. Pairs well with Ross McElwee’s 1986 film “Sherman’s March.”
— Nara Shin

The Makioka Sisters, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1948)
This quiet, deeply thoughtful novel follows several years in the lives of four sisters in a once-prominent upper-middle-class family in a suburb between Kobe and Osaka in the late 1930s. The slowly building characterization of each sister’s personality and how she moves through the world is one of the most artfully realistic portraits of family life I’ve ever read.

While mostly focused on the relationship between the sisters, the novel takes place in the shadow of the impending world war, and in scattered moments throughout the book Tanizaki sketches a compelling depiction of people who — despite being otherwise caring, empathetic, and worldly — are reflexively loyal to a government that is, at the time of narration, actively committing unspeakable crimes abroad.

For fans of: Thomas Mann, Colm Tóibín, Elena Ferrante.
— Noah Hurowitz

The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (2017)
A great contrast from the Nolan movie, which simply regurgitates the male heroic stereotype — I think (I have not seen it).
— David Bralow

Nonfiction

The Kentucky Cave Wars, David Randolph Kem (2014)
Soliciting recommendations, our editor helpfully intoned that “It doesn’t have to be a nonfiction book about war!” So, naturally, this is a nonfiction book about war. 

Beneath the gentle rolling hills of Kentucky are hundreds of both mapped and hitherto yet uncharted miles of labyrinthine subterranea which have wormed their way through hollowed limestone over queer aeons. Yet all is not sanguine in these netherworlds, the mirthful perusal of which has been rendered “quixotic” if one is attempting the maintenance of a fairly fairy tale vernacular (or “illegal,” if one is not) through the corrosive joint forces of State and Capital, which seep hideously into the ground, oozing from the words and deeds of those who have no business being alive. 

And so, we have the Kentucky Cave Wars, wherein to stop people from killing one another over rival private cave enterprises, the government stepped in and closed off miles of caverns under the standard doublespeak veneer of ostensibly opening them up under the hollow promises of a cavernous national park. This is America, land of the free, where entry into cave systems now requires government permission. 

The real losers of the cave wars weren’t manipulative businessmen, who were arguably already losers by simple clear cut reason of being businessmen in the first place; no, they were those of us who were imprisoned in the outer realm by the unbridled malignity that is the National Park Service, condemned to beg for entry into the Earth on which we live, and into which we die.
— Nikita Mazurov

Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li (2025)
“Grieving mother’s resilience in the face of repeated tragedy” doesn’t feel quite right here. While I hesitate to call the word “resilience” trite, the way Yiyun Li narrates the process through which she navigates her two sons’ deaths makes me feel like the word does not encompass enough — that living through Terrible Things necessitates a kind of self-justification, but also doubt, denial, and optimism, that threatens the living and spurs it on. Things in nature do merely grow, and they’ll develop based on different external conditions. But their interiority, we’ll never know.
— Fei Liu

Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing, Molly Gebrian (2024)
Some really interesting discussion that is applicable to everything we do.
— David Bralow

Double Eagle, Charles McCarry (1979)
A chronicle of the first successful balloon journey across the Atlantic. Previous attempts claimed five lives. Written in 1970s magazine style with occasional odd asides about the crew’s marriages, it’s a fascinating tale of rich men determined to do the impossible for no particular reason.
— Matt Sledge

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey (launched October 2018)
Fair warning: Host Andrew Hickey is the kind of obsessive cataloguer of popular culture who never met a parenthetical — say, about the session drummer’s later production credits — that wasn’t worthy of explication. So while I can’t recommend this podcast for the kind of casual half-listening that the medium often invites, I can promise that your attention to detail will be well rewarded.

