When it was founded a year ago, news reports suggested that Fellowship PAC would concentrate on supporting Republicans.

Since June, however, the only candidates Fellowship PAC has spent on have been Democrats, including those who have criticized the president’s meme coin, and it is getting help from a former Trump administration official’s company.

Fellowship PAC funneled $600,000 since this summer through a firm co-founded by former Trump crypto adviser Bo Hines to help reelect Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York; Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire; and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. The Democrats are considered crypto allies, and none of them are facing competitive elections this fall.

All those advertising dollars have been spent through a vendor called Nxum Group, which was co-founded by Hines, a former Republican congressional candidate and Trump administration official.

Hines did not return a request for comment, and it is not known whether he has personally been involved in the Nxum Group’s work on behalf of Fellowship PAC. In congressional races in 2022 and 2024, he presented himself as a Trump-loving MAGA acolyte.

There is a thick web of ties between Hines, Fellowship PAC, and one of the biggest players in the crypto industry, a stablecoin company called Tether.

Before Trump’s election, Hines was involved in promoting a Trump-themed meme coin that made a handful of investors millions before plummeting in value. After Trump’s election, the president tapped Hines to serve as the head of the White House Council of Advisers on Digital Assets. In that role, Hines helped pass a law that created stablecoin regulations that benefited Tether.

As Hines served in the Trump administration, Tether was paying money to the firm that Hines co-owned, Nxum Group, according to a report last week in the Wall Street Journal. Nxum Group told the news outlet that Hines had no involvement in the company’s business dealings with Tether during that time. Hines said in a June 2025 ethics disclosure that he had only a “passive investment interest” in the company.

Hines left the Trump administration in August 2025 and, a month later, Tether announced that he would serve as the CEO of its U.S. branch.

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Tether also has ties to Fellowship PAC. The newly created Fellowship PAC received a $10 million donation in January from Tether’s U.S. banking firm, Cantor Fitzgerald. In April, Fellowship PAC announced that Tether’s vice president of regulatory affairs would serve as its chair.

Although it launched with a splash last year by claiming that it had a $100 million war chest, the PAC has never reported as much as that in official campaign finance disclosures. The PAC’s last receipt was in January, and its cash on hand dwindled to $250,000 as of October 14.

Throughout the midterm elections, Fellowship PAC has leaned heavily on Nxum Group to spend advertising dollars on various congressional races.

Fellowship PAC spent exclusively on Republicans until its first expenditure on behalf of a Democrat, Torres, in June. That spending coincided with public polls showing increasingly dismal fortunes for Republicans in the midterm elections. Since then, the PAC has spent exclusively on Democratic candidates.

Torres’s and Warner’s campaigns did not respond to requests for comment. Goodlander’s campaign said she had nothing to do with the $150,000 that Fellowship PAC spent on digital advertising in her race. The money, the PAC disclosed in filings, had been routed through Nxum Group on August 31.

“Congresswoman Goodlander has been one of the strongest advocates in Congress for cracking down on Big Tech and crypto profiteering and getting dark money out of politics,” her campaign said in a statement. “Like all campaigns, we’re legally barred from coordinating with outside groups like these, so you’d need to ask them why they’re spending in this race.”

The PAC did not return a request for comment.

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Goodlander, Torres, and Warner are all rated as strong supporters of the crypto industry on an industry scorecard. Still, all three have been critical of Trump’s personal dealings in the industry though his $TRUMP meme coin, which has helped make him $1.4 billion from crypto ventures.

Warner recently ran an ad of his own attacking Trump over the meme coin.

“That’s not governing. It’s grifting,” the Democratic senator said. “The corruption needs to stop.”

The post Giant Crypto Super PAC Funnels Big Money to Former Trump Official’s Firm to Support… Democrats? appeared first on The Intercept.

Brazilians will head to the polls on Sunday in one of the most consequential presidential elections of the last decade. The run-off election will determine the future of the largest democracy in Latin America and the fate of the Amazon rainforest.

Incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is facing off against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The elder Bolsonaro is currently on house arrest for his role in a failed 2023 military coup that intended to assassinate Lula, his vice president, and a Supreme Court justice. Despite his father’s attempted coup, Flavio Bolsonaro is currently the frontrunner, after coming out slightly ahead in the first round of voting.

“If they don’t win this election, then not only is Jair going to stay in jail, most likely, but Eduardo, Flávio’s brother and Jair’s son, who is in self-exile in the U.S., he has a multiyear prison sentence for his actions in the U.S. lobbying against Brazil’s foreign interests. He’s not going to be able to go home if they lose this election,” says Andrew Fishman, a Rio de Janeiro-based investigative journalist. “So they’re really just willing to do whatever they can to make sure that they win because this is their only get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Sound familiar? This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Fishman, president and co-founder of The Intercept Brasil, about what’s at stake for Brazil and the planet in Sunday’s election.

“It’s a global election. The voters in Brazil will be deciding the future of humanity,” Fishman tells The Intercept. Jair Bolsonaro oversaw significant deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, leaving the ecological and climate linchpin in danger of becoming a “savanna.” Now, he argues, his son can finish the job. “You’re going to have an international migration crisis,” says Fishman. “It’s really self-defeating because the cattle ranchers are his base. They are the ones that are wanting to do the things that will end their future profitability — the future existence of their business.”

President Donald Trump has taken a particular interest in the race, as he seeks to expand U.S. influence and control across the Western Hemisphere. “Brazil — as the biggest economy, the biggest country, the most powerful entity in the hemisphere besides the United States — if Brazil falls, then the rest falls in line,” says Fishman. “But if Brazil remains as this big island of resistance in the middle of the continent, it really messes up [the Trump administration’s] plans, doesn’t it?”

Big Tech is also looming large over the race. “There’s all these pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggest that Meta is interfering in this election, and they have every incentive to do so. They will have a much better regulatory environment if Flávio wins because of Flávio’s submissiveness to U.S. interests and his willingness to play ball with whatever Trump tells him to,” adds Fishman.

In a request for comment, Meta said, “Meta applies the same rules to every candidate, every party and every political viewpoint in Brazil, as we do in elections around the world. We do not suppress content to disadvantage one side, and we do not give preferential treatment to any side. Each of the incidents cited by Lula’s campaign has a straightforward, documented explanation. … Brazilian voters deserve facts, not a political narrative built by combining unrelated technical issues. Meta will continue to enforce its rules, comply with Brazilian electoral law, fix mistakes when they occur and provide a level playing field for everyone who uses our services.”

As U.S. leaders attempt to mold Brazil into a satellite state, Fishman argues the United States is slowly becoming more and more like its southern neighbor.

“It’s not that Brazil is becoming more like the United States, it’s that the United States is becoming more like Brazil,” says Fishman. “You have just shrinking spheres of democracy while oligarchs have increasing power and control and are able to do what they want and insist on decisions for the country that are bad for all of the society and the people, but good for their individual interests.” 

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

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. 

Akela Lacy: I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. Jessie, what do our listeners need to know about this week?

JW: I’ve been following a pretty disturbing story that’s actually centered on a campaign ad. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released what I would argue is the ugliest campaign ad of a dark season. That is, of course, a season of campaign ads filled with Islamophobic, transphobic, sexist rhetoric, and racist rhetoric as well. But in the ad, the mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton accuses her daughter of being a liar, claiming “she’s lied her whole life.”

 Now, what makes this really dark is that Acton was removed from her mother’s care at 12 years old, after she alleges she was raped by her mother’s then-40-year-old husband. 

AL: That’s horrible. Has Acton responded? 

JW: Acton responded to the attack ad saying, “My brother Phil and I endured abuse, hunger, and neglect. We were often kept in a dark basement, were frequent-fliers with child protective services, and lived in fear of our birth mother’s violent and erratic temper. I’ve always known that she was deeply sick and unwell, and it’s sad to see Vivek Ramaswamy exploit her all for his own political gain.”

 This is one, as I’ve said, of the darkest campaign ads in a really horrifying season of campaign ads. 

Akela, I know you’ve been tracking another big election story this week on a beat you’ve covered for a really long time, and that’s [American Israel Public Affairs Committee].

AL: So we have been covering extensively the way that AIPAC’s strategy has changed over the last few election cycles since they started spending directly on campaigns.

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If you’ve been following our reporting, you know that we’ve written a lot about both their super PAC, United Democracy Project, and this shell PAC strategy where there were a number of different groups that popped up throughout the midterm season, took money from AIPAC, spent against candidates that AIPAC didn’t like, and then — per filings that came out this week — shut down and gave all their money back to AIPAC. 

So the idea being that, they had been trying to shield what was an increasingly toxic reputation amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza from creating backlash against their activity in these races. 

Jewish Insider scooped on Wednesday that AIPAC announced that it will no longer endorse candidates or give PAC contributions through its AIPAC PAC. Now, this doesn’t mean that they will stop spending on elections. Their super PAC, United Democracy Project, will continue to spend, as it has been pouring record amounts of money into various races. But this is getting a lot of attention, both from the left and I would say from the center. 

The left, Justice Democrats in particular, and candidates who are no longer in Congress, but I saw Jamaal Bowman talking about this, saying that this is the culmination of the fight that the left has been putting up against AIPAC in elections. I don’t know that I would categorize this as a win necessarily, considering that the super PAC seems like it’s going to continue to spend a lot of money. But that was the big news in my campaign finance world this week. 

JW: You’ve done a lot of really interesting coverage of how AIPAC is moving their money around through these different PACs and trying to get around the fact that people really dislike AIPAC, and that it has really tarnished the reputation of candidates who take this money. Obviously, this is a maneuver to get rid of the reputational harm of AIPAC money while still giving people AIPAC money. 

I’ve actually been tracking a story completely off our election cycle, and that’s what’s going on in France. I know we touched on that a couple weeks ago but, really, these protests have taken on another life.

 For those who don’t know, in France, there were these protests that were initially launched by students primarily in the suburbs concerned about educational inequality. This meant staffing shortages and poor facilities. But it has exploded into a nationwide uprising about the cost of living and broader economic inequality. 

Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, and not to bring it too quickly back to the U.S., but President Donald Trump has used this as an opportunity to rail against immigrants. So despite the fact that there is zero indication any of the violence has been spurred on by immigrants. At a campaign rally on Monday, he told the crowd, “If Europe doesn’t close its borders and bring the criminals out, like the people that are protesting, Europe is finished.”

 So yeah, that’s just one other example of how Donald Trump has inserted himself into international politics.

AL: Trump has also inserted himself into politics in a different region in the world. We have the Brazilian elections for president heading to a runoff this week. I know you spoke, Jessie, to Andrew Fishman, an investigative reporter and president and co-founder of The Intercept Brasil, about those elections.

JW:  It’s a really interesting election with a ton of parallels to the political situation in the United States, as well as, as you’ve pointed out, a ton of influence from the United States. On Sunday, Brazil will have a run-off presidential election that will determine the future of not only Latin America’s largest democracy, but also — and this is really important — the fate of the Amazon rainforest, and one could argue, the planet. 

This is the first presidential election since former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was imprisoned on house arrest in an attempted military coup, a sentence that his son, the current frontrunner, Flávio Bolsonaro has promised to overturn.

 I talked to Andrew about the media landscape, the history of military leadership, and the outside influences that have made this a tight race, despite the fact that the perceived frontrunner is running on freeing the man who attempted a coup years prior.

President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva is running for reelection. He’s accused both President Donald Trump and Meta of attempting to sway the election in favor of Flávio Bolsonaro. 

The Intercept reached out to Meta for comment, and Meta denied interfering in the election process, saying they do not suppress content to disadvantage one side or give preferential treatment to the other.

But this is a really interesting conversation with Andrew, and I’m excited for people to get to hear it.

AL: As am I. Let’s hear it. 

JW: Andrew, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Andrew Fishman: Hi, thanks for having me. 

JW: On Sunday, Brazilians will head to the polls in a runoff presidential election between right-wing senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, and incumbent left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to determine the leadership of Latin America’s largest democracy and biggest economy.

Now, this is the first presidential election since former President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the Capitol in 2023 and attempted to overturn the election results. Now, Flávio Bolsonaro, his son and ally, is widely considered to be the frontrunner after coming out slightly ahead in the first round of voting.

But as of Tuesday, his lead in the polls has been narrowing. Andrew, big picture, what are the major issues at play in this election on Sunday? 

AF: If you want to be really direct about it, it’s the future of humanity.

You have one candidate who’s been responsible for record reductions of deforestation in the Amazon; and you have another one who’s saying, let’s chop it all down, and farmers should be able to do whatever they want on their land.

And under his father’s leadership, deforestation in the Amazon soared, as in the other regions in the area. Scientists think that there’s a major tipping point that we could be on the cusp of, that if we were to reach that, the Amazon will turn into a savanna. There would be no going back from that.

If that were to happen, all of the rain in South America comes from the Amazon, basically. [That would affect] the cattle ranching that’s doing the deforestation, no more of the soy that’s doing the deforestation — people would have trouble feeding themselves. São Paulo would probably run out of water, which it has done in the past.

It’s very precarious. So you would be having mass refugee influxes, migrations. I really do think that this election is on that scale; it’s a global election. The voters in Brazil will be deciding the future of humanity, very possibly. 

JW: To your point, his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration oversaw significant deforestation of the rainforest, which houses 10 percent of all [known] species on Earth, and his son appears to be moving in that same direction.

Flávio told reporters in August that he did not believe in climate change and that “the best way to address environmental issues is what we did during the Bolsonaro administration,” referring, of course, to the senior Bolsonaro’s administration.

What is at stake for climate change when we’re talking about this massive deforestation that could potentially be happening if Flávio wins?

AF: Every ecosystem in South America is interconnected and in the world. If the Amazon collapses and turns into savanna and the rainfall stops, and you have this massive drying out of the continent — which is one of the major exporters of food in the world — you’re going to have all of those issues locally, and that’s going to impact local markets and everything. You’re going to have an international migration crisis.

But on top of that, we have no idea what the ecological knock-on effects of that could be. With that, we could be having a more rapid increase in polar ice cap melting. With the temperatures increasing, it could be exacerbating the death of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, which is the thing that would put Europe back into an ice age. It’s very possible that’s already happening right now.

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We’re at this really tenuous moment for the climate, for the Earth, for humanity. And you have a candidate that says very proudly [he] doesn’t believe in any of that and wants to slash all mechanisms that are used to have more responsible management of land and prevent this massive catastrophe in just this proudly Luddite sort of way.

It’s really self-defeating because the cattle ranchers are his base. They are the ones that are wanting to do the things that will end their future profitability — the future existence of their business. It’s really self-defeating in this way for the Brazilians, and these very short-term benefits for massive long-term costs.

There’s estimates that the impact that the Amazon has for the global economy is in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and that benefit is far larger than the profits that they get out of these extractive industries that they do with farming and mining. It’s really hard to overstate the potential impacts that this could have.

JW: Is that urgency resonating with voters? 

AF: Absolutely not. That is not what people are voting about, unfortunately. It’s what the people living in the heavy agricultural regions — where their local economy depends on that — they’re voting for Flávio for that reason. But the people who are voting against him, yes, there’s many people that care about the Amazon and want to preserve it, but it’s not the issue that’s being discussed day to day on TV, in the news, on the streets.

People are talking more about more human issues of corruption and who has better communication, security, economics. They’re not talking about the Amazon, unfortunately. 

JW: That’s hardly surprising in the U.S. context, which I’m a little bit more acquainted with. Certainly climate, the environment, have never been top issues for voters, even if they’ve resonated more so with young people.

I did want to talk about another issue in the election, and that is the fate of Jair Bolsonaro. His son, Flávio Bolsonaro, has promised to free him. Jair Bolsonaro has been imprisoned on house arrest since 2025 for plotting a military coup. How is that particular campaign promise landing with the electorate in Brazil, and are you at all surprised by the public’s response?

AF: It’s very clear that for the Bolsonaros, this is an all-or-nothing for them. If they don’t win this election, then not only is Jair going to stay in jail, most likely, but Eduardo, Flávio’s brother and Jair’s son, who is in self-exile in the U.S., he has a multiyear prison sentence for his actions in the U.S. lobbying against Brazil’s foreign interests. He’s not going to be able to go home if they lose this election. 

For them, it’s been very clear, and they’ve even said it in moments, that’s what this is about for them: their ability to get their father out of prison and to get themselves off the hook. Also, if you’re elected president, the investigations on things you did before you got elected, they go away.

So then Flávio’s off the hook, and he’s so wrapped up in so many different schemes and accusations and active investigations, some of which that we have revealed, including U.S. and abroad and offshore bank accounts and money laundering and potential connections to organized crime and militias. So they’re really just willing to do whatever they can to make sure that they win because this is their only get-out-of-jail-free card. To do that, they’re going to completely change the structure of the Supreme Court, and they’ll be able to put in a majority even without impeachment. They already have the Senate and the lower house of Congress.

They would control all of the executive branch. They have the majority of governorships that are in their coalition, and they run the local police. And the executive has control over the federal police and all the investigative and regulatory agencies. So they would have just absolute lockstep control over every branch of government federally and most of local government as well.

It would be a democratically elected coup. 

JW: And voters, do they care about that? Do they care about the preservation of democracy? Is this ranking as a top election issue? 

AF: It’s always double speak, right? Both sides say that they’re preserving democracy. The Bolsonaristas say that Lula and the Supreme Court are running a judicial dictatorship right now because they were getting censored and put in jail for actively plotting a coup, which included active planning to assassinate Lula after he was elected, his vice president after he was elected, and a member of the Supreme Court. So that’s what they’re [Jair Bolsonaro and military officials] in jail for. That’s why they were getting pushback, and they’re saying that having the pushback against that is a dictatorship. 

In the meantime, you have the Lulistas who are saying that what the Bolsonaros want to do is a coup because they actively have said year after year, over and over again, “We want a coup. We love the military dictatorship. The military dictatorship was great! When we were torturing everybody, that was good.” Jair said, “When I’m elected, we’re going to take a machine gun and shoot down all of the leftists, the petistas, the Workers’ Party [Partido dos Trabalhadores] supporters.”

Remember that the military government was going alive and strong into the ’80s. It happened in ’64, and it went through the ’80s. So it’s very recent.

The people that are in his orbit, they were actually part of the military coup government until very recently. And I think that Lula supporters are very, very concerned about this. They really do care.

The Bolsonarista supporters, which are about 30 percent lockstep — same as it is in the U.S. with Trump — they’re just in their own information ecosystem, and they want Bolsonaro to win. It doesn’t matter, and anything that he does is good because it’s him.

It’s not, there are people that support the Workers’ Party, and there are people that support Bolsonaro. The Bolsonaro movement is essentially anti Workers’ Party, anti-petismo. The Bolsonaros have been seen as the greatest vehicle for getting rid of the Workers’ Party, which has been so hard to do because they’ve been so popular because of all the policies they’ve put into place over the years.

But you’ve had the media saying for 30 years now, just drilling it in, that the PT [Partido dos Trabalhadores] equals corruption, the PT invented corruption. The PT is everything that is bad in Brazil, and anything that is not the PT is everything that is good in Brazil. You’ve had a generation of this narrative being repeated over and over in all these different instances that it’s really hard to shake.

JW: Could you talk more about that legacy of military leadership in Brazil, and for Brazilians, how they feel about it on the day to day? I recognize that it’s a very large country, as we’ve mentioned multiple times. I assume not everyone feels the same way, but I am curious about that legacy and how people respond to it.

AF: Brazil has been a country of negotiated solutions. So when they were the last in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888, it was not some sort of civil war or uprising. It was a negotiation: “OK, I think it’s time that we do this, but let’s just make sure that everyone that did own slaves is in the best possible situation, and let’s make sure that we have some sort of semi-slavery going on afterwards.”

It was really the same thing with the dictatorship. It was a moment where the economy was going into the can. It was very unpopular. It wasn’t having the economic glory years of before, and so they said, “All right, we’ll step back. We’ll let you run some elections, but we’re going to make sure that we’re never held accountable, that we’re able to continue exercising power in the way we want.”

As part of that, they were able to help control the narrative. So during the military dictatorship, there was an impression — and it continues today — that there wasn’t corruption. The reason why they had that impression, it was actually very corrupt, very corrupt. But the impression exists because there was censorship of the media, so the corruption that existed just wasn’t exposed.

When the Lula government came into power the first time in the early 2000s, they started making the federal police stronger. They made the judiciary stronger and more independent. They increased the ability of the federal government to investigate and uphold the rule of law. As a result of that, many corruption schemes started coming out of the woodwork that were legacy of the military leadership. 

It was called a civil military dictatorship, technically, in Brazil, because it was the business elite together with the military that did the coup and ran everything.

So that business elite didn’t change. It’s still the same families. They were running the same corruption schemes back then. They were running it through re-democratization. Whether it’s a right-wing government or a left-wing government in power, they’re making sure that their interests are being served. That corruption is just this constant throughline. People don’t really see that because that’s not how it’s presented in the media and in the day-to-day in communications.

I know for a fact that there’s lots of people that really want us to go back to the dictatorship. There are people that really want us to go back to the monarchy because they see it as a better, simpler time when things were the way that they should be. Everyone was in the right place and things were safer and everything was just better, this idealized past, “Make Brazil Great Again” sort of thing. How far back do you want to go? 

Then there are the people that, like Dilma Rousseff, who was the successor to Lula after a second term — who fought against the dictatorship — that are currently active in politics, that are still around, and they were tortured. Their friends were murdered. They know exactly what a dictatorship means and what it means for people like them, anyone that stands against those entrenched powers of the old elites that go back for centuries.

That’s why you have a lot of older voters tend to vote PT [Workers’ Party] because they came up with the workers’ struggle with re-democratization. They understand what that means. It’s this interesting dynamic now where you have more younger people that are starting to tip more to the right because they don’t have this memory.

They don’t remember what it was like in the ’80s in the northeast when there was water shortages and food shortages, and the standard of living was so much lower. You have this new narrative being rewritten in real time online.

JW: The parallels to the United States and Brazil are just incredibly striking in what you’re saying. This kind of the “Make America Great Again” movement and the Make Brazil Great Again, even if they’re not using those exact same phrases. There are just so many points of similarity, especially with what we’ve seen with youth even in the United States, some of whom have taken a rightward tilt.

I want to get into the relationship between Brazil and the U.S. because that’s obviously been such a big issue in this election. In a Lula ad earlier this month, his campaign called Flávio Bolsonaro Trump’s candidate, arguing that, “What Trump wants is to colonize Brazil, take our riches, steal our future, and leave us in the dust.”

Now, this comes after President Lula confirmed that Brazil denied visas to two U.S. officials over election interference concerns. The State Department has denied any claims of election meddling, telling reporters, “Any insinuation of a ‘ploy’ to undermine a democratic nation’s election is a baseless lie.”

Andrew, is there any evidence that the Trump administration is attempting to sway this election? Does it veer into election interference as we generally understand it? 

AF: The answer is oh God, yes. So much so it’s overwhelming. Overwhelming evidence, and it’s the same thing they’ve been doing across the region, which is why there’s been this rightward swing in elections across Latin America.

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That’s why they’re so interested in Brazil right now because Brazil — as the biggest economy, the biggest country, the most powerful entity in the hemisphere besides the United States — if Brazil falls, then the rest falls in line.

But if Brazil remains as this big island of resistance in the middle of the continent, it really messes up their plans, doesn’t it? The interference has been done on many levels. The reality is that we don’t know the full extent of it, and we won’t know the full extent of it for years. We’re still learning about things that happened in 1964 with the U.S. role in the coup.

