Supporters of Palestinian rights gathered outside Downing Street last night. The protest condemned the detention of the ‘Filton 24’, political prisoners held for more than a year without trial for acting to save Palestinian lives.
Eight of the twenty-four are on hunger strike because of their mistreatment by the justice system which is denying them bail and a trial — as well as the Starmer government’s collaboration in Israel’s genocide. Six have been refusing food for more than a month, and at least two are now hospitalised and at risk of death.
Nida Jafri, a friend of Amu Gib — one of the most dangerously ill — read out a letter from Gib to the five hundred or so protesters, condemning the ‘justice’ secretary — and, until recently, foreign secretary — David Lammy for his contempt for justice, democracy, and humanity. Skwawkbox contributor Gerry Tasker was there to film it.
It is powerful:
Emma Kamio, the mother of political prisoner Leona Kamio, had a different message. She asked those on hunger strike to eat, because she is convinced that Starmer and his criminal cronies are perfectly prepared to let them die rather than act for Palestinian freedom from Israel’s atrocities. Watch her speech here.
Two supporters of the Prisoners for Palestine hunger strikers took their message direct to David Lammy’s office on 12 December.
The hunger strike is approaching its seventh week, and there’s still no response from the British government. So activists from the group took action against the Ministry of Justice. At 8am, using re-purposed fire-extinguishers, they covered the front of the building in symbolic blood-red paint. The activists then locked-on in front of the building with a banner which read “Elbit corrupts Justice”.
No response to the hunger strikers
Two weeks before the start of the Prisoners for Palestine hunger-strike, on 2 November, Prisoners for Palestine wrote to the Ministry of Justice, informing it of the hunger-strikers’ demands.
Since then, 8 prisoners have joined the protest: Qesser Zuhrah, Amu Gibb, Jon Cink, Heba Muraisi, Teuta Hoxha, Kamran Ahmed, Muhammed Umer Khalid, and Lewie Chiaramello.
Prisoners for Palestine, the lawyers representing the prisoners, and over a hundred medical professionals have repeatedly sent letters. Despite this, there’s been no response from the government accepting a meeting to find a resolution to the hunger strike.
The eight hunger strikers are all unconvicted of any offence but several have now spent over a year in custody.
Their lawyers have written to deputy prime minister and justice secretary Lammy, calling for an urgent meeting, referring to the “increasingly likely potential” that their clients could die on hunger strike.
The activists taking action today are also demanding Lammy agrees to meet with the lawyers urgently. And they want this to happen before the health of the hunger strikers deteriorates further. Five of them have already needed hospital treatment.
In October, the hunger-strikers’ demands were communicated to the government. They include the right to a fair trial, an end to the interference with their mail, and release on bail as per the established rules.
A spokesperson for Prisoners for Palestine said:
It is six weeks now, since the hunger strikers, imprisoned without trial, and looking at up to a further year unjustly incarcerated, were forced to use their bodies to expose this situation and resist injustice.
Despite their rapidly deteriorating health, the government has continued to ignore them. We must stand in solidarity with the hunger strikers, and escalate our activity in support of them.
This is an emergency, which David Lammy could swiftly resolve by meeting with representatives of the hunger strikers to come to an agreement on the demands
It is his responsibility to urgently find a resolution, rather than to continuously delay responding at the detriment of the health of unconvicted prisoners.
It is time for David Lammy to accept a meeting, to save the lives of those on hunger strike.
Each of the prisoners is incarcerated for allegedly taking direct action against a genocide.
By the prison system, they are being treated and labelled as ‘terrorists’ despite being detained before Palestine Action was proscribed.
Their mail is restricted, communications censored and they are denied the right to see the full evidence of foreign and political interference in their cases.
They should be released on bail and given fair treatment and the right to a fair trial.
“Male detainee needs to go out due to head trauma,” an employee at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention center in Georgia tells a 911 operator.
The operator tells the employee at Stewart Detention Center that there are no ambulances available.
“It’s already out — on the last patient y’all called us with,” the operator says.
“Is there any way you can get one from another county?” the caller asks.
“I can try,” the operator says. “I can’t make any promises, but I can try.”
Listen to the 911 call
The call was one of dozens from the ICE detention facility seeking help with medical emergencies during the first 10 months of the second Trump administration, a sustained period of high call volume from the jail not seen since 2018.
Emergency calls were made to 911 at least 15 times a month from Stewart Detention Center for six months in a row as of November 1.
Like the call concerning a detainee’s head trauma from April 1, emergency dispatch records show that the ambulance service in Stewart County, Georgia, where the detention center is located, has had to seek help outside the county more than any time in at least five years — including three instances in November alone.
The burden on rural Stewart County’s health care system is “unsustainable,” said Dr. Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who researches health care in immigration detention.
“People are going to die if they don’t get medical care,” said Zeidan. “All it takes is one person who needs a life-saving intervention and doesn’t have access to it.”
“People are going to die if they don’t get medical care.”
This continuous barrage of calls for help with acute medical needs reflects increased detainee populations without changes to medical staffing and capacities, experts told The Intercept. Shifting detainee populations, they said, may also be exacerbating the situation: Older immigrants and those with disabilities or severe health issues used to be more frequently let out on bond as their cases were resolved, but ICE’s mass deportation push has led to an increase in their detention.
With the number of people in immigration detention ballooning nationwide, health care behind bars has become an issue in local and state politics. In Washington state, for instance, legislators passed a law last year giving state-level authorities more oversight of detention facilities. A recent court ruling granted state health department officials access to a privately operated ICE detention center to do health inspections. (A spokesperson from Georgia’s health department did not answer questions about the high volume and types of calls at Stewart.)
911 calls from Stewart included several for “head trauma,” such as one case where an inmate was “beating his head against the wall” and another following a fight.
Impacts of the situation are hard to measure in the absence of comprehensive, detailed data, but they extend both to Stewart’s detainee population — which has increased from about 1,500 to about 1,900 during the Trump administration — and to the surrounding, rural county. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)
The data on 911 calls represent what Dr. Marc Stern, a consultant on health care for the incarcerated, called “a red flag.”
Illness and Injuries
Data obtained by The Intercept through open records requests shows that the top four reasons for 911 calls since the onset of the second Trump administration have been chest pains and seizures, with the same number of calls, followed by stomach pains and head injuries.
Neither written call records nor recordings of the calls themselves offer much insight into the causes of injuries. One cause of head traumas, though, could be fights between detainees, said Amilcar Valencia, the executive director of El Refugio, a Georgia-based organization that works with people held at Stewart and their families and loved ones.
“It’s not a secret that Stewart detention center is overcrowded,” he said. “This creates tension.”
Issues such as access to phones for calls to attorneys or loved ones can lead to fights, he said.
Another issue may be self-harm, suggested testimony from Rodney Scott, a Liberian-born Georgia resident of four decades who has been detained in Stewart since January. One day in September, Scott, who is a double amputee and suffers high blood pressure and other health issues, said he saw a fellow detainee climb about 20 stairs across a hall from him and jump over a railing, landing several stories below.
“He hit his head,” Scott said. “It was shocking to see someone risk his life like that.”
He doesn’t know what happened to the man.
On another day, about a month earlier, Scott saw a man try to kill himself with razors.
“He went in, cut himself with blades, after breakfast,” Scott said. “There was a pool of blood,” he said. “It looked like a murder scene.”
In addition to interpersonal tensions, large numbers of detainees in crowded conditions can strain a facility’s medical capacities.
“People are becoming sicker than what the system can handle.”
“There’s a mismatch between the number of people and health workers,” said Joseph Nwadiuko, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who researches the immigration detention system. “People are becoming sicker than what the system can handle. The complexity of patients is above and beyond what Stewart is prepared for.”
CoreCivic, the company that operates Stewart, is currently advertising to hire a psychiatrist, a dental assistant, and two licensed practical nurses at the detention center. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
“A Lack of Accountability”
The situation at hand also potentially impacts the residents of Stewart County, a sprawling tract of about 450 square miles in southwest Georgia. About 28 percent of the county’s nearly 5,000 residents, two-thirds of whom are Black, live below the poverty line.
The county has two ambulances, and there are no hospitals. The nearest facilities equipped to handle calls coming from the ICE detention center are in neighboring counties about 45 minutes to the east or nearly an hour north. County Manager Mac Moye, though, was nonplussed when presented with the data on the sustained high volume of 911 calls from the detention center.
“We are in a very rural, poor county, with very low population density,” he said. “We’ve always had slow responses compared to, let’s say, Columbus” — the city of 200,000 nearly 45 miles north where one of the nearest hospitals is located.
“We run two ambulances; most surrounding counties have one,” he continued. “We have more money, because of Stewart” — the detention center.
The ICE facility paid nearly $600,000 in fees in fiscal year 2022, the latest year for which data is available, or about 13 percent of the county’s general fund of $4.4 million.
Moye, who worked at the detention center before taking his current job, also called into question whether 911 calls were always made for legitimate reasons. The county manager did not comment on whether his own constituents are increasingly more at risk in situations like the one on April 1, when no ambulance was available to answer a call from the detention center.
“It’s still faster than if we had one ambulance,” he said. “We wish we would never have to call another county, and deal with every call on our own.”
As for the conditions facing detainees, particularly given the types of emergencies the detention center calls 911 about, Moye said, “It’s difficult to comment on what’s happening over there, because we don’t have any control over it.”
That points to a larger problem reflected in the increased calls.
“Obviously, a prison is a prison — it’s blind to the rest of the world,” said Nwadiuko, the Penn professor. “There’s a moral hazard for conditions that don’t occur elsewhere, a lack of accountability.”
“Do No Harm”?
“Seizures, chest pains — are they preventable? Why is it happening?” said Stern, the doctor who consults on carceral health care, commenting on the high volume and types of calls. “Could mean that access or the quality of care is poor. It’s a red flag if the number is high or increasing, and it indicates that investigation is required.”
In September, Democratic Georgia Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons expressing concern over the 14 deaths in ICE custody this year, including Jesus Molina-Veya, whose June 7 death at Stewart has been reported as a suicide.
The letter sought answers to a series of detailed questions by October 31 about the care Stewart and other ICE detention centers are providing to detainees. Warnock and Ossoff’s offices said they have not received a reply. Ossoff also released an investigation in October called “Medical Neglect and Denial of Adequate Food or Water in U.S. Immigration Detention” that included information gathered at Stewart.
Zeidan, the Emory professor, noted that there’s little information about what happens to ICE detainees once they reach a hospital.
“What happens after detainees are admitted?” Zeidan said. “Are they discharged? Are they getting comprehensive, follow-up care?”
Nwadiuko echoed the concern.
“Are doctors and hospitals using good judgment regarding when going back to a detention facility doesn’t mean ‘a safe discharge’?” he said. “We have an oath: ‘Do no harm.’ That may conflict with an institution’s desire to minimize a detainee’s time outside the gates of the detention center.”
As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a voluntary commitment to halt climate change. And for the first time in the 30-year history of the U.N.’s international climate talks, the U.S. did not send a delegation to the annual conference, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil.
The Trump administration’s assault on climate action has been far from symbolic. Over the summer, the president pressed his Republican majority in Congress to gut a Biden-era law that was projected to cut U.S. emissions by roughly a third compared to their peak, putting the country within reach of its Paris Agreement commitments. In the fall, Trump officials used hardball negotiating tactics to stall, if not outright derail, a relatively uncontroversial international plan to decarbonize the heavily polluting global shipping industry. And even though no other country has played a larger role in causing climate change, the U.S. under Trump has cut the vast majority of global climate aid funding, which is intended to help countries that are in the crosshairs of climate change despite doing virtually nothing to cause it.
It may come as no surprise, then, that other world leaders took barely veiled swipes at Trump at the COP30 climate talks last month. Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and a longtime Costa Rican diplomat, summed up a common sentiment.
“Ciao, bambino! You want to leave, leave,” she said before a crowd of reporters, using an Italian phrase that translates “bye-bye, little boy.”
These stark shifts in the U.S. position on climate change, which President Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “con job,” are only the latest and most visible signs of a deeper shift underway. Historically, the U.S. and other wealthy, high-emitting nations have been cast as the primary drivers of climate action, both because of their outsize responsibility for the crisis and because of the greater resources at their disposal. Over the past decade, however, the hopes that developed countries will prioritize financing both the global energy transition and adaptation measures to protect the world’s most vulnerable countries have been dashed — in part by rightward lurches in domestic politics, external crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and revolts by wealthy-country voters over cost-of-living concerns.
The resulting message to developing countries has been unmistakable: Help is not on the way.
In the vacuum left behind, a different engine of global climate action has emerged, one not political or diplomatic but industrial. A growing marketplace of green technologies — primarily solar, wind, and batteries — has made the adoption of renewable energy far faster and more cost-effective than almost anyone predicted. The world has dramatically exceeded expectations for solar power generation in particular, producing roughly 8 times more last year than in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed.
China is largely responsible for the breakneck pace of clean energy growth. It now produces about 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 percent of solar panels. In the first half of 2025, the country added more than twice as much new solar capacity as the rest of the world combined. As a result of these Chinese-led global energy market changes and other countries’ Paris Agreement pledges, the world is now on a path to see 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, compared to preindustrial temperatures, far lower than the roughly 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) projections expected just 10 years ago.
These policies can be viewed as a symbol of global cooperation on climate change, but for Chinese leadership, the motivation is primarily economic. That, experts say, may be why they’re working. China’s policies are driving much of the rest of the world’s renewable energy growth. As the cost of solar panels and wind turbines drops year over year, it is enabling other countries, especially in the Global South, to choose cleaner sources of electricity over fossil fuels — and also to purchase some of the world’s cheapest mass-produced electric vehicles. Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia are all expected to see massive increases in solar deployment in the next few years, thanks to their partnerships with Chinese firms.
“China is going to, over time, create a new narrative and be a much more important driver for global climate action,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Shuo said that the politics-and-rhetoric-driven approach to solving climate change favored by wealthy countries has proved unreliable and largely failed. In its place, a Chinese-style approach that aligns countries’ economic agendas with decarbonization will prove to be more successful, he predicted.
Meanwhile, many countries have begun reorganizing their diplomatic and economic relationships in ways that no longer assume American leadership. That shift accelerated this year in part due to Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, to impose tariffs on U.S. allies, and more broadly, to slink away into self-imposed isolation. European countries facing punishing tariffs have looked to deepen trade relationships with China, Japan, and otherAsian countries. The EU’s new carbon border tax, which applies levies to imports from outside the bloc, will take effect in January. The move was once expected to trigger conflict between the EU and U.S., but is now proceeding without outright support — or strong opposition — from the Trump administration.
African countries, too, are asserting leadership. The continent hosted its own climate summit earlier this year, pledging to raise $50 billion to promote at least 1,000 locally led solutions in energy, agriculture, water, transport, and resilience by 2030. “The continent has moved the conversation from crisis to opportunity, from aid to investment, and from external prescription to African-led,” said Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chairperson of the African Union Commission. “We have embraced the powerful truth [that] Africa is not a passive recipient of climate solutions, but the actor and architect of these solutions.”
The U.S. void has also allowed China to throw more weight around in international climate negotiations. Although Chinese leadership remained cautious and reserved in the negotiation halls in Belém, the country pushed its agenda on one issue in particular: trade. Since China has invested heavily in renewable energy technology, tariffs on its products could hinder not only its own economic growth but also the world’s energy transition. As a result the final agreement at COP30, which like all other United Nations climate agreements is ultimately non-binding, included language stipulating that unilateral trade measures like tariffs “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”
Calling out tariffs on the first page of the final decision at COP30 would not have been possible if negotiators for the United States had been present, according to Shuo. “China was able to force this issue on the agenda,” he said.
But Shuo added that other countries are still feeling the gravitational pull of U.S. policies, even as the Trump administration sat out climate talks this year. In Belém last month, the United States’ opposition to the International Maritime Organization’s carbon framework influenced conversations about structuring rules for decarbonizing the shipping industry. And knowing that the U.S. wouldn’t contribute to aid funds shaped climate finance agreements.
In the years to come, though, those pressures may very well fade. As the world pivots in response to a U.S. absence, it may find it has more to gain than expected.
A top FBI official toed the White House line about antifa as a major domestic terror threat at a House hearing on Thursday — but he struggled to answer questions about the leaderless movement.
Pressed repeatedly by a top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee about antifa’s size and location, the operations director of the FBI’s national security division didn’t have answers.
At one point, the FBI’s Michael Glasheen fumbled with his hands as he tried to find an answer for the question from Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.
“Well, the investigations are active,” Glasheen said.
“You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that?”
Glasheen’s comments came three months after President Donald Trump proclaimed that antifa is a “major terror organization,” even though it the broad political movement does not have a hierarchy or leadership.
