In May 2023, the Pentagon's shiny new fighter jet was not looking so shiny or new.

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

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

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

Collins was the largest recipient of Lockheed cash in the period surrounding the inspector general report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Company Behind California Chemical Leak Was Building F-35 Parts Amid Rush of Orders From U.S. and Israel

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

Fight of Her Political Life

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

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

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

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

Related Susan Collins's Committee Bought Trucks the Army Didn't Want. Then Campaign Donations Poured In.

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

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

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

Lockheed Giving

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

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

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

Of the 60 donations of $1,000 or more during May and June of that year, 56 went to Collins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Vehicle Army Didn't Want

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related The Pentagon's Secret Budget

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

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

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

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

Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, during a news conference ahead of the State of the Union address in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 24, 2026. Photo: Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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

Related ICE Raid on Ilhan Omar Shows How Dangerous Two Years of Flailing Trump Could Get

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

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

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

As a rule for U.S. media, the consistent application of principle takes a back seat to class solidarity.

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

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

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

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

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

Related How Democrats Paved the Way for Kevin McCarthy's Attack on Ilhan Omar

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

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

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

Earlier this month, Acting Secretary of the Army Adam R. Telle signed an order scheduling the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major who was convicted of killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. Two days later, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth made a startling announcement. "We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public," Hegseth told the conservative Real America's Voice News network, as the interviewer raised his eyebrows. The Department of War's official "Rapid Response" Twitter account promptly promoted the clip.

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

Related The Trump Administration's Shameless Snuff-Film Fixation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Lethal Injection, Electric Chair, or Firing Squad? An Inhumane Decision for Death Row Prisoners

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

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

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

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

Related Indiana Banned Press From Executions for "Dignity." It Actually Serves Repression.

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

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

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

Related Video of U.S. Military Killing Boat Strike Survivors Is Horrifying, Lawmakers Reveal

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

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

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

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

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

After agents with Homeland Security Investigations, a division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Monday morning, officials who spoke to The Intercept raised questions about whether the raid was political in nature.

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

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

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

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

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

Related ICE Gave New Hires Access to Restricted Info on Palantir App Before They Passed Background Checks

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A Waste of Time"

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

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

"We are highly trained agents who should be working child exploitation and trafficking cases, instead we are being used as pawns."

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

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

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

"It Backfired"

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

Related ICE Mandates Dress Code After Killings and Botched Arrest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vehicle Stops "Shit Show"

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

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

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

"The footage looks like a carjacking."

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

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

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

Related ICE Agent on Scene of NYC Shooting Was Posing as Construction Worker, Eyewitness Says

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

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

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

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

This story was reported and produced by Injustice Watch, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago that investigates issues of equity and justice in the court system. Sign up here to get their weekly newsletter.

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

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

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

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

Related ICE Contractor Locked a Mother and Her Baby in a Hotel Room for Five Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related ICE Deleted Reviews for Deaths in Custody That Cited Shoddy Medical Care

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

The Sonesta Chicago O'Hare Airport Rosemont where Galvis and her son were detained for five days in 2025.
 Photo: Sebastián Hidalgo for Injustice Watch

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

"We're not providing Holiday Inns," said Mullin.

Related Inside the Business of Trump's Third-Country Deportations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes exploded at Trump administration attorneys on Monday after they admitted more than 400 trees had been cut down at a D.C. public golf course that President Donald Trump wants to turn into a championship-level course, like those of his personal properties.

"430 trees!" Reyes raged. "I had said at the May hearing that I didn't want 10 trees chopped down without someone having notice." She continued, "In what universe did anyone in your office think that that was acceptable?"

It was refreshing to hear someone erupting at Trump administration minions, if only about the destruction of trees. In a saner world, someone, anyone would be bellowing at Trump or his top officials on a daily basis. There would be real anger about the killing of 238 civilians in extrajudicial boat strikes, the slaying of more than 150 in an Iranian elementary school attack, the deaths of anti-ICE protesters on American streets, and on so many other injustices.

Sometimes, it's difficult to see the forest for the trees, even if those trees have been uprooted against a judge's order.

But sometimes, paying close attention to the lesser sins of an immoral, megalomaniacal president can tell us something important. Today, I examine what the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — which is being refilled as I write — says about a White House in free fall and a president who can't win for losing.

- Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

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An Iconic Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nested Failures

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

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

Related ICE Raid on Ilhan Omar Shows How Dangerous Two Years of Flailing Trump Could Get

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

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

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is blocked off to the public on Oct. 13, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP A Presidential Crime Scene

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

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

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

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

The National Park Service staff and contractors are repairing areas damaged by vandals and completing a historic effort to clean, fix, and beautify the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Since 1922, prior administrations have neglected this iconic national landmark, evidenced most recently by more than half of the pool's pipes being clogged and the sidewalks and granite coping stones being filthy dirty. The Reflecting Pool will remain drained while this work proceeds so that it can truly reflect the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of our nation's capital.

"Work Won't Love You Back," by Sarah Jaffe Available on Bookshop.org

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

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

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

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

With Malice Toward All

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

Related The Intercept Sues Trump for Selling Premium Access to Truth Social Announcements

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

Trump promised to drain the "swamp" of Washington corruption. He managed only to drain the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool of water and the country of any shred of decency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An aerial photo shows a Google data center on July 24, 2025, in Henderson, Nev. Photo: Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no economic disincentive stopping Entergy from SLAPPing again the next time a news report interferes with its business.

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

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

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

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

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

Related Kash Patel Is Using MAGA's Favorite Tool to Muzzle the Free Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correction: October 13, 2026

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

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

Rep. Delia Ramirez is expected to introduce a bill to abolish the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate all immigrant detention in the United States on Tuesday, the Illinois Democrat shared exclusively with The Intercept. 

The Reimagining Safety Act would repeal "duplicative and overreaching terrorism laws," according to the bill summary and text, and curtail the widespread surveillance state that emerged in the wake of 9/11 terror attacks.

It comes the day after agents from Homeland Security Investigations searched the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in what the Department of Justice has described as an opaque "federal criminal investigation." HSI is a component of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the center of mounting concerns about the violent weaponization of DHS against immigrants and the Trump administration's perceived political enemies.

The sweeping legislation faces long odds in Congress, but Ramirez argues that strictly limiting the government's immigration enforcement apparatus is critical for public safety in the wake of yet another shooting by federal immigration agents.

Related ICE Agent on Scene of NYC Shooting Was Posing as Construction Worker, Eyewitness Says

Last Thursday, an ICE agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck by firing into his car, where Belgal's 5-year-old child was in the backseat, in New York City. Belgal was the latest of at least 25 people shot by federal immigration agents in the past year; six of those shootings were fatal. Deaths in detention are also surging under Trump. As of early October, at least 28 people have reportedly died in ICE custody this year, according to the National Immigration Project.

"Just this week, our communities were reminded that DHS is a weapon: pointed at a father shot in front of his 5-year-old and at Congresswoman Omar, who is using her voice to demand an end to fascism," wrote Ramirez in a statement to The Intercept. "It is clear that now is the time to reimagine our safety, dismantle DHS, abolish ICE, and end the use of broad authorities to circumvent our rights and due process."

Ramirez's bill seeks to replace DHS with a new agency called the Department of Community Safety, which would oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The new department would also fund new public safety measures like providing support to community violence intervention programs and public health-backed approaches to gun violence. And it would implement a new program where social workers, medical professionals, and interpreters aid asylum-seekers who arrive at the border.

Other DHS functions would be transferred to existing agencies. The DOJ would take over immigration enforcement authority; the Department of Transportation would assume the functions of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard; and the Department of the Treasury would conduct customs enforcement.

Related "Terrorist": How ICE Weaponized 9/11's Scarlet Letter

The Department of Homeland Security has only existed since George W. Bush established it in 2003, ushering in a new era of broad federal surveillance and policing powers that the new legislation now seeks to roll back.

For example, the bill would prevent the federal government from placing people on the "no-fly list" without a criminal conviction or warrant. Civil liberties advocates have frequently criticized the database that restricts people from air travel, arguing it's arbitrary, secretive, and racially biased.

The legislation would also terminate the ability of the secretary of state to declare "foreign terrorist" organizations, arguing that the arbitrary list has been weaponized against protesters and civil liberties groups.

In 2025, Trump's State Department attempted to revoke the visas of several students who had protested or spoken out against Palestine under the guise that their support for Palestinians amounted to "material support" for Hamas, making them immediately deportable. The Treasury Department, meanwhile, in August sanctioned Palestine Action, a U.K.-based group that opposes Israel's genocide in Gaza, as a foreign terrorist organization, allowing the federal government to freeze all the group's U.S. assets, impose travel restrictions, and ban U.S. companies from conducting business with the organization.

Related How ICE Arrests Went Quiet — and Got Even More Deadly

The raid on Omar's home, Ramirez said, is just the latest example to underscore how the Trump administration has weaponized DHS in particular. President Donald Trump and his allies have routinely and without evidence accused Omar, who became a U.S. citizen in 2000, of immigration fraud and threatened to deport her back to Somalia.

In a statement to The Intercept, Omar spokesperson Jackie Rogers called the raid "an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies."

Ramirez said the search was an example of DHS "acting as designed."

"DHS has been utilized by the government to target and persecute those they consider the public enemy."

"DHS is not rogue," wrote the congresswoman. "For 23 years, since its inception, DHS has been utilized by the government to target and persecute those they consider the public enemy — whether it is Muslim-Americans, Haitians escaping violence, Latinos yearning for a better life, or dissenting voices demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine and the kidnapping of our neighbors."

Congress is currently in recess until after the November elections to give members a chance to campaign, which means the bill won't get a vote until November 9 at the earliest. The legislation is highly unlikely to pass this session. Republicans maintain the majority, and only a handful of Democratic members have called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Still fewer have called for abolishing the Department of Homeland Security.

But Ramirez said she hopes this bill shows what is legislatively possible if lawmakers want to unravel the surveillance and carceral state that has arisen in the last two decades. 

"Every person dead in detention, everyone shot or killed by ICE and CBP, every neighbor deported to a third country, every family separated, every community FEMA failed," wrote Ramirez, "every miscarriage due to substandard care, every dissenter wrongfully branded, targeted, and persecuted as 'terrorist,' and every threat against our elections by Trump, Markwayne [Mullin], and [Stephen] Miller is a reason DHS must be dismantled and something new must take its place."

The post Don't Stop at ICE, Says Progressive Dem: Abolish the Department of Homeland Security appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE agents raid the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Oct. 12, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Andrew Leyden/Getty Images

In the mode of historic fascist regimes, President Donald Trump's administration sent federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid the home of a political opponent, singled out for her race and religion, in a transparent effort to strip her of her citizenship.

On Monday, agents with Homeland Security Investigations, ICE's investigative wing, conducted a search of the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with federal officials describing the incursion as part of "an ongoing federal criminal investigation."

HSI was previously known for targeting human traffickers, drug smugglers, and war criminals. But under the second Trump administration, the unit has been increasingly focused on investigating protesters and immigration fraud.

That latter category is exactly what Trump administration officials have been prejudiciously applying to Omar for months. In March, Vice President JD Vance said, "We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America."

And, last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that "something is going to happen" on the Omar case, with immigration czar Tom Homan confirming an investigation.

The ICE raid against Omar, however, is an extremist escalation in Trump's long-running threats to denaturalize the member of Congress, who was born in Somalia but came to the U.S. as a refugee when she was a young child. Omar, who has denied the repeated allegations of immigration fraud, is on the ballot for reelection in November.

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Not only does the raid send a chill to all naturalized citizens who, like Omar, oppose the Trump regime, it is also one of the most ominous signs to date of how dangerous Trump and his acolytes can get in the next two years.

With his popularity tanking and his grip on power growing tenuous, Trump is becoming a flailing tyrant. Meanwhile, he has been granted extraordinary executive power by a loyalist Supreme Court and has purged the federal government of practically all checks and balances. It's a recipe for immense harm.

A Nakedly Fascist Move

Debates about whether the Trump regime qualifies as fascist are old, tired, and not worth retreading here.

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

There can be little doubt, though, that targeting a racialized political opponent for deportation three weeks before an election is a nakedly fascist move — especially in the context of the far right's evermore vitriolic attacks on Somali communities nationwide.

"Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last week. "The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!"

 It was nothing short of an exhortation to a race war.

Read our complete coverage

Chilling Dissent

As his popular support continues to wane, we can be sure that the president and his white supremacist Cabinet will marshal the force of the federal government in even more fascistic ways.

Many means of stopping Trump have been defanged, as the raid itself makes clear.

We cannot rely on the courts. The warrant to search Omar's home, for instance, was signed by a judge.

The judicial system, indeed, has permitted vast swaths of Trump's anti-immigrant excesses. Courts have also sent activists to prison for decades for attending protests against the federal government. And, while some federal judges and even the Supreme Court have pushed back on some of Trump's agenda, it is also the courts that have covered the president with impunity. We know, too, that this administration routinely disregards court orders in the knowledge that it will not face consequences.