There’s dirty tricks happening that’s being run through intelligence agencies. That’s absolutely positive. There’s very, very strong signs that they’re using U.S. companies, Big Techs like Meta, who’s been getting a lot of attention — a lot of flak — lately because of clear signs that its algorithm is favoring Bolsonaro and suppressing Lula.

Multiple instances that they even admit happens, “Oh, but no, but it was just a mistake. It was just a mistake.” Meta and the Big Techs in the U.S., they’re really concerned about what a Lula government could do for their profits. Maybe Lula wants to have more sovereignty and control over what they’re doing.

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The Brazilian government doesn’t even know how much money they make in Brazil, the Big Techs. They just know how much money they send out through the tax bills that they pay and the money they send out of the country. The Big Techs in the U.S. are really concerned about getting their access on rare earths and on lithium reserves, which Brazil has the largest deposits of rare earths after China. This whole trade war with China, Brazil becomes much more important. It’s a huge market.

So you have one candidate that is just completely submissive — like painfully, embarrassingly submissive — to U.S. interests. So much so that one of his former closest allies, a general, Santos Cruz, who’s a very famous well-known general, he came out recently and said, “I’m a conservative. I’m right-wing. This is not conservatism. This is not right wing. This is just ‘voluntary submissiveness.’”

They’re just absolutely scamming Brazilians with this level of supplicancy that we’ve never seen before, that the military dictatorship even didn’t do, which was hand in glove with the U.S. interests. This is completely next level, and it’s something that obviously the left is very concerned about. 

But people like Santos Cruz, Brazilians that actually believe in Brazilian sovereignty, and that it’s important for Brazil to be able to pursue its own interests rather than the interests of foreign powers — they’re very concerned about that, which is, some segments of the elite. 

Whenever you have a submissive local government in an imperialist relationship, there are people that benefit. There are local people that will get special contracts, that will get special treatment. They’ll be able to crush their enemies through these relationships. And that’s what they’re doing in Bolivia and in Peru and in Ecuador right now.

What they did in Venezuela, where they just came in and took all of the oil and said, “All right. We’re going to take 90 percent of the oil profits, and we’ll give you a couple billion a year.” People are seeing this in Brazil. They see what Trump has done. And they’re still saying, “Well, we like Bolsonaro, so we’re going with Bolsonaro. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

It’s a massive issue, and I really, I don’t think we know how bad it will be and how submissive they’ll be this time around. Because it always is the case that, with right-wing authoritarian governments, it’s the second term where they really take off whatever mask was left and decide, “We have a mandate and we can do whatever we want.”

You saw it in the U.S. with Trump. They saw it in Turkey with Erdoğan. They saw it in Hungary with Orbán. They saw it in India with Modi. This is what always happens. It’s the second term where they say, “OK. We showed them who we are, and everyone said it’s fine.” They’re able to smoke out all of their rivals in the first term. They map them out, and so when the second time comes around, it’s just bang, bang, bang. Let’s get rid of them. Let’s maximize our power and do whatever we want. 

The result’s not going to be positive for Brazil. That’s the thing: If I were a Brazilian billionaire — which I am not — it would be in my personal interest for Brazil to follow the economic path that the Lula government is following, much more than what Bolsonaro is proposing.

Lula’s not some left-wing radical. He’s center-right. He was left, then he became center-left, and he’s moving ever more to the right. This last election, his vice presidential candidate was his former presidential rival, the center-right guy. They’re very much doing what the big banks want. They’re helping the big agro get what they want. They give tons of subsidies to major industries. But the thing that they do, they take a little bit of that money, and they spread it around to the poorest people with public services with access to education, with some cash transfers. We’re talking about 60 bucks or 80 bucks a month to families, and that is what is making the economy grow. Because if you don’t have consumers in your economy, and you have domestic industries you’re trying to build, then no one’s going to buy the things. Your employees can’t buy the things.

That’s intolerable to some people in Brazil, and they can’t see that it benefits their own economic interests.

You’re in this kind of crazy situation where it doesn’t really make sense what they’re doing. And they saw it happen with Bolsonaro, with Jair! They all supported him, and then he crashed the economy. Then they all went back to Lula begrudgingly and said, “OK, we’re going to support you in ’22 because things aren’t going very well.”

Then Lula turned it around immediately, and now they’re forgetting again and going back to Bolsonaro. Logically, it doesn’t make sense. It’s more psychological. Freud has to explain what’s going on.

JW: Again, the parallels between the United States and Brazil are very apparent in terms of some of those economic choices. You’ve already gone over what the U.S. wants to gain from involvement in this election. But there’s another foreign power that’s also interested in the election. Flávio Bolsonaro has been cozying up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, obviously in stark contrast to President Lula, who’s been an ardent supporter of the Palestinians. What would a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency look like for Brazil’s stance towards Israel? 

AF: You can’t say that Lula has been the heroic savior, but he has made statements saying, “This is a genocide. This is very bad. This shouldn’t happen.”

At the same time, he’s allowed Petrobras to ship petroleum products to the Israeli government that are being used in the genocide. He’s allowed one of the major steel manufacturers to ship steel and ore to the Israeli weapons companies that are using it to build rifles and bombs to use in Gaza.

It’s not like you’re dealing with the leader of BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] versus Netanyahu’s best friend. It’s a run-of-the-mill European-style center-left social democrat leader that’s kinda disappointing on this issue, versus someone that just wants to be absolutely submissive to everything that Israel wants and does and just completely supports it.

Again, you said, there’s so many parallels to the U.S. The parallels in Brazil, why does this make sense? Why would they care about supporting Israel? Why would this be something that they would want to put their name on, like these horrible scenes that people have been seeing for years online?

Everyone’s seeing it. Why would they want to support it? They kind of want to do the same thing in Brazil. One of the things that Jair always complains about is that he’s jealous of the U.S. because their cavalry was more effective at exterminating the Indigenous population than the Brazilian cavalry was. They’re upset that they have these relatively small numbers of Indigenous people that have claims to these massive swaths of land, much of which in the Amazon, that they want to get their hands on so they can cut down the trees and throw cows in and do mining. So a colonial–settler project that involves extermination of the Indigenous population to benefit their economy.

That’s what Israel’s doing, and that’s what they want to do in Brazil: “Why don’t you give me all the fun, fancy tools of espionage and surveillance and war and suppression that you guys have developed and honed in Israel for the last decades, and let me get my hands on them too so I can do the same thing back here.”

I think that’s one of the main reasons ideologically. Plus the whole political, evangelical right-wing movement, which was a concerted project by the CIA to implant in Latin America, bringing in prosperity gospel to get rid of the Catholic Church and all their support of left and workers movements.

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This is all very well documented, that they brought it in because it’s more individualist ideology, and that individualist ideology also includes the idea that all the Jews need to go to Israel for the reckoning.

There are a ton of parallels between Brazil and the U.S., and that’s because almost all of the worst ideas in the United States have been intentionally exported to Brazil as a way to make Brazil a worse country that’s more in line with U.S. interests. 

That includes healthcare companies. The U.S. model of healthcare. They have free, independent public healthcare in Brazil called SUS [Sistema Único de Saúde]. It’s an incredible system that’s very popular. They want to privatize it. They want to get rid of it to create more profit. Prosperity gospel with all this right-wing ideological movements, they love it.

The NRA sent lobbyists down in 2002 to Brazil to work with the right-wing movements to say, “This is the game plan for how you create a gun movement in Brazil.” And what happened? It manifests itself in the Jair Bolsonaro administration, where they just opened up the floodgates for access to guns, increasing the number of guns you have, the type of guns that you could have, the number of bullets you could have, and getting rid of anything that could help prevent organized crime from getting massive amounts of assault rifles and unmarked bullets they can use in crimes. Under Bolsonaro, that’s one of the things that spread more than ever.

There’s all these little levers that they’re really just doing copy and paste, and we’ve seen these alliances with JD Vance and the Rockbridge [Network], which is a group that he created before he was vice president with a bunch of Peter Thiel and other billionaires in the U.S. They’ve created a subsidiary in Korea and now one in Brazil that they were using to do the same sort of alignment with the local elites that they did before, in the lead-up to the ’64 coup. I can go on for hours about all the different connections and ties. 

JW: To your point, you’ve talked about how this is much bigger than just Brazil.

To me, the “Donroe Doctrine” is hanging over all of this. Last November, President Donald Trump released what he described as a corollary to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the “Donroe Doctrine,” which effectively calls for the U.S. to take an aggressive interventionist stance in Latin America under the guise of protecting the United States’ national security and economic interests in the region.

Andrew, from your perspective, what more should we understand about what the United States is doing in Brazil and kind of the wider context of the Trump administration’s actions in Latin America over the last two years? 

AF: It’s pretty simple. They are fighting the Cold War against China in Latin America, just like they used to do against the Soviets. As part of that war, they are aligning with far-right upstart leaders that are seen as anti-establishment, even though they’re usually tied to billionaires or even billionaires themselves, like in Ecuador.

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There’s this weird coincidence with all of them that they almost all have connections to organized drug trafficking. They’re almost all known drug smugglers or connected to them or have some sort of financial relations. While they’re doing that, they’re arguing that “We are working together with these local governments in South and Latin America to fight drug trafficking,” which is obviously a farce.

That’s what they did in Ecuador. The president of Ecuador, Noboa, he’s the son of a banana dynasty that does a lot of exporting bananas, and in those crates of bananas, they’ve also been known to export a lot of kilos of cocaine. Their allies in Colombia have always been this way, and the things that they’re doing in Bolivia, it’s the exact same thing. The [Bolivian] attorney general who was trying to push back against the corruption of this right-wing government that has allied with Trump, well Trump and Rubio came in and said listen, you need to go after this attorney general and get rid of him. So he was arrested because he was going after their allies.

They don’t care about drug trafficking, obviously. The U.S. government never cared about drugs. It’s always been a weapon or a tool for them. So they’re aligning with these people to create this lockstep union that they’re calling the “Shield of the Americas.” It’s this new alliance that they’re using instead of the existing, the U.N. or other mechanisms. They’re creating all their own, just like they did with the “Board of Peace.” They’re working to make sure that those economies just stay in their sphere of influence just a little bit longer. 

They know that China’s winning. China is the main trade partner with all of these countries now. They’re Brazil’s biggest trade partner. The United States cannot absorb all of the exports that Brazil produces that goes to China. They’re not going to get Brazil to stop trading with China or stop having relations with China. They compete on corn and ethanol and soy exports. They can’t absorb what China’s buying.

They’re really just trying to buy a little bit more time as their empire is slowly waning, but at the cost of what? At the cost of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of lives? It’s not clear what the indirect results of this will be. At the cost of destroying the democratic institutions in these countries that are already, many of them struggling and teetering, and potentially at the cost of massive ecological devastation, as would be the case in the collapse of the Amazon under a Bolsonaro government?

It’s uplifting, right? 

JW: Very uplifting. That is my first word that comes to mind. You’ve pointed out everything that Donald Trump is doing, but we also know that tech oligarchs are involved as well. Tech tycoons like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have taken a massive interest in Latin American politics.

What impact do you think that is having on the rightward shift we’re seeing throughout the Americas? 

AF: Oh, big time. Big time. I think the biggest tycoon that’s most in the news lately is Mark Zuckerberg. He’s the guy who runs Meta. Something like 99 percent of people in Brazil use WhatsApp as their primary form of communication. 

The idea of sending a text message in Brazil is like, “What are you, some sort of barbarian? What decade is this?” People only use WhatsApp. And for a lot of people, you get a cheap phone, and you get a prepaid phone plan because they didn’t have net neutrality like it was passed in the U.S. It’ll come with free credits for WhatsApp and Facebook, and it’ll come preinstalled on the phone even, and it’s part of the plan.

So for a lot of people, Facebook for many years and WhatsApp were the internet. Now Instagram as well. Instagram is really the main tool of political communication at this point. As we know, [it is] highly censored. You guys saw recently at the No Kings protests what Meta can do if it just decides to suddenly have a technical error that they fail to fix for eight hours.

That’s what they’ve been doing in Brazil for months now. So you have a young right-wing member of Congress named Nikolas Ferreira. He comes from a right-wing evangelical church, and he’s very charismatic, and he’s really good on social media, and he’s got something like 22 million followers or something. Brazil has 214 million people.

When Lula was having this dispute a year or two ago with foreign tech interests, including Meta’s interests, Nikolas Ferreira planted this fake news that Lula was trying to tax the main financial instrument that people use called Pix. It’s this free instant cash transfers that you can do that’s created by the central bank, and everyone loves it. Trump hates it because it competes against Mastercard and Visa.

So [Ferreira] created this fake news that what Lula was trying to do was tax all transactions and so therefore you were just going to get taxed even more, and you, the poor working man, was going to get screwed. In reality, there was no tax involved, and it was an anti-money laundering initiative that any transactions over 1,000 reais [Editor’s note: 5,000 Brazilian reais] would be immediately reported so they can trace questions of money laundering, which is a huge problem in Brazil.

That video was seen, the last time I checked, over 300 million times in a country that has 214 million people, and not all of them are on Instagram. That’s just Instagram — not including the other social networks. And in the last few weeks of the election, Nikolas Ferreira’s account has had greater engagement and views than every global celebrity you can name. I don’t know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but three times more than Beyoncé. Just think of the most famous person that you can think of in the world and their account, and Nikolas Ferreira — who you hadn’t heard of until I said his name just now — is crushing them.

That’s being seen as probable algorithmic manipulation by Meta in favor of the right-wing movement. OK, that’s one example, we don’t have access to the algorithm, we can’t be sure about that. Well. if you go onto the Meta’s AI in WhatsApp, and you say, “Create me a political poster for Flávio, vote Flávio,” it’ll do vote Flávio, and they’ll use his election number, 22.

And you say, “Vote for a capybara, vote for a flamingo,” They’ll say, “Vote 22.” They’ll use Flávio’s number. And then if you say, “Do another poster, but say vote Lula,” it’ll say, “We can’t do that. That’s an election interference, and we’re not allowed to do that.” And say you just did it for Flávio,” and then the AI will be like, “Oh, you’re right. That’s a mistake.” But then it keeps happening, and it’s been happening for weeks now. People have been pointing it out for weeks. 

They blocked Lula’s Meta account from being able to run paid ads like 10 days before the first round of the elections. They said, oh, that was a mistake. It was my bad. Lots of left-wing accounts have seen these weird number shifts.

So they’ll have, let’s say, 20,000 comments, but it’ll say zero shares, or the views will go down to zero, or people have been talking about, “My engagement just has been completely in the tank since this election has started.” Not everybody, but some people. 

There’s all these pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggest that Meta is interfering in this election, and they have every incentive to do so. They will have a much better regulatory environment if Flávio wins because of Flávio’s submissiveness to U.S. interests and his willingness to play ball with whatever Trump tells him to.

So that’s just one case. That’s just Mark Zuckerberg.

JW: Cutting in here, from the future. After our conversation with Andrew. We requested comment from Meta who sent a lengthy response, but in summary, they said, “Each of the incidents cited by Lula’s campaign has a straightforward, documented explanation. … None reflects political targeting. None reflects manipulated distribution. None reflects an effort to influence the election.”

Meta said Lula’s campaign ad account was disabled for one hour by mistake, not for political reasons. The company also claimed that issues with ad creation and video view count were global errors, and not politically motivated. 

On Monday, a Brazilian court gave Meta 24 hours to prove that it was not favoring Flávio Bolsonaro over President Lula in its feeds, or it would face an escalating fine. This comes after that same judge ruled that while he could not find evidence of deliberate interference, the company had 24 hours to prove that the issues affecting the Lula campaign were solved and would not reoccur. 

OK, now back to Andrew. 

AF: Elon’s coming down here. Peter Thiel was just down in Argentina to hang out with Javier Milei, who’s the president who’s been destroying the economy and businesses are shuttering, unemployment’s up, costs of living have gone through the roof, but he’s this anarcho-capitalist, hyper-libertarian that’s just been cutting everything with a literal chainsaw. He came on stage with a chainsaw saying, just like Elon Musk did, I’m going to cut through all the regulations and the red tape.

That’s what they want, and Flávio Bolsonaro said, I’m going to do that. I want to follow the Milei model. In the last debate that they had, the first debate, which was just the other night, Lula asked Flávio about this: Are you going to be Milei?

He was just sort of refusing to answer the question. Eventually OK, what model are you going to follow? [Lula] said, I’m going to follow the Lula model, the one that I’ve been doing that’s been working. What are you going to do? Answer the question. But, outside of that debate, [Flávio] had been saying that he loves Milei.

Milei gave him an official endorsement, just like Benjamin Netanyahu did an official endorsement for Flávio, which is something that doesn’t happen in international relations. Foreign leaders just as a matter of course don’t endorse a candidate in a foreign election. So they’re being very overt in this, and they’re all working together with their billionaire buddies who have controls over huge levers of power in Brazil because of how Big Techs work in the world.

That’s one of the main issues for leftist voters in Brazil right now. They want sovereignty for their country. They want Brazil to be able to govern Brazil under Brazilian law and have control over Brazil to serve Brazilian interests.

Flávio Bolsonaro does not care about that. Trump and Musk and Zuckerberg do not want that because it would be a limitation on their ability to exert power in Brazil and in the world. They don’t want it to be a model for the rest of the world. 

JW: Listening to everything you’re saying, obviously, we’re not going to fix the issue of tech oligarchs meddling in foreign elections by Sunday. But are there any final thoughts that you have just about this election? 

AF: I would say that this election is so important and relevant for the United States and for the world. For many years, there’s been this concept called the Brazilification of the United States.

Brazil wants to become, or, people that vote for Flávio at least, they want Brazil to become the United States. They see the U.S. as the country where everything works, where everything is perfect and goes well, and they don’t see all the bad stuff that listeners and readers of The Intercept know all about far too well.

But in reality, it’s not that Brazil is becoming more like the United States, it’s that the United States is becoming more like Brazil.

The middle class is getting squeezed and disappearing. In Brazil, 90 percent of the country makes $1,200 or less a month. The middle class would be considered extremely poor by U.S. standards, and what it does exist of a U.S.-style middle class is just teeny-tiny. You have just shrinking spheres of democracy, while oligarchs have increasing power and control and are able to do what they want and insist on decisions for the country that are bad for the society, bad for all of the society and the people, but good for their individual interests.

It’s just this more polarized, divided, K-shape economies, what you guys call it in the U.S. That’s where things are going. So you should really pay attention to this Brazilian election because the things that are happening here and the things that are going to happen in the next few days are very likely to be happening in the United States in the near future, if they’re not already happening.

JW: The Brazilification of the United States is a really good way to put it. I think so often people in the U.S., and, I can include myself, we think about the impact that the United States has on other countries, but we rarely think about the mutual shared relationships and larger shared ideas that people have between countries, between continents. So I think that’s a really good point. 

We’re going to have to leave it there, but Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Andrew Fishman’s reporting at The Intercept Brasil. 

AF: Thank you. Keep up the good work.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

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

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

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

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington. 

The post The Stakes of Brazil’s Presidential Election  appeared first on The Intercept.

The October 8 shooting of Oscar Belgal by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in front of his 5-year-old son in Manhattan forced into the open a question that had been on many New Yorkers’ minds: What would the New York Police Department do when ICE broke the “rule of law” in the city, and how would Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the person who has the power to hire and fire the NYPD commissioner, respond? 

Shortly after the shooting, Mamdani addressed the incident with an appropriate amount of outrage, declaring ICE “rotten to its core,” and calling for the department to be abolished. His frustration was visible, but he was much less expressive when it came to his appraisal of the city’s response to the situation. He had nothing substantive to discuss with respect to his police department’s involvement, despite NYPD officers arriving on the scene only to find unidentified ICE agents holding guns, wearing plain clothes and disguises and masks, in apparent violation of federal laws requiring identification. (A recently passed New York state law prohibiting federal agents from wearing masks and other face coverings was temporarily blocked by a judge.) NYPD officers applied first aid and transported Belgal to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen hospital.

According to many eyewitness accounts and widely circulated video, members of the NYPD appeared to assist ICE agents by forcefully helping with crowd control — at one point, an NYPD officer shoved congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom Mamdani personally stumped for, to the ground. Later, NYPD cleared a path for federal agents to whisk Belgal away from the hospital to a federal detention facility downtown. 

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After the shooting, the Democratic Socialists of America, several legislators, and Avila Chevalier all called on Mamdani to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and demanded the mayor uphold his campaign pledge to disband the NYPD’s infamous Strategic Response Group. Mamdani repeatedly refused to fire Tisch but said he was reviewing the 24-hour period around the shooting. When asked directly about Avila Chevalier being thrown to the ground, the mayor called it unacceptable, saying, “That is not something I will look to justify.” He reminded New Yorkers to be patient with efforts to reform the NYPD, ordered a review of the department’s use-of-force policies, and added funding for the inspector general’s office. But once again, he stood by his commissioner, citing “her record of uprooting corruption from the upper echelons of the NYPD while lowering crime across our city.”

Noticeably absent from any of Mamdani’s public remarks about the NYPD or Tisch was any public acknowledgment of the NYPD officers in relation to ICE agents during the Belgal incident.

Federal and city law enforcement occupy similar spaces but never really interact with each other. Mamdani made no mention of the ways in which the actions of federal agents put pressure on the NYPD as mediators — the primary function of police — to liaise in moments of conflict.

The NYPD typically relishes this role, which is why the department consumes so much of New York’s budget and shuns any attempts to redirect funds to other services that might reduce the need for police mediation to begin with. ICE forces local police to make choices in policy and in practice about how to deal with violent (often illegal) immigration operations.

If the NYPD believes itself to be the thin blue line, on which side of order and chaos do New York’s force and Mamdani believe these federal outside agitators to be?

This omission — or evasion, depending on how you look at it — of this predicament is strange considering Mamdani’s willingness to speak with moral clarity about even the most contentious issues and confront them head-on. It’s also bizarre considering his penchant for weaving shared experiences together and for putting the lived experiences of New Yorkers front and center.

On the campaign trail, one of Mamdani’s most alluring traits was his ability to speak to the actual problems of everyday residents. It wasn’t just because he possessed once-in-a-generation oratory skills; candidate Zohran achieved this because, as a proud democratic socialist, there was an analysis — an explanation of the material conditions of life — baked into his politics. His rhetoric seemed in line with, or at least not alienated from (see: establishment Democrats), how fast reality was moving and how it was impacting the lives of everyday New Yorkers.

When it comes to ICE, however, Mayor Mamdani’s rhetoric and policies haven’t always aligned, which has opened him up to questions about the kind of mayor he really is. On one hand, he has shown that he will speak out against Trump’s fascist and inhumane immigration efforts. On the other hand, Mamdani hasn’t moved with the same level of force as his words. Many have pointed out that Mamdani seems to be engaging in realpolitik in an effort to get his extensive progressive agenda passed. It’s certainly not easy to bring the machine of the New York government up to speed while also being transparent about the ways in which he is moving the needle. But that’s exactly what he was elected to do.

Had Mamdani got into office and done nothing different than previous mayors — or even been exceptionally corrupt, pro-cop, and willing to help the Trump administration like predecessor Eric Adams — he might have been able to avoid his current moment of reckoning. But his administration’s genuine efforts on immigration set into motion a future where the NYPD and ICE would come into conflict.