Trump followed his designation with a presidential memo on September 25 directing the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate and prosecute antifascists and other adherents of “anti-Americanism.”
The formless nature of the antifascist movement, however, appears to have flummoxed the FBI as it attempts to carry out Trump’s orders.
Glasheen called antifa “our primary concern right now” and called it “the most immediate, violent threat” from domestic terrorists. That led Thompson to ask him where antifa is located and how many members it has.
“We are building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen said.
“So what does that mean?” Thompson shot back. “I’m just — we’re trying to get the information. You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that? Where do they exist? How many members do they have in the United States as of right now?”
Glasheen visibly struggled to answer the question before saying that the FBI’s investigations were “active.”
“Well, that’s very fluid. It’s ongoing for us to understand that. The same, no different than Al Qaeda or ISIS,” he said at another point.
“ No different than Al Qaeda or ISIS.”
Glasheen is a veteran FBI official who was appointed to serve as the Terrorist Screening Center director under the Biden administration in 2023 and selected by current FBI Director Kash Patel as one of the agency’s five operations directors earlier this year.
The FBI’s shift to focusing on alleged left-wing violence comes despite researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies finding that despite an increase this year, it remains “much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”
Trump has long obsessed over the “threat” that antifa poses to the U.S. His fixation appears to have been supercharged by the September 10 slaying of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Utah, allegedly by a shooter who engraved one unused bullet with the words “Hey fascist! catch!”
That helped spur Trump administration officials to launch an extensive search for links between the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, and domestic or foreign groups that so far has produced no arrests.
The trial of six anti-genocide activists in London has once again exposed close coordination between the Starmer regime and the organs of the illegitimate state of Israel. The trial of Palestine Action activists known as the ‘Filton 24′ has revealed that Israeli-owned arms company Elbit had access to evidence the activists’ defence barristers did not. Concerningly, evidence bagged by the Met Police was found in a safe on Elbit’s premises just days before the trial started.
Moreover, prosecution witnesses had to – and were allowed to – change their statements mid-trial after body-cam footage showed that what they had previously said was false. All this raises serious questions about the conduct of the British state and its collusion with Israel during and before the activists’ trial.
Anti-genocide activists
The six activists on trial are members of the Filton 24 group and have been held in prison for more than a year. Many are facing delays of one or even two years more before their cases are heard. They were arrested last year before Starmer proscribed Palestine Action, a non-violent campaign group, as a terrorist organisation in July 2025. None of the six have been charged with terrorist offences, although the government is still applying terrorism legislation to hold them beyond the 180-day statutory limit.
The activists have denied charges of criminal damage and, in one case, of grievous bodily harm, levelled at them.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) claims that the six activists used violence against police and security guards, releasing a heavily-edited body-cam video before the trial purportedly showing an attack. However, the defence was not allowed to release its own footage. The video is unclear, and it’s difficult to identify the attackers or their targets.
The move appears to be a transparent attempt to sway public opinion about the trial and the regime’s decision to ban Palestine Action.
Accusations over evidence
However, crucially the body-cam footage draws attention to concerns about the handling of evidence in the case, and acts of apparent collusion with Israel.
As journalist Jonathan Cook has pointed out, for over a year the police and the prosecution allowed Elbit — a military technology company co-founded by the Israeli government — to have unrestricted access to video evidence central to the case against the activists currently on trial, among other materials. Cook noted:
the “full” footage – that is, the footage shown to the jurors, but not the public – is far from full. Elbit, the police and the prosecutors appear to have colluded in keeping some of the footage out of the trial. One can only speculate about why they would wish to do this.
He then went on to list the following “key points about the video evidence”:
* The state initially failed to provide the defence lawyers with accurate plans of the Elbit factory site. It was eventually forced to submit revised plans that revealed previously missing CCTV camera locations.
* Conveniently, multiple cameras in an “alcove” area, where most of the confrontations took place, were not working, according to Elbit.
* In an email revealed in court, suggesting that Elbit may have edited the footage, a police officer in charge of handling the video evidence warned Elbit’s security manager: “There’s a huge opportunity for the defence counsel to use the gaps and jumps [in the footage] to their advantage”…
* Inexplicably, the police allowed Elbit to retain exclusive control over the camera footage for two days after the confrontation. Some of the other footage, from critically important cameras, was not sought by police until “much later”, according to a police investigator.
* In a further sign of collusion between the police and Elbit, it was revealed that during a search of the Filton premises last month, as the trial got underway, an Elbit safe was opened that contained Metropolitan Police evidence bags, holding USB sticks of security camera footage.
In other words, evidence collected and bagged by the police had been given over to Elbit, one of the parties involved in the trial, who had been allowed to keep it for more than a year.
The last fact is simply astonishing. The evidence collected and apparently correctly bagged by the police had simply been handed over to Elbit, apparently for over a year. This is only a part of a much wider collusion between Elbit and the UK state, including the police…
It is hard to imagine a plainer admission that a serving British police officer saw her primary duty as helping Israel’s largest arms manufacturer to secure convictions, rather than establishing the truth…
It is also simply remarkable that the prosecution’s highly selective and edited video evidence has been put into the public domain and has notably affected the public narrative, but that the defence video evidence may not be made public.
Contradictions
Murray’s own summary of the exposures also notes that:
Every single prosecution witness who gave evidence about the melee was obliged to change their statement when confronted by the defence with video evidence which contradicted it. This included much more video than was released by the prosecution.
This is because claims by police and security guards about who was holding weapons and who attacked who are consistently contradicted by the video evidence:
The first sledgehammer shown in the footage is in the hands of a security guard – confirmed by testimony in court.
In his testimony security guard Nigel Shaw, who had claimed he was hit by the actionists, was forced to agree that, “no one in the building had struck him”.
Guard Angelo Volante had claimed an activist had held an angle-grinder during the confrontation but had to concede that the video showed that he, not the activist, was wielding the tool and also holding a hammer in the other hand and later a whip.
Footage shows Volante grabbing a sledgehammer from a activist Zoe Rogers and pointing it at her.
Another activist had to defend himself with a sledgehammer from a guard coming at him with a sledgehammer.
suggested [Volante] had swung his sledgehammer at Zoe, showing some more footage, in which the shadow of the hammer appeared as though raised, and Zoe covering her face in response. [Volante] had already accepted that he had kicked [another defendant Jordan] Devlin, and he now acceded that Zoe might have ‘thought’ that the hammer would hit her, but maintained he hadn’t swung it at her.
The evidence also appeared to show that Volante may used a sledgehammer on Devlin and bitten him on the neck, though Volante denied causing bite marks found on Devlin’s neck after Volante put him in a choke hold that Volante admitted in court was potentially dangerous. Devlin suffered serious injuries, according to a an examination after his arrest:
his “shoulder tricep area was swollen” and there were ”injuries to both wrists and his right cheek, a bump on his head, black right eye, bruised shins, thighs, and left arm, a bruised right elbow, and his left pectoral”
‘Unreliable witnesses’
Murray noted:
What is evident from these exchanges is that the security guards and police are unreliable witnesses.
It is not merely that their evidence differs from what is shown by the video cameras.
It is that, consistently, their sworn evidence is untrue in a way that always makes the Palestine Action activists more aggressive, and themselves more passive, than in fact was the case.
Of course, the British state’s collusion with Israel was on the record before. For example, the CPS and the Attorney General’s Office had previously been consulting with the Israeli embassy – again, over the Filton 24 anti-genocide activists. Similar collusion has also been seen in earlier cases. Additionally, the court has allowed police officers and security guards to change their sworn statements after video evidence showed them to be false.
The Starmer regime has no boundaries it will not cross in its eagerness to defend and support Israel and its interests at any cost.
Prisons in Pakistan are overcrowded and jam-packed with thousands of inmates living under conditions that take away their health, dignity, and hope. Behind the bars lies a human rights crisis that goes well beyond the mandate of official reports or the business of courtroom debate.
Pakistan’s prisons now confine around 102,026 inmates despite being built to hold only about 65,811. This means the system operates at 152 percent of its capacity. Punjab alone houses more than 61,000 prisoners in space designed for just 37,000. Sindh prisons run at 161 percent, while Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan exceed safe limits by 20 to 30 percent. The Justice Project Pakistan calls this overcrowding “one of the country’s most urgent and ignored humanitarian failures.” More than 74 percent of those behind bars are under-trial detainees still waiting for their first hearing. They are the forgotten faces of a justice system that moves too slow and punishes before proving guilt.
Deeply entrenched within the foundations of the very system lies the root cause of this crisis. The slow pace of the courts makes a glacier’s movements look fast, with delays for months or years on hearing dates. The police rush to effect arrests; bail is nonexistent or is set so high that it becomes unaffordable for many. The National Commission for Human Rights has called it a “silent crisis of neglect.” Old laws inherited from colonial times still favor detention over release. Governance failures and limited budgets only worsen the pressure. Political promises of reform appear and vanish, leaving cells more crowded than ever. Pakistan’s rate of pre-trial detention is among the highest in South Asia, even surpassing India and Bangladesh, according to UNODC data.
Inside the walls, conditions are grim. Inmates often share one toilet for fifty people. Meals are meager and medical care is rare. Human Rights Watch has described prisons as “nightmare zones for health and dignity.” Tuberculosis, skin infections, and HIV spread unchecked in cramped cells. Outbreaks at the Adiala Jail have become national concerns, but normal health care is rarely allowed. The harsh realities are even more so for female inmates. Two hundred inmates are cramped into one women’s jail in Lahore, which was originally built for half that number. Reports of harassment by staff are common. Pregnant women receive no special care, and survivors of abuse rarely get counseling. Juvenile offenders share space with hardened criminals, turning confinement into a school of crime rather than a chance for reform.
Overcrowding also destroys any hope of rehabilitation. Workshops, education, and counseling programs rarely function. Guards are overworked and untrained, and violence among inmates is frequent. Drugs circulate freely, and fights break out daily. According to Penal Reform International, more than sixty percent of prisoners reoffend within a year of release. Jails that should reform instead produce more hardened criminals. Society pays the price through rising crime, mistrust, and fear. In Karachi, a prison designed for 2,400 people now confines about 8,500. Three inmates died in violent clashes last year alone.
Courts have occasionally intervened. During the pandemic, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered the release of 25,000 under-trial prisoners to ease congestion. Yet numbers climbed back quickly. However, the prison reform panel remains unactive, which the Wafaqi Mohtasib (Federal Ombudsman) had formed in 2015. None of the bail reforms or alternative sentencing have been implemented yet as part of the National Jail Reform Policy 2024. Such a debate was stalled in Parliament in 2023 over the plea bargains and parole under the distracting political environment. Provincial budgets are shrinking with prison funds cut by 10 percent this year. Without consistent political will, even sound policies turn into paperwork.
There are practical ways forward. Bail reform must take priority. Judges should grant bail for minor, non-violent offenses unless a real flight risk exists. Introducing plea bargains and fast-track trials could cut delays significantly. Parole boards could free low-risk prisoners after serving part of their sentences.
Community service and fines should be imposed instead of imprisonment for petty crimes. With such non-custodial measures and justice reforms in India have had limited success. This burden could be eased through rehabilitation interventions for drug users instead of imprisonment. Norwegian practice may provide an appropriate example for local adaptation, emphasizing rehabilitation instead of punishment. UNODC continues to promote these alternatives in South Asia with an emphasis on human rights and economic benefits.
The civil society is the lifeline of prison reforms. Amnesty International, Justice Project Pakistan, and independent lawyers have filed petitions and written detailed reports about many grave violations and conditions of inhumanity. There is also the media, which is beginning to make a difference; a Dawn investigation in 2024 led to a review of Punjab’s overcrowded prisons. Such successes, however, have been few and far between; for instance, part of the creation of secure bail for 500 women was the result of concerted efforts from human rights groups in 2022. So far, limited change has come from sustained activism, the involvement of the religious sector in seeking rehabilitation funding, and pressure from the public.
The overcrowding in prisons in Pakistan reveals deeper moral and administrative failure. It’s not just about poor infrastructure, in fact it lies deep inside justice and humanity. To neglect those who are in jail threatens both prisoners and society.
Disease, violence, and radicalization fester in these broken spaces. Building more prisons will not solve anything unless the present system learns to dispense justice speedier and fairer.
Conclusion
Pakistan is at a juncture, and prison overcrowding is no longer a bureaucratic issue at this point: it has now become a matter of national conscience. In order to restore the balance of justice, state action must be immediate and urgent: speedier trials, changes in the laws governing bail, and humane forms of punishment to replace imprisonment. No longer time for promises. Every day of delay adds to the mute suffering of thousands. True justice cannot exist while its foundations remain trapped behind bars.
Campaigners have spray painted two local Labour Party offices in support of hunger strikers in UK detention. A group called ‘Justice for the Hunger Strikers’ carried out the actions on 7 and 8 December. They targeted the Harrow office of Gareth Thomas MP and the Sheffield office of Louise Haigh MP.
On 2 November, 7 prisoners began a collective open-ended hunger strike. An eighth, with diabetes, is on a partial hunger strike. They’re all on remand in relation to two actions by Palestine Action, which took place before proscription. This includes a raid at Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems in Filton, Bristol and an action at RAF Brize Norton. They each face up to two years on remand before trial, far exceeding the pre-trial custody time limit of six months.
The hunger strikers’ demands
They’re now entering their sixth week on hunger strike, and are demanding an end to censorship, a right to a fair trial, bail, de-proscription of Palestine Action and an end to Ministry of Defence contracts for Elbit Systems. The demand for an end to censorship means allowing them to have unrestricted access to their own mail and books, as well as being able to freely associate with one another.
The hunger strikers are entering a critical phase of the hunger strike, where irreversible damage to their health is likely. Despite this, the Ministry of Justice has failed to respond to their demands. When confronted by family members of the hunger strikers at a local MP event on 5th December, Labour’s Justice Secretary David Lammy said “I didn’t know anything about this”.
A spokesperson for Justice for the Hunger Strikers said:
If the Labour cabinet is so intent on ignoring the hunger strikers then we will take the demands to their doors. We have started with only paint but we make a promise to our hunger strikers – and to our so-called government – that we shall continue the campaign each day their demands are not met.
David Lammy has failed to abide by his own policy of responding to communications in relation to the hunger strike, and his proclaimed ignorance is no defence to permitting the political prisoners’ condition to rapidly decline without so much as a response.
This is an emergency, and we all must act as such. We stand by the hunger strikers, and their resistance from behind bars inspires us all to escalate our resistance on the outside.
Justice Secretary David Lammy has claimed that he has no idea about the political prisoners currently on hunger strike in the UK.Shahmina Alam confronted the ‘justice’ secretary about her brother, Kamran Ahmed, who is currently on hunger strike. Shamima explained that Kamran’s family have written to both Lammy and the Ministry of Justice – and Lammy maintained that he hasn’t even heard about the hunger strikers.
Prisoners for Palestine posted the shocking clip of Lammy running away from hunger strikers families:
Justice Secretary and Deputy PM David Lammy runs away from hunger strikers family. It’s been 35 days of hunger striking in British prison with no response for him.
They demand immediate bail. They have been held in prison for upto 2 years without charge for Palestinian activism pic.twitter.com/LtWbetYva4
Does anyone really believe Lammy hasn’t heard of the hunger strikers?
Muhammad Umer Khalid became the seventh hunger striker on Thursday, December 4. He joined the other activists including, Kamran Ahmed, Amu Gib, and Jon Cink Mothin Ali, co-deputy leader of the Green Party reposted the post and added:
Burying your head won’t make things go away, we demand justice! We won’t go away until we have it!
Ali became the first politician to visit imprisoned Palestine Action activists on a prolonged hunger strike, calling their condition “horrifying” and “inhumane.” He visited two activists in HMP Bronzefield – Amu Gib and Jon Cink – describing them as on their “last legs,” visibly frail, and struggling with health issues after more than 30 days without food. In an exclusive interview with the Canary Ali described meeting the hunger strikers:
And, Lammy really doesn’t have a leg to stand on given the fact that Jeremy Corbyn wrote to him on November 20th to say that he was “gravely concerned” for the health of the hunger strikers and demanded an urgent meeting with the Justice Secretary to discuss the matter.
Corbyn built his appeal around the desperate situation of his own constituent, Amu Gib. Gib has been locked up on remand since June 2025, with his trial not even on the calendar until January 2027. This timeline, Corbyn noted, means Gib is facing over eighteen months in pre-trial detention, far exceeding the standard custodial limit of 182 days.
Gib and Ahmed are among two dozen Palestine Action activists currently imprisoned without trial, with several now having been detained for over a year. The letter condemned the government’s earlier proscription of Palestine Action. And, Corbyn also took Lammy to task for his role in Israel’s genocide of Palestine:
This government could have ended arms sales to Israel and upheld its legal obligations to prevent genocide. Instead, it is criminalising those who dare to oppose British complicity in the mass murder of Palestinians. We will keep campaigning for an end to military cooperation with Israel, and for the only path to peace: freedom and justice for the Palestinian people.
