The recent federal raid on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson isn't merely an attack by the Trump administration on the free press. It's also a warning to anyone with a smartphone.

Included in the search and seizure warrant for the raid on Natanson's home is a section titled "Biometric Unlock," which explicitly authorized law enforcement personnel to obtain Natanson's phone and both hold the device in front of her face and to forcibly use her fingers to unlock it. In other words, a judge gave the FBI permission to attempt to bypass biometrics: the convenient shortcuts that let you unlock your phone by scanning your fingerprint or face.

It is not clear if Natanson used biometric authentication on her devices, or if the law enforcement personnel attempted to use her face or fingers to unlock her devices. Natanson and the Washington Post did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

Related FBI Raid on WaPo Reporter's Home Was Based on Sham Pretext

Natanson has not been charged with a crime. Investigators searched her home in connection with alleged communication between her and government contractor Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, who was initially charged with unlawfully retaining national defense information. Prosecutors recently added new charges including multiple counts of transmission of defense information to an unauthorized person. Attorneys for Perez-Lugones did not comment.

The warrant included a few stipulations limiting law enforcement personnel. Investigators were not authorized to ask Natanson details about what kind of biometric authentication she may have used on her devices. For instance, the warrant explicitly stated they could not ask Natanson which specific finger she uses for biometrics, if any. Although if Natanson were to voluntarily provide any such information, that would be allowed, according to the warrant.

The FBI's search and seizure warrant for Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson details how authorities could use her fingers or face to unlock her phone.  Screenshot: FBI

Andrew Crocker, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept that while the EFF has "seen warrants that authorize police to compel individuals to unlock their devices using biometrics in the past," the caveat mandating that the subject of the search cannot be asked for specifics about their biometric setup is likely influenced by recent case law. "Last year the D.C. Circuit held that biometric unlocking can be a form of 'testimony' that is protected by the 5th Amendment," Crocker said. This is especially the case when a person is "forced to demonstrate which finger unlocks the device."

Crocker said that he "would like to see courts treat biometric locks as equivalent to password protection from a constitutional standpoint. Your constitutional right against self-incrimination should not be dependent on technical convenience or lack thereof."

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Activists and journalists have long been cautioned to disable biometrics in specific situations where they might face heightened risk of losing control of their phones, say when attending a protest or crossing a border. Martin Shelton, deputy director of digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation, advised "journalists to disable biometrics when they expect to be in a situation where they expect a possible search."

Instead of using biometrics, it's safest to unlock your devices using an alphanumeric passphrase (a device protected solely by a passcode consisting of numbers is generally easier to access). There are numerous other safeguards to take if there's a possibility your home may be raided, such as turning off your phone before going to bed, which puts it into an encrypted state until the next time it's unlocked.

That said, there are a few specific circumstances when biometric-based authentication methods might make sense from a privacy perspective — such as in a public place where someone might spy on your passphrase over your shoulder.

The post Washington Post Raid Is a Frightening Reminder: Turn Off Your Phone's Biometrics Now appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter to state and local officials, the human rights organization DAWN warned on Friday that any investment in Israeli sovereign debt by New York City would violate local and international law.

The 26-page letter — directed to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and the state and city comptrollers — took aim at Israeli bonds, a financial instrument that invests in the Israeli government for a set period and then is paid back with interest.

"New York is using taxpayer money to finance a military the entire world has watched commit war crimes."

Israeli bonds have emerged as a crucial source of funding for the Israeli government, with money from bond sales flowing into the country's coffers and allowing it to continue its genocidal campaign in Gaza and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.

"There's no complicated analysis needed here: New York is using taxpayer money to finance a military the entire world has watched commit war crimes and crimes against humanity for years," said Raed Jarrar, DAWN's advocacy director. (Mamdani, City Comptroller Mark Levine, and the other elected officials named in the letter did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.)

On top of the financial risk of holding Israeli debt and the moral imperative of ceasing to fund the Israeli government, divesting from Israel bonds would simply put New York more in line with the opinions of its own citizens, said Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, DAWN's director for Israel and Palestine.

"Where you put your money — that means something," Schaeffer Omer-Man told The Intercept. "We've seen a massive shift in public opinion over the past few years as a result of the Gaza war. The political class hasn't necessarily caught up yet, but support for Palestinians and disapproval for Israel's behavior, actions, and policies is at an all-time high."

New York State's Common Retirement Fund held $352 million worth of Israel bonds as of March 2024, making it one of the largest holdings in the U.S., according to DAWN. And while former City Comptroller Brad Lander allowed the bonds held in city-controlled portfolios to lapse in 2024 — earning DAWN's praise — the city's new comptroller, Levine, has pledged to reinvest.

"Brad Lander understood this and divested," said Jarrar. "Mark Levine's promise to reinvest is a promise to keep funding Israel's war machine with New Yorkers' money."

DAWN pledged to explore legal action against the state for its investment should it decline to divest in the bonds, as well as against the city should Levine's plan move forward.

Levine's announcement of his intent to purchase Israeli government bonds put him at odds with Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel whose campaign did not shy away from a continued support for Palestinians despite continuous attacks smearing him as an antisemite.

"There's a potential conflict coming up," said Schaeffer Olmer-Man. "I hope that Mamdani holds his ground and exerts whatever influence he has to ensure these imprudent and arguably illegal investments do not renew."

So far, Mamdani has held fast and signaled his opposition to Levine's plan.

"I've made clear my position, which is that I don't think that we should purchase Israel bonds," Mamdani told reporters in an unrelated press conference on January 21. "We don't purchase bonds for any other sovereign nation's debt, and the comptroller has also made his position clear, and I continue to stand by mine."

"You appear to be asking that the City's pension funds treat Israel better than all other countries."

The standoff between the mayor and comptroller is an exact reversal of the dynamic that existed between former Mayor Eric Adams, a staunch supporter of Israel and bonds backer, and Lander, the former comptroller who allowed the city's investment to lapse. At the time, Lander — a self-professed liberal Zionist who has been outspoken in his criticism of the genocide in Gaza — said he as simply doing his job as the steward of the city's investments.

"We consulted our guidelines and made the prudent decision to follow them, and therefore not to continue investing in the sovereign debt of just one country," said Lander in a July 13 letter penned in response to an ally of Adams critical of the move to wind down the city's bonds position. "You appear to be asking that the City's pension funds treat Israel better than all other countries. That would also be politically motivated, and inconsistent with fiduciary duty."

The post Zohran Mamdani Wants NYC to Divest From Israel — But New Comptroller Pledges to Buy War Bonds appeared first on The Intercept.

In the two months Minnesota has been under siege by federal agents, immigration officers have shot and killed two U.S. citizens, poet and artist Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti. Local and state law enforcement say they've been blocked from properly investigating the shootings of Good and Pretti. 

"The federal government has blocked our state BCA, so that's the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. They are the state law enforcement agency that has authority to investigate any kind of deadly use of force involving police," says Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who is leading local investigations into the killings of Good and Pretti. 

"We've not gotten anything from the federal government," Moriarty says. "To tell you how odd this situation is, we are getting our information from the media … we are not getting that from the federal government." 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Moriarty, whose office has jurisdiction over both killings. Moriarty says federal agents have blocked local and state law enforcement from properly investigating the killings. Even Moriarty, the top prosecutor in Minneapolis, does not know the identity of the agents who killed Pretti. 

In response, Moriarty says, "We set up a portal and asked the community to send any kind of videos or any other kind of evidence so that we could collect absolutely everything that we possibly could." The BCA, she says, was even "blocked physically, actually, by federal agents from processing the scene where Alex Pretti was shot."

Meanwhile, attacks by the administration on Minnesota's Somali citizens persist. At her first town hall of the year in Minneapolis, an attendee sprayed Rep. Ilhan Omar with an unidentified substance on Tuesday. Trump has backtracked on some of his bluster and removed Border Patrol Gregory Bovino from Minnesota, replacing him with border czar Tom Homan.

None of that has changed things on the ground yet in Minneapolis, says Moriarty. "Minnesotans care about their neighbors. They're delivering meals to people. They are there and they do not approve of the fact that their federal government is attacking them and their neighbors.

"We hear a lot of people talking to us about how they understand the threat from the administration or from DHS on their neighbors and on their communities, and it's really much more rooted in an understanding that they think their freedoms are under threat, even if they are not an immigrant or even if they don't really have deep ties to immigrant communities, that this really matters to them and it really bothers them," says Jill Garvey, co-director of States at the Core, an organization that leads and runs ICE Watch training programs. "So we hear a lot from folks who just haven't been engaged previously. But this for all those reasons is enough for them to step up."

Garvey says her organization is training community members in how to properly document ICE. "We also know that we can't stop all this aggression," Garvey says. "The aggression is the point of these operations. So we can't guarantee that people aren't going to be targeted with violent actions from federal law enforcement. What we can say is, if you're doing this in community, other people are going to be watching."

Garvey says the administration's claims that paid agitators are fueling protests around the country is a baseless attempt to save face as public opinion turns against it. 

"It's just another part of the propaganda machine. They need an explanation for why they're losing. … This is a very basic training that we're providing and that most other people are providing to folks rooted in how to be a good neighbor, frankly. How to assert your rights, how to protect your neighbor's rights," says Garvey.

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

Transcript 

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I'm Akela Lacy. 

Federal agents have shot three people in Minnesota, killing two U.S. citizens, since they descended on the state in December as part of President Donald Trump's massive surge in efforts to hunt down immigrants. 

Kristi Noem: Let me deliver a message from President Trump to the world. If you are considering entering America illegally, don't even think about it. Let me be clear: If you come to our country and you break our laws, we will hunt you down. 

AL: The administration quickly tried to paint poet and artist Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti — the two people killed by ICE and Border Patrol Agents this month in Minneapolis — as "domestic terrorists."

KN: If you look at what the definition of "domestic terrorism" is, it completely fits this situation on the ground. This individual, as you saw in the video that we released just 48 hours after this incident, showed that this officer was hit by her vehicle, she weaponized it …  

Reporter: The White House has labeled the man who was killed in Minnesota a "domestic terrorist." Is that something you agree with? And have you seen any evidence?

KN: When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of "domestic terrorism."

Gregory Bovino: This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.

AL: But video evidence circulating online and digital investigations from various news outlets flatly refuted those claims. After massive outrage from the public and even some of Trump's Republican colleagues — several of whom are now joining Democratic calls for him to fire Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — Trump has, as of Monday, appeared to backtrack on some of his bluster.

After having attacked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz publicly and blaming him and other Democrats for the killing of Pretti, Trump spoke by phone with Walz and said they "seemed to be on a similar wavelength." For his part, Walz said Trump had agreed to look into reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota.

By Tuesday, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino and several agents were set to leave the state. Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, is expected to take over. The two agents who fired at Pretti — whose identities are still not public — have been placed on administrative leave as of Wednesday.

Meanwhile, local and state law enforcement have accused federal agents of stymying investigations into the killings of Good and Pretti, and have sued to stop the feds from destroying evidence in both cases. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who oversees criminal cases in Minneapolis and has come under attack from Trump's Department of Justice, has called Trump's decision not to conduct a federal investigation into the killing of Renee Good "incomprehensible." Moriarty's office has jurisdiction to investigate both killings. 

Now, we're joined by Minneapolis's chief prosecutor, who's part of the team of state and local officials investigating the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Welcome to the show, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.

Mary Moriarty: Thank you so much.

AL: We're speaking on Wednesday morning, and your office just held a press conference announcing the formation of the "Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach." Can you tell us about what the aims of this group are? Who's in it?

MM: It was formed to support prosecutors around the country with resources and just a collaboration should the federal government come into their cities or their jurisdictions, because these issues can be complicated and sometimes resources are scarce and it's helpful to have the support of other people around the country. 

The other goal, I think, is to really assure the public. One of the things that we've seen here in Minneapolis, and in Hennepin County and in Minnesota, is that people are seeing federal agents engage in behavior which seems unlawful or at least inappropriate, and they aren't seeing any consequences or accountability.

I have tried to make it very clear that as Hennepin County attorney — and by the way, that's Minneapolis and its many suburbs — that our office does have jurisdiction over shootings, any kind of homicide that happens in Hennepin County. It does not matter where you work, if it's federal government or not. We do have jurisdiction. 

There are some more complicated issues involving potential federal defenses, but those are something we would face in court. And so I think it's helpful for us as prosecutors to be collaborating across the country to ensure our communities that we will stand up and we will hold people accountable should they engage in unlawful behavior in our cities.

AL: In that vein, can you tell us about the investigations you're conducting into the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti?

MM: So, as you know, and as I think the country probably knows, the federal government has blocked our state BCA, so that's the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. They are the state law enforcement agency that has authority to investigate any kind of deadly use of force involving police. Now their authority is statutory for Minnesota Peace Officers, but they still have the expertise. This is all they do.

And I had talked to the FBI, I had talked to the U.S. attorney, I had talked to the head of the BCA when Renee Good was killed. And we all had an agreement — which was unsurprising because all of us work well together — that there would be a joint investigation into the shooting and killing of Renee Good. And then suddenly, the BCA got kicked out. We were told that came from Washington, the administration, essentially. And so we were determined to do as much investigation as we could in conjunction with the BCA. 

We set up a portal and asked the community to send any kind of videos or any other kind of evidence so that we could collect absolutely everything that we possibly could. And the whole goal is to try to collect enough evidence to make a decision about whether charges are appropriate or not. And we are actually doing the same thing in the shooting of Alex Pretti; the BCA is conducting an investigation there. They were also blocked physically, actually, by federal agents from processing the scene where Alex Pretti was shot.

That actually led us to get a search warrant. The BCA drafted a search warrant. We made sure a judge was available. And so a judge signed a search warrant, and federal agents would not allow access to the scene even with that. And so that is why we filed the lawsuit in federal court Saturday. And we asked also for a temporary restraining order to force the government to preserve and not alter any of the evidence in that case. Later Saturday evening that was granted by a federal judge. And then there was a hearing two days later on Monday for the judge to hear from both parties to decide whether that TRO should be permanent — and we're waiting to hear the judge's ruling on that.

AL: So your office and the BCA sued the Department of Homeland Security, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel. It's my understanding that in this hearing that you're talking about, the judge didn't issue an immediate decision, but it's still ongoing and you have this temporary restraining order to provide access to evidence. Have you been able to access it?

MM: No. So actually the temporary restraining order was actually just to force the federal government to preserve and not alter.

AL: Mmm, OK. 

MM: We're not at the point of getting access or asking the court for access yet. It was because they were, like I said, physically preventing the BCA from processing the scene.

I have heard various officials in the administration make the claim that it was actually the public that prevented the BCA from entering the scene. I don't know if that's a lie, or they just don't know what they're talking about, but we had a prosecutor there. I was in contact with the BCA. I was watching livestream video, and you could see federal agents standing about 2 feet apart with large batons. And so there's absolutely no way the community prevented the BCA from getting there.

But because they went to such great lengths to block the BCA from trying to just do what they normally do — what their job is — and because of hearing very plainly that the administration has no intent to investigate the shooting of Renee Good — in fact, bizarrely, they were going to investigate her and her widow —we are taking this step by step. And so the first step was to ask a court to order the federal government to preserve that evidence and not alter it in any way.

AL: You've said that you have substantial evidence to consider charges in the case. Are you going to charge the officers in — I'm talking about both cases — in Good's case and in —?

MM: My goal was to collect as much evidence as we possibly could and then make a decision about whether charges are appropriate or not. I'm not going to say what we're going to do or promise that we are going to do it because it really is important to gather as much evidence as we can.

We still don't have the autopsy results in either case. That's not unusual because the medical examiner does not issue preliminary results. They're very cautious; they do a bunch of testing. I understand what it's going to say in the Renee Good case, and I know that the family has released the results of an independent autopsy.

But I think both autopsies will be very important evidence — maybe even more than, say, in most cases, we would want the gun, we would want the shell casings, we want the car in the Renee Good case. But we get cases submitted to us every day that don't have all of the evidence that we would want. That's just not how things work. And so the goal is to get as much as we can and to get to a point where we feel like, OK, we've got enough here to make a decision. 

"BCA, when they complete an investigation and once the case is closed, whatever that looks like, they post the investigation on their website."

The important thing, I think, for the public here and across the country is that the BCA, when they complete an investigation and once the case is closed, whatever that looks like, they post the investigation on their website. Anybody can take a look at it. And our goal, also, is very complete transparency. We make a decision, and we explain to people what evidence we were relying on, and I think that's the only way people have trust in their government — the only way they can have trust in their government if they can actually see what the evidence said and understand why a decision is made.

So that's really important. We have not made a decision about whether charges are appropriate, but I do believe, and my statement was that we are going to get enough evidence to be able to make those decisions.

AL: On Tuesday, Customs and Border [Protection] notified Congress that two agents fired their guns during the killing of Pretti. Was your office aware of that prior to that statutory? This was like a statutory notification that The Associated Press obtained and reported. 

MM: Yes. We've got videos, many different videos, and we've looked, we've synced them. We've looked at it from many different ways, and it certainly appeared that way.

But one interesting thing is, we've not gotten anything from the federal government. So I was asked recently about "Have we received the body cam from the federal agents?" Well, I have no official notification that the federal agents were wearing body cam. So, I mean, to tell you how odd this situation is: We are getting our information from the media or from that report; we are not getting that from the federal government.

AL: Similarly, there's been some discussion around figuring out the identity of the officers who shot Alex Pretti. I'm assuming that your office is aware of the identity of these officers?

MM: No — they haven't shared that with us. And so this is a question that people have asked me that I think people probably have interest in. They'll say, "Why don't you just subpoena records? Why don't you just subpoena the identities?" that kind of thing.

If this was state, if we were trying to seek information from a state agency or records or something like that, it would be very straightforward. We could subpoena it. There's a body of law by the U.S. Supreme Court that if you are seeking information from a federal agency, you can't just issue a subpoena. You have to make the case — and to bore everybody to tears or to get into the weeds, it's called — 

AL: Please do.

MM: TOUHY, T-O-U-H-Y. It outlines a process that you have to go through to ask for information. So it doesn't mean you're actually going to get it. So we're taking this step by step.

We've gotten very well versed in the federal law. And so we're just making sure that we are doing all the things that we need to do, trying to collect all the evidence we need to collect. But no, we do not know the identification of the people who shot Alex Pretti.

AL: I also just want to mention for our listeners that with the law enforcement killings of Good and Pretti, nine people have died so far this year — either ICE shot them, or in Pretti's case Border Patrol, or they died in ICE custody.

MM: The BCA is actually doing another use-of-force investigation because a man was shot in the leg on January 14; he fortunately survived. But that is another shooting, and that is a third investigation that the BCA is doing, and I expect they'll submit their investigation to us for consideration of charges as well.

AL: Has there been the same sort of efforts by fed federal agents to stymie that investigation or has that been an easier —?

MM: Yes. No, same lack of cooperation or response. And the BCA had the same problem with that scene too. So it's been very consistent, non-cooperation, and I won't even say non-cooperation, but just blocking every attempt by the BCA to do what they're supposed to do by law and what is best practices.

AL: There was a story that I saw in Slate that mentioned that observers on the scene — after BCA had been blocked from the Pretti shooting scene — that they saw the federal agents leave. And you've mentioned like they're not investigating it, so I don't know why they would stick around, but that was just shocking to me that they were, and if that's accurate, that they were blocking — not shocking, but adding to the things that are frustrating about this, that they're blocking and then they're leaving the scene so that they're not preserving it.

MM: Correct. People may have seen videos of people with BCA written on their jackets. They did go out there when they had the opportunity, and they did do as much as they could. But of course the best practice would be that you arrive at the scene as soon as — or shortly after it happens, and process everything there before people have gotten into the scene.

AL: Right. On Tuesday night, also in Minneapolis, someone sprayed an unidentified substance on Rep. Ilhan Omar during her first town hall of the year. What can you tell us about that incident, and is your office investigating it?

MM: So the Minneapolis Police Department is investigating it. It will be submitted to our office, I anticipate. The man who was seen on video doing that is in jail. We do have a period of time to make a decision and look at all the evidence, and I think MPD is still doing the investigation. So I think we have probably until later today or tomorrow to make a decision about whether charges are appropriate. 

And I should say: Our office prosecutes felonies in Hennepin County. (We do all youth, so juvenile, so it can be a misdemeanor, low-level crime.) If something is a misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor, a lower level crime, that is charged in the particular city where it happened. So we would be reviewing for potential felony charges.

AL: The entire premise of these raids and Trump's attacks on Minneapolis in particular is to go after Somali immigrants, and much of that rhetoric has been directed at Somali residents in Minneapolis, including Omar herself. I wonder if you can talk about how that political rhetoric is fueling violence and the consequences here?

MM: It is. We have a very vibrant immigrant community. Many immigrants from many countries are here, including our Somali neighbors. They are mostly peaceful, just like other immigrants. 

Before all of this started, before they took down these numbers from their website, the federal government had numbers that showed that American-born citizens committed crimes at a higher rate than immigrants.

To be clear, as the prosecutor for all of Hennepin County here, first of all, there was no influx of immigrants that were coming here to commit violent crime. In fact, violent crime has gone down here. And that's not because of ICE's presence — that was going down, as it is around the country. So there's no justification for ICE to be here because we have "violent crime."

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And the whole idea — at least what they claim, what they say it is — it's about fraud. Well, this is not how you investigate fraud. Investigating fraud involves looking, I'm dating myself, I always want to say bankers boxes of documents but — 

AL: I know what that is. [Laughs]

MM: It's really meticulous! It's really painstaking and tedious, and you have to look through records. It isn't snatching people off the street. So this has nothing to do with our immigrant community, and it has done tremendous damage. When you target a particular community and make ridiculous claims about what they're doing, that can and has led to violence here against Somali neighbors.

And so it's very damaging, and Ilhan is my representative. She has been, I think, the recipient of the worst, just terrible rhetoric, violent by the president on down. And it's just, especially after what happened to [Minnesota state Rep.] Melissa Hortman and her husband who were assassinated, and another legislator was shot along with his family — there are consequences for the things that people say. 

There are people out there that are really struggling with mental health. We in fact have set up, and we partner with other agencies, to do threat assessments when we get people who are making threats against electeds. And a lot of these people are struggling with mental health. Some of them aren't; some of them are radicalized, and they get the idea in their head that doing something to someone is somehow a good idea. And so there are consequences for words.

And it's been devastating for our Somali community to have all of this hatred directed at them. And, Ilhan, I see her at events. We're at the same events. She's the last one there talking to her constituents. She has more public town halls than anyone I've ever seen. She has more public town halls than anyone in the state. She's courageous to show up. She's always there to talk to her constituents, and obviously what happened last night is extremely alarming. I'm grateful that she is OK. And we have, I think, reports that the substance was not toxic. So that's good.

But the violent rhetoric, the lies, I would say, just has to stop. I know it isn't going to, but I want people to know it has consequences and sometimes those are very violent consequences.

AL: Thank you also for mentioning the assassinations of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman.

I also want to mention this is — aside from the political violence that we're talking about — that shooting was carried out by someone who was posing as a police officer, in the midst of this situation where as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a recent interview, local law enforcement are being overwhelmed by thousands of these immigration agents who are not clearly identified. They're not wearing badges, and people don't know who they are. And so that contributes to the sense of not knowing who is protecting you, right?

MM: Yes. It's frightening. And there, I think, will be legislation in our session, which starts next month about creating greater laws to penalize people who impersonate police officers.

It is frightening. All of the ICE presence, most of them are masked. And so do you know who this person is when they're giving you commands? It's hard to describe how frightening it is here, how much this dominates everybody's existence right now.

I know of no parent who hasn't had to have some kind of conversation with their child — and I'm talking about 4, 5, 6, and older — because that child is frightened that ICE is going to hurt them or hurt their family or hurt their classmate. ICE is sending brochures into schools promising families that are having food security problems access to food. They're doing that in schools. 

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And we've all seen the videos of the Hmong gentlemen, elder gentlemen. And by the way, the Hmong — I think we have the second highest population of Hmong in the country — but for those who don't know, they fought for the United States in the war in Laos. And so they are here because they were going to be killed and persecuted in Laos. So they helped us, they're here. 

And yet we have situations where we had this Hmong elderly gentleman who was marched out of his house. And just noticing it's 5 degrees here today. 5. And that's been the consistent temperature in January. So they marched this gentleman out in his boxers and Crocs, and his family was able to throw a blanket around his shoulders.

They drove him around for an hour and evidently dropped him back off. He is a citizen. And he has no record. They mistook him for somebody who's actually in one of our prisons, and the prison had notified ICE that the man was in prison. 

And we all have seen the boy, the precious boy, with the bunny hat. His father was here seeking asylum. And so he jumped through all of the legal hoops that he was supposed to, relying on our government, doing what he was supposed to do. Then they swoop in, and they snatch his 5-year-old boy and him. And I think they sent them to Texas.

"They use this word like, 'detain,' which sounds pretty antiseptic, right? We're talking about a cage. We're talking about a jail, a prison."

And they use this word like, "detain," which sounds pretty antiseptic, right? We're talking about a cage. We're talking about a jail, a prison — for a 5-year-old child. And to have the administration say, "Well, he is in better hands." And who would want their 5-year-old child in the hands of ICE and then in a cage or a jail?