One of Mamdani’s first moves as mayor was to take stock of how the city’s many agencies were upholding existing sanctuary city laws. In February 2026, he signed Executive Order 13, his first major order pertaining to immigration, to create the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and establish baseline guidance, such as explicitly prohibiting ICE and other non-local law enforcement agencies from using city-owned garages and vacant lots. Crucially, EO 13 also required an audit of several agencies, including NYPD, to review their immigration-related policies.

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NYPD already has a problematic history dealing with immigration enforcement. During the Adams administration, there were documented cases where the NYPD assisted or collaborated with immigration enforcement, sometimes in accordance with NYPD policies. A December 2025 report by Jocelyn Strauber, then-commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation, found at least one incident in which “an officer violated local law by providing assistance to federal authorities in connection with enforcement of the federal civil immigration law,” as well as evidence that NYPD did “not fully comply with documentation and reporting requirements concerning requests for assistance with federal civil immigration enforcement.” The report also found that there were numerous examples of NYPD policies and practices that elevated the “risk of improper information sharing or assistance to federal authorities for purposes of civil immigration enforcement.”

The resulting audit, which was released on May 22 by Mamdani’s deputy mayor, built on those findings and recommended NYPD (and other city agencies) update its reporting requirements. But the audit also left a lot of open questions, which numerous legal advocates attested to, about areas in which NYPD protocols and policies keep avenues open to potentially collaborate with ICE. The NYPD was “not being held to a high standard of accountability or scrutiny for collusion,” the audit found, and there were significant “gaps” in documenting potential violations of department policies. The question of what the city and its mayor could do to ensure compliance also remained unanswered.

Sanctuary laws prohibit using city resources for immigration enforcement, and a January 2025 NYPD internal memo specifically barring officers from facilitating street closures to enable immigration enforcement seemed to solidify that directive. But several high-profile incidents involving the NYPD have tested the department’s compliance with sanctuary laws. In October 2025, before Mamdani was elected, during an immigration raid in Chinatown, eyewitnesses and viral videos showed NYPD officers establishing perimeters to create a path for federal law enforcement agents. In another instance in May 2026, ICE reportedly “dragged” a Nigerian immigrant out of a Brooklyn hospital after agents used force in his arrest; NYPD officers brutalized and arrested numerous protesters and cleared debris from the road to enable ICE to escape the crowds and abscond with their target.

Both of these incidents happened under the watch of Tisch, who has insisted again and again that the department follows all sanctuary laws. When asked about the Brooklyn incident, Mamdani insisted NYPD was responding to 911 calls about the protest, not helping ICE. “Our laws leave nothing, no room for interpretation about the fact that our NYPD will not participate in civil immigration enforcement,” he said. NYPD told the Guardian US: “Upon arrival, officers observed numerous individuals acting in a disorderly manner, obstructing vehicular traffic, and blocking emergency entrances and exits at Wyckoff Heights medical center.” 

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When the NYPD arrives at an ICE raid or at a protest against an immigration abduction, what are officers supposed to do? On this point, NYPD and Mamdani have offered little clarity. But October 8 doesn’t pass the smell test for anyone who lives in overpoliced neighborhoods or closely observes the activity of police and their behavior.

NYPD officers were responding to an unrelated call nearby when they heard the report of shots fired. When they arrived, they encountered several men in various forms of attire, including some in construction-style vests, face masks, and at least one carrying a long gun, which officer body camera footage released by the Department confirms. The official account of the NYPD’s interaction offers no mention of ICE. There are no additional insights or explanations of department protocol that might shed light on how officers are supposed to act given the circumstances. Curiously, what those officers thought when they encountered several masked men with guns, and the conversations that took place between the ICE agents and the police, is a mystery, too. All we know is that officers agreed at some point that the NYPD would place Belgal in a vehicle, apply aid, and take him to the hospital. 

Since that evening, Mayor Mamdani has stood firm in his condemnation of ICE and their operations. “We will not normalize ICE’s viciousness,” he said, calling for the agency to be abolished. That’s the least he could say to reassure New Yorkers he understands the stakes they feel in their bones already. The shooting of Oscar Belgal and his subsequent inhumane treatment — his lawyers say Belgal is still in solitary confinement with a bullet in his neck — is a reminder of how normalizing ICE operations in New York City is already well underway. 

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There have been more lower-profile ICE sightings and kidnappings, which echoes what has been the case in other parts of the country. What Mamdani will do to bring the city’s response into alignment with the needs of New Yorkers in this moment still remains an open question, including clarifying the NYPD’s role in the city’s ongoing fight against the Trump administration’s gestapo tactics.

If this month’s incident offered a lesson for Mamdani, it is that clearly articulating what is right is a full-time job that requires an unwavering willingness to confront reality. It’s not enough to say the thing on one issue — calling a genocide by its name, publicly dragging FIFA for pandering to wealthy elites, or deriding the inhumane practices of slumlords — but not stand on business when it comes to the reality that New Yorkers are seeing on their own streets. 

Sometimes, an actual seismic event can reveal what needs to be done and that there are alternatives that may not have been fully realized before. Hope isn’t lost. There is still time for Mamdani to update his analysis. But in this moment, the mayor must make a choice: renew his commitment to the truth, or be defined by its absence. 

The post Mamdani’s High-Wire Balancing Act Between ICE and NYPD Can’t Last appeared first on The Intercept.

Disenchanted and disturbed by Google’s military contracts with the U.S. and Israel, Liguori says she could no longer stand working at a company that was going to help kill people or help build technology that “automatically makes it easier to escalate the brutality of war.”

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Liguori joined DeepMind in 2023 and began working on AI systems aimed at more efficiently routing power through the electrical grid, a peacetime engineering problem. But as she learned of Google’s Project Nimbus contract, which furnishes Israel’s military and top weapons manufacturers with a suite of advanced artificial intelligence tools, she began to question her role in the company, and the company’s role in the world. The day after Google announced its classified military AI contract with the Pentagon in April, Liguori staged a personal sick-out, using a combination of sick leave and holiday time off to cease her work.

In a letter she sent internally informing DeepMind and her colleagues of her resignation, Liguori urged them to “stay human” in the face of military work. “I no longer believe that our technology will have a net positive impact on society. I think there’s a fantasy world where AI can help decarbonize grids, cut waste, protect ecosystems, and benefit humanity,” she wrote. “But it’s not this world, and it’s not this type of general purpose AI we are racing to develop. Racing to deploy agentic AI in this society and historical moment is a terrible idea, and will definitely be a net evil.”

The Intercept spoke to Liguori, an Italian national living in London, where DeepMind is headquartered, about how she came to view her employer as dangerously powerful. During a series of interviews by phone and via text, which have been edited and condensed for length and clarity, she explained her moral opposition to military work, the role of unionization in dissent, and what hope engineers and scientists might have for influencing their companies.

What was it about DeepMind that made you want to work there?

I had a high opinion of DeepMind; it was a dream company. It had this aura of being a research-oriented place where you could sit close not just to computer scientists, but real scientists and researchers and people with backgrounds in biology, in physics, in mathematics, in ecology, in anthropology.

You joined in 2023, by which point the company had already been involved in Project Nimbus. Were you aware of that project at the time?

Not really. The first year when I joined, I was very new and very isolated in my team. Google DeepMind is a huge company and if you’re not in the right channels, you end up being very siloed. I didn’t know about Project Nimbus, but when the Gaza war escalated, I discovered it. I immediately looked for some internal resistance movement to join, but I didn’t find anything.

I discovered [Google employee advocacy group] No Tech for Apartheid, but I thought it was mainly a U.S. organization. I didn’t know how to connect with colleagues that share concerns, so the only thing that I did was buy a Palestine hoodie and go to the office with that.

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In the summer of 2024, I went on maternity leave because my daughter was born, and during maternity leave I was watching news from Gaza every day. I was really suffering experiencing maternity and watching a livestreamed genocide, and every time I was thinking of my company’s complicity in that. I thought about not coming back to work at all.

When I was due to come back, I met a colleague that had basically taken my role in my team before maternity leave, and they were actually leaving for ethical reasons. They put me in contact with the union movement and No Tech for Apartheid. And so I found other colleagues fighting against this.

How and when did you learn of the company’s contracts with the U.S. military?

By the time they started engaging with the U.S. Department of War, [Editor’s note: July 2025] I was already involved in activism. By this winter we saw the GenAI.mil contract materializing, and for me, this was a very clear indication of the company’s intentions. At the same time Google ramped up the security level authorization for Cloud: IL6, which is the level required to handle classified workloads.

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The combination of the two — signing this non-classified deal with the Department of War, and ramping up security level — really meant that we wanted to use AI for war, on the battlefield. Even if the internal narrative was, “No, don’t worry, it’s just for administrative purposes, just to process documents.”

What was happening internally?

Internally there was a lot of conversation in specific channels where people were complaining, but leadership never really answered anything. I had some of my posts deleted.

What had you written, and did you ever get any sort of answer as to why this stuff was deleted?

I had several posts deleted because they contained the word “genocide,” and I was told that genocide is an intrinsically violent word, and so I was violating internal policies. Even when my posts weren’t deleted, I often had conversations with my manager and HR telling me that my tone was not appropriate because I was too aggressive and that I should raise my concerns in different ways.

They basically wanted us to send [internal HR] tickets to raise our concerns. The problem is that when you do that, you receive semi-automated answers with absolutely no content, nobody is engaged on the concern you have raised. There’s no discussion at all, you don’t even interact with a human. It’s a lot of administrative and bureaucratic steps you have to follow to raise concerns. What I wanted was discussion and what I wanted was very clear answers from leadership.

They tell you this is not the place to raise concerns, try to go through this other channel. This is the common technique. They always tell you to do something else, try to make you tired, and you will never get an answer.

[Editor’s note: The Intercept asked Google about Liguori’s criticism of both the contract and how discussion is handled internally. Spokesperson Tom Hewett responded: “We work with public sector organisations worldwide and follow a consistent process for reviewing and entering these contracts, including compliance with our acceptable use policies and AI principles. We also have dedicated channels for employees to safely raise any concerns – ranging from business ethics to misconduct – and have strict workplace policies in place to prevent retaliation of any kind.”]

I think the reason why you would be opposed to Project Nimbus is pretty straightforward: genocide. What were your specific concerns about or opposition to the Department of War contract?

I’m against the use of AI for targeting and in warfare in general, not only for autonomous weapons. I’m against AI for war, and I don’t think a commercial company like Google should have anything to do with that.

AI for targeting is very dangerous; it creates a system where it’s easier to escalate the brutality of war. The first problem is the opacity introduced in the definition of targets and the dehumanization that follows. In principle, if you have to define targets, if you want to define Hamas combatants, you have to think what it actually means and come up with a definition.

But with these systems, you can bypass the definition. The system itself comes out with a definition. You don’t even question it, you just blindly rely on the definition as the ultimate truth. The person just becomes a set of aggregated data points. All individuality is lost, all humanity is lost in in this process.

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It becomes a system that dehumanizes people. It becomes a rubber stamp because the human brain cannot process all this information. You keep a person that formally approves it, but they don’t, they cannot, meaningfully evaluate the output. This links to the accountability gap: Everyone in the kill chain can plausibly say that they didn’t decide.

What did you do to protest the Department of War contract internally?

Mainly messaging on corporate channels to inform colleagues, and speaking with them in person. I tried to channel the widespread dissatisfaction and indignation over the contract into the collective movement we are building, into our union effort. [Editor’s note: DeepMind employees voted to unionize in May.] Many people still don’t know there are other colleagues organizing against these contracts and for a more ethical Google DeepMind.

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When you are alone and you lose faith in your company, and you stop believing your work makes a positive difference, you can only become disillusioned and frustrated, and you ultimately end in acceptance and cynicism, or you leave. Finding you are not alone, and joining a collective movement, gives a much better option. It gave me the strength to stay, at least for a year.

I also co-organized a demonstration in February in front of the office. The scope was broader than just the Department of War, but the December GenAI.mil launch had given me a deep sense of urgency, and that’s why I organized the demonstration. I knew something like the classified deal was coming, and I knew this meant legitimizing Nimbus-style collaborations to become the standard. The demonstration was for Gaza and for any use of AI in war. We had banners with “No AI in the kill chain” and “No Gemini for Genocide.”

Has your work as a research engineer contributed to your concerns about this technology being used to kill? How has your technical knowledge informed your opposition?

Understanding how these systems work makes it easier to see where the problem is. Understanding statistical aggregation, and how easy it is to just delegate responsibility, delegate decision-making, makes a difference. But I think it’s more important to do some philosophical reasoning here.

Do you have concerns about the reliability of the technology?

I am concerned about unreliability. But I don’t think you should ever look at unreliability separate from a discussion of why AI in warfare is wrong by itself.

A lot of the time what I hear is a focus on error, for example, the Minab school attack. If we focus only on the error, we are basically saying that if there was no error, these systems for automated targeting are OK.

Were there people within Deep Mind who were supportive of this contract or military work generally?

Yes, it was actually a very debated topic. I think there is broad consensus on the Anthropic red lines, which are fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.

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But on whether to use AI for military purposes, this is a much more debated topic, and a lot of people buy the narrative of us-versus-them: That we need to defend ourselves against Russia, against China, and so on.

What was your thought process on deciding to leave the company over this?

It was a very challenging year. I came back as a new mom with a full-time job, a baby to handle, I had some health issues, and I was committing to activism basically on the side. Many people told me, you can slow down, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stay in the company and just go on with business as usual. I really felt we needed to stop the Department of War contract because I perceive that contract as normalizing what happened in Gaza — the kind of tech-powered, AI-powered, brutal war that was tested in Gaza was getting approved to become the standard of war.

I don’t think petitions have a great effect in general. The [DeepMind] petition summarized my disillusionment from us not having done more during the year to prevent this from happening. For me, really, we should have gone on strike this year. We should have stopped working.

In the U.S., there is a lot of defense of these contracts on the basis that it’s important for national security. That might be persuasive if you’re American. But Americans are a pretty small minority on the planet. I’m curious what your perspective is on that kind of rationale as someone who lives in another country, who is a citizen of another country.

There’s been discussion about that as well. A lot of Europeans were actually scared of that, because the current Trump administration is not very friendly even to Europeans. What feels like national security for U.S., people feels like a threat for Europeans.

Are you aware of other colleagues at DeepMind who are going to follow what you’re doing and quit?

Some have quit already, some publicly and some silently. There have been many people leaving because of ethical reasons. Not all of them publicized it.

Do you think it’s possible for workers to change something like the Pentagon contract? What is the worker movement inside Google/DeepMind missing that would allow for that kind of change?

I think it’s possible, but it requires a real commitment and readiness to take some risk. Ultimately, I think we need a workforce ready to strike to oppose these contracts. Currently, many people are too scared to even express an opinion publicly. The company was very effective at creating a pervasive sense of fear, which induces self-censorship.

What I tried to show my colleagues this year was exactly that the boundaries we perceive and we retreat behind are not the real boundaries — that we can speak out and keep our jobs. Most of the times the reaction is intimidation in meetings, mentions of policy violations, but nothing else follows. Obviously, there are some boundaries, but they are much farther then the perceived ones.

I also took a day off and demonstrated in front of the office in February, together with University College London BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement] staff and a few other colleagues. I faced literally no consequences for that because it’s a trade union activity in my spare time, and in the U.K., we are protected for such an action. This can be a form of soft strike.

As I write in my letter, if we fail to challenge these restrictions, we internalize them and become diminished versions of ourselves. And I think that in an era of increasing surveillance and authoritarianism, that’s something to reflect on. I have felt much freer since I found the courage to speak out and take some risks. It’s empowering. Fighting this fear is a big part of our task in the union movement we are trying to create in Google DeepMind.

The next step would be a real strike. I always tell my union friends that if I see any Google workers strike, I can die happy.

The post Google DeepMind Engineer Resigns in Protest of Pentagon Contract appeared first on The Intercept.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has routinely cast Somalia as lawless and Somalis as violent. Meanwhile, his administration has, largely without public knowledge, killed hundreds of people in Somalia, claiming they belong to terror groups. Trump personally ordered the death of a Somali man within days of regaining the White House, according to his counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka. The administration claimed, without offering any evidence, that the man was connected with the Islamic State terror group. Trump has sought to do the same with Omar.

Homeland Security agents raided Omar’s Washington, D.C., home last Monday, three weeks before the midterms, in which she is seeking reelection. The Trump administration reportedly launched the investigation to build a case to strip Omar of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her. (Omar fled war in Somalia with her family when she was 8 years old, later immigrated to the U.S. as a refugee, and became a citizen in 2000.) The administration has also issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to some of Omar’s relatives. On Monday, conservative media outlets reported that federal prosecutors obtained Omar’s DNA as part of their investigation.

“This is what happens in a dictatorship. The leader identifies his political, ethnic and religious enemies, and his agents scramble to do his bidding and make him happy,” Zaynab Mohamed, a Somali immigrant who represents Minneapolis in Minnesota’s state Senate, told The Intercept. “Representative Omar is the latest subject where Trump identifies the target and his minions go looking for a crime. The cases always fall apart, and this one will, too.” 

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Trump claimed not to have ordered the raid, but throughout his second term, his Justice Department has repeatedly targeted his political enemies — from New York’s attorney general, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” Trump said to reporters. “I have nothing to do with it.”

Omar called it “an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.” She added: “For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.” Omar’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Intercept.

With the Somali community, Trump found a target that he could attack with Islamophobic, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric, without incurring much mainstream backlash, said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“As immigrants, Muslims, and — most importantly — Black people, it’s the trifecta,” he told The Intercept. “None of us expected the scale and level of the vitriol. But despite this, it’s at the point that the traditional media almost ignore the attacks on the Somali-American community because it’s not a large constituency. Trump says these things, and people just move on.”

Trump’s War on Somalia

Over the last decade, Trump has overseen the killing of as many as 1,500 Somalis in more than 400 attacks, according to a count by New America, a D.C.-based think tank. During his second term alone, the Trump administration has conducted more than 200 airstrikes in Somalia, including close to 90 this year, claiming to target terrorists.

The U.S. military has been at war in Somalia for almost a quarter-century, conducting air attacks and commando raids aimed at the terrorist group al-Shabab as well as the Islamic State group, while the CIA and special operators created local proxy forces to conduct low-profile operations on behalf of America. At the same time, the U.S. has provided Somalia with billions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance.

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U.S. attacks in Somalia have skyrocketed during Trump’s terms in office. From 2007 to 2017, under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. military carried out 59 declared airstrikes in Somalia. The Biden administration conducted 51 declared strikes over four years. During Trump’s six years in office, the U.S. has launched more than 400 attacks against purported militants.

The U.S. rarely offers any evidence that those killed are members of terrorist groups, much less leaders. A New America analysis found militant leaders comprised just 1.7 percent of those killed. Africa Command refused to provide requested evidence that any of those killed in airstrikes in Somalia this year were militants. “All U.S. strikes in Somalia are conducted in close coordination partners [sic] against designated terror groups,” an AFRICOM spokesperson told The Intercept by email.

“Trump has conducted more drone strikes in Somalia than Bush, Obama, and Biden combined. And so many civilians have died,” historian Elizabeth Schmidt, the author of “Foreign Intervention in Africa After the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror,” told The Intercept. “They were often just young men living in an area where it was easy to label them jihadis. And it turns out they had nothing to do with terrorism.” 

The U.S. claims that it has only killed six civilians over almost two decades of war in Somalia. A count by the airstrike monitoring group Airwars put the number at as much as 2,600 percent higher. A 2023 investigation by The Intercept determined, for example, that a drone attack in Somalia during Trump’s first term killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time of the attack, the U.S. announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.” 

Trump calls Somalia a “third-world” or “fourth-world nation,” says that it “stinks,” and disparaged Somalis who come to the U.S., saying “we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

His most xenophobic consigliere also claims Somalia is responsible for violence that has caused people to flee the country. “The entire Somali refugee program is predicated on a lie,” wrote Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, late last year. “Destroying your own country does not give you the right to become a citizen in ours.” But this faux history disregards America’s decadeslong role in fomenting violence in Somalia and destabilizing the country.

A casualty of the Cold War geopolitics that led to widespread conflict, political repression, and millions of deaths across the developing world, Somalia has experienced persistent political instability and strife since the late 1960s. In recent decades, the country has suffered civil war, famine, droughts, a longtime al-Shabab insurgency, and persistent humanitarian crises.

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Over the last quarter century, the U.S. has intensified conflict in Somalia through direct attacks; training, funding, and running proxy forces; and funneling in weapons and other military assistance to one side of a civil war. As early as 2007, the Pentagon was aware that there were fundamental flaws with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa, and Somalia devolved into another forever war stalemate. This has continued, despite the record number of airstrikes in Somalia under Trump.

Before Trump took office, in 2016, Islamist militants in Somalia killed 4,281 people, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. By August, this year’s total hit 6,731 deaths, a 57 percent increase. An analysis by the Costs of War project at Brown University found that instead of eliminating militant groups, the U.S. counterterrorism campaign in Somalia was “ensuring that the conflict continues in perpetuity.” An AFRICOM spokesperson said the command’s “operational focus remains on working with partners to degrade terrorist organizations to create the space required for Somali-led governance and stability.” But Trump claims Somalia has no government, no military, and is “not even a country.”

The Intercept interviewed people displaced by the forever war in a camp on the outskirts of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, in 2023. “We had to leave because of the drought and the conflict,” a mother of seven told this reporter. She was one of more than a dozen women from the Lower Shabelle region of southwest Somalia who spoke to The Intercept after fleeing the front lines of an offensive by the U.S.-backed Somali government against al-Shabab. Since Trump first took office, the number of Somalis forced from their homes has almost doubled from 2.4 million to 4.4 million.

“I don’t think most Americans realize that the presence of Somalis in the U.S. has a lot to do with U.S. wars in Somalia. U.S. military intervention made a bad situation worse. This led to a surge of refugees and asylum-seekers to the U.S.,” said Schmidt. “They weren’t coming because they wanted a better job. It’s because they feared for their lives and their children’s lives.”

During Trump’s first term, his administration acknowledged “the ongoing armed conflict” as a reason to extend temporary protected status — which grants legal status, work authorization, and protection from deportation — to Somalis in the U.S., noting the security situation was “fragile and volatile, with ongoing armed conflict among government forces, clan militias, African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops, and al-Shabaab.”

Bringing the War Home

Despite the increase in violence, according to Pentagon statistics, the administration terminated Somalia’s TPS designation earlier this year. More than 1,000 Somali asylum-seekers have been ordered deported since February; more than half the deportation orders involve Somalis living in Minnesota, a nearly tenfold increase from 2025, according to a Minnesota Star Tribune investigation.

About 84,000 of the 260,000 people of Somali descent in the U.S. live in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, according to the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. The overwhelming majority are American citizens. Almost 58 percent were born in the U.S. and 87 percent of foreign-born Somalis are naturalized citizens.

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The administration targeted that Somali community during a violent immigration crackdown in and around Minneapolis known as “Operation Metro Surge” during late 2025 and early 2026. “I don’t want them in our country,” Trump said in December 2025. The next month, he said: “Every one of them should be forced to leave this country, including Ilhan Omar.”

During Metro Surge, federal agents shot and killed protesters Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. They, like Omar and hundreds of drone strike victims in Somalia, were labeled as terrorists by the administration without providing evidence.

During Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have also arrested hundreds of Somali people, with reports of assault and mistreatment at the hands of federal agents.