There is little more optimism to be had on the congressional front. Even if Democrats take back Congress in November, they must reckon with an embattled authoritarian executive with a fully funded standing militia — namely, ICE.

Democrats should unite to stop Trump's efforts to lawlessly deport a colleague based on a racist political witch hunt, but we can expect little congressional action beyond condemnatory statements. Indeed, all too many centrist Democrats have been happy to throw left-wing colleagues, particularly Muslims like Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to the wolves.

Related Trump Wanted Minneapolis 15 Case to Be Another Prairieland. Instead, Twin Cities Rallied Behind Anti-ICE Activists.

Elected leaders, from the national to municipal level, should be strategizing about how to protect their constituents from Trump's worst extremes in the knowledge that he and his allies will escalate further. Impeachment should be a priority, yes, but so too should passing laws to dismantle and defund ICE, among other measures — just the sorts of things mainstream Democrats have refused to countenance.

If not the courts or elected leaders, what then? The answer is clear: Trump's desperate authoritarianism must also be met by mass popular and militant opposition.

It is not enough to vote in November, then cross our fingers for two more years.

It is not enough to vote in November, then cross our fingers for two more years. Organizers on the front lines defending immigrant neighbors against ICE are exhausted and need numbers and support.

Activists facing trial or already sentenced to decades in prison for resisting Trump's regime need ongoing legal support and funding. Readiness is all.

This is not to suggest that we must live in a state of paralyzing fear of an evermore delusional tyrant. The point, rather, is to recognize the danger and go on.

Resistance to Trump, to the border regime, and to racist state violence already exists; it must be supported, expanded, and the subject of an escalation of our own.

The post ICE Raid on Ilhan Omar Shows How Dangerous Two Years of Flailing Trump Could Get appeared first on The Intercept.

A Republican-affiliated super PAC is having a little trouble finding Maine on a map.

The Defending Main Street super PAC spent thousands of dollars on an attack ad to audiences thousands of miles away from the Maine Senate race it was targeting. 

The ad hit Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson on the issue of taxes and cost of living in the state.

"Maine can't afford Troy Jackson and all his taxes," the ad said.

"It's clear these people don't know anything about Maine."

The group, which describes itself as the "most effective independent expenditure organization supporting the governing wing of the Republican Party," paid for the ad to attack Jackson, who's mounting a challenge to incumbent GOP Sen. Susan Collins. Both candidates have made cost of living a central plank of their campaigns in the run-up to the midterm election on November 3.

The only problem with the ad in question: The group paid for the video ad to show more than 1 million times in the wrong Portland.

Rather than being delivered to audiences in Portland, Maine, the state's largest city, the ad was shown to digital audiences more than 3,000 miles and three time zones away in Portland, Oregon, according to data from Google.

The mix-up may be embarrassing for the super PAC, which is oriented around electing so-called moderate Republicans like Collins, but likely spared voters in Maine from the latest wave in a deluge of ad spending in the state, according to Andy O'Brien, a political operative who supports Jackson.

"We have billionaires with no connection to Maine spending millions of dollars to buy Susan Collins the election, so it's pretty hilarious to see them throwing money at the wrong Portland," O'Brien told The Intercept. "It's clear these people don't know anything about Maine, because they're directing their ads to the wrong Portland."

"I'm glad they're wasting their money in Oregon and not continuing to waste it in Maine."

Related Susan Collins's Committee Bought Trucks the Army Didn't Want. Then Campaign Donations Poured In.

Representatives of the Jackson's and Collins's campaigns and a spokesperson for Defending Main Street did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The group is affiliated with Republican Main Street Partnership, a nonprofit group that counts Collins among its nine members in the Senate. Republican Main Street Partnership was initially aimed at supporting moderate Republicans that has, along with much of the rest of the GOP, moved to the right in recent years.

Busy Maine Street

The race between Collins and Jackson — a longtime Maine politico who stepped in to replace Graham Platner after Platner dropped out amid allegations of sexual assault — has become one of the most high-profile races in the country in the run-up to the midterms.

The campaign has helped make Maine one of the top locations for political spending this cycle, according to the Portland Press Herald. 

The Defending Main Street ad, however, did not have the impact its sponsors might have hoped. The ad buy first came to light after an X user reported seeing multiple anti-Troy Jackson ads in Portland, Oregon.

"I've gotten 5 anti-Troy Jackson ads in the last 24 hours. I choose to believe they mixed up Portlands," wrote the user, who goes by the name Lillian Belle and posts about progressive politics in Oregon. "Hearing I'm not alone lol."

That suspicion appears to be borne out by data from Google Ads Transparency Center, which shows Defending Main Street dropped between $20,000 and $25,000 to place the 30-second ad in hundreds of ZIP codes across Oregon and the state of Washington between October 8 and October 11.

O'Brien, the Maine political operative, said, "At least now Portland, Oregon, residents can enjoy some of the crap we've been seeing every single day."

Correction: October 12, 2026, 2:04 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misstated how many time zones away Portland, Oregon, is from Portland, Maine; it is three, not two.

The post Susan Collins-Aligned Super PAC Buys Attack Ads in Portland… Oregon appeared first on The Intercept.

The Pentagon quietly acknowledged additional Iran war deaths on Friday evening after The Intercept repeatedly demanded an explanation for inaccurate statistics on a War Department website tracking U.S. casualties from the conflict.

Almost 900 U.S. troops have been wounded or killed in the war with Iran, according to the official Pentagon count, including the two deaths added on Friday. This raises the Pentagon's total to 21 dead.

The additional war dead include Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and died while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. For more than six months, The Intercept has raised Davius's case in dozens of emails and phone conversations with Pentagon officials and publicly in 10 articles.

The Pentagon recently revamped the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS — which provides official counts of dead and wounded for Congress and the White House — to include more detailed casualty category tables. But it initially listed no "non-hostile" illness or injury fatalities, despite the Pentagon announcing in March that Davius died "as a result of a non-combat related incident."

At first, the military claimed that Davius was involved in another operation instead of Epic Fury — the original designation of the Iran war. Two weeks ago, however, The Intercept revealed that a recent National Guard news release admitted that when "President Donald Trump made the decision to attack Iran and launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, the [42nd Infantry] division headquarters began conducting combat operations." The 42nd served as the primary headquarters leading what became, according to Maj. Gen. Jack James, the division commander, the "largest and first long-range precision fires campaign in the history of the United States Army." James specifically saluted Davius, whom the Guard admitted was "conducting operations" when he died.

Last week, The Intercept pointed the Pentagon to the non-hostile illness or injury casualty count for Epic Fury on the website, and emphasized its tally showing zero deaths was not possible.

"I will check within," Patricia Kreuzberger, a Pentagon spokesperson said on Tuesday. "Let me reach out to leadership."

Three days later, and after repeated follow-up messages on Friday, the tally was updated, to 1.

 

In addition to Davius, the DCAS death count now also includes an unidentified Navy suicide that occurred last month, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. DCAS currently lists this death as "pending," despite the recent addition of a "self-inflicted" category to the website.

A "War Department official" told The Intercept by email on Sunday that "the Department is introducing a 'Pending Adjudication' category to track the status of active duty casualties pending final categorization and reporting in DCAS." She added: "This new category will allow the Department to minimize reporting delays while ensuring data consistency between the DoW and Joint Staff."

The "pending" designation, however, isn't new. The Pentagon re-introduced it to DCAS in mid-July, and major discrepancies have continued in the tally since.

Many casualties remain uncounted in DCAS, including a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in "strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury" on March 25.

Related The Pentagon Found a New Way to Undercount U.S. Casualties in Iran

Most Iran war casualties in the official count — 454 personnel as of Friday — have occurred since July 7, after the Trump administration claimed the conflict ended. At that time, the Pentagon switched from counting casualties under Epic Fury to the anodyne moniker "Overseas Operations."

The most recent casualties are three Army personnel wounded in action this month. The latest known Iran war fatality is Capt. Bianca Wilkerson, 37, of Norfolk, Virginia, who died on September 18 from a "coronary issue," according to her brother. He said she returned from Saudi Arabia on September 10 and was headed back but died on the return flight, according to reporting by the Virginian-Pilot. A U.S. official told The Intercept that Wilkerson died "as a result of a non-combat-related incident," but after nearly a month, DCAS still lists no non-hostile illness or injury deaths.

"There is no excuse for a mistake of this magnitude," Reps. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., and Adam Smith, D-Wash., said in a joint statement on Friday after the House Armed Services Committee discovered "a discrepancy in the Pentagon's reporting of casualty numbers" and brought it to "the Trump Administration's attention." They continued: "The failure of Secretary Hegseth to immediately take ownership of the problem also does a grave disservice to the men and women putting their lives on the line in service to our country."

For six months, The Intercept has reported on anomalies in official counts offered on DCAS. When the first ceasefire was struck between the Trump administration and Iran on April 7, the tally of U.S. casualties was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics. But on April 21, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public acknowledgment by the War Department. Despite repeated questions for months, the Pentagon has not explained the adjustment.

Other discrepancies have also gone unjustified for months. An Army "illness/injury" death appeared on or about May 26 but disappeared by June 1. On July 20, the Pentagon repeatedly altered DCAS, adding 100 casualties to the war's tally without explanation; the total number of wounded cited by DCAS on that date included counts of 413, 427, and 447. Three days later, the Pentagon dropped the Iran war death toll from 18 to 14. On July 22, DCAS added 10 recent casualties to the Epic Fury count. By July 25, those wounded personnel were dropped from the tally. They may have been added to the Overseas Operations casualty toll, but the Pentagon has failed to offer any explanations.

Related U.S. Has Suffered More Casualties in Iran Since the Conclusion of Operation Epic Fury

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

When asked by The Intercept about the Pentagon's continued peddling of bogus statistics, Kreuzberger did not offer an explanation. An email from a nameless "War Department official" said: "We have nothing to provide beyond the Defense Casualty Analysis System website."

The post Pentagon Finally Counts an Iran War Death — Six Months Late appeared first on The Intercept.

As the Trump administration unveiled an indictment earlier this year against 15 anti-ICE activists, many of whom identify as radicals, for purportedly tormenting federal agents last winter, a top U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official took the podium.

There were two types of protests, said Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge Michael McCarthy, who oversaw the ICE agents in a St. Paul, Minnesota, field office who conducted the investigation.

"Peaceful protest is a protected right, and a cornerstone of our democracy," said McCarthy. "When protest turns into rioting, violence or criminal activity, it becomes unlawful and it will not be tolerated."

McCarthy's comments stood in stark contrast with ICE's record in Minneapolis, where a federal judge had been forced to issue an injunction to stop federal agents from pepper-spraying and arresting peaceful protesters during their enforcement blitz, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

Legal experts, too, had criticisms of the indictment: The Justice Department, one pointed out, had concocted a federal conspiracy out of what would normally be misdemeanor charges.

Related Secret ICE Agent Tried to "Entice" Minneapolis Activists Into Confrontational Tactics

In the months since, criticisms of the case have only grown louder. Court filings revealed that McCarthy's agents secretly infiltrated groups that preach nonviolence, including labor unions and nonprofits. They also wielded subpoenas in a fruitless hunt for financiers of "domestic terrorism," taking a cue from President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 labeling swaths of the far left as terrorists.

The Trump administration has won some success in going after left-wing protesters under NSPM-7, but the Minneapolis case is proving to be more challenging.

In other prosecutions targeting activists, like the Prairieland case in Texas, mainstream groups have shied away from supporting the defendants. In Minnesota, though, groups once wary of being associated with the 15 defendants, many of whom are self-described anarchists, have rallied to their side.

Powerful labor unions that make up the backbone of the state's progressive movement have raised funds on behalf of the defendants, incensed at the infiltration from federal undercover agents. Rather than dividing and conquering the left, the case has united it.

"They're trying to split the movement and absolutely failing."

Supporters of the defendants, who have collectively come to be known as the Minneapolis or Minnesota 15, recently packed a bowling alley for a fundraiser. On October 3, hundreds of labor union members marched through downtown Minneapolis, demanding that the charges against the activists be dropped.

Meanwhile, the defendants themselves have so far mounted a unified, joint defense; none of them have taken a plea deal.

"They're trying to split the movement and absolutely failing," said Emmett James Doyle, a defendant in the case. "There's been just complete solidarity behind us from basically every sector of Twin Cities life."

"Can't Indict 100,000 People"

Doyle's ruddy face and wild beard would have been at home in Big Bill Haywood's Industrial Workers of the World a century ago. By day he's a union carpenter, by night he plucks a banjo and sings songs about America's radical past.

Federal prosecutors allege that he brought those songs to life on the streets of Minneapolis.

In a 94-page indictment, prosecutors claim that Doyle and the other 14 defendants were members or associates of a group called Direct Action Minnesota that "infiltrated and exploited lawful protests" to target ICE.