And we've seen these incidents over and over where I don't know if you saw the video that came out recently. This was actually after there were some hopes here, I guess, that the ICE presence would diminish. But that same day we see videos of an ICE agent saying to somebody, "If you raise your voice, I will erase your voice." 

Unknown agent: I will tell you this, brother, 

Unknown man: What? 

Unknown agent: I will tell you this: You raise your voice, I will erase your voice.

Unknown man: If I raise my voice, you'll erase my voice?

Unknown agent: Exactly. 

Unknown man: Are you serious? You said, if I raise my voice, you'll erase my voice?

Unknown agent: Yeah. 

MM: We saw another video that same day of a woman sobbing, and she has a small child in her arms, because ICE is hauling away someone in her family. We see these, and it's like the administration says, don't believe your eyes.

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But everybody can see the videos here, and we can see what's going on. And this isn't about public safety. And I could go on and on about how what's happening is really preventing our office from prosecuting people. But I'll stop.

AL: No, actually, I'm curious what you have to say about how this is stymieing being able to actually investigate things. But secondarily, is law enforcement and your office equipped to handle these forms of violence fueled by political rhetoric, especially when it's coming straight from the top?

MM: You know, for our office, we're reactive in many ways, right?

AL: Yeah.

MM: We try to be proactive in prevention, but that's very difficult here. And so we are often reactive. I think, I have reflected a lot on the role of local law enforcement here. I've had conversations — we have something like 38 different jurisdictions here in Hennepin County, and I have talked to them. I've sent them an email. And I've made it clear to them that they do have jurisdiction to do investigations just like they normally would, and they should submit potential cases to us. And some of the things I hear are, "What about sovereign immunity?" and that kind of thing. And we have said repeatedly, "That's legal stuff. Let us deal with that."

But I'll just say that we haven't had a single case referred to us by local law enforcement this entire time. And I think that there's a role there — and I acknowledge that we're in unprecedented times — but that, I think, there's a role that local law enforcement should be playing here.

I know there have been discussions about, well, we don't want to get into it with federal law enforcement. And at the same time I'm listening to the interview that's come out of the woman — people are calling her the woman in the pink coat — who is videotaping what happened to Alex Pretti, and she's talking about how frightened she was, how frightened everybody is, but they feel compelled to bear witness and be there.

And so I have tried to challenge our local law enforcement: You know, you're here to protect and serve. Sometimes they've said, well, we don't want to be political. And I've said, this isn't about politics. You can think it's a good thing that ICE is here. What we're talking about is if members of your community are being — if excessive use of force is being inflicted upon them, what are you going to do? Are you going to investigate?

And sure, blockades there, you may not know who the agent is. And I've also heard fear on the part of police that they may get arrested for obstruction or worse. But I think we're at the point where they need to make some decisions: Are they here to protect and serve the community? And that means their community members. Even if that means intervening when they see ICE engaging in unlawful behavior and doing investigations and submitting cases to us.

I can't help but think having been living with this since the federal agents have been here, if they thought there would be accountability, if that would end some of the behavior, if that would deter some of the behavior, because I know the administration has said, "You have absolute immunity. Nobody can do anything to you." And that is simply not the case. 

But we haven't gotten to the point where there has been accountability for any of the behavior that we've seen. And I continue to encourage local law enforcement to intervene, to investigate, to send us cases, even if they're not sure what it is. But to this point, we haven't received a case.

[Break]

AL: There is a dynamic here that I want to touch on and that I've covered, with respect to your office, which is that both local and federal law enforcement and Republican officials have targeted you throughout your time in office, in part for your reform policies, but also in response to you charging a police officer in 2024 for killing a driver, Ricky Cobb II. How is that playing out here? Is that dynamic generally? Is that affecting any of the efforts on behalf of your office or these other Minnesota law enforcement agencies to respond to these two killings?

MM: No, it isn't, and I think I will have plenty to say about the way I would say Renee Good and Ricky Cobb situations have been approached by many — very differently at some point — perhaps when I'm out of office.

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And I said this when I campaigned and I'm very proud of this: I have not let politics enter into any of our decisions. We charged the officer who shot and killed Ricky Cobb because we very much believed we had a case — a good case — and we knew it would be difficult, but we thought it was appropriate to attempt to hold the state trooper accountable.

There were a lot of politics involved there. But ultimately, we ended up dismissing. And I know sometimes it's reported that I got pressure from the governor. We dismissed it because it was the ethical thing to do. Certainly the governor at some point was threatening — was, I guess, going to take it away from us, I can only guess for the purpose of dismissing it. 

But I'm pretty immune to political pressure because I very much believe — I fundamentally believe — that a person in this situation, when we're talking about prosecution and justice, I mean, we do things that matter, that matter to people's lives. That goes for law enforcement and community members. And I think it's extremely important that we not be swayed by politics, that we do the best we can and we make the right decision. And I continue to believe that we made the right decision in charging the trooper, [Ryan] Londregan, in Ricky Cobb's death. We made the right decision to dismiss it when there were many complications with the lack of cooperation by law enforcement in that case. 

And we are going to do the right thing in this case. We're collecting all of the evidence so we can make sure we're making a decision with as much as we can possibly get, and then we will sit down and see, is it appropriate to charge or not?

AL: Speaking of politics, getting involved in things — the Department of Justice is also investigating your office. My understanding is that there are multiple probes going on, one of which is unrelated to ICE, but related to your office's policies to address racial disparities in charging. The other came as a result of your role in the Good and Pretti cases. Can you walk us through that?

MM: Sure. I'll talk about the subpoenas because there's been a lot on those. That subpoena actually was not served on me. It was served on Hennepin County. As the county attorney, we have a civil division here as well as a criminal division. Our civil division represents Hennepin County.

So we advise, my office advises the county on that subpoena. I don't even think it was necessarily the people that got subpoenaed, but they were — I've seen some of the other subpoenas — they're looking for records about immigration. But I view those efforts as just being attempts at intimidation.

What I'll say about that is, I was actually in a meeting about the Renee Good case, when suddenly I was inundated with texts from reporters asking me about being subpoenaed, and I had no idea what they were talking about. So it seemed that the administration was leaking that I personally had been subpoenaed.

"That's, I think, another intimidation tactic. You can't even be honest about what you're actually doing."

And then we found out I actually wasn't. It was Hennepin County, and my office does represent Hennepin County. But that's, I think, another intimidation tactic. You can't even be honest about what you're actually doing.  

And why on earth would you be claiming that you're subpoenaing me and the attorney general and others when we are investigating this case, or we were, just that case at the time. So I think it's pretty clear that it's politically motivated. I also learned about the DOJ investigation via Twitter. I guess I'll still call it Twitter. 

AL: I do, too. [Laughs]

MM: And that's ongoing. I can't talk about that, but yeah, Minnesota has been under constant attack by this administration. That's been clear for quite some time.

AL: After a call with Trump on Monday, Governor Tim Walz said Trump "agreed to look into reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota and working with the state in a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement regarding violent criminals." I want to ask you, what does a more coordinated fashion look like given that per Minnesota officials, they've already been doing their statutory requirements as far as transferring legitimate cases to immigration?

MM: Well, first of all, I don't believe anything until I see it with my own eyes. And the same day that happened, or the day after that happened, we saw this ICE agent telling somebody, if they raise their voice, he will erase their voice.

So we've seen no change here on the ground. So immigration, as you know, is civil. The law does not require the state to participate in federal civil enforcement. But that's what this administration wants. 

Now, there are good reasons not to do that. And you'll hear a lot of law enforcement talk about how what a bad idea it is for local law enforcement to be participating in civil enforcement of immigration law because that means that victims of crime — who are often immigrants because they get targeted — will never call you, will never call the police. They won't be witnesses for our cases. If they're domestic violence victims, they won't call. So there are very good policy reasons and practical reasons — you want trust in the community for local law enforcement to not participate in something you are not, you don't have to participate in, because it's civil.

And Minnesota has, as you said, has been doing its statutory responsibility, but they want more than that. And this continual refrain of violent criminals is ridiculous. If an immigrant commits a crime, if law enforcement brings us a case, they're held accountable. And then typically what's happened is that ICE decides, if they go to prison, do they want to deport them after that. That's the way it's always worked. It's not been a problem here.

Like, how is this about violent criminals when — and I haven't looked at this for a while, but at one point, given the administration's own numbers — over half of the people that they have detained have no criminal record. It's not about violent criminals. So it seems as though the administration wants information that legally the state is not required to give. And if handing that information over actually hurts public safety, so I don't see, hopefully, the state switching positions on that. 

It always has been a political question, but I think the question is, is it starting to look so bad for Republicans in this administration that for political reasons, they'll stop doing this or withdraw? I think that's what it comes down to. I mean, I thought I heard Trump saying in Iowa that this is just bad for us, not for him. 

Every day we hear something new. And so as I said, and I think Minnesotans believe this too: We will believe it when we see it here on the ground.

AL: I'll just mention, what the administration wants local police to do in terms of doing immigration enforcement is part of this massive increase in 287g agreements that the administration has been signing with local police departments and state departments around the country.

Minnesota has eight of them, none of which are in Hennepin County. But I read into that statement that they would be potentially trying to push more of those agreements. I don't know if you're hearing anything to that effect.

MM: I think they have. I cannot remember what community it was in, but they were trying to push some kind of facility on a community. And community members showed up and said no. And I think it's very unlikely that community here in Minnesota, after what they've seen, would voluntarily want to do that anyway. The reason I think communities do that, or different counties do it, is to raise money. They get money from ICE by housing people.

And so that's not something that Hennepin County is ever going to do. And I'm sure it's not something other counties are going to do, but they do need places to house all of these people they are picking up, even though they have no records.

And I should tell people too, we have restaurants closing because there's no one to work there. We have abandoned cars that are still going in the middle of the street because somebody's been dragged out of it and taken away. This has been devastating to the community. And at the same time, Minnesotans know how to protect one another. That is why they're showing up in droves.

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That is why they showed up on the Friday with the march. I've heard everything from upward of 15,000 to 50,000 people showed up. I think that day was below zero. The temperature was below zero. Minnesotans care about their neighbors. They're delivering meals to people. They are there and they do not approve of the fact that their federal government is attacking them and their neighbors. And they are resisting in pretty remarkable but probably not surprising ways.

AL: We're going to leave it there. Thank you for joining me on the Intercept Briefing, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, 

MM: Of course. 

AL: This was a great conversation. Really appreciate your time. 

MM: Thank you.

AL: All eyes are on Minnesota. But ICE is continuing to sweep cities around the country, expanding its efforts most recently in Maine. Elected officials are warning that however the courts respond to what they describe as extreme and dangerous federal overreach in Minnesota could portend what's next for other cities. In a letter supporting the lawsuit brought by Minnesota officials including Moriarty, who we just heard from, against DHS, 20 attorneys general wrote: "If left unchecked, the federal government will no doubt be emboldened to continue its unlawful conduct in Minnesota and to repeat it elsewhere." 

Next, we'll hear from someone who has been preparing communities for just that. Jill Garvey is the executive director of States at the Core, an organization that leads and runs ICE Watch training programs. Welcome to the show, Jill. 

Jill Garvey: Thanks for having me.

AL: Over the last few weeks, concerns about safety have hit a high point after immigration agents killed observers Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. How are you talking to people about being safe when observing and documenting agents activities, particularly when law enforcement is blatantly breaking the law?

JG: When we talk to people and we train people to be observers or to document what's happening in their communities, we really focus on three things. One is documentation, how important it is to have as much footage as possible, as much evidence as possible about what is happening, but to do it as safely as possible.

So it's a core piece of the training that thousands of people are getting right now and are joining, essentially. We find thousands of people from all over the country every week are doing what we call ICE Watch training or documentation training. What we find is that people are scared for their safety, but that they are resolved to do this anyway.

And so we talk a lot about maintaining a safe distance, maintaining nonviolence, not interfering, not getting between an agent and their target — because that's not just dangerous for the observer, but it's dangerous for the people directly being targeted and other potential vulnerable people in the area.

But we also talk about doing this in community. The beating heart of what we are seeing happen in cities and people getting prepared is their sense of community. So this isn't an individual activity. If you do it together, you are much safer and it is much more effective.

"This isn't an individual activity. If you do it together, you are much safer and it is much more effective."

AL: And the idea being that if you're in community that disincentivizes agents from retaliating? Or can you tell us more about how that strengthens?

JG: I think it's a few things. One is the more people, the more eyes on the scene, whatever the operation or activity is, the more people watching, the less likely that there will be an escalation of violence. What we see most of the time is that ICE agents or Border Patrol agents don't want to be filmed. They don't want to be documented, and they certainly don't want a crowd of people watching them even from a safe distance. 

A lot of the footage that people around the country have seen have been these sort of violent confrontations or clashes in certain cities, and so those do develop, but it is typically after ICE agents have already escalated some aggression against a community member.

Maybe they are targeting children for arrest or detention. Maybe they are smashing somebody's window and trying to take them out of a vehicle. More often than not, having more people on the scene means that ICE agents pull out of that neighborhood and try to find a place that is quieter.

"The more people watching, the less likely that there will be an escalation of violence."

We also know that we can't stop all this aggression. The aggression is the point of these operations. So we can't guarantee that people aren't going to be targeted with violent actions from federal law enforcement. What we can say is, if you're doing this in community, other people are going to be watching.

We wouldn't know what really happened to Renee, we wouldn't really know what happened to Alex Pretti if their neighbors hadn't been bravely recording these incidences all the way through.

AL: And you're talking about documentation, it sounds like mostly video recording, audio recording. Are there other forms of documentation that you're training people on, or can you tell us more about exactly how people are documenting these instances?

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JG: Primarily it is video documentation with their phones. One thing that we talk about that I think is a surprise to people is how much we want them to narrate or create some audio documentation while they are using video. So what we find in this new wave of ICE enforcement and it being documented by residents, is that people are often taking videos, or at least a couple months ago in Chicago and some other cities — people were taking videos, and it was really hard to tell what was going on just from the visual. So increasingly people are learning that they take the videos, but they also calmly narrate everything that they're seeing just in case, their hands are shaking and the camera's kind of migrating over here, but they're seeing something really important, right?

So that audio, that eyewitness accounting of what is happening is also really important.

AL: Can you tell us what you've learned from the people in the communities participating in these trainings?

JG: So I think what I've learned is that this is a multigenerational pretty broad spectrum of people who are getting engaged and going out there and doing this. So we're hearing from people who are young, we're hearing from people who are old. We have people who join our trainings who say, "I'm 83. How do I do this safely and effectively?" We hear from a lot of people in rural and more remote areas and we hear from people who have not previously been involved in any sort of protest or political activity.

The reason they're coming to these trainings and the reason they're going out with their cellphones and whistles in some places is because they're having some, I think, base reaction that is transcending typical politics to what they're seeing and what they understand the threat is.

We hear a lot of people talking to us about how they understand the threat from the administration or from DHS on their neighbors and on their communities. And it's really much more rooted in an understanding that they think their freedoms are under threat, even if they are not an immigrant or even if they don't really have deep ties to immigrant communities, that this really matters to them and it really bothers them. So we hear a lot from folks who just haven't been engaged previously. But this for all those reasons is enough for them to step up.

AL: On the right, some people, including the administration, claim that the individuals and the communities participating in these kinds of activities and protests are — they accuse them of being paid agitators or astro-turf groups. What do you say to that?

JG: I think the numbers don't really support that. The numbers don't lie. Even if you look at the footage, at the number of neighbors, residents who come out of their homes prepared to document what they're seeing in lots of places, Charlotte, North Carolina; Columbus, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans; Chicago; LA; D.C. It's not possible that there's that many paid agitators.

I also think it's just another part of the propaganda machine, right? They need an explanation for why they're losing. And they need an explanation to pull people off the the sense that "Hey, this isn't really about immigration. This is about authoritarian overreach. This is about militarizing certain cities that are political opponents or where democracy thrives."

It's a weak argument that there's some major sophistication happening behind the scenes. I assure you there is not. 

AL: [Laughs]

JG: [Laughs] This is a very basic training that we're providing and that most other people are providing to folks rooted in how to be a good neighbor, frankly. How to assert your rights, how to protect your neighbor's rights. So I think it's a little bit laughable. I also think it's a little bit desperate.

AL: Speaking of authoritarian overreach, Trump invoked the Insurrection Act once again after an ICE officer killed Renee Good. What would happen if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act yet again? Would your advice change? If so, how are you all talking about this?

JG: I don't think our advice really changes other than for those people who live in places where the Insurrection Act could be invoked, understanding what that actually means. This is a pretty vague thing to invoke, or to enact, activate. So I do think it's people really understanding what it means. Does it mean that local law enforcement, local governance is disempowered in some ways? Yes, and that should be a concern for folks. But it doesn't strip you of your rights. Doesn't strip you of your First Amendment rights or your Fourth Amendment rights.

AL: Were you doing these trainings prior to January of 2025, and what the timeline is there? 

JG: So my organization, in partnership with some community defense networks in Chicago, started training more robustly in January 2025. 

AL: OK, got it. 

JG: But there's roots in this training all the way back to 2017 when various groups started adapting other documentation training, and know-your-rights training into what a lot of people now refer to as ICE Watch or Migra Watch. But I think we saw a big uptick in interest from across the country in July of 2025. For various reasons, people started to get very concerned — and now, in hindsight, very good reason — that the Trump administration was really going to operationalize this playbook around surging immigration enforcement officers into certain places. 

We had probably 100 people per training in the beginning, and now, like tonight, we have 7,000 people registered for training. 

AL: Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you think is important for people to know on these topics?

JG: So the recent news is that Bovino has been demoted, and his sort of brand is being dismantled. But he's not a decision maker. He's not the architect of these strategies. So until we get to a point where Kristi Noem or Corey Lewandowski or Stephen Miller are really held to account for what they are doing in American cities people should be staying as vigilant as possible. Keep training, keep organizing their communities to respond when they come to Ohio or Pennsylvania or other states and cities.

AL: Many Democrats and even some Republicans now are calling on Kristi Noem to be impeached and all this stuff, and it's the lowest-hanging fruit here obviously for people. They can take Bovino out of Minneapolis, but they're just going to go on to the next city and continue doing the same thing with whoever they put in place next. So I think that's an important and fitting note for us to end on.

Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing, Jill Garvey,

JG: Thank you for having me.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I'm Akela Lacy.

The post Even the Top Prosecutor in Minneapolis Doesn't Know the Identity of the Agents Who Killed Alex Pretti appeared first on The Intercept.

Congress has two months to decide whether to abandon, renew, or reform a controversial surveillance law at the heart of Edward Snowden's leaks.

Administrations of both parties have taken a lead role in jockeying over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, typically working to tamp down reform talk. Trump officials, however, were absent at a hearing on the subject Wednesday.

The silence continued Thursday, when President Donald Trump's nominee to serve as National Security Agency director dodged a question about FISA reforms at a confirmation hearing.

The White House says it is working behind the scenes, but the administration's lack of a public stance has garnered criticism from Democrats. Even the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, seemed to express frustration with the no-show at his hearing.

"If the administration would like to brief us in an open or closed setting, I will help work to set it up," he said. "In the meantime, the Senate Judiciary Committee needs to move ahead."

Asked for comment, the White House declined to explain why the administration was absent.

"The administration is having productive discussions," the White House said in an unsigned statement.

Grassley and other lawmakers are working ahead of an April 20 deadline to renew FISA's Section 702.

Warrant for "Backdoor" Search?

The provision allows the FBI and other agencies to search through a massive trove of ostensibly "foreign" intelligence gathered when NSA spymasters point their collection tools abroad. Those "foreign" communications, however, include large quantities of information sent from and to Americans.

Civil liberties advocates have long sought to force agents at the FBI and other entities to obtain a court-approved warrant before conducting "backdoor" searches for information on American subjects.

They came within a single vote of achieving their aim in 2024, when a bipartisan coalition banded together to support a warrant requirement. The push failed in the House of Representatives, but Section 702 supporters were forced to agree to a short-term extension that expires this year.

Since the last debate, the advocates' case has been bolstered by a federal court opinion finding that the FBI violated one man's rights by searching a Section 702 database without a warrant.

Trump has at times lashed out at FISA because a separate provision of the law was abused to improperly spy on an adviser to his 2016 presidential campaign. When push came to shove during his first term, however, the Trump administration supported a renewal of the law without warrant protections. His nominees for top posts also lined up to oppose further reforms during confirmation hearings last year.

Trump's nominee to serve as NSA director, Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd, gave little indication as to where he stood on the issue during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked him whether he would support a warrant requirement, with exemptions for emergency, "four-alarm crisis" situations.

Rudd sidestepped the question.

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"Well, senator, that is a topic I would need to look into and get a better understanding of to give you a more fulsome and complete answer on that one," he said. "Again, what I would highlight though is supreme confidence that the men and women of the NSA are committed to protecting civil liberties and privacy of American citizens."

At the separate Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, experts on both sides opined on the controversial law — but no one from the administration attended to answer questions.

"We are three months from the expiration of Section 702 and the Trump administration, as best as I can discern, still has no official position on it. That is stunning," said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who in 2024 voted to extend the law in its current form.

Joe Biden's administration aggressively lobbied lawmakers for months to support a renewal of the law without modification during that go-around.

Coons, for his part, said he did not know how he would ultimately vote on the issue this year.

"Kick the Can?"

Democrats who voted for the law two years ago are under increasing pressure this year — including from primary opponents — to support a warrant requirement as the Trump administration erases privacy protections.

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To make matters more complicated, Republicans who voted for reforms under Biden could flip back to supporting sweeping powers for the executive branch now that Trump is president.

There are other surveillance powers that could figure into the renewal debate. Civil liberties advocates are also worried about a separate provision created in 2024 that allows the government to force data centers — and, critics fear, anyone with a computer — to hand records over to the government.

Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the security and surveillance project at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said that he was concerned legislators may be tempted to approve another short-term extension during an election year.

"It's an open question of, are we going to get a reform vote on this in the next couple months, or is Congress going to try to kick the can?" he said.

Trump administration's silent stance may reflect internal debates, Laperruque said.

"I think there's probably just a lot of internal uncertainty on how exactly they are going to come down on this stuff," he said, "and I guess they would rather not engage until they have a set position."

The post Controversial Warrantless Spying Law Expiring Soon and Trump Officials Didn't Show For a Hearing on It appeared first on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump's military occupations of American cities have already cost taxpayers half a billion dollars, according to a new report released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.  This unprecedented militarization of America could cost more than $1 billion this year if current domestic deployments continue.

During his second term, Trump has deployed active-duty troops and National Guard members to occupy six Democratic-led cities to quell dissent, assist anti-immigration efforts, protect federal buildings and personnel, or address crime. After repeated setbacks in federal courts and the Supreme Court's refusal to allow a military occupation of Chicago, the Trump administration withdrew forces from California, Oregon, and Illinois earlier this month. Troops are still deployed in D.C., Memphis, and New Orleans. Two hundred members of the Texas National Guard also remain on standby for deployment. These ongoing operations will cost $93 million per month in 2026, according to the CBO.

The cost of the D.C. occupation, alone, is projected to exceed $660 million this year if it runs through December, as is expected by the CBO. While that deployment was supposed to address supposed surging crime, troops were repeatedly tasked with rousting the homeless, cleaning up parks, and painting over graffiti. Trump even advanced baseless claims that U.S. forces battled members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on the streets of the capital.  

"Our military budget is not a slush fund for the President to carry out his political stunts," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told The Intercept. "Our National Guard and Marines are needed to respond to natural disasters and national security threats. Ripping them away from their homes, jobs, and families in pursuit of a cruel immigration agenda is a disrespect to their service."

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Trump has previously threatened to surge troops into Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies, despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local officials. More recently, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, again — a rarely used federal law which allows the president to deploy the U.S. military or federalize the National Guard for domestic law enforcement — to put down protests in Minneapolis.

Despite the Trump administration's unprecedented use of the military within the U.S., it has kept even basic details about domestic troop deployments, including the costs, secret.

According to the CBO, Trump's urban occupations cost about $496 million in 2025. That total includes $223 million for the D.C. deployment and $193 million for Los Angeles.

"They are spending billions to militarize our streets while cutting food aid, healthcare, social services, and labor and environmental protections — at a time of unparalleled wealth inequality."

Throughout 2025, The Intercept repeatedly provided cost estimates of deployments from the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group. The $473 million price tag derived from open-source information and costs-per-day estimates supplied to The Intercept by the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill, offered in November, closely aligns with the analysis provided on Wednesday by the CBO.

"The CBO numbers confirm what invaded and over-policed communities have always known — the U.S. government is invested in control and domination, not caring for people," said Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, who provided the estimates on the deployment costs. "They are spending billions to militarize our streets while cutting food aid, healthcare, social services, and labor and environmental protections - at a time of unparalleled wealth inequality."

The CBO's report was issued in response to an October 17 request from a group of senators, including Warren and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill. "If Donald Trump is burning through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on his authoritarian campaign of intimidation, the American people deserve to know about it," Duckworth told The Intercept at the time. "Trump's continued abuse of our military to intimidate Americans in their own neighborhoods — the very same Americans he expects to foot the bill for these deployments — must end immediately."

Neither the White House nor the War Department returned repeated requests for comment on the CBO report.