Trump recently seemed to call for vigilante violence and threatened to back it with federal force. “The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants,” Trump posted on Truth Social earlier this month. “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Hussein, of CAIR-MN, said Trump’s rhetoric was endangering the Somali community. “Every few weeks, he’s literally going on a tirade. And I don’t think he’s ever spoken about other people the same way. He literally put out the message saying, ‘go fight them. I’ll come and help’ on social media,” he told The Intercept. “We’ve seen bullying. We’ve dealt with harassment. We’ve have some assaults.”

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Trump has routinely demonized Somalis by tying the broader community to a high-profile fraud case: the alleged theft of $250 million from a pandemic-era program that provided food for children. The former leader of Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the case, is white, although most of the defendants in the related cases are of Somali descent. “The Somalians, they’re crooked as hell,” Trump ranted at a Cabinet meeting in May, with the administration offering escalating and unverified claims, including reference to a “$19 billion Somali fraud scandal.” 

The Trump administration’s effort to denaturalize and deport Omar is part of a broader push to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, with those of Somali descent specifically singled out. “I would do it in a heartbeat if they were dishonest,” Trump said in an Oval Office interview earlier this year. “I think that many of the people that came in from Somalia, they hate our country.”

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said on Saturday that he had been “told they have a strong case” against Omar. “Of course, if you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody. We’ve done it before,” he told Fox News. The rarely used denaturalization statute has been most famously employed to strip citizenship from Nazi war criminals, like John Demjanjuk, a former death camp guard and retired U.S. autoworker convicted on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder.

Mohamed, who in 2022 became the first Somali woman elected to the Minnesota Senate, called out Trump’s push to expel Omar as a grave threat to the country. “If the president can threaten to denaturalize and deport a member of Congress, no one is safe,” she told The Intercept. “This is a test of our democracy, and even Republicans should be speaking out about it. If we don’t defend the rights of Ilhan Omar, Somali-Americans, immigrants, and Trump’s political targets, we lose everything.”

The post Trump’s Obsession With Somalia Isn’t Just Racist. It’s Been Lethal. appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, Senatobia residents got their answer: Officials plan to do nothing. “In this incident, the Attorney General’s Office found the use of force was justified,” Republican Mississippi AG Lynn Fitch announced in a three-sentence news release posted on her official website.

The announcement was met with anguish and outrage from people inside and outside the state. The Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus demanded more information. “Kohen Wiley was a baby,” said state Rep. Kabir Karriem, who chairs the MLBC. “He posed no threat. He deserved protection, and he deserved a future. His family is owed more than a conclusion. … Announcing that a review is complete does not fulfill the responsibility to explain how a police encounter ended with a baby dead.”

The attorney general’s decision followed a probe into the case by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which was “responsible for conducting a thorough and impartial investigation,” as Mississippi Department of Public Safety Press Secretary Alex Gibert wrote to The Intercept on Tuesday. The email said that the probe “remains open and active.” But in a subsequent phone call, Gibert said that the investigation “involving the officer is closed.”

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Gibert reiterated what the agency has previously said: that body camera footage and other investigative materials will be made available through public records requests. But she added that nothing will be released until after officials meet with Kohen’s family. “We are meeting with the family later this week,” she said.

As recently as Monday, however, the family maintained they had received no communication from the state. Kohen’s grandmother, Veronica Roberson, told Mississippi Today that she found out about the attorney general’s decision on Facebook and that no one had reached out. The outlet also reported last month that, although the investigation was complete and on the attorney general’s desk as of mid-September, no one had interviewed Kohen’s mother, Vel’lesiya Wiley, who was holding her child in her lap when he was shot dead by police. This called into question whether the investigation is as “thorough” as authorities have claimed. Asked by The Intercept whether the MBI investigation sought to interview Wiley, Gibert said she could not comment.

The man who killed Baby Kohen, as the child is now known, was identified by the press as Senatobia Police Sgt. Hunter Foster, who fired his gun into the car where Wiley was riding in the passenger’s seat on June 14. The exact circumstances that led to the shooting remain murky. Police said that officers responded to a shoplifting call at the Walmart; a two-page incident log released to The Intercept via a public records request contained no information about the shooting but noted that the items allegedly stolen were baby clothes and a pack of Pampers.

In a video posted on social media shortly after her child was killed, Wiley said she got into the passenger’s seat of the Ford Fusion after the driver, Latoya Ferrell, was stopped on her way out of the store. Police accused the women of trying to flee; according to Wiley, when she saw officers approach with guns drawn, she said, “I raised my baby up” to warn that he was in the car. Then the police shot him. Ferrell was also struck and was hospitalized, but survived.

The Senatobia Police Department immediately claimed that the car drove toward police, almost hitting them — an account swiftly echoed by the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. But to date, officials have released no evidence to support this account. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who took the family’s case, hired an outside pathologist to do an external examination of the child and to review visual evidence. The medical examiner concluded, based on the appearance of the injuries and path of the fatal bullet, that the officer shot the baby from the side of the car, undermining the police’s version of events.

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The announcement by the attorney general has renewed long-standing calls for video to be released. In a press conference held earlier this month, local activist Patrick Lumumba of the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency accused the state of tailoring its investigation to support a lie — that Wiley and Ferrell deliberately sought to strike Foster with the car.

“If video footage would prove that, they would have released it the next day,” he said.

The killing of Kohen Wiley drew national attention to Senatobia, a small city just south of Memphis, Tennessee. City leaders mostly refused to address the killing, save for a brief, scripted video released by Senatobia Mayor Greg Graves a few days after the shooting. By the time Kohen’s family laid him to rest in late June, the police narrative had prompted many inside and outside Senatobia to blame Kohen’s mother for his death, with rumors suggesting that, rather than charge the police officer, authorities would charge the mother and driver.

The child’s death followed years of warnings by Black residents over the police’s treatment of adults and children alike. Among the string of high-profile incidents was the jailing of a 10-year-old boy for public urination, as well as the violent arrest of two sisters, 13 and 14, outside a public housing complex. According to the girls and their mother, then-police chief Richard Chandler personally ordered one of the girls to “get your Black ass out of the road” before forcing her to the ground. And on Mother’s Day 2025 — in the same Walmart parking lot where Kohen Wiley would be shot dead — a female officer forced a woman out of her car in front of her young children for sitting in a handicapped parking space.

In the summer of 2025, the Senatobia Board of Aldermen dismissed Chandler, replacing him with interim police chief Harold Vanderford, a move aimed at restoring trust, as one alderman put it. But the killing of Kohen Wiley revealed that, in reality, nothing had changed.

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Cops Are Using Flock to Spy on People for the Crime of Standing Around

Residents of Senatobia, including one former law enforcement officer, told The Intercept that the institutional culture brought by Chandler remained entrenched, with Senatobia officers showing disdain and disregard for the community. City records also showed that the chief had pushed the city to adopt new ordinances that would bring in revenue for the police department, while expanding punishment for misdemeanors like loitering.

At several board of alderman meetings over the summer, Lumumba and other activists reminded city leaders that they’d warned officials about the danger posed to Black residents by Senatobia police. At the same time, Mississippi Today revealed evidence that Foster had a history of racist remarks. Just days before he shot Kohen Wiley, Foster was accused of making racist comments to a Black colleague, who later left the police department. Foster is still on the force, on paid leave.

Then, in late August, Mississippi Today exposed racist text messages sent by Vanderford himself. The text messages dated back to the summer of 2025 and contained more than a dozen uses of the N-word. City leadership initially tried to sweep the scandal under the rug: Vanderford claimed that the messages were created by AI and, after a closed-door meeting, the mayor and members of Senatobia’s board of aldermen announced that Vanderford would stay on. But individual aldermen pushed back publicly. On September 1, Vanderford tried to resign, only for the board to announce that they had voted to fire him. Vanderford was replaced by a Black woman, Senatobia Police Lieutenant Angelica Maze.

In a statement accepting the appointment as interim chief on September 5, Maze did what the police department had previously failed to do: express “heartfelt condolences to Kohen Wiley’s family and to everyone in the community who has been affected by this tragic loss.”

In another statement on Monday, after the attorney general announced the use of force was justified, Maze acknowledged that the community “may have questions, concerns, and strong emotions, and we respect everyone’s right to express their views peacefully.”

With the body camera footage likely to be released within the next several days, a new round of waiting begins in Senatobia. In the meantime, the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency released a statement on social media.

“This was never just a news story for us. It was personal – many of us are residents of Senatobia and parents of vulnerable children. … We are also human beings who need time to grieve, reflect, and process everything that has transpired.”

The post Kohen Wiley’s Family Says Investigators Didn’t Contact Them Before Concluding Cops Did No Wrong appeared first on The Intercept.

The 58-year-old had lived with kidney failure for two years, and his doctor had prescribed dialysis twice a week.

Since the siege, however, the fighting stood between al-Eissi and the dialysis center in Taiz city that kept him alive. Al-Eissi wouldn’t let his family risk their lives to take him to the center.

“My father’s condition deteriorated badly,” said his son, Muadh, 38. “We couldn’t move him to Taiz because the fighting had intensified.”

About a week ago, al-Eissi died at home in his bed.

“When I saw my mother weeping for her husband, I felt helpless,” Muadh said. “It might have been avoided if my father had reached his dialysis sessions on time.”

Abdullah is one of at least 10 dialysis patients who have died since the siege on Taiz began because they could not reach treatment, according to Dr. Issam Mahyoub, director of the kidney dialysis center at al-Jumhuri Hospital in Taiz. Doctors warn that many more could follow.

“About 60 percent of kidney failure patients in Taiz face the risk of death because they cannot reach the dialysis center,” said Dr. Fouad al-Haddad, the hospital’s director. “Behind every number is a human being and a family living in anxiety, waiting for a chance to continue treatment that may never come.”

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The kidney-failure deaths are part of the toll of a wider regional war set off by an unprovoked February attack against Iran by Israel and the United States. Estimates hold that 10,000 or more people have died during the war, including both military and civilian deaths across the region. Since the regional war reignited in Yemen this summer, according to the World Health Organization, at least 800 people have been killed, with thousands wounded and tens of thousands displaced.

“The plight of dialysis patients in Taiz illustrates how geopolitical struggles over deterrence, energy security, and regional leverage translate into blocked transit, disrupted medical care, and preventable deaths,” said Sina Toossi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy. “Yemen’s population has already endured more than a decade of devastating war, and the tragedy is that this wider regional conflict is now threatening to plunge it back into another humanitarian catastrophe.”

Yemen in the Iran War

Yemen entered the war in March, when the Iran-aligned Ansarallah armed group, more commonly known as the Houthis, began firing missiles into Israel in retaliation for its attacks on Iran. The Houthis, who gained control of various portions of Yemen during a two-decade-long insurgency, including the capital of Sana’a, saw their prominence in the Iran war grow with attacks against shipping channels surrounding the Arabian Peninsula.

The Yemeni civil war itself had been a long-simmering conflict when the Iran war broke out, straining a 2022 truce signed by the Houthis and their rivals, including Saudi Arabia, which was broken this July when the Houthis attacked a regional Saudi airport. Throughout August, the Houthis launched missile, drone, and ground attacks across the front lines against the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed Yemeni government.

In September, the Houthis seized strategic areas on Yemen’s coast and imposed a naval blockade that cut off the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, while firing missiles deeper into Saudi Arabia.

In early October, Yemeni government forces backed by the Saudi-led coalition launched an operation aimed at retaking the coast and pushing into Sana’a.

As they moved inland to consolidate their coastal gains, Houthi forces pushed into the highlands around Taiz, a strategically located city controlled by the government. In short order, the insurgents severed the main mountain road linking Taiz to Aden, another city also controlled by the government.

The blockade trapped more than 600,000 residents and sent food and fuel prices soaring. The U.N. World Food Program warned that Taiz’s wheat and flour stocks are close to running out.

“We have confirmed cases of death and cases of severe impact,” said Tawfiq al-Humaidi, head of the SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties, a Geneva-based international body monitoring violence in Yemen, who said fighting on roads near Taiz has cut off medical supplies from the city. “Those who are dying and suffering are among the victims of the Iranian war, which drove the Houthis to expand toward Taiz and Bab al-Mandeb.”

On October 14, the Yemeni government formally petitioned the U.N. Security Council for immediate, practical intervention to lift the “suffocating siege.”

Any action would be too late for families like the al-Eissis.

Cut Off From Care

Taiz is Yemen’s cultural capital and its third-largest city. Healthcare facilities there serve a huge geographical area. Al-Haddad, the head of the al-Jumhuri Hospital, said patients hail from across the governorate.

“They come from the West Coast, al-Mawasit, Jabal Habashi, al-Shamayatayn, Sama, al-Silw, al-Misrakh, and al-Maafer areas,” he said, “where distances are long and the hardship of travel is multiplied by rough roads and security conditions.”

The kidney dialysis center has 270 registered patients.

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“That doesn’t count the patients from outside the city who haven’t been able to reach us,” said Mahyoub, the head of the dialysis center. “Patients from al-Misrakh, al-Aqroud, al-Shamayatayn, al-Hujariya, al-Turba, and Jabal Habashi localities used to come to us. Now getting here has become extremely difficult, with the fighting and the restrictions on movement into the city.”

Ahlam Ali Abdo, 33, walks about 30 kilometers from her village in Jabal Habashi to reach the center, crossing rough roads and areas where gunfire and shelling ring out. The walk, extremely risky for a kidney failure patient, takes between 5 to 9 hours. After treatment, she faces the same distance back, uphill, to her three children. Some days the road is too dangerous, and Abdo waits for hours in the city.

“I cry constantly of pain and exhaustion and worry that I wouldn’t be able to see my children again. My condition is miserable,” she said.

Her husband stays home with the children. Bringing any of them with her, she said, would put the whole family in danger.

Mahyoub’s center tried and failed to find her housing in the city. Yesterday, on Friday, another dialysis patient took her in, for fear she would be killed on the road.

Reaching the center doesn’t guarantee treatment.

“The shortage of diesel needed to run the generators forced us to cut dialysis sessions from 4 hours to 2,” said Mahyoub. Supplies from the Ministry of Health in Aden “no longer arrive regularly, and the remaining stock is nearly gone.”

“Dialysis is a lifeline for these patients,” he said.

Haddad, the hospital director, said of the dialysis center doctors: “They are expected to save patients, but the means available are not always enough.”

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The Office of Public Health and Population in Aden has warned of an imminent health and humanitarian catastrophe in Taiz caused by the continuing siege and the obstruction of supplies.

In a statement, it said “medicines, solutions, medical supplies and fuel in the city’s health facilities were close to running out. That threatens emergency services, surgery, intensive care, dialysis and neonatal incubators.”

No Road to Aden

For patients who can no longer reach Taiz’s center, Aden is the fallback, whether for treatment or for its airport to travel abroad. The Taiz–Aden road, however, is unusable, according to patients and Mahyoub. The detours wind through mountain bends and rough terrain, add hours and transport costs, and in places run through active clashes.

The crisis extends beyond Taiz.

Dr. Anis al-Asbahi, spokesperson for the Health Ministry in Sana’a, said that “more than 8,000 kidney failure patients in Houthi-controlled governorates are suffering because hemodialysis machines and dialysis medicines can’t get in.”

He blamed the blockade and the closure of Sana’a airport.

“Kidney failure knows no political barriers,” Mahyoub said. “Patients cannot wait for disputes to be settled or for circumstances to change before they get treatment.”

For Muadh al-Eissi, whose father died from kidney failure, the question is simpler.

“How can the parties using heavy weapons in populated areas ignore what the fighting does to patients,” he asked, “to the children, women and elderly people who need medicine and treatment? People, like my father, are losing their lives for what?”

The post Yemenis Unable to Reach Hospital Are Part of the Iran War Death Toll appeared first on The Intercept.

The Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan spent more than $40,000 to cover a single private jet bill last month, according to campaign finance records reviewed by The Intercept. The five-figure ticket was part of over $100,000 worth of campaign cash Rogers spent on luxury travel last quarter, most of it on private jet trips.

As economic woes shape the Michigan Senate race, Roger’s opponent, Democratic candidate and former public health official Abdul El-Sayed, has attacked the Republican repeatedly for his ties to corporations and billionaire donors. Rogers, who represented Michigan’s 8th District in the House from 2001 to 2015, regularly advocated in Congress to let lawmakers receive gifts and other benefits from restricted nonprofit groups. He helped defeat a 2006 bill that would have cracked down on former congressional members’ lobbying activities and banned certain privately funded trips.

For Jeffrey Hauser, a critic of corporate political influence, Rogers’s newly revealed campaign spending on luxury services might spell a warning to Michigan voters feeling the crunch of a struggling economy.

“It seems like Mike Rogers has developed a real taste for the finer things,” said Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, which is not backing any candidate in the Michigan race. “That means he is likely to want to continue to court, and be courted by, the economic elite, which portends badly for working class Michiganders who prefer their Senator have some understanding of their lives and identification with their interests.”

In September, the Rogers campaign paid $93,152 to JL Jets for at least five separate private charter flights, including the $40,000 transaction. Around the same time, the campaign also dropped another $500 on the luxury chauffeur company Blacklane. From July to September, Rogers’s campaign paid an additional $4,527 to Blacklane for luxury car services, including a $2,078 chauffeur expense on August 17. The campaign spent $683 on a pair of limo rides in August and September.

Campaigning requires a lot of travel, and El-Sayed’s campaign finance records show higher total travel costs — roughly $330,000 last quarter, according to public filings. But those funds went toward commercial flights on Delta and American airlines, Hertz car rentals, gas, Uber and Lyft rides, and hotel accommodations.

El-Sayed had a busier campaign calendar with a competitive Democratic primary against Rep. Haley Stevens, while Rogers was the presumed Republican nominee since the early days of the race. El-Sayed’s campaign said he did more than 500 events ahead of the August primary, and Rogers has carried a more relaxed schedule into the general election cycle.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Rogers pointed to El-Sayed’s spending on meals and travel on the campaign trail as well as a series of high-dollar contributions his father-in-law made to a super PAC backing the campaign.

“Abdul El-Sayed reimbursed himself $90K, and his father-in-law, a senior advisor of CAIR, gave his SuperPAC $300K,” said Rogers campaign spokesperson Abby Ronson. “If the Intercept is looking for an FEC story, I’d take a long hard look at Abdul.” The El-Sayed campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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If elected, Rogers wouldn’t be the only U.S. senator to spend big on private jets. He would appear to compete with top spenders. As public scrutiny has driven politicians away from chartered flights, only Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., spent more on private flights than Rogers did last quarter, Axios reported — and they spent it over the course of a year and a half.

The Rogers campaign did book some flights with airlines like Frontier and Southwest, spending about $29,000 on 10 flights, but luxury transportation accounted for the vast majority of the campaign’s travel expenses last quarter.

Among Rogers’s hotel spending was a $2,000 stay at The Breakers, a luxury oceanfront hotel in Palm Beach, Florida; another $1,295 at the Grand Traverse Resort and Spa in Michigan; and $200 at the five-star Palazzo at The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. In addition to travel costs, the campaign paid $2,165 to its deputy campaign manager Tyler Henningsen in late September for car repairs at a BMW dealership in Bloomfield Hills, one of Michigan’s most affluent areas. Henningsen did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, but the Rogers spokesperson said the car was used for campaign purposes.

Campaign finance rules state that spending on travel and vehicle costs is allowed, as long it’s strictly for campaign purposes. It is generally illegal to use campaign funds for personal travel; if a person uses campaign funds for mixed personal and campaign travel, they have to reimburse the campaign within 30 days. If the campaign pays for a car, that car can only be used for campaigning.

Rogers holds significant personal investments in the real estate, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity industries. His Senate campaign has received significant backing from corporate figureheads such as billionaires, Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan, the DeVos family, and Elon Musk, who through his super PAC, America PAC, has poured into the race more than $6 million since Rogers promised to “shield” the world’s richest man from congressional oversight.

On the debate stage, El-Sayed has targeted Rogers’s home in Florida and his two “yachts,” attempting to paint the former congressman as out-of-touch from everyday, working Michiganders. Public records show Rogers owned two boats measuring 32 and 39 feet in Maryland, though he reportedly sold one of them. Rogers is attempting to sell his Florida home and is living full-time in Michigan, according to news outlet Bridge Michigan.

While Rogers was in Congress, he chaired the House Intelligence Committee and was a key supporter of the Patriot Act, pushing to expand domestic spying powers. Toward the end of his time in Congress, in 2013 and 2014, he and his wife Kristi attended a pair of weekend retreats at a five-star resort, The Cloister in Sea Island, Georgia, on the dime of the right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute. At the 2014 forum, described in 2022 by CBS News as “a private, off-the-record gathering of conservative leaders and wealthy donors,” Rogers spoke as a panelist in his capacity as House Intelligence Committee chair on “cybersecurity and national security issues,” disclosure forms said. 

Alongside Rogers, the 2014 event featured prominent conservative figures as speakers, such as then-House majority leader Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.; Iraq War architect Karl Rove; then-Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; New York Times columnist David Brooks; then-president of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling; and Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Also in attendance were Betsy and Dick DeVos, Donald Trump’s first-term education secretary and former Amway CEO, respectively, who have since funded Rogers’s current run and several past campaigns.

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A few weeks after the conservative retreat, Alexander stepped down as NSA director under the cloud of the Edward Snowden leaks revealing the U.S. government’s role in a global spying network. That year Alexander founded cybersecurity firm IronNet, which hired Rogers in 2015 after he decided not to run for reelection. He was later elevated to a board role at IronNet — which has since gone bankrupt — and received more than $700,000 in payments and held stock with the company worth $250,000 to $500,000, according to financial disclosure forms.

“Politicians spend enormous amounts of time with the super rich, either because they are seeking to raise money from them, consulting with them about the economy, or both,” Hauser said. “As a result, they start to develop expensive tastes.”

The post Mike Rogers Spent $100K on Private Jets and Luxury Travel Last Quarter appeared first on The Intercept.

Army Cyber Command is developing a platform to turn AI agents into autonomous weapons that can navigate and “neutralize” the computer systems of adversaries, the documents show.

Since 2010, Army Cyber Command, or ARCYBER, has led the U.S. Army’s cyber operations. This includes the defensive effort of protecting domestic computer systems and the secretive offensive work of hacking military targets. So far, this has largely been the work of human soldiers operating computers, like those of the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade. But as the government races to adopt artificial intelligence technology, ARCYBER is looking to offload some of its attacks to AI.

The nascent program, codenamed “ECHOTRIBBLE,” is based on one of the leading trends of the AI boom: agents. AI agents are essentially software programs that leverage machine learning technology, often large language models like Anthropic’s Claude, to autonomously accomplish tasks provided by their user. Consumers can deploy AI agents to schedule meetings, generate itineraries, make online purchases, or book tickets. Through ECHOTRIBBLE, the Pentagon plans to turn AI agents into tools of war “designed to autonomously navigate infrastructures” and capable of “identifying and neutralizing identified threats/targets,” according to an ARCYBER document reviewed by The Intercept circulated to potential contractors.

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The military’s adoption of cutting-edge technologies is unsurprising, especially considering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fervent embrace of AI. But amid constant revelations of rogue behavior by agents, the potential for serious mishaps is immense, experts warn.

“Given the known failure modes of the current AI paradigm, making autonomous AI systems with a mandate to ‘neutralize threats’ is incredibly dangerous,” David Krueger, a professor of machine learning at the University of Montreal who founded Evitable, an organization that advocates for a moratorium on AI development. “We’ve seen AI systems knowingly attack systems that were not intended targets. In simulations, AIs have even proven willing to kill to achieve their goals.”