Corbyn has also tabled an Early Day Motion on Thursday, December 4, supported by thirteen other MPs including Zarah Sultana, which expresses:
its extreme concern that six prisoners associated with Palestine Action have felt that they had no other recourse to protest against their prison conditions but to launch a hunger strike; and calls upon the Secretary of State for Justice to intervene urgently to ensure their treatment is humane and their human rights are upheld.
Mothin Ali, Jeremy Corbyn, and Zarah Sultana have all done what they can to draw the attention of the media and other politicians to the political prisoners who have been pushed to a hunger strike. But, Lammy scurrying away from the families of the hunger strikers says it all about the British political class’ relationship to Israel’s genocide: immoral and afraid of consequences.
It’s been quite the week for Donald Trump and his top law enforcement officials. First, FBI head Kash Patel was roundly mocked for his incompetence. Then, Patel and the attorney general excitedly announced that they’d caught the Washington pipe bomber. Now, it turns out Trump may have already pardoned the guy:
Kash Patel is Trump’s head of the FBI; he’s also a conspiracist who wrote children’s books based on the president:
This is Kash Patel—the author of a “children’s” book that teaches kids the U.S. is a kingdom, indoctrinates them in false conspiracy theories, assaults democracy and primes them to be obedient MAGA fascists. pic.twitter.com/Cqv2jZ1vxW
Although he targets his literary works at children, his policing is actually less well thought-out than that. As reported by the Guardian:
According to the assessment, on 11 September, the day after conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Patel arrived in Provo, Utah, but refused to leave the FBI jet without an appropriate raid jacket. A described “highly respected” source in the report explained that agents working the Kirk investigation had to stop their work to find a medium-sized jacket for Patel. When a female agent’s jacket was delivered, Patel complained about missing Velcro patches on the sleeves and refused to disembark until Swat team members removed patches from their own uniforms and attached them to the borrowed jacket.
The same source confirmed media reports that Patel “yelled” at the special agent-in-charge and directed “an expletive-laden tirade” over “perceived blunders” in the case. Dan Bongino, the deputy director, later telephoned to apologize, “saying that never should have happened”.
Patel has also allegedly been using the FBI to facilitate his romantic entanglements:
FBI Director Kash Patel ordered agents to drive his girlfriend Alex Wilkins’ intoxicated friend home on at least two occasions.
In one instance, Patel called the head of Wilkins’ security detail and yelled at him to carry out the request on behalf of his girlfriend.
FBI Director Kash Patel is using taxpayer funds to fly around on a $62 million jet to his girlfriend’s concerts…all while Americans struggle to pay for healthcare, rent, and groceries. pic.twitter.com/0dKXgAbfpk
Bringing us to Patel’s bounceback, the following clip was from the pipe bomber announcement (we’d advise you don’t watch the full video at work, because it’s a hardcore 30 minutes of Trump officials sucking each other off):
Irony just died on live TV.
Kash Patel actually said: “When you attack our nation’s Capitol, you attack the very being of our way of life. We will always refute it and combat it.”
This from the same crew that pardoned 1,500 attackers and turned January 6 into a loyalty test.… pic.twitter.com/zFtCWeGiGu
The suspected pipe bomber is one Brian Cole Jr., who placed bombs outside the Democratic and Republican party headquarters the day before the January 6th insurrection-attempt. According to NBC:
The man charged with planting two pipe bombs near the Democratic and Republican party headquarters on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol told the FBI he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the matter.
They add:
Trump’s claims about the 2020 election were part of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into his efforts to overturn the results. In his final report on the investigation, Smith said that Trump “inspired his supporters to commit acts of physical violence” by spreading “demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false” claims about the 2020 election. Trump has publicly maintained that he believed he won the election.
As a matter of contract or statutory language, “related to” is considered perhaps one of the broadest qualifiers possible. There’s case law on that exact language. Yes, he’s got a very good argument, will be fact-specific.
Imran Khan is being held in a death cell in solitary confinement, his court-imposed rights ignored. He’s been held for years on one bogus charge after another
As dozens of agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement surged into Minnesota’s Twin Cities this week as part of a federal crackdown targeting the Somali diaspora, it struck fear in the hearts of community members.
It’s not just immigrants, however, worried over ICE’s presence. The rhetoric behind the operation — notably racist rants from Donald Trump about Somalis at large — prompted legal residents of Somali descent to reel from fear.
“I’ve had a number of people reach out to me who are actually U.S. citizens who are wondering if they can have their citizenship revoked for a traffic ticket, or asking how they can prove their citizenship,” said Linus Chan, the faculty director of the University of Minnesota Law School’s Detainee Rights Clinic. “People are worried about their family and friends and neighbors, but even citizens are worried for themselves.”
“This is absolutely a racist weaponization of ICE against an entire community.”
The operation, announced this week amid a rising tide of vitriol aimed at Minnesota’s Somali diaspora, isn’t likely to result in booming deportations from Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The Somali community is largely made up of American citizens and permanent residents.
“Ultimately this isn’t going to yield results in terms of numbers of arrests or removal of people,” said Ana Pottratz Acosta, who leads the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School. “This is absolutely a racist weaponization of ICE against an entire community.”
Though many Somali residents cannot be legally deported, some community members are at risk. In some cases, however, the number of potential immigrants with issues doesn’t accord with the scale of the crackdown.
Take temporary protected status, or TPS, which is bestowed on some refugees in the country. The ICE raids came on the heels of a decision by Trump last month to rescind TPS for Somali residents, effectively depriving them of legal status in the country. While previous moves to rescind TPS for refugee communities have affected hundreds of thousands of refugees from Haiti and Venezuela, the number of Somalis with TPS stood at just 705, according to a congressional report earlier this year. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said about 300 Somalis previously receiving protected status are living in Minnesota.
Still, things are tense as reports of ICE raids pop up across the city, according to Luis Argueta, a spokesperson for Monarca Rapid Response, a community group that tracks ICE.
“We’re really feeling it,” Argueta said. “We have cases where ICE is showing up at three or four locations across our Twin Cities.”
Argueta said an observer with Monarca Rapid Response had witnessed an incident in which federal agents grappled with a man of East African descent in front of a house, telling onlookers they were trying to identify the man. In a video of that incident posted to TikTok by MPR, the local NPR affiliate, agents can be heard saying they will release the man if he gives them the information they’re looking for.
“They literally just profiled an East African man.”
“We are identifying who he is,” an agent is heard saying. “We will let you know if there is a warrant.”
Argueta said, “They literally just profiled an East African man.”
According to MPR, the agents left the scene shortly thereafter without anyone in custody. In video captured by a local Fox affiliate showing a similar scene, two men from Somalia were questioned by masked ICE agents before showing their papers and being let go.
And with a dearth of deportable Somalis to detain, ICE agents have been going after Latino immigrants in their stead, Argueta said.
“The rest of the immigrant community in the Twin Cities is on alert,” Argueta said. “It really feels like this administration is going to use whatever narrative that it wants to spin up to justify the damage and the hurt.”
Targeting All Somalis
Minnesota is home to the largest Somali diaspora community in the country, with steady growth since the 1990s, when a civil war drove refugees to the state as part of resettlement programs. In the decades since, Somalis have become a significant minority and a political force, with Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar as their most visible face.
Omar has been a constant thorn in the side of Trump, who singled her out by name in comments this week justifying the crackdown.
The remarks about Omar were part of escalating rhetoric from the right against Somalis. Last week, Trump made baseless claims in a social media post that “Somalian gangs” were “roving the streets looking for ‘prey.’”
He continued his tirade at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, at which he reportedly awoke after dozing off to rage against Somalis, whom he described as “garbage.” Trump spoke of immigrants but also showed little compunction about addressing Somalis at large. Even the New York Times, usually hesitant to directly ascribe bias to right-wing rhetoric, said the “outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry.”
The racist rhetoric from the president and his allies has prompted a sense of “continual pain” in the Somali diaspora, said one community activist, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“The response from families in the community is one of overwhelming fear, based on what the president is saying,” the activist told The Intercept. “What did our families run to safety for if we’re just going to be attacked in our new home?”
Even in nearby states with significantly smaller Somali populations, the rhetoric has played out in real life, the activist said.
“I was speaking to one young brother in Omaha, Nebraska, who said that the energy had really shifted in that state,” they said. “Even at the local grocery store, he said, people don’t treat him the same. It’s just bias.”
Trump has made anti-immigrant language a centerpiece of his platform since he announced his first run for the White House in 2015. His comments against the Somali community of Minnesota may have been the most specific broadside against a single ethnic group, said Chan.
“I can’t think of a time in recent U.S. history that a sitting U.S. president has called the people from an entire country ‘garbage,’” Chan said. “Even where there is a historical precedent, it’s one that we thought we were beyond.”
Twelve Arrests?
It’s unclear how many arrests have been made so far. ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, have refused to give specifics.
In one press release on Thursday, however, Homeland Security officials said that at least 12 people had been arrested so far. As with other recent immigration sweeps across the country, Homeland Security labeled the detainees as the “worst of the worst,” saying the arrestees included people with convictions for sexual assault of a minor.
Many, however, had minor criminal infractions, including driving while intoxicated. And others still had checkered pasts that they had long since made amends for.
Among the detainees picked up this week by ICE was Abdulkadir Sharif Abdi, whom the agency described in a press release as a gang member.
Abdi’s wife, Rhoda Christenson, told The Intercept that she was driving to pick up a prescription for her mother on Monday when she received a call from a neighbor telling her that Abdi had been arrested by ICE.
Christenson acknowledged her husband’s criminal past — which led to a deportation order during the first Trump administration — and his struggles with addiction, but said he’s been sober for more than 15 years. He now works at a homeless shelter and has become a staple of the local recovery community.
“He’s such a light in the community,” Christenson said in an interview Friday morning. “He has so much to offer and shows so much love and respect for the homeless population he works with.”
Christenson was sent reeling again Thursday when she saw the allegations from Homeland Security that her husband was an active gang member, something she categorically denied.
“How can they just lie like that?” she asked. “I know social media is crazy, but a government website is something we have to be able to rely on for accurate information. It’s really disheartening and it makes me worried for how they will treat him.”
Federal immigration agents pepper-sprayed and shot crowd suppression munitions at newly sworn-in Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva during a confrontation with protesters in Tucson on Friday.
A video Grijalva posted online shows an agent in green fatigues indiscriminately dousing a line of several people — Grijalva included — with pepper spray outside a popular taco restaurant.
“You guys need to calm down and get out,” Grijalva says, coughing amid a cloud of spray. In another clip, an agent fires a pepper ball at Grijalva’s feet.
Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin denied that Grijalva was pepper-sprayed in a statement, saying that if her claims were true, “this would be a medical marvel. But they’re not true. She wasn’t pepper sprayed.”
“She was in the vicinity of someone who *was* pepper sprayed as they were obstructing and assaulting law enforcement,” McLaughlin continued. The comment suggested a lack of understanding as to how pepper spray works. Fired from a distance, pepper-spray canisters create a choking cloud that will affect anyone in the vicinity, as Grijalva’s video showed.
In a separate video Grijalva posted to Facebook, the Democratic representative from Southern Arizona described community members confronting approximately 40 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in several vehicles.
“I was here, this is like the restaurant I come to literally once a week,” she said, “and was sprayed in the face by a very aggressive agent, pushed around by others.” Grijalva maintained that she was not being aggressive. “I was asking for clarification,” she said. “Which is my right as a member of Congress.”
Video from journalists on the ground show dozens of heavily armed agents — members ICE’s high-powered Homeland Security Investigations wing and the Department of Homeland Security’s SWAT-style Special Response teams — deploying flash-bang grenades, tear gas, and pepper-ball rounds at a crowd of immigrant rights protesters near Taco Giro, a popular mom-and-pop restaurant in west Tucson.
The Tucson Sentinel, a local outlet whose reporter was pepper-sprayed in the face Friday, reported that DHS targeted the restaurant as part of a larger human trafficking investigation dating back to the Biden administration. Protesters cornered several of the agency’s vehicles and kept them from leaving the area for approximately an hour before reinforcements arrived, the outlet reported.
According to McLaughlin, two “law enforcement officers were seriously injured by this mob that Rep. Adelita Grijalva joined.” She provided no evidence or details for the claim.
“Presenting one’s self as a ‘Member of Congress’ doesn’t give you the right to obstruct law enforcement,” McLaughlin wrote. The DHS press secretary did not respond to a question about the munitions fired at Grijalva’s feet.
Grijalva “was doing her job, standing up for her community,” Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said in a social media post Friday. “Pepper-spraying a sitting member of Congress is disgraceful, unacceptable, and absolutely not what we voted for. Period.”
Additional footage from Friday’s scene shows Grijalva and members of the media face-to-face with several heavily armed, uniformed Homeland Security Investigation agents as they loaded at least two people — both with their hands zip-tied behind their backs — into a large gray van.
Grijalva identifies herself as a member of Congress and asks where they are being taken. One of the masked agents initially replies, “I can’t verify that.” Another pushes the congresswoman and others back with forearm. “Don’t push me,” Grijalva says multiple times. A third masked agent steps in front of the Arizona lawmaker, makes a comment about “assaulting a federal officer,” and then says the people taken into custody would be transferred to “federal jail.”
“We saw people directly sprayed, members of our press, everybody that was with me, my staff member, myself,” Grijalva said in her video report from Friday’s chaotic scene. She described the events as the latest example of a Trump administration that is flagrantly flouting the rule of law, due process, and the Constitution.
“They’re literally disappearing people from the streets,” she said. “I can just only imagine how if they’re going to treat me like that, how they’re treating other people.” Earlier in the week, Grijavla similarly spoke out against a warrantless Border Patrol raid on a humanitarian aid station in Arizona, calling the operation “lawless, intentional, and part of a broader pattern of unchecked enforcement that treats border communities as if the Constitution does not apply.”
The violence Grijalva experienced Friday marked the latest chapter in what has been a dramatic year for Arizona’s first Latina representative.
Grijalva won a special election in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District earlier this year to replace her father, Raúl Grijalva, a towering progressive figure in the state who represented Tucson for more than 20 years before passing away in March.
Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson delayed the younger Grijalva’s swearing in for nearly two months amid the longest government shutdown in history. Grijalva would add the deciding signature on a discharge petition to release files related to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, which she signed immediately after taking office.
Update: December 5, 2025, 7:31 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with additional information about Friday’s ICE action and Rep. Adelita Grijalva.
Six Just Stop Oil supporters who were denied all legal defences during their trial were today given sentences of up to 30 months at Southwark Crown Court for peacefully climbing gantries on the M25 in 2022, to demand an end to new fossil fuel projects.
Just Stop Oil M25 action
Cosmo Cattell, Adelheid Russenberger, Jane Touil, Andrew Dames, Clara O’Callaghan and Michael Dunk took action on the M25 on 8 November 2022.
The six were among scores of Just Stop Oil supporters who climbed on gantries that week. They were sounding the alarm about the government’s plan to license over 100 new oil and gas projects against all expert advice.
They were found guilty of intentionally or recklessly causing a public nuisance in October 2025 in an 8 day trial before Judge Perrins, during which they were denied all legal defences.
Additionally, in a break with every previous Just Stop Oil trial for gantry actions on the M25, the prosecution refused to accept any agreed facts on the climate crisis as part of the evidence.
Sentences
Today, Judge Perrins handed down prison sentences of between 20 and 30 months to Adelheid Russenberger, Jane Touil, Andrew Dames and Michael Dunk. Cosmo Cattell and Clara O’Callaghan were given suspended sentences.
Adelheid Russenberger was sentenced to 30 months and Jane Touil to 20 months, with no costs. Each will serve 40% in custody. Andrew Dames and Michael Dunk will each serve 40% of 26 months and must pay £2,480 and £4,380 in costs respectively. Cosmo Catterall and Clara O’Callaghan were each sentenced to 20 months suspended for 2 years with 200 hours of unpaid work and £750 prosecution costs.
Three of the Just Stop Oil group had already spent time on remand in 2022 following the action. Adelheid Russenberger and Jane Touil spent 42 days and 5 days respectively in Bronzefield prison. Michael Dunk was remanded for 8 days. Whilst on bail in 2022, Cosmo Cattell spent 94 days living under a curfew and Michael Dunk 187 days. The Judge indicated that previous time on remand would be deducted from these sentences.
Mitigation
Speaking in mitigation today, Adelheid Russenberger, 34, a history PhD student from London said:
I believe that I acted morally and according to my conscience.
There is no justice in climate breakdown and without a stable climate no-one can live, let alone thrive.