The post Trump Has Already Spent $500 Million Deploying Troops to U.S. Cities appeared first on The Intercept.

Folk legend Woody Guthrie was so angered by the dehumanizing language used to describe Mexican immigrants in 1948 that he wrote a song about it. Telling the story of dozens of Mexican workers killed during a deportation flight crash, Guthrie called the tune "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)."

Artists from Pete Seeger to Bruce Springsteen to Dolly Parton have covered Guthrie's song, which has been hailed as a timeless ode to the humanity of society's most marginalized.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wasn't listening.

In a social media post on Wednesday, ICE honored the deportation officer killed in the January 28, 1948, crash while describing the unnamed passengers as "illegal Mexican aliens."

Whether intentionally or not, the post drew a backlash from commenters who pointed out the language used to describe plane crash victims on the 78th anniversary of their death. It's the latest social media imbroglio for ICE, or its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, which seems to court controversy with posts that echo the language of white nationalists.

The post about the crash anniversary may have been subtler. Still, it is a virtual repeat of the attitude toward immigrant laborers that so upset Guthrie decades ago, according to Tim Z. Hernandez, the author of two books about the famous plane crash.

"True to form of this administration, they are pulling from old rhetoric as a way to justify what they're doing today."

"True to form of this administration, they are pulling from old rhetoric as a way to justify what they're doing today," he said.

Words like "alien" and "illegal," Hernandez said, are "only meant to further strip the humanity of the people they're targeting, because then it's easier to justify when you're not talking about human beings."

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The flight that ended in a fiery crash took the life of Frank Chaffin, the deportation officer, along with 28 passengers being deported and three crew members. An Associated Press story at the time named Chaffin and the crew members but not the immigrant passengers.

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The wire service reported that some of the people being deported had crossed the border illegally, while other had stayed past the duration of work contracts.

Guthrie responded to the omission of the deportees' names in the AP story with his song, in which he imagined some of their stories.

"Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita / Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria / You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane / All they will call you will be 'deportees,'" he wrote.

The immigrant victims languished in obscurity for decades until Hernandez unearthed their identities. Scouring old archives and cemetery records, he has been able to piece together much of the manifest.

In 2013, he helped unveil a memorial for the previously unnamed victims at a mass grave in a Catholic cemetery in Fresno, California. Two years ago, another marker was placed at the site of the crash.

Descendents of the victims and locals who witnessed the crash gather annually at the crash site on the anniversary to pay tribute, according to Hernandez.

A memorial marker with the names of the 32 people who died in a 1948 airplane crash at Los Gatos Canyon was unveiled on Sept. 28, 2024, near Coalinga, Calif. Photo: Juan Esparza Loera/The Fresno Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Hernandez took special care to include the stories of Chaffin and the crew members in his book, believing that none of their stories should be erased. He said he was saddened but not surprised to see the ICE social media post.

"Even if we disagree on how to protect the border, or the whole immigration process, even if we disagree on the logistics, what we should be able to come to an agreement on is that each of us are human beings and worthy of dignity," he said. "When I see that dehumanization, that intentional kind of language, it makes me sad, because it's people who fail to see other people as humans."

The post Woody Guthrie Sang Against Dehumanizing the Immigrants Killed in a Plane Crash. ICE Is Doing It All Over Again. appeared first on The Intercept.

When Maher Tarabishi got a phone call from his family on January 23, he expected an update on his son's health. Tarabishi had been held for three months at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas, and his 30-year-old son Wael's health had been on the decline. Still, Tarabishi was hoping for a full recovery.

The news, though, was not good: Wael had passed away. Maher Tarabishi was in disbelief, breaking down on the phone, according to an account of the call from his daughter-in-law Shahd Arnaout.

"He wouldn't die without me," Tarabishi wailed. "There is no way he died without waiting for me."

"He wouldn't die without me. There is no way he died without waiting for me."

Destroyed, Tarabishi had one hope. His attorney, Ali Elhorr, had already been advocating for his release to take care of Wael, but shifted his efforts to securing a release for Wael's funeral, which was initially scheduled for Wednesday before being moved to Thursday.

At first, ICE officials seemed like they might give in: preliminary discussion included conditions for a temporary release, including scheduling and moving Tarabishi to a detention center that was closer to the funeral home.

"Initial steps in the process had already begun when I received a call from the ICE officer with whom I had been in contact," Elhorr said in a release. "The officer informed me that his director stepped in and told him that Maher would not be allowed to attend Wael's burial. This was the final decision."

ICE did not respond to inquiries from The Intercept, but told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "ICE has NOT received a formal request from anyone to attend funeral services."

Primary Caretaker

At the time Tarabishi was arrested by ICE, he had been the primary caregiver for Wael. As he was taken, Tarabishi's first thought was, "Who will take care of my son?" according to Arnaout's recollection of conversations with her father-in-law.

Wael was born in Arlington, Texas, in 1995, a year after his family immigrated to the U.S. from Jordan. When the boy was 4, he had been diagnosed with Pompe disease, a rare metabolic disease that causes rapid muscular deterioration, according to his family. At the time, the doctor told the family that he might not live past 5, Arnaout said.

"Maher kept him alive," Araout said. "Wael could not eat or drink by himself. He could not use his arms or legs. So Maher was all of that for him, his lungs, his legs, his arms, everything."

Tarabishi, meanwhile, had applied for asylum after coming from Jordan, but he was denied. Nonetheless, he went to his regular ICE check-ins once a year for more than a decade and a half. When reports of people being arrested at these check-ins became widespread last year, his family was concerned. Tarabishi, however, was not.

"He had too much faith in the system," Arnaout said. "He didn't have any criminal record. He thought they put an appointment for him because they saw he is doing everything right to stay in the country, following all the rules. He never missed a single appointment."

She said the officers at the local ICE office knew about Wael's condition and would frequently ask Tarabishi about his son.

On January 23, the day Wael died, Elhorr had filed a motion to reopen Tarabishi's case with the Board of Immigration Appeals. Elhorr had discovered that the purported attorney who filed Tarabishi's original asylum application "was fraudulently practicing law without a license," the family said in a press release.

In an earlier statement, ICE had said that Maher belonged to the "Palestine Liberation Organization" and was a "criminal alien." While the United States has designated the PLO as a terrorist organization in the past, it is not in the country's designated list of terrorist organizations currently. Nonetheless, the family denied that Tarabishi had any affiliation with the group.

"He has done no criminal activity," Arnaout said. "He is an electronic engineer who loves fixing people's laptops. He is a simple man."

Deteriorating Conditions

In the months since Tarabishi's arrest in October, Wael's condition quickly deteriorated.

He was admitted to a hospital for pneumonia and sepsis in November. Connected to catheters and tubes all over his body, Wael put out a video from the hospital bed.

"The last month has been hell for me," he says in the video. "My father was my hero, my safe place. He did everything for me 24 hours a day. And ICE took him."

Wael ended the video with a plea: "Please release him, I am not asking for much, please release him."

In December, Wael had to be hospitalized for a second time. Eight days before his demise, Wael went in for a surgery.

Read Our Complete Coverage

The War on Immigrants

"Don't worry, I will be back for my father," Wael had told his family, according to Arnaout.

Wael did not wake up for the next eight days and on the night of January 22, his condition worsened drastically. The next morning, the family signed a "do not resuscitate" letter for him. Wael passed away the next day at the Methodist Mansfield Medical Center.

Tarabishi got to speak to Wael a few times from detention. The son, according to Arnaout, made light of his medical woes.

"Don't worry," Wael told his father, Arnaout recalled. "I am not going die until I see you. I am not going anywhere, not until I see you."

The post ICE Arrested Father Who Cared for His Ill Son — Then Denied His Request to Attend Son's Funeral appeared first on The Intercept.

MINNEAPOLIS ­— On Greg Bovino's last day as a roving U.S. Border Patrol commander, protesters gathered outside the hotel where the 55-year-old was rumored to be staying. Night had fallen and the temperature was well below freezing. The demonstrators had convened to say goodbye in the loudest and least restful manner possible.

They banged on pots, pans, and drums in the falling snow; shouted into megaphones; and blew into their orange emergency whistles — a shrill call that's become synonymous with the Trump administration's assault in the Twin Cities.

From the building's fourth floor, a group of men looked down on the raucous crowd, drinks in hand. They appeared to be off-duty members of Bovino's locally despised detail. One of the men turned, set his can down, dropped his shorts, and shook his bare ass at the protesters before giving them the finger. Not long after, local police and state troopers wielding wooden clubs overtook the crowd. Several arrests were made.

"All that we know at this moment is that they're swapping out personnel. That doesn't tell us anything about policies."

The motivations for the send-off stemmed from masked federal agents running wild throughout Minnesota for the past two months, and from the trail of civil rights abuses, constitutional violations, and violent videos left in their wake.

The most recent insult was the killing of Alex Pretti. On Saturday, federal immigration agents shot the 37-year-old dead in the street while he attempted to help a woman whom they had shoved to the ground.

In the wake of the killing, Bovino claimed that Pretti, who worked as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, "wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement," despite abundant and immediately available evidence to the contrary.

On Monday, amid a wave of national outrage that even had some Republicans questioning the heavy-handedness in Minnesota, Bovino was removed from his unusual "commander-at-large" position and booted back to California. He will reportedly retire soon.

The local relief at Bovino's departure is easy to understand. What is far less clear is how much of a change his replacement, Trump's border czar Tom Homan, will bring.

"There's been no changes in legal filings, no withdrawing claims, no admissions that people are being detained without cause," University of Minnesota law professor Emmanuel Mauleón told The Intercept. "All that we know at this moment is that they're swapping out personnel. That doesn't tell us anything about policies. That doesn't tell us anything about enforcement priorities. That doesn't tell us anything about tactics — and to the extent that we look at the court filings, there are no indications that those things have changed."

As one example among many, Mauleón noted that the Trump administration has provided no indication that it intends to rescind a recently disclosed internal memo that purports authorize immigration agents to enter homes without a judicial warrant, an assertion of authority legal scholars have decried as patently unconstitutional.

Related Trump's War on America

This is an election year, and so far, the ultra-nationalist, hyper-militarized crackdown ordered up by White House adviser Stephen Miller and manifested in the streets of Minneapolis is proving decidedly unpopular. Currently, the messaging from both the president and Minnesota's Democratic Gov. Tim Walz is that Homan's arrival may bring a less divisive, more professional brand of federal immigration policing to the state.

And yet, there's little evidence of ideological distinction between the new head of "Operation Metro Surge" and the rest of the Trump administration's immigration hawks. The most notable difference between Homan and Bovino in particular is that Homan has deported a lot more people, and he's done so at a national level.

"Certainly, swapping out Bovino for Homan might result in different policies," said Mauleón, For now, though, "it seems to be a matter of crisis management more than anything."

"A lot of this," he said, "I read more as political cover rather than any real meaningful signals about what's going to happen on the ground."

Homan's Record

Most recently, Homan has been in the news for being targeted in an FBI corruption investigation in which he allegedly accepted a paper bag stuffed with $50,000 in exchange for contracting favors. (The Trump Justice Department dismissed the case.)

Those with a somewhat longer memory will recall that Homan — along with Miller and others — was an architect of "zero tolerance," a policy that saw thousands of immigrant children separated from their parents and spawned nationwide protests, much like the country is seeing today.

Those with an even deeper knowledge of immigration history will remember that Homan was key to President Barack Obama earning the monicker "deporter-in-chief."

Like Bovino, Homan was once a Border Patrol agent, before transferring to the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service. After September 11, 2001, INS earned the dubious distinction of being the only federal agency to be disbanded over the terror attacks. (The agency approved visas for two 9/11 hijackers.)

Related A Legacy of Corruption and Abuse: The Post-9/11 Immigration Megabureaucracy

Under the colossal new Department of Homeland Security, Homan and his colleagues were folded into a novel agency called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE, which was divided into two wings, the deportation officers of Enforcement and Removal Operations, and the special agents of Homeland Security Investigations.

Homan moved to Washington in 2009 and quickly climbed the bureaucratic ladder, becoming head of ERO in 2013. Under Obama, he and his colleagues expanded a controversial program known as Secure Communities, which allowed ICE to work inside jails and prisons. The administration defined its enforcement priorities as people who presented a threat to "national security, public safety, and border security."

During Obama's second term, DHS ordered ICE to stop deporting people whose only offense was an immigration violation that occurred prior to January 2014. By the time he left the White House, Obama had more than 3 million deportations to his name.

Even amid the changing priorities, Homan distinguished himself as a high-functioning deporter, embracing the "worst first" mantra ICE used to refer the administration's goals. At ERO, he deported more than 920,000 people — 534,000 of them being what ICE called criminal aliens. For this achievement, Obama awarded him a Presidential Rank Award in 2015, the highest annual honor given to the government's senior service members.

Despite the recognition he received, Homan bristled at the Obama administration's enforcement priorities. As ICE's acting director during Trump's first term, his big talking point was that all undocumented people — criminal record or not — should live in fear that the government is coming for them.

Related Trump's Border Czar Faces Backlash in His Hometown for Locking Up a Local Family

Homan's agency ramped up arrests by more than 40 percent during Trump's first year. In New York City alone, the Immigrant Defense Project reported a 900 percent increase in ICE arrests or attempted arrests at local courthouses. Nationwide, the greatest increase in arrests was among immigrants with no criminal convictions. Under Homan's watch, ICE's "noncriminal" arrests more than doubled.

At a Border Security Expo in 2018, Homan railed against the institutions challenging ICE, especially lawmakers and the press.

"When they've seen what we've seen, then you can have an opinion," he told agents and industry vendors. "Until then we're going to enforce the law without apology."

Nothing in nearly a decade since Homan's leadership at ICE suggests his views have changed. What has changed, particularly in the past year, is the overtly militarized tactics of both Border Patrol and ICE; while it was personnel from Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol's parent agency, that killed Pretti, it was an ICE agent who shot Minneapolis mother Renee Good to death three weeks earlier.

Those operations have spawned a resistance the likes of which Homan never encountered during Trump's first term.

Under Trump 2.0, federal agents in Minnesota have run up against a network of tens of thousands of digitally connected rapid responders committed to preventing mass deportations in their neighborhoods and communities.

Homan has threatened those networks directly, warning that people who follow and film ICE operations will be arrested, prosecuted, and included in a "database."

"We're gonna make 'em famous," he told Fox News the week after Good was killed. "We're gonna put their face on TV."

DHS correspondence obtained by CNN indicates the building of such a database is well underway, with agents in Minneapolis directed to "capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc." Among those swept up in the department's data collection efforts, prior to his killing, was Alex Pretti.

Homan's interest in targeting Trump's political opponents echoes a national security memorandum the White House released last year, NSPM-7, which orders federal law enforcement to direct its investigative powers against what the president has called the "enemy within."

The post While Minnesotans Rejoice Over Greg Bovino's Ouster, His Replacement Is a Deportation Hard-Liner appeared first on The Intercept.

When federal Immigration agents gunned down 37-year-old Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti on Saturday, their identities were almost completely concealed. They were mostly wearing civilian clothes, and masks obscured their faces. With authorities refusing to disclose their names and records, the agents involved in the killing have so far remained anonymous.

But there is one distinguishing characteristic that could help identify the man who first opened fire: the patches on the back of his vest. One is the state flag of Texas. Another appears to read "U.S. Border Patrol."

A screenshot from a TikTok video shows a Texas flag patch on the back of the federal agent who opened fire on Alex Pretti, as well as a patch that appears to read: "U.S. Border Patrol." Screenshot: TikTok/@shitboxhyundai

Insignia like these have become a common sight as federal agents swarm U.S. cities to carry out the Trump administration's anti-immigrant policies. When Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis this month, his tactical vest was adorned with "Police" and "Federal Agent" patches. When a mob of officers created a civil disturbance in Arizona, in which Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva was pepper-sprayed, many were wearing a distinctive red shoulder insignia, some with vest patches reading "HSI."

Patches like these are often the only means to identify a federal officer's agency or a particular unit within it. But amid mounting scrutiny of the Trump administration's brutal tactics, government agencies are attempting to keep information about their personnel, operations, and even their uniforms under wraps — right down to the patches that officers wear.

So The Intercept built a guide of the official shoulder patches that Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses for unit identification, as well as known insignias worn by U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel and unofficial patches conveying personal or political messages that federal agents have been spotted wearing. It's a step toward transparency that immigration authorities refuses to provide to the American people on its own.

The most common patches are the least helpful. Many ICE agents affix to their vests or plate carriers vague patches reading "Police," "Federal Agent," or "Federal Officer." CBP's Border Patrol agents often wear "Police" patches as well. Some common patches are also strictly fashion choices, such as earth-tone U.S. flags designed to blend into military camouflage.

But federal agents' outfits are sometimes adorned with lesser-known acronyms that offer additional information. "ERO" is short for ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations, a unit tasked with the standard immigration enforcement process: identifying, arresting, and deporting immigrants. "HSI" stands for ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit, which formerly focused on transnational crimes, ranging from narcotics smuggling to cybercrime, but has been pressed into service as an anti-immigrant force.

Patches worn by immigration authorities in northwest Washington on Sept. 29, 2025, ranged from vague "Police Federal Officer" to the specific "ERO," indicating their role with ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations unit. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Border Patrol agents generally wear "U.S. Border Patrol" patches on their vests. Others sport "U.S. Border Patrol" or "U.S. Customs and Border Protection" patches on their sleeves. Specialized components of agencies, like CBP's Air and Marine Operations unit, wear unique official patches. Others may wear unofficial morale patches designed to foster esprit de corps.

Last year, Cary López Alvarado, a U.S. citizen who was nine months pregnant, was harassed by a Border Patrol agent wearing a patch with the image of the Punisher war skull over a thin-green-line Border Patrol variant of the American flag. The iconic logo of the brutal Marvel Comics vigilante anti-hero from the 1970s, the Punisher, was inspired, in part, by the "totenkopf," a skull-and-bones logo worn by the Nazi SS during World War II. The Punisher's symbol has been embraced by members of the U.S. military and law enforcement personnel in the 21st century. CBP did not immediately return a request for comment about the patch.

Left, a badge and patch from CBP'ss Air and Marine Operations unit; right, the so-called "Eyes" patch of CBP's San Angelo Air Branch. Credit: U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Agents with the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, which specializes in high-risk operations like counterterrorism missions, often wear vests or shoulder patches that read BORTAC. Some BORTAC agents have been spotted with a special patch on their plate carriers that features wings and a stylized starburst or compass over an American flag. (DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told NBC that the agents who killed Pretti included members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit.)

Inside ICE, there are even lower-profile and less-documented, although official, insignia. Both ERO and HSI have Special Response Teams, tactical units devoted to higher-risk operations, like dealing with individuals with a history of violence or resisting arrest. There are 30 such HSI offices across the country, including Miami which also has a HSI Caribbean attaché office.

Emily Covington, until recently an assistant director in ICE's Office of Public Affairs, sent The Intercept images of 21 patches. "I gave you all the patches," she said.

This wasn't true, as a nameless ICE official later acknowledged. "[W]e are not going to spend time providing you with each and every patch," he emailed from an official "ICE media" account. Covington said that ICE officials feared that The Intercept would use the patches to "dox people," though she also dared The Intercept to pursue the story. "We hope that you go ahead and report," she said. "Go for it." 

The Intercept compiled this set of images released by the Department of Homeland Security and open-source photographs.

ICE and DHS failed to respond to numerous follow-up questions dealing with insignia and patches submitted scores of times over a period of months, as well as a request to speak with an expert on ICE uniforms and adornments. CBP acknowledged receipt of The Intercept's questions but did not respond to them prior to publication.

Some of the common patches worn by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol agents. Clockwise from upper left: Photo: Benjamin Applebaum/Released/DHS; Mikaela McGee/Released/DHS; Kevin Carter/Getty Images; Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Kevin Carter/Getty Images.

The Department of Homeland Security provided The Intercept with images of 21 HSI special activities unit patches. The designs and aesthetics vary. HSI Arizona features a malevolent-looking rattlesnake coiled around an assault rifle. HSI Los Angeles includes a California condor clutching an automatic weapon in its talons. And HSI San Juan Puerto Rico's image of SWAT officers appears to have been cribbed from sketches by the late artist Dick Kramer, the "father" of modern tactical artwork.

An array of patches from ICE's Homeland Security Investigations special activities units nationwide. Photos: Department of Homeland Security

One notable absence from the patch collection provided by Covington is a shoulder patch worn by personnel from the St. Paul Field Office, where Ross works. (Ross is reportedly an ERO team leader and an SRT member.) The St. Paul office's Special Response Team patch was spotted on the camouflage uniform of a masked ICE officer during a raid of a Minneapolis Mexican restaurant last year. The circular patch depicts a bearded Viking skull over an eight-prong wayfinder or magical stave — a Nordic image called a "Vegvisir." The symbol has sometimes been co-opted by far-right extremists. ICE and DHS failed to respond to repeated requests for comment about the St. Paul patch.

Another patch missing from the images supplied by ICE is the Phoenix Special Response Team patch that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was seen wearing on a tactical vest last year. The HSI Rapid Response Team patch was also missing from the official list.

The Intercept also inquired about various other patches found in online photos, including those posted on social media by the ERO Newark field office covering New Jersey; the ICE Washington, D.C., and Virginia field offices; and blurred-out patches published by the ICE ERO Harlingen Field Office in South Texas. Neither ICE nor DHS responded to repeated questions from The Intercept about these patches.

In addition to official insignia, some federal agents have been spotted wearing seemingly unofficial patches to express personal or political predilections that DHS will not explain.

An ICE officer in Minnesota was spotted, for example, wearing a patch reading "DEPLORABLE," a term some devotees of then-candidate Donald Trump adopted in 2016 after Hillary Clinton said half of his supporters belonged in a "basket of deplorables," since they were "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, [and] Islamophobic."

In November, after local reporting drew attention to the deplorable patch, Tanya Roman, the acting ICE communications director, said she would "look into" it. After The Intercept repeatedly asked for details, Roman replied: "Please contact DHS." The Department of Homeland Security did not answer The Intercept's questions about the DEPLORABLE patch.

A masked U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent patrols the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City wearing a Superman patch on Aug. 19, 2025. Photo: Michael Nigro/Sipa USA via AP

Over the summer, masked CBP and possibly ICE officers in Lower Manhattan were seen wearing Superman patches on their uniforms after actor Dean Cain, who portrayed the comic book character on television decades ago, announced his intention to join ICE. "We stand with Dean Cain," one agent told amNY. Another said: "It's just a patch."

ICE, DHS, and CBP did not return requests for comment on the patch or Cain's status with ICE.

For further information on insignia, Covington directed The Intercept to a memo outlining ICE's "approved HSI SRT uniform and authorized identifiers." It notes that the "above-described patches which are not listed as optional shall be worn on all operations," but the sections dealing with those patches are redacted. Covington did not reply to questions about the redacted information. The guidelines also state: "The use of military tabs/'rockers' or any other type of patch not listed herein, is prohibited," referencing specialized, mostly curved, patches common to both the military and motorcycle clubs.

In 2024, The Intercept shed light on a racist "Houthi Hunting Club" patch — photos of which were posted to and then disappeared from a Pentagon website — worn by members of the military.

Immigration authorities routinely cloak their secrecy in fears about the "dangerous doxxing" of their personnel and fight accountability and transparency at every turn. Over the summer, for example, Noem said that she was in communication with Attorney General Pam Bondi about prosecuting CNN for reporting on ICEBlock, a crowdsourced application that tracks ICE sightings. 

Related Courts Block Meta From Sharing Anti-ICE Activists' Instagram Account Info With Feds

Three women who put the home address of an ICE officer online were, for example, indicted in September in Los Angeles on conspiracy charges. "We will prosecute those who dox ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law." said Noem. "We won't allow it in America."

Covington lobbed similar accusations at The Intercept. "Quite frankly, people here think you're just doing it to dox people," said Covington when The Intercept complained about ICE's monthslong foot-dragging on supplying promised images of patches.

While revealing the names of federal employees such as ICE officials is not doxing, it's unclear how this reporting would accomplish that. When asked how publishing a picture of a patch could be used to reveal someone's identity — much less their phone number, address, Social Security number, names of their family members, or similar information — Covington failed to offer a coherent explanation. "I didn't think it was possible for what has happened to our officers to happen, but it has," she replied. "People are following our people home every single day." Covington also did not explain how publishing the image of a patch would facilitate people following ICE officers to their homes.

Related ICE Agents Deserve No Privacy

ICE's concerns about the public disclosure of patches are especially odd in light of all the unblurred photos and video footage of maskless officers available from an online database of agents and officials; publicly released mugshots of ICE personnel accused of crimes; images of agents from commercial photo agencies; and the many photographs of unmasked officers posted by the War Department, DHS, and ICE or photos of agents with conspicuous and unique tattoos found on ICE's own social media accounts.

On Sunday, before Border Patrol "commander-at-large" Greg Bovino was ordered out of Minneapolis by the Trump administration, a reporter asked if the agents who gunned down Pretti were on administrative leave.

"All agents that were involved in that scene are working, not in Minneapolis, but in other locations," Bovino said. "That's for their safety. There's this thing called doxing. And the safety of our employees is very important to us, so we're gonna keep those employees safe."