A Q&A document answering questions from potential contractors offers more details about the initiative. It explains that ECHOTRIBBLE is “primarily focused” on offensive missions, and explains that “neutralizing” a target could include “disabling the threat completely or temporarily, deleting the threat from the target.” ECHOTRIBBLE would function almost like a computer worm, silently navigating a foreign network and hopping from device to device until it finds the Army’s quarry, hitting targets in the cloud as well as those on “air-gapped” systems that are disconnected from networks entirely.

Once its task is complete, ECHOTRIBBLE’s agents would effectively self-destruct, ideally without having been noticed by the target at all. The agents themselves will be designed for stealth, minimally reporting back to the Army and concealing whatever outside transmissions are necessary.

Although documents say the Army will be able to program ECHOTRIBBLE agents with some initial “predefined triggers” — dictating what and where to attack — the software “must operate with minimal human oversight” and be capable of “Self-Directed Behavior.”

A PowerPoint presentation to interested vendors at a June 24 ARCYBER event provided a hypothetical example of this self-direction. Once ECHOTRIBBLE is uploaded to a laptop, the software on its own “identifies other potential targets” on the same network and then “produces a replica of itself tailored specifically for the iPad, Apple desktop, and Windows 11 PC.”

The Army’s move toward autonomous self-propagating comes after a flurry of revelations about agentic systems taking unintended disturbing actions while attempting to accomplish their goals, including breaking into computers of the Australian government, breaching the infrastructure of the AI firm Hugging Face, uploading malicious software into online platform RubyGems, and attempted to hack into the U.S. Education Department.

These attacks occurred during scenarios in which agents had been given no commands to attack anything. Experts say militarized versions given explicitly destructive objectives could cause a threat to the public, even with nominal rules set in place by the military. Just as the Army of old might consider the destruction of civilian infrastructure an acceptable means to an end, a self-directed AI agent dispatched by the Pentagon might make similar determinations about collateral damage.

Governmental intelligence agencies frequently route their offensive operations through civilian devices. Volt Typhoon, a Chinese state hacking group, has directed its attacks through homes and small businesses, and preemptively hacks American IT systems for later use. A hack of a Chinese university attributed to the National Security Agency made use of the school’s internet routers. What happens if ECHOTRIBBLE decides these kinds of stepping stones are part of the problem?

“The target may well be hit. But what path will it take?” asked Hyrum Anderson, co-founder and CEO of the AI security firm Abundant. “Will it go through a US water utility on its way, because that’s where the adversary has staged its command and control, and take that down too?”

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Anderson, who previously worked in cybersecurity at Microsoft and for the U.S. government, said that a vast amount of the internet is vulnerable to agentic attacks.

“There’s a huge class of public and private organizations that fall below the security poverty line,” he said. “They include critical national infrastructure, small businesses, mom-and-pop shops, dentist offices and law firms, and whoever else doesn’t have a single cybersecurity professional on staff.” With their networks wide open to infiltration, Hyrum worries about “these organizations getting hit directly, or getting caught in the blast radius of a target that gets hit along the way.”

Given the impressive ability of AI agents to overcome obstacles placed in their path — even by their creators — it follows that the Pentagon would want to leverage that power for military purposes. But agentic software has proven unpredictable and prone to executing its commands in ways those ostensibly in control did not want, akin to a drone that get its target but hits a hospital on the way. It’s critical to remember that agents are a piece of software lacking human judgment.

“One of the reasons that we trust 19-year-old Marine corporals in Ramadi with live rounds and a weapon is because they have both the compute substrate — the brain and the eyes — but the deep world knowledge to understand, ‘Yeah, I probably shouldn’t do that,’” said William Marcellino, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation whose research has focused on military AI applications. “That is not something that current public AI technology has.”

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The risk presented by ECHOTRIBBLE will likely depend on the ability — and willingness — of the Army to impose guardrails upon it. ARCYBER did not respond to questions from The Intercept, including queries about the measures it would take to prevent ECHOTRIBBLE from causing inadvertent damage.

Placing constraints on the actions an agent can take might impede its ability to ultimately neutralize a target. But even with strict safeguards in place, genuinely restricting the behavior of an autonomous agent, as Anthropic and OpenAI have learned recently, is easier said than done. When presented with obstacles, AI agents have proven an ability to bypass them with unpredictable and potentially dangerous consequences.

“If I give powerful machines that have no judgment — and no context for judgment — a goal, unless you’ve done a really good job building scaffolding around them, there’s a real chance that they’ll go sideways on you and decide, ‘Well, I’ll do what you asked me to do, but I’ll do it this way,’” Marcellino said.

It only gets more dangerous when this technology is deployed for the purposes of war, Anderson said.

“Under pressure, they’ll often treat guardrails as obstacles,” said Anderson. “Once you add context that says break it, destroy it, shut it down, it stands to reason that the blast radius widens dramatically unless it’s properly controlled for.”

The post The Army Wants to Sic AI Agents on Its Enemies. What Could Go Wrong? appeared first on The Intercept.

A Winner on a Losing Planet

Do I even faintly believe the times I’m living in?  The simple answer is: no.

Every now and then, I try to imagine going back in time to tell my long-dead parents about the world of President Donald Trump, which just happens to still be mine as well. Of course, they simply wouldn’t have believed it, not for a single second.

To put it in the context of their time on this planet, the only equivalent I can imagine would be if Sen. Joseph McCarthy, that anticommunist nightmare-and-a-half of the 1950s, hadn’t flamed out, been censured by the Senate, and died young but somehow had made it to the White House. But even he undoubtedly would have fallen short in terms of chaos and cruelty, if judged by the standards of Trump World. A President McCarthy might have been catastrophic for America, but Trump is on another level, an apocalyptic one.

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Trump’s capacity for ushering in world-wrecking havoc is made possible by a character constructed almost entirely of flaws. His second term has been defined by global aggression and hostility. Yet he recently complained bitterly — and in a fashion it’s hard to imagine any other politician ever doing — because he wasn’t awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. As he put it, “The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel peace prize, but didn’t. And this is an indelible stain on the country of Norway, and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision.” 

This is not only a petty man, but also a delusional one. As president, Trump has presided over more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and outright wars who nonetheless swears that he “settled” eight conflicts and should have “won 8 Nobel Peace Prizes, not just 1.” This includes a war between Egypt and Ethiopia that, of course, never happened and a failing war with Iran that drags on to this day.

If you’re going to “end” a war with bombs and missiles, then there are, of course, going to be casualties. A few thousand or more Iranians killed, obviously, and tens of thousands injured, not to mention ever-rising American casualties.

Frighteningly, the Iran war may not even be enough for him. He’s already starting to hint (if there even is such a thing as “hinting” in the all-too-blunt world of Donald Trump) that he might join Saudi Arabia in taking on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. “We’re going to look at it” was how he put it. I should really have added “again” there, since he essentially began his second term in office by attacking those same Houthis — killing large numbers of civilians in the process. But after the U.S. burned through $1 billion and failed to even achieve air superiority in Yemen, Trump ended the stalemate. Despite having vowed the Houthis would be “completely annihilated,” he announced a cessation of hostilities last May, leaving the group in control of most of Yemen’s populated areas.

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Given American history — think the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among other places — there’s nothing faintly strange about endless American military operations thousands and thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C., even for a president who said, upon taking office in 2025, that he would measure success by “the wars we never get into.”

A Grim Presidency

You would hardly know it from the mainstream press but one of those 20 Trumpian conflicts is the forever war in Somalia. And that war has an increasing domestic component. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security raided the home of Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar in the Washington, D.C., area, aiming in some fashion or other to discover information that might help denaturalize her and so make it possible to eject her from this country.

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As the president put it on Truth Social, Omar “left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars.” Of course, who would know better about such things than the president of the United States who, in these years, is estimated to have made literally billions of dollars while in office?

And yet, the never-ending war in Somalia, the nearby conflict we may reenter against the Houthis, and the failed war in Iran should be considered the lesser of the potential disasters that will sooner or later be associated with Trump. After all, he clearly has the urge to do nothing less than end this very world of ours, at least as we’ve known it, even if in a distinctly slow-motion fashion.

I’m not even thinking about nuclear weapons (although he admittedly still is). No, I’m thinking about the president who, at the United Nations in 2025, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” And since then, he has indeed done everything he could think of to ensure that this planet would get hotter yet. His Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has recently repealed “rules that limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas.” And that’s just to start down a long list of what should truly be considered Donald Trump’s ultimate war on this planet of ours — including blocking wind power development and doing the same with solar power. 

All of this is happening as global warming reaches unprecedented levels, sea level rise is accelerating, northern forests and tundra are releasing more carbon dioxide than they absorb, the Greenland ice sheet has lost about 129 gigatons of ice (or roughly 129 billion metric tons), and other major ecological systems like tropical coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest, and Antarctica’s ice sheet are being pushed toward catastrophic tipping points.

While Trump campaigns for eight Nobel Peace Prizes, his war on humanity’s only home continues unabated, a slow-motion destruction that threatens us all. My parents couldn’t have imagined a leader in the White House who would put McCarthy to shame and push the country — and the world — to the precipice of doom: a commander-in-chief worthy of the name President Apocalypse.

The post President Apocalypse appeared first on The Intercept.

Democratic leaders like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York have been cagey about their strategy on Iran for the lame-duck period before the next Congress is sworn in on January 3. So far, months of Capitol Hill maneuvering have produced few concrete results. And one path to potential progress for ending the war is laden with risk: threatening a government shutdown.

Opponents of the war say that, with Democrats pushing for support based on their efforts to end to the war, they owe it to voters to put government spending on the line.

“It will certainly demonstrate whether Democrats are willing to stretch themselves and put up a fight and get uncomfortable,” said Hannah Morris, the vice president of government affairs for the liberal, pro-Israel group J Street, which opposes the conflict. “So much of the rhetoric has been about the Iran war.”

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In the months since the conflict began on February 28, Democrats and the handful of Republicans opposed to the war have poured most of their energy into votes based on the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which limits the president’s power to wage war without congressional approval. In June, they succeeded in securing House and Senate passage of a war powers resolution, but the Trump administration has ignored the vote, arguing the law is unconstitutional.

Advocates still believe the Trump administration should be bound by the June resolution, but they concede that other paths may have more teeth.

If they really want to stop the war, Democrats will have to confront questions of timing, divisions within their own caucus, and the risk of a government shutdown.

One prime opportunity could be the December 11 expiration of a spending bill called the continuing resolution that has been funding the government since the last shutdown. Democrats could attempt to attach a rider to the bill prohibiting the use of any of its funds for the Iran war. If that bill does not pass both chambers, the government shuts down.

The process will provide Democrats with rare leverage before the next Congress is sworn in.

Congressional Democratic leaders have not said whether they are willing to risk a shutdown, however. Jeffries did not tip his hand when he was asked during a recent interview with CNN.

“Listen, we’ll deal with the appropriations process when we deal with the appropriations process,” he said. “Right now, the mechanism that is in front of us will be to aggressively move war powers resolutions until we end this war in the best interest of the American people.”

Some Democratic candidates in hotly contested races have gone much further than Jeffries, zeroing in on the appropriations issue. Rep. Tom Barrett, of Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, was one of the few Republicans to vote for an Iran war powers resolution. But environmental activist Will Lawrence still attacked him at a recent debate on the issue of war funding.

Morris, who is part of a coalition of groups that have called on Congress to cut off funding for the war, said she is not sure how aggressively Democrats will be willing to pursue the issue during the lame-duck period.

“Will they be willing to shut down the government over this? I don’t have real answers. I think there are a lot of variables here,” she said.

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Another option supported by many advocates is the pending debate over the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual Pentagon budget and policy bill. Critics of the war argue that Congress could attempt to insert a provision into the law cutting off authorization for the conflict.

Democrats should be willing to block the bill if it does not include “meaningful restrictions” on the administration’s ability to wage the war, said Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East Policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

“That’s the mandate we’re seeing from the American people,” he said. “They shouldn’t pass a massive defense bill while leaving the administration free to pursue yet another open-ended war in the Middle East.”

The defense bill is generally considered “must-pass” legislation on Capitol Hill, providing leverage for Senate Democrats who could block it with a filibuster. The office of Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who plays a key role in the process as the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not respond to a request for comment.

Falling short of either of those paths, Democrats could continue to try to pass more war powers resolutions. With their party poised for a dramatic shift in its favor in the midterm elections, Democrats could even try to exert pressure on Republican legislators to vote in favor of the resolutions, some opponents of the war believe.

Democrats could also wait until January, when they are widely predicted to retake control of one or both chambers of Congress. Holding the gavel in the House or Senate will give them vastly expanded powers to set military spending and launch investigations into the conduct of the war.

One key Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, told The Intercept in a statement he was willing to pursue multiple paths to stopping the war, but all of them face obstacles until the next Congress.

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“I am open to exploring options for using the NDAA or appropriations bills as a way to end the war,” said Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. “That effort would most likely require bipartisan support. Unfortunately, I am not confident that there is sufficient Republican will or support for such legislative efforts or to override an inevitable veto.”

Whether in this Congress or the next, cutting off spending for the war appears to be the best way for Democrats to force the Trump administration to negotiate with Iran, according to Brian Finucane, a former State Department official who serves as a senior adviser at the nonprofit International Crisis Group.

“If they are serious,” he said, “they should be willing to play hardball, and that would require using the power of the purse.”

The post Dems Have an Opportunity to Force an End to the Iran War. Will They Take It? appeared first on The Intercept.

A fresh wave of outrage over the Trump administration’s use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has surged after two high-profile events involving ICE in the span of a week: the shooting of a young father in New York City last Thursday, and the Monday morning Homeland Security Investigations raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home.

Reporting from the Wall Street Journal suggests that the raid was a part of an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to strip the Minnesota Democrat of her U.S. citizenship. Omar arrived in the United States as a child refugee from Somalia and became a naturalized citizen in 2000, long before the start of her political career. The outspoken progressive congresswoman has since become a foe of President Donald Trump; in a statement, her spokesperson condemned the raid on her home as “an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” 

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Omar’s House colleague, Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., argues this sort of weaponization is an inherent feature of the Department of Homeland Security, which was established in 2003 as part of the George W. Bush administration’s mounting war on terror. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Ramirez about a new bill she introduced on Tuesday to abolish DHS and what the raid on Omar’s home reveals about the department. 

“The Department of Homeland Security cannot be reformed. It should be dismantled,” said Ramirez. “What they did — just three weeks from an election — was to attempt to create such paralysis on everyday people. … If they can do this to one of my colleagues, they can do that to anyone. And it should concern everyone.”

Washington also speaks with Rozina Ali — a journalist covering the war on terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, South Asia, and literature — and Will Sommer, a senior reporter covering right-wing media and conspiracy theories at The Bulwark. 

Ali and Sommer unpack the role of conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim propaganda in the attacks on Omar, and how DHS has been historically weaponized against Muslims in the United States.

“Over the last 30 years, we have been conditioned to believe that Muslims, and now more broadly immigrants, are not just a threat to national security, but a threat to the American way of life,” said Ali. 

“The right has been really eager to denaturalize Ilhan Omar for really going back a decade almost to the first Trump administration,” said Sommer. He called the investigation into Omar “one of the most striking examples we’ve seen of how the Trump administration is willing to use law enforcement to achieve its political aims and to sort of threaten its enemies.” 

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

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. On Monday, Homeland Security Investigation agents searched the home of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Reporting from the Washington Post suggests that the probe centers on allegations that Omar’s late father lied on immigration paperwork decades ago when Omar was a teenager.

According to a source familiar with the case who spoke to the paper, the Department of Homeland Security had previously declined to move ahead with an investigation years prior based on similar allegations. There still weren’t many details out as of Wednesday. The Department of Justice has vaguely described a “federal criminal investigation,” but Omar has long been a political foe of President Donald Trump.

In a statement to The Intercept, Omar called the raid “an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” The raid on Omar’s home comes days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck in New York City, with his 5-year-old son in the back seat.

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The incidents have reignited concerns about the violent weaponization of the Department of Homeland Security by President Donald Trump against immigrants and the administration’s perceived political enemies. 

The group Democracy Defenders Fund filed a complaint over the raid on Tuesday, arguing it violates the Hatch Act, a federal law that restricts political activity by members of the government’s executive branch. With early voting in Minnesota scheduled to start Friday, the group says the raid “appears to be timed to influence voters in the upcoming midterm election.”

Rep. Delia Ramirez, a Democrat from Illinois, introduced a new bill this week to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security and abolish immigrant detention in the United States. I’m speaking to her on Wednesday, October 14. Congresswoman Ramirez, welcome back to The Intercept Briefing. 

Rep. Delia Ramirez: Oh, happy to be on.

JW: First, I wanna get your reaction to the Homeland Security Investigation search of Representative Ilhan Omar’s home on Monday. Were you surprised by the news? And what do you think it tells us about how the Department of Homeland Security is operating under President Donald Trump?

DR: I’m gonna tell you that, unfortunately, I’m not surprised by what happened — but it is still bone-chilling.

You’re talking about a department that was created to have full authority to violate civil rights every single day, now weaponized against a sitting member of Congress — sending, I don’t know, 20 HSI agents into her home at 4:30 in the morning.

Cruelty, complete control, and authoritarianism, and demonstrating their ability to get away with whatever they think they can, was the point of what they just did.

And it is clearly the embodiment of abuse of power. But it also shows us exactly why the Department of Homeland Security cannot be reformed. It should be dismantled. And that what they did — just three weeks from an election — was to attempt to create such paralysis on everyday people to believe that if they can do this to one of my colleagues, that they can do that to anyone. And it should concern everyone.

Anyone that cares deeply about our democracy, about our ability to exercise our freedom of speech, or to be protected from being harmed by the federal government should see what is happening to my colleague Ilhan Omar as a clear indicator that this could also happen to them, if we don’t stop them.

And that justice is not just that she gets her phone back, or they leave her alone. Justice is holding accountable the leadership that made that terrorizing experience for Ilhan happen.

JW: Speaking of stopping them, I want to get into the bill that you introduced on Tuesday, the Reimagining Safety Act, which would abolish the Department of Homeland Security, eliminate all immigrant detention, and repeal “duplicative and overreaching terrorism laws.”

Now, there has been some forward momentum on the movement to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at least from progressives — but this bill would get rid of all of DHS. Can you talk about how that would work and why, in your opinion, it’s not enough to just abolish ICE? 

DR: I just mentioned to you what’s happening to Congresswoman Omar, and to me, it’s a clear indicator of the greatest threat to our security: It’s not immigrants; it’s the Department of Homeland Security.

And I know that a lot of people say, DHS is “rogue,” we need to address this “rogue” organization. But it’s not rogue. I wanna be clear with people. DHS did not exist my entire lifetime. As a matter of fact, it’s been operating less than 23 years. And it was built exactly to do what it’s doing right now: to violate our rights under pretense of securing our safety, and it’s been, in fact, empowered to act with impunity, which is why people keep saying like, “How can they possibly get away with what they’re doing, and why can’t Congress stop them?”

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Because frankly, since its inception, DHS has been utilized by the government to target and persecute people that they consider the public enemy. And we know that fascism always requires a public enemy. Muslim Americans, Latinos, Haitians, protesters. DHS has never kept us safe. And 24 years ago, Americans, Republicans, and Democrats alike, let’s be clear, raised a flag about how DHS would constitute unprecedented consolidation of power, and yet this agency was still formed under the United States Congress.

DHS has been a problem of the administration for its entirety. And administration after administration has demonstrated to us that this agency needs to be completely dismantled piece by piece. And when you have people like Donald Trump with very authoritarian tendencies, you have clearly seen what they’re capable of doing. And frankly, I don’t think we’ve seen the full extent of what they could do.

So this is a moment for us to ask ourselves: What kind of world do we wanna live in? And do we want to continue to live with the fear that this agency can be weaponized against you, to persecute you, to arrest you, to detain you, to denaturalize you, to attempt to question your own citizenship, to kill you?

And at the same time, ask ourselves: If FEMA and TSA and cybersecurity and the Coast Guard and other critical programs are important for us, how can we allow them to be politicized by this agency that constantly keeps taking away the resources that these critical programs need? And so for me, this is the moment that we don’t just abolish ICE or abolish CBP — we take on the institution that was created to allow ICE and CBP to operate in the way that it does. 

JW: To your point, there are all of these other functions of the Department of Homeland Security, from federal disaster relief to TSA screenings to customs enforcement. What happens to all those other functions if DHS is dismantled?

DR: I’m glad you asked me that question ’cause people keep saying, “Do you not care about FEMA?” Actually, because I care about FEMA, I want to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security.

H.R. 10803, the Reimagining Safety Act, it’s a first of its kind bill, and for the very first time, it’s a bill that community stakeholders spent months designing a Cabinet-level department. Because the Reimagining Safety Act would actually establish another department, the Department of Community Safety, that in fact is about protecting our communities.

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It would dismantle DHS by preserving the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — we call it CISA, that was created under the Department of Homeland Security; protecting and expanding the Federal Emergency Management Agency; protecting and redirecting the Transportation Security Agency and custom functions into the Department of Transportation; while abolishing ICE and CBP and reinvesting funds in community.

And, certainly, I think the other piece of that is the surveillance: limiting government surveillance and reining in the unlawful abuses of data and curb the militarized enforcement that you’re seeing under DHS while beginning the process of taking what we call USCIS, that’s also under the Department of Homeland Security, and establishing it as its own separate civil immigration system that no longer operates under this agency that could call Renee Good, Alex Pretti, or Silverio Villegas terrorists.

JW: Thinking about your bill — obviously, Republicans currently control every lever of power, and only a handful of Democrats support abolishing ICE, and fewer still have called to abolish the Department of Homeland Security. Why introduce this bill now, knowing that it likely can’t pass this current Congress, much less get signed by President Donald Trump?

DR: Every single issue, whether it’s talking about universal healthcare, Medicare for All, whether it’s talking about raising wages — and now I introduced Living Wage for All — or blocking bombs and ending endless wars, oftentimes the assumption has been it is too early, or Republicans control, or Democrats have not arrived.

The people have arrived to where we are. They believe that this agency is the biggest threat to their well-being. And for me, this is an opportunity to provide a roadmap on how we actually in fact address the problem and then create a solution that centers people’s safety — and not just rhetoric of protecting the homeland under the guise of protecting us from terrorism, so that they can terrorize us.

Jessica, I am clear that this bill is not gonna pass overnight, but I am also clear that our community expects for us to propose something that is tangible, something that is comprehensive, and something that gets to the root of the problem by creating a permanent solution, so that we’re never here again.

That means that over the next few months, and perhaps over the next year, we are building the support and changing the conversation in such way where in the same way only nine or 10 of my colleagues were willing to, out loud, say “Abolish ICE” two months ago, now we have actually more like 45, 50 of them, that we are in the same place when we’re talking about reimagining safety in this country.

Furthermore, every single poll that you look at ICE, CBP, [ousted former CBP head Greg] Bovino, [ousted former DHS head Kristi] Noem, immigration enforcement, and the fear of surveillance and losing our civil rights is top concern for the American people.

I am providing a bill that begins to respond to what our communities are demanding. I’m hoping that Congress doesn’t continue to be behind the ball of what the people are asking of them. And now I’m giving them something that they could actually in fact use.

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I wanna tell you too that, look, in 2002, people expressed concerns about DHS. And 25 years later, those warnings have been validated as we watch what they’re doing. It’s a weapon pointed at anyone that the state considers a public enemy, whether it’s Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, whether it’s Congresswoman Omar, or the millions of people in this precise moment that are living in fear because of the way that this agency was created.