Related Wearing All Black at Protests Makes You Guilty of Terrorism, Prosecutors Tell Jury

Prosecutors painted a dark picture of DAMN. Their tactics allegedly included blocking access to a federal building used by ICE with disabled cars or trailers, bringing shields and gas masks to protests, and, in one instance, following an ICE agent across state lines to his home in Wisconsin.

Government attorneys also leaned heavily on the defendants' comments to each other in private messages about their frustration with more mainstream protesters and the need for "militant" action.

Despite the prosecutors' claims about rioting and violence at the June press conference, however, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, was unable to identify injuries to federal officers when reporters pressed him.

There are committed anarchists among the defendants charged in the indictment, several defendants told The Intercept, but there was little difference between what they did and what thousands of Minneapolis residents did during the federal immigration crackdown.

Ordinary Minnesotans walked frigid streets with whistles dangling from their necks to alert their neighbors about ICE raids. They sent license plate numbers of federal vehicles to Signal group chats. Members of rapid-response networks trailed suspected agents in their cars.

Related Trump's War on America

The indictment is replete with examples of protesters trailing agents in vehicles, a tactic known as "commuting." Yet that was a tactic so widely employed by rapid-response groups in Minneapolis that it was even adopted by a congressional candidate in a suburban district who recently won his Democratic primary.

"I think there are people in the government who really do believe that there is like a small cabal of people who are fomenting all the dissent, and if you get rid of them, that everyone will be quiet," Doyle said. "And that's fundamentally wrong."

Doyle, like the four other defendants interviewed by The Intercept, declined to discuss the specific allegations in the indictment, citing advice from his attorney.

"They're just trying to find people to make examples of."

Still, another defendant, Treasure Thoreson, was adamant that none of the defendants ever used violence. Thoreson is a special education teacher whose elementary school's lanyard was still dangling from her neck during a recent interview. She believes the group was targeted because of its radical views.

"They clearly had people that they had identified as problematic in some way and have been trying to tie these people to leading the resistance," Thoreson said. "They can't indict 100,000 people, so really, they're just trying to find people to make examples of."

Read our complete coverage

Chilling Dissent "Attack on the Movement'

Thoreson said she has received steady support from her teachers union since the indictment.

She and many other defendants believe the charges against them are a way of attacking Minnesota's powerful labor movement. By the count of defendants who spoke to The Intercept, at least 11 of the 15 have been involved in union organizing.

Related How Did the Feds Get Into Anti-ICE Activists' Signal Messages?

The internal Homeland Security Investigations files unearthed by the defense team lend credibility to this theory. Undercover agents attended an organizing meeting at the United Labor Centre, a building that houses multiple unions. HSI, the investigative wing of ICE, also subpoenaed the financial records of the SEIU and the Communications Workers of America as part of an overlapping probe into "domestic terror financing."

Several defendants interviewed by The Intercept were amused at the idea that they were receiving funding from mainstream organizations. They have long lobbed critiques at the labor movement's institutional core from its fringes.

After some initial hesitance, unions and nonprofit groups responded in force to the case. Days after the indictment, some labor groups signed onto a joint statement denouncing the charges. After a court filing from the defendants revealed the subpoenas of the unions' financing, more labor organizations raised their voices.

"Generally speaking, the labor movement is awfully conservative — too conservative — on issues like this, and can sometimes be scared out of solidarity with people who are fighting back," said Kieran Knutson, the president of CWA Local 7250 in Minneapolis.

More unions rallied, Knutson said, as it became clear that prosecutors could not point to examples of physical harm, as union locals pressured statewide organizations, and as the defendants themselves articulated why the case was important.

Related Trump's Communist Boogeyman Playbook: Charging Protesters as Terrorists

"These are active people in the labor movement, and I think in many ways people see them as an expression of the movement as a whole," Knutson said. "And these charges were an attack on the movement as a whole."

Knutson said he knows the value of solidarity: In 1993, he was charged with assaulting a man wearing neo-Nazi patches during an antiracist demonstration on the University of Minnesota campus, according to news reports from the time. He was acquitted with the help of attorney Keith Ellison, who later went on to win election as the state's attorney general.

"I know what it's like to have the weight of the charges just hanging over you," Knutson said.

The leading candidate in the Hennepin County Attorney race, state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, who also works as a lawyer for labor union Education Minnesota, told The Intercept in a recent interview that the charges should be dismissed.

"I think they're trying to, for lack of a better word, 'Trump' up some charges to continue his pursuit of retribution against Minnesota," said Frazier. "I mean, look, they don't like labor groups."

Related Feds Charged Activists Just Before Major Anti-ICE Protest in a Tiny Vermont Town

A broad coalition of labor groups including the state AFL-CIO endorsed an October 3 rally and march in support of the defendants, another sign that skepticism of the case has gone mainstream.

Hundreds of janitors, teachers, public employees, and hospitality workers joined the march, said Isaac Sant, a defendant and longtime labor organizer. He said seeing them on the streets was "humbling."

Sant recently joined defendants from other cases with political overtones, including Prairieland, to form what they are dubbing the NSPM-7 Defendants Union.

"I can only speak for myself, but I don't have any problem linking my case to the Prairieland cases. I think what happened to them was a travesty and a miscarriage of justice," Sant said. "I think it's very important that we stand in solidarity with people who are in that position, and especially with people who are getting railroaded even worse than we are."

The post Trump Wanted Minneapolis 15 Case to Be Another Prairieland. Instead, Twin Cities Rallied Behind Anti-ICE Activists. appeared first on The Intercept.

Dana Joudeh was in shackles when she found out she was pregnant.

The 35-year-old from the West Bank city of Nablus was newly married and had just spent her first night in an Israeli prison. Israeli forces had arrested her without charges and put her under administrative detention, an arbitrary condition for holding Palestinians hostage. She lost consciousness in front of Israeli soldiers at Sharon Prison, a temporary detention facility in the city of Netanya, and they took her to a hospital blindfolded. There, with her hands and feet bound in chains, she was given a pregnancy test that came back positive.

Joudeh would never get to experience the joys and travails of pregnancy outside of prison. She was in Israeli custody from the moment she found out, until she gave birth.

Like Joudeh, pregnant Palestinian women arrested by Israeli security forces since October 7, 2023, are forced to endure a physically and medically complex process in conditions characterized by inadequate access to food, family visits, and medicine, as well as frequent reports of violence.

The total number of pregnancies in custody among the hundreds of women seized since October 7 is unknown, but Joudeh is only the second documented example of a woman who gave birth while under Israeli detention in nearly 17 years, according to Palestinian prisoners' rights advocates. Many cases, advocates say, may have gone unreported.

The Intercept spoke to Joudeh through her sister, Maram, who sat with Joudeh by her side while sharing a detailed account of her sister's six-month pregnancy, which ended in a premature cesarean section.

Corroborated by statements and reports published by the Palestinian Prisoners' Society and the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, among others, Joudeh's story offers a glimpse into what it's like to go through pregnancy while locked in Israel's prison system, where she struggled to obtain basic prenatal care and relied on other prisoners to share their already limited food.

"She went through every kind of suffering in there," Maram said.

Israeli forces used sound grenades inside the prison, according to Joudeh's family and her lawyer, Hassan Abbadi, who provides volunteer legal support for detained Palestinians. They said soldiers would force the women to lie face down on the floor.

"Female prisoners are subjected to all forms of violence and are deprived of the most basic rights," said Abbadi, who regularly visits Palestinian women in Israeli prisons. He described shortages of underwear, attacks by police dogs, and strip searches, among other forms of mistreatment.

Related This 16-Year-Old American Is Among Hundreds of Palestinian Children Jailed in Israel

Joudeh's pregnancy unfolded against a broader surge in Israeli arrests and violence across the occupied Palestinian territories. As of September, Israel was holding roughly 9,350 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including 90 women and more than 350 children, according to Palestinian prisoners' organizations. More than 3,100 of them are being held under administrative detention, without charge or trial.

For Joudeh, who was transferred to Damon Prison in Haifa soon after discovering she was pregnant, there was little effort to make accommodations for her pregnancy. According to Maram and Abbadi, the food was scarce and of poor quality, consisting usually of a slice of toast and lentils, chickpeas, or hummus. Sometimes, the prisoners received a few olives, and the other women incarcerated with Joudeh would offer a part of their own meager portions and give it to her.

In a small cell she shared with 13 other women, she discussed baby names with Manar Karaja, another detainee who was pregnant at the same time. According to Amany Sarahneh, the media director of the Palestinian Prisoners' Society, Karaja was still pregnant and still in Israeli detention as of October 6.

As her pregnancy progressed, Joudeh grew increasingly worried about her baby. She repeatedly asked for medical tests to make sure that both she and the fetus were healthy, Maram said, but her requests were refused.

"I would reassure myself by the baby's heartbeat, and later, when I started feeling her move," Maram relayed on behalf of her sister, who sat next to her at Maram's home in Ramallah. "I needed vitamins and folic acid, but they refused to give them to me."

In response to outreach from The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Israeli military directed queries to the Israel Prison Service. An Israel Prison Service spokesperson said the agency could not comment on individual detainees' cases, but described a detailed list of Joudeh's experiences as "false."

Palestinian women have faced pregnancy and childbirth inside Israeli prisons for decades, often under harsh conditions and with limited medical care. The first documented Palestinian woman to give birth in Israeli custody was Zakia Shammout, who delivered her daughter Nadia in 1972 at Neve Tirza prison in Ramla, assisted by fellow prisoners. The last documented case before the start of Israel's ongoing genocide was Fatima al-Zaq, who gave birth to her son Youssef in prison in 2008; the 17-year-old was killed in July 2025 after an Israeli drone hit his family's apartment on Al-Thawra Street, in central Gaza City.

In September 2025, Tahani Abu Samhan gave birth to her son Yahya while in Israeli custody. Then, a year later, there was Joudeh.

Related Dozens of Gaza Medical Workers Are Still Disappeared in Israeli Detention

Joudeh suffered from debilitating headaches while pregnant, but basic pain relief was difficult to obtain. Prison authorities refused to give her Acamol, a common brand of acetaminophen, which is generally considered safe for use during pregnancy despite recent guidance to the contrary from health officials in the U.S.

The other women found ways to help. One prisoner would sometimes pretend that she had a headache herself, ask for a painkiller, and secretly give the tablet to Joudeh.

"She was crying most of the time," Maram said.

By July, Joudeh had contracted scabies, a rash caused by highly contagious mites that results in severe itching and pain. The women were given single container of a topical treatment to share among the entire cell, and it wasn't enough for everyone who was infected. They resorted to mixing the treatment with chlorine to make it stretch further, Maram said.

Months into the pregnancy, Joudeh began suffering severe pain and bleeding. She was taken to the prison clinic, where she was told that her condition was stable and that there was no need to send her to a hospital. She learned she was carrying a girl.

Related Trump Admin Said She Was Lying About Stillbirth in ICE Custody. New Evidence Points to Lack of Prenatal Care.

By then six months pregnant, Joudeh was having her first medical examination since her positive test, Maram said. World Health Organization guidelines recommend that a pregnant person would have had at least three prenatal appointments by that point, though many doctors recommend more frequent visits to monitor the development of the fetus and identify potential complications. Joudeh had received none.

In response to detailed questions from The Intercept, an Israeli Prison Service spokesperson wrote in a statement, "The allegations described are false, entirely without factual basis, and form part of a broader campaign to defame the State of Israel and its lawful institutions."

"All prisoners and detainees held by the Israel Prison Service are held in accordance with the law and receive the rights and care to which they are entitled," the spokesperson added, including medical care in accordance with Israeli standards. They wrote that the prison agency would not provide medical information specific to any particular detainee.

Israeli officials have shown an interest in following the most limited interpretation of the law. In an interview last week, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said prisoners "will not receive a single grain more than the legal minimum." He recalled making a monitoring visit to Ketziot prison because, he claimed, he'd heard prisoners had received two extra olives on their plates.

Related A Doctor Said Israel's War Is Fueling Health Crises in Gaza. UCSF Fired Her.

Outside the prisons, access to prenatal and other medical care has been pulled further out of reach for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. By the end of 2025, the United Nations had documented 925 Israeli checkpoints, road gates, and other movement obstacles across the territory, restricting the movement of 3.4 million Palestinians and making it harder to reach health services. And in Gaza, where Israel keeps bombing despite the ceasefire announced last October, the health system has been destroyed, with severe shortages of basic necessities and a lack of functioning medical facilities making pregnancy particularly dangerous.

Around 50,000 women are pregnant in Gaza, according to UNFPA. One in 3 pregnancies are considered high-risk. Nearly 4,000 pregnancy losses were reported in the first half of 2026, three times the number recorded in the previous six months.

In the prison, Joudeh's bleeding would not stop.

It continued for two weeks, Maram said, and Joudeh's hemoglobin level eventually fell to 9 grams per deciliter, which the WHO classifies as anemic during pregnancy. As her condition deteriorated, she was taken to Rambam Hospital, again blindfolded and with her hands and feet shackled. There, doctors decided that the baby needed to be delivered prematurely.