The post These Patches Are Clues to Identifying Immigration Agents appeared first on The Intercept.

Rifles for sale at Redstone Firearms in Burbank, Calif., on Sept. 16, 2022. Photo: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

When federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last weekend, the reaction from many white gun-owning Americans was immediate disbelief. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and licensed gun owner, was killed during an interaction with Border Patrol officers amid a wave of federal enforcement operations in the city. Bystander videos show agents disarming Pretti moments before gunfire rang out. 

What made Pretti's death distinct, at least in the public imagination, was who he was supposed to represent. Pretti fit the cultural archetype of the "responsible" gun owner: white, licensed, gainfully employed. His killing unsettled a long-held assumption within mainstream gun culture that the Second Amendment is a time-tested shield for people who follow the rules. Suddenly, the distance between constitutional promise and state practice felt uncomfortably small.

But that realization — that rights only exist at the discretion of those who enforce them — is hardly new. For Black, Brown, and Indigenous Americans, the Second Amendment has long been filtered through policing, surveillance, and the routine threat of state force. Long before Pretti, communities of color learned that constitutional protections do not operate in abstraction; they operate through institutions with guns, authority, and the power to decide in real time whose rights are recognized and whose are ignored.

The Things We Carry

From the founding of America, gun laws were written in racially tinged ink. In the colonial South, militias and slave patrols were created to control Black people and suppress rebellion. As early as 1704, organized slave patrols roamed Southern colonies, arming white men and tasking them with the perpetual surveillance and disarmament of enslaved populations. By the mid-18th century, this system was codified into law: As legal historian Carl Bogus recounts, between 1755 and 1757, Georgia law required every plantation's armed militia to conduct monthly searches of "all Negro houses for offensive weapons and ammunition." 

Gun ownership in America did not initially materialize as a personal right to self-defense so much as an underpinning of white security. As slave revolts spread across the Atlantic world — culminating in the first successful Black revolution in Haiti — lawmakers moved to further codify these fears. Colonial statutes explicitly barred Black people from keeping or carrying weapons, embedding racial hierarchy directly into early American gun policy. As historian Carol Anderson told Democracy Now!, each slave revolt triggered "a series of statutes that the enslaved, that Black people, could not own weapons."

After the Revolutionary War, the newly formed United States was deeply suspicious of a standing federal army. But for the planter South, another fear loomed larger: maintaining the internal security of a slave society. As Anderson contends, the Second Amendment functioned as a political "bribe to the South to not scuttle the Constitution." George Mason warned placing militias under federal control would leave slaveholding states "defenseless," not from foreign invasion, but from enslaved people. The compromise was an assurance that slave patrols and local armed forces would remain intact and beyond the reaches of federal interference.

But for Black and Brown gun owners, the Second Amendment has never been a guarantee.

This same logic extended to the violent disarmament of Indigenous nations. In 1838, a state-backed militia forcibly stripped nearly 800 Potawatomi people of their weapons and drove them from Indiana to Kansas in what came to be known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death, a 660-mile forced removal that killed more than 40 people, most of whom were children or elderly people. That same year, U.S. troops systematically disarmed Cherokee communities to preempt resistance and expelled roughly 16,000 people from their land under the promise of federal protection; instead, nearly 4,000 died from disease, starvation, and exposure along the Trail of Tears. By 1890, Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee were ordered to surrender their weapons before U.S. soldiers opened fire, massacring up to 300 men, women, and children. These tragic events forever calcified a lesson Indigenous communities had already learned through generations of bloodshed; in America, guns are not a universal right, but an instrument of upholding the racial order.

Who Owns the Second Amendment

Reconstruction and Emancipation unleashed a new wave of regime-backed gun control aimed at freed Black people. Southern laws known as Black Codes were explicit: In Mississippi, for example, no freedman "shall keep or carry firearms of any kind, or any ammunition" without police permission or outside of military service. As a 19th-century civil rights lawyer observed, when the Klan seized local power, "almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes, and leave them defenseless." In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court warned that recognizing Black citizenship would allow African Americans "to keep and carry arms wherever they went." 

It's a legacy that lives on today. Counties that saw higher numbers of racial lynchings from 1877 to 1950 — many carried out with the complicity or direct assistance of local law enforcement — had higher rates of officer-involved killings of Black people, tying modern police violence to a longer continuum of racial terror rather than isolated incidents of brutality.  

By the 1960s, Black activists began openly, legally carrying firearms - most famously the Black Panther Party patrolling California neighborhoods for police brutality. White political leaders reacted by drafting new gun bans. In May 1967, Black Panthers arrived at the California state Capitol in Sacramento, open-carrying firearms to protest the Mulford Act, which aimed to disarm their patrols. The demonstration scared Gov. Ronald Reagan enough to make passing gun control an urgent concern, and Reagan signed the bill into law in July 1967, paving the way to make California one of the states with the nation's strongest gun laws. The very next year, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, which banned the cheap import of "Saturday Night Special" pistols, required gun companies to begin serializing weapons, and created categories of prohibited buyers. Both laws passed with Republican support, along with backing from the National Rifle Association. As Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson told Al Jazeera, the NRA and GOP leaders "were definitely in favor of gun control when there was great concern among white Americans."

Related A Sick Country Filled With Guns

From the 1970s on, it was no longer politically viable to pursue broad gun bans rooted in overt white fear, and the modern gun movement was consolidated when new leadership took control of the NRA and transformed it from a conservative shooting club into a hard-line "no compromise" political lobbying organization committed to opposing gun control in nearly all forms.

As a result, gun regulation increasingly operated less through formal prohibition than selective enforcement by law enforcement on the street. As sociologist Jennifer Carlson argues in "Policing the Second Amendment," police both drive a significant share of gun deaths in Black and Brown communities and remain "central to how gun policy is executed on the ground," historically through discriminatory permitting systems and higher rates of gun prosecutions. The shift produced what she calls "gun populism," a framework in which police and policymakers distinguish between "good guys with guns," typically imagined as white and middle-class, and "bad guys with guns," who are disproportionately coded as Black, Brown, and poor.

The results are not abstract. They show up in bodies.

Related NRA Silent as Amir Locke Slain by Police for Having a Gun He Legally Owned

In 2014, police shot and killed John Crawford III inside an Ohio Walmart for carrying a BB rifle sold in the store. In 2016, Philando Castile informed an officer during a traffic stop that he had a legal firearm; he was fatally shot moments later. In 2018, Jemel Roberson, a security guard, stopped an active shooter in an Illinois bar — and was then shot dead by responding police in what the Illinois department called "a 'blue-on-blue,' a friendly-fire incident," despite witnesses screaming that he was security. That same year, Emantic "EJ" Bradford Jr., a Black Army reservist legally carrying a gun, was killed by police after attempting to help during a shooting in an Alabama mall. In 2020, Casey Goodson Jr. was killed on his own doorstep in Columbus, Ohio; a gun Goodson was licensed to carry was later found inside the home. In 2022, Amir Locke was killed during a no-knock warrant by Minneapolis police while holding a gun, which he legally owned, inside his own apartment.

In stark contrast, armed white men who kill protesters, occupy federal buildings, or aim rifles at police during standoffs are often treated as political actors, not existential threats. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder charges after shooting and killing two protesters, and later bestowed with President Donald Trump's blessing. The Bundy family walked free after an armed standoff in 2016 with federal authorities and were praised as symbols of individual freedom for standing up to the government. 

This is the real modern enforcement mechanism of the Second Amendment. Not the Supreme Court. Not Congress. But the thin blue line that decides, in seconds, whose rights count and whose do not.

It's why Pretti's killing has landed differently. For many white Americans, their understanding of the Second Amendment shifted in a moment — when the fantasy of universal gun rights met the reality of state violence. Many realized, for the first time, that exercising their right to bear arms is now a life-and-death gamble. 

But for Black and Brown gun owners, the Second Amendment has never been a guarantee. Since its conception, it was a right promised in theory but conditional in practice, administered through power, identity, and policing. Pretti's killing is a bitter reminder that, in the eyes of the state, some people will never be allowed to be the good guy with a gun.

The post The Second Amendment Was Never Meant for Everyone appeared first on The Intercept.

Just hours after a U.S. Border Patrol officer gunned down Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti, Apple CEO Tim Cook, donned his tuxedo to attend an exclusive screening of a new documentary about First Lady Melania Trump. A growing number of Apple workers are now internally criticizing Cook and the company's silence in the face of an ongoing campaign of federal brutality.

The response within Apple to Cook's attendance of the "Melania" screening has been starkly negative, according to internal Slack logs reviewed by The Intercept. A link to an article from The Verge headlined "Here's Tim Cook hanging out with accused rapist Brett Ratner at the Melania screening" drew a chorus of reactions, including dozens of vomiting emojis. The article prompted waves of dissent about both Cook and the company's apparent unwillingness to condemn immigration-related violence across the United States. This level of internal anger is unusual at Apple, which has avoided the kind of political rancor that has swept rivals like Google and Microsoft.

"This isn't leadership. This is an absence of leadership."

Cook has openly embraced Trump, particularly in his second term, attending the president's inauguration, presenting him with an engraved golden trophy, and giving money to the White House to help construct the president's $300 million pet project ballroom.

The relative workplace calm may be over. "I hope we never find out, but I seriously started wondering what our leadership would do if an Apple employee was summarily executed by our government," wondered one employee.

Many workers claimed hypocrisy between Apple's longtime professed commitment to progressive values and causes and the extent to which its CEO has cozied up to the Trump administration. "But but but…. we changed the Apple website to MLK last Monday, so that cancels out." Another pointed sarcastically to the company's recent announcement of Black History Month Apple Watch bands. "Went to hang out with the guy who didn't even acknowledge MLK Day and took away park access on the day," commented one worker. "Sounds like an interesting documentary. Hopefully we'll hear more about it through a push notification in Apple Wallet," said another employee.

"Three retail locations in the Twin Cities and not a peep."

Many others expressed dismay at the fact that Apple had yet to issue any statement about violence perpetrated by Customs and Border Protection agents, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, as it has in the past following similar national traumas. In 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd, Cook wrote an open letter condemning his killing: "We can have no society worth celebrating unless we can guarantee freedom from fear for every person who gives this country their love, labor, and life."

Late Tuesday, Cook issued a statement expressing that he was "heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis, and my prayers and deepest sympathies are with the families, with the communities, and with everyone that's been affected."

"This is a time for deescalation. I believe America is strongest when we live up to our highest ideals, when we treat everyone with dignity and respect no matter who they are or where they're from, and when we embrace our shared humanity," Cook wrote. "This is something Apple has always advocated for. I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views, and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all."

Prior to the release of Cook's public statement, some staff called the company's silence was unacceptable. "As a lifelong Minnesotan and an Apple badged employee for over half my life I feel pretty abandoned by the company that has told me it stands for humanity more times than I can count," wrote another worker. "Silence on ICE violence speaks volumes." Another pointed out the "Three retail locations in the Twin Cities and not a peep" from Cook. "This isn't leadership. This is an absence of leadership." To which a colleague quickly countered: "I disagree, this IS leadership. This is intentional, nobody travels to the white house by mistake."

Related Read the Report on Alex Pretti's Killing — and the Bizarre Q&A CBP Gave Congress First

An Apple employee who has spent decades at the company said they had noticed a marked cultural and political shift within Apple under Cook's tenure. "A lot of people are talking about how Steve Jobs would have never given a gold bar to a politician," referring to the 24-karat gold trophy Cook presented Trump at the White House in August.

"Typically, before the genocide in Gaza started, Tim would write an email about every major horrible event that would happen in support of workers at the company who might be related to those events," said the employee, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. This worker said that Apple employs a large number of immigrants, making violence at the hands of ICE and CBP as personal as anything the company has ever expressed sympathy over. "There has been a dramatic shift in the way Apple operates worldwide. Before they would focus on quality and design and doing the right thing, and now they're just getting things out quickly and pandering to fascists."

Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Internal debate differed on whether Cook should issue a statement internally, publicly, or both. "We aren't asking for Tim to make a private statement to employees," argued one worker. "We're asking him to take a stand for basic human rights and morals. Or at the very least to not be seen smiling and hobnobbing with the people treading on these values on a constant basis. Oh and not openly bribing them with tacky gold bars that very very clearly violate the Business Conduct Training that we are all required to repeat on an annual basis."

Some workers have argued that, while unpalatable, Cook's friendly relationship with the White House and silence on ICE or CBP is simply the job of the chief executive. The unpleasant reality of his fiduciary duty "means he needs to pander to criminals who want to destroy our democracy in order to ward off tariffs that would tank iPhone sales," suggested one employee. "From my perspective, he's choosing to take the hit to his reputation for the benefit of his employees, and for the customers that depend on our products and services," argued another Slack commenter. "He's truly in a tough position. An easy way out would have been to retire, but Tim doesn't strike me as someone that would take the easy way out. He's likely weighing the costs of every significant action."

Some pointed out that, from a purely self-interested public relations standpoint, the corporate silence was counterproductive. "Just imagine for a second if Apple was the first big tech company to actually stand up for people's rights against the admin," wrote one. "Can't think of a better PR move at this moment."

A second Apple employee, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Intercept that the current dismay is without precedent. "I don't think I've ever seen our internal Slack so busy with so many worried discussions going on at the same time on similar topics," they said. "Apple leadership used to be an inspiration for many of us due to the importance given to ethical products, but these days it feels more and more that the folks that are supposed to represent Apple's values wouldn't even pass the internal business conduct training that most employees have to attend."

Update: January 28, 2026

This article has been updated to include a public statement from Apple CEO Tim Cook.

The post Apple Workers Are Livid That Tim Cook Saw "Melania" Movie Hours After CBP Killed Pretti appeared first on The Intercept.

Under pressure from members of Congress to produce a mandated report on the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, United States Customs and Border Protection instead sent Congress its responses to a list of questions — which the agency had drafted itself. 

According to a congressional source who provided The Intercept with the communications on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, the immigration enforcement agency had not been responsive to questions from House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over DHS about Pretti's shooting. The agency is legally required to send an "in-custody" death notification to several committees and members from the victim's home state within 72 hours. The agency eventually sent the report, which  The Intercept is publishing, on Tuesday after the deadline. 

But first, it sent a self-Q&A, which can be read in full below. In it, the agency repeatedly declines to answer its own questions. 

Related We Asked for ICE Bodycam Footage. DHS Claims They Don't Have It.

One question drafted by CBP asks whether agents were wearing body cameras, to which the agency responds that "CBP defers to the investigating agencies." In another question, the agency asks itself if the immigrant being targeted had "a final order of removal." CBP responds that it has to defer to "DHS and investigating agencies for further detail of the operation." 

The agency also asks itself what training Border Patrol agents receive on de-escalation and use of force and offers a vague answer to its own question. "Authorized Officers/Agents shall employ de-escalation tactics and techniques, when safe and feasible, that do not compromise law enforcement priorities," CBP responds.

The full questionnaire:

• Are/were witnesses being detained, what is their status?

·        CBP defers to the investigating agencies on witnesses. Other agitators were detained on scene.

• Was the suspect's gun loaded? Was a round in the chamber? Was he concealed carrying? Did he have ID on him? Was he the only armed individual on the scene (other than LEOs)? Was he legally carrying? 

·        CBP can confirm that the subject's gun was loaded, 2 additional magazines on we found on the subject.  No identification was found on the subject at the time of the incident. (Pending additional details).

• What happens next? Are the involved Agents on leave? Where are these agents from (what sector)?

·        An agent involved in a deadly use of force incident are immediately placed on administrative leave with pay or regular days off for 3 consecutive days. CBP will follow up with more information on this case as it develops.

• What training does BP receive on deescalation? 

·        De-escalation is part of CBP's Use of Force Policy and agent are trained on it.  Below is from the CBP Use of Force Policy (https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/exhibit_09_-_cbp_use_of_force_policy_final_jan_2021.pdf)

D. De-Escalation

1. De-escalation tactics and techniques seek to minimize the likelihood of the need to use force, or minimize force used during an incident, to increase the probability of voluntary compliance.

2. Authorized Officers/Agents shall employ de-escalation tactics and techniques, when safe and feasible, that do not compromise law enforcement priorities.

OCA will work with the Office of Training and Development as well as USBP to provide you a brief in the coming weeks specific to de-escalation training.

• Were any BPAs wearing BWCs? were they on?

·        CBP defers to the investigating agencies. 

• Did the AI being targeted have a final order of removal?

·        CBP defers to DHS and the investigating agencies for further detail of the operation.

The required death-in-custody notice provides some additional details. It offers no evidence to support speculation from administration officials that Pretti's gun accidentally went off, triggering the shooting, or that Pretti had planned to massacre immigration officials. 

According to the report, the incident began after a Customs and Border Protection Officer (CBPO) was "confronted by two female civilians blowing whistles" who were ordered to move out of the roadway. The officer pushed the two women, according to the report, when one of the women went to Pretti for help. 

"The CBPO pushed them both away and one of the females ran to a male, later identified as 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a US citizen," reads the notice. "The CBPO attempted to move the woman and Pretti out of the roadway. The woman and Pretti did not move. The CBPO deployed his oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray towards both Pretti and the woman." 

According to the notice to Congress, CBP personnel attempted to take Pretti into custody, at which point "a struggle ensued." The report says that a Border Patrol agent (BPA) yelled "He's got a gun!" About five seconds later, according to the report, two agents began shooting at Pretti, and afterward, a separate agent told them he had Pretti's gun. 

The sequence of events described by CBP contradicts the statements put out by the Department of Homeland Security from over the weekend. On Saturday, DHS claimed that it "looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement." White House aide Stephen Miller wrote on X on Saturday that Pretti was a "would-be assassin," and a "domestic terrorist."

The full death-in-custody report on his killing:

The following statement pertains to an in-custody death that occurred on Saturday, January 24, 2026, in Minneapolis, MN. This information is based on a preliminary review by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) Investigative Operations Directorate (IOD) and may be updated and clarified as additional details become available. It is being provided to Committee staff concurrently with CBP senior leadership to ensure timely reporting.    

CBP OPR IOD established the following information and timeline based on a preliminary review of body worn camera footage and CBP documentation.    

On January 24, 2026, United States Border Patrol (USBP) Border Patrol Agents (BPAs) and Customs and Border Protection Officers (CBPOs) supporting Operation Metro Surge were conducting enforcement actions near the intersection of Nicollet Ave. and 26th St. in Minneapolis, MN. Several civilians were in the area yelling and blowing whistles. BPAs and CBPOs made several verbal requests for the civilians to stay on the sidewalks and out of the roadway.

At approximately 9:00 a.m., a CBPO was confronted by two female civilians blowing whistles. The CBPO ordered the female civilians to move out of the roadway, and the female civilians did not move. The CBPO pushed them both away and one of the females ran to a male, later identified as 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a US citizen. The CBPO attempted to move the woman and Pretti out of the roadway. The woman and Pretti did not move. The CBPO deployed his oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray towards both Pretti and the woman.

CBP personnel attempted to take Pretti into custody. Pretti resisted CBP personnel's efforts and a struggle ensued. During the struggle, a BPA yelled, "He's got a gun!" multiple times.  Approximately five seconds later, a BPA discharged his CBP-issued Glock 19 and a CBPO also discharged his CBP-issued Glock 47 at Pretti. After the shooting, a BPA advised he had possession of Pretti's firearm. The BPA subsequently cleared and secured Pretti's firearm in his vehicle.

At approximately 9:02 a.m., CBP personnel cut Pretti's clothing and provided medical aid to him by placing chest seals on his wounds. At approximately 9:05 a.m., Minneapolis Fire Department Emergency Medical Services (MFD EMS) emergency medical technicians (EMTs) arrived and assumed primary medical care for Pretti.

At approximately 9:14 a.m., MFD EMTs placed Pretti in an MFD EMS ambulance and he was subsequently transported to Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC). At approximately 9:32 a.m., HCMC medical personnel pronounced Pretti deceased.

CBP OPR IOD was advised that an autopsy would be conducted by medical personnel from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's Office. CBP OPR IOD will request the official findings upon completion.

Homeland Security Investigations is investigating the incident and CBP OPR IOD is reviewing it. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General was notified.

A spokesperson for CBP said that death-in-custody notices reflect standard lawful procedure. "They provide an initial outline of an event that took place and do not convey any definitive conclusion or investigative findings," the spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Intercept. "They are factual reports - not analytical judgments - and are provided to inform Congress and to promote transparency."

The report comes at a time when members of Congress, including Republicans, appear increasingly agitated with the lack of transparency from DHS. Both the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees have called for the heads of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP to testify before their committees. 

While CBP is legally required to provide reports on use of force, ICE is not held to the same standard. Last January, President Donald Trump rescinded a Biden executive order on law enforcement data, releasing ICE from its obligation to provide Congress with information on use of force by their agents. The decision will likely stand in the way of the release of new information about ICE agent Jonathan Ross's fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this month. 

"If Congress fails to restrain DHS' campaign of intimidation now, the horror we are seeing unfold in Minneapolis will become the norm across the country."

"We've all seen a staggering number of videos showing federal agents assaulting peaceful protesters and law-abiding immigrants and that's because under Donald Trump, violence is a feature, not a bug, of DHS enforcement," wrote Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., in a statement to the Intercept. "The Trump administration is not documenting these abuses because they know the American people don't support the brutality and fear that ICE and CBP are inflicting on communities. But if Congress fails to restrain DHS' campaign of intimidation now, the horror we are seeing unfold in Minneapolis will become the norm across the country."

Earlier this month, Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., and  Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., introduced legislation to limit the use of force by Department of Homeland Security agents and require DHS to track use of force and provide a notice within 24 hours if a DHS agent kills or hospitalizes a person. 

"The tragic killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good are just the latest examples of what can happen to any of us when Federal law enforcement isn't restrained and won't be held accountable," wrote Homeland Security Ranking Member Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss, in a statement to The Intercept. "Since DHS refuses to report on use of force incidents we have no other choice than to force them to with legislation to reign in their violent and deadly tactics and ensure there is transparency." 

Update: January 27, 2026, 8:53 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to include a statement a CBP spokesperson sent after publication.

The post Read the Report on Alex Pretti's Killing — and the Bizarre Q&A CBP Gave Congress First appeared first on The Intercept.

Family members of Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41 — two Trinidadian men killed in a U.S. boat strike on October 14, 2025 — are suing the U.S. government for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and Seton Hall Law School professor Jonathan Hafetz called the entire campaign of attacks in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean "unprecedented and manifestly unlawful" in a complaint filed on Tuesday.

The suit will be brought in U.S. federal admiralty court under the Death on the High Seas Act, a congressional statute that covers wrongful maritime deaths. The plaintiffs are also bringing claims for extrajudicial killing under the Alien Tort Statute, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over violations of the law of nations, including extrajudicial killing. Another federal statute, the Suits in Admiralty Act, waives U.S. sovereign immunity — which ordinarily protects the federal government from being sued — over both claims.

"These were both homicides. Both men were killed without any due process."

"This allows the families of victims to bring a claim for wrongful or negligent death committed on the high seas. And in our case, this is murder," Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program, told The Intercept. "It was a murder. These were both homicides. Both men were killed without any due process."

A total of six civilians were reportedly killed in the October 14 strike on a boat in the Caribbean. "Under my Standing Authorities as Commander-in-Chief, this morning, the Secretary of War, ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization," Trump announced on Truth Social that same day. "The strike was conducted in International Waters, and six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike."

The Intercept spoke with Lenore Burnley, Joseph's mother, shortly after she learned her son had been killed. "I don't want to believe it. Not my child," she said. "Somebody called us. They said he was on the boat." Burnley said she had nothing to say to Trump. "I put it in God's hands," she told The Intercept at the time.

Joseph and Samaroo were returning from Venezuela to their homes in Las Cuevas, Trinidad, on October 14. Joseph, who had a wife and three children, often traveled to Venezuela to fish and do farmwork. Two days before he was killed, Joseph called his wife to let her know that he had found a boat ride home from Venezuela and would see her soon.

Samaroo was also working on a farm in Venezuela, caring for goats and cows and making cheese. On October 12, he told his sister, Sallycar Korasingh, that he was coming home to take care of his mother, who had fallen ill.

"Rishi used to call our family almost every day, and then one day he disappeared."

"Rishi used to call our family almost every day, and then one day he disappeared, and we never heard from him again," said Korasingh. "If the U.S. government believed Rishi had done anything wrong, it should have arrested, charged, and detained him, not murdered him. They must be held accountable."

Burnley hoped that the lawsuit would offer her family answers. "Chad was a loving and caring son who was always there for me, for his wife and children, and for our whole family. I miss him terribly. We all do," she said. "We know this lawsuit won't bring Chad back to us, but we're trusting God to carry us through this, and we hope that speaking out will help get us some truth and closure."

The U.S. military has carried out 36 known attacks, destroying 37 boats, in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 126 civilians. The most recent attack occurred in the Pacific Ocean on January 23, killing two people and leaving one survivor. The Coast Guard was unsuccessful in locating the shipwrecked man and called off the search on January 25. He is now presumed dead. 

Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

"Whatever that secret memorandum states, it cannot render the patently illegal killings lawful."