I think this is also an opportunity, Jessica, for us to actually educate the world around the fact that DHS was not created as a Cabinet department from our Founding Fathers — that we were OK before 2003 without DHS, and we can live in a life without it as well. 

JW: On the subject of looking to the future, if Democrats take one or both houses of Congress in the upcoming midterms, I’m curious what else you’re thinking about in terms of reining in DHS, and if you have any other priorities for the next session.

DR: Let me just come back to this bill, ’cause I think it’s really important — my own bottom line on it. The Reimagining Safety Act takes apart DHS and creates a new agency, a new agency that responds to what people are asking for — for we the people that they’ve elected to represent them, to keep them safe, to protect the mission of community safety, and to protect the public.

And it means that dismantling DHS is doing the work Congress should have done actually 24 years ago, to actually look at these agencies, all agencies under this department, but also how DOJ has been weaponized against us. How we created a Department of War. Just think about that: We’ve created a department where we want to spend more money on war than we want to actually spend on housing, on healthcare, on wages, and on infrastructure.

So for me, this is a moment for us to actually demonstrate that we’re going to fight like hell for accountability, to take on corruption, to end the terror, while also creating tangible ways to address the issues.

And one of those, and I’m going to be introducing a resolution [Thursday] around what should our positioning be when it comes to immigration. Because this agency is about what is wrong and what needs to stop so that we can actually have safety, but then we also need to talk about how we restore our systems of asylum, how we actually in fact establish legal pathways, and how do we bring 11 million people who are in fear, in the shadows, crying daily, to finally come out of the shadows into a justice status.

I am gonna be working really hard to make that front and center with our leadership, and I’m disappointed that our leadership isn’t centering that as one of the very first things that they wanna work on in the first 100 days. Because unfortunately, that is telling the people that have been under siege by this administration: Being an immigrant or being brown or being a protester isn’t the top priority of people that need to be protected.

When our leadership is talking about first 100 days of many important things, but not a word around immigration, and not a word around real accountability to what has happened under ICE and CBP.

JW: Thank you, Congresswoman. We’re gonna leave it there, but people can read more about your bill, the Reimagining Safety Act, at theintercept.com, where we have a story out about it. And thank you so much for joining The Intercept Briefing. 

DR: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Jessica Washington: Next, I speak with Rozina Ali, a journalist covering the war on terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, South Asia, and literature; and Will Sommer, a senior reporter covering right-wing media and conspiracy theories at The Bulwark. Will, welcome to the Intercept Briefing, and Rozina, welcome back. 

Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.

Rozina Ali: Thank you so much for having us. 

JW: Rozina, I want to start with you. In your new book, “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America,” you discuss the history of how immigration enforcement has been weaponized against Muslims in the United States. And while I want to preface by saying that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the raid on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s home, we do know that Omar is outspoken, Muslim, Black, and an immigrant. She’s also been a consistent target of Trump and his allies.

How might this relate to the broader history of how the Department of Homeland Security has been weaponized against Muslims in the United States?

RA: Well, I really appreciate this question. There’s a very long history when it comes to using immigration enforcement to target Muslims and the Muslim community in the United States, and I just wanna go back a little bit before 9/11 to the late 1990s.

One thing that was happening was the use of secret evidence against Muslim immigrants, a lot of Arabs and South Asians, and a lot of Muslim immigrants, to, essentially, detain them and deport them. And what that meant was actually using classified evidence that the government brought forward that the defendant could not see.

And it actually kind of reminds me of what’s happening with Ilhan Omar now, is that we don’t actually know what the allegations are. We don’t know what the case is hinged on.

What the DHS did after 9/11 was actually broaden out its use of immigration enforcement to target Muslim communities. One of the things it did was actually institute a registry called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. That essentially allowed the U.S. government to detain thousands of Muslim immigrants and eventually deport them — even though they had no criminal charges.

One of the things that protects Ilhan Omar is that she is a U.S. citizen, but one of the things that does chill me is there is this longer, broader history of the government using immigration enforcement in order to deport people and detain people, even if they have not been guilty of any criminal charges.

JW: That makes a lot of sense, the concern, because we know there’s history of this power being used in secretive ways, kind of similar to what’s potentially happening now. And I do, again, want to caution that we do not have all the details on this case at the moment. But Will, I wanted to bring you in to kind of get into the origins at least where some of these conspiracy theories that have been swirling around Congresswoman Omar.

You wrote about this in September, kind of where you found that many in MAGA world were frustrated that after nearly a decade of conspiracy theories — some of which were pushed by Trump about alleged immigration fraud from Omar — she remains not only in the United States, but in Congress.

Will, can you explain some of the conspiracy theories that are fueling this push to deport Omar? Is there any evidence for them? And do we know if they had anything to do with the raid on her home? 

WS: The right has been really eager to denaturalize Ilhan Omar for really going back a decade, almost to the first Trump administration. A lot of it was fueled by this idea that she had married her brother as some kind of immigration scheme, or essentially that this man she was married to was secretly her brother.

Now, I looked into the origins of this at the time. I thought, “Well, is this true? Could it be?” No, it’s not. In fact, it all started on some random kinda Somali Minnesotan message board where someone said, “Yeah, she’s married to her brother.” And then from there, once she became more prominent as a Democratic figure, people on the right kinda dug through that and sort of built this whole conspiracy theory based off of this one post.

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Essentially, now that Trump is back in power, there’s this demand on the right because, as with other conspiracy theories, they’ve come to believe this. So they’re saying, you know, “Oh man, when are we finally gonna deport Ilhan Omar?” So Markwayne Mullin, the head of DHS, has been under this pressure, and he gave this interview at the Republican convention to [right-wing YouTuber] Benny Johnson, and he said, “Oh yeah, she married her brother.”

And Benny Johnson said, “Well, OK. Are you gonna deport her?” Now, you kinda can’t deport her anyway, even if she had married her brother. But there’s all this demand. And so what we’re seeing with this latest investigation is it’s not even related to the brother thing, reportedly. It’s — according to the Washington Post and some other outlets — related to this idea that Ilhan Omar’s father, who is dead now, misstated her age on a citizenship application.

Essentially, she was 17, according to the official record. But had she been a year older, 18, it would’ve kind of complicate it because she would’ve been an adult. It would’ve made it harder for her to get citizenship. This is this idea that’s been pushed by her Republican opponents in elections in the past. It’s really thin, and we can kinda get into it in a second. But this is some thin gruel, essentially, that they’re trying to manufacture this whole effort to pull her citizenship. 

JW: I really wanna get more into the conspiracy theory of it and what’s being pushed here. And I think it’s interesting that it’s almost like they’re kind of grasping at any little thing they can get their hands on.

At first, it’s the brother-marriage of it all, which, as you pointed out, has very thin evidence, essentially no evidence. And then it’s pulling at these other threads about her dad, which have all been swirling in the ecosystem for a while.

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I want to get a little bit deeper into what conspiracy theories, what role they have here, and I want to talk about what Donald Trump said on Monday night after the raid. He spoke at an Ohio rally pushing more conspiracy theories about Rep. Ilhan Omar and the Somali community in Minnesota in general. Let’s hear that clip now. 

Trump: Just look at what’s happening in the once great state of Minnesota. What a mess they have done. Somalia, wonderful, wonderful. And that Ilhan, somebody was asking me, I don’t know what they’re doing with her, but I can tell you this: She’s a disaster. She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military, without — all they do is shoot each other. And she comes into our country, and she says, “I have a constitutional right.” She’s got a constitutional right. She’s telling us about the Constitution, and she comes from one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet. Last week, savage Somali gang members shot two people in the high school parking lot in the middle of a football game. Just days later, a few miles away, the FBI arrested a radicalized Somalian who was planning to carry out an ISIS-style terrorist attack at the Mall of America, aiming to kill as many as possible, in his words. This is not what we want in this country.

Crowd: Deport! Deport! Deport! Deport!

Trump: What they have done to Minnesota.

JW: Rozina, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the administration spread conspiracy theories about Muslims. Ahead of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, for example, we heard similar rhetoric about the Somali community. What role have conspiracy theories played in the targeting of Muslims in the United States?

RA: Oh, where to start? 

JW: Yeah, there’s a lot. 

RA: There is a lot. I think one of the most enduring theories of Muslim communities is that there are radical elements that are living among Muslim neighborhoods, among Muslim communities. And that is a conspiracy theory born out of, obviously, the war on terror framework.

But one of the things that we saw in the aughts, especially under the Obama administration and especially as Trump rose in power, was this notion that Muslims, not just foreign elements, but Muslims living inside the United States are secretly hiding their agenda.

And this is something that we hear with regards to Abdul El-Sayed, that basically any Muslim that you meet is hiding a secret agenda, and what they wanna do is enact Sharia law in the United States. No one has yet to explain what Sharia law means and what that would mean to enact it, but this is one of the things that keeps coming up over and over again.

What is so interesting about this speech that Trump made recently is that he is actually throwing every theory against the wall that he can. That he mentions ISIS — something we haven’t heard for a long time. He mentions radicalization. He mentions fraud. And so all of these things that have been talking points that have been used against Muslim communities, particularly against the Somali community in Minnesota, he is using all at once in this one speech.

I will say, this is also the talking points — well, fraud is a new one — but when it comes to radicalization and when it comes to the notion of radical elements threatening the security and Western way of life of the United States, these are talking points he was peddling back in 2015 when he eventually called for a Muslim ban.

As we may remember, one of his first executive orders when he became president in January 2017 was to sign an executive order banning immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.

This is actually something that we see Donald Trump doing a lot, which is, he peddles conspiracy theories. He puts them on the main stage. His allies reinforce them and regurgitate them, and he gives them legitimacy, right? He legitimizes them by using a government framework to offer some veneer of truth to them. And unfortunately, as we know, one iteration of the Muslim ban was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court.

JW: As Rozina said, fraud is kind of a newer iteration of these kind of Muslim conspiracy theories. Where did it originate from, and why has it become such a powerful talking point on the right when targeting particularly the Somali community in Minnesota? 

WS: I should say: Minnesota has a very — despite being a Democratic state — it has a very intense Republican activist and kind of like quasi-journalist scene going on. And so a lot of that has been built around, again, building, talking about Ilhan Omar. And now we’ve seen it kinda going after the Somali community in various ways.

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But really, this hit a new level in January with this young man named Nick Shirley, who’s like a YouTuber. He went around, he was led around by one of these Minnesota conservative journalist types to various daycares, and they said,”Look at the fraud here.”

Now look, there are some criminal fraud cases that are being prosecuted in Minnesota. But there was this broader sense created by this video of, like the Somali community are parasitic, that they’re up to no good, they’re stealing all this money, what have you.

And then in fact, that helped justify then — at least in the view of the Trump administration — the ICE surge into Minneapolis. And so this has created this idea of constant Somali American fraud, not just in Minnesota, but all over the place. And so obviously it dovetails with the Ilhan Omar idea as well, that she forged her citizenship, she somehow faked that. 

JW: That makes a lot of sense. It is really interesting to see the way the administration targeted Minnesota, both because of the Somali community, which was particularly vulnerable, because as we’ve mentioned this is both a Black, immigrant, and Muslim community, so this trifecta of areas that the Trump administration is targeting. And then also you had Ilhan Omar, who was this image that the administration could attack and go after, and it was really popular to their base to do so.

Rozina, when we’re talking about the stories that kind of stick when it comes to conspiracy theories, what sort of stuff has really stuck and why? I’m curious to understand why in the imagination of so many people in the U.S. these conspiracy theories have really stuck.

RA: I think one of the most enduring theories that keeps coming up over and over again and that really has stuck is this notion that, as I mentioned, that Muslims have nefarious secret agendas, but also that they have ties to foreign organizations and foreign elements.

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And one of the things that we hear with regards to Ilhan Omar, too, is that — and I think I’ve heard this from some right-wing talking points in the previous days — is that there might be allegations that she has some financial ties or connections to foreign groups. This is something we have heard about Zohran Mandani. This is something we have heard about Abdul El-Sayed. This is actually something that has been a part of the American narrative about Muslims for decades.

One of the crucial things that was happening in the ’90s was that the U.S. government was looking for financial ties to foreign organizations among the Muslim community. And one of the things that happened immediately after 9/11 was that the United States government shut down the biggest Muslim charity in the United States, called the Holy Land Foundation, because of alleged nefarious ties to militant groups abroad.

Because there has been a government framework for this, I think it is really easy for a lot of conspiracy theorists and for a lot of Islamophobes, frankly, to keep regurgitating this notion that “just look at the financial ties of Muslims.” And one of the lasting shifts that we have seen in the last 25 years is that that scrutiny is not just against Muslim immigrants or visa holders, but also against Muslim Americans and citizens of the United States. And I don’t think we’re actually going to be able to break out of those conspiracy theories so easily if we don’t actually start discussing and reckoning with how we think about what terrorism is.

So for example, with the Holy Land Foundation case, that is a case that keeps coming up over and over again. A lot of those ties, financial ties, it’s a really complicated case, but a lot of those financial ties were related to Hamas, but it’s also relevant to remember that Hamas at the time was a governing body in Gaza that was supplying aid to people.

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And essentially, the way we talk about terrorism, the way we talk about countries abroad, has a real impact for how we think about the Muslim community at home. So I just wanna go back to Abdul El-Sayed for just really quickly, is that one of the biggest talking points peddled against him these days is that his mother is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now, there’s very little understanding of what it had meant to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, right? Because we just see that through the lens of terrorism, it’s completely dismissing all the political dynamics on the ground in those countries abroad. And I think what a lot of conspiracy theorists and Islamophobes have done so effectively is forever tie Muslim communities in the U.S. to what Americans largely think of as nefarious elements in other countries.

JW: I think that’s all really important, recognizing, to your point, that none of these conspiracy theories — I mean, again, they had taken new iterations — but that conspiracy theories against Muslims in the United States is not a new phenomenon. I guess I am curious if we’re moving into a new phase though, of danger, essentially, from the administration.

Will, coming back to your September piece, in it you compare the calls to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar to the Department of Justice’s attempts at convicting the president’s political enemies. And those have, for the most part failed, in terms of getting these convictions, “locking up” his enemies, as he’s said he wants to do.

Does this raid of a sitting congresswoman’s home signal a new, more dangerous era from the White House when it comes to threats against the administration’s perceived political enemies? Are we entering a new, more dangerous phase? 

WS: I think the raid represents sort of the confluence of two alarming trends. One is what we’ve been talking about, which is the growing, second tide of Islamophobia that we’re seeing from this administration, that I think was sort of on the back burner as there was so much promotion on the right about fears about immigration from Latin America. Now, we see in Texas there’s so much anger at Muslim communities in that area in particular.

We’re also seeing though, as you said, the politicization of the Justice Department. I mean, this raid falls within the 60 days. Typically, the DOJ doesn’t raid politicians this close to an election, particularly something that’s about a 30-years-old child immigration case. Clearly, it’s political. It’s an attempt to make Ilhan Omar the face of the Democratic Party, suggest all this fraud.

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Look, a lot of those attacks, those political lawfare, what have you, is related to Israel and Palestine, people like Fergie Chambers, Max Blumenthal, have either faced indictments or had their devices seized, in Max Blumenthal’s case. Certainly a lot of it aimed at campus activists as well.

I think the Ilhan Omar thing is really one of the most striking examples we’ve seen of how the Trump administration is willing to use law enforcement to achieve its political aims and to threaten its enemies.

JW: You mentioned that post-Watergate 60-day rule, which is an unwritten policy designating a blackout period effectively before elections during which the Department of Justice is not supposed to conduct activity which could influence voters. There’s also the Hatch Act, which states that government employees cannot use their authority or influence to interfere with or affect an election. There was actually a Hatch Act complaint filed yesterday by a watchdog group over the raid on Ilhan Omar’s house.

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At this point, Will, with an administration that has already done so much over the years without consequence, does the Hatch Act and do these other kind of long-standing norms serve any purpose or any protection?

WS: No. At this point, unfortunately, I think the Hatch Act is a dead letter in terms of, no one’s gonna enforce it, at least until Democrats retake some kind of power. Look, the administration is using government money to buy political ads, outright political ads. And so certainly, I think they’re going to unfortunately be able to get away with things like raiding a congresswoman’s house.

I think really it’s just become, the idea that they would use Justice Department or DHS to achieve political aims is just understood now that that’s something Trump is gonna do.

JW: And Rozina, from your perspective, does this raid to you signal a kind of new, more dangerous era, for not just the president’s political enemies, but also disfavored groups? 

RA: Yeah, I want to just go back specifically to the Somali community living in the United States. It is telling that President Trump disparaged the country of Somalia as he also bombs this country with hundreds of airstrikes in the past year alone, displacing more people and causing more people to search for refuge abroad.

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We mentioned the ICE Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota last December. Trump was talking about the Somali community in Minnesota, and ostensibly fraud was the reason, one of the reasons, for which he sent ICE agents into the city.

One of the things that the government learned very quickly was that a lot of Somalis living in Minnesota are actually citizens. They are naturalized or that they were born here, and they could not be easily picked up and detained or deported, even though there were some who were. Yet what happened in the months after Operation Metro Surge was that it really chilled the Somali community living in the city. Even though there were so many people who did go out and protest and help each other, there were a lot who basically stayed at home. And I actually spoke with several people who would not leave their house for months.

Now, one of the things that really frightens me about what the DOJ and DHS did with regards to Ilhan Omar is that it is actually expanding the war against Somalis. It’s now seeing ways in which to not just frighten asylum-seekers and refugees and visa holders, but also naturalized citizens.

And I think what this administration has done so effectively is actually telling everyone that there are some communities who are no longer protected the way they used to be. And we saw that also in the context of, for example, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and pro-Palestine protesters. We are seeing a level in which government is used to target people who before would have protections from the government, and now they are being told that they are actually vulnerable.

And Ilhan Omar, it’s possible that nothing comes of this raid, and things will just go back to normal. But what worries me is the larger chilling effect on the community, including now naturalized citizens. 

JW: Trump aside, the Trump administration aside, Rozina, is this just the logical endpoint of effectively decades of crafting a federal domestic surveillance and police state that is laser-focused on immigrants and Muslim Americans?

RA: Yes, it is, right? One of the things that has happened over the 20, or last 25 years has been one immense power that has been concentrated in the executive branch. This notion that when it comes to national security, the government has a lot of leeway to violate people’s civil rights But the other thing — one of the other enduring legacies of the last 30 years — is precisely what the American public is willing to accept.

And over the last 30 years, we have been conditioned to believe that Muslims, and now more broadly immigrants, are not just a threat to national security, but a threat to American way of life.

And again, Trump is able to throw everything — when it comes to Ilhan Omar and the Somali community — throw everything at them. They’re a threat to national security. They are threatening how we live in this country. They are threatening what it means to be American. They are taking away our money and our dollars, and he is using all of these talking points to help build up public support for this agenda against the Somali community. I don’t think such a blatant targeting and explicit targeting would have been met with such support even in, for example, October or November 2001.

JW: I think those are all very good points. I hate when people say this is the only form of acceptable bigotry, because I can frankly say that there are many forms of acceptable bigotry. But the extent to which Islamophobia is a part of American culture is accepted, I think is not just troubling, it’s decades of conditioning, as you’ve pointed out. It is decades of feeding these conspiracy theories, of repeating them until they feel almost natural to so many of us.

But I want to give you both an opportunity to just share any final thoughts. Will, I want to start with you. Is there anything else that you’d wanna add? 

WS: As this case goes forward, it’ll be interesting to see what it looks like. But the idea that Ilhan Omar lied about her birthday or whatever is all based on, there was this one congressional website that said she was born in 1981 instead of 1982. And so Republicans have seized on this. Look, it’s one website, right? I looked in the court records, all this stuff. Before she became famous, she was listing her birthday as 1982, all this stuff. And so if that’s gonna be the crux of it, that one website had a typo, I don’t think the administration’s gonna have a lot to run on here.

JW: There’s very thin evidence for some of these conspiracy theories, although people will take very thin evidence and run with them. Rozina, any final thoughts from you? 

RA: I agree with Will, I don’t think that the government has that much to go on. It seems to be very thin evidence. But again, it is government resources that are being used to basically go on a, what appears to be for right now, a witch hunt. But again, what worries me is the more lasting effects of this, which is, what does this mean for denaturalization efforts across the board? And there seems to be not just support for it, but also a deliberate desire to run with such an agenda. 

JW: And we’re gonna leave it there. But Will, Rozina, thank you both so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

WS: Thank you. 

RA: Thank you.

JW: That does it for this episode. We wanna 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-PODCAST. That’s 530-763-2278. This episode was produced by Andrew Stelzer. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer.

Ben Muessig is our editor in chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slipstream 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 review. It helps other listeners find our reporting. Until next time.

The post DHS Was Designed as a Weapon appeared first on The Intercept.

Three years later, the housing and health crises remain acute. Maui Medic Healers Hui runs a free clinic, but Ahia wishes it had 10 more to address the community’s needs. “The fire may be out, but the catastrophe is not over by any stretch of the imagination,” she said. 

The devastation extended well beyond the lives lost and buildings destroyed. Research published last year by researchers with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Maui Wildfire Exposure Study, or MauiWES, found that more than 1 in 5 residents had reduced lung function.

Now, new research from the same project has found elevated levels of toxic metals in the island’s residents months after the fires, with higher exposure associated with impaired lung function. The findings offer further evidence that the health consequences of catastrophic wildfires can persist long after the flames are extinguished and the smoke clears.

“What we consider and sometimes look at as a one-time event isn’t really one-time anymore,” Alika Maunakea, who is Kanaka Maoli and co-director of MauiWES, told Grist. 

Researchers don’t yet know how much of the contamination came from the fires and how much was already present in the environment. That distinction matters as wildfires increasingly race through towns like Lāhainā and cities like Los Angeles, where burning homes, cars and infrastructure can leave contaminants that people encounter for months or years afterward.

“We have traditionally thought about wildfire exposure primarily through the lens of smoke,” Maunakea said in a press release. “But when an entire community burns, we are dealing with a much more complicated exposure environment.” Researchers must also understand what contaminants were already present, what the fire may have released, and what entered residents’ bodies, he said.

The research, which studied 1,400 adults across Maui six to 18 months after the fires, measured 24 metals in urine samples. It found that participants had higher concentrations of several metals than people in a nationwide health survey conducted before the fires. That included 2.2 times as much arsenic, 2.3 times as much barium, and 3.8 times as much manganese. Antimony, which is used in flame-retardant materials and has been previously linked to lung irritation, stomach pain, and other symptoms, was found at levels nearly 40 times higher.

Because the researchers lack comparable data from before the fires, they could not determine how much of the metal exposure resulted from the disaster. Maunakea told Grist answering that question is the next step for the project, which has received a $3.6 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. That work will include investigating whether and to what degree past agricultural and industrial activity contributed to the contamination.

“It’s important to realize that these are all part of settler colonialism,” Ahia said. “So what we’re looking at is confounding factors that are to the detriment of the health of our local people.”

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Decades of plantation agriculture altered water systems, introduced herbicides, and displaced native plants, leaving a legacy on the islands that is still felt today. Disasters like fires and storms can compound those ongoing environmental problems. 