I climbed onto the gantry to try and prevent the government’s disastrous plans to license more North Sea Oil and gas extraction – oil and gas that would have pushed us closer to lethal irreversible tipping points.
I climbed on a gantry because I refused to ignore that basic moral principle of acting to protect life.
Also speaking in mitigation, Jane Touil, 59, a visually impaired former crown servant from Rochdale, said:
We are in an unprecedented situation. Yet the law says our protest was not justified. Not necessary. Not reasonable or proportionate.
Disruption from flooding, extreme heat, extreme weather and wildfires is not a public nuisance. I am.
The law will not save us. I have always tried to live and act according to my conscience. I call on everyone in this courtroom and in this country to do the same.
Politicians will not make the change we need, but we can.
The judge’s position
In his sentencing remarks, Judge Perrins said that it would be wholly wrong to take the individual actions of each defendant in isolation. He said each knowingly took part in a much broader plan to cause as much disruption as possible.
Together the Just Stop Oil protests had eventually affected approximately 228,000 vehicles and caused 18,000 hours of vehicle delays. They affected nearly a quarter of a million people who were trying to go about their daily lives.
He said he was satisfied having heard the evidence that not one of the defendants took seriously the impact they had caused.
However, he noted that the defendants had acted on their conscience which would lessen their culpability.
No regrets
Speaking ahead of the sentencing, Clara O’Callaghan, 21, a recent graduate from Edinburgh said:
I have no regrets. I took action because I felt I had no choice.
By planning to license new oil and gas, our government was prepared to recklessly destroy my future and drive us even faster towards mass crop failure, starvation, water scarcity and war.
Civil resistance and mass disruption gave us a chance of forcing them to change. I was willing to risk prison because it is nothing compared to what is coming down the road.
I could not sit by and do nothing whilst this horror unfolds.
Touil added:
I am at peace with all the decisions I have made and the actions I have taken in support of love, life, humanity and a liveable future.
In the worst crisis humanity has ever faced, the government chose to legislate to silence dissent, rather than implementing policies to avert disaster.
People of conscience are imprisoned, while others remain free to continue destroying our life support systems.
Andrew Dames, 63, a Quaker, engineer and father of four from Cambridge, said:
Our government’s continued commitment to No New Oil that we and the country asked for – that is all that matters.
And a Just Stop Oil spokesperson summed up:
In 2024 Just Stop Oil successfully won its original demand of ‘no new oil and gas’ and on March 27th 2025 announced an end to the campaign of action.
However, our supporters will continue to tell the truth in court, to speak out for our political prisoners and to help build what comes next.
Luigi Mangione appears for the second day of a suppression of evidence hearing in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan Criminal Court on Dec. 2, 2025 in New York City.Photo: Curtis Means/Pool via Getty Images
Luigi Mangione’s legal defense fund has swelled to more than $1.3 million and is still growing daily. As the December 4 Legal Committee, we created that fund — but it would mean nothing without the donations, prayers, and support of people from around the world. As corporate social media platforms censored support for Luigi, the fundraiser page became a place for people to share stories of senseless death and suffering at the hands of the for-profit health insurance industry in this country.
There is a deep irony in the widespread support for Luigi. People celebrate an alleged murderer not because they hate reasonable debate or lust for political violence, but out of respect for themselves and love for others. Across the political spectrum, Americans experience the corporate bureaucracies of our health care system as cruel, exploitative, and maddening. They feel powerless in the face of the unnecessary dehumanization, death, and financial ruin of their neighbors and loved ones.
One year ago, the December 4 killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson temporarily suspended the usually intractable left vs. right polarization of America. Ben Shapiro’s audience revolted when he accused Luigi supporters of being “evil leftists.” Donors to Luigi’s fund come from across the political spectrum, and a common theme among them is their acute realization that the political differences of the culture war are largely manufactured to benefit the powerful. This was a crucial difference between Mangione’s alleged act and, for example, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. While the latter intensified existing political divides, the former seemed to strike upon the common ground of a different political landscape: from red vs. blue, or left vs. right, to down vs. up.
Luigi Mangione’s mugshot painted by the artist Sam McKinniss.Courtesy: Sam McKinniss
But a year on, it is clear that even bipartisan public support for killing a health care CEO on the street and the endless stories of suffering and death as a result of insurance claim denials are not enough to depose the for-profit health care system. Today, Medicare for All looks even more politically unrealistic than when Bernie Sanders made it the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.
This fact poses a challenge for Luigi’s supporters: Will his alleged act be remembered as nothing more than a salacious contribution to the true crime genre? Will we settle for him being installed as an edgy icon of celebrity culture, used to market fast-fashion brands and who knows what next?
We do not think his supporters, or anyone else who believes that health care is a human right, should accept that. But what would it take to make the events of last December 4 into a movement to build a more humane health care system in America?
The time has come for the long struggle for the right to health care to make a strategic shift from protest to political direct action.
For the last year, we have been asking this question of medical professionals, community organizers, scholars, and ourselves.
In our forthcoming book, “Depose: Luigi Mangione and the Right to Health,” we offer the beginnings of an answer: The history of the struggle for the right to health in America shows that it is indeed politically unrealistic to expect politicians to deliver it from above — but our own dignity and intelligence demands that this right be asserted by all of us from below. The widespread support for Luigi shows that the time has come for the long struggle for the right to health care to make a strategic shift from protest to political direct action.
Consider the sit-in movements to end Jim Crow laws and desegregate American cities. These were protests, insofar as participants drew attention to unjust laws — but they were also political direct actions. Organizers were collectively breaking those laws, and in doing so, were enacting desegregation. Activists organized themselves to support and protect each other in collectively nullifying laws that had no moral authority and, in the process, acted as if they were already free. This is what we mean by a shift from protest to direct action.
Less well known is the role of direct action in winning the eight-hour workday. For half a century, industrial workers had been struggling to shorten their hours so they could have some rest and joy in their lives. One decisive moment in this struggle came in 1884, when the American Federation of Labor resolved that two years later, on May 1, their workers would enact the eight-hour day. After eight hours, they would go on strike and walk off the job together. They called on other unions around the country to do the same and a number did — including in Chicago, where police deployed political violence to attack striking workers, killing two. While this action did not immediately win the struggle everywhere, it did succeed in beginning to normalize the 8-hour day and raised the bar for everywhere else to eventually do the same. The key is that this could only happen when workers stopped demanding something politically unrealistic and started changing political reality themselves.
The struggle for the right to health care has been ongoing in the United States for at least a century. At every turn, it has been thwarted by industry lobbyists and the politicians they control. But what would it look like to strategically shift the struggle for the right to health care in the U.S.? How would health care providers go on strike or engage in direct action without harming patients?
We found the beginning of an answer from Dr. Michael Fine, who has called on his fellow physicians to organize for a different kind of strike: not halting all their labor, but stopping the aspects of their work that are unrelated to their responsibility as healers. Fine writes, “We need to refuse, together, to use the electronic medical records until they change the software so that those computers free us to look at and listen to patients instead of looking at and listening to computer screens.”
All of us could organize to free the labor of health care from the corporate bureaucracies that act as parasites on the relationship between caregiver and patient.
A strike by health care workers could mean not the cessation of care, but liberating this critical work from the restraints imposed by profit-seeking companies. Beginning from this idea, all of us could organize to free the labor of health care from the corporate bureaucracies that act as parasites on the relationship between caregiver and patient.
If we step outside of our usual political bubbles and into a direct action movement to assert the universal right to health care, we might find that the common ground that Luigi’s alleged actions exposed is the precise point from which the wider political landscape may be remade.
For five months, Daniel Sanchez Estrada was the prisoner of a government that has branded him an “Antifa Cell operative.” He was accused of moving a box of anarchist zines from one suburb of Dallas to another after a protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On the day before Thanksgiving, he was released without warning or explanation. He walked out to a jail parking lot relishing the fresh air — and watching over his shoulder.
During the week that followed, Sanchez Estrada savored his time with family members and worried that his release might have been an accident. Apparently, he was right.
“I just have to go through this process. It’s necessary to show that I’m not the person they say I am.”
On Thursday, Sanchez Estrada turned himself in to await a trial that could be months away.
It was another swerve in the case of a man who has been demonized by the federal government for actions he took after a protest against Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Civil liberties advocates have decried the case against him as “guilt by literature.” (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas and the Federal Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
In a Wednesday night interview during his final hours of freedom, Sanchez Estrada said the decision to voluntarily surrender himself was gut-wrenching.
“As scary as it is, I’m innocent,” he said. “I just have to go through this process. It’s necessary to show that I’m not the person they say I am. I’m not fleeing. I’m not hiding. Because I’m innocent. I haven’t done anything.”
Sanchez Estrada spoke to The Intercept outside an ice cream shop in an upscale shopping mall in Fort Worth, Texas. He was set to turn himself back into jail 16 hours after the interview — but before that, he was treating his 12-year-old stepdaughter to sweets during his first meeting with her as a free man since his arrest in July.
Prairieview Protest
Prosecutors allege that Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, attended a chaotic protest outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center on July 4 that ended with a police officer wounded by gunfire. A separate defendant is the sole person accused of firing a gun at the officer.
The gathering outside the Alvarado, Texas, detention center happened in the context of huge rise in the number of immigrants detained under Trump, from 39,000 in January to 65,000 in November, which has been accompanied by reports of dire conditions inside.
Supporters of the Prairieland defendants say the protesters hoped to cause a ruckus with fireworks in a show of solidarity. The government has accused members of what it dubs the “North Texas antifa cell” of rioting and attempted murder.
No one claims that Sanchez Estrada was present at the protest. Instead, he is accused of moving anarchist zines from his parents’ house to another residence near Dallas on July 6 after Rueda called him from jail. Sanchez Estrada was arrested when the move was spotted by an FBI surveillance team, according to the government.
“My charge is allegedly having a box containing magazine ‘zines,’ books, and artwork.”
Prosecutors said the zines contained “anti-law enforcement, anti-government and anti-Trump sentiments.” In a statement made outside of his interview, Sanchez Estrada said that possession of such items is clearly protected by the First Amendment.
“My charge is allegedly having a box containing magazine ‘zines,’ books, and artwork,” Sanchez Estrada said. “Items that should be protected under the First Amendment ‘freedom of speech.’ If this is happening to me now, it’s only a matter of time before it happens to you.”
Civil liberties groups such as the Freedom of the Press Foundation have denounced his case as “guilt by literature.” They warn that his could be the first of many such prosecutions in the wake of a presidential memo from Trump targeting “antifa” and other forms of “anti-Americanism.”
The purported “North Texas antifa cell” has been cited by FBI Director Kash Patel and others as a prime example of a supposed surge in the number of attacks on ICE officers — although a recent Los Angeles Times analysis found that unlike the incident in Texas, most of those alleged attacks resulted in no injury.
Sanchez Estrada faces up to 20 years on counts of corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents. The stakes are higher for him than other defendants because he is a green card holder, which ICE spotlighted in a social media post that included his picture and immigration history.
“I Did Not Participate”
Sanchez Estrada also worries about the fate of his wife, who faces life imprisonment if convicted. She pleaded not guilty in an arraignment Wednesday. The case is currently set for trial on January 20.
“I want to be very clear. I did not participate. I was not aware nor did I have any knowledge about the events that transpired on July 4 outside the Prairieland Detention Center,” Sanchez Estrada said in his statement. “My feeling is that I was only arrested because I’m married to Mari Rueda, who is being accused of being at the noise demo showing support to migrants who are facing deportation under deplorable conditions.”
Sanchez Estrada said that he spent his months in jail anguishing over how his stepdaughter would be affected and how his parents, for whom he is the primary supporter, would make ends meet.
A nature lover who peppers his speech with references to “the creator,” for Sanchez Estrada one of the toughest things about being in jail was not being able to breathe fresh air or watch the sun set.
He said he was immediately suspicious when jail officers told him that he was being released.
“I thought they would be waiting in the parking lot to arrest me.”
“You normally would assume the worst when you’re in there. I just did not believe them. I thought they would be waiting in the parking lot to arrest me,” he said.
Soon, however, Sanchez Estrada was eating vegan tacos and spending time with friends and family.
“It is something just beautiful to see — everyone rooting for you,” he said.
He fears what could happen when he returns to custody. Still, he will have a reminder of his brief return to life on the outside: freshly inked tattoos of a raccoon and an opossum.
“They’ve been here even before people,” he said. “They’re wild animals, and they’re beautiful.”
For five months, Daniel Sanchez Estrada was the prisoner of a government that has branded him an “Antifa Cell operative.” He was accused of moving a box of anarchist zines from one suburb of Dallas to another after a protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On the day before Thanksgiving, he was released without warning or explanation. He walked out to a jail parking lot relishing the fresh air — and watching over his shoulder.
During the week that followed, Sanchez Estrada savored his time with family members and worried that his release might have been an accident. Apparently, he was right.
“I just have to go through this process. It’s necessary to show that I’m not the person they say I am.”
On Thursday, Sanchez Estrada turned himself in to await a trial that could be months away.
It was another swerve in the case of a man who has been demonized by the federal government for actions he took after a protest against Donald Trump’simmigration crackdown. Civil liberties advocates have decried the case against him as “guilt by literature.” (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas declined to comment and the Federal Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request.)
In a Wednesday night interview during his final hours of freedom, Sanchez Estrada said the decision to voluntarily surrender himself was gut-wrenching.
“As scary as it is, I’m innocent,” he said. “I just have to go through this process. It’s necessary to show that I’m not the person they say I am. I’m not fleeing. I’m not hiding. Because I’m innocent. I haven’t done anything.”
Sanchez Estrada spoke to The Intercept outside an ice cream shop in an upscale shopping mall in Fort Worth, Texas. He was set to turn himself back into jail 16 hours after the interview — but before that, he was treating his 12-year-old stepdaughter to sweets during his first meeting with her as a free man since his arrest in July.
Prairieview Protest
Prosecutors allege that Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, attended a chaotic protest outside ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center on July 4 that ended with a police officer wounded by gunfire. A separate defendant is the sole person accused of firing a gun at the officer.
The gathering outside the Alvarado, Texas, detention center happened in the context of huge rise in the number of immigrants detained under Trump, from 39,000 in January to 65,000 in November, which has been accompanied by reports of dire conditions inside.
Supporters of the Prairieland defendants say the protesters hoped to cause a ruckus with fireworks in a show of solidarity. The government has accused members of what it dubs the “North Texas antifa cell” of rioting and attempted murder.
No one claims that Sanchez Estrada was present at the protest. Instead, he is accused of moving anarchist zines from his parents’ house to another residence near Dallas on July 6 after Rueda called him from jail. Sanchez Estrada was arrested when the move was spotted by an FBI surveillance team, according to the government.
“My charge is allegedly having a box containing magazine ‘zines,’ books, and artwork.”
Prosecutors said the zines contained “anti-law enforcement, anti-government and anti-Trump sentiments.” In a statement made outside of his interview, Sanchez Estrada said that possession of such items is clearly protected by the First Amendment.
“My charge is allegedly having a box containing magazine ‘zines,’ books, and artwork,” Sanchez Estrada said. “Items that should be protected under the First Amendment ‘freedom of speech.’ If this is happening to me now, it’s only a matter of time before it happens to you.”
Civil liberties groups such as the Freedom of the Press Foundation have denounced his case as “guilt by literature.” They warn that his could be the first of many such prosecutions in the wake of a presidential memo from Trump targeting “antifa” and other forms of “anti-Americanism.”
The purported “North Texas antifa cell” has been cited by FBI Director Kash Patel and others as a prime example of a supposed surge in the number of attacks on ICE officers — although a recent Los Angeles Times analysis found that unlike the incident in Texas, most of those alleged attacks resulted in no injury.
Sanchez Estrada faces up to 20 years on counts of corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents. The stakes are higher for him than other defendants because he is a green card holder, which ICE spotlighted in a social media post that included his picture and immigration history.
“I Did Not Participate”
Sanchez Estrada also worries about the fate of his wife, who faces life imprisonment if convicted. She pleaded not guilty in an arraignment Wednesday. The case is currently set for trial on January 20.
“I want to be very clear. I did not participate. I was not aware nor did I have any knowledge about the events that transpired on July 4 outside the Prairieland Detention Center,” Sanchez Estrada said in his statement. “My feeling is that I was only arrested because I’m married to Mari Rueda, who is being accused of being at the noise demo showing support to migrants who are facing deportation under deplorable conditions.”
Sanchez Estrada said that he spent his months in jail anguishing over how his stepdaughter would be affected and how his parents, for whom he is the primary supporter, would make ends meet.
A nature lover who peppers his speech with references to “the creator,” for Sanchez Estrada one of the toughest things about being in jail was not being able to breathe fresh air or watch the sun set.
He said he was immediately suspicious when jail officers told him that he was being released.
“I thought they would be waiting in the parking lot to arrest me.”