Over and over again, Hickey offers a helpful corrective to the various mythologies of early rock ’n’ roll, especially by later (mostly white) critics who have policed genre boundaries and exalted a narrow range of guitar gods and studio auteurs. From the beginning, he is careful to emphasize the communal and collaborative nature of musical production, drawing attention to figures who’ve been marginalized in other histories. Along the way, he smuggles in some fascinating lessons in social history, political economy, and even music theory.
— Michael Sherrard

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan (2021)
It is incredibly well-written and easy to read. The book grapples with the realities of gender, class, race, and politics in really thought-provoking ways.
— Jessica Washington

Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution, Anand Gopal (2026)
Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria, Loubna Mrie (2024)
The constant onslaught of news these days can make us forget that, just a decade and a half ago, the Middle East and North Africa were rocked by a series of uprisings and revolutions that changed the face of the region. Perhaps none was more consequential than Syria’s eventually successful revolution, and yet so few people have an in-depth understanding of the circumstances. If the old saw about being doomed to repeat history holds true, we would do well to educate ourselves, to better understand the pitfalls and potentials of our paths. That’s where two new books from Anand Gopal and Loubna Mrie come in.

Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage traces the story of the Syrian Civil War through the eyes of the mid-sized city of Manbij. A masterwork of literary reporting, Gopal’s hearty volume recounts the waves of political power that swept over the city — a revolutionary movement, a more neoliberal city council, the Free Syrian Army, the Islamic State group, and so on — with Gopal deftly reporting out intimate views of each, provided by those who fought for, against, or simply lived through them.

Loubna Mrie’s striking memoir about the war, Defiance, provides the one view Gopal doesn’t go deep on: Syria’s ruling Alawite sect. Neither does Mrie, however, provide a straight-ahead understanding of the regime that controlled the country for more than half a century. Instead, it provides a window into that world precisely by departing from it. Mrie’s family was firmly in the pro-regime fold, but her observations, empathy, and intellect quickly led her to become a revolutionary. What follows from there is a harrowing personal journey whose contours are best left to Mrie herself, who lets the reader so far into her travails and inner life that it feels almost intrusive to keep reading — but also makes it impossible to stop.
— Ali Gharib

Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple (2026)
At this point it is perhaps redundant to recommend this extraordinary, beautifully written history of the Jewish Labor Bund, by friend-of-The-Intercept, Molly Crabapple. But for those who have yet to read it, I couldn’t recommend a book more highly. Molly offers us a gift: richly rendered revolutionary characters, rigorously researched history, and a corrective to Jewish historical narratives that treat Zionism as transhistorical and inevitable. Here’s to Molly!
— Natasha Lennard

The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1977)
I first read German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey about 20 years after it was published. My mind wasn’t blown. It was blown up.

I suspect that almost 50 years after it was published, the book still packs a formidable punch. Every page seemed to be a revelation, drawing on myriad sources from 19th century philosophy, sociology, psychology, literature, physics, medicine, and, seemingly, everything else. The volume was slim, but it seemed to be packed with more startling information than any three great books. It wasn’t a history of train travel, it was an exploration of modernity and an explanation of how human perceptions of distance, time, space, speed, personal autonomy, psychological integrity, and physical trauma were shattered and remade by the advent of railway travel, creating a new “industrialized consciousness.”

Much of The Railway Journey now exists as a blur in my mind, much like the sheer speed of the train fundamentally changed how people experienced the landscape, forcing passengers to focus only on distant vistas and transforming what had been an immersive experience in nature to a series of (window-)framed, here and gone, two-dimensional images of a panoramic landscape. But for all that I’ve forgotten of the book, for every fact that has long since fled my mind, I have never looked at the world in the same way again.

“The notion that the railroad annihilated space and time was not related to that expansion of space that resulted from the incorporation of new spaces into the transport network,” Schivelbusch observed. “What was experienced as being annihilated was the traditional space-time continuum which characterized the old transport technology.” Travelers had, that is, experienced the physical space between cities as a “living entity” and had been embedded in that landscape before the train obliterated such “travel space.” Schivelbusch called on 19th-century poet and writer Heinrich Heine to explain the incredible disorientation experienced by early train travelers. Without The Railway Journey, I would probably have been ignorant of the existence of Heine (and so many other forgotten thinkers past). But I’d pick up a copy of the book for Heine’s commentary on the opening of railway lines from Paris to Rouen and Orléans in 1843, alone:

What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our notions! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone. … Now you can travel to Orléans in four and a half hours, and it takes no longer to get to Rouen. Just imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.

— Nick Turse

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