“If we begin the story when the fire starts, we miss the decisions that shaped the landscape and the community’s ability to respond,” said Katie Kamelamela, who is Kanaka Maoli and an assistant professor at Arizona State University based in Hawaiʻi. “Micro climate change acts on places already shaped by histories of land ownership, water diversion, development, and unequal access to resources.”

Kamelamela said true recovery must look beyond the fire. “I want recovery to be measured by whether people can remain in their communities, care for ʻāina, and pass on their knowledge and practices in place,” she said, using the Hawaiian word for land, which carries deeper meaning and relationship than property or mere place. “Rebuilding should not recreate the same conditions that left people at risk. Caring for ʻāina and caring for people need to be funded and planned together.”

Maunakea said the multitude of intersecting pressures is one reason why he wanted to pursue this research. As climate change continues to accelerate, long-standing issues facing Native Hawaiians like housing, the harms of tourism, and the legacy of plantations can amplify problems. “We worry that disasters like this that we experience on Maui, as well as the floods and other storms that we’re experiencing now, is just going to continue widening the gaps in health disparities that already exist in those populations,” he said.

Moving forward, the project will not just identify health risks but also help residents respond to them. Study participants receive their results, discuss them, and meet with health professionals. “People now know that there’s these types of potential hazards, and what to do about them is a big concern,” Maunakea said. “We still don’t have all the answers for sure, but we are taking the next steps to get a better picture and inform our community around it.”

The post Long After the Maui Fires, Toxic Metals Linger in Residents’ Bodies appeared first on The Intercept.

Already a decade late and nearly $200 billion over its original cost estimate, the F-35 program faced a new crisis. An internal government watchdog report detailed a cascade of new problems with the program, which was in a period of flux amid plans to upgrade the jet’s engine and cooling system.

The report from the Government Accountability Office criticized the Pentagon for lumping those upgrades in with the overall purchase of the planes. Conflating the two, the authors said, would limit congressional insight into cost increases. And they criticized the contractors behind the aircraft for failing to deliver the F-35 in a timely manner.

For Lockheed Martin, the main defense giant overseeing the development of the F-35, the timing was far from ideal. In a few weeks, Congress was set to debate the Pentagon’s mammoth budget — and with it, new funding for the military’s purchase of F-35 jets.

So Lockheed and its lobbyists went on a charm offensive in Washington. The weapons maker shelled out hundreds of thousands over a two-month period, in what the money-in-politics watchdog Open Secrets described as “one of the largest coordinated lobbying efforts” around that year’s military budget.

No member of Congress benefited more than Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who at the time served as the ranking member on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

From May 1 to June 30, 2023, employees and top executives from Lockheed Martin donated $59,500 to Collins’s campaign committee. The donations were outliers during that period: Collins was among the largest recipients of Lockheed cash; the company was her largest single donor over those two months; and it was the largest spending blitz on Collins by Lockheed compared to the same period in other years.

The effort appeared to pay off for Lockheed. In July 2023, less than two months after the release of the Government Accountability Office report, Collins voted in favor of appropriating funds to purchase 83 new F-35 jets. Later that year, when the final version of the military budget was signed into law, Collins celebrated the economic boon she said it would bring to the state of Maine.

In response to questions from The Intercept, Phoebe Keller, a spokesperson for the Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee, said Collins’s support for the jet had nothing to do with donations from Lockheed or any other firm.

“Sen. Collins did not support the F-35 because of donations that she received,” Keller said.

“The F-35 jet program is a longstanding bipartisan defense priority,” Keller said. “Sen. Collins has always publicly supported the F-35 jet program, as dozens of both Republican and Democratic Senators.”

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Collins’s position on the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee likely played a role in the outsized donations, according to analyst Dan Grazier. And Collins, for her part, would have good reason to approve the spending: The F-35 program, Lockheed claims, has had a nine-figure economic impact in Maine.

Fight of Her Political Life

In the final weeks of the biggest fight of her political career against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson, fresh scrutiny on Collins’s donations from defense contractors has become a sore spot for her campaign.

In some cases, the senator’s interactions with defense firms are the routine for Washington: glad-handing, lobbying, contributions, and directing pork-barrel spending back home. Not all of it, though, is standard.

Last month, a bombshell report in ProPublica detailed an FBI investigation into an alleged pay-to-play scheme. A former defense contractor claimed to federal agents that he worked with figures tied to Collins to disguise campaign donations — and got federal contracts totaling $32 million in return. (The FBI probe fizzled after Trump returned to office and purged the bureau; Collins denied wrongdoing, pushing back on elements of the report.)

On Wednesday, more than 250 Mainers signed a letter to the state’s attorney general asking the official to investigate the allegations of corruption, according to Maine Morning Star, a local news outlet.

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And earlier this month, The Intercept reported on donations from another defense contractor, AM General, and its parent company, whose employees gave $58,000 to fundraising committees associated with Collins after a damning assessment from the Army put its federal contracts in jeopardy.

As with the AM General donations, the contributions by employees and lobbyists of Lockheed Martin do not indicate wrongdoing by Collins or her donors. They instead illuminate how companies that garner lucrative contracts zero in on powerful members of Congress, who often tout the benefits to their states.

“This is an example of what’s wrong with our approach to buying weapons,” said William Hartung, an analyst who has written critically of defense spending and influence peddling in Washington. “If we buy things because they’re in the state of a powerful member, we’re not going to have a coherent arsenal.”

Lockheed Giving

Collins was not the only member of Congress to push for funding the F-35, which enjoyed broad bipartisan support — especially from lawmakers with eligible firms and facilities in their states. And she was not the only one to benefit from the largesse of Lockheed Martin.

From May 1 to June 30, 2023, Lockheed’s corporate PAC doled out $421,000 in a bipartisan blitz to various campaign political action committees, campaign funds, state parties, and charitable foundations. (Aside from 2024, the year of the presidential election, contributions in that two-month period in 2023 eclipsed subsequent years. In the same period this year, Lockheed’s corporate PAC made 128 donations totaling $236,000; last year, it gave $286,000 across 158 donations during the same period.)

Collins was by far the biggest single beneficiary of the influx of cash — which came at a time when she was not actively campaigning. And, unlike the donations spread out to other campaign committees, the cash going from Lockheed into Collins’s coffers during those months came exclusively in the form of individual donations by employees and executives, including the firm’s CEO and chief operating officer, data from the Federal Election Commission shows.

Lobbyists working for Lockheed contributed another $5,000 to Collins during that period, and corporate PACs for Lockheed’s lobbying firms shelled out another $5,500 total, according to FEC disclosures.

Among individual contributions by Lockheed employees, donations to Collins made up more than 10 percent of all donations during the two-month period surrounding the watchdog report.

Only the firm’s in-house employee PAC, which received 75 percent of all employee donations, took in more from figures tied to Lockheed. Collins got more than twice as much as the next highest recipient, ActBlue, the Democratic Party-aligned fundraising vehicle, which received 4 percent of all Lockheed employee contributions in that period, according to FEC data.

The vast majority donations from Lockheed employees and officials were under $1,000. Of the 60 donations of $1,000 or more during May and June 2023, 56 went to Collins.

Virtually all employee contributions from Lockheed workers and executives to Collins during her current term came during that two-month window, according to the FEC.

Lockheed donations made up a quarter of all contributions during May and June 2023 to Collins’s main fundraising arm, Collins for Senator. The next runner-up was telecom giant Charter Communications, whose employee contributions made up just 8 percent of gifts to the Collins campaign in the second quarter of the 2023 fiscal year.

A spokesperson for Lockheed did not answer specific questions regarding the reason for the sudden influx of individual contributions to Collins in 2023.

“Our employee PAC program continues to observe long-standing principles of bi-partisan political engagement in support of our business interests,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Another Vehicle Army Didn’t Want

Two years later, a similar pattern played out in miniature when a lesser-known defense firm with a troubled product enjoyed Collins’s support on Capitol Hill.

Collins went out of her way last year to slam the Pentagon for canceling its plans to purchase robotic combat vehicles from Textron and its subsidiary Howe & Howe, the Maine-based developer of the Ripsaw.

Collins has repeatedly hyped the unmanned robotic combat vehicle in Senate hearings and official statements. On June 18, 2025, she took issue with the fact that the vehicle had appeared in a recent military parade, but did not make the cut for further spending.

“It’s the height of irony that you would feature this combat vehicle in your parade as the future of the Army at the same time that you’ve canceled the contract — the cancellation of a contract that was won over a lot of other competitors,” Collins said, describing the decision as “terribly unfair and a real mistake.”

A month later, after the military budget cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee, Collins singled out Howe & Howe, and its plant in Waterboro, Maine, as a potential beneficiary of a portion of $44 million allotted to outfit the U.S. Marine Corps with amphibious and autonomous vehicles.

She gave another shoutout to Howe & Howe in January, after the 2026 military budget was signed into law. This May, during the congressional testimony by then-Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, Collins again took the military to task for cutting its planned purchase of the Ripsaw.

Textron’s corporate PAC made contributions totaling $4,000 to various PACs associated with Collins just ahead of her vote on the 2026 military budget. $3,000 of the gifts came days after Collins criticized the military for cutting its plans for the Ripsaw program that would have brought millions of dollars to Howe & Howe.

Later in the year, the Textron corporate PAC donated another $7,000 to Collins for Senator and the Collins-linked Dirigo PAC, according to FEC filings. (A spokesperson for Textron and Howe & Howe did not respond to a request for comment.)

Keller, the Senate Appropriations Committee spokesperson, said that Collins was not a member of the Armed Services Committee that voted on funding the Ripsaw.

“She doesn’t have the agency to fund or not fund the vehicle because it wasn’t through the Appropriations Committee,” Keller said, adding that Collins’s longtime support for the Ripsaw was not motivated by the Textron and Howe & Howe donations.

Employees of Textron and its subsidiary, meanwhile, made contributions to various Collins-linked PACS totaling nearly $15,000 between September 2025 and October 15, 2026, FEC data shows.

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The donations, relatively small in the post-Citizens United era of campaign finance, still illustrate a troubling pattern of how influence plays out in Washington, according to Hartung, the analyst critical of military spending.

“A lot of members lobby to get more units of something built in their state, or craft legislation for a system that only their local firm can produce,” Hartung said. “It’s kind of business as usual, but sometimes business as usual causes great harm.”

Update: October 15, 2026, 7:00 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include further statements from Phoebe Keller, a spokesperson for the Senate Appropriations Committee, that were made after publication.

The post Lockheed Martin Showered Susan Collins With Cash as F-35 Program Hit Turbulence appeared first on The Intercept.

Agents from the Department of Homeland Security on Monday raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar ostensibly in connection with a criminal investigation into her childhood immigration to the United States. The raid was signed off on by a federal judge, apparently after a “back-and-forth” with federal law enforcement, and has been condemned by civil rights groups as highly suspect.

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On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s targeting of Omar escalated even further as federal agents issued subpoenas to many of her relatives, including her sister Sahra Noor, and the Wall Street Journal reported the Trump administration’s ultimate goal is to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her. This obscene abuse of power comes after years of Trump targeting Omar with threats, racist smears, intimidation, and calls for her deportation. 

But with rare exception, the response from the mainstream media’s pundit class has been largely muted, with the vast bulk of the coverage coming in the form of he said/she said, down-the-middle reporting. This is in stark contrast with how elite opinion-shapers responded with uniform outrage in the days after Trump’s also dubious raid on John Bolton, his former national security adviser and a neoconservative commentator, in August 2025. Both are part of a consistent pattern of Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice to attack his perceived enemies, yet only the latter solicited widespread media condemnation.

The very day of the Bolton raid, we saw scathing editorials from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each of these newspapers also published separate pieces from their opinion staff opposing the raid, casting doubt on its legitimacy, and otherwise leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in Politico, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns.

The raid on Omar’s home has thus far received zero of the above media interventions. No editorials, no opinion columns in the Times, Post, or Journal; no preening in The New Yorker or Politico or Atlantic about the erosion of “rule of law.” The Atlantic did run an article on the Omar raid but it was equivocal and Both Sides in its tone. (A similar Both Sides column The Atlantic published about the Bolton raid was not included in our list of opinion pieces expressing outrage over the Bolton raid.) 

This is in stark contrast to the breathless tone of outrage leveled at Trump when his DOJ targeted Bolton last year. “It is clear that Mr. Trump and his appointees,” the Times wrote in August 2025, “are perverting the justice system to serve their political interests and intimidate their critics.” “FBI raid targeting Bolton crosses a line in the Trump revenge campaign,” proclaimed the Trump ally–owned Washington Post. Even the right-wing WSJ editorial board, typically a staunch backer of Trump, got in on the fervor under the headline “Trump’s Vendetta Campaign Targets John Bolton,” which made clear “that second-term success for the President includes retribution.”

The Journal not only didn’t publish an editorial or column opposing the Omar raid as they did with Bolton, they published a column by assistant editorial page editor James Freeman endorsing it and using tabloid innuendo to cast aspersions on Omar.

This isn’t to say the mainstream press hasn’t reported on the Omar raid. The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all ran articles, and analysis, on the raid, but — unlike with the Bolton case — they have published no opinions expressing outrage and demanding recourse for the obvious authoritarian power grab.

The reasons for this glaring discrepancy are likely many: Omar is Black and Muslim, Bolton is white and not. Omar is a woman, Bolton is a man. Omar is considered “far left,” Bolton is squarely in the center-right of elite Washington consensus. Omar is a harsh critic of Israel, and Bolton is among its most overtly and bloodthirsty champions. The reality is it’s almost certainly a combination of all these factors. Writ large, Bolton is a member of The Club, and Omar isn’t.

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A similar dynamic of asymmetric In-Group vs. Out-Group outrage could be seen during the early months of Trump’s first term when the media spilled oceans of ink lamenting Trump’s determination to intimidate the press and lock up reporters. Yet this same press almost entirely ignored his DOJ’s absurd prosecution of two independent reporters, Aaron Cantu and Alexei Wood, for covering the January 20 unrest during his 2017 inauguration — a case that was found to have no merit. Ultimately, the city of Washington, D.C., was, despite the lack of any sustained media attention, forced to settle with a payout to the persecuted reporters. 

As a rule for U.S. media, the consistent application of principle — as high-minded and lofty as they may appear — takes a back seat to class solidarity. Bolton is a corporate media figure, a national security elite, a hawk, and a committed institutionalist. He is, in other words, one of them. Omar is none of these things. As a direct result, her outrageous persecution by Trump is noted and perhaps critiqued around the margins but is not a source of widespread, sustained outrage and condemnation. This distinction is reserved, very clearly, for those in The Club.

The post Trump Is Targeting Ilhan Omar. Where’s the Elite Media Outrage? appeared first on The Intercept.

Hegseth’s plan apparently won’t come to fruition. Amid outcry about the barbarity and optics of streaming the planned execution by firing squad — scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood — President Donald Trump on Thursday called off the broadcast. “I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump posted on his social media website.

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Some news outlets, such as The New York Times, framed the planned killing as an aberration, claiming that “such a broadcast has little precedent, and releasing video of executions is most often associated with extremist militant groups like the Islamic State.” This narrative, however, overlooks a forgotten American cultural history in which filmed executions turned government killings into spectacle.

The practice of filming executions in America is effectively as old as cinema itself.

In 1897, a few years after the first motion pictures began to be exhibited in the United States, a Missouri farmhand named William Carr was convicted of murdering his daughter and sentenced to death by hanging. Filmmaker Frederick Guth, of the American Phonographic Company, who had previously recorded an interview with Carr in prison, opted to film the execution as well — marking a grim milestone as history’s first filmed execution. The resulting motion picture, “The Hanging of William Carr” (1897), was first exhibited in Kansas City and St. Louis, then screened around the country.

The following year saw the nationwide premiere of “An Execution by Hanging,” otherwise known as “Execution of Negro at County Jail, Jacksonville, Fla” (1898). It showed the hanging of Edward Heinson, who was convicted and sentenced to death for criminal assault of a 14-year-old white girl. Illustrating racist views that have long shaped the American criminal legal system and the death penalty, the catalog of the film’s production company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, teased the film as depicting “a very ghastly, but very interesting subject.”

As these early films were distributed across the nation, they were met with interest and outcry. The journal Phonoscope at the time described the filming of Carr’s execution as “revolting,” while the Cleveland Leader cautioned that the film may have “brutalizing effects” on viewers. Some newspapers even claimed that during the hanging of Carr, Guth had hired people to storm the gallows to create added pandemonium.

Soon, the burgeoning cinema industry came to adopt a different practice for the growing number of films about executions. Filmmakers started blending reality with fiction, by combining clips recorded at actual execution locations with fictionalized reenactments of the killings themselves.

For instance, after Thomas Edison’s Edison Studios failed to gain permission from the authorities to film the actual execution by electrocution of President William McKinley’s assassin, filmmakers combined exterior location shots on the day of the killing with footage of a mannequin to depict the actual death in “Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison” (1901).

Edison was no stranger to the format: He had previously produced numerous historical execution reenactments like “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots” (1895) and “The Execution of Joan of Arc” (1895). His studio also dabbled in zoosadistic entertainment, with films showcasing actual animal deaths, such as “Electrocuting an Elephant” (1903), which presented an elephant named Topsy being put to death for killing a spectator who had burnt her trunk with a cigar.

In 1905, American Mutoscope reused the title of its earlier film, “An Execution by Hanging,” this time depicting a reenactment of the hanging of Mary Rogers, who was convicted of killing her husband (alternate title “Execution of a Murderess”). Along with what were apparently genuine location shots, American Mutoscope incorporated reenactments of the moment of death. The film was released as part of a trilogy, including “Reading the Death Sentence” and “Reprieve from the Scaffold,” with the third installment presenting an alternate fictional ending in which Rogers was not killed.

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Other films around the turn of the century used a similar technique to conflate reality and fiction, with film catalogs accentuating the lurid nature of these pictures. The description of “Beheading a Chinese Prisoner” (1900) in the Lubin production company catalog reads: “The executioner displays the head to the spectators to serve as a warning for evil doers. Very exciting.” Lubin had also earlier produced another execution reenactment, “Execution of the Spanish Spy” (1898).

Many films focused on executions carried out by mobs rather than the government. There was “Edison’s Lynching Scene,” also known as “Lynching of a Horse-Thief” and more coyly as “A Frontier Scene” (1898), as well as “Lynching Scene: A Genuine Lynching Scene,” also known as “Lynching Scene at Paris, Texas” (1897) from the International Film Company, and “A Lynching at Cripple Creek,” otherwise known as “Tracked by Bloodhounds” (1904).

The motion picture camera, of course, wasn’t the only new technology at that time shifting the public’s perception of execution. When William Kemmler was killed in the first electric chair execution in New York in 1890, the American media heralded a “new era in capital punishment.” Witnessing the new death technology, even in reenactment form, would prove to be a fascination for filmgoers over the years.

“Death in the Electric Chair at Sing Sing” (1902), the final installment in American Mutoscope’s five-part “A Career of Crime” series, is described in the company’s 1902 catalog as “an accurate and thrilling representation of an electric execution at Sing Sing.”

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As the novelty of new execution methods wore off, their cinematic popularity likewise began to taper, though film promoters occasionally used the electric chair as a prop outside the cinema to attract moviegoers in the 1930s. At the same time, as the practice of public hangings faded in the U.S. and executions moved indoors, authorities began restricting access to death chambers to select groups of family members, victims’ relations, official personnel, and chosen media. It’s a practice that continues to this day, preventing actual recordings of executions from reaching the public.

With the advent of grindhouse exploitation cinema in the 1970s and the home video boom of the 1980s, however, the American entertainment industry once again found a way to court audiences by depicting executions. 

Taking up the mantle of films that blended real footage and reenacted execution scenes were movies like “The Electric Chair” (1976), whose theatrical promotional materials prominently featured the titular chair and touted that “scenes in this picture were filmed in an actual death house. What you will see is real.” The infamous shockumentary “Faces of Death” (1978), whose marketing material similarly emphasized its staged electrocution scene, enticed viewers to “experience the graphic reality of DEATH, close-up.”

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In the bloody wake of “Faces of Death” came a seemingly endless parade of straight-to-video death compilations, spanning from the late 1970s to the mid-2010s, which made death something to be consumed in private in the home, versus as theatrical spectacle. The films, which spliced together clips of executions with other atrocities, have titles such as “Dying: Last Seconds of Life” (1988) and “Executions 2001” (2001).

“Death Watch,” a typical entry in the genre released on VHS in the late ’90s or early ’00s, adequately summed up its genre: “unedited first-hand footage of death, vivisection, autopsy, cremations, suicides, tortures, decapitations, state and governmental executions, animal ingestion of humans, as well as human limb extraction.” Its cover featured an electric chair, echoing the posters promoting films such as “The Electric Chair” (1976) and “Death in the Electric Chair at Sing Sing” (1902).

When Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging on December 30, 2006, a security guard used his cellphone to record the execution. The phone video was promptly released on DVD in the U.S. under the title “Sad Damn! Who’s Sane?” Though still listed on online retailers like Amazon, the DVD is now long out of print, much like turn-of-the-century execution films.

The proposal to livestream Hasan’s firing squad execution would have, in some ways, marked a significant change in course. The killing would have been the first known execution to be recorded and disseminated by the government itself, rather than a film studio. Critics lambasted Hegseth’s plan as violent propaganda that could invite similar brutality against American prisoners abroad. Trump himself reportedly expressed hesitation about the imagery, fearing footage of the U.S. military killing Hasan, who uses a wheelchair after injuries during the Fort Hood shooting, might result in him being celebrated as a martyr.

The post America’s Sordid History of Filming Executions as Entertainment appeared first on The Intercept.

Though the investigation into Omar has reportedly been ongoing for years, an ICE official working in immigration enforcement suggested the timing of the raid raised questions.

“She’s always been a thorn in the side of the Trump administration,” said the ICE official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood. “This has to be politically motivated.”

The raid is the latest of what several officials inside ICE told The Intercept were a series of moves — policy changes, sweeping initiatives, and, in Omar’s case, a specific operation — that reflect a scramble to help lift Republicans’ dimming prospects in November’s midterm elections.

In the last month, ICE has undertaken steps like requiring vehicle stop training, announcing surges into sanctuary cities, and freezing then quickly unfreezing non-criminal deportations — what one official called a “midterm panic move.”

According to analysts, these politically charged moves are rapidly degrading the reputation of law enforcement agencies among many Americans.

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“Throughout the Trump administration, we have seen them use law enforcement for overtly political purposes, often directly targeting blue states or blue politicians for their actions” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy analyst and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “This is something that has really been a significant challenge for the reputation of law enforcement, because we have seen so many issues along these lines where there are allegations of these overtly political actions.”

Reporting had linked the raid on Omar’s home immigration paperwork — she arrived in the U.S. as a refugee in 1995 and naturalized five years later — but a second ICE official familiar with the matter questioned that explanation.

“There is something more than that, there have to be other charges for the substantiation of the warrant because a judge wouldn’t sign something beyond statute of limitations,” said the official, who is with Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of ICE that carried out the raid, who also spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity.

An article in the New York Post suggested the investigation might be related to an effort by Omar in 2019, just after she arrived in Congress, to correct her birth year in a Minnesota state legislature library.

The statute of limitations for crimes related to citizenship, according to a Justice Department website, is 10 years. Civil denaturalization proceedings do not have a statute of limitations, but must meet certain conditions, according to Reichlin-Melnick.

“In order to subject someone to civil denaturalization,” Reichlin-Melnick said, “the government has must prove either that the person committed fraud or that they were ineligible for naturalization in the first place.”