“You normally would assume the worst when you’re in there. I just did not believe them. I thought they would be waiting in the parking lot to arrest me,” he said.
Soon, however, Sanchez Estrada was eating vegan tacos and spending time with friends and family.
“It is something just beautiful to see — everyone rooting for you,” he said.
He fears what could happen when he returns to custody. Still, he will have a reminder of his brief return to life on the outside: freshly inked tattoos of a raccoon and an opossum.
“They’ve been here even before people,” he said. “They’re wild animals, and they’re beautiful.”
Update: December 4, 2025, 12:58 p.m. ET This story has been updated to reflect that, after publication, the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas declined to comment.
A Quaker is appealing her climate conviction after a judge threatened the jury with contempt of court if they found defendants not guilty according to their conscience.
On Thursday 4 December the Royal Courts of Justice will hear the appeal of five women convicted of criminal damage for breaking a bank’s windows in protest at their fossil fuel investments.
The main ground for the appeal from the five appellants is that Judge Reid wrongly directed the jury.
Liverpool Quaker Amy Pritchard was sentenced to 12 months in prison for her part in the action at JP Morgan’s European head office in London in September 2021.
She has set up an open letter to the court, outlining how the judge’s actions undermines her Quaker faith.
What the judge told the jury
At the trial in February 2024, Judge Silas Reid told the jury that they would be committing a criminal offence if they made a verdict on anything other than the evidence.
This direction is counter to the centuries-old principle of the independence of juries. This was established during the trial of two Quaker preachers in 1670. There’s even a marble plaque in the Old Bailey to commemorate it.
Under jury independence, or equity, jurors can acquit a defendant as a matter of conscience, irrespective of the directions of the judge.
Yet Judge Silas Reid directed the jury:
It is a criminal offence for a juror to do anything from which it can be concluded that a decision will be made on anything other than the evidence.
The appeal against his court’s convictions comes as Justice Secretary David Lammy plans to limit jury trial.
Critics say this would undermine a vital counterbalance for the people in resisting the power of the state.
Pritchard said:
Quaker faith and persecution are the origins of this vital legal principle of conscience, reaffirmed in the Warner case at the Old Bailey.
This appeal reaches much further than this case and aims to contribute to protecting what democracy we have left, whilst holding this abuse of power to account.
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Judge Reid has previously banned people charged for climate-related protests from referring to their motivations in their defence.
In 2023 he imprisoned three people for using the words “climate change” and “fuel poverty” in his courtroom. This was after he had forbidden the use of those words.
In February this year, the UN highlighted UK courts in an international report on state repression of environmental protest.
Yesterday, the Canary published an article on justice secretary David Lammy confirming that defendants in ‘either-way’ trials will no longer have the right to a jury trial if their sentence would be three years or less. Today, as promised, we’ll go through some of the rebuttals to Lammy’s speech given by other MPs.
Jury trials—that’s not the argument you think it is
The deputy PM argued that, in England and Wales, magistrates have long handled most criminal cases. That is, around 90% of trials aren’t handled by a judge already. Overall, only 3% of trial cases go before a jury. Likewise, three-quarters of the trials that go to crown court will go before a jury.
Lammy seemed to think that these would be reassuring points in favour of rolling back the right to jury trial. However, they only served to beg the question: If so few trials go before a judge and jury, how will scrapping a fraction of them actually serve to reduce the backlog?
The bar council, the law society, the criminal bar association have all said that juries aren’t the problem. Even Lammy himself stated that a judge-alone trial would only be about 20% faster.
Whose line is it anyway?
And that’s not the only question raised by the justice secretary’s parliamentary speech. Tory MP Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, pointed out that:
the best opponent of the justice secretary’s plans to curb jury trials is the justice secretary himself.
This is quite a fun reveal: We didn’t know Jenrick was a Canary reader. You see, we actually used the same line ourselves in earlier reporting on Lammy’s plans. If the shadow chancellor is reading today, we’d like to invite him to go fuck himself.
However, his/our point was a good one. Back in 2020, Lammy published a report on racial disparity in the justice system. He pointed out that Black and brown people often opt for a jury trial due to their recognition of racism among the judiciary. Likewise, he stated that juries will always have more diverse experience than a single judge, and that juries help to eliminate prejudice.
In other words, Lammy knows that his current line of argument is racist.
Jury trials—’Miscarriages of justice’
Labour’s own Diane Abbott — often a bastion of reason within the PLP — made a similar point. She pointed out that Lammy waxed lyrical about wanting to help victims. In particular, he spoke about wanting swift justice for victims of violence against women and girls. However, Abbott stated:
The entire house is concerned about victims, including attacks on women and girls, but the entire house is also concerned about the men and women who will undoubtedly suffer miscarriages of justice if the right to trial by jury is curtailed.
She went on to ask how Lammy could stand up and talk about rolling back the right to a jury trial:
when he knows very well the category of defendant who will suffer the ill-effects of that?
Lammy, in response, bizarrely pointed out that many of the crimes committed by women command a sentence of no more than 12 months, and are usually handled by magistrates. He then tried to turn the conversation back to victims, stating:
It cannot be right that we’re asking women to wait.
So, when Abbott stated that the justice secretary knew who would lose out from the lack of jury trials: apparently, he did not.
Again: FUND THE COURTS
Robert Jenrick also pointed out that, on the morning of the debate, 50 crown courtrooms sat empty in England alone. Likewise, 21,000 court days went unused this year. If they were funded, estimates hold that the trial backlog would actually have shrunk by 10,000, rather than growing.
Lammy pointed out that many Crown and Magistrates’ Courts closed under Tory austerity. In his original speech, he argued that funding alone would not fix the problem. This places his assessment of the issue at odds with over 100 lawyers who stated outright that any funding should go to additional court sitting days within the existing system.
Those same lawyers also pointed out that Lammy’s new judge-alone court system would still place strain on existing court infrastructure. They’d still need holding cells, courtrooms, waiting rooms and the rest. Yesterday, the Lib Dem’s Jess Brown-Fuller echoed this sentiment. She highlighted the £1.3bn court maintenance backlog for our crumbling judicial infrastructure, which Lammy’s plans would only serve to entrench.
Time and again in yesterday’s parliamentary debate, Lammy chose to evade the questions that were put to him.
He had no response to his own former arguments that his current course of action will disproportionately disadvantage Black and brown people, and that eroding the right to jury trials will entrench racial disparity in the justice system.
He had no decent answer to why he was choosing to plough money into a new branch of the judiciary, rather than better funding and fixing the current infrastructure.
All he could do was appeal to the idea that swift justice is true justice. However, he missed a simple fact: the system he is setting up may indeed be marginally faster, but it certainly cannot be more just.
Homeland Security Investigations officers search for two individuals who fled the scene after being stopped while selling flowers on the side of the road on Nov. 16, 2025, in Charlotte, N.C.Photo: Ryan Murphy/Getty Images
On a chilly evening in mid-November, about 135 people gathered along a highway in Boone, North Carolina, a small Appalachian college town not known as a hotbed of leftist protest. They held signs reading “Nazis were just following orders too” and “Time to melt the ICE,” and chanted profane rebukes at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rumored to be in the area. “They came here thinking they wouldn’t be bothered,” one Appalachian State University student told The Appalachian at the impromptu rally. “Boone is a small, southern, white, mountain town. We need to let them know they’ll be bothered anywhere they go.” In a region often stereotyped as silently conservative, this flash of defiance was a startling sign that the battle lines of American politics are shifting in unexpected ways.
For the past several weeks, the Trump administration has been rolling out a mass deportation campaign of unprecedented scope — one that is now reaching deep into Appalachia. Branded “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a deployment of hundreds of Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents descended on North Carolina in mid-November, making sweeping arrests in and around Charlotte and into the state’s rural mountain counties.
Officials billed the effort as targeting the “worst of the worst” criminal aliens, but the numbers tell a different story: More than 370 people were arrested, only 44 of whom had any prior criminal record, according to DHS. The vast majority were ordinary undocumented residents — people going to work or school, not “violent criminals” — which underscores that the crackdown is less about public safety than meeting political quotas.
Indeed, Trump campaigned on conducting the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, vowing to round up 15 to 20 million people (which is more than the estimated 14 million undocumented people living in the U.S.) and pressuring ICE to triple its arrest rates to 3,000 per day. The federal dragnet has already driven ICE arrests to levels not seen in years; immigrants without criminal convictions now make up the largest share of detainees. But the administration is also facing widespread resistance to its policy of indiscriminate arrests and mass deportations, not as the exception, but as the rule — and among everyday, fed-up Americans across the country.
Kicking the Hornets’ Nest
What officials didn’t seem to anticipate was that this crackdown would face fierce pushback not only in liberal hubs with large immigrant communities like Los Angeles or Chicago, but in predominantly white, working-class communities.
In Charlotte, a city on the edge of the Blue Ridge foothills, activists scrambled to implement a broad early-warning network to track federal agents. Thousands of local volunteers — many of them outside the city’s political establishment — mobilized to monitor convoys and alert vulnerable families in real time. They patrolled neighborhoods, followed unmarked vehicles, and honked their car horns to warn others when Customs and Border Protection or ICE agents were spotted: acts of quiet guerrilla resistance that Border Patrol’s local commander derided as “cult behavior.” The effort spanned from downtown Charlotte into the rural western counties, with observers checking hotels and Walmart parking lots in mountain towns for staging areas and relaying tips across the region.
By the time the sheriff announced the feds had pulled out — and video showed a convoy hightailing it down the highway — locals were already hailing it as a “hornet’s nest” victory, comparing the retreat to British Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s abrupt withdrawal from the area during the Revolutionary War after being met with unexpectedly fierce resistance.
Charlotte’s mostly quiet, semi-official resistance — dubbed the “bless your heart” approach for its polite-but-pointed Southern style — was notable. But the open rebellion brewing in coal country may be even more significant. In Harlan County, Kentucky — a storied epicenter of the Appalachian labor wars — residents recently got an alarming preview of the deportation machine’s reach. Back in May, a convoy of black SUVs rolled into the town of Harlan, and armed agents in tactical gear stormed two Mexican restaurants. At first, the operation was framed as a drug bust; Kentucky State Police on the scene told bystanders it was part of an “ongoing drug investigation.” But despite being carried out by DEA agents, it was an immigration raid, and local reporter Jennifer McDaniels noted that of the people arrested and jailed, their cases were listed as “immigration,” without a single drug-related offense.
Once the shock wore off, residents were livid. “We took it personal here,” McDaniels, who witnessed the raid, told n+1 magazine. Watching their neighbors being whisked away in an unmarked van — with no real explanation from authorities — rattled this tight-knit community. “I don’t like what [these raids] are doing to our community,” McDaniels continued. “Our local leaders don’t like what it’s doing to our community. … We just really want to know what’s happening, and nobody’s telling us.” It turned out at least 13 people from Harlan were disappeared that day, quietly transferred to a detention center 70 miles away. In Harlan – immortalized in song and history as “Bloody Harlan” for its coal miner uprisings — the sight of government agents snatching low-wage workers off the job struck a deep nerve of betrayal and anger. This is a place that knows what class war looks like, and many residents see shades of it in the federal government’s high-handed raids.
Blood in the Hills
For decades, Appalachia has lived with the same lesson carved into the hills like coal seams: When Washington shows up, it’s rarely to help. When the mining ended and industry dried up and when opioids ripped through these communities, the federal response was always too little, too late. When hurricanes and floods drowned eastern North Carolina — Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 — thousands of homes sat unrepaired a decade later, with families still sleeping in FEMA trailers long after the rest of the country had moved on. After Helene floods smashed the western mountains in 2024, relief trickled in like rusted pipe water — with just $1.3 billion delivered to address an estimated $60 billion in damage. A year later, survivors were living in tents and sheds waiting for their government to step in.
Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored.
But the federal government’s priority is a parade of bodies — arrest numbers, detention quotas, a spectacle of force — and so suddenly, these forgotten communities are lit up with floodlights and convoys. Operation Charlotte’s Web saw hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed overnight. Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored. It only reinforces the oldest mountain wisdom: Never trust the government.
It’s a paradoxical arrangement that to many working Appalachians is simply untenable. “It’s a rural area with low crime,” one organizer in Boone pointed out, calling ICE’s authoritarian sweep “disgusting and inhumane.” The organizer also said, “That’s the number one conservative tactic: being tough on crime even when that crime doesn’t exist.” In other words, the narrative about dangerous criminals doesn’t match what people are actually seeing as their friends, classmates, and co-workers are being carted off.
To be sure, public opinion in Appalachia isn’t monolithic; plenty of folks still cheer any crackdown on “illegals” as a restoration of law and order. But the growing resistance in these communities suggests a profound shift: Class solidarity is beginning to trouble the traditional partisan lines. The old playbook of stoking rural white fears about immigrants begins to lose its potency when those same immigrants have become neighbors, co-workers, or fellow parishioners — and when federal agents descend like an occupying army, indiscriminately disrupting everyone’s lives.
“Abducting a so-called violent gang member at their place of employment is a contradiction,” a local Boone resident scoffed. It doesn’t take a Marxist to see the underlying reality: This isn’t about protecting rural communities, it’s about using them for political ends. For many who’ve been told they’re the “forgotten America,” the only time Washington remembers them is to enlist them as pawns — or body counts — in someone else’s culture war. And increasingly, they are saying no.
Appalachia has a long, if overlooked, tradition of rebellion from below. A century ago, West Virginia coal miners fought the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history at Blair Mountain, where thousands of impoverished workers (immigrants and native-born alike) took up arms together against corrupt coal barons. In the 1960s, poor white migrants from Appalachia’s hills living in Chicago formed the Young Patriots Organization: Confederate-flag-wearing “hillbillies” who shocked the establishment by allying with the Black Panthers and Young Lords in a multiracial fight against police brutality and poverty.
That spirit of solidarity across color lines, born of shared class struggle, is reappearing in today’s mountain towns. You can see it in the way Charlotte activists borrowed tactics from Chicago’s immigrant rights movement, setting up rapid-response networks and legal support. You can see it in how North Carolina organizers are sharing resistance blueprints with communities in Louisiana and Mississippi ahead of “Swamp Sweep,” the next phase of Trump’s crackdown, slated to deploy as many 250 agents to the Gulf South on December 1 with the goal of arresting 5,000 people. And you can certainly see it each time a rural Southern church offers protection to an undocumented family, or when local volunteers protest Border Patrol outside their hotels.
No Southern Comfort for Feds
This all puts the Trump administration — and any future administration tempted to wage war on Trump-labeled “sanctuary cities” — in an uncomfortable position. It was easy enough for politicians to paint resistance to immigration raids as the province of big-city liberals or communities of color. But what happens when predominantly white, working-class towns start throwing sand in the gears of the deportation machine? In North Carolina, activists note that their state is not Illinois — the partisan landscape is different, and authorities have been cautious — but ordinary people are still finding creative ways to fight back. They are finding common cause with those they were told to blame for their economic woes. In doing so, they threaten to upend the narrative that Appalachia — and perhaps the rest of working-class, grit-ridden, forgotten America — will forever serve as obedient foot soldiers for someone else’s crusade.
The resistance unfolding now in places like Boone and Harlan is not noise — it’s a signal. It suggests that America’s political fault lines are shifting beneath our feet. The coming deportation raids were supposed to be a mop-up operation executed in the heart of “real America,” far from the sanctuary cities that have defied Trump. Instead, they are turning into a slog, met with a thousand cuts of small-town rebellions. This is hardly the passive or supportive response that hard-liners in Washington might have expected from the red-state USA.
On the contrary, as the enforcement regime trickles out into broader white America, it is encountering the same unruly spirit that has long defined its deepest hills, valleys, and backwoods. The message to Washington is clear: If you thought Appalachia would applaud or simply acquiesce while you turn their hometowns into staging grounds for mass round-ups, bless your heart.
Homeland Security Investigations officers search for two individuals who fled the scene after being stopped while selling flowers on the side of the road on Nov. 16, 2025, in Charlotte, N.C.Photo: Ryan Murphy/Getty Images
On a chilly evening in mid-November, about 135 people gathered along a highway in Boone, North Carolina, a small Appalachian college town not known as a hotbed of leftist protest. They held signs reading “Nazis were just following orders too” and “Time to melt the ICE,” and chanted profane rebukes at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rumored to be in the area. “They came here thinking they wouldn’t be bothered,” one Appalachian State University student told The Appalachian at the impromptu rally. “Boone is a small, southern, white, mountain town. We need to let them know they’ll be bothered anywhere they go.” In a region often stereotyped as silently conservative, this flash of defiance was a startling sign that the battle lines of American politics are shifting in unexpected ways.
For the past several weeks, the Trump administration has been rolling out a mass deportation campaign of unprecedented scope — one that is now reaching deep into Appalachia. Branded “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” a deployment of hundreds of Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents descended on North Carolina in mid-November, making sweeping arrests in and around Charlotte and into the state’s rural mountain counties.