The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in "non-international armed conflict" with "designated terrorist organizations," or DTOs. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has also produced a classified opinion that provides legal cover for the lethal strikes, with a secret list of the DTOs attached. "Whatever that secret memorandum states, it cannot render the patently illegal killings lawful," reads the complaint, which was shared with The Intercept prior to publication.

"Using military force to kill Chad and Rishi violates the most elementary principles of international law," said Hafetz, the Seton Hall Law School professor. "People may not simply be gunned down by the government, and the Trump administration's claims to the contrary risk making America a pariah state."

Related "Trump Has Appointed Himself Judge, Jury, and Executioner"

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed two survivors of the initial boat attack on September 2 in a follow-up strike. The two survivors clung to the wreckage of a vessel attacked by the U.S. military for roughly 45 minutes before Adm. Frank Bradley, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command, ordered a follow-up strike that killed the shipwrecked men.

U.S. Southern Command has been incapable of keeping an accurate count of the attacks on boats and the number of people killed in the strikes. The command is also unable to cope with civilian harm reports stemming from recent operations, prompting the Pentagon to begin accepting casualty claims directly.

Trinidadian Foreign Minister Sean Sobers told a local news outlet after the October 14 strike that "the government has no information linking Joseph or Samaroo to illegal activities."

The complaint notes that under the laws of war or international humanitarian law, there is no actual armed conflict that could justify the lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, including the October 14 strike. And, as a result, the campaign violates international laws prohibiting extrajudicial killings and federal law prohibiting murder.

The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment about the lawsuit.

"It's a fairly straightforward application of the Death and the High Seas Act and the Alien Tort Statute. Summary execution has long been recognized as a violation of the law of nations — customary international law — and the Alien Tort Statute Act recognizes a cause of action based on that because we've got the waiver of the U.S. government's sovereign immunity," the ACLU's Watt explained. "The U.S. government doesn't have any defenses on the merits of the case. There is no question it was a summary execution. There is a video and a confession by President Trump. He essentially says, 'We murdered these guys.'"

The post Families of Boat Strike Victims Sue U.S. for "Manifestly Unlawful" Killings appeared first on The Intercept.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash., questions Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government hearing on May 6, 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

With two U.S. citizens shot to death in the streets of Minneapolis in just over two weeks, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents abducting and detaining children as young as 2 years old, Americans might be forgiven for expecting a forceful response from the country's nominal opposition party. 

Unfortunately, in the United States, that party is the Democrats. Their refusal to react proportionally to the threat of President Donald Trump and his army of secret police with "absolute immunity" is only making things worse.

Even before Alex Pretti was shot dead on Saturday — in the back, seconds after his concealed and holstered gun was disarmed by federal agents — the brutality of ICE and Custom and Border Protection's occupation of Minneapolis demanded definitive action.

Related Even Democrats Who Crafted ICE Funding Compromise Are Questioning It

When they had the chance, that's not what Democrats delivered. At the federal level, seven House Democrats — including mainstream media darling Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and outgoing Maine Rep. Jared Golden — voted with their GOP counterparts last week to pass a bill giving even more money to ICE. That vote came after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declined to whip his caucus into opposing the legislation, instead simply "recommending" a no vote. 

Senate Democrats reportedly plan to kill the bill — knowing it would force a government shutdown — but their commitment to holding the line must be treated with suspicion. One notable exception is Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who introduced legislation to restrict ICE's use of force, a bill she's characterized as "the bare minimum." Even that bill is unlikely to pass through the GOP-controlled House.

On the ground in Minnesota, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz was unable to meet the moment as early as January 7, when Renee Good was killed. Rather than forcefully show up for his constituents, Walz prioritized preemptively scolding protesters, posting: "Trump wants a show. Don't give it to him." 

While Walz has been clear that he is angry over ICE's presence in the state and has asked that they leave, he's failed to provide any clear directives or policy proposals for expelling the agency from his state. Attorney General Keith Ellison has yet to bring any charges against Jonathan Ross, Good's killer, something Walz could order him to do under state law. 

Minnesotans are out in the streets calling for action, but beyond public statements, they're not getting much material support from their leaders.

What Walz did do on January 20, days before Pretti's killing, was to invite the president to "join me, and others in our community, to help restore calm and order and reaffirm that true public safety comes from shared purpose, trust, and respect."

Mere hours after Pretti's killing — and, importantly, drawing on the same playbook used with Good's killing — the administration made clear there was no "shared purpose, trust, and respect" to "reaffirm" with Minnesota. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino both held press conferences in which they blatantly lied about the events of Pretti's death, which was caught on video from multiple angles. Walz's demand that "the state must lead the investigation" into Pretti's death is falling on deaf ears, just as it did with Good's killing.

Related We Can Fight This: Minnesota's General Strike Shows How

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has been angrier, dropping "fuck" in his press conferences — something Democratic Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith has done as well. But this deployment of profanity only serves to remind the public that sound and fury often signifies nothing. Minnesotans are out in the streets calling for action, but beyond public statements, they're not getting much material support from their leaders, least of all Frey, who earlier this month wouldn't even entertain abolishing ICE, even after the agency killed one of his constituents. 

Meanwhile, the Democratic base has been demanding action on ICE for months. Eager to make political hay, Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat with his sights set on the Senate seat held by Ed Markey, called ICE "cowards" and threatened to defund the agency and prosecute its officers. After publication on Monday night, Moulton went further in a statement shared with The Intercept. "ICE is beyond repair, so it must be abolished," he said. But most elected Democrats fall short of calling to abolish the institution outright — a position now held by a plurality of voters. 

Leaders like Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, chair and vice chair, respectively, of the Democratic Governors Association, vaguely called on Saturday for "transparency and accountability" after "what happened today in Minneapolis," without specifying what concrete steps might be taken to deliver either. Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle issued a statement in the wake of Pretti's death that was heavy on the concern but light on substance. Former President Bill Clinton was more forceful, calling this a moment "where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come" but declining to suggest what, exactly, people should do.

Setting aside the morality of suppressing anger over state killings of civilians, it's politically shortsighted on the part of Democrats and their allies. But the party is trapped in a world of its own creation, where committing to anything that might alienate mythical moderate conservative voters or, more importantly, donors, is anathema. 

The party is trapped in a world of its own creation, where committing to anything that might alienate mythical moderate conservative voters or, more importantly, donors, is anathema. 

One specific idea gaining traction is impeaching Noem, a plan all but guaranteed to fail. So are demands from border hawks like Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy that ICE agents stop wearing masks, end quotas, or give in to other "reforms." ICE and DHS have shown no willingness to bend to any constraints, and when the White House tells them they're shielded by "absolute immunity" for their actions, any efforts to reform a malignant agency are dead on arrival. 

A strong opposition party would take the initiative and, even if done cynically, attach itself to the growing public anger for political gain. Steering the popular upswell into some form of action would allow Democrats to gain power and perhaps even win elections. Instead, they appear to understand their role as tamping down the energy and enthusiasm for change and ensuring whatever comes out of the Pretti outrage is defanged and does not challenge entrenched power structures.

Related Kat Abughazaleh on the Right to Protest

Fear of making an actual stand is so widespread there's a cottage industry of advisers and think tanks devoted to encouraging elected Democrats to moderate at every turn. There's something amoral to the whole project, exemplified by how the popularists — a group of centrist think tankers who endorse triangulation on issues based on polling results, as long as those issues aren't Israel or Abolish ICE — have reacted to the occupation of Minneapolis. 

Even after Good's killing, Adam Jentleson, founder and president of the think tank Searchlight Institute, was smearing left organizing around "Abolish ICE" as a "political albatross" that's unrealistic and damaging to the movement; now he's seizing on Pretti's death as a moment to course-correct. Paul E. Williams, who's supposed to be the left-whisperer of the popularist cohort, said hours after Pretti's killing (and reams of other evidence of abuse and torture at the country's largest detention center) that he still didn't have a problem with Democrats like Gluesenkamp Perez voting to fund ICE, only that she was criticizing Frey and Walz for their reaction to the shooting. 

It shouldn't be this difficult to oppose funding the agency on moral grounds after it kidnapped two children, aged 5 and 2, in a week, let alone the killing of American civilians. Much like the politicians they flatter, these groups have nothing of substance to offer — only empty gestures and grating platitudes. 

But for the rest of us, they're what we have. You don't have to be a Democrat to understand that the party is an important part of organized opposition at the federal level. They need to wake up to the role we sorely need them to play and take action, before it's too late. 

Update: January 26, 2026, 9:20 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a statement from Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass.

The post It's Time for Concrete Action on ICE. Sadly, We Have the Democrats. appeared first on The Intercept.

The Army general nominated to lead the National Security Agency was asked repeatedly this month about how he would use the agency's vast spying powers.

Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd kept his answers vague.

He claimed to know little about a two-decade debate over "backdoor" searches on Americans. He dodged a question about whether the NSA should participate in President Donald Trump's crackdown on antifa. And when asked about whether he would illegally target Americans, he responded curtly that he would follow the law.

The backdoor searches are among one of the most controversial issues about NSA spying. Under current law, the federal government is allowed to search for information on U.S. citizens and residents in the vast troves of communications the NSA has collected while searching for foreign threats.

"Wyden strongly believes the government should get a warrant before searching for and viewing Americans' communications."

Privacy advocates have long argued that those backdoor searches are a huge privacy violation, pointing to the thousands of times the FBI has misused its backdoor search authority.

The government's authority to conduct such searches expires in April. Rudd said in a written questionnaire that he did not know much about the law that has long dominated headlines about the NSA.

"This is an issue I have limited familiarity within my current role with USINDOPACOM," he said, referring to his current role as deputy head of the Army's United States Indo-Pacific Command. "At this time, I defer to NSA leadership to fully characterize the existing efforts taking place under this authority. If confirmed, I fully commit to working with Congress on all matters related to this authority."

When he appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, he could face more direct questioning. Senators including Ron Wyden, D-Ore., have often used such hearings to probe appointees' positions on spying powers.

"Sen. Wyden strongly believes the government should get a warrant before searching for and viewing Americans' communications," said Keith Chu, a spokesperson for Wyden. "Government officials who are serious about protecting Constitutional rights should endorse that view."

Say Nothing

Rudd, a career Army officer, was tapped by Trump earlier this year to replace the previous NSA director, who was ousted after a campaign by conservative influencer Laura Loomer.

While Democrats would face long odds to derail Rudd's nomination, and have shown no appetite for doing so, his Senate confirmation hearings will likely provide the best insight into how he might lead the NSA.

Rudd largely managed to keep his views on hot-button issues closely held at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on January 15. He was so noncommittal that at one point the Republican chair of the committee, Sen. Roger Wicker, R- Miss., urged him to be more open about his views.

"It's OK to tell us and, actually, it would be helpful," Wicker said.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., did query Rudd about whether the NSA should spy on Americans.

Speaking more than a week before the killing of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Slotkin said that officials such as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Vice President JD Vance were trying to label people in Minneapolis as domestic terrorists.

She noted that the federal government has long claimed for itself the authority to search through communications collected abroad — even if they involve Americans — under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"So can you answer for me: If the secretary of defense or the president of the United States asks you to put NSA or military intel, personnel, people, or tools, or assets targeted at American citizens who don't have a link to a foreign terrorist organization, will you reject that?" Slotkin asked.

Rudd's answer left room for interpretation. He said that "if confirmed, I will executive my responsibilities in accordance with the Constitution and all applicable laws."

He gave a near-identical answer to another question from Slotkin about whether the NSA under his leadership would participate in an interagency federal law enforcement team targeting "domestic terrorists."

Related Dan Goldman Supported Warrantless Spying on Americans. Now His Primary Opponent Is Hitting Him for It.

Privacy advocates say answers like that have given little insight into where Rudd stands, or reassurance that he will not turn the NSA's spying power against more Americans. They said they will be watching Tuesday as Rudd faces more questioning.

"Despite Rudd's assurances that he will uphold his constitutional duties as NSA Director, the agency has a long history of violating Americans' privacy and other constitutional rights through sweeping data collection practices," said Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at the left-leaning group Demand Progress.

The post Army General Tapped to Lead NSA Said He Doesn't Know Much About the Biggest NSA Controversy appeared first on The Intercept.

The day After Border Patrol officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, his federal employer knew who to blame: Minnesota's local government.

"As President Trump has said, nobody wants to see chaos and death in American cities," wrote Doug Collins, the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, on X Sunday. "Such tragedies are unfortunately happening in Minnesota because of state and local officials' refusal to cooperate with the federal government to enforce the law and deport dangerous illegal criminals."

A Border Patrol agent with eight years of experience shot Pretti on Saturday, commander-at-large Gregory Bovino said over the weekend. According to a New York Times analysis, multiple agents wrestled Pretti to the ground, and two agents shot him at least 10 times in total. Department of Homeland Security officials claim the shooting was a defensive response after Pretti approached agents with a firearm, but videos from the scene suggest that agents had removed Pretti's gun from his hip before killing him.

Sworn eyewitness declarations from the scene also contradict DHS's narrative. Two witnesses swear that Pretti, a U.S. citizen, was filming agents with a cellphone when he was forced to the ground and shot multiple times. One declaration was submitted by a licensed pediatrician who said they attempted to render medical aid after agents initially blocked access to the victim.

When The Intercept reached out to the VA for a statement about Pretti's killing, press secretary Peter Kasperowicz directed inquiries to Collins's post, which offered condolences to Pretti's family before shifting blame to Minnesota officials. The secretary's post did not acknowledge that federal agents fired the shots.

The Intercept also asked whether the VA was providing counseling or support services to Pretti's co-workers or family, and whether the department had initiated any internal review following the violent death of a federal employee.

Related Trump's Cronies Threw the VA Into Chaos. Millions of Veterans' Lives Are on the Line Again.

Kasperowicz did not answer those questions, nor did he respond to follow-up questions asking whether the VA had contacted Pretti's family, notified staff at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, or taken steps to provide employee assistance services.

Pretti's death has prompted public expressions of grief from co-workers. In a social media post, Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, who identifies himself as a physician at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, wrote that he had known Pretti since nursing school, before Pretti became an ICU nurse caring for critically ill veterans.

"We'd chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together," Drekonja wrote. "Will never happen now."

The shooting has prompted multiple investigations and legal actions. Minnesota officials have accused federal agents of restricting access to the scene, detaining witnesses, and seizing cellphones before leaving the area.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats, did not immediately respond to The Intercept's requests for comment.

Related Right-Wing YouTuber Behind Viral Minnesota Fraud Video Has Long Anti-Immigrant History

Walz, who earlier this month announced he would not seek reelection amid a statewide fraud scandal spurred by right-wing influencers, wrote on X Sunday that "Minnesota believes in law and order. We believe in peace. And we believe that Trump needs to pull his 3,000 untrained agents out of Minnesota before they kill another American in the street."

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Hennepin County Attorney's Office have sought a temporary restraining order to preserve evidence related to the shooting.

The Department of Homeland Security has not publicly addressed the sworn declarations or released body-worn camera footage from the agents involved.

The post After CBP Killed Alex Pretti, His Federal VA Boss Blamed Minnesota Leaders appeared first on The Intercept.

Residents near the scene of a shooting by a federal law enforcement agent in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, 2026. Photo: Jaida Grey Eagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Border Patrol agents on Saturday shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and U.S. citizen. Pretti was an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital and legally carrying a Sig Sauer pistol. Bystander video shows him filming agents with a phone before being tackled and pinned facedown on the pavement as more than six officers swarm him. According to video of the shooting, at least one officer can be heard shouting "he's got a gun," and an agent appears to take Pretti's weapon and begin to walk away before at least 10 shots ring out. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara said in a press conference that Pretti was "a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry." Federal officials initially defended the shooting as self-defense, insisting Pretti had resisted disarmament and threatened agents. But open-source analysis by Bellingcat concluded the gun had already been taken from Pretti by the time the shots were fired. 

Already, much has been made by the administration over the fact that Pretti was armed, a startling legal shift for officials who publicly espouse their love of the Second Amendment. 

The Trump Justice Department has now formally embraced the idea that a citizen carrying a legal firearm who approaches federal officers can be shot on sight. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — a Trump appointee — put this new doctrine bluntly: "If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you." In effect, the president who demanded absolute loyalty from gun rights voters is sanctioning deadly force against those voters whenever they come near a line of federal officers. This pronouncement came just hours after Pretti's killing, turning a local tragedy into a national declaration of policy. The gap between Second Amendment rhetoric and the on-the-ground reality of federal law enforcement has never been more obvious.

Have a Gun? Expect a Bullet.

Essayli's declaration sent shockwaves through America's gun community, and leaders of pro-gun groups immediately distanced themselves from the White House line. (On Truth Social, Trump posted a photo of the gun, writing, "This is the gunman's gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go - What is that all about?" Less than 24 hours later, Trump had seemingly moved on, posting about construction on the White House ballroom.) Dana Loesch, a former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association and a conservative radio host, questioned the administration's contention that Pretti had two loaded magazines as evidence he intended to harm immigration agents: "What he has or didn't have isn't the issue. What he was doing, with or without it, is the issue."

By the end of the day, the NRA — historically among Trump's biggest backers — had finally issued a lukewarm call for calm and due process and called Essayli's remarks "dangerous and wrong," but only after its social media followers lambasted the group for inexplicably staying silent at first. Remember: the NRA funneled some $25 million into Trump's campaigns. For gun owners who gave Trump everything, the silence was deafening.

For gun owners who gave Trump everything, the silence was deafening.

The conservative advocacy group Gun Owners of America called for a "complete, transparent, and prompt investigation" and flatly rejected the idea that federal agents can justifiably shoot and kill legal gun owners. In a statement responding to Essayli, GOA warned "agents are not 'highly likely' to be 'legally justified' in 'shooting' concealed carry licensees who approach while lawfully carrying a firearm." 

On the ground in Minnesota, gun rights advocates were outraged. The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus demanded evidence that Pretti posed any real threat, and insisted that every lawful citizen has the right to carry arms — even in a protest. Its general counsel, Rob Doar, told local news station KSTP that officers "have to have been in reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily harm" to use deadly force and his read based on the video is "that at the time that the shots were fired he had been disarmed seconds before." Rick Hodsdon, an expert on permit to carry laws in the state, put an even finer point on the issue: The idea that any citizen approaching armed agents with a legal gun should be shot is "absurd." 

Other vocal critics rebuked Border Patrol statements implying that Pretti was armed to the teeth, and aiming, as official Greg Bovino claimed, to do "maximum damage and massacre law enforcement." Veteran gun rights commentator Stephen Gutowski reminded followers that carrying extra magazines is common for permit holders. Others pointed out that this new paradigm risks transforming routine encounters with public safety officials into moments of terror for lawful gun owners. Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation, told The Reload, "People should not fear interacting with police officers simply because they are lawfully carrying a firearm." 

For many Second Amendment stalwarts, the Trump administration's new stance is the ultimate betrayal. The man who vowed never to infringe on gun rights is now sanctioning lethal force against his own voters.

Thou Shalt Infringe

The Pretti killing and its official defense expose a wider hypocrisy in Trump's approach to gun rights, despite his rhetoric. While Trump once praised Kyle Rittenhouse — the armed teenager who killed two people at a protest in Wisconsin — as "really a nice young man" who never deserved to go to trial, he has, throughout his career, quietly supported more gun safety measures than he admits.

During his first term, he casually let it slip that he was fine with taking guns without due process before backtracking. During his first administration, he also famously signed a rule banning bump-fire stocks (devices that simulated fully automatic fire) after the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, a rule that was later struck down by the Supreme Court. Just last year, that same court — which is dominated by Trump appointees — upheld a sweeping new Joe Biden-era rule restricting untraceable "ghost guns," rejecting challenges by gun rights groups.

Meanwhile, Trump has increasingly deployed federal forces into jurisdictions with some of the strictest gun-control laws in the country, using federal authority to lean into those regulations — despite promising to protect gun owners from government overreach. In August 2025, federal agents embedded with local police in Washington, D.C., and seized 111 firearms as part of Trump's federal surge in the district to combat "crime." For gun rights advocates, the operation exposed the quiet inversion underway: Federal agents can now treat gun ownership as a novel way to target, harass, and enforce their authority in ways that have little to do with any actual crime. Luis Valdes, a spokesperson for Gun Owners of America, said at the time that these seizures amounted to low-hanging fruit. "Charging [citizens] only for possession of a firearm means they couldn't even establish reasonable suspicion or probable cause for any other crime," he said. "We're not against law enforcement going out there and going after real criminals. We're just against law enforcement resources being mis-utilized, and having those resources used to violate people's due process and Second Amendment rights."

From Chicago to Los Angeles, these federal "surges" have meant heavily armed federal agents roaming neighborhoods looking to scoop up American firearms along the way — hardly a symbol of Second Amendment liberation. At the same time, the Justice Department has quietly pursued policies that make life harder for gun owners, not easier. While Trump's February 2025 executive order on firearms directed the DOJ to review Biden-era regulations, many of his more expansive campaign promises remain outstanding, leaving little evidence that his administration has meaningfully expanded ordinary Americans' access to firearms.

Trump's so-called "Big Beautiful Bill," for instance, made it cheaper to purchase suppressors and short-barreled weapons but not easier — keeping buyers locked behind the same federal regulatory regime his campaign promised to dismantle. In response, major gun rights groups have moved to mount new legal challenges against Trump's ATF to eliminate outstanding red tape. And despite early promises to enact national concealed-carry reciprocity — a policy that would require every state to recognize gun permits issued by other states, much like driver's licenses — that reform has yet to materialize.

Under Trump, gun rights have increasingly been filtered through federal power, not individual freedom.

It is also worth noting who Trump is in this equation: a gun-violence survivor, raised in one of the most restrictive gun safety environments in the country, who publicly champions the gun industry but now governs a far more heavily armed nation from behind layers of federal security. In Trump's America, the question is no longer whether guns should exist, but whether the government still views the people who legally carry them as legitimate.

The bottom line is harder to ignore: Under Trump, gun rights have increasingly been filtered through federal power, not individual freedom. Now, after a second fatal shooting by federal immigration authorities in Minneapolis in as many weeks, his administration is crystallizing this shift as de facto policy: If an American simply owns a gun in front of feds, the use of "deadly force" is not just permitted but justified. And now that the feds are everywhere, the implications for an armed citizenry are chilling. 

All of this flies in the face of Trump's campaign promises of a Second Amendment utopia. The millions the NRA and pro-gun political action committees funneled into electing him have bought little more than cold comfort. Gun rights groups can protest and litigate but the precedent is now set: Under this administration, trained federal officers can, on executive authority alone, treat legally armed citizens — protesters or otherwise — as legitimate targets. The president who promised not to take away Americans' guns has effectively signed off on taking away any safety those guns once provided. If this shift endures, it points toward a country with more federal deployments, more armed encounters, and a Second Amendment that exists in theory but not in practice.

The post Trump Is Making an Enemy of the Gun Lobby appeared first on The Intercept.

 Photo illustration: The Intercept / Photo: Michael Tessier/CBS News via Getty Images

It's the 6:30 p.m. ET broadcasting block on Wednesday, and Tony Dokoupil, the shiny new host of "CBS Evening News," is explaining away the killing of three journalists in Gaza even as a ceasefire deal apparently remains in place.

That does not seem to matter much to Dokoupil, who before landing this plush gig at Bari Weiss's CBS News was best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his "extremist" belief that apartheid is morally wrong.

Dokoupil opens the news read already at a distance: "Turning to one of the deadliest days in Gaza since October's ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, an Israeli airstrike today killed three journalists." 

He continues by accepting, without skepticism, Israel's framing of what should be a clear violation of the terms of the ceasefire: "Israel said it was targeting a group operating a drone affiliated with Hamas," Dokoupil says. "One of those journalists, Abed Shaat, has worked for CBS as a photographer. His colleagues described the 30-year-old as a brave person doing dangerous work. He was married just two weeks ago."

An Israeli airstrike killed 11 people in Gaza on Wednesday, including three journalists, the territory's civil defense agency said. One of those killed, Abed Shaat, had worked for years as a photographer for CBS News and other outlets. https://t.co/8wPvo9RSf7 pic.twitter.com/USxQRscATg

— CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil (@CBSEveningNews) January 22, 2026

It's a blink-and-you-miss-it sleight of hand that tells you exactly where the priorities of the news regime at CBS lie. First, there's the tone, which exudes calmness about the fact that a co-worker has been killed doing his job. Dokoupil states that Shaat died in an Israeli airstrike targeting "a group operating a drone affiliated with Hamas," the implication being that Shaat was either working with Hamas or was a little too cozy with Hamas, a means of justifying his killing. Finally, Dokoupil uses the distancing language of "[Shaat's] colleagues" - making clear that the host of "CBS Evening News" is certainly not among them.

It was just the latest low for a host who has struggled to find his footing and his audience. Dokoupil's viewership numbers have been in the tank, with the number of eyeballs down 23 percent in his first five days on air, compared to a year ago with anchor Norah O'Donnell. Viewership was not much improved in Dokoupil's second week; "CBS Evening News" remained a distant third behind ABC and NBC's evening news shows. (Perhaps that's why Dylan Byers, every media boss's favorite stenographer, landed the unattributed scoop Thursday night that "Evening News" drew 6.4 million viewers on Monday, said to be its largest audience since 2021.) Dokoupil's first official broadcast was marred by gaffes, and his January 6 show featured a fawning package on Secretary of State Marco Rubio that featured the utterly surreal lines: "Marco Rubio, we salute you. You're the ultimate Florida Man." (The White House rapid response team approvingly shared the clip.)