"The terrorist has arrived," she remembered the Israeli doctor saying about the fragile newborn.

On September 12, Joudeh gave birth by C-section under local anesthesia, watching the operation as it was happening. Maram said that Joudeh's hands and feet were shackled while she was cut open, and female Israeli soldiers surrounded her with guns in the operating room, standing guard.

She saw her daughter only briefly in the first 72 hours after giving birth, Maram said, because the baby, born prematurely at around six months, needed to be cared for in a neonatal intensive care unit.

Joudeh's doctor was Israeli, and she recalled him speaking to her in cruel, degrading terms, according to Maram. "The terrorist has arrived," she remembered him saying about the fragile newborn. Joudeh named her Lia.

Some of the nurses caring for Joudeh were Palestinian citizens of the 1948 occupied territories, Maram said. They looked for small ways to help her, like secretly bringing the baby to Joudeh's bedside while she remained handcuffed to the hospital bed. They dressed Lia in a pink onesie. And they asked the Israeli soldiers guarding Joudeh to remove her handcuffs so she could walk around, but the soldiers refused, Maram said.

Related Palestinians Asked for Help Against Settlers. Israelis Detained Palestinian Workers Instead.

Officials at Rambam Hospital did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment.

Joudeh and Lia were supposed to be released on September 15, according to Maram, but on September 14, just two days after the birth, Israeli authorities took Joudeh and her newborn daughter from the hospital back to the prison to process Joudeh's release. An ambulance was waiting outside with Joudeh's husband, Maram said, and as soon as Joudeh and Lia were released, the baby was taken by ambulance to Hclinic Specialty hospital in Ramallah. Before they left, Lia's pink onesie was replaced with a gray outfit.

Read our complete coverage

Israel's War on Gaza

Maram believes her sister was released a day early to prevent the family from preparing a celebration to welcome them home.

When Joudeh's sisters were finally able to hug her, they were shocked by how frail she seemed. "She was exhausted. She had lost so much weight," Maram said. "She was physically and psychologically devastated."

She was still suffering from scabies, but her family embraced her anyway. "I didn't care about anything except hugging her," Maram said. "I had missed her so much, and I had been so worried about her."

Joudeh is now staying with Maram at her home in Ramallah, where she's recovering from her pregnancy and incarceration. Lia remains in the neonatal unit at Istishari Arab Hospital in Ramallah.

Sometimes, Maram said, Joudeh breaks down when she remembers the trauma of giving birth in detention. But when the mother and baby are both well, Joudeh wants to hold a small celebration, bringing relatives and loved ones together to welcome Lia. She's already begun thinking about the food and sweets she wants to serve. Despite all she's been through, Maram said, when the family talks about the celebration, Joudeh smiles.

The post A C-Section in Shackles: A Palestinian Woman's Harrowing Birth in Israeli Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing a firestorm over how his administration handles policing and responds to federal immigration raids after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot 28-year-old father Oscar Belgal in front of his 5-year-old child in Manhattan on Thursday. 

Outraged New Yorkers poured into the streets Thursday night and soon clashed with the New York City Police Department, inflaming a perennial point of tension for the city's socialist mayor. Mamdani has faced criticism from his left for neglecting to pursue aggressive reforms of the NYPD and distrust from his right for having vowed to rein in the department. Now, as residents recover from the latest in a string of violent episodes in President Donald Trump's war on immigrants, Mamdani is tasked with shielding his city from ICE and controlling his local police.

"We know that ICE is rotten to its core," Mamdani said Thursday night, standing side-by-side with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a holdover from the Adams administration known for pushing to expand the department's sweeping surveillance apparatus. While Mamdani has made his disdain for ICE clear, his detractors argue the mayor must do more than deliver harsh words. 

Mamdani's rhetoric marks "a great first step," said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. "But what is the city going to do other than deliver that? What are the actionable ideas that they're planning? That's the piece that we need to be pushing more on hearing about, because we're gonna keep being in the same situation." 

Legally, there isn't much Mamdani can do to keep federal immigration agents out of the city. Despite the steps he's taken to curtail their access to city property or stop the federal government from illegally accessing New Yorkers' private data, Trump and the federal agencies sending ICE to New York are the only ones who could actually stop them from coming. 

Related ICE Agent on Scene of NYC Shooting Was Posing as Construction Worker, Eyewitness Says

But Mamdani's administration could make it harder for ICE to operate in New York by exerting more control over the NYPD, immigration advocates argue. The department later showed up at the protests on Thursday night, and rapid response activists at the scene alleged its officers were speaking with agents from Homeland Security Investigations, which they viewed as evidence of coordination. 

Pete Gizas, director of the White House National Security Council and Homeland Security Investigations New York Acting Special Agent in Charge, was at the scene liaising directly with NYPD personnel, according to two rapid responders who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation from law enforcement agencies. 

One rapid responder said Gizas was there for hours, "speaking directly to both NYPD and federal personnel. He had HSI officers in his immediate area going door to door, getting into apartment buildings." Another witness confirmed that they'd seen Gizas interacting with the police. 

"Why is a crime scene, a shooting scene, being presided over by Homeland Security Investigations?"

"If NYPD is in fact an agency that is controlled by the mayor of New York and by the people of New York, then why is a crime scene, a shooting scene, being presided over by Homeland Security Investigations?" said the first rapid responder, who added that they'd seen members of the ICE investigative unit going in and out of the local NYPD precinct. 

The NYPD doesn't have an official partnership with ICE, which would be prohibited by sanctuary city laws and a state law passed in August. But the department has been notified of ICE activity in the city and shares information like fingerprints with federal agencies, which in turn shares that information with ICE. 

Awawdeh said even if the police aren't helping ICE detain people, they're still helping them move freely around the city and carry out their operations.

Related LAPD Won't Do Immigration Enforcement — But Will Shoot You With Rubber Bullets for Protesting ICE

"They'll not cooperate or work with ICE on immigration enforcement, but then when they do crowd control, it does end up becoming collusion because then you're still helping them do the thing you're not supposed to be doing," he said. 

ICE directed questions about Gizas being at the scene to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, an NYPD spokesperson said, "The NYPD does not conduct civil immigration enforcement."

Mamdani has already faced a barrage of criticism for his abandonment of several police reform promises he made on the campaign trail. Advocates want him to get rid of Tisch, who is widely associated with the "tough-on-crime" tenure of former Mayor Eric Adams, and disband a controversial unit often deployed to protests known as the Strategic Response Group. (Mamdani has said he still wants to disband the unit but has not provided a plan or a timeline to do so. His office and an NYPD spokesperson told The Intercept that the unit was not deployed on Thursday.)

According to eyewitness accounts and footage of the protests shared on social media, NYPD officers pushed demonstrators, including knocking down Democratic congressional nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier. But there don't appear to have been mass arrests. In a statement to The Intercept, an NYPD spokesperson said the agency arrested five people at the protests and issued them tickets to appear at the precinct.

"We're seeing both the shock of ICE's violence, but we're also seeing this aggressive treatment of the protesters and of the response to people who are speaking out," said Yasmine Farhang, executive director of the Immigrant Defense Project. 

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Mamdani's office called the ICE shooting "heinous" and said it "underscores the dangers that ICE operations create in our communities." 

"The Mayor and the NYPD will review all of the events of the last 24 hours," the spokesperson said, "including ICE's shooting; the Police Department's response to that incident and the ensuing protest; the staging of ICE operations in privately-owned parking lots; and every action the City can take to protect New Yorkers from ICE's terror."

The Socialist Stance

Mamdani's strongest political base of support has directed its ire at Tisch, not the mayor. In a statement from the NYC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose organizing operation helped one of its own get elected mayor, the group called for Tisch's firing and condemned the NYPD without mentioning Mamdani by name. 

Asked why Mamdani didn't just direct the NYPD not to respond to protests, NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo said the group hadn't yet been in touch with City Hall but that the police response fell on Tisch, who read out Belgal's criminal record at her appearance with Mamdani Thursday night. Gordillo also said it was time for the mayor to move forward on campaign promises like disbanding the Strategic Response Group, although the unit wasn't at Thursday's protests. 

"The mayor and we all agree that ICE is not making New Yorkers safer. Democratic socialists have to defeat Trump if we want to abolish ICE," Gordillo said, pointing to the seven DSA members likely heading to Congress next session, including Avila Chevalier. "The mayor helped us elect several of those people. That's really the top priority. Because until the federal government changes, the tools that we have in New York City are pretty limited." 

Related Trump's National Killer Police Force

In an interview about Mamdani's policing policies earlier this month, Gordillo's co-chair, Grace Mausser, said the group was being careful about how it was approaching pushing Mamdani to do more on police reform while balancing the political risks. In light of the shooting, Gordillo said, there may be an opportunity to up the pressure. 

"There's an opening among the public right now that means we can harness public anger and public support to make changes for the better in the NYPD in a way that maybe felt harder a few weeks ago," Gordillo said. 

Farhang said she welcomed Mamdani's pledge to demand that Trump end all ICE enforcement operations in New York City, but there are other, less obvious ways to end local collaboration with ICE. 

"People justifiably are focused on the role of the NYPD at the site of a protest, and those are important conversations," Farhang said. "But every single day, we know that the Department of Corrections, the Department of Probation, and also yes, the NYPD, they are continuing to communicate and collaborate with ICE."

City Council officials recently reintroduced two bills that would limit that sort of cooperation. They'd been sitting "for years," Farhang said. Now, she added, with so many people "unequivocally saying that ICE is an agency whose mission is squarely to terrorize communities, and that there's no bounds to their violence, we ask people to take that next step and say, if that's the case, there is no justification for collaboration at all."

ICE has surged operations in cities around the country, particularly targeting blue cities with so-called sanctuary city laws that strengthen protections for immigrants. 

Related Local Cops Flout Sanctuary Law to Help ICE Deport Immigrants

"This surge that's happening in New York City is happening all across the country. In California, in Illinois, in anti-sanctuary states as well," said Naureen Shah, who leads immigration policy and advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union. "So for any community that's bracing for or experiencing a law enforcement surge, it is really vital that police departments are not providing cooperation to the street arrests, either formally or informally." 

Cities and states can't stop ICE from doing federal law enforcement, Shah added. But, she said, "they can hold officials accountable for the abuses they commit."

The post ICE Shooting in NYC Inflames Mamdani's Policing Problem appeared first on The Intercept.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a vengeful America was braying for blood. Nine out of 10 Americans approved of attacking Afghanistan. About one-third were comfortable with the prospect of Afghan civilian deaths. Less than a quarter thought the conflict would last more than two years. 

Hardy bands of protesters took to the streets in New York City, D.C., and elsewhere in a vain attempt to prevent the war. They were called scum and traitors and worse.

Americans got the war that most of them wanted — and it was an abject disaster. The invasion of Afghanistan begat conflicts across the world: a sprawling global war that brought death and destruction to Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Niger, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, and Yemen, among other locales. And it's never stopped. Under Donald Trump alone, the U.S. has been embroiled in more than 20 conflicts. And close to 1 million people have died as a result of the post-9/11 wars.
 
By 2013, a CNN/ORC poll found that 82 percent of Americans opposed the Afghanistan War, the highest rate of recorded opposition for any major American conflict in modern history. Almost 75 percent of Americans agreed that the war was a failure at the time of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Has anyone sought out those 2001 protesters for expert foreign policy advice? Have they been feted in the corridors of power for having sense when 90 percent of Americans — including almost the entire government — did not? Of course not.
 
Having courage and being right — much like protesting in America — has been, especially in the post-9/11 era, a quick and sure path to irrelevance. Warmongers like Atlantic staff writer and podcaster David Frum — who coined the term "axis of evil" as George W. Bush's speechwriter — were allowed to fail upward instead of being treated like pariahs. Of course, the protesters failed, too, in their own way. They failed to stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and everywhere else.

While war is not the answer, maybe marching isn't either. Today, TomDispatch regular and protest veteran Frida Berrigan takes on the question of where the anti-war movement went and why we haven't seen massive marches against the Trump administration's failed Iran war. If we lived in a rational world, Berrigan — who was in Manhattan on 9/11 and was deeply involved in the peace movement from its earliest moments — would be a top foreign policy adviser or official. America's loss is your gain.

— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

If you haven't yet, sign up to receive TomDispatch in your inbox here.

Do the Old Ways Still Work?

Have you been recently scolded by an older peacenik about the good old days of street protests? I have!

Has an older beloved activist — a mentor, even — bemoaned "kids these days" and criticized their lack of political engagement? Have you heard the dreaded preamble: "In my day, we…" — fill in the blank — marched, struck, organized?