Officials billed the effort as targeting the “worst of the worst” criminal aliens, but the numbers tell a different story: More than 370 people were arrested, only 44 of whom had any prior criminal record, according to DHS. The vast majority were ordinary undocumented residents — people going to work or school, not “violent criminals” — which underscores that the crackdown is less about public safety than meeting political quotas.
Indeed, Trump campaigned on conducting the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, vowing to round up 15 to 20 million people (which is more than the estimated 14 million undocumented people living in the U.S.) and pressuring ICE to triple its arrest rates to 3,000 per day. The federal dragnet has already driven ICE arrests to levels not seen in years; immigrants without criminal convictions now make up the largest share of detainees. But the administration is also facing widespread resistance to its policy of indiscriminate arrests and mass deportations, not as the exception, but as the rule — and among everyday, fed-up Americans across the country.
Kicking the Hornets’ Nest
What officials didn’t seem to anticipate was that this crackdown would face fierce pushback not only in liberal hubs with large immigrant communities like Los Angeles or Chicago, but in predominantly white, working-class communities.
In Charlotte, a city on the edge of the Blue Ridge foothills, activists scrambled to implement a broad early-warning network to track federal agents. Thousands of local volunteers — many of them outside the city’s political establishment — mobilized to monitor convoys and alert vulnerable families in real time. They patrolled neighborhoods, followed unmarked vehicles, and honked their car horns to warn others when Customs and Border Protection or ICE agents were spotted: acts of quiet guerrilla resistance that Border Patrol’s local commander derided as “cult behavior.” The effort spanned from downtown Charlotte into the rural western counties, with observers checking hotels and Walmart parking lots in mountain towns for staging areas and relaying tips across the region.
By the time the sheriff announced the feds had pulled out — and video showed a convoy hightailing it down the highway — locals were already hailing it as a “hornet’s nest” victory, comparing the retreat to British Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s abrupt withdrawal from the area during the Revolutionary War after being met with unexpectedly fierce resistance.
Charlotte’s mostly quiet, semi-official resistance — dubbed the “bless your heart” approach for its polite-but-pointed Southern style — was notable. But the open rebellion brewing in coal country may be even more significant. In Harlan County, Kentucky — a storied epicenter of the Appalachian labor wars — residents recently got an alarming preview of the deportation machine’s reach. Back in May, a convoy of black SUVs rolled into the town of Harlan, and armed agents in tactical gear stormed two Mexican restaurants. At first, the operation was framed as a drug bust; Kentucky State Police on the scene told bystanders it was part of an “ongoing drug investigation.” But despite being carried out by DEA agents, it was an immigration raid, and local reporter Jennifer McDaniels noted that of the people arrested and jailed, their cases were listed as “immigration,” without a single drug-related offense.
Once the shock wore off, residents were livid. “We took it personal here,” McDaniels, who witnessed the raid, told n+1 magazine. Watching their neighbors being whisked away in an unmarked van — with no real explanation from authorities — rattled this tight-knit community. “I don’t like what [these raids] are doing to our community,” McDaniels continued. “Our local leaders don’t like what it’s doing to our community. … We just really want to know what’s happening, and nobody’s telling us.” It turned out at least 13 people from Harlan were disappeared that day, quietly transferred to a detention center 70 miles away. In Harlan – immortalized in song and history as “Bloody Harlan” for its coal miner uprisings — the sight of government agents snatching low-wage workers off the job struck a deep nerve of betrayal and anger. This is a place that knows what class war looks like, and many residents see shades of it in the federal government’s high-handed raids.
Blood in the Hills
For decades, Appalachia has lived with the same lesson carved into the hills like coal seams: When Washington shows up, it’s rarely to help. When the mining ended and industry dried up and when opioids ripped through these communities, the federal response was always too little, too late. When hurricanes and floods drowned eastern North Carolina — Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 — thousands of homes sat unrepaired a decade later, with families still sleeping in FEMA trailers long after the rest of the country had moved on. After Helene floods smashed the western mountains in 2024, relief trickled in like rusted pipe water — with just $1.3 billion delivered to address an estimated $60 billion in damage. A year later, survivors were living in tents and sheds waiting for their government to step in.
Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored.
But the federal government’s priority is a parade of bodies — arrest numbers, detention quotas, a spectacle of force — and so suddenly, these forgotten communities are lit up with floodlights and convoys. Operation Charlotte’s Web saw hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed overnight. Help arrives slow; enforcement arrives fast and armored. It only reinforces the oldest mountain wisdom: Never trust the government.
It’s a paradoxical arrangement that to many working Appalachians is simply untenable. “It’s a rural area with low crime,” one organizer in Boone pointed out, calling ICE’s authoritarian sweep “disgusting and inhumane.” The organizer also said, “That’s the number one conservative tactic: being tough on crime even when that crime doesn’t exist.” In other words, the narrative about dangerous criminals doesn’t match what people are actually seeing as their friends, classmates, and co-workers are being carted off.
To be sure, public opinion in Appalachia isn’t monolithic; plenty of folks still cheer any crackdown on “illegals” as a restoration of law and order. But the growing resistance in these communities suggests a profound shift: Class solidarity is beginning to trouble the traditional partisan lines. The old playbook of stoking rural white fears about immigrants begins to lose its potency when those same immigrants have become neighbors, co-workers, or fellow parishioners — and when federal agents descend like an occupying army, indiscriminately disrupting everyone’s lives.
“Abducting a so-called violent gang member at their place of employment is a contradiction,” a local Boone resident scoffed. It doesn’t take a Marxist to see the underlying reality: This isn’t about protecting rural communities, it’s about using them for political ends. For many who’ve been told they’re the “forgotten America,” the only time Washington remembers them is to enlist them as pawns — or body counts — in someone else’s culture war. And increasingly, they are saying no.
Appalachia has a long, if overlooked, tradition of rebellion from below. A century ago, West Virginia coal miners fought the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history at Blair Mountain, where thousands of impoverished workers (immigrants and native-born alike) took up arms together against corrupt coal barons. In the 1960s, poor white migrants from Appalachia’s hills living in Chicago formed the Young Patriots Organization: Confederate-flag-wearing “hillbillies” who shocked the establishment by allying with the Black Panthers and Young Lords in a multiracial fight against police brutality and poverty.
That spirit of solidarity across color lines, born of shared class struggle, is reappearing in today’s mountain towns. You can see it in the way Charlotte activists borrowed tactics from Chicago’s immigrant rights movement, setting up rapid-response networks and legal support. You can see it in how North Carolina organizers are sharing resistance blueprints with communities in Louisiana and Mississippi ahead of “Swamp Sweep,” the next phase of Trump’s crackdown, slated to deploy as many 250 agents to the Gulf South on December 1 with the goal of arresting 5,000 people. And you can certainly see it each time a rural Southern church offers protection to an undocumented family, or when local volunteers protest Border Patrol outside their hotels.
No Southern Comfort for Feds
This all puts the Trump administration — and any future administration tempted to wage war on Trump-labeled “sanctuary cities” — in an uncomfortable position. It was easy enough for politicians to paint resistance to immigration raids as the province of big-city liberals or communities of color. But what happens when predominantly white, working-class towns start throwing sand in the gears of the deportation machine? In North Carolina, activists note that their state is not Illinois — the partisan landscape is different, and authorities have been cautious — but ordinary people are still finding creative ways to fight back. They are finding common cause with those they were told to blame for their economic woes. In doing so, they threaten to upend the narrative that Appalachia — and perhaps the rest of working-class, grit-ridden, forgotten America — will forever serve as obedient foot soldiers for someone else’s crusade.
The resistance unfolding now in places like Boone and Harlan is not noise — it’s a signal. It suggests that America’s political fault lines are shifting beneath our feet. The coming deportation raids were supposed to be a mop-up operation executed in the heart of “real America,” far from the sanctuary cities that have defied Trump. Instead, they are turning into a slog, met with a thousand cuts of small-town rebellions. This is hardly the passive or supportive response that hard-liners in Washington might have expected from the red-state USA.
On the contrary, as the enforcement regime trickles out into broader white America, it is encountering the same unruly spirit that has long defined its deepest hills, valleys, and backwoods. The message to Washington is clear: If you thought Appalachia would applaud or simply acquiesce while you turn their hometowns into staging grounds for mass round-ups, bless your heart.
Defend our Juries have announced a fresh Lift the Ban action, after the Judicial Review hearing against the proscription of Palestine Action finished on 2 December. Following the hearing the Claimant, Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori, said:
Our legal challenge to the most extreme attack on our right to free expression in recent British history has laid bare what this unprecedented ban is really about.
The Government’s presentations in court have made clear the ban rests solely on property damage, not violence – actions we took to prevent harm by disrupting the flow of arms being used to kill Palestinian people. The Government offered no justification for refusing to consult those of us whose rights this ban strips away, while admitting they did consult the Israeli embassy, pro-Israel lobby groups and weapons manufacturers like Elbit, with Starmer even discussing the proscription with Donald Trump.
This ban was always about caving into pressure to appease those interests, not about public safety. Indeed it diverts police and counter-terror resources away from actual threats to the British public, while contributing to court backlogs and potentially to already overflowing prisons.
My legal team presented an open and shut case that this proscription amounts to discrimination, and the Government provided no answer to the prima facie evidence put before the court. This includes evidence that its own advisers warned at the time that proscribing Palestine Action would raise serious questions about why it was not banning other direct action groups using similar tactics, such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion.
The most disturbing revelation from this hearing has been the Government’s complete failure to address the severe chilling effect of this ban on free speech we have seen impact thousands of people across the country. Justice Chamberlain warned of this when granting the judicial review, and the last four months have proved him right. The 200 arrests at that time have exploded to 2,717 people, arrested under terrorism laws for silently holding a seven-word sign, many elderly and disabled.
The court heard evidence of the utterly dystopian impacts of the ban far beyond those expressing support for Palestine Action, from a Jewish woman woken by police at her door over an email she sent criticising the ban before it even came into effect, to the prospect of Sally Rooney withdrawing her books. Other Orwellian incidents include local Palestine solidarity groups having bank accounts frozen; and police interrogations of people going about their day for simply wearing Palestine flag badges and T-shirts, all of which have nothing to do with Palestine Action.
The Government’s arguments in court have shown there is no justification for this dangerous, authoritarian assault on our fundamental civil liberties.
Defend our Juries announce next Lift the Ban action
Defend Our Juries will hold a sign-holding action outside the Royal Courts of Justice on the day the judgement of the Judicial Review is read into the court record. People will hold handwritten signs with the now legendary wording: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries said:
Although we do not know whether the judgement will be delivered in December or January, we do know that there are many people determined to continue to fight against the erosion of protest rights and our government’s complicity in genocide.
This will undoubtedly create a dilemma for the police – will they arrest us as the result of the Judicial Review is being read out?
If the appeal against proscription is successful, their action looks ridiculous.
If it is unsuccessful, we will continue our pressure against this unjust law, and the dilemma of whether to continue arresting peaceful protesters under terrorism legislation for having a moral conscience will continue.
We are also aware that should the judgement be in the favour of Huda Ammori, the state is likely to challenge the verdict to ensure the proscription still stands.
We cannot stand by while fundamental rights to protest and free speech are eroded, and while our government continues to support a country charged with genocide. We will have no option but to continue our resistance.
U.S. Border Patrol agents raided a humanitarian aid station in the Arizona desert late last month, taking three people into custody and breaking into a trailer without a warrant.
Video taken by No More Deaths, a faith-based aid group out of Tucson that operates the site, shows agents with flashlights prying open a trailer door and entering the structure. The camp, located just miles from the U.S.–Mexico border, has long been used to provide medical care to migrants crossing one of the world’s deadliest stretches of desert.
Monica Ruiz House, a No More Deaths volunteer who’d recently been involved in deportation defense work in Chicago, said the warrantless raid spoke to a rising culture of lawlessness among the Trump administration’s front-line immigration enforcement agencies.
“There’s this frightening pattern of impunity that’s happening across the country,” Ruiz House told The Intercept, “whether it’s Border Patrol, whether it’s ICE agents,” referring to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
The November raid marks the third time in recent years that Border Patrol agents acting under the authority of President Donald Trump have targeted the remote Arizona site, and the first case in which the agency has entered a structure at the location without a warrant.
According to volunteers, Border Patrol agents claimed they were in “hot pursuit” when they broke into the group’s trailer. Hot pursuit has a particular legal meaning and typically applies in cases where law enforcement attempts to make an arrest, a subject flees into a private space, the opportunity to obtain a warrant is not available, and the risk of further of escape, destruction of evidence, or harm to others is high.
Amy Knight, an attorney who has represented No More Deaths volunteers in the past and is currently providing informal legal advice to the group, said there is no evidence that any of those factors were present in the November raid.
By all appearances, Border Patrol tracked a group of people to an aid camp but made no attempt to arrest them en route. “They were inside of a building on private property, and the agents were able to pretty well surround the place — so if they left, they could catch them,” Knight told The Intercept. “There was no reason why they couldn’t get a warrant.”
“Disappeared”
A handful of Border Patrol vehicles amassed at around 4:30 p.m. on the afternoon of November 23 at the organization’s gate near the unincorporated community of Arivaca, according to a summary of events produced by No More Deaths in the immediate aftermath of the raid.
“United States Border Patrol,” said a voice on a loudspeaker, according to the summary, which was shared with The Intercept. “Come out.”
Volunteers who approached the gate were informed agents had tracked a group of suspected migrants to the location and requested access to make arrests.
Three people were on the property receiving medical care at the time, Ruiz House said.
The volunteers refused access to the camp without the presentation of a signed warrant, the summary said. An hour passed before Border Patrol agents parked at the gate and on a nearby hill entered the property. They made a beeline for a trailer on the property.
“If there are people locked in that trailer that’s a big concern,” one of the agents reportedly said.
Asked about their lack of warrant, the agents replied that they were in “hot pursuit” of suspects, according to No More Deaths, and their warrant exception was authorized by “the U.S.A.” — potentially referencing a call to an assistant U.S. attorney, often referred to as an “A.U.S.A”
“They’ve disappeared into the ICE custody black hole.”
In the past, Border Patrol respected the need to have a warrant before entering structures, said Ruiz House. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, declined to comment on the agents’ purported justification for entering the aid group’s property.
The first of the three people taken into custody was dragged to a Border Patrol truck as volunteers prayed. No More Deaths has been working to find the arrestees in the weeks since, to no avail. “They’ve somewhat disappeared into the ICE custody black hole,” Ruiz House said. “We’re trying to locate them.”
Years in Trump’s Sights
No More Deaths, also known as No Más Muertes, is the most prominent of several humanitarian aid providers in the Sonoran Desert, offering medical care to migrants for more than two decades in a region that has claimed thousands of lives since the U.S. government undertook a program of intensifying border militarization in the 1990s.
In June 2017, Border Patrol agents staked out the group’s camp near Arivaca for three days during a blazing heatwave. They entered after obtaining a warrant, and approximately 30 agents took four Mexican nationals into custody who were receiving treatment for heat-related illnesses, injuries, and exposure to the elements. The men had been traveling by foot for several days in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.
The operation marked the beginning of a multiyear campaign by the Trump administration to imprison U.S. citizens involved in the provision of humanitarian aid. In a January 2018 raid at a separate aid station, Border Patrol agents arrested No More Deaths volunteer Scott Warren and two Central American asylum-seekers who’d become lost in Arizona’s ultra-lethal West Desert.
The Trump administration additionally levied federal littering charges against several No More Deaths volunteers for leaving jugs of water on a remote wildlife refuge where the dead and dehydrated bodies of migrants are often found.
Warren’s arrest came just hours after No More Deaths released a damning report, complete with video evidence, showing Border Patrol agents systematically destroying water jugs the aid group left in the area.
Warren was hit with federal harboring and conspiracy charges and faced up 20 years in prison.
The prosecutions became a cause célèbre in Tucson, with yard signs filling residents and businesses’ windows that read “Humanitarian Aid is Never a Crime — Drop the Charges.”
Both cases collapsed at trial, with Warren’s defense attorneys successfully arguing that his volunteerism was the product of deeply held spiritual belief concerning the sanctity of human life and thus protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The administration targeted the camp again in 2020, again after No More Deaths released unflattering documents concerning the agency’s operations.
In both 2017 and 2020, the raids targeting No More Deaths were carried out by agents with BORTAC, a specialized SWAT-style arm of the Border Patrol now tasked with carrying out high-profile and controversial arrests in cities far from the U.S.–Mexico divide.