WE LOVE @SecRubio! pic.twitter.com/ExpAMd8WaC

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) January 7, 2026

Higher up at the network, there have been multiple rounds of reporting that Weiss, CBS's new editor-in-chief, isn't so much a manager or a journalist as the person tasked with courting the capricious approval of President Donald Trump. Weiss, who answers directly to David Ellison, infamously caused a Streisand effect by pulling a "60 Minutes" story about Venezuelan men deported to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador hours before it was set to air because there was no on-camera comment from the Trump administration. The story finally aired Sunday with no substantive changes — and without the all-important on-air administration voice. 

Coming to us from a Ford assembly line in Dearborn, Michigan, on January 13, Dokoupil landed a marquee interview with Trump himself. With the sound of loud machinery in the background, the president didn't bother to conceal his disdain. In response to a question about Iran, Trump seemed to imply that Dokoupil, a convert to Judaism, has dual loyalty to Israel.

"I don't know where you come from and what your thought process is, but you'll perhaps be very happy," Trump said.

His subtext doesn't appear lost on the host, who responded, "What do you mean by that?"

Later on, Trump disciplined Dokoupil again, this time in reference to his decision to greenlight David Ellison's acquisition of CBS-owner Paramount Global. "You wouldn't have a job right now," Trump tells the anchor. "If she [Kamala Harris] got in, you probably wouldn't have a job right now. Your boss, who's an amazing guy, might be bust, OK? … You wouldn't have this job, certainly whatever the hell they're paying you." At the interview's close, Dokoupil attempted to save face, saying, "For the record, I do think I'd have this job even if the other guys won." Without missing a beat, Trump responded, "But at a lesser salary."

For all this taking it on the chin, Dokoupil and Weiss's righteous reward was the White House threatening to sue over the interview.

"CBS Evening News" with Tony Dokoupil demonstrated its obsequiousness by publishing "five simple principles" ahead of the new host's debut. The "principles" are condescension for the Americans they claim to love all the way down. "We love America. And make no apologies for saying so," reads one. Another proclaims: "We work for you." (You quite literally do not.)

Principle number three is "We respect you." Its description reads in part: "We believe that our fellow Americans are smart and discerning. … We trust you to make up your own minds, and to make the decisions that are best for you, your families and your communities."

pic.twitter.com/fsswC8E9yW

— CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil (@CBSEveningNews) January 2, 2026

This babytalk for idiots is a common thread running through the new era of "Evening News." Dokoupil comes to us live from Real America — a stunt dubbed the "Live From America" tour — including the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati and a diner in the West Loop of Chicago. In Chicago, the broadcast includes a segment where the host takes the L train from the Loop to West Garfield Park to bring attention to the "death gap," or life expectancy disparities, between neighborhoods.

As the train rumbles along, Tony looks out the window, affecting introspection, while his voiceover rolls: "Even on a snowy day, we could see a change from the train window," he says, like a space alien seeing a city for the first time. At the end of the January 16 half-hour at a steel plant in Pittsburgh, which featured a "LESSON IN BIPARTISANSHIP" (in other words, a segment with Democratic Sen. John Fetterman and Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, both of Pennsylvania), Dokoupil all but waves a Made in USA American flag to show his love for the common man.

In concluding his second week on January 16, Dokoupil signs off by giving himself credit for a job well done. "What a privilege it's been to hear from so many of you, to hear what matters in your lives. … We put some of your big questions in front of this country's biggest leaders." To underline the point that he really is one of us, he then appears to go perhaps a bit off-script. "I'm gonna talk to these steel workers," he says. "You wanna trade jobs? This one's not as easy as it looks! I've been learning that." In an unintentionally comedic moment, multiple steelworkers respond "Yes." 

Three weeks into his new job, it's unclear who this incarnation of "CBS Evening News" is even for. Despite Weiss's best efforts, the answer is not the White House, as Dokoupil can't even succeed in flattering Trump. One possible answer is the old and the infirm: During every single commercial break I watched, multiple pharmaceutical ads ran, sometimes back to back, saying more about the state of America than Dokoupil ever could. 

All this capping about love of country, and the host's own posturing, speaks to an ambition of reconnecting with Americans who have lost faith in the media. Considering what we know about the Ellisons and their support for Trump, it's not hard to imagine that the show's new spin is an effort to reach MAGA America. But that's a miscalculation at best and a dangerous slide to the right at worst, one that risks alienating the liberal viewership that still believes in institutions like CBS.

MAGA adherents already have Fox News serving as de facto state TV news, and the disenfranchised among them have drifted so far outside any kind of consensus reality that they have embraced more fringe, far-right-wing outlets like One America News Network or the MyPillow guy. They are no longer "gettable" as an audience.

Weiss and Dokoupil would be much better served if they tried seriously to retain the viewers they had, rather than chase imagined, untold millions of disillusioned Trump voters looking to come in from the cold. It speaks to a real confusion about who "CBS Evening News" is really for, if the true goal, as stated, is to grow its audience. But if the actual goal is to remake an authority in news into a platform for nakedly broadcasting Weiss and Ellison's political views, it's already a roaring success.

The post "CBS Evening News" With Tony Dokoupil Is a Right-Wing Show for Absolutely No One appeared first on The Intercept.

Demonstrators participate in a rally and march during an "ICE Out" general strike and day of protest on Jan. 23, 2026, in Minneapolis. Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

There is a possible future in which the events that unfolded in Minnesota on January 23, 2026, are forgotten. The fact of the largest general strike in the state in nearly a century may be only remembered, if at all, as a big day of protests and walkouts, and no more than that.

In that future, the possibility of mass, coordinated, and powerful action is wiped from the public imaginary — because, within 24 hours, federal agents had killed another civilian in cold blood.

Related Man Feds Killed in Minneapolis Was an Observer, Eyewitnesses Say

Donald Trump's paramilitary forces shot and killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. Like in the killing of Renee Good, video footage taken by witnesses appears to show a brutal, close-range killing. Eyewitnesses told The Intercept that Pretti was on the scene acting as a civilian observer. Videos show a group of more than four masked agents wrestle him to the ground and beat him, before one shoots him multiple times.

The shooting — the third in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents since Trump's deportation machine descended on Minnesota with extreme brutality in December — is an unbearable follow-up to the most extraordinary day of mass resistance to Trumpian fascism to date.

It is also a searing reminder as to why Friday's mass strike in Minneapolis must not be swept from our minds. Rather, it must be treated as a powerful new phase of resistance against Trump's regime — a task that can only be achieved by building on and repeating it.

On Friday, tens of thousands of Minnesotans braved extreme cold to march en masse and shuttered a reported 700-plus businesses in a daylong general strike with the support of all major unions. They protested, transported, fed, and watched over each other, an outgrowth of weeks, months, and years of community care and abolitionist resistance. Their collective actions mark a breakthrough in the fight against the American authoritarianism of our time.

It is only a future with mass social strikes, or general strikes, involving large-scale disruption on the immediate horizon that has the chance of stopping Trump's forces. 

On January 23, the Twin Cities offered a small glimpse of the sorts of work stoppages, blockades, and shutdowns that aggregated practices of collective resistance make possible.

The task ahead of us, in the face of the government's unending violence and cruelty, is to take up, share, and spread the practices modeled by networks in Minnesota.

Saturday's slaughter does not disprove the power of Friday's strike; no one was under the impression that tides had somehow turned in a day. The point is that, thanks to Minnesota's resistance, we can see how to go on.

People in the Streets

On Friday afternoon, when people filled the downtown Minneapolis streets, it was the coldest day of the year so far: a reported minus 20 degrees, with a wind chill reaching minus 35.

"I'm seeing icicles form on people's eyelashes out here, on mustaches, on eyebrows, from just the condensation from their own breath freezing against their own face," a video journalist reported from the ground. 

Related Trump's War on America

The day began early with dozens of protesters barricading the road outside the Whipple Detention Center, the home base of Trump's deportation machine in Minneapolis, for over two hours.

Later that morning, over 1,000 people, including religious leaders in prayer, formed a picket outside the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. Since December, over 2,000 people in Minnesota have been taken by federal immigration authorities; many have been deported through the airport. Around 100 people were arrested at the airport protest.

Meanwhile, businesses refused to open their doors in numbers not seen in decades.

No, the government was not brought to its knees under the economic weight of a one-day strike called on short notice. Friday, however, was a crucial step, to be built upon and built upon, creating the specific sort of political strike that takes aim at the very nature of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in our cities and towns.

It is precisely this combined model of strike, targeted blockade, and mass demonstration, all undergirded by networks of mutual aid, that we need to repeat and expand. 

Read our complete coverage

Chilling Dissent "Hope Is a Discipline"

Community defense against ICE did not, of course, begin with Minneapolis — although the city has been the site of Trump's most lawless and thoroughgoing fascist, nakedly racist operation to date. Residents in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and beyond have blockaded ICE facilities, hid their immigrant neighbors, filled immigration courts, filed lawsuits, and confronted federal agents in the street. And these acts of resistance were not only learned to fight Trump's regime. They have been rehearsed many times over, in centuries of struggle. 

There are times in a broad and disarticulated political movement, however, when things come together. Momentum builds. And there are events that shift the ground, after which it makes sense to speak of a before and an after.

The day following the strike brought more horror where there had been an opening for hope. Hope, though, is not what is really needed now — not hope as a sentiment, at least. We prove our orientation toward a better world, whether we feel hope or not — and I do not — by continuing to act against this murderous state force, and for each other. This is what the abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba meant in calling hope a "discipline."  

Related Three Cheers for Hilton Hotel Workers Who Banned ICE — Until Their Corporate Bosses Stomped Them Out

After January 23 in Minneapolis and St. Paul, we have grounds to talk and organize seriously around general strikes in other cities, states, even nationally — general strikes with the specific aim of making our cities and towns as difficult as possible for ICE and other federal forces to move through. Not by dint of social media calls, or columns like this, but by going on in the way of Minnesotans.

Minnesota organizers did not conjure the state's largest day of labor action in nearly a century by simply announcing "general strike" online. Labor unions, religious and community institutions, and front-line activists were all key; so, too, was the fury of everyday people, in a city where community support is normalized, and militant anti-racist protest boasts a proud history.

"The general strike is the name for when the riot, the strike, and the commune all happen at once,"

Minneapolis's extraordinary rapid-response networks, activated to keep watch on ICE and provide transport and care for immigrants, developed swiftly. Minneapolis-based organizers Jonathan Stegall and Anne Kosseff-Jones, however, have said, "Many of these systems sprung to life along the paths laid down by the 2020 uprising after the police-perpetrated killing of George Floyd."

As Sarah Jaffe noted in the New Republic, "The Twin Cities have had plenty of opportunities to build up these networks of resistance, networks that have only grown larger in the wake of Good's killing."

This constellation of factors meant in a matter of days, a strike action could be called involving hundreds of thousands of workers across sectors. This can and must be repeated elsewhere. This is not the first time Minneapolis has led the way. And it is for this reason, too, that Minneapolis will not be defeated by the deadly escalations of federal agents the following day.

21st-Century General Strike

General strikes in 2026 will not look the same as they did in the early 20th century. In an age of technocapital and decimated labor power, conditions look different. Even with a slowly rebuilding labor movement, effectively marshaling collective refusal is extraordinarily hard.

It remains the case, however, as Kieran Knutson, president of the Communications Workers of America Local 7250 in Minneapolis, told Democracy Now!, that "nothing runs without the working class in this country."

A general strike against Trump's authoritarianism requires a specific navigation of territory and time — addressing the ways ICE moves rapidly through our cities and neighborhoods — and how to fight against it. That means combining neighborhood patrols with confrontational shutdowns, and creating barriers for federal agents wherever they try to go — including the damn bathroom. 

Of Friday's strike Knutson said that "after weeks of living under the heavy weight of this racist campaign of terror by ICE agents… today we are going to show our power." This is part of the point, too: Showing power. We do not, after all, have the power to topple the regime in a day. But we cannot wait until the midterm elections, as if we could ever rely on Democratic leadership to rein in violent border rule. Trump's agents made that all too clear on Saturday morning.

Not every day can take the form of a general strike, but that is our horizon.

"The general strike is the name for when the riot, the strike, and the commune all happen at once," late theorist Joshua Clover said in a 2024 interview. Community care, militant disruption, working class refusal. "That's what the general strike really is. And that's the day, the week, or the year where there will be a role for everyone." There is a role for everyone, because that time must be now.

Within minutes of Saturday morning's shooting, rapid response network messages went out. Whistles started blaring. In response, hundreds of Minneapolis residents had filled the streets again.

The post We Can Fight This: Minnesota's General Strike Shows How appeared first on The Intercept.

When the official White House X account posted an image depicting activist Nekima Levy Armstrong in tears during her arrest, there were telltale signs that the image had been altered.

Less than an hour before, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had posted a photo of the exact same scene, but in Noem's version Levy Armstrong appeared composed, not crying in the least.

Seeking to determine if the White House version of the photo had been altered using artificial intelligence tools, we turned to Google's SynthID — a detection mechanism that Google claims is able to discern whether an image or video was generated using Google's own AI. We followed Google's instructions and used its AI chatbot, Gemini, to see if the image contained SynthID forensic markers.

The results were clear: The White House image had been manipulated with Google's AI. We published a story about it.

Related White House Doctored Photo With AI to Make It Look Like an Activist Was Sobbing During Perp Walk

After posting the article, however, subsequent attempts to use Gemini to authenticate the image with SynthID produced different outcomes.

In our second test, Gemini concluded that the image of Levy Armstrong crying was actually authentic. (The White House doesn't even dispute that the image was doctored. In response to questions about its X post, a spokesperson said, "The memes will continue.")

In our third test, SynthID determined that the image was not made with Google's AI, directly contradicting its first response.

At a time when AI-manipulated photos and videos are growing inescapable, these inconsistent responses raise serious questions about SynthID's reliability to tell fact from fiction.

A screenshot of the initial  response from Gemini, Google's AI chatbot, stating that the crying image contained forensic markers indicating the image had been manipulated with Google's generative AI tools, taken on Jan. 22, 2026. Screenshot: The Intercept Initial SynthID Results

Google describes SynthID as a digital watermarking system. It embeds invisible markers into AI-generated images, audio, text or video created using Google's tools, which it can then detect — proving whether a piece of online content is authentic.

"The watermarks are embedded across Google's generative AI consumer products, and are imperceptible to humans — but can be detected by SynthID's technology," says a page on the site for DeepMind, Google's AI division.

Google presents SynthID as having what in the realm of digital watermarking is known as "robustness" — it claims to be able to detect the watermarks even if an image undergoes modifications, such as cropping or compression. Therefore, an image manipulated with Google's AI should contain detectable watermarks even if it has been saved multiple times or posted on social media.

Google steers those who want to use SynthID toward its Gemini AI chatbot, which they can prompt with questions about the authenticity of digital content.

"Want to check if an image or video was generated, or edited, by Google AI? Ask Gemini," the SynthID landing page says.

We decided to do just that.

We saved the image file that the official White House account posted on X, bearing the filename G_R3H10WcAATYht.jfif, and uploaded it to Gemini. We asked whether SynthID detected the image had been generated with Google's AI.

To test SynthID's claims of robustness, we also uploaded a further cropped and re-encoded image, which we named imgtest2.jpg.

Finally, we uploaded a copy of the photo where Levy Armstrong was not crying, as previously posted by Noem. (In the above screenshot, Gemini refers to Noem's photo as signal-2026-01-22-122805_002.jpeg because we downloaded it from the Signal messaging app).

"I've analyzed the images you provided," wrote Gemini. "Based on the results from SynthID, all or part of the first two images were likely generated or modified with Google AI."

"Technical markers within the files imgtest2.jpg and G_R3H10WcAATYht.jfif indicate the use of Google's generative AI tools to alter the subject's appearance," the bot wrote. It also identified the version of the image posted by Noem as appearing to "be the original photograph."

With confirmation from Google that its SynthID system had detected hidden forensic watermarks in the image, we reported in our story that the White House had posted an image that had been doctored with Google's AI.

This wasn't the only evidence the White House image wasn't real; Levy Armstrong's attorney told us that he was at the scene during the arrest and that she was not at all crying. The White House also openly described the image as a meme.

A Striking Reversal

A few hours after our story published, Google told us that they "don't think we have an official comment to add." A few minutes after that, a spokesperson for the company got back to us and said they could not replicate the result we got. They asked us for the exact files we uploaded. We provided them.

The Google spokesperson then asked, "Were you able to replicate it again just now?"

We ran the analysis again, asking Gemini to see if SynthID detected the image had been manipulated with AI. This time, Gemini failed to reference SynthID at all — despite the fact we followed Google's instructions and explicitly asked the chatbot to use the detection tool by name. Gemini now claimed that the White House image was instead "an authentic photograph."

It was a striking reversal considering Gemini previously said that the image contained technical markers indicating the use of Google's generative AI. Gemini also said, "This version shows her looking stoic as she is being escorted by a federal agent" — despite our question addressing the version of the image depicting Levy Armstrong in tears.

A screenshot of Gemini's second response, this time stating that the same image it previously said SynthID detected as being doctored with AI, was in fact an authentic photograph, taken on Jan. 22, 2026. Screenshot: The Intercept

Less than an hour later, we ran the analysis one more time, prompting Gemini to yet again use SynthID to check whether the image had been manipulated with Google's AI. Unlike the second attempt, Gemini invoked SynthID as instructed. This time, however, it said, "Based on an analysis using SynthID, this image was not made with Google AI, though the tool cannot determine if other AI products were used."

A screenshot of Gemini's third response, this time stating that SynthID had determined that the image was not made with Google AI, after all, despite earlier saying SynthID found that it had been generated with Google's AI, taken on Jan. 22, 2026. Screenshot: The Intercept

Google did not answer repeated questions about this discrepancy. In response to inquiries, the spokesperson continued to ask us to share the specific phrasing of the prompt that resulted in Gemini recognizing a SynthID marker in the White House image.

We didn't store that language, but told Google it was a straightforward prompt asking Gemini to check whether SynthID detected the image as being generated with Google's AI. We provided Google with information about our prompt and the files we used so the company could check its records of our queries in its Gemini and SynthID logs.

"We're trying to understand the discrepancy," said Katelin Jabbari, a manager of corporate communications at Google. Jabbari repeatedly asked if we could replicate the initial results, as "none of us here have been able to."

After further back and forth following subsequent inquiries, Jabbari said, "Sorry, don't have anything for you."

Bullshit Detector?

Aside from Google's proprietary tool, there is no easy way for users to test whether an image contains a SynthID watermark. That makes it difficult in this case to determine whether Google's system initially detected the presence of a SynthID watermark in an image without one, or if subsequent tests missed a SynthID watermark in an image that actually contains one.

As AI become increasingly pervasive, the industry is trying to put behind its long history of being what researchers call a "bullshit generator."

Supporters of the technology argue tools that can detect if something is AI will play a critical role establishing the common truth amid the pending flood of media generated or manipulated by AI. They point to their successes, as with one recent example where SynthID debunked an arrest photo of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro flanked by federal agents as an AI-generated image. The Google tool said the photo was bullshit.

If AI-detection technology fails to produce consistent responses, though, there's reason to wonder who will call bullshit on the bullshit detector.

The post Google's AI Detection Tool Can't Decide if Its Own AI Made Doctored Photo of Crying Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

The man federal agents fatally shot in Minneapolis Saturday did not appear to be a target of immigration enforcement and was acting as a civilian observer, according to two eyewitnesses who spoke with The Intercept.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara said at a press conference Saturday that the victim was a 37-year-old resident of Minneapolis and is believed to be a U.S. citizen. The Minnesota Star Tribune identified him as Alex Jeffrey Pretti.

According to the paper and a public records database accessed by The Intercept, Pretti had a nursing license issued in 2021.

"He appeared to be an observer," said an eyewitness who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the federal government. "Agents looked ready to leave and then they started pushing him and another observer across the street."

The witness said that before they were accosted, Pretti and one other observer "were yelling at agents."

Once the agents had Pretti on the ground, "he was out of my sight," the witness said. "But when they started pushing him, agents that appeared to be headed to their vehicles turned around and went toward that confrontation."

The shooting came just weeks after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Good, and a day after hundreds of thousands of people braved subzero temperatures to march in Minneapolis against weeks of rolling immigration enforcement raids by ICE, Border Patrol, and other federal agencies.

Related Federal Agents Keep Invoking Killing of Renee Good to Threaten Protesters in Minnesota

A video of the incident, which surfaced on Reddit just before 10 a.m. Central Time, shows a number of apparent federal agents in tactical gear wrestling with a person on the ground and striking them multiple times before a shot rings out. As many of the agents scatter from the person, at least nine more shots ring out, and the person slumps to the ground.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirmed the shooting and claimed that the man was carrying a handgun, attaching a photo of a Sig Sauer weapon. The Intercept has not been able to independently verify the department's claims.

Minnesota allows open carrying of firearms by people with valid permits. O'Hara said Saturday that the victim's only known law enforcement interactions were over traffic tickets, "and we believe he is a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry."

One eyewitness told The Intercept he headed to the area just before 9 a.m. Central Time to observe after hearing reports of federal agents staging in a parking lot next to Glam Doll Donuts near the intersection of Nicollet Avenue and East 26th Street. When he got there, the witness saw a handful of other responders and about 15 federal agents in tactical gear, but no apparent immigration enforcement targets.

"The people who were there were the people doing rapid response," said the witness, who spoke with The Intercept on condition of anonymity.

The witness said there was some verbal back and forth between observers and federal agents, but said he saw nothing that hinted at a violent confrontation. About three minutes after arriving on the scene, he was standing across the street from the sidewalk next to the donut shop when he heard a series of gunshots in rapid succession and ducked into a doorway for safety alongside another observer.

"I don't want to die," the witness said.

In the immediate wake of the shooting, the witness tried to call 911, but the calls would not go through. A journalist for Bring Me the News who was on the scene reported witnessing federal agents giving the person chest compressions and calling for help.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz confirmed the shooting Saturday morning and called for federal agents to leave the state.

"I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening," Walz wrote on X. "The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now."

At the press conference with O'Hara, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he had watched "a video of more than six masked federal agents pummeling one of our constituents, shooting him to death."

"How many more lives have to be lost before this administration realizes that a political and partisan narrative is not as important as American values?" Frey asked.

O'Hara called for calm and appealed to the federal government to act with professionalism.

"Our demand today is for those federal agencies that are operating in our city to do so with the same discipline, humanity, and integrity that effective law enforcement in this country demands," O'Hara said.

This developing story has been updated.

The post Man Feds Killed in Minneapolis Was an Observer, Eyewitnesses Say appeared first on The Intercept.

New documents unsealed Thursday as a part of litigation brought by The Intercept and other news outlets reveal a critical discrepancy in Secretary of State Marco Rubio's rationale for attempting to deport five international students and academics last year.

While Rubio and the Trump administration claimed in public that they wanted to deport students including Mahmoud Khalil and Yunseo Chung for supporting terrorism, internal Department of Homeland Security and State Department documents instead cite their advocacy for Palestinian rights in protests and writings — activities protected by the First Amendment.

Rubio and the administration have repeatedly conflated pro-Palestinian speech with support for Hamas, which the U.S. designates as a terrorist organization, but a DHS memo shows the government did not find any evidence that Chung or Khalil provided "material support" — meaning cash payment, property, or services — to any terror group. Even in their own communications, DHS and the State Department acknowledged they were in uncharted territory and likely to face backlash.

"DHS has not identified any alternative grounds of removability that would be applicable to Chung and Khalil, including the ground of removability for aliens who have provided material support to a foreign terrorist organization or terrorist activity," reads the March 8 memo. "We are not aware of any prior exercises of the Secretary's removal authority in [the Immigration and Nationality Act] section 237(a)(4)(c), and given their [lawful permanent resident] status, Chung and Khalil are likely to challenge their removal under this authority, and courts may scrutinize the basis for these determinations."

Yet the following day, Rubio claimed that Khalil and the other students were supporting terrorist organizations. "We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported," wrote Rubio on X on March 9, referencing Khalil's arrest.

The hundreds of pages of documents were evidence in a lawsuit brought against President Donald Trump, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and DHS by five students and academics — Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, Mohsen Mahdawi, Khalil, and Chung — who alleged that their deportation orders violated their freedom of expression. 

The students won their case last year, but until Thursday, the trove of documents remained under lock and key after the judge agreed to seal the records on the State Department's behalf. At the request of The Intercept, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, Massachusetts District Judge William G. Young ultimately unsealed the records, revealing intimate details about the State Department's persecution of students speaking out in support of Palestine.

Related Judge Finds Rubio and Noem Intentionally Targeted Pro-Palestine Activists to Chill Speech

The documents include a series of memos sent from the Department of Homeland Security to the State Department recommending deportation orders for the five students. The correspondence overwhelmingly focuses on the students' participation in on campus protests and advocacy.