Related Armed Border Agents Arrest Protesters, Bulldoze 200-Year-Old Tree to Build Border Wall

I have been on the receiving end of some of these rebukes recently, even though I am not much of a kid anymore. These aging activists aren't seeing the outrage. They aren't seeing the opposition. They aren't seeing the resistance. But it might just mean they aren't looking in the right place. Because there is plenty of resistance if you know where to look.

But more on that later.

The war against Iran is hugely unpopular. And it is not just a faraway, abstract wrong. It is having a demonstrable impact on the daily lives of Americans. Gas and heating fuel are and will continue to be more expensive. The Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, a project of Brown University's Climate Solutions Lab, estimates a nearly $1,000 war tax paid by each U.S. household. That is on top of the actual and massive price tag of military operations so far: nearly $40 billion and rising at a rate of $2 to 3 billion a month, with the projected final price tag in the trillions.

At the end of February, Trump's war opened in typical Trumpian fashion with a massive bombardment that not only targeted Iranian leaders but also the smallest and most innocent Iranians: Operation Epic Fury had an elementary school in its sights, and the result was obliteration. Raytheon-manufactured Tomahawk missiles slammed into the school in Minab, Iran, killing 156 civilians, most of them children. A U.N. panel now asserts that the U.S. attack was a war crime.

Related When Anti-War Candidates Become War-Monger Presidents

As the war ground on, the resistance continued. In March, Green Party candidate for Senate in North Carolina, former Marine, and member of Veterans for Peace, Brian McGinnis, disrupted a Senate hearing, shouting: "Americans do not want to fight this war for Israel." (He suffered a broken arm at the hands of Capitol Police.) That same month, a top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned from the Trump administration, citing his opposition to the Iran war. More than 65 veterans and military family members were arrested inside a congressional building in April, protesting the illegal use of military force against Iran. The list goes on and on and on.

But we have not seen a reprise of the massive protests that marked the lead-up to the Iraq War 23 years ago. Maybe it's understandable. And maybe it's OK.

Demonstrators gather near Central Park for te third No Kings protest in New York City on March 28, 2026. Photo: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images March Where? To Stop What?

I love a good protest march. I love the signs, the energy, the chanting, the music, coordinated outfits, mass-printed placards, and creative, handmade signs, a veritable rainbow of puns and alliteration and outrage glittered to cardboard and foamcore. I love the collection of newsletters and radical tracts and stickers and flyers for the next get-together that fill my backpack by the end. I love the chance encounters with friends. ("OMG, I didn't know you'd be here.") For a time, long ago, I served on the United for Peace and Justice steering committee and played a very small role in organizing such big and beautiful anti-war marches.

Related Code Pink's Medea Benjamin on Disrupting the U.S. War Machine

But I have a friend in her 70s who recently announced: I will not march in an empty city on a weekend ever again. And I agree. Her point was that big protest marches are often planned to be convenient for working people, so they are scheduled on weekends. But the leaders we want to confront with our people power don't work on the weekends. In Connecticut, where I live, that means we end up marching in circles around a deserted downtown Hartford, our chants lost in the caverns of empty office buildings.

That happens in Washington, D.C., too. The weekend that 200,000 people reportedly marched at a "No Kings" rally in the capital last fall, Trump was holding a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. That is not disrupting business as usual. It is not creating some alternative. So it ends up feeling performative and like a numbers game. We show up to be counted. And now, the counting is itself a battleground. In D.C., the U.S. Park Police used to count crowds at protests. But they stopped in the 1990s, after the Million Man March challenged their count as a low-ball figure.

What is the political utility of marching one day and then returning to business as usual the next?

Personally, I would march on a Monday, down the middle of the highway, stop traffic, and sit in to demand that the world stop business as usual until there is justice for the children of the Minab school, or an end to Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, or an end to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

But I agree with my friend. I am not going to a performative protest that's easy to ignore. What is the political utility of marching one day and then returning to business as usual the next?

Our History Is Inspiration, Not Fodder for Scolds

I am white-haired and I can no longer say it is premature. When people assume I am a grandma, I am learning to accept it gracefully. At 52, I could be a grandmother. But I am too young to have lived through the so-called heyday of protest marches that required months or years of organizing work and political finesse. These marches — like the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or the huge November 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, or the April 1971 protest made famous by Vietnam veterans throwing their medals — demonstrated the movements' organization, economic, and cultural power.

The March on Washington was the culmination of decades of vision, years of work, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. It brought upward of 250,000 mostly Black Americans to the nation's capital to demand a civil rights act, desegregation, jobs, the right to vote, and more. The march is credited with helping pass both the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights acts.

During my lifetime, there have been major mass mobilizations of varying utility. The June 12, 1982, March and Rally for Nuclear Disarmament in New York City was the largest single protest in U.S. history (so far), with more than 1 million people calling for an end to the nuclear weapons threat. There were so many people lined up in the streets that tens of thousands of marchers never even arrived at the rally in Central Park!

Organized to coincide with the United Nations meetings on nuclear disarmament, the event was the culmination of 18 months of work. Coordinator Leslie Cagan, who eventually helped found UFPJ, recalled that the march was "a tremendous success." Historians like Vincent Intondi credit it as a cultural turning point that created the conditions for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons nearly four decades later. Intersectional, joyful, and woman-led, the rally also encouraged participants to bring the spirit of the march home with them, seeding countless anti-nuclear community efforts around the nation.

Related The Gaza Protests Can Save Lives — Maybe Even Your Own

In February 2003, the world said no to the impending U.S. war on Iraq with rallies and marches in almost 800 cities around the globe, demonstrating both the power of the people and the limitations of this form of resistance. All over the world, as many as 30 million people participated in an unprecedented coordinated series of actions, with marches from Athens, Greece, to Zagreb, Croatia. The pages of the New York Times called the global movement against the Bush war the "Other Superpower," but the muscle flexed in the streets did not translate into the political, economic, or cultural might needed to stave off a war built on a web of lies.

Historian Jeremy Varon writes vividly about the impact of the marches and rallies in his recent study of the movement against the war on terror, "Our Grief is Not a Cry for War," concluding that while they didn't keep the Iraq war from happening, they bolstered and built a peace movement that is still active in creative resistance today. Our past is inspiring. We need to learn this history and apply the lessons that make strategic sense for this context.

We shouldn't look at the past and beat ourselves up by saying, "Wow, they got a million people to turn out for nuclear disarmament in 1982, and I can't even get 10 people to come to a street corner protest." The saying goes, "We learn our history so we don't repeat it," and I think that goes for movement history, too. We don't want to repeat history to keep it precious and amber-encased. We want to learn from it and apply what is useful to our own very different moment right here in 2026, where we are flooded with social media's steady stream of bad news, fake news, infotainment, and rage-bait.

Related Ed Sheeran's Craven "Neutrality" Is a Watershed Moment for Mainstreaming Palestine Solidarity

Today, people are exhausted, stretched thin, worried about their own bottom lines. Or maybe I should just speak for myself. I am exhausted. Stretched thin. Supremely worried. It is easy to despair. Everything in modern life seems geared toward our individual hopelessness and isolation. We are better consumers when we feel alone and powerless.

Like many, I was inspired by political scientist Erica Chenoweth's 2010s research on nonviolent civil resistance and regime change, which established the 3.5 percent rule. It states that no government can withstand a challenge where 3.5 percent of its population is mobilized for a "peak event" like a mass protest. It seemed simple and achievable. That is, until I did the math. Three and a half percent of the U.S. population is approximately 12 million people. Only 10 million people bought tickets to Taylor Swift's entire Eras Tour — 149 sold-out shows in 51 cities and 21 countries. If we got all those Swifties out in the streets here in the U.S., we'd still come up short for a regime-changing General Strike.

Read Our Complete Coverage

TomDispatch Mobilizing, Not Marching

Everything feels existential. Everything feels like an emergency. Trump floods the zone with rage-bait every single day. Do I have to stay mad to be a good leftist? That does not seem healthy to me. So, what can we do instead?

Related Apocalypse Now: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance

Activists today are marching less and instead mobilizing for community power over the long haul. This means relationship building, visible and decentralized resistance, and crisis response that transforms into solidarity after the acute crisis subsides. For example, you may have seen visibility brigades, the grassroots activist groups that display large signs and wave to drivers from highway overpasses and pedestrian bridges. Then there are the rapid-response networks that turn out trained community witnesses and protection squads whenever ICE is active in a neighborhood or town, or the calls to show up and support people being held at detention facilities like Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey.

Dissent is once again being labeled as terrorism. Critique is labeled as terrorism. Questions are labeled as terrorism.

The past teaches us that the tactics must keep changing. Most of what worked in 1963 in Washington wasn't applicable to organizers in 1982 and was outdated by 2003. And that is OK; we don't still use mimeographs or fax machines, either. There might not be millions of people in the street to oppose the war on Iran but that doesn't mean people are not resisting. It just looks different. It is also landing differently, and more heavily, on the people arrested for resistance. Those who protest and are arrested are looking at serious charges, hostile court environments, and a Justice Department high on its own supply of anti-terrorist, anti-antifa fearmongering.

People are struggling and afraid, and I can't blame them for that. Dissent is once again being labeled as terrorism. Critique is labeled as terrorism. Questions are labeled as terrorism. Anything that is not lockstep, grinning compliance is terrorism.

Still, people are stepping up. Not the way their parents or grandparents did. Not in a way that gets front-page news. Not in a way that penetrates the white noise of the corporate media. Here is a Harper's Index entry from June 2026: "Estimated number of protests that took place in the United States in the first year of Trump's first term: 10,873. In the first year of his second term: 39,154." That is you and me and everyone we love. We need to keep doing it, smart, hopeful, inviting, and full of righteous rage.

Related Anti-Nuclear Pacifists Get Federal Prison Terms for Nonviolent Protest

I'll admit that I am still struggling with how to make my opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran evident and public. I had a "No War on Iran" sign in my weedy front yard. It lasted a few weeks before it disappeared. I have talked to friends about a regular peace vigil downtown or at the nearby plant of weapons-making giant General Dynamics. But I have a time conundrum. The best time to be most visible is 2 or 3 p.m., right when my kids are coming home from school and most people are still at work. The most convenient time for more people to gather is 6 p.m., but by then our downtown is a ghost town and the mosquitos are fierce. So should we be strategic or inclusive? The debate continues.

In the meantime, I just put up a new sign in my yard yesterday. I painted the message: The U.S. War on Iran Kills Civilians, Wastes Money, Destroys the Environment. Let's Stop It!

We'll see how long it lasts.

The post Where Are the Iran War Protests? appeared first on The Intercept.

As so-called prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket embed themselves in every aspect of our daily lives, from elections to sports and entertainment, concerns have grown about what the explosion of these poorly understood, loosely regulated platforms could mean for regular people and democracy writ large.

Celebrities from LeBron James to Sydney Sweeney have inked lucrative deals with prediction platforms. Legacy news outlets have even begun including prediction market data in their coverage. And the Trump family is deeply embedded in these platforms' success; Donald Trump Jr.'s VC firm just became a lead investor in Polymarket, and he is a paid adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

But what actually is a prediction market, and what separates it from online sports betting platforms like DraftKings or FanDuel? 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Kate Knibbs — a senior writer at Wired who covers prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet — breaks down the battles to define prediction markets; what they're getting away with in the meantime, while existing in this "weird" regulatory gray zone; and their potential to be a "disruptive force" in next month's midterm elections.

States have been looking to regulate these platforms like they do sports gambling. But the companies are pushing back: The founders of Kalshi donated $200,000 to a new Texas-focused political action committee, a week after state lawmakers held hearings to investigate whether prediction markets constitute sports betting, which is illegal in Texas.

"Both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight," says Knibbs. "Donald Trump Jr. is very involved in this industry, and stands to gain a lot from prediction markets being able to operate as they desire and not be beholden to various state regulations that they're currently not beholden to. … I am very interested in what is going to happen in this space when we have a different administration. Kalshi is seeming to hedge its bets by aggressively hiring former Biden administration stars."

In addition to spending heavily on lobbying, their survival strategy includes inking deals with mainstream media companies like CNN, CNBC, and even Substack to establish credibility.

"I have been following the enmeshment between prediction markets and the media very closely because I think it's flown under the radar a little bit, while all of these regulatory fights have been going on, just how quickly the prediction markets managed to establish themselves as another source of truth about what's potentially happening in the world," says Knibbs. "They are still so new, and the way that they are operating is still in this murky regulatory gray area. It just boggles my mind that they've managed to just become part of the financial news establishment in the way that they have."

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

Transcript

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

Akela Lacy: And I'm Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

JW: So Akela, we completely missed a major milestone for the Intercept Briefing.

AL: That's right, we published 100 episodes — and technically this is our 102nd.

JW: I actually can't believe how fast the time has flown. Thank you all so much for sticking with us every week. We genuinely and literally could not do this without you. Akela, what are you watching this week?

AL: The story that was all over my feed on Thursday morning was this bombshell report from the New York Times about how a senior adviser to U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, suppressed and distorted internal reports that were critical of Israel, including a report describing the dozens of Palestinians who were killed near food distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation last summer. This reporting comes after the anniversary this week of the October 7 attacks in 2023.