“ICE is increasingly relying on Border Patrol to carry out its internal operations,” said Ruiz House. “Having Border Patrol operate in the interior is absolutely a force multiplier because the fact is ICE simply doesn’t have all the resources to carry out mass deportations, they are going to need other agencies to help them, but there’s also a very big symbolic dimension.”
The green, soldier-like uniforms, she argued, instill a “particular kind of fear” in immigrant communities. It is precisely this externalization of militarized border enforcement that aid groups in the borderlands have been warning about, and Border Patrol leadership have spent years clamoring for.
As one senior agent told the New York Times recently, “The border is everywhere.”
In a parliamentary speech today, justice secretary David Lammy confirmed that he will go ahead to scrap plans to remove the right to trial by jury for thousands of ‘either-way’ cases – that is, trials which could take place either at the Crown or Magistrates Courts.
In an interview with the Telegraph prior to his speech, Lammy stated:
Some argue that reform is an attack on the traditions that define our legal system. They reach for Runnymede and Magna Carta, insisting that nothing must disturb the arrangements of centuries past. These are grand claims but they overlook what Magna Carta actually says. Clause 39 promises the judgment of our peers and the law of the land and, crucially, clause 40 warns that to no one will we delay or deny right or justice.
When a victim waits years for a trial, when the courts are so backed up that criminals fear no punishment, when an innocent person sits under a cloud of accusation – justice is denied. Magna Carta was a protest against state failure. If its authors saw the delays in our courts today, they would not urge us to cling rigidly to tradition. They would demand action.
He later echoed that sentiment – that justice should not be delayed – in his parliamentary speech. In particular, he again cited the Magna Carta, stating that “we must never forget that it implores us not to deny or delay justice”.
Likewise, he also leaned heavily on the idea of doing away with jury trials as being more friendly towards victims. More specifically, he returned several times to the figure of the victim as a survivor of violence against women and girls:
Behind the statistics are real people. Katy was abused by her partner. She reported him to the police in 2017, but then had an unbearable 6-year wait for justice. During this time, she lost her job due to her mental health deteriorating, she became increasingly isolated, lived in fear, and lost faith in the court system.
This is well and good – delays in the justice system do place massive strain on victims. However, that doesn’t explain why it’s the right to trial by jury that should be sacrificed in order to relieve the burden on the courts. Likewise, it also fails to address the public loss of faith in the court system from the loss of that right.
Increase funding first
Lammy also attempted to address the concern that we should increase funding for court days before scrapping jury trials. He stated:
Some will ask why we don’t simply increase funding. This government has already invested heavily in the courts. Nearly £150 million to make them fit for purpose. £92 million committed a year for criminal legal aid solicitors, and funding for a record number of sitting days in our crown courts – 5000 more than those funded last year by the previous government. […]
I’m clear that sitting days for the Crown and Magistrates courts must continue to rise. […] But as Sir Brian has made clear, investment is not enough. The caseload is projected to reach 100,000 by 2028, and without fundamental change could keep rising, meaning justice will be denied to more victims and trust in the system will collapse.
Again, we’re eroding the right to a jury trial to support trust in the system, honest.
In place of jury trials, the justice secretary explained that he would introduce ‘swift courts’ to try either-way cases with a likely sentence of 3 years or less by judge alone. He estimates, based on the Leveson report, that this will result in a 20% increase in speed compared to a jury trial.
Of course, many actual legal professionals disagree with this optimistic estimate of time savings. They point out that it isn’t juries that consume time. Rather, the time taken by prosecutors to lay out their cases has ballooned in recent years.
Yet more reforms
Lammy also announced that defendants would no longer be able to opt for jury trials, in line with other Common Law countries. Likewise, Magistrate Courts will gain sentencing powers up to 18 months, so that they can take a greater proportion of low-level offending. The deputy PM speculated that this could rise as high as 2 years, should needs must.
Finally, he also stated that lengthy fraud and financial trials could now be sat by a judge alone. Ostensibly, this would relieve undue pressure on jurors. Notably, the government actually tried this same trick with the Fraud (Trials Without a Jury) Bill of 2006. However, even this relatively minor amendment to the justice system didn’t make it into law at the time.
Of course, immediately after he gave his speech, Lammy was met with a wave of criticisms large and small. Many of these – even the ones that came from the Tories – had merit, and deserve dissecting in detail. As such, the Canary will report on the (many, many) rebuttals tomorrow.
For now, however, we have confirmation that Labour are still determined to carry out their attack on the right to trial by jury. And, along with it, the public’s right to a fair and balanced trial.
Speaking to the Home Affairs Committee, West Midlands Police have provided further detail on why they banned Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the Aston Villa game. They’ve also disputed the claims of lord John Mann, who’s the government independent advisor on antisemitism:
The West Midlands Police explained to the Homes Affairs Committee why they decided to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.
Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy, and every single person who tried to undermine the police and gaslight us should be ashamed of themselves. pic.twitter.com/oq2giBitmr
Speaking to the committee, chief constable Craig Guildford said:
on Wednesday the 1st of October… I sat down with the Chief Inspector, who is our planning expert, who had spoken to the three Dutch police commanders. And this really, panel, is where the difference occurs between what Lord Mann has said and the information that was provided to the Chief Inspector…
the information provided from the Dutch was very, very clear… they reflected on the days before, during, and after the match as a result of the clashes between the Maccabi ultras and the local Muslim community. …
Police in Amsterdam were very stretched, particularly the day before, because they hadn’t assessed the match as being high risk from their perspective. And they informed us very clearly, and I’ve spoken to the chief inspector myself on Wednesday of last week, that they said they deployed 2,000 riot police on the day of the match.
He noted it was the “professional assumption” of their silver commander that:
over the three and four days of the actual event, you’d need about 5,000 police officers.
So, in terms of what we were told, the ultras were very well organised – militaristic in the way that they operated. They attacked members of the local community, including taxi drivers, tore down flags, people were thrown into the river, and definitely the singing.
Regarding this singing, Guildford noted that Maccabi ‘ultras’ (hardcore hooligans) were known to sing:
there are no schools in Gaza, as the children were all dead.
The Dutch police also told West Midlands Police that the Maccabi ultras:
specifically targeted the local Muslim community deliberately. Members of the local and wider Muslim community subsequently reacted and deliberately then, on the day after mainly, attacked Maccabi fans on match day, both before the match and after the match, as Lord Mann has made reference to.
That’s what we were told.
The Dutch commanders were unequivocal. They would never want to have Maccabi Tel Aviv playing in Amsterdam again in the future.
That was what they said to our chief inspector.
Lord Mann also spoke at the committee, with his performance described as follows:
Comical scenes as Lord Mann – an obvious idiot and blowhard – huffs, roars and bullshits his way through yet another committee, while senior police officers quite reasonably explain what happened. Self-clowning shit, reported as if it’s *the cops* behaving horrendously. https://t.co/B2iJ4QLqSI
Infamously, Tel Aviv police banned a Maccabi match in their home town due to safety concerns, with this happening mere weeks after the Aston Villa ban:
west midlands police must apologise, resign then take an antisemitism training course. https://t.co/yd4Zfkigbq
Despite all of the above, political figures like John Mann continue to defend the honour of foreign hooligans, seemingly over the safety of British citizens.
In a 26th floor courtroom overlooking Manhattan’s frigid winter skyline, dozens of immigrants sat in on the trial of their former president, the once untouchable symbol of a “narco-dictatorship” that reorganized of the government’s judicial, police, and military leadership to collude with drug traffickers.
It wasn’t Nicolás Maduro — though the Venezuelan president had likewise been indicted in the Southern District of New York. It was Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who, as U.S. prosecutors said in their closing arguments in 2024, “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States. In a monthlongtrial we covered from New York that winter, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons charges, earning him a 45-year prison sentence.
Now, as B-52s plow the skies near Caracas and U.S. President Donald Trump announces the closure of Venezuelan airspace via social media, Hernández is poised to have his conviction erased. A key asset likely working in his favor is something Maduro pointedly lacks: a long-running allyship with the United States. Before his prosecution, Hernández spent years promoting Washington’s goals of militarization and migrant crackdowns as a friend of Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, and Trump.
Trumpannounced on Truth Social on Friday that he would grant a “full and complete pardon” to Hernández, “who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.” The message doubled as an endorsement of Honduran presidential candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a member of Hernández’s conservative National Party, who as of Monday afternoon was effectively tied with another conservative candidate after Sunday’s election. (In his endorsement-and-pardon announcement, Trump threw in a threat to cut off aid to the country if Hondurans elected a rival candidate.)
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He claimed to have spoken to Hondurans, who “said it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”
“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”
Hernández was first directly named as a potential co-conspirator during the drug trafficking trial of his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, in 2019. Emil Bove, a deputy attorney general for the Trump administration until September, worked on both their prosecutions in the Southern District.
“There are a lot of reasons this administration might want to curry favor with Juan Orlando Hernández and people close to him, but none of them point to the fight against drugs,” said Todd Robinson, a retired diplomat who served most recently as assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs under former President Joe Biden. News of the impending pardon came as a shock to civil servants with knowledge of Hernández’s case, Robinson said. But with Trump, he added, “if you get in his ear and there’s some kind of benefit to him or someone close to him, then your case will be heard. It is not hard to put two and two together and get four.”
The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
While Hernández awaits his freedom, the U.S. has taken to extrajudicially executing civilians accused vaguely of being low-level drug runners leaving Venezuela — including, as first reported by The Intercept, striking the same boat twice in September in an apparent war crime known as a “double tap.” Beyond killing at least 80 people this fall, the U.S. is positioning military equipment around Venezuela ostensibly, according to the Trump administration, to dismantle Maduro’s “narco-state.” In a November 16 statement designating the “Cártel de los Soles” — which doesn’t appear to formally exist — as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Rubio alleged that the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”
The language could have come from the mouth of U.S. prosecutors as they condemned Hernández. In fact, as Hernández’s trial revealed, the same institutionalized collusion between state forces and criminals that Rubio attributes with exclusive ideological fervor to Maduro has been well documented by U.S. investigators among U.S.-tied government officials in Honduras.
When Hernández took the stand last year, he cited his ties to U.S. officials so frequently, the prosecution objected at least 43 times. “We get it,” the judge said at one point, exasperated. “The defendant has visited the White House and met several Presidents.”
Making sense of Hernández’s journey from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to a prison cell in Manhattan alongside Sam Bankman-Fried requires going back 16 years, to June 28, 2009, when a military coup ousted center-left President Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya under the passive watch of U.S. officials and turned the already violent Central American country into the bloodiest on the planet.
As wars between gangs, drug traffickers, and corrupt security forces set fire to a crisis of undocumented migration, Hernández, known by his initials “JOH,” presented himself as a savior. Before El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele rose to power and incarcerated nearly 2 percent of his country’s population, Hernández promised iron-fist ruthlessness and made a constellation of military–police special forces units with the help of the FBI while granting ever more power to the Honduran military. The U.S. welcomed him as an ally not just for his collaboration in drug war militarization, but for his willingness to help crack down on migrants as well as business-friendly neoliberal policies.
Corruption and violence flourished in Hernández’s Honduras, where political and economic elites in the shadow of one of the largest U.S. military bases in Latin America, for decades, have systematically weaponized the state to protect both criminal networks and transnational corporate interests. In 2017, Hernández claimed a second presidential “reelection” — which the Organization of American States denounced for widespread irregularities — sparking protests that were squashed with murderous crackdown as dozens were killed by security forces. Human rights abuses abounded. Land and water defenders organizing their villages against mining, agribusiness, and tourism megaprojects were assassinated, disappeared, and incarcerated on trumped up charges. The same military police units he created were implicated in widespread accusations of torture and extrajudicial killings as well as collusion with organized crime. A year later, his brother Tony, a congressional deputy for the conservative National Party, was arrested in the U.S. (He was convicted on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to life in prison in 2021.) Many Hondurans, now fleeing in caravans, took to referring to his government as a “narco-dictatorship.”
According to allegations first presented in the trial of the drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes, Hernández promised to “shove drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”
He was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa in February 2022, less than a month after he left office from his contested second term, leaving the reins of the violence-plagued state to left-leaning Xiomara Castro. Two months later, the former drug war hawk was escorted to a plane in shackles and extradited to the U.S., where his defense team argued that convicted criminals tied to the drug trade were unreliable witnesses, “depraved people” and “psychopaths” who wanted to punish Hernández for “working with the US to take down cartels.”
The U.S. government countered that the meticulous detail of their workings with Hernández and his brother was itself indicative they had participated in the president’s racket, one that “directed heavily-armed members of the Honduran National Police and Honduran military to protect drug shipments as they transited Honduras.” It was implausible, they argued, to believe that Hernández was oblivious to the conspicuous criminality of his younger brother Tony, already in jail for drug trafficking charges.
The Biden administration celebrated Hernández’s conviction as a triumph — and Robinson, the former assistant secretary of state,pointed to declining opioid deaths in recent years as the fruit of the administration’s efforts to attack root causes of the drug trade, including limiting traffickers’ abilities to move money.
“If these networks can’t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems.”
“We started to move the needle on synthetic opioid deaths in those four years and it was precisely because we worked with countries on a global level,” he said. “If these networks can’t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems. We were doing the diplomatic spadework to get those people sanctioned by international financial networks.”
Over the course of the trial, which reached a fever pitch during his testimony, the former president had been eager to underscore his anti-drug collaboration with Obama and Trump, as well as officials like John Kelly, then head of U.S. Southern Command and later adviser to Trump, who he claimed to have met with “15 to 20 times.” His administration organized U.S. training and funding for the TIGRES, an elite police force later accused of hunting down anti-election fraud protesters at the beginning Hernández’s second term; the Maya Chorti Interagency Task Force, a binational group of soldiers and police charged with stemming drug and migrant flows between Honduras and Guatemala; and the FNAMP, an FBI-trained military unit that was later accused of extrajudicial killings.
“We’re stopping drugs like never before,” Trump said with Hernández at a gala in Miami in 2019. In October 2020, publicity emails show U.S. Southern Command Adm. Craig Faller meeting Hernández and underscoring that U.S. and Honduran drug war efforts were “successful because of the trust of both of us working together.”
In 2019, when damning revelations emerged in the trial of his brother implicating JOH as a probable co-conspirator in the drug trade, the then-president paid over half a million dollars to a lobbying firm to wipe his cocaine-tarnished image in Washington. The lobbyists, known as BGR Group, set off on an aggressive publicity campaign to assure journalists and congressional staffers of Hernández’s anti-drug record. The firm had also hosted campaign fundraisers and contributed $34,000 to then-Sen. Marco Rubio.
It’s not hard to find traces on the internet of Rubio, already one of the most powerful forces of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, meeting with Hernández in the years during which he was accused of organizing a high-level drug ring. From his influential position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio advocated for weapons shipments to Hernández.
Corruption, undoubtedly, is rampant in Venezuela, where the military has selectively colluded with drug traffickers since the 1990s and where security forces under Maduro, whose last election was denounced as fraudulent, have been implicated in widespread crimes against humanity. Though it’s a myth that fentanyl comes from Venezuela, cocaine is flown from the Caribbean nation to clandestine landing strips in Honduras, where they have been received by drug clans operating under protection from Hernández. (The statement designating Cártel de los Soles as an FTO, coincidentally, accused it of being tied to the Sinaloa Cartel, another designated FTO accused of funneling money to Hernández’s 2013 presidential campaign).
The 2020 indictment of the Honduran drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes asserts he had “received support from the highest levels of the Honduran military,” an institution long trained by the Pentagon, whose officials provided the drug lord with weapons, uniforms, intelligence and protection. Testimonies in the trial against Hernández made frequent mention of military forces deployed to grease the skids of cocaine smuggling operations, providing security for drug shipments, and murdering traffickers who had fallen afoul of the president. Police corruption was no less damning: The 2016 testimony of Ludwig Criss Zelaya Romero, a former member of the Honduran National Police who turned himself in to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, indicated systematic pacts between police officials and drug traffickers, including the claim that a U.S. trained police special forces unit worked with the Grillos, one of the many paramilitary gangs roving Honduras. A top cop and U.S. ally, Juan Carlos Bonilla — who was denounced for orchestrating a system of social cleansing death squads in the 2000s and 2010s — was indicted by U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan in 2020 for “conspiracy to import cocaine” while also being named in the Hernández trial.
Critics have argued that the idea of “cartels” offers an insufficient framework for understanding complex criminal networks, and the “Cartel of the Suns” is little different: an agglomeration of interconnected drug networks, systematic though disperse, working outside and through state institutions.
“This is a case about power, corruption, and massive cocaine trafficking,” the prosecutors said in their 2024 opening arguments against Hernández, “and one man who stood at the center of it all.” Yet the person at the “center” doesn’t always get the worst treatment. The lowest members of the trade — or unaffiliated fishermen whom the U.S. deems criminal — are obliterated, burned alive, or left to drown. Maduro could face assassination or exile, while the people of Venezuela are left to fear a U.S. invasion. Hernández is awaiting a ticket to freedom.