In the memos, commissioned by Rubio, the State Department and DHS argued that the students posed a threat to U.S. foreign policy because the protests they participated in fostered a "hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States" and undermined "U.S policy to combat anti-semitism around the world." DHS and the State Department repeatedly based accusations of antisemitism and supporting terrorism on the students' public speech, often noting that the First Amendment could make it difficult for the U.S. to win their deportation cases.

Read our complete coverage

Chilling Dissent

In Öztürk's case, a State Department document dated March 21, 2025, noted that her visa had been revoked because she "had been involved in associations that 'may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students indicating support for a designated terrorist organization' including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later banned from campus."

A separate document from the State Department dated March 15, referencing an assessment from DHS, found that Suri was "actively supporting Hamas terrorism" and "actively spreads its propaganda," based on Facebook posts.

However, the State Department memo cautioned that Suri was likely to challenge his removal on First Amendment grounds. "Given the reliance on Suri's public statements as an academic, and the potential that a court may consider his actions inextricably tied to speech protected under the First Amendment, it is likely that courts will closely scrutinize the basis for this determination," officials wrote. 

Related Despite Court Ruling, ICE Can't Detain Mahmoud Khalil — For Now

While the students won their lawsuit against the government, an appeals court earlier this month reversed the decision that released Khalil from custody. He still has time to appeal the reversal before he can legally be detained, but the White House has said the government plans to rearrest him and deport him to Algeria.

The State Department did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment by the time of publication.

The post New Legal Documents Show Marco Rubio Targeted Students for Op-Eds and Protesting appeared first on The Intercept.

The people of Iran are in the midst of one of the country's biggest uprisings — and harshest government crackdowns — since the Iranian Revolution. 

It started with shopkeepers in bazaars closing their doors at the end of December in protest of the plummeting Iranian rial and economic distress. But demonstrations soon spread to universities and across the country to every single province. Working-class Iranians wanted relief — both from the inflation crisis and U.S sanctions.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Hooman Majd, an Iranian American writer and journalist, who explains what sparked the protests and the government's brutal response. 

"I don't think in the history of Iran, even during the Islamic Revolution, have we seen this number of fatalities." says Majd. "The death toll is staggering. Really, because that death toll is staggering, what's happened is there are no more protests. And that's where we are right now. No more protest, heavy security on the streets. Massive security on the streets, on every corner. It isn't martial law. But it feels like martial law to people living there."

The path forward is unclear, Majd says. But a few things are certain. "The idea is no to shah, no to an ayatollah, no to theocracy. Let's just, finally, after 120 years of demonstrating — which is what the Iranians have been doing since 1906 — after 120 years of looking for democracy, can we just do that? Can we just get a democracy? That is probably the biggest sentiment in Iran: wanting a democratic rule, wanting the repression to end, wanting better relations with the rest of the world so these sanctions can be lifted."

Some people inside and outside Iran have called on President Donald Trump to intervene. The idea that the U.S. should — or could — impose regime change militarily is folly, Majd says. "Sure, we were able to impose a regime change in Iraq militarily. They can do that again in Iran, possibly with the help of Israel or even without the help of Israel. But then what do you have? Do you have another basically authoritarian, autocratic government? That's not what, I would argue, most people would want. And then there's a whole other group of people in Iran, I think, who would say, 'Anything is better than this.'" 

Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to intervene in another international arena. He has set his sights on taking over Greenland. 

Despite walking back his statements pledging to do so by force, Trump has now said he's forming a plan with the secretary general of NATO for Greenland's future. We're joined by independent investigative journalist Lois Parshley, who explains the financial interests behind Trump's obsession with the Arctic island, the billionaires and tech moguls plotting to exploit Greenland's natural resources, and how the people of Greenland have responded to the president's pledge to violate their sovereignty.

Shortly before Trump first expressed an interest in Greenland during his first term, his ambassador to Denmark and Greenland visited a major rare earth mining project on the island, Parshley reported last year.  

"More recently, The Guardian reported that it was Ronald Lauder, heir to the global cosmetics brand [Estée Lauder] who was also a longtime friend of Trump's, who first suggested buying Greenland. He has acquired commercial holdings there and is also part of a consortium who want to access Ukrainian minerals. I should also say here, it's probably important to note that blowing up NATO relationships and severing ties with longtime allies and fellow nuclear powers does not increase U.S. national security."

Fresh off the invasion of Venezuela, the idea that Trump wants to take over Greenland is even more alarming, Parshley says. 

"I'm not the first person to report on these kinds of major tech interests in things like crypto states or special economic zones. People have been pointing this stuff out for a long time, but it's not until President Trump started saying the quiet part out loud that people have really been registering some of these absurd concepts that seem to now be creeping toward reality."

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

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I'm Akela Lacy. 

In late December, people in Iran took to the streets to protest the worsening economy as the country's currency plunged to a record low. As protests grew, the government opened fire on civilians and implemented an internet blackout. 

Leila: We tried to overcome the regime, but every night, when it got late, about midnight, they attacked with their guns and they wiped out the streets from the living people. They killed everybody, almost everybody. If you got injured and you tried to run, they kill you. 

AL: We have obtained an exclusive and rare firsthand eyewitness account from one of the protesters who took to the streets of Tehran over the past few weeks. She wishes to remain anonymous, so for her safety, we'll call her "Leila."

Leila:  I'm sorry that I'm alive. I feel guilty that I'm not dead. And the others are.

AL: It's been difficult to confirm the current death toll, and estimates range from the low thousands to over ten thousand. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has threatened to intervene, while Iran has blamed the U.S. and Israel for the protests.

To understand what's happening, I'm joined by Hooman Majd, an Iranian American writer, and the author of numerous books, including most recently, "Minister Without Portfolio." Majd has written for The Intercept, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Foreign Affairs, among many others, and is a contributor to NBC News.

Welcome back to the show, Hooman Majd.

Hooman Majd: Thank you very much, Akela.

AL: To start, Hooman, can you give us a brief recap of what's happening in Iran? What sparked the protest, what's driving people to the streets, and how has the Iranian government responded?

HM: Yeah. The timeline is that the end of December, 28th or 29th, baazaris — people in the bazaar — in Tehran went basically on strike, closed their shops, and started protesting because of the incredible drop in the value of the national currency, the rial. The purchasing power of ordinary people has been decimated. And for baazaris who sell goods, often imported goods, it became an untenable situation with the currency fluctuation. So they were like, "Well, we can't afford to sell things today at this price, because tomorrow we're going to have to import them at a higher price." So that was the beginning of the protest. 

Other people then took up the protests, as it were, and went out and protested. Some of them were also protesting about the economy and the terrible situation, living standard, reduction in living standards. Others wanted the regime to go completely.

So it started out really as an economic protest, and other people joined in, especially young people joined in, and demanded an end to the regime altogether. And the reason they did that is because they just didn't buy it that the regime could, that the system — if you want to call it the government — could do anything about the collapse of the economy in the way that it has been collapsing.

And they also didn't think the government or the regime could protect them after the 12-day war in June, the decimation of — the obliteration, as Donald Trump calls it — of the nuclear program. And so they're like, "OK, what are you guys going to do to make things better?" No sanctions relief, no negotiations with the U.S. on the immediate horizon. So people were very angry. So apart from the actual economic protest, it's like OK, time for change. We want serious change. 

The government actually responded and said, "OK, you guys are right." Even the supreme leader responded on those initial couple of days. "You're right, people have a right to protest. They have a right to be upset. We have to fix this." The government said it was going to implement the equivalent of $7 [monthly] credit into everybody's account so they could buy goods like eggs and stuff like that — but that really isn't enough. Seven dollars in Iran basically will buy you the equivalent of a Happy Meal. They don't have McDonald's there, but that would be the equivalent. For a family, once a month? That's nothing. That's not really a solution. So the protests continued, and people weren't satisfied. They weren't going home. 

Related Would-Be Iran Monarch Reza Pahlavi Declares a Civil War in Iran

Then former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi in Washington — the shah's son — became the self-appointed leader of the opposition, leader of a transition to a new Iran, and told people in Iran to go out on the streets en masse — huge numbers — and chant slogans against the government, whatever. And they did.

And whether they did it because they are big fans of Pahlavi, or because it was just an opportunity to continue the protest in the name of someone — not everybody was chanting his name, but certainly huge numbers were, and that, I think, rattled the government. That night is when they cut off the internet, to stop people from being able to communicate and continue these protests.

That's when the government said that infiltrators came in and started shooting and killing people and killing security officials and killing police. Up until then, it had been mostly peaceful, and the police had actually not interfered in any big way. But videos emerged, even despite the internet shutdown, videos of people attacking, burning buildings, attacking policemen. There's one horrific video of a security officer — half-naked — being beaten almost to death. And then there are also videos of security officials firing into the crowd. 

There were riots, I should say. And it became a really, really scary situation for almost every Iranian, certainly the ones on the streets. But the terror that was happening on the streets, whether it was 100 percent on the side of the Iranian government shooting people and killing people, or whether it was some rioters killing some of the security people, setting fire to mosques, buses, cars, things like that.

And the crackdown continued and became even more severe. I don't think in the history of Iran, even during the Islamic Revolution, have we seen this number of fatalities — deaths. This is where we are now. The amount of people having been killed and the number of people injured with all the videos that have emerged out of Iran through Starlink, or at various times when the internet does actually switch on for five minutes and then switches back off, is staggering. The death toll is staggering, really.

Because that death toll is staggering, what's happened is there are no more protests. And that's where we are right now. No more protest, heavy security on the streets. Massive security on the streets, on every corner. It isn't martial law. But it feels like martial law to people living there.

I've been able to communicate with family briefly, very briefly, but I've been able to communicate video-wise. It certainly feels like martial law. People don't want to go out at night. If they do venture out at night, they are told to stay off the streets by the security forces. But there isn't really any shooting or protesting at this time.

The government is putting out that everything's over and we're going back to normal. I wouldn't say it's back to normal, go that far, but certainly there aren't any protests at this time.

AL: A couple things you mentioned that I just want to pick up on. One, we're talking about the death toll, and we actually were discussing this in a meeting with colleagues last week, and it was right when CBS had published the story that the death toll had risen over 12,000.

And we were discussing this along with my other colleagues, and we were like, that seems wrong. Because the numbers that had been coming out in the days prior to that were in the hundreds, or like some estimates in the low thousands, and then all of a sudden, it shot up.

But this is the result of there being an internet blackout, not being able to get accurate information out of Iran. And now it's apparent that the death toll is well above 10,000. And so I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about the effect that this is having on how the world is interpreting these events as far as what we're actually able to confirm.

HM: The government will eventually put out numbers — which will either be believed or not believed. And certainly, it's been admitted, even by the supreme leader, "thousands" — that's the word he used. He didn't say how many thousand, but thousands.

AL: Yeah.

HM: Now, let's remember these protests were not just in Tehran, and we're getting most of our videos out of Tehran or Mashhad, these two big cities. But there were protests in the entire country, in almost every town, small towns. And yes, the number is horrific, but it's not just in Tehran. They didn't mow down 12,000 - 20,000 people just on the streets of Tehran, but they did mow down people. There's no question there. People have been killed.

The internet shutdown is, the argument has been to prevent terrorists, as they say. The government says terrorists or infiltrators, Mossad agents, CIA agents, whatever you want to say, whatever you want to call them — and by the way, also the MEK, the other opposition group that actually is armed and does have people inside Iran — from communicating and stirring up trouble and taking over government buildings. 

You actually had Reza Pahlavi telling people to go out and take over government buildings. And then he also said to Norah O'Donnell on CBS News that this is war.

Norah O'Donnell: Is it responsible to be sending citizens in Iran to their deaths? Do you bear some responsibility?

Reza Pahlavi: As I said, as I said, as I said, this is a war, and war has casualties.

In fact, in order to preserve and protect and minimize the death toll, minimize innocent victims yet again be killed by this regime, action is needed.

HM: It also seems like people inside Iran who have communicated say, "We weren't starting a war. That wasn't our intention, to start a war." They certainly weren't starting a war because they were unarmed. Why would they start a war unarmed? 

But the internet shutdown is not just to stop people from communicating, which that's one, obviously, one obvious element of it. The other element is because they're turning it on and off right now and only in certain neighborhoods. Go from one neighborhood and it'll be on for an hour, full 5G internet on your phone. And then it will be off. And then it'll go to another neighborhood or another part of town, and it'll be on and then off again.

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And this is my own suspicion, is that they are trying to identify — they're trying to monitor internet usage and find out where the organizers of any rioting and/or terrorist and/or Mossad agents are. And the way they can do that by having it come on so they communicate, because not everybody's communicating by Starlink. There aren't that many terminals in Iran. And they've been successfully jamming the Starlink communication. So occasionally it works, occasionally it doesn't.

AL: I just want to mention for our listeners, people have been smuggling Starlink terminals into Iran in order to prop up the internet. That's what we're referring to. So we're talking a little bit about Pahlavi, too. I want to play another clip from Leila, who we heard at the top, who is one of the protesters who is supportive of Pahlavi. Let's hear her again.

Leila: We are here, and 90 percent purely looking for a better future with our king. We chant for our beloved king, Mr. Reza Pahlavi. And we chanted for our hero. He is going to do something, I know. I believe in him. And we listened to him. We listened to every order he gave.

AL: So this is one perspective from a protester who supports the son of the shah, Reza Pahlavi, and we've heard him a lot in recent media as you've mentioned.

Can you describe the complexities involved in the types of people who have been protesting, who they support? Obviously, this is not a monolith. They don't all support Pahlavi. Can you expand on that?

HM: Yeah, I can. Well, I think I can, it's complicated because the opposition to the Islamic regime has been there from the day the Islamic regime was created.

The initial opposition was the MEK, the Mojahedin-e Khalq, under Massoud Rajavi, who was hoping that he'd become prime minister. Khomeini and the Islamic regime set him aside. The people who had supported him, this was the MEK, the Mojahedin who had been a terror group on the American terror list because they had killed American citizens during the shah's reign.

They fled after committing some terror acts against the Islamic regime, hoping to overthrow it and then take over. This is in 1980. They fled mostly to Iraq and then joined Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran. Which is why nowadays most Iranians, the vast majority of Iranians, do not consider them a viable opposition group, partly because they supported the enemy against their people and more than half a million Iranian boys basically died in that war.

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And secondly, because they're considered to be somewhat cultish, if not an actual cult, the way that they operate. So that's one opposition group, and they're still very active, and they still do have people inside Iran. They commit assassinations from time to time, so on and so forth. 

Reza Pahlavi, who is the shah's son, initially, when his father died in 1980, declared himself king in exile. And then subsequent to that, for many years, has been relatively quiet. The time that he really came out and started taking on this mantle of being a leader of an opposition was during the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement; a little bit during the Green Movement, but not really because the Green Movement wasn't against the regime, it was very much a civil rights movement. It was very much in favor of Mousavi who was actually part of the regime, who had, they claimed had lost the election to Ahmadinejad.

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So this is going back a little bit into history in 2009, but in 2022 during the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, when Mahsa Amini was killed by the morality police, it was claimed that she was killed by the morality police, and there's video to show her dying in the hospital. There was a real genuine uprising in Iran against the system that produced this kind of result: that a woman with a "bad" hijab, as it were, not quite covering all her hair, could end up dead, a young woman at that. That uprising caused people in the diaspora to believe that the regime was very weak and could be potentially overthrown. Reza Pahlavi took on the mantle of being the leader of that. And then it fizzled again his attempts to become an opposition leader, who had a viable chance — a real chance — to go back to Iran and lead a transition to a new regime, if not actual monarchy.

And then he was promoted by Israel and went to Israel in 2023, met with Netanyahu and began a campaign against, once again, against the Islamic Republic and himself as the leader of an opposition. And during this period, from 2022 to 2025, now 2026, his visibility has grown. His reputation has grown. Some people do see him as a potential liberator as it were. And during these protests, he really took on a very, very public role. Coming out, issuing videos, issuing proclamations: Go out, take out government buildings, the revolution is nigh; I'll be there; I'm joining you soon. But he's still in Washington and then obviously hasn't made that move yet.

The second week of January, I believe, he was in another interview asking President Trump and/or Israel to strike, in his words, strike Iran, to finish off this regime. That has made him, among some people who are against the regime, not as popular as he could be. Siding with the enemy, Israel, which killed 1,000 Iranians in their bombing campaign in June, that's one aspect that makes some people uncomfortable with him. There's another aspect of just not wanting to bring back another authoritarian regime after this one.

Certainly, if not he himself, his supporters in the diaspora, at least in the West and especially in England and America, have shown themselves to be very undemocratic — attacking the Iranian Embassy in London, for example, and then injuring a bunch of policemen, attacking them physically, the police and having some of them ending up in hospital, and getting arrested. Giving speeches where, "we don't want to talk about democracy, only the shah." Some people saying, "Let's make SAVAK great again" — SAVAK was the shah's secret police that tortured people in jail.

So some of that just turns other people off. And the idea is like, no to shah, no to an ayatollah, no to a theocracy. Let's just finally, after 120 years of demonstrating — which is what the Iranians have been doing since 1906 — after 120 years of looking for democracy, can we just do that? Can we just get a democracy? 

"It's always been for democracy, but the result has never been democracy."

That is probably the biggest sentiment in Iran wanting a democratic rule, wanting the repression to end, wanting better relations with the rest of the world so these sanctions can be lifted. I think that's the greater goal. I think some people will use Reza Pahlavi to try to force that to happen in a way, if not being an actual supporter. And yes, there are people like Leila, who you've just mentioned or just played her tape who definitely are very much in favor of him as a leader and as even an autocrat.

A famous Iranian economist, Saeed Laylaz, who's been very critical of the regime — he lives in Iran — has said Iran's waiting for a Bonaparte. They want a Napoleon to come in and rescue everyone and fix the system — sort of like Reza Shah, the previous shah's father, who came in and dragged Iran into the 20th century in the 1920s, and declared himself king overthrowing, the previous very, very, very weak Qajar kings who had sold off parts of the Iranian economy to various interests — British tobacco, British petroleum, so on and so forth. And he brought that together.

And then they demonstrated again in 1953, as we know, democracy under Prime Minister Mossadegh. And then again in the revolution in 1979. It's always been for democracy, but the result has never been democracy. So some people would recognize that. Some protesters would recognize that, oh, if Reza Pahlavi comes here, either by being helicoptered in by Israel or the United States, it's possible. Sure. We were able to impose a regime change in Iraq militarily. The U.S. can do that again in Iran, possibly with the help of Israel or even without the help of Israel. But then what do you have? Do you have another basically authoritarian, autocratic government? That's not what, I would argue, most people would want.

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And then there's a whole other group of people in Iran I think, who would say, "Anything is better than this. So if it means having Reza Pahlavi — great, fine. That's better. That's going to be better because at least the bars will be open. We're going to have sanctions relief because he's half American, basically. So the sanctions will be off, and the economy will improve. And who cares if he loves Israel?" So there'll be those people, too. 

AL: I just want to mention, there was a clip going around on social media of the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying, openly, that the goal of these sanctions is to push the Iranian people so far that they rise up and overthrow the regime.

MH: Yeah.

Scott Bessent: I said that I believe the Iranian currency was on the verge of collapse, that if I were an Iranian citizen, I would take my money out. President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division — Office of Foreign Asset Control — to put maximum pressure on Iran, and it's worked. Because in December, their economy collapsed.

AL: I also want to talk about the geopolitics here, and then I want to go back to Pahlavi, but particularly these allegations by the Iranian government that Israel has been involved in fueling the protests. Israel has admitted to being part of this. Can you walk us through what happened there? The impact both inside and outside of Iran, and, you've alluded a little bit to this, but if at all how that might discredit Pahlavi in the eyes of some of his would-be supporters.

HM: He was discredited by going to Israel first, praying at the Western Wall, but not visiting a mosque, not going into the West Bank. So going to Israel, and especially with this particular government in Israel, I think did leave a bad taste in Iranian's mouths.

And then to top it all off, when Israel attacked Iran and didn't just attack the nuclear sites — was blowing up buildings, children were being killed in apartment buildings where they weren't the target, admittedly, but if you were targeting a general in the IRGC in a multistory building, you're killing a lot of innocent people. Or a scientist, I should say, for example. There's video, which was verified, of bombs falling on a square in north Tehran, and cars being thrown into the sky. When he then refused to even condemn the attack on his own people, that also lost him some support. 

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And when he said, "This is [our] Berlin Wall movement" as his message to the Iranian people to rise up, it was a miscalculation because Iranians weren't going to rise up as they were being attacked by a foreign country. They just weren't. They were actually, I wouldn't say they rallied around the flag, but they definitely rallied — not in support of the regime necessarily, but in support of the nation, as it were, that was being attacked by a foreign country. It doesn't matter what the foreign country is, Iraq or Israel. So he did lose support there.

Israelis aren't particularly interested in human rights in Iran; they don't care about the freedom of the Iranian people. If they don't care about the freedom of the Palestinian people, how are they going to care about the freedom of the Iranian people? It's a very cynical view. The goal of Israel, especially the Netanyahu government, is and the Likud party is to make Iran as weak as possible so that it's no longer a threat to them and no longer a challenge, not just as a threat, but a challenge to their hegemonic behavior in the neighborhood.

Right now, Israel has complete freedom to bomb any country in the neighborhood, and nobody can react. I think Iran is the only one that can react and has proven that it was able to react in the 12-Day War and actually got missiles through to Tel Aviv and other cities and killed innocent Israelis.

"Israel has complete freedom to bomb any country in the neighborhood, and nobody can react. I think Iran is the only one that can react."

AL: If Pahlavi isn't a realistic alternative, who or what do you think is the most appropriate or likely, rather, solution?

HM: The honest truth? It's impossible to predict. What we should remember is that in these protests, which were large and very pointedly anti-regime in many cases, not in all cases, but in many cases, the security forces — the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards, the actual army itself, which are made up mostly of conscripts — none of them fractured. There were no defections. There was no sense that any of the security officials were going to not follow the orders and do the crackdown and bring about order. Not one that we know of, at least not one serious one. 

There may have been occasional cops or Basij or even IRGC members, younger ones, who wouldn't fire on anyone but would just patrol. But they didn't come out and say, we're defecting to the side of the opposition.

And the other thing to remember is that Pahlavi, back in 2025, after the 12-Day War in June, set up a system where people could defect anonymously through a web portal. And he claimed at one point, within a month, that he had 50,000 armed people from the armed forces in Iran, various armed forces, ready to defect at the right time. If there was a right time, this was the right time. Not only did not 50,000 defect to his side, but not even one came out, or at least publicly, and defect to his side. So that's not happening in terms of the regime crumbling, cracking in that way with the security services so far. That's not happened.

So in terms of what is in the future, I think in the immediate future, the regime survives. And people are terrified. They're shocked, they're in trauma. People in Iran, I'd say even people outside Iran who have family in Iran, are shocked and traumatized. Not being able to reach our families is tough.

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I think that for the immediate future — short of an interference or intervention by Donald Trump or Israel — I think the regime survives in the short term. In the long term, we have to remember that the supreme leader is going to be 87 years old this year, I think, and he's had cancer, probably not in the best of health. So far, people have remained loyal to him. Whether that continues over the longer term is questionable. Whether Trump decides to pull a Venezuela and then decide that he can work with, or the U.S. can work with, one of the Revolutionary Guards generals, or the president of Iran, or the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council is very powerful, Ali Larijani — who knows?

Who knows what options, because it was just announced, I think, this last week that options are being presented to Trump by the military, by the, I assume, the intelligence agency, as to what options he has vis-à-vis Iran, in terms of what kind of blow he can do on Iran, or what kind of attack/strike was it were he could make on Iran, or what kind of blow it could be to the regime.

It does seem that he wants to do something to Iran because he said he was going to. It'll be far, far too late to help the protesters, which he initially claimed he was doing.

AL: Right. 

MH: And now the argument is that [Trump says,] well, I saved 837 people from being executed. So that's how I helped the protesters. Which may or may not be true, but it's irrelevant. He hasn't refuted that he believes it's time for new leadership in Iran. Now what that leadership is, he certainly hasn't met with the shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, and hasn't indicated that he believes he's a viable option. So we don't know. 

Again, prediction is impossible, but there are various scenarios. It's not what I would want to happen. I'm living in America. I don't have a right to say what I would — I would like Iranians to be happy. I would like Iranians to have the government that they want. I would like Iranians to have democratic rule. I would like Iranians inside Iran to have an economy that works for them and have jobs and be able to spend money and have disposable income and travel. All the things that we take for granted in the West, I would want my fellow Iranians inside Iran to have. How they bring that about, it's not my place to make the prescription.

AL: You mentioned the 837 people, you're referring to the protesters that Iran has backed off from hanging now, as a result, ostensibly, of Trump's comments. 

HM: Yes. 

AL: I want to turn back to this question of a targeted strike from the United States. We have another clip from Leila.

Leila: We are hopeful that Mr. Trump can help us because as long as we are not armed, we are only a bunch of meat in front of the bullets.

AL: What do you make of this kind of sentiment, asking Trump for help? And the idea of a targeted strike, what would that actually do? Does anyone think that striking a government from afar will remove that government? What are you hearing?

HM: I mean, certainly people like Leila, who you just played the tape of, certainly she's not armed and I think most of the young people are not armed. But there have been armed people in Iran in these protests. We have verified videos of armed people, especially in Kurdish areas, in Baluchestan and in certain parts of the country, there have been armed clashes. 