There was also a lot of news in New York City where protesters met Mayor Zohran Mamdani at an October 7 vigil and were shouting him down, basically criticizing him over his administration's inaction on different policies that are within his purview in terms of sticking to some of his campaign promises on Israel policy, including the sale of occupied land in the West Bank that occurs across New York City.

JW: Online, what I had really seen was a lot of misconstruing of what the protesters were actually doing there. A lot of people saying they were just upset about Mamdani's October 7 post, where he both spoke about the loss of life in Israel and the people who were killed on October 7, but then also talked about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and about the long history that led to the point of October 7. So there were some who were saying that the protesters felt that he wasn't deferential enough to Gaza protesters in that post. But obviously the reality, as you've pointed out, is that while there are, I'm sure, a myriad of reasons that people showed up that day, a lot of it had to do with actual policy disagreements.

Speaking of protest movements, in France, hundreds of thousands of protesters — including students, teachers, and union leaders — have taken to the streets to protest widespread education inequality. The protests began in the suburbs outside of Paris, which are plagued by deep racial and socioeconomic inequality.

Students say they've suffered significant neglect, from teacher shortages to crumbling infrastructure. As the protests continued, they've really been bolstered by union leaders and left-leaning politicians. Now, there have been accounts of violence from the police towards protesters, and thousands have been arrested. Another mass demonstration was held on Thursday as well. 

It really made me think back to that Nikole Hannah-Jones essay in The New York Times from a few weeks ago, where she wrote about her own experience navigating our unequal education system in the U.S. as a parent. It's been really interesting to read about the parallels in France to our domestic system, where we're also currently seeing massive cuts to the education system, particularly for vulnerable communities in programs like Head Start, but also in college programs throughout the country that are seeing cuts in high schools.

So it's interesting to see both those parallels and the anger we're witnessing in France toward not just cuts, but the long-standing inequality that's been present.

AL: That's one of many issues that will be top of mind for voters as we get closer and closer to the midterm elections next month.

Related They Trained to Protect Immigrants From ICE. Now They're Prepping to Defend the Midterm Elections.

JW: We're less than a month away from the midterms, and among this long, long, and growing list of concerns around election integrity, prediction markets have somehow made their way into the conversation. So while these markets are best known for users betting on sports, Kalshi and Polymarket users — and by the way, these are prediction market platforms — are also betting on election outcomes.

So a number of controversies have come up in the primaries related to these platforms. Both of these platforms have had to ask their paid influencers to remove misleading information on social media. I get into all of that and much, much more with Kate Knibbs, senior writer at WIRED. She covers prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet.

Kate, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Kate Knibbs: Thanks so much for having me. 

JW: Kate, we wanted to speak to you today because prediction and betting markets appear to be everywhere these days. You can't walk down a busy street without seeing an ad for one, or on TV, watching your favorite sport's team. Celebrities are cashing in. NBA player, LeBron James has a major deal with Polymarket, the prediction platform. Actress Sydney Sweeney made waves with her ad promoting Novig, a sports prediction site. Prediction markets have become ubiquitous.

So to start, how are prediction markets being defined? How do they differ or not from sports betting and gambling, and how are they similar? 

KK: OK, you're starting off with a very hard question because— 

JW: It's a big question. [Laughter.]

KK: There's this huge, ongoing, multifaceted legal battle happening in the United States right now to define prediction markets. So what the federal government and the prediction markets think is these are regulated financial instruments that are traded on regulated financial exchanges. This view of prediction markets perceives them as a cousin to traditional commodities exchanges — except instead of trading corn futures, you're trading futures on who's going to win the Super Bowl, who's going to win the presidential election, whether Iran is going to nuke anyone.

"They want to commodify absolutely everything in the world."

It's just this idea that these are financial markets for anything. Kalshi actually means, I believe, "everything" in Arabic. And the idea behind the platform is that they want to commodify absolutely everything in the world.

Now, a lot of states have seen this and gone, "OK, wait, but you're also allowing people to trade futures on the outcome of sports events. That's just sports gambling, and we want the tax money. And we don't think that the federal government should be able to just give you carte blanche to operate in our states without our permission, without you having to abide by state gambling laws."

There's honestly dozens and dozens of lawsuits to the point where I don't have the exact figure. It's upwards of 50. So at the moment, the status quo is that they're "financial exchanges." Whether that will change and they'll be reclassified as gambling platforms remains to be seen and will likely go to the Supreme Court.

To make matters even more confusing — there are two main prediction markets right now, Kalshi and Polymarket. Kalshi is a federally regulated exchange in the United States. Polymarket has Polymarket U.S., which is a federally regulated exchange with the United States.

But Polymarket's flagship product, like what you're probably thinking of — the website polymarket.com — that people go on and trade about the Iran war? That is an offshore, unregulated exchange that Americans are actually banned from using, even though it's headquartered in America and heavily promoted in America.

So it's actually in its own weird regulatory gray zone right now, and I think there are intentions to bring the entire exchange back into the U.S., but right now, the main Polymarket is not supposed to be accessed by people in the U.S. It doesn't have the "Know Your Customer" regulations that something like Kalshi does, so people can trade anonymously, and it's just sort of a different beast. So there's that layer that makes things even more confusing. 

JW: From your perspective, what is the difference between placing a bet on who wins the Super Bowl on something like DraftKings, and making a prediction on something like the Super Bowl? Understanding that, yeah, this is complicated, but what is the difference between those two things?

KK: It's complicated on a technical level in that when you're placing a bet on something like DraftKings — DraftKings has a house, so you are giving money to the platform.

And with prediction markets, you're supposed to be trading with another person. It's supposed to be peer to peer, and that's why it's allegedly more like a financial exchange.

In practice, though, if I'm betting that the Bears win, and they win, I make money either way. Functionally, for most regular people who are using these platforms, there's not much of a difference at all. 

JW: I want to get into some of the impacts and some of the potential harm, but first, you alluded to some of these state fights, and so I wanted to get into one of them in Texas and how these prediction markets are responding.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the founders of Kalshi, the prediction market platform, dropped $200,000 into a new Texas-focused PAC.

The state has some of the strictest gambling laws in the country, where it's pretty much illegal outside of the state lottery and some animal races. Kalshi's founders' contributions come one week after Texas lawmakers held a hearing to investigate whether prediction platforms like Kalshi are actually just gambling sites.

What is known about how these companies are trying to influence lawmakers and shape policies that are going to affect their bottom line? 

KK: Kalshi in particular is making an extremely concentrated push into political lobbying. It has a murderers' row of lawyers — many of whom come from the Biden administration — fighting to ensure that it stays a federally regulated financial exchange and doesn't get reclassified as gambling. It is basically continually hiring different comms people and lobbyists who come from D.C. and know how to get things done.

There are a few different organizations that it's associated with, in addition to the PACs that it's giving money to. One is called the Coalition for Prediction Markets, and that does a lot of advocacy work on behalf of regulated exchanges, really trying to ensure there's a bipartisan coalition that approves of these markets being regulated like financial exchanges.

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It's also worth mentioning, right now, the company has pretty deep pockets. Both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight. They are willing to put everything on the line and as much money as necessary on the line to ensure that they have the right people in Washington advocating on their behalf.

JW: I want to get into who they have in Washington a little bit more and what's going on with the federal government in this regard. But I also want to talk about their potential impact on the midterms.

You reported in August that "election officials are preparing for prediction markets to sow chaos in the midterms." You spoke to election officials across the country for that story. What did you hear from them? What are their major concerns? 

KK: There's a lot of concern about this. One of the main concerns is actually not directly tied to how the markets are resolved. So it wouldn't be tied to how, for example, Kalshi or Polymarket called an election — but it's tied to how these platforms currently use social media.

Both of the prediction markets have very popular X accounts and social media accounts, and they really use them like they are more traditional media companies. There's a lot of breaking, scoop. There's all of these news summaries blasted out to millions of followers. There have already been some cases where the way that these prediction markets have been updating their followers has been confusing or misleading for voters. They've made social media posts that implied that a race was over when it wasn't.

"A lot of people are more distrustful about election integrity than ever."

There's concern that their social media presences will be a disruptive force. Right now, when we're in a moment where a lot of people are more distrustful about election integrity than ever. If a candidate that someone has put money on them winning ends up losing, but then one of these prediction markets sent out a tweet two hours before the polls closed, implied that it was a sure thing — that that could anger the electorate to the point where poll workers would be in jeopardy, or there would just be even more rancor and discord and distrust of the election process. That's one of their concerns. 

Another major concern is that there could be market manipulation in some of the markets that are directly tied to elections. We've already seen — Kalshi has caught politicians trading on their races. None of them were really successful in moving the odds for a long period of time or anything. But there's still a risk, especially on Polymarket offshore where people can trade semi-anonymously, that there could be bad actors coming in deliberately trying to manipulate the markets in a way that, again, would make the wagering electorate very angry when they ended up losing money on races that they thought they would win, in part because the markets were manipulated to make them think they would win.

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There are a few different reasons why people are really concerned. Then there's the overarching concern that encouraging people to gamble on the elections is going to change their relationship with the electoral process in a very detrimental way to society. It's not tied to any one specific race, but more of a general, "This is degrading our democracy just by commodifying electoral races in this way." I honestly think that that's the one that I'm the most on board with as a real threat.

"There's the overarching concern that … 'This is degrading our democracy just by commodifying electoral races in this way.'"

JW: These platforms are partnering with traditional media as well. Your reporting has shown, and other reporting as well, that we're seeing these partnerships between Polymarket and Dow Jones and Substack; Kalshi has deals with CNN, CNBC, and Fox.

What is known about how these partnerships and how the data from Polymarket and Kalshi are being integrated into news coverage? Does this give them an air of legitimacy that maybe is unearned? 

KK: I think that striking these deals was such a huge coup for these companies, and it really did a lot to establish credibility that they might otherwise not have at all with the general population.

"Striking these [media] deals was such a huge coup for these companies, and it really did a lot to establish credibility."

If you flip around, I've been waking up super early with my baby and turning on [CNBC's] "Squawk Box" — because I hate myself, I guess [laughs]. And I'm always amazed: They are constantly bringing up Kalshi. The Kalshi odds are another part of the program in the same way that like the stock market ticker is. It's really just considered another signal to tell people about what's going on with the world, what's going on with different markets — and they're not being treated as experimental things at all at this point by very mainstream organizations like CNBC, CNN, Dow Jones.

I'm sure there's going to be more partnerships inked by the time the year is up, too. I have been following the enmeshment between prediction markets and the media very closely because I think it's flown under the radar a little bit while all of these regulatory fights have been going on, just how quickly the prediction markets managed to establish themselves as another source of truth about what's potentially happening in the world.

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They're not inaccurate; they're not more inaccurate than polling in many cases. I think there are many reasonable arguments to be made that these can be sources of information that have use cases. That's one of the reasons I'm interested in writing about them, to be honest, is because I do think that they're fascinating signals about public sentiment.

That said, they are still so new, and the way that they are operating is still in this murky regulatory gray area. It just boggles my mind that they've managed to just become part of the financial news establishment in the way that they have. 

"They're not being treated as experimental things at all at this point by very mainstream organizations like CNBC, CNN."

JW: In that vein, I wanted to talk about a really interesting story you published on Monday, about a new prediction market — Verifact Markets — which allows users to essentially place predictions on facts, like where the Covid-19 virus originated from, and whether the moon landing was staged.

You spoke to tech investor, Peter Wokwicz, whose family office Positron Capital Management, is funding and incubating the start-up, writing that Wokwicz, "envisions the startup as a way to settle debates over hot-button issues like the amount of energy consumed by AI data centers."

How does predicting on a fact even work, and should prediction markets be in the business of adjudicating reality?

KK: Such an interesting question, and it's just such a bonkers startup. I get a lot of pitches from startups in the prediction market space in my inbox at this point, and most of them I just ignore for my own sanity. This one was so off-the-wall that I had to speak to them, and I had to know more about how this would actually play out, because it's such a zany concept.

I still have a lot of questions because, as I laid out in the piece, they're pretty unwilling to give potential users or the media any specifics about how they'll ultimately resolve the markets.

My first question was, "OK, well, if somebody wanted to prove a point, they could just put a bunch of money on whatever their desired outcome would be, and then point to that and say, 'See, I was right.'"

And the Verifacts team was quick to assure me that they weren't actually going to resolve the markets based on the outcome of the markets alone. It was going to be how people were trading on them and the odds. Then they were going to use some sort of proprietary, AI-flavored system to adjudicate the truth.

JW: Of course. 

KK: There was a lot of hand-waving going on. The market just opened, so we'll see, first of all, if anyone's going to use it, and second of all, whether they're actually going to be able to clear up any of the long-standing mysteries or debates about conspiracy theories that are ongoing, because it seems like an extremely tall order.