“A Waste of Time”

According to accounts from inside ICE, the moves, allegedly motivated by the midterms, are creating chaos and confusion inside the agency — and fostering resentment among employees.

“We are highly trained agents who should be working child exploitation and trafficking cases, instead we are being used as pawns in our administration’s games,” said the Homeland Security Investigations official, touching on a shift away from the ICE branch’s traditional areas of focus. “I think everything happening with the agency right now is related to the midterms and to stoke divisive fires.”

Politically motivated operations started ramping up inside Homeland Security Investigations after federal agents were ordered to pursue a criminal voter fraud probe across nine states in early September, according to the first ICE official.

“The voter fraud initiative was just inefficient and ridiculous,” the official said. “Knocking on doors to question people about voting before you even have evidence to present to them is a non-starter.”

The official added, “Directing your entire workforce to do that for weeks instead of real criminal investigations is a waste of time.”

“It Backfired”

With the midterms themselves approaching, fresh controversies engulfed ICE, prompting the administration to react with a string of messy policy changes and public announcements.

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As the voter fraud investigations were underway, public backlash erupted after immigration officers from ICE’s other division, Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, shot and wounded a 28-year-old Venezuelan man during a traffic stop in Austin, Texas, on September 20.

Days later, on the weekend of September 25, ICE leadership quietly issued internal orders for a major change that would overhaul nationwide immigration enforcement. The orders directed all deportation officers to stop arresting undocumented immigrants without criminal histories. After news of the orders broke in the right-wing Daily Wire, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, denied the story.

Despite the denial, ICE officials operating across the country told The Intercept that the orders were legitimate and stayed in place for nearly a week.

“We reverted back to Biden-era enforcement,” said one official with Enforcement and Removal Operations, who was ordered to stop all arrest of non-criminal immigrants, including those who had standing deportation orders from immigration judges. “The DHS denied it but the orders stayed in place for 4-5 days and we followed them.”

Another deportation officer, who also asked for anonymity, described the orders as a “midterm panic move” in response to the ICE shooting in Austin.

“Our FODS” — field office directors — “told us through our team group chats and word-of-mouth to keep it out of the press, it was never in writing. I think leadership wanted to dial things back after the Austin shooting, but the orders got leaked and it backfired.”

On the same day as the leak and denial, the Department of Homeland Security seemed to take a harder public line by announcing a “nationwide public safety surge in sanctuary cities” targeting “criminal illegal aliens.”

Vehicle Stops “Shit Show”

On October 1, a week after the stand-down order, the Washington Examiner reported on another leaked DHS guidance that announced the formally amended ICE’s vehicle stops policy.

The Department of Homeland Security issued another direct denial, downplaying the significance of the guidance, which took aim at keeping unexperienced personnel from engaging with vehicles.

“Wrong, this is nothing new. This memo makes no changes to how ICE conducts vehicle stops,” the department said. “ALL officers have always received vehicle stop training.”

In 2025, the DHS cut training time requirements for ICE’s academy by approximately 40 percent, including cuts to driving and firearms training. The cuts came ahead of a hiring spree that added about 12,000 people to ICE’s ranks to meet the Trump administration’s deportation goals.

The recent amendments to ICE’s vehicle stops policy marks the third time this summer that department and ICE leadership ordered Enforcement and Removal Operations officials to change how they engage with vehicles. Previously, ICE halted and then amended its policy after immigration officers shot and killed two men during traffic stops in Texas and Maine in July. These orders were also challenged by official government social media channels.

“There’s clearly a disconnect between leadership on the ground level and what’s coming out of Washington” said one official. “It’s a total shitshow.”

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Then, on Thursday, October 8, plainclothes ICE officers opened fire on a vehicle during a targeted enforcement operation in New York City. At least seven rounds were fired into the car, according to reports. The driver, a 28-year-old Dominican man, was struck in the neck as his 5-year-old son sat in the backseat.

“The footage looks like a carjacking, they fucked up again,” said another Homeland Security Investigations official after reviewing video of the incident. “ERO was never given the freedom to work like they have in the past 2 years. They were always much more restrictive with their general enforcement.”

“Now comes these free-for-all mandates, and these guys who weren’t used to ‘enforcement’ and dealing with the public who were thrust into this world. Couple that with no tactical training — disaster.”

The post Inside ICE, Officials Question String of Trump Admin “Midterm Panic Moves” appeared first on The Intercept.

After being detained for five days in an airport hotel, a mother filed suit against a longtime Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractor on behalf of herself and her now 23-month-old son, alleging false imprisonment among other counts.

The lawsuit was filed on September 29, more than a year after an investigation by Injustice Watch and The Intercept revealed MVM Inc. had confined Valentina Galvis, an asylum-seeker from Colombia, and her then seven-month-old infant, a U.S. citizen, in a room at the Sonesta Chicago O’Hare Airport Rosemont last summer. In that reporting, Galvis had described her captivity in stark terms, detailing how she and her son were locked in a room with no way to communicate with the outside world and no idea when, if ever, they would be set free.

Galvis is seeking monetary damages for the alleged harm and injury she and her child suffered as a result of the detention following their arrest by ICE at a Chicago immigration court in June 2025. Galvis named the Sonesta International Hotels Corporation and affiliated companies that own and operate the hotel as defendants in the complaint. 

The lawsuit also named five Sonesta and two MVM executives and employees. It identifies JoAnna Granado as the MVM employee who transported Galvis and her son from the hotel to a federal office in Chicago on the day they were released, drawing on the original reporting in which Granado confirmed she was involved in the family’s detention.

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Granado and other individuals named in the suit couldn’t be reached for comment. MVM didn’t respond to questions about the lawsuit. During the original investigation, Sonesta said that it “does not condone illegal behavior of any kind” at its hotels. The company declined to comment on the lawsuit. 

The suit accused both the ICE contractor and the hotel of detaining Galvis and her child for profit, and alleged the companies engaged in a civil conspiracy by working together to use the hotel room as a detention cell.

“MVM, a federal contractor, physically seized, transported, and confined Ms. Galvis and her infant son,” the suit claimed. “Sonesta knowingly provided and maintained the hotel room used as a makeshift detention cell, profiting from the arrangement while a mother and her infant were locked inside.” 

The suit seeks more than $50,000 in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages, and demands a jury trial.

In the complaint, Galvis alleged that her detention at MVM’s hands caused her and her baby a range of physical, emotional, and caregiving harm. Her son had just recently started transitioning to solid foods before the pair were seized by ICE; the suit alleged the infant was provided only scraps of food that were nutritionally inadequate for his age. Meanwhile, confinement-induced stress caused Galvis to decrease her breastmilk production at a time when her son needed it most. 

Her baby suffered sleep disturbance and a worsening skin condition, the lawsuit claimed. While MVM had given Galvis an adequate change of clothing, the garments provided for her baby didn’t fit him. Because no laundry service was available, Galvis “washed [the infant’s] clothing in the bathroom sink multiple times,” she stated in an affidavit filed with the court, hanging “the wet clothes near the bed where the air conditioning would dry them quickly.” The infant wore only diapers while his clothes were being washed, and left the hotel on a Tuesday wearing the same outfit he’d worn since he and Galvis were detained by ICE the previous Thursday, according to the affidavit.

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In court documents, Galvis alleged MVM confined her and her infant to a room near O’Hare International Airport. Galvis said she was sometimes told she would be taken to a Texas detention center and, on one occasion, that she would be deported to Colombia. She was released by MVM after a federal judge ordered that Galvis and her baby couldn’t be removed from Illinois. 

The practice of using hotel rooms as makeshift detention sites has drawn little media attention; far more scrutiny has centered on conditions inside the growing network of ICE detention centers around the country. An inspector general’s report published last month found that ICE had failed to manage its detention space contracts. When asked about it at a September 30 press conference, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended facility conditions, saying detention centers meet and often exceed federal standards — and that comfort isn’t the department’s priority.

“We’re not providing Holiday Inns,” said Mullin.

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While ICE agents don’t generally place people in hotels, the agency contracts with MVM to transport immigrant children and families; the contractor sometimes places them in hotel rooms across the U.S. Since fiscal year 2020, MVM has received more than $1.3 billion in ICE contracts, much of it for transporting families. 

The lawsuit doesn’t name the federal government as a defendant. 

William G. McLean III, who represents Galvis and her baby, underscored the companies’ role in their confinement. “The corporate defendants in this case unlawfully imprisoned and permanently traumatized my clients,” he said, “over five terrifying days after the Department of Homeland Security illegally arrested them.”

Galvis remains at risk of deportation — a final decision on her asylum claim is still pending in immigration court. She’s currently in therapy after an evaluation determined she’s experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the detention.  

“I isolate myself to avoid anything that reminds me of what happened. I stay home and I do not go outside unless I really need to,” she said in an affidavit. 

“Even now, when I go out, I get very nervous, and I feel terror.”

The post Mother Sues ICE Contractor for Jailing Her and Her Baby in a Hotel Room appeared first on The Intercept.

An Iconic Transformation

It was dark and cold when I first spotted him, sitting serenely, bathed in soft light. The statue of Abraham Lincoln at his memorial in Washington, D.C., sits 19 feet tall and weighs 120 tons — a white marble monument dedicated to one of the nation’s most intelligent, eloquent, and moral presidents.

I hadn’t come to gaze upon Lincoln but at the reflecting pool that bears his name. It’s been transformed into a different kind of landmark by the inane, inarticulate, and completely immoral man who now holds that same office Lincoln did.

President Donald Trump wants to remake the landscape of Washington D.C., tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a monstrosity of a ballroom; adding his name to the Kennedy Center or demolishing it if he can’t; and installing a 250-foot-tall “Triumphal Arch” that will “house … large numbers of drones, plus snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas.” This past weekend, the administration even defied a judge’s order and ripped up 430 mature trees at East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal course in southeastern Washington that Trump wants to refashion into a championship-level course, like those of his personal properties.

Trump’s rehabilitation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — planned to be complete for the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4 — should have been the easiest lift of his planned remodel of the nation’s capital. But it quickly became a monument to failure.

Back in April, Trump said adding a bargain-priced “industrial-grade swimming pool topping” in “American flag blue” to the reflecting pool would leave it looking “gorgeous, beautiful” and would “last for 40 or 50 years.” Instead, the renovation — awarded via a no-bid contract and announced as America 250 festivities on the National Mall approached — started to fail within days. This was followed by a bright green algae bloom and finally a catastrophic lining failure that saw Trump’s chosen coating blister, peel, and then separate from the concrete.

When I visited, the only water in the iconic national landmark — which Martin Luther King Jr. overlooked as he made his historic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech — was a stagnant puddle that stretched out toward a mass of rotting leaves, a motley collection of plastic beverage bottles, a silver-and-blue aluminum can of RAIN spring water, and a pair of heavy-duty spray bottles often used for commercial cleaning chemicals.

Nested Failures

What I witnessed was emblematic of a White House far out of its depth and completely overwhelmed by disasters — large and small — of its own making. From Washington, D.C., to the Middle East, the Trump administration has been humiliated. It’s a disaster wrapped in fiascos inside a swirling catastrophe, to riff off Winston Churchill’s famed line. These nested failures are legion. The attack on the elementary school in Minab — which killed more than 150 people, most of them children — within the larger failure of the Iran war. The extrajudicial executions of defenseless, shipwrecked survivors within the murderous boat strike campaign. The killings of unarmed people by federal immigration agents and deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody during the larger administration project of anti-immigrant cruelty.

The brutal deportation operations have spawned endless wrongdoing: military occupations of American cities; the arrest and detention of American citizens, the heartless expulsions to third countries; the shootings and beatings of protesters and immigrants, the targeting of Kilmar Abrego Garcia; the swirl of corruption allegations around then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; and on and on.

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Then there is the debasing of democracy and the undercutting of the rule of law through politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department; turning federal law enforcement into a presidential goon squad; gutting of civil rights protections; targeting of political opponents; relentless attacks on the independent judiciary; executive overreach; and the pardoning or commuting of the prison sentences of insurrectionists.

Other scandals and revelations of wrongdoing have been legion: the failure to release the full Epstein files; the settling of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS; the floating of the “anti-weaponization” fund; the cover-up of the U.S. death toll of the Iran war; Signal-gate; the $400 million Qatari jumbo jet that turned into a security liability; crypto-grifting; quid pro quo tariff reductions; brazen self-dealing; and reckless actions of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which could result in more than 14 million preventable deaths globally by 2030 — including approximately 4.5 million deaths of children under 5 — all to save Americans about 17 cents per day.

A Presidential Crime Scene

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — dry and barren behind a bevy of barricades — looked to me like an open-air prison. At its head, the west end by the Lincoln Memorial, several black metal crowd-control fences and a similar lone orange metal barrier guarded two layers of chain-link fencing. The rest of the perimeter was hidden behind a single layer of metal fencing supplied by National Rent-A-Fence.

Some of the fencing — which stretched a little less than a mile — was covered in a dark mesh screen that hid the waterless pool. In other areas, the fabric had fallen or was torn down and lay in unsightly heaps. Closer to the east end, one small section of fence lay on the ground — a crumpled mess of metal mesh, poles akimbo, looking like a victim at a crime scene — behind a wall of yellow tape: 27 crisscrossed strands reading “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.” Beyond that, where the water should have been reflecting the rays of the rising sun, pickup trucks rolled through and workers slowly paced, nodded their heads, and stared out on the hardscape, as if waiting for a factory whistle to sound.

In the face of this fiasco, Trump — as always playing the victim and blaming perceived enemies for his shortcomings — has repeatedly claimed knife-wielding vandals slashed the pool’s liner. Several people, including former Olympian David Hearn, were arrested and charged with felonies and misdemeanors, but those cases fell apart. The Interior Department provided documents to the U.S. attorney’s office “indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings.” The Justice Department also called it a “rushed and botched installation” and in July dropped charges that it had brought against people accused of vandalizing the monument. On October 1, a judge said federal prosecutors cannot refile charges against Hearn. But just last week, Trump was still pushing the lies. “We had vandalism there,” he told the press. “Only sick people do that, and we have their pictures.”

Not far from Lincoln’s statue, the administration offered up these same excuses, complete with Trump’s “filthy dirty” language and vandalism falsehoods. A lone laminated sheet of paper affixed to the fencing read:

Last week, Atlantic Industrial Coatings announced on its website that: “All warranty repairs were completed Friday, 10/2/2026!” The company added: “It has been an honor to serve our great nation!” Trump followed by claiming that the reflecting pool re-do was nearly finished. “I think they’re gonna fill it up this week,” he said on October 6. “The Reflecting Pool is totally complete.”

The National Park Service did not respond to numerous detailed questions from The Intercept about the work by Atlantic Industrial Coatings and whether the pipes were completely unclogged and the granite completely clean. Atlantic Industrial Coatings also failed to respond to questions.

On Monday, a new sign appeared on the fencing as water began flowing back into pool. “The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being refilled as the National Park Service and contractors put the final touches on a historic effort to clean, repair, and beautify this iconic national landmark,” read a sign without any attribution. It also contained a caveat: “As part of the normal refilling process, the water may temporarily appear cloudy before clearing.”

Whether the Reflecting Pool will again stand as a fitting reflection of “the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of our nation’s capital,” or suffer another catastrophe that leaves it looking like an eyesore, it is symptomatic of the larger issue of unforced errors heaped upon failures which the Trump administration is powerless to fix and can only sometimes, after multiple attempts, contain. It has become a pitiful, helpless giant, unable to achieve even its most modest goals with the power to do little more than spew out misinformation; cloak misdeeds in secrecy; undermine, sabotage, and destroy government institutions; and unleash pain on the most vulnerable and defenseless, like school children in Iran and undocumented immigrants in America.

With Malice Toward All

Trump promised to drain the “swamp” of Washington corruption but instead supercharged it and managed only to drain the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool of water and the country of any shred of decency.

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In late August, Trump took to Truth Social to claim he was “six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln” — a reference to a poll of present-day Republicans, of whom 53 percent said the president they most admire is Trump, compared to 8 percent who named Lincoln. That same month, he ranked himself above Lincoln and all other presidents. It’s somehow fitting that Trump wrecked the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the same way he has soiled the office Lincoln once held.

Whether Lincoln could have imagined a president as depraved as Trump is unknowable but he did fear, in his own time “something of ill-omen, amongst us … the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts.” He couldn’t have anticipated the boat strikes, the term human trafficking victim, or the fact that the U.S. might kill the latter during the former, but in that same 1838 speech — when he was just 28 years old — he understood the perils of such summary executions, noting “when men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer.”

Trump is, however, content to kill without compunction and even recently appeared to invite the nuclear annihilation of Los Angeles and San Diego, although it’s increasingly impossible to divine meaning from Trump’s incoherent ramblings. (He has, though, threatened both cities in the past, deploying troops to LA and threatening to do so in San Diego.) Even Lincoln’s armies — turning to “total war” to end a long, brutal, and costly civil war — did not annihilate the South and decimate its people. And at its close, he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” with words Trump would choke on: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”

Lincoln did not believe that the U.S. could be felled by a foreign power but did foresee the possibility of America sealing its own fate. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” he said in that 1838 speech. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” The reelection of a craven criminal who sought to subvert what remains of democracy in America certainly appears to be more than a mere cry for help.

“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855. Some 171 years later, it may well be complete.

The suffering meted out by Trump has been immense. And his penchant for failure may now be his essential quality. He may ultimately be remembered for turning a reckless military “excursion” into a forever-war failure or as the most debased reprobate to hold the office of the presidency. But Trump’s micro-mismanagement of a local construction project that turned a functioning national monument into a fenced-off blight might be his most illustrative disappointment: a small failure of epic proportions and, in some way, a sorry reflection on all Americans.

The post Reflecting on the Trump Era appeared first on The Intercept.

Two wealthy lawfare warriors recently failed in their attempts to bury reporting on government-released documents. Both lawsuits — one in state court in California, the other in federal court in Arkansas — were frivolous strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPPs. Supreme Court precedent couldn’t be clearer that it’s not the journalists’ problem if the government accidentally shares information it’s not supposed to disclose. 

But only the California SLAPP victim had any real recourse against the censorial bully who wanted to shut him up — not because that case was any more frivolous than the Arkansas one, but because of the court in which it was filed.

Let’s start with the Arkansas case. Jessica Kivell — a mom, healthcare worker, and concerned citizen — sought to find out who was paying for a data center project in West Memphis. She filed public records requests with the Arkansas Public Service Commission and received documents indicating Google would cover only one-third of the cost of a new solar plant to power the facility, contradicting its promises that ratepayers would not be on the hook. Kivell shared the documents with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which reported on them.

Entergy Arkansas, the utility set to build the solar facility, sued Kivell, the Democrat-Gazette, its reporter, and the Arkansas Times, which said it never even had the records. It claimed the commission erred by releasing the records to Kivell, that they contained trade secrets (sidenote: baselessly invoking the need to protect trade secrets to duck public records laws is also a serious problem), that she and the press should be restrained from discussing them, and the Democrat-Gazette should have to take down what it had already reported. Entergy also disputed the Democrat-Gazette’s characterization Google would share the costs.

There are at least four Supreme Court cases that should have put Entergy’s lawyers on notice that they had no legal leg to stand on. Even in scenarios involving information far more sensitive than a utility’s purported business secrets — and far less newsworthy than the public being misled about what a data center would cost them — the court has rejected “prior restraints” that would claw back records that the government released inadvertently. 

One such case, Florida Star v. BJF, involved a newspaper that published the name of a rape victim in violation of state law. The court held the law was unconstitutional to the extent it barred news outlets from publishing information released by the government, regardless of whether the government intended to release it. The red-line rule against holding the press liable for the government’s failure to protect confidences makes sense given that the court has called prior restraints against the press the “most serious” of all First Amendment violations.

Ultimately, U.S. District Court Judge Lee Rudofsky rightly denied Entergy’s request for an emergency gag order. Entergy subsequently dropped the case. But it forced the defendants to lose money, time, and sleep. (Kivell, who rushed to court in her work scrubs for the hearing on Entergy’s motion, reportedly broke down sobbing in the courthouse hallway.) The defendants should have been able to at least recover their legal costs but, because they were in federal court, they could not.  

Arkansas, like 39 other states and the District of Columbia, has an anti-SLAPP law allowing those hit with frivolous anti-speech lawsuits to recover their attorneys’ fees. But there is no federal anti-SLAPP statute, and district courts in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Arkansas, have declined to apply the state’s anti-SLAPP law. Federal courts in some states, like Florida, apply state anti-SLAPP laws, but many others decline to do so, viewing them as in conflict with federal pleading standards.

That means that other than their own legal fees — likely a drop in a bucket for them — there is no economic disincentive stopping Entergy from SLAPPing again the next time a news report interferes with its business in hopes that an incompetent judge grants it unconstitutional relief (it wouldn’t be the first time, unfortunately), or a scared defendant backs down without a fight. 

Now let’s head to California. In 2023, independent journalist Jack Poulson published a story in his news outlet, All-Source Intelligence, about the 2021 domestic violence arrest of Maury Blackman, then CEO of Premise Data, a surveillance tech company that holds U.S. government contracts. Poulson reported on and linked to a police report that Blackman claimed the government never should have released because it was sealed. (Under California law, the records could be sealed because charges were not filed.)

Blackman sued Poulson; Substack, which hosted the article; and others in an attempt to not only punish them for their journalism, but also scrub the articles and police report from the internet. For the same reasons Entergy’s case failed, a judge threw out Blackman’s SLAPP. That decision was affirmed by an appeals court last week. 

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Leading its opinion with a quote from the Florida Star case, the appellate court also upheld the lower court’s award of attorneys’ fees to the defendants under California’s robust anti-SLAPP law. That means Blackman will need to reimburse his SLAPP target’s legal fees, and that other wannabe SLAPPsters in California might think twice knowing there are consequences for weaponizing the courts against their critics.

While Poulson’s victory was more satisfying than the Arkansas defendants’ win, in both cases, the plaintiffs achieved the exact opposite of what they wanted. The stories they tried to bury became national news as their lawsuits got far more coverage than the records they sought to suppress. It’s a phenomenon Techdirt editor Mike Masnick dubbed the Streisand effect, after a privacy lawsuit by the singer backfired and drove exponentially more publicity than it prevented.

Blackman, whose suit was only one component of a multifaceted censorship and intimidation campaign, went from his sealed arrest report appearing on a single, relatively niche blog to being detailed in an opinion from the California Court of Appeals, not to mention reported on by everyone from the San Francisco Chronicle to Courthouse News. Blackman only made things worse when he or his apparent representatives tried to manipulate Google to keep the articles about his arrest and SLAPP suits out of searches, generating even further bad press.

Oddly enough, he now runs a reputation management company. Go figure. 

But public shaming is of little use to people like Kivell, whose lives are interrupted by legal nonsense from companies or governments trying to censor them. That’s why Congress needs to pass a federal anti-SLAPP law that would apply even if states decline to enforce their local versions. That would give defendants in federal court, like Kivell, what Poulson had in California: a quick way to get meritless speech suits dismissed, with plaintiffs paying the price. 

Nobody’s ability to request public records or publish news should depend on which courthouse a corporation picks.

Correction: October 13, 2026

A previous version of this story reported that Entergy disputed the Democrat-Gazette’s math of how Google would share the costs of the data center. Instead, the newspaper reported on a figure cited in the documents it obtained.

The post An Arkansas Mom Obtained Public Records About a New Data Center. Then She Got Sued. appeared first on The Intercept.