In a 26th floor courtroom overlooking Manhattan’s frigid winter skyline, dozens of immigrants sat in on the trial of their former president, the once untouchable symbol of a “narco-dictatorship” that reorganized of the government’s judicial, police, and military leadership to collude with drug traffickers.
It wasn’t Nicolás Maduro — though the Venezuelan president had likewise been indicted in the Southern District of New York. It was Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who, as U.S. prosecutors said in their closing arguments in 2024, “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States. In a monthlongtrial we covered from New York that winter, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons charges, earning him a 45-year prison sentence.
Now, as B-52s plow the skies near Caracas and U.S. President Donald Trump announces the closure of Venezuelan airspace via social media, Hernández is poised to have his conviction erased. A key asset likely working in his favor is something Maduro pointedly lacks: a long-running allyship with the United States. Before his prosecution, Hernández spent years promoting Washington’s goals of militarization and migrant crackdowns as a friend of Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, and Trump.
Trumpannounced on Truth Social on Friday that he would grant a “full and complete pardon” to Hernández, “who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.” The message doubled as an endorsement of Honduran presidential candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a member of Hernández’s conservative National Party, who as of Monday afternoon was effectively tied with another conservative candidate after Sunday’s election. (In his endorsement-and-pardon announcement, Trump threw in a threat to cut off aid to the country if Hondurans elected a rival candidate.)
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He claimed to have spoken to Hondurans, who “said it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”
Hernández was released from a federal prison in West Virginia on Monday, according to Bureau of Prisons records.
“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”
Hernández was first directly named as a potential co-conspirator during the drug trafficking trial of his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, in 2019. Emil Bove, a deputy attorney general for the Trump administration until September, worked on both their prosecutions in the Southern District.
“There are a lot of reasons this administration might want to curry favor with Juan Orlando Hernández and people close to him, but none of them point to the fight against drugs,” said Todd Robinson, a retired diplomat who served most recently as assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs under former President Joe Biden. News of the impending pardon came as a shock to civil servants with knowledge of Hernández’s case, Robinson said. But with Trump, he added, “if you get in his ear and there’s some kind of benefit to him or someone close to him, then your case will be heard. It is not hard to put two and two together and get four.”
The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
While Hernández awaits his freedom, the U.S. has taken to extrajudicially executing civilians accused vaguely of being low-level drug runners leaving Venezuela — including, as first reported by The Intercept, striking the same boat twice in September in an apparent war crime known as a “double tap.” Beyond killing at least 80 people this fall, the U.S. is positioning military equipment around Venezuela ostensibly, according to the Trump administration, to dismantle Maduro’s “narco-state.” In a November 16 statement designating the “Cártel de los Soles” — which doesn’t appear to formally exist — as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Rubio alleged that the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”
The language could have come from the mouth of U.S. prosecutors as they condemned Hernández. In fact, as Hernández’s trial revealed, the same institutionalized collusion between state forces and criminals that Rubio attributes with exclusive ideological fervor to Maduro has been well documented by U.S. investigators among U.S.-tied government officials in Honduras.
When Hernández took the stand last year, he cited his ties to U.S. officials so frequently, the prosecution objected at least 43 times. “We get it,” the judge said at one point, exasperated. “The defendant has visited the White House and met several Presidents.”
Making sense of Hernández’s journey from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to a prison cell in Manhattan alongside Sam Bankman-Fried requires going back 16 years, to June 28, 2009, when a military coup ousted center-left President Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya under the passive watch of U.S. officials and turned the already violent Central American country into the bloodiest on the planet.
As wars between gangs, drug traffickers, and corrupt security forces set fire to a crisis of undocumented migration, Hernández, known by his initials “JOH,” presented himself as a savior. Before El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele rose to power and incarcerated nearly 2 percent of his country’s population, Hernández promised iron-fist ruthlessness and made a constellation of military–police special forces units with the help of the FBI while granting ever more power to the Honduran military. The U.S. welcomed him as an ally not just for his collaboration in drug war militarization, but for his willingness to help crack down on migrants as well as business-friendly neoliberal policies.
Corruption and violence flourished in Hernández’s Honduras, where political and economic elites in the shadow of one of the largest U.S. military bases in Latin America, for decades, have systematically weaponized the state to protect both criminal networks and transnational corporate interests. In 2017, Hernández claimed a second presidential “reelection” — which the Organization of American States denounced for widespread irregularities — sparking protests that were squashed with murderous crackdown as dozens were killed by security forces. Human rights abuses abounded. Land and water defenders organizing their villages against mining, agribusiness, and tourism megaprojects were assassinated, disappeared, and incarcerated on trumped up charges. The same military police units he created were implicated in widespread accusations of torture and extrajudicial killings as well as collusion with organized crime. A year later, his brother Tony, a congressional deputy for the conservative National Party, was arrested in the U.S. (He was convicted on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to life in prison in 2021.) Many Hondurans, now fleeing in caravans, took to referring to his government as a “narco-dictatorship.”
According to allegations first presented in the trial of the drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes, Hernández promised to “shove drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”
He was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa in February 2022, less than a month after he left office from his contested second term, leaving the reins of the violence-plagued state to left-leaning Xiomara Castro. Two months later, the former drug war hawk was escorted to a plane in shackles and extradited to the U.S., where his defense team argued that convicted criminals tied to the drug trade were unreliable witnesses, “depraved people” and “psychopaths” who wanted to punish Hernández for “working with the US to take down cartels.”
The U.S. government countered that the meticulous detail of their workings with Hernández and his brother was itself indicative they had participated in the president’s racket, one that “directed heavily-armed members of the Honduran National Police and Honduran military to protect drug shipments as they transited Honduras.” It was implausible, they argued, to believe that Hernández was oblivious to the conspicuous criminality of his younger brother Tony, already in jail for drug trafficking charges.
The Biden administration celebrated Hernández’s conviction as a triumph — and Robinson, the former assistant secretary of state,pointed to declining opioid deaths in recent years as the fruit of the administration’s efforts to attack root causes of the drug trade, including limiting traffickers’ abilities to move money.
“If these networks can’t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems.”
“We started to move the needle on synthetic opioid deaths in those four years and it was precisely because we worked with countries on a global level,” he said. “If these networks can’t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems. We were doing the diplomatic spadework to get those people sanctioned by international financial networks.”
Over the course of the trial, which reached a fever pitch during his testimony, the former president had been eager to underscore his anti-drug collaboration with Obama and Trump, as well as officials like John Kelly, then head of U.S. Southern Command and later adviser to Trump, who he claimed to have met with “15 to 20 times.” His administration organized U.S. training and funding for the TIGRES, an elite police force later accused of hunting down anti-election fraud protesters at the beginning Hernández’s second term; the Maya Chorti Interagency Task Force, a binational group of soldiers and police charged with stemming drug and migrant flows between Honduras and Guatemala; and the FNAMP, an FBI-trained military unit that was later accused of extrajudicial killings.
“We’re stopping drugs like never before,” Trump said with Hernández at a gala in Miami in 2019. In October 2020, publicity emails show U.S. Southern Command Adm. Craig Faller meeting Hernández and underscoring that U.S. and Honduran drug war efforts were “successful because of the trust of both of us working together.”
In 2019, when damning revelations emerged in the trial of his brother implicating JOH as a probable co-conspirator in the drug trade, the then-president paid over half a million dollars to a lobbying firm to wipe his cocaine-tarnished image in Washington. The lobbyists, known as BGR Group, set off on an aggressive publicity campaign to assure journalists and congressional staffers of Hernández’s anti-drug record. The firm had also hosted campaign fundraisers and contributed $34,000 to then-Sen. Marco Rubio.
It’s not hard to find traces on the internet of Rubio, already one of the most powerful forces of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, meeting with Hernández in the years during which he was accused of organizing a high-level drug ring. From his influential position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio advocated for weapons shipments to Hernández.
Corruption, undoubtedly, is rampant in Venezuela, where the military has selectively colluded with drug traffickers since the 1990s and where security forces under Maduro, whose last election was denounced as fraudulent, have been implicated in widespread crimes against humanity. Though it’s a myth that fentanyl comes from Venezuela, cocaine is flown from the Caribbean nation to clandestine landing strips in Honduras, where they have been received by drug clans operating under protection from Hernández. (The statement designating Cártel de los Soles as an FTO, coincidentally, accused it of being tied to the Sinaloa Cartel, another designated FTO accused of funneling money to Hernández’s 2013 presidential campaign).
The 2020 indictment of the Honduran drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes asserts he had “received support from the highest levels of the Honduran military,” an institution long trained by the Pentagon, whose officials provided the drug lord with weapons, uniforms, intelligence and protection. Testimonies in the trial against Hernández made frequent mention of military forces deployed to grease the skids of cocaine smuggling operations, providing security for drug shipments, and murdering traffickers who had fallen afoul of the president. Police corruption was no less damning: The 2016 testimony of Ludwig Criss Zelaya Romero, a former member of the Honduran National Police who turned himself in to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, indicated systematic pacts between police officials and drug traffickers, including the claim that a U.S. trained police special forces unit worked with the Grillos, one of the many paramilitary gangs roving Honduras. A top cop and U.S. ally, Juan Carlos Bonilla — who was denounced for orchestrating a system of social cleansing death squads in the 2000s and 2010s — was indicted by U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan in 2020 for “conspiracy to import cocaine” while also being named in the Hernández trial.
Critics have argued that the idea of “cartels” offers an insufficient framework for understanding complex criminal networks, and the “Cartel of the Suns” is little different: an agglomeration of interconnected drug networks, systematic though disperse, working outside and through state institutions.
“This is a case about power, corruption, and massive cocaine trafficking,” the prosecutors said in their 2024 opening arguments against Hernández, “and one man who stood at the center of it all.” Yet the person at the “center” doesn’t always get the worst treatment. The lowest members of the trade — or unaffiliated fishermen whom the U.S. deems criminal — are obliterated, burned alive, or left to drown. Maduro could face assassination or exile, while the people of Venezuela are left to fear a U.S. invasion. Hernández is awaiting a ticket to freedom.
Update: Dec. 2, 2025
This story has been updated to note that Juan Orlando Hernández has been released from prison.
Vinzons is a quiet coastal town in the eastern Philippines province of Camarines Norte in Bicol. With a spread out population of about 45,000. it is known for its rice production, crabs and surfing beaches in the Calaguas Islands.
But the town is really famous for one of its sons — Wenceslao “Bintao” Vinzons, the youngest lawmaker in the Philippines before the Japanese invasion during the Second World War who then took up armed resistance.
He was captured and executed along with his family in 1942.
One of the most interesting assets of the municipality of Vinzons — named after the hero in 1946, the town previously being known as Indan — is his traditional family home, which has recently been refurbished as a local museum to tell his story of courage and inspiration.
“He is something of a forgotten hero, student leader, resistance fighter, former journalist — a true hero,” says acting curator Roniel Espina.
As well as a war hero, Vinzons is revered for his progressive politics and was known as the “father of student activism” in the Philippines. His political career began at the University of Philippines in the capital Manila where he co-founded the Young Philippines Party.
The Vinzons Hall at UP-Diliman was named after him to honour his student leadership exploits.
Student newspaper editor
He was the editor-in-chief of the Philippine Collegian, the student newspaper founded in 1922.
At 24, Vinzons became the youngest delegate to the 1935 Constitutional Convention and six years later at the age of 30 he was elected Governor of Camarine Norte in 1941 — the same year that Japan invaded.
In fact, the invasion of the Philippines began on 8 December 1941 just 10 hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in Hawai’i.
The invading forces tried to pressure Governor Vinzons in his provincial capital of Daet to collaborate. He absolutely refused. Instead, he took to the countryside and led one of the first Filipino guerilla resistance forces to rise up against the Japanese.
His initial resistance was successful with the guerrilla forces carrying out sudden raids before liberating Daet. He was eventually captured and executed by the Japanese.
The bust of “Bintao” outside the Vinzons Town Hall. Image: Asia Pacific Report
The exact circumstances are still uncertain as his body was never recovered, but the museum does an incredible job in piecing together his life along with his family and their tragic sacrifice for the country.
One plaque shows an image of Vinzons along with his father Gabino, wife Liwayway, sister Milagros, daughter Aurora and son Alexander (no photo of him was actually recovered).
A family of Second World War martyrs . . . their bodies were never recovered. Image: Asia Pacific Report
According to the legend on the plaque:
“Wenceslao Vinzons with his father disappeared mysteriously – and were never see again. The Japanese sent out posters in Camarines Norte expressing regret that on the way to Siain, Quezon, Vinzons was shot while attempting to escape. ‘So sorry please.’
“The remains of the body of Vinzons, his father, wife, two chidren and sister have never been found.”
The Japanese Empire as portrayed in the Vinzons Museum. Video: APR
Imperial Japan showcase
One room of the museum is dedicated as a showcase to Imperial Japan and its brutal invasion across a great swathe of Southeast Asia and the brave Filipino resistance in response.
A special feature of the museum is how well it portrays typical Filipino lifestyle and social mores in a home of the political class in the 1930s.
The tourist author, Dr David Robie (red t-shirt) with acting curator Roniel Espina (left), Tourism Officer Florence G Mago (second from right) and two museum guides. Image: Asia Pacific Report
When I visited the museum and talked to staff and watched documentaries about “Bintao” Vinzons’ life, one question in particular intrigued me: “Why was he thought of as a ‘forgotten hero’?”
According to acting curator Espina, “It’s partly because Camarines Norte is not as popular and well known as some other provinces. So some of the notable achievements of Vinzons do not have a high profile around in other parts of the country.”
Based at the museum is the town’s principal Tourism Officer Florence G Mago. She is optimistic about how the Vinzons Museum can attract more visitors to the town.
“We have put a lot of effort into developing this museum and we are proud of it. It is a jewel in the town.”
The Vinzons family home . . . now refurbished as the town museum under the National Historical Institute umbrella. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Four Papuan political prisoners have been sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment on treason charges.
But a West Papua independence advocate says Indonesia is using its law to silence opposition.
In April this year, letters were delivered to government institutions in Sorong West Papua, asking for peaceful dialogue between Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto and a group seeking to make West Papua independent of Indonesia, the Federal Republic of West Papua.
Four people were arrested for delivering the letters, and this triggered protests, which became violent.
West Papua Action Aotearoa’s Catherine Delahunty said Indonesia claims the four, known as the Sorong Four, caused instability.
“What actually caused instability was arresting people for delivering letters, and the Indonesians refused to acknowledge that actually people have a right to deliver letters,” she said.
“They have a right to have opinions, and they will continue to protest when those rights are systematically denied.”
Category of ‘treason’
Indonesia’s Embassy based in Wellington said the central government had been involved in the legal process, but the letters fell into the category of “treason” under the national crime code.
Delahunty said the arrests were in line with previous action the Indonesian government had taken in response to West Papua independence protests.
“This is the kind of use of an abuse of law that happens all the time in order to shut down any form of dissent and leadership. In the 1930s we would call this fascism. It is a military occupation using all the law to actually suppress the people.”
Delahunty said the situation was an abuse of human rights and it was happening less than an hour away from Darwin in northern Australia.
The spokesperson for Indonesia’s embassy said the government had been closely monitoring the case at arm’s length to avoid accusations of overreach.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Big Brother Watch have warned that police forces are feeding passport data into facial recognition databases:
Your passport photo has secretly been turned into a facial recognition police mugshot.
By subverting our photos into a giant facial recognition database, we’re all at risk not only of profound invasions of privacy but misidentifications & injustice.https://t.co/KIFHRGsqVLpic.twitter.com/5zTrY2bBWD
This affects everyone with a passport. When you applied for your passport, brushed your hair, sat down for a photo that would stay with you for the next 10 years, I’m guessing you didn’t expect that photo to secretly be turned into a police mugshot. But that’s exactly what’s happening.
British passport and immigration databases are being used by the police for mass facial recognition searches without a clear legal basis or the public or parliament’s knowledge. The number of searches of the passport database has skyrocketed from two in 2020 to 417 in 2023.
This not only violates our privacy, it puts us at serious risk of misidentification and injustice. It means police officers could secretly take photos from protests, social media, or anywhere really, and seek to identify us.
The police shouldn’t be able to scan and track us without cause, consent or accountability. If you believe in privacy, freedom and justice, now is the time to act.
Police and private companies in the UK have been quietly rolling out facial recognition surveillance cameras, taking ‘faceprints’ of millions of people — often without you knowing about it. This is an enormous expansion of the surveillance state — and it sets a dangerous precedent worldwide. We must stop this dangerously authoritarian surveillance now.
(@Rail_splitter1) 
Your passport photo has secretly been turned into a facial recognition police mugshot.