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A friend of mine texted me after I published that article and was like, "I think we just had our Pets.com moment for the prediction market space." This specific startup is really indicative of how frothy the bubble is right now. You're just rolling out a prediction market for the past, and people are seemingly OK with it.

We'll see if they actually manage to do that. I definitely don't think that a world in which Verifact markets will be able to adjudicate contentious specifics about reality would be good, but I also am very skeptical that that will actually happen. 

JW: That's a fair point. Reading the article, which is really well-written and interesting by the way, I thought it was a very good catch when you pointed out that it would be a very big deal if they could figure out what actually caused the Covid-19 virus, if they could give a definitive answer, and you're like, "Well, major news outlets are really interested in some of these questions."

I did want to get into some of the possible harms here though. Prediction markets obviously want to distinguish themselves from sports betting, but people suffering from gambling addictions and the clinicians who treat them have said both produce the same results. That's according to reporting from The Associated Press earlier this year. 

"There may be real differences in how these products are defined or regulated, but in the therapy room, we are often seeing the same cycle of anticipation, action and reaction play out again and again." That's what Dr. Cynthia Grant told the AP. She's the vice president of clinical for Birches Health, which operates a national network of providers for treating gambling addiction.

Kate, what have you found in your reporting? Do they really differ in terms of promoting addictive tendencies? 

KK: No, I don't think so. I've talked to some people who are working in the addiction space to try to get some clarification about whether there's a big difference, for example, in demographics of people who are coming in with problematic behaviors in prediction markets versus traditional sportsbooks.

I haven't actually written anything about it yet because I've been still gathering thread, but what I've found so far is that there's a ton of overlap. One therapist I spoke to noted that they anecdotally have seen more women who have been coming in with problematic behaviors tied to prediction markets versus traditional sportsbooks.

It's still really something that predominantly affects young men. The prediction markets, even while they're having these battles and insisting that they're financial instruments, have at least nodded towards the reality that the way that people use their products has a lot in common with gambling and wagering.

They've come up with different guardrails. Both sportsbooks and prediction markets now offer people an opportunity to self-exclude. So if you basically want to ban yourself from something like DraftKings, you can, and now from something like Kalshi, you can. Which obviously is a good start, but it doesn't resolve the baseline fact that what they're offering is something that is speculative, and you're putting money on the line.

For many people, it can be fun and entertaining in the same way that people wagering small sums of money on football games in traditional sportsbooks can be fun and entertaining. But there's inevitably always going to be a portion of the population that struggles with addictive behaviors, and the way that these platforms incentivize risky financial choices.

As they grow even more and more mainstream, inevitably that's going to mean that there's going to be more and more people who struggle with that kind of behavior. I don't know if there's any version of these products that's going to exist that can do away with that kind of harm altogether.

I really perceive these platforms, both sportsbooks and prediction markets, they're vice platforms at heart — in the same way that alcohol can be fun for a lot of people, but then drinking is deeply addictive behavior for others, and there's no inventing a healthy alcohol. There's no inventing a type of prediction market or sportsbook or stock exchange that doesn't have some portion of the people using it displaying really problematic behaviors.

"Alcohol can be fun for a lot of people, but then drinking is deeply addictive behavior for others, and there's no inventing a healthy alcohol."

JW: It sounds like what you're saying is that these are almost like the flavored vapes of the online world, in some way, where it's like, "Oh, it's so safe," and now all of the kids are smoking these vapes. 

KK: Yes. 

JW: There's something similar about it. And there's a ubiquitousness about it that feels really different, too. What you just said about women being more pulled in, potentially — obviously, we don't know that research yet — that makes sense to me, only because I see the ads in a way that I never would get ads for sports betting.

Do you want to place a bet on "Dancing With the Stars"? Do you want to place a bet on whether or not Donald Trump's tie is going to be this color that day? Things that are outside of the sports world that kind of appeal to a larger audience. That clearly seems to be the goal, like you said earlier.

KK: "Love Island" was a big one for a while, and "Survivor." There are certain reality shows that have really robust markets, and I think that the people on them skew more female than they would versus a football market or basically anything happening on the sportsbook. So yeah, the ubiquity is crazy.

It'll be interesting to see how long these platforms are able to cater to the 18-to-24[-year-old] crowd. There are some, Novig, for example, like the prediction market startup that Sydney Sweeney's involved with, they are only 21+ and are positioning themselves as a more virtuous option because of that.

I could see regulators really pushing to raise the participation floor to 21. I don't think that the other major players are going to do it voluntarily. But, yeah, just how rampant this seems on college campuses doesn't seem great. 

JW: It's hard to argue that. And when we're also talking about the harm of these platforms, I think it's important to also talk about who is propping them up.

I know earlier we got a little bit into who was behind these real attempts to limit regulation. Of course, the elephant in the room here is that these industries have exploded in an environment where a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the floodgate to legalized sports betting, and you also have a president and his family fully invested in the prediction market industry succeeding.

When it comes to the legal battles to regulate companies like Polymarket and Kalshi, the Trump administration is backing the prediction market operators, fighting the states who are at minimum trying to enforce some regulations or outright ban them where sports betting and gambling is illegal.

Can you talk more about this tension and the stakeholders who in particular have a lot to gain by limiting regulations on these industries?

"Any conversation about what's going on with prediction markets in the U.S. right now needs to have a big disclaimer: Donald Trump Jr. is a huge investor in Polymarket."

KK: I think that any conversation about what's going on with prediction markets in the U.S. right now needs to have a big disclaimer: Donald Trump Jr. is a huge investor in Polymarket. His VC firm, 1789 Capital, just became the lead investor for Polymarket's latest fundraising round. He's, in addition to that, also a paid adviser to Kalshi.

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In addition to that, Trump Media was planning on launching its own prediction market. It walked that back a little, and now it just has this weird partnership with crypto.com. But Donald Trump Jr. is very involved in this industry, and stands to gain a lot from prediction markets being able to operate as they desire and not be beholden to various state regulations that they're currently not beholden to. It's the fact that it's coloring everything that's going on here. 

I am very interested in what is going to happen in this space when we have a different administration. Kalshi is seeming to hedge its bets by aggressively hiring former Biden administration stars, or people affiliated with the Biden administration, or Democratic politicians.

Will that be enough? I don't know. But yeah, at the moment, the very explicit financial ties that the Trump family has to the leading players in this world seem to be directing how easily it's been for them to explode in popularity.

JW: With all of that said, with the Trump family's interest, with the fact that these companies know that they need to get in good with Democrats as things go forward, where is this going to go?

Where do these platforms go from here? Do you see them massively expanding? Do you really see any kind of effort at regulation? I frankly, five years ago, could not have predicted that I would be interviewing people about prediction markets and sports betting as this kind of major force. Where do we go from here? 

KK: Right now, almost everyone I talk to who is a legal expert paying attention to the regulatory battles is expecting the Supreme Court to end up taking one of these cases — and most of the cases are specifically about whether the sports markets are gambling or not.

"Prediction markets are here to stay as part of the fabric of the speculative economy. They are the inheritors to the commodities trade."

It's really unclear how they will land on that, so there is a world in which the sports markets end up getting reclassified as gambling. I definitely don't think that these markets are going away, by any means. Prediction markets are here to stay as part of the fabric of the speculative economy. They are the inheritors to the commodities trade.

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Kalshi and Polymarket are often described as arch-rivals, and they are, but they're also gunning for CME Group and more traditional financial institutions. So, we'll see. I do think that we will probably get more guardrails at some point, I hope, but not until a new administration comes in.

If the Supreme Court ends up siding with state regulators and reclassifying the sports markets, that will have a pretty big impact on the bottom lines of these companies, because right now the war markets and some of the more controversial geopolitical markets get a lot of attention, but most retail traders are using these to bet on sports. So yeah, I think they're not going away. They might be reined in, but not in the near term. 

JW: Sounds like we have a lot to watch out for. We're going to leave it there. Kate, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Kate Knibbs's reporting at Wired. 

KK: Thanks so much for having me.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

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

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

Until next time, I'm Jessica Washington.

The post Prediction Markets Have a Lock on the Midterms appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents shot a person in New York City on Thursday afternoon, according to police.

The shooting took place around 4 p.m. in Manhattan's Marble Hill neighborhood, according to a statement from the New York Police Department. The NYPD said the victim was taken to a local hospital and was conscious, but provided no further information about the victim.

Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., told The Intercept that there was a child in the car and that the child is OK, which New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani later confirmed in a statement.

"This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds," Mamdani said. "We believe the child was physically unharmed."

At a press conference, Espaillat said that he attempted to visit the shooting victim in the hospital, but was prevented from doing so by federal authorities.

"I went to the hospital to see the victim," Espaillat said, "but we were not allowed by ICE agents to go in the room."

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A neighbor, Iris Rosa, said the shooting happened just as a nearby school was being let out. After hiding in a store for a few minutes, she said she went to look at the scene and said it looked like agents had shot into a car.

The victim, Rosa said, was on the ground bleeding and being held down by the agents. A baby, she said, was in the car and was held by ICE agents until someone picked the child up.

Photos of the aftermath of the shooting, taken by a neighbor and obtained by The Intercept, show apparent government agents in plain clothes and tactical vests pinning a man on the asphalt. Another man in a high-visibility vest is clutching an assault rifle while holding a phone between his cheek and shoulder.

The aftermath of a shooting, reportedly by ICE agents, of a vehicle in New York City on Oct. 8, 2026. Obtained by The Intercept

Rosa, the neighbor, said a man with a high-visibility vest appeared to be posing as a construction worker, but as she watched, Rosa told The Intercept, the man took the vest and put it in a nearby vehicle.

Related ICE Agent Caught on Camera Disguised as a Construction Worker

ICE agents routinely pose as construction workers in order to stakeout targets for immigrations.

Representatives of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said the shooting occurred during "a targeted enforcement operation."

"During the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon and the criminal illegal alien was injured," the spokesperson wrote in a statement. "ICE officers immediately rendered aid. The individual is alive and at a local hospital. The FBI and HSI are on the scene. The incident remains under investigation."

The victim is the latest of at least 25 people to be shot by federal immigration agents this year. In July, after two fatal ICE shootings and a botched arrest in Las Vegas by plainclothes agents wearing hooded sweatshirts, the agency mandated a new dress code for field operations.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she had been briefed on the shooting. "We expect federal authorities to provide a full and transparent accounting of the circumstances surrounding this incident," she said on X.

"ICE's violent tactics are a clear danger to all New Yorkers, as today's shooting in a residential neighborhood demonstrates," said Murad Awawdeh, the head of the advocacy group New York Immigration Coalition, in a statement. "This incident is another reminder of the unchecked, rampant violence ICE has been spreading throughout our communities."

This is a developing story and may be updated.

The post ICE Agent on Scene of NYC Shooting Was Posing as Construction Worker, Eyewitness Says appeared first on The Intercept.

In his "state of the force" address last week, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth coupled his usual attacks on the press, the Ivy League, and "beardos" and "weirdos" with new initiatives that have the potential to reshape the U.S. military for decades: an Autonomous Warfare Command, and an effort to map out the future of warfare called "Project Meridian." The former, a combatant command devoted to AI-enabled robotic warfare, will have purchasing powers specifically designed to thwart effective oversight. The latter puts defense contractors, tech titans, and weapons merchants in charge of planning the military's future — producing innumerable conflicts of interest.

The Pentagon has revealed few details about the command or the commission beyond barebones descriptions and Hegseth memorandums. The four-paragraph document that authorizes Project Meridian, for example, says little beyond a decree that the U.S. must "dominate" in "new domains, new ways of fighting" centered on "artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics, [and] biotechnology, among other critical high-tech areas."

While billed as efforts to promote blue-sky thinking and catapult the Pentagon into the future, former defense officials as well as experts on government contracting say both initiatives are ripe for out-of-control spending as well as waste, fraud, and abuse.

One former official asked how Hegseth's Pentagon would "plan for future wars when they didn't plan for the current one," referencing the failed war with Iran. A second former official foresaw tough sailing for both of Hegseth's efforts due to institutional intransigence, inertia, and roadblocks that even Hegseth's repeated purges of top brass would not help overcome.

I, Robot

AUTOWARCOM will be "a new four-star combatant command … built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force," Hegseth said in a wide-ranging speech rife with Pentagon jargon and juvenile insults. The new command is scheduled to be formally established by October 1, 2027, according to a memo released following Hegseth's speech at Marine Base Quantico, Virginia.

"The pace of war is changing faster than the processes to support it. Cheap computing, Super Intelligence, and advanced commercial manufacturing have enabled the proliferation of low-cost, high precision strike," Hegseth explained, using President Donald Trump's preferred and incorrect term for artificial intelligence before offering up a thunderstorm analogy. "We need bolts of lightning … our existing high-end kill chains," he said, emphasizing the need for traditional and expensive weapons systems, like the Tomahawk missiles that leveled an elementary school in Minab, Iran. "We also need steady wind and rain: mass drones and other autonomous attritable systems that flip the cost exchange and impose unrelenting pressure on an adversary on the battlefield."