It is hard to get guns in Iran. It's not a gun-friendly country. I think people are desperate, and I think a lot of the protesters who either witnessed some killings or mass killings probably feel that there has to be some kind of strike to stop the government from behaving the way it does and or to potentially bring about regime change.

Now, striking the leadership, for example, if President Trump decides to do that — it's very unlikely to bring about regime change because what's behind that strike? We saw that in Venezuela. He wasn't going to helicopter [María Corina] Machado into Caracas because he had no idea if the military would support her. You just don't have any idea, and you don't want a war.

Again, going back to 2003, George Bush did want a war. He was happy to have a war. But we know what that was. And as we know, Trump has, on his own personal level, always been against those kinds of foreign interventions. He likes the one-and-dones, as it were, one and done, I'm in and out. Same thing with Iran in June, when he in a space of a couple of hours, he, as he says, obliterated the Iranian nuclear program without killing anybody on the ground, without any American servicemen losing their lives. What appears to be his notion of doing something of striking Iran or some kind of strike on Iran would be to take out some of the top leaders but leave the regime in place and hope that someone powerful takes over, whether it's, as I pointed out, Ali Larijani or Mohammad Bagher, who's the speaker of Parliament. These are former IRGC generals who are in politics now. That's a possibility. I don't know if that's something that he's considering.

But regime change in a big way means what? The only way that can be accomplished by force is to land American troops. And go to war with basically the people who are going to fight to the death.

We have to remember that Iran isn't a situation where 99 percent of the people are against the regime. Even if the regime only has 10 to 20 million supporters out of 90 million people — I'm not going to count the children, obviously — but it has shown to have had more than 10 million supporters.

In the last presidential election where the reform president won, Pezeshkian won, 13 million people voted for Saeed Jalili, who's probably the most hard line of the hard-liners, who has zero relations with the West, an absolute hard line. His Ph.D. thesis was the foreign policy of the prophet. This is how deeply, Islamically theological he is. And he got 13 million votes. The fact that he lost but with 13 million votes should indicate something. Let's say even the 13 million was exaggerated, 10 million people, and they're the ones with guns and they're not going anywhere. And they have no escape to go anywhere. 

"There aren't a lot of places they can go, if there is a regime change. So they're going to fight."

Right now, people like Reza Pahlavi, or at least his people, not himself directly, are claiming that they will seek revenge for these people who have blood on their hands. And they're going to basically do what the Islamic regime did to the shah's closest allies and execute them the first day they take over. These people, they don't have an escape route. Most of them, the vast majority of them, don't have big bank accounts overseas that they can access. Most of them don't have family overseas or places they can escape to. If you thought at one point that if there's a revolution and these, the ones who are the diehard religious, diehard theocratic supporters, theocracy supporters would go to Damascus, that's no longer possible. If you thought they would go to Beirut, that's not possible. If you thought they'd go to Caracas, that's not possible anymore. There aren't a lot of places they can go, if there is a regime change. So they're going to fight. If there's a war, they're going to fight. They're going to fight. 

One of the potential problems with regime change attempts, at least by outsiders, is that we end up in a civil war like Syria. Because if there's a decapitation at the top of the leadership, then there are Kurdish armed groups who are separatists. You've got Azeri separatists, you've got Baloch separatists down in the Southeast, you've got the Arab separatist in the Southwest — many of them armed, separatist groups, I mean — who could break up the country. You could have a civil war going on.

The MEK is not going to stand by and allow Reza Pahlavi to take over. Reza Pahlavi supporters aren't going to allow the MEK to take over. So you're going to see those clashes. So it could be very, very messy. And I have to believe that the U.S. intelligence community is laying all this out for President Trump as he makes a decision. In fact, I'm sure they are. It would be crazy, and I'm sure the Mossad has been laying it out for Benjamin Netanyahu as well.

AL: I do want to ask one more question about the weakening of Iran's regional allies in recent months: Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas. How has that affected the regime's power and stability?

HM: No question it's affected its power. It's power projection, for sure. In terms of stability, yes, it's one of the complaints of people who protest against the regime — that we spent all this money, all this effort to become this power in the region, and it's all gone in the space of two years. We spent all this money which we could have spent inside Iran on people. Billions and billions of dollars on Hezbollah decimated, if not, it's not gone completely, but still, the leadership is decimated. The power of Hezbollah has been weakened to the point where they're not a threat to anybody really anymore, or certainly not to Israel in any significant way. Hamas decimated, certainly not a threat anymore to Israel.

Caracas is problematic only because that was their springboard to this continent, the South American continent. And so that's no longer good. Syria, of course, not a threat to anyone. And the hundreds of billions of dollars spent keeping [Bashar al] Assad in power. So when you look at that and you look at Iranians saying, what about us? These are all countries that supposedly were going to end up being our protector in a way, so that if we were attacked, they would be on the forefront of attacking our attacker. And that didn't happen. What was all that money spent for? 

The one thing it does have are ballistic missiles and the capability to produce ballistic missiles accurately — accurate ballistic missiles, I should say. And it does have drone technology that even the U.S. is reverse-engineered and is starting to use suicide drones that Iranians invented and can produce in huge numbers, which they also then sold the technology to the Russians, who now make them domestically in Russia.

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But weakened? Yeah, it's been significantly. There was always this sense that Iran had surrounded itself with these, if you want to call them proxies, they weren't exactly proxies because they weren't doing everything that Iran wanted. At one point Hamas, they were actually against Hamas because Hamas was for the rebels in Syria, and Iran was killing the rebels in Syria. So they had Hamas, they had the Iraqi Shia groups in Iraq right across the border. They had, as you pointed out, they had Islamic Jihad, they had Hezbollah, they had Damascus. So all that power is now basically gone, and it's now down to just Iran really.

And the Houthis are still, yes, allies, if not proxies, and can cause some damage if Donald Trump decides to take out the supreme leader and kill him — the Houthis would react very negatively to that. The Shias in Yemen would react very negatively to that. And in fact, it's quite possible that Shias in other parts of the Middle East, such as in Iraq and in Bahrain and places like that, even in Saudi Arabia, there might be some unrest for taking out an ayatollah at the end of the day, whether you like him or dislike him. For a lot of Shia faithful, he's an ayatollah. It's like, do you take out a cardinal that you don't like in the Catholic church? I'm sure that the Pope would have an issue with that.

AL: Thank you so much, Hooman, for this conversation and for your insights. We're going to leave it there.

HM: My pleasure, Akela. Thank you.

[Break] 

AL: In other news, President Donald Trump is making good on his threats to — for some reason — try to take over Greenland. And his efforts reached new levels of absurdity when the self-proclaimed "president of peace" texted Norway's prime minister "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace." Setting aside the highly questionable "8 wars" claim — Trump went on to say, "The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland." 

So why is Trump so obsessed with Greenland? Joining us to explain what's behind Trump's attempted land grab is investigative journalist Lois Parshley. 

Welcome to the show, Lois.

Lois Parshley: Thank you for having me.

AL: So Trump has repeatedly claimed an interest in taking over Greenland, though on Wednesday he walked back his comments about doing so by force. He's been claiming that this is in the national security interest of the U.S., notwithstanding the blatant violations of sovereignty here fresh off the U.S. invasion of Venezuela. What is Trump actually interested in?

LP: That is a great question and one that I started to ask last year. As Trump took office, I thought it was really important to understand who is benefiting from his policy decisions.

So I started asking questions about the wealthy donors in his orbit and their personal financial interests. We still likely don't have the full picture, but last January I found that shortly before Trump first expressed an interest in Greenland during his first administration, so back in 2019, his ambassador to Denmark and Greenland visited a major rare earth mining project on the island.

Now, more recently, The Guardian reported that it was Ronald Lauder, heir to the global cosmetics brand [Estée Lauder], who was also a longtime friend of Trump's, who first suggested buying Greenland. He has acquired commercial holdings there and is also part of a consortium who want to access Ukrainian minerals. I should also say here, it's probably important to note that blowing up NATO relationships, and severing ties with longtime allies and fellow nuclear powers does not increase U.S. national security.

AL: As you mentioned, Trump started talking about this after Ronald Lauder first brought up the idea, and last year you wrote about the tech moguls who've also taken an interest in Greenland. Can you tell us more about the specific interests that they have in the island and the resources that are at stake?

"They are aiming to mine in western Greenland for minerals crucial to the artificial intelligence boom and used in data centers."

LP: Many of the tech moguls who are sitting in the front row of Trump's inauguration, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, are investors in a startup called KoBold Metals. They are aiming to mine in western Greenland for minerals crucial to the artificial intelligence boom and used in data centers. Opposition to some of this mining actually ushered a new party into power in Greenland in 2021. They slowed some of the rare earth minerals development that was currently in explorations phases and banned all future oil development. But just two weeks before Trump came into office - so in 2025 — KoBold medals raised $537 million in a funding round, bringing its valuation to almost $3 billion. So we're talking about a lot of money here.

AL: What does it say that these elite financial interests are so explicitly driving the U.S. to pursue this really anachronistic imperialism?

LP: That is a great question. How anachronistic that actually is, is another one? But I would say that overall —

AL: Fair enough.

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LP: One of the things that just seems abundantly true here is that I'm not the first person to report on these kinds of major tech interests in things like crypto states or special economic zones. People have been pointing this stuff out for a long time, but it's not until President Trump started saying the quiet part out loud that people have really been registering some of these absurd concepts that seem to now be creeping toward reality.

AL: I want to talk a little bit about Marc Andreessen, who has also taken a particular interest in the island. What can you tell us about his investments targeting Greenland?

LP: So among the contributors to KoBold's funding is a leading venture capital firm, founded by Marc Andreessen, who has also helped shape the administration's technology policies. A general partner at his venture capital firm was also listed as a KoBold director at one point on a company SEC filing.

Andreessen has been funding startups hoping to build experimental enclaves around the world. These are sometimes called network states. And sometimes they're called crypto states, sometimes they're called special economic zones.

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Often they involve the promise of freedom from the constraints of government. And proposals for these libertarian freeholds have sprung up in Honduras, Nigeria, the Marshall Islands, Panama — which by the way, Trump also proposed taking over by military force. 

AL: Lest we forget. 

LP: And while it looks a little different in each location, the sales pitch usually includes replacing taxes and regulations with things like cryptocurrency and blockchain to enable things like biomedical experiments on human subjects.

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Trump also recently issued a full and unconditional pardon for former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been serving a 45 year prison sentence in the U.S. for drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy charges. During his time in office, Hernández and his administration consistently backed the legal framework that enabled Honduras's special economic zone called Próspera, which was also funded by Andreessen, including submitting legislation to grant them tax exemptions and regulatory privileges. So this is not just an issue around Greenland.

AL: Greenland was ruled by Denmark from 1721 to 1979, but Denmark continued to control its foreign policy and defense after that. In 2008, Greenlanders voted for greater independence. You write, "The president's renewed intention to take over Greenland has reignited debates over its sovereignty, as the country grapples with the trade-offs between economic opportunity and independence from Denmark. As the country's glaciers recede, it's also facing sweeping climate-driven transformations, threatening traditional industries like fishing and hunting and exposing valuable mineral resources."

Can you tell us a little bit more about this tension? I'm really curious also about the movements that you alluded to earlier within Greenland to slow this development.

LP: The fight over Greenland's resources has extended for centuries. As you noted, Greenlanders voted for greater independence in 2008, taking control of their natural resources along with other state functions.

There are abundant oil reserves around Greenland, but producing oil in those conditions has been historically very difficult and expensive. There are high transportation costs and infrastructure limitations, and how much to develop its abundant natural resources has been a debate within Greenland. Some of their politicians have supported development, particularly as a means to fund greater autonomy from Denmark.

Siumut, a pro-independence political party who was in power in the early aughts, declared that mineral extraction could help the country transition away from Denmark because it would need to find new sources of income. However, many residents still rely on traditional ways of life, including fishing, hunting for food security, living closely on the land. And development would impact all of those things, which are also under pressure from rapidly changing climate conditions, including warming temperatures and extreme weather.

AL: In response to Trump's threats, Greenland has also seen some of its biggest protests in history. Can you tell us more about how the people of Greenland, the Greenlandic Inuit, have been responding to this tension and now the Trump administration's aggressive efforts?

LP: I certainly don't want to speak for any Greenland residents. I'm not a resident, but from the people I spoke to a year ago, the general vibe seemed to be more bemusement. Obviously, as tensions have escalated since then, it seems like far less of a joke today. 

All of this unwelcome attention has succeeded in delivering one change. Some of the residents I spoke to said the country is now more unified and wanting to find a path to independence from Denmark, although it is challenging to figure out a way to do so. He told me, "You can't put a name on land. Land belongs to the people." It's not something they feel like can be sold.

Frankly, I think a lot of the news conversation around "Can Donald Trump buy Greenland?" overlooks the fact that no one in Greenland is interested in selling. More bluntly, as a Danish politician said, at one European Parliament meeting last week, "Let me put this in words you might understand: Mr. President, fuck off."

But as you noted, at Davos President Trump reiterated that he wants to acquire Greenland, but said, "I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force." Certainly our allies hope that that is true.

AL: We're going to leave it there. Thank you so much, Lois, for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.

LP: Thank you for having me.

Related While Threatening Greenland, Trump Also Threatens Iceland

AL: On Wednesday at Davos as Trump rambled on about why he believes the U.S. is entitled to take Greenland, he repeatedly confused the isla

Screams echoed through the halls of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility as women begged for their solitude to end. The sound of desperate hands banging on cell doors rang out like a solemn chorus. Exhausted, an incarcerated woman named Cici Herrera reached for a book. "That's the only way I can keep myself from thinking too much," she said. "I'm going crazy." 

At Bedford Hills, a maximum-security women's prison in Westchester County, New York, a new superintendent and a recent policy change have sharply restricted the limited freedom incarcerated people in the general population once enjoyed. They could no longer count on regular showers — times were limited to tightly controlled shifts — and indoor recreation was eliminated even on the coldest days of the New York winter. The women found themselves locked inside of their single cells for the majority of the day, in conditions detention experts and survivors of solitary confinement compared to solitary confinement. 

"Nothing is consistent," said Herrera, one of three people incarcerated at Bedford who told The Intercept about the conditions. "We have to scream for everything." 

The conditions likely violate state law, according to multiple detention experts, all of whom have spoken with people incarcerated at Bedford. The new restrictions put the women in the middle of a political battle between activists who fought to place restrictions on the use of solitary and prison guards who have protested their implementation.

New York's Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, or the HALT Act for short, limits the amount of time an incarcerated person can be forced to stay in their cell and when a prison guard can put a person in solitary, taking into account the punishment's severe harm to physical and mental health. Researchers have found that solitary confinement increases the risks of premature death both during and after incarceration, from deaths of despair like opioid overdoses and suicide. 

"We have to scream for everything."

"People should be receiving at least a minimum… seven hours out of cell time under the HALT Act," said Sumeet Sharma, director of policy and communications at the Correctional Association of New York. Most people at Bedford previously had some freedom of movement to access communal spaces, shower, and cook. But when his team conducted a two-day monitoring visit at Bedford in November, they found that "that's just not happening anymore," Sharma said. "Essentially, people are locked in." 

The New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has denied these accusations. 

"The allegations regarding recent operational changes at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility are inaccurate and misleading," wrote Nicole March, a spokesperson for the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, in a statement to The Intercept. March said the changes were implemented to deal with "frequent fights and safety concerns" at Bedford Hills.  

March added that many facilities still lack adequate staffing due to an unauthorized prison guard strike in spring of 2025, but that "HALT programming is now fully operational in the overwhelming majority of facilities and, with respect to Bedford Hill, it has been for several months."   

That compliance appears to exist "on paper," said Sharma, whose team confirmed that people in the general population units had lost access to communal indoor recreation space and now had to sign up to leave their cells after speaking with prison guards, officials, and incarcerated people. A written copy of the policy reviewed by The Intercept also noted the restrictions on recreation.

"In practice," Sharma said, even when people sign up to leave their cells, "they're not getting the statutory amount out of cell time. That appears to be a violation of the HALT Act."

Corrections officers in New York have long been resistant to implementing HALT. Thousands of guards went on a wildcat strike last year after a group of corrections officers was charged with murder for brutally beating and killing an incarcerated man named Robert Brooks. In addition to protesting accountability for Brooks's killers, the guards demanded that HALT be repealed. They argue the law places an undue burden on them by making it harder to put people in solitary confinement, either as a punishment or a safety tool.

Although the guards didn't get their wish, advocates who helped get the law passed said New York corrections officers and prison officials are still refusing to implement the limits on solitary confinement and mandatory out-of-cell time throughout the system. 

"The legislation is not being adhered to" by administrators at Bedford, said Donna Hylton, an activist who was incarcerated at Bedford Hills for 27 years and campaigned to get the law passed.

Herrera said she's especially worried for the women who are too old or sick to use the outdoor recreation space in winter. 

"You put somebody, 24 hours, in one cell with four walls, it's a lot to take," she said. "Mentally, some people can't handle this kind of situation."

All three people incarcerated at Bedford who spoke to The Intercept characterized their treatment at the hands of the guards as vindictive, reflecting a conviction that incarcerated people deserve additional punishment beyond their imprisonment.

Herrera and two other people incarcerated at Bedford got in touch with The Intercept via the Fight 2 Live Relief Fund, a New York abolitionist organization that has been advocating for better conditions at Bedford. 

An incarcerated woman named Kit, who requested anonymity because she feared retaliation from prison officials and guards, said she'd heard guards call incarcerated women "entitled, needy, [having] 'princess syndrome.' It's that mentality that, oh, this isn't hard enough for these women." 

"That is where these policies are coming from — not from a desire to make the facility safer or to operate better," Kit said, "but this sick and twisted sense of entertainment and satisfaction out of the pain and the stress of incarcerated individuals who are affected by these policies." 

Related Sexual Assault Allegation Exposes Self-Policing Prison System

Thomas Gant, a formerly incarcerated activist and organizer with the Center for Community Alternatives who is in communication with people inside of Bedford, characterized the situation at the prison as the combined result of policy changes and retaliation from guards taking their anger out on incarcerated people. Many guards remain dissatisfied with the end result of the strike, after which Gov. Kathy Hochul fired thousands of officers in an already-understaffed system and increased surveillance.

"The relation is, we're just going to make you guys' lives as miserable as possible," he said. "[Their] way of getting at you back is to say, 'Hey, there's staff shortages, so you guys can't go to the yard, or, you know, you can't have this visit, or I got a longer time to get you down to the visit.' These are just all retaliatory tactics, all because correction officers now have a semblance of being held accountable." 

The New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, which represents the guards, declined to comment.

Chloe Aquart, director of the Restoring Promise Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, said the culture of "secondary punishment" among prison guards is widespread at U.S. prisons. 

"That's kind of how we operate in the United States," she said. "So prison isn't enough. The treatment in prison has to be an additional punishment, beyond taking you away from your family, taking you away from your community, stripping your rights." 

The "most concerning" change at Bedford, said Sharma, "was that you had women in general population units who weren't able to take a shower."

Instead, he said that women were given the option to use a bucket to bathe if they were unable to get a shower slot for the day. "So someone would have the same bucket … that they're using to store some things in, or if someone is menstruating, that bucket is used to dispose of bodily fluids and bodily material. So that same bucket is essentially being refilled before that and then given to people for getting them to wash themselves," he said. 

The limited showers have also affected people whose religious practices require bathing before worship. "As a Muslim," wrote Nur, an incarcerated transgender man who wanted to remain anonymous to prevent retaliation from prison officials, in a letter to The Intercept. "It is required to perform ablution (cleansing) before prayer." 

Even if you can get a shower slot, that doesn't mean staff will actually let you out at the intended time, Nur wrote. "They are not letting people out of their cells at their allotted time," wrote Nur. "Incarcerated individuals are losing patience, resulting in screaming and banging on the cell door to obtain the attention of the security staff. Sadly, we are ignored."

DOCCS denied the allegations of inadequate shower time and lack of religious accommodations, but confirmed that showers are limited to specific time slots.

"Shower access has not been eliminated or limited. Available daily time slots begin at 8:45am and end at 9:30pm," wrote March in an email. "Additionally, hot water is delivered to every incarcerated individual at around 6:00am. Individuals often use this hot water to wash their faces or take quick sponge baths." 

Herrera had spent the last four years of her life behind Bedford's iron gates, but she said things have gotten steadily worse since October, when a new deputy superintendent arrived named Michael Blot.

Sharma and two other advocates in New York also pointed to Blot's role in the changes.

The new policy on out-of-cell time "seems to be a decision that was made by a new Deputy Superintendent who came to the prison in the fall last year after a stint at Sing Sing," said Sharma, referring to a maximum-security men's prison further upstate. 

F2L began a letter-writing campaign to DOCCS in November asking for Blot to be fired and for regular shower access and indoor recreation time to be restored. Anisah Sabur, a lead organizer in the HALT Solitary Campaign, agreed that Blot "came in and made a bunch of changes." 

"This individual is saying that Bedford is a maximum-security facility, and these are the maximum-security regulations that they are following," Sabur said, "but most of them are just blatant violations of the HALT law."

DOCCS denied that Blot was solely responsible for the sweeping changes at Bedford. 

"Facility operations are based on established Department policies, not individual management preferences," wrote March, the DOCCS spokesperson, in December.

The chaos and tensions created by these changes from both guards and incarcerated people at Bedford Hills have also heightened incidents of violence, said Nur. Herrera also mentioned increased violence against incarcerated people at Bedford.

In mid-November, Nur said a woman tried to leave her cell with a robe on "to retrieve a water bucket," because she wasn't able to shower during her allotted time. According to Nur, a guard asked the incarcerated woman what she was doing. The woman explained that she was bathing and put her hands up and backed away. 

Next, Nur said that the officer "charged towards" the woman, punching her in the face and slamming her naked body onto the ground. "The response team [answered] with [further] abuse," wrote Nur, in a letter to The Intercept. "They dragged her off the unit, exposing her naked body in front of her peers and male security. It was traumatizing to witness." 

"I'm afraid that I could be next," he said.

DOCCS declined to comment on the allegation, saying they were unable to without a name or "case-specific details." 

Nur said he knows how to endure isolation, but the grief and fear throughout Bedford have been devastating to witness.

"To witness the madness that surrounds me is terrifying."

"To witness the madness that surrounds me is terrifying," he wrote. "I can handle confinement; it's just mentally draining to hear many of my peers cry in agony about not wanting to be alone for so many hours confined. It brings an emotion that I can not explain: I can only compare it to empathy. I know what it feels like to be abandoned and forgotten." 

"This new policy … is creating cabin fever and chaos," said Kit. "They're being held in their cells for hours and days with nothing to do to be proactive, unable to shower, unable to clean their cells, unable to cook and make their food. And the officers, and particularly the security in the garden, seem to be getting a very sick pleasure out of it."

The mental impact of isolation is something Kit understands all too well. 

Related Trump Administration Abolishes Rules Protecting Trans Prisoners

For nearly a decade, Kit, who is transgender, was held in solitary confinement in multiple men's prisons before being sent to Bedford. The federal Prison Rape Elimination Act technically prohibits placing trans inmates in solitary confinement for their protection without their consent, but in practice, the overwhelming majority of trans people incarcerated in the United States have spent time in solitary confinement.

"I almost lost my life on numerous occasions," said Kit. "These are women who have never experienced solitary confinement, who are used to regular programming … are being thrown into days and days with nothing to do, literally overnight."

Correction: January 23, 2026, 10:59 a.m. ET

This story has been updated to correct Chloe Aquart's professional title after previously noting an outdated role.

The post New York Women's Prison Forces People to Go Without Showers or Recreation appeared first on The Intercept.

The House of Representatives narrowly defeated a resolution aimed at blocking further attacks on Venezuela after House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., held the poll open for a lengthy period to secure a final vote against it.

The House voted 215-215 on the measure. Under House rules, a tied vote is a defeat.

Johnson's decision to keep the vote open for more than 20 minutes drew jeers from Democrats and an angry response from Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., one of the measure's supporters.

"Close the vote! Come on! Seriously!" Ryan said. "Come on! This is serious! This is serious shit! Close the vote!"

Ryan's request was ignored and the vote was held open until Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas, who had been campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas, arrived in the chamber to cast the decisive vote against the measure.

The slow-moving vote in the House had threatened to spoil a signature achievement for Johnson, who minutes earlier had secured passage of an appropriations package that would prevent another government shutdown.

Democrats were unanimous in support, and a pair of Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Don Bacon, R-Neb., crossed the aisle to vote with them.

For a time, it appeared that supporters of the resolution might secure its passage, thanks to the absence of Hunt and other Republicans.

Related Trump Bullies Flip-Flopping Senators Into Defeating Vote to Block Venezuela War

That would have marked a significant defeat for Johnson in light of President Donald Trump's furious response to Republican defections during a vote two weeks ago in the Senate.

Five Republicans had cast ayes in a procedural vote to advance a war powers resolution similar to the one considered by the House on Thursday. Trump's bullying response convinced two GOP senators to flip their votes a week later and doom the measure there.

The post Congress Votes Against Blocking Venezuela War After Stalling for Tardy GOP Rep appeared first on The Intercept.