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A money pit in the making, according to the first former Pentagon official, AUTOWARCOM will — according to Hegseth — possess "directed manpower, budget, acquisition authorities and create dedicated military career pathways for Officers and Enlisted personnel." Hegseth suggested weapons would be tested on battlefields whenever feasible. That former official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity due to his current employment, said to "expect a fiasco financially."

This was echoed by Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst with Taxpayers for Common Sense. "By Secretary Hegseth's own admission, the purpose of this combatant command is to cut out the oversight that autonomous systems so desperately need by deploying untested autonomous weapons in combat," he told The Intercept. "That approach promises to waste a tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars while also endangering service members and threatening the missions they're tasked with carrying out."

Hegseth's push for a command devoted to autonomous weapons comes amid a furious debate over safeguards for AI. The tech sector has been roiled by recent revelations that AI agents went rogue, circumvented controls and began colluding in secret; inserted "jailbreak-like instructions" into their own notes to free the models from human-imposed constraints; hacked or took aim at government websites, networks and databases around the world; and almost instigated a confrontation between the U.S. and China, both nuclear-armed powers. Questions also continue to mount over the AI-enabled Maven Smart System, built by Palantir and used by the military for targeting in Iran, that paved the way for the Minab strike that killed more than 150 people, most of them children.

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Hegseth said he anticipated internal resistance within the military to the creation of AUTOWARCOM. Both former defense officials agreed it was a certainty.

Hegseth said that Owen West, who led the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit, and Max Strasiser, a Navy SEAL senior chief and a test pilot, will run the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems (DRPM-UxS) "under a unique CEO-COO partnership." 

Their "culminating mission" will, said Hegseth, "take place over the course of months, clearing the path for Autonomous Warfare Command." This will be conducted under a new moniker, Project Agincourt, a nod to a 1415 battle in which outnumbered English forces used longbows to defeat a larger French army, offered no quarter for a time during combat, and then massacred prisoners. (Hegseth has also advocated for offering no quarter to enemies, now a war crime.)  

Project Agincourt will set up AUTOWARCOM while it simultaneously "prototype[s] a new construct called Warfighting Acquisition." Hegseth laid out a move-fast-and-break-things vision for the new command. "This model fuses operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles, while distributing decisions and dollars closer to frontline units and the combatant commands," he explained. "By removing unnecessary layers, reducing the distance between our warfighters and our world-leading innovators, and then giving the right people the authority to act — Project Agincourt will pilot innovation at the edge, in a way that only Americans can do."

Both former officials said such an arrangement was likely to lead to both contracting fraud and technological failures.

(Armed) Conflicts of Interest

Hegseth also announced the formation of Project Meridian, an effort to study the future of warfare which he claimed would be "co-led by three of our nation's best minds," before clarifying that it would instead be run by Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey, the founder of the virtual reality firm Oculus Rift and defense contractor Anduril Industries. Assisted by War Department chief technology officer, Emil Michael, the three Trump boosters are tasked with ensuring "America's long-term military superiority by identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield." Hegseth said the project would be completed within 120 days, at which time the group would issue a final public report with a classified annex.

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A Republican fundraising bundler partial to Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts, Luckey fancies himself a techno-war futurist and believes tomorrow's conflicts will be fought in a "subterranean domain," with "weapons that move through the crust of the earth." He says that "Anduril has working prototypes of subterranean systems that can deliver a variety of kinetic, electronic, and other effects." Luckey also envisions the moon as a future battlespace. He said lunar warfare would resemble that of Robert Heinlein's 1966 science fiction novel "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," which includes subterranean combat and an electromagnetic catapult that lobs lunar boulders, with the kinetic force of atomic blasts, at the earth.

Anduril has been cleaning up on Pentagon contracts, inking a deal this year with the Army for commercial information technology potentially worth $20 billion. Anduril is also leading a contractor consortium, including the weapons-tech company Palantir — whose Maven Smart System contributed to the Minab school strike — helping build Trump's "Golden Dome" missile defense system, which is predicted to be a trillion-dollar boondoggle.

Luckey joins Musk, whose firm SpaceX has been awarded billions for a key role in the Golden Dome project, as a defense contractor with a clear conflict of interest in mapping out the future of U.S. warfare. Musk, who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump elected in 2024 and is providing at least $100 million to help Republican candidates during this election cycle, is returning to government service after flaming out last year as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. A cost-cutting agency that promised to save Americans trillions of dollars by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, DOGE failed to deliver on that promise, wasted taxpayer money, repeatedly misled the public about supposed savings, and may have played a role in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

"There is a genuine need for government reform and modernization, but we saw how Musk's approach worked out with DOGE," Murphy told The Intercept. "It failed spectacularly, creating disruptions, payouts for workers not working, firings and rehiring, and a pittance of the savings taxpayers were promised."

"Project Meridian is an unveiled effort to outsource our future military strategies to individuals and companies that stand to profit most from a hypermilitarized future."

Luckey and Musk will be joined at the helm of Project Meridian by the 83-year-old Gingrich, who resigned as House speaker in 1998 after admitting that he broke congressional rules and "brought down on the people's house a controversy which could weaken the faith people have in their government."

Hegseth announced that a meeting between "a small group" was to take place just after his Wednesday speech in a sensitive compartmented information facility at Quantico. Pentagon propaganda photos from the first meeting show 11 grim-looking men, including Musk, Gingrich, and Luckey, seated around a table as Hegseth holds forth.

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The nonprofit MITRE Corporation, which conducts independent research for federal government agencies, announced that it will be coordinating Project Meridian and named 17 current board members beyond the Big Three, including Francis J. "Bing" West, a Vietnam War veteran, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1983, and is the father of DRPM-UxS CEO Owen West; Rick Smith, the CEO of Axon, the manufacturer of Taser stun guns, which saw nine of 13 members of its ethics advisory board resign in 2022 over plans for a Taser-equipped drone project (which was then shelved); Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir; and Safra Catz, former CEO of Oracle.

"Project Meridian is an unveiled effort to outsource our future military strategies to individuals and companies that stand to profit most from a hypermilitarized future," said Murphy. "Their security solutions will predictably entail vast expenditures of taxpayer resources on unproven military systems that rely on the AI models and software these companies control."

Hegseth's office did not respond to questions about Project Meridian and AUTOWARCOM.

The New 1 Percent

Hegseth made the announcements of both AUTOWARCOM and Project Meridian in front of more than 500 junior officers and enlisted troops at the site where, a year before, he had ranted at generals about fitness and grooming standards, while promoting both Christianity and violence.

In this year's diatribe, Hegseth touted his overhaul of the military, which has included firings of many top brass and an overwhelming emphasis on physical appearance, masculinity, and troops' testosterone levels. "We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department. Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals," Hegseth announced. "The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in — with testosterone testing on top."

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Despite laying out a future in which artificial, not human, intelligence will be ever more central to war-making, Hegseth ended his rant by nonetheless praising the troops, casting them as members of a violent and lethal warrior elite that are superior to civilians.

"See, the Ivy League faculty lounges, they'll never understand you, and that's OK, because they could never, ever do what you do. The media will mischaracterize you, and that's OK. Because deep down they know you're the real reason they live free. They envy you because you do real things every single day," said Hegseth, an Ivy League-educated war chief who used to work for Fox News.

"You feel comfortable inside the violence. … Lethality is your calling card and victory your only acceptable end-state. The outside world can't understand this, so stay true to this department. You don't want to look like civilians, because you are different, you are set apart. You are warriors." He added: "You are the real 1 percent." 

The post Pete Hegseth's Military of the Future: Defined by AI and an Utter Lack of Oversight appeared first on The Intercept.

Armed, masked agents stand in front of a bulldozer near the U.S. border with Mexico on Oct. 5, 2026. A 200-year-old tree, which had for weeks been occupied by activists, was bulldozed to make way for Trump's border wall. Photo: Sierra Club Borderlands

For more than 70 days, dozens of activists and an ancient cottonwood tree on the Arizona-Mexico border have successfully disrupted the construction of President Donald Trump's ruinous $50 billion border wall. 

Since July, one protester at a time has occupied the cottonwood, or the grandmother tree, as it is locally known. After three other cottonwoods in the area were torn down by government contractors, the remaining grandmother on the U.S. side of the border became the site of a growing protest camp in the remote town of Lochiel, Arizona, and neighboring Sonora, Mexico, where organizers gathered for more than a year to oppose the border wall's construction.

On Monday, heavily armed federal agents moved in with force. Activists on the ground estimate that 150 Border Patrol officers — many of whom masked their faces — raided the encampment during the protesters' morning prayer ceremony. At least 10 demonstrators were arrested, and the 200-year-old cottonwood was bulldozed. 

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As Arizona-based journalist John Washington reported, "agents began cutting the tree while a person was still sitting in its branches. Agents removed that person with a cherry picker and then felled the tree. Screams could be heard as 'grandmother' fell around 8:30 a.m."

In the 48 hours since the early morning raid, land defenders have refused to leave and remain in an ongoing standoff with federal agents. Numerous participants told The Intercept that around 50 people are holding the line against further construction, with dozens more en route following urgent calls to support the encampment and defend the imperiled borderland ecology.

On Tuesday, another tree sitter climbed the last remaining cottonwood standing in the path of the border wall construction, this one on the Mexico side. The tree was briefly occupied by demonstrators in mid-August and, according to a press release from the land defenders, "is once again halting construction."

The protesters' aim to stop the construction of two parallel, 30-foot-high border walls ripping through the remote San Rafael Valley. Miles of the double wall structure have already been built in the area. The region is sparsely populated and hardly ever used as a border-crossing site by humans but is renowned as a unique wildlife migration corridor. The cottonwood felled on Monday was the last of four ancient grandmother trees on the Arizona side of the border, which stood in the path of planned wall construction.

"The feeling is that they're pushing through the construction process as quickly as possible, and they'll deal with the consequences of the law later."

Until this week, federal forces had left the encampment and tree sit in relative peace, largely, activists said, because the camp is located on private land. That fact had not changed on Monday. 

"Border Patrol has been coming onto private property since yesterday morning. No warrants are shown," Rachel, a land defender who withheld her last night out of concern for being targeted by law enforcement, said on a call with reporters on Tuesday. "There's no legal ground for them to come onto private property. And the feeling is that they're pushing through the construction process as quickly as possible, and they'll deal with the consequences of the law later. They just want to push the wall through, regardless of the harm they have to cause to us and to the land in the process."

According to Rachel and other activists on the ground who spoke to The Intercept, construction workers have moved quickly since the raid, digging a deep trench that threatens the roots of the newly occupied cottonwood on the Mexico side. 

An aerial view of the raid by federal agents on the protesters' encampment on Oct. 5, 2025.  Photo: Sierra Club Borderlands

A statement on Monday from Belicia Lynch, a member of the De La Ossa family who owns one of the tracts of private property along the border, confirmed the protesters were welcome on her property. "I just want to thank you guys for being out there to not only protect the grandmother tree, but the land itself that many animals and bugs inhabit," Lynch told the land defenders in the statement. 

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Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security have not yet responded to questions from The Intercept.

The federal attacks on the Lochiel encampment came on the heels of a legal victory for anti-border activists in Big Bend, Texas. On Friday, a U.S. district judge granted an injunction to stop all border wall construction in the Big Bend area, including in national and state parks, while the court hears a lawsuit brought by local environmental and community groups. In the order, the judge wrote that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on at least one of their claims' merits. 

The standoff between armed federal agents, many of whom are masked to conceal their identities, and border wall protesters on Oct. 5, 2026. Photo: Sierra Club Borderlands

But with practically unlimited funding for his border regime, Trump's administration can continue fueling money into his violent and destructive border wall. What activists in Lochiel, Sonora, Big Bend, and beyond make clear, however, is that the government's victory cannot be assumed. Disruptions and interventions are not just possible but also an absolute necessity, and pressure can be applied in an array of directions.

As one Arizona-based Mexican American tree sit participant told The Intercept in August, "The border is everywhere, which means that there are subcontractors and there are power players maybe in your backyard, maybe in your city, maybe an hour drive from where you're living."

Rachel, the land defender, made the stakes of the fight clear.

"We have to stop this wall here because the trajectory they're going on, there is no safety in the U.S. for anyone," she said on Monday. The call was cut short as news spread through the encampment that federal agents would attempt to remove the tree sitter on the Mexico side. At the time of writing, the grandmother tree in Sonora remains occupied; the fight against Trump's border wall, and all it represents, has not been lost. 

In a social media post on Wednesday, encampment participants announced a "call to presence" to celebrate the life of the felled cottonwood and continue the anti-border struggle. "If you have been waiting to come to Lochiel, this is the time," they said. "Let your heavy heart lead you to action!"

The post Armed Border Agents Arrest Protesters, Bulldoze 200-Year-Old Tree to Build Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.