Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is calling on the Department of Homeland Security to cease what he describes as an illegal abuse of customs law to reveal the identities of social media accounts tracking the activity of ICE agents, according to a letter shared with The Intercept.

This case hinges on a recent effort by the Trump administration to unmask Instagram and Facebook accounts monitoring immigration agents in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. It’s not the first effort of its kind by federal authorities.

In 2017, The Intercept reported an attempt by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to reveal the identity of the operator of a Twitter account critical of President Donald Trump by invoking, without explanation, its legal authority to investigate the collection of tariffs and import duties. Following public outcry and scrutiny from Wyden, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded its legal summons and launched an internal investigation. A subsequent report by the DHS Office of Inspector General found that while CBP had initially claimed it needed the account’s identity to “investigate possible criminal violations by CBP officials, including murder, theft, and corruption,” it had issued its legal demand to Twitter based only on its legal authority for the “ascertainment, collection, and recovery of customs duties.”

The report concluded that CBP’s purpose in issuing the summons to Twitter was unrelated to the importation of merchandise or the assessment and collection of customs duties,” and thus “may have exceeded the scope of its authority.” The OIG proposed a handful of reforms, to which CBP agreed, including a new policy that all summonses be reviewed for “legal sufficiency” and receive a sign-off from CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

Eight years and another Trump term later, CBP is at it again. In October, 404 Media reported that DHS was once again invoking its authority to investigate merchandise imports in a bid to force Meta to disclose the identity of MontCo Community Watch, a Facebook and Instagram account that tracks the actions of immigration authorities north of Philadelphia. A federal judge temporarily blocked Meta from disclosing user data in response to the summons.

In a letter sent Friday to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Wyden asked the government to cease what he describes as “manifestly improper use of this customs investigatory authority,” writing that “DHS appears to be abusing this authority to repress First Amendment protected speech.”

The letter refers to the 2017 OIG report, noting that CBP “has a history of improperly using this summons authority to obtain records unrelated to import of merchandise or customs duties. … The Meta Summonses appear to be unrelated to the enforcement of customs laws. On the contrary, DHS apparently is trying to expose an individual’s identity in order to chill criticism of the Trump Administration’s immigration policies.” Wyden concludes with a request to Noem to “rescind these unlawful summonses and to ensure that DHS complies with statutory limitations on the use of 19 U.S.C. § 1509 going forward.”

The MontCo Community Watch effort followed an earlier attempt this year to unmask another Instagram account that shared First Amendment-protected imagery of ICE agents in public. This subpoena, first reported by The Intercept, focused not on merchandise imports. Instead it invoked law “relating to the privilege of any person to enter, reenter, reside in, or pass through the United States,” even though the subpoena was issued pertaining to “officer safety,” not immigration enforcement.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment

The post Wyden Blasts Kristi Noem for Abusing Subpoena Power to Unmask ICE Watcher appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Sandra never knew what happened to the child she had at 17.

Growing up in a respected, church-going, middle-class family in the South, her parents were dismayed when she told them she was pregnant. This was the early 1960s. “To get pregnant out of wedlock and while you were still that young was a stigma,” Sandra said. A baby also threatened her future ambitions: She was an outstanding student, a top basketball player, and lead clarinetist in her school band. Her parents were firm; the child should be given up for adoption. “I wasn’t going to fight it,” she said.

The family kept the baby a secret, sending Sandra to New York City to give birth. She stayed at a home for unwed mothers and on January 3, 1963, delivered a boy at the municipal hospital in Queens. He weighed 7 pounds, 13 ounces, according to the birth records, an “alert” and “responsive” baby with “curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and a medium complexion.” She named him Barry. Then he was gone.

For the next several years, Sandra didn’t dwell on the child she gave up. “Or maybe I purposely put it out of my mind so that I could move on,” she said. She graduated high school, went to college and got married, choosing her career over raising children. At a time when few women were working on Wall Street, let alone Black women, she found success in international banking. “I was good at it,” she said. And it gave her a chance to travel the world.

Nevertheless, as she approached her 30th birthday in 1975, Sandra found herself yearning to know what had happened to her child. The adoption remained a closely guarded secret even within her own family. (She agreed to be interviewed on the condition that she would not be identified by her real name.) But she did tell her husband. “And he asked me, would I like to find him?”

Sandra called the group home and the hospital in Queens. But New York’s stringent adoption record laws blocked her at every turn. It was not until decades later, in 2019, that the state would amend its adoption regulations, giving adoptees a right to obtain a copy of their birth certificate upon turning 18. By then, Sandra had long left the city and moved back south.

On October 26, 2022, she heard a knock at her front door. As she recalls, she was in the process of booking a vacation — her first big trip since losing her husband of 45 years. “I had just started to get myself together,” she said. But her world was about to turn upside down again.

The visitor was an investigator from the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel’s Office in Florida. She carried a copy of her son’s birth certificate, along with a handful of other records. She told Sandra that her son wished to be in touch with her. Was she open to that?

Elated, Sandra said yes. It was only when they sat down at her breakfast nook that the woman told her that her son was in prison. His name was Richard Barry Randolph, and he was on Florida’s death row.

Three years later, Sandra still struggles to find words to describe that moment. Her excitement turned to shock, then disbelief, then horror. Before leaving her house, the investigator warned that if Sandra planned to read news coverage of the crime, she should keep in mind that it did not reflect the whole story. Her son was no longer the same person he’d been. Sandra went online soon afterward. “That’s when I lost it,” she said.

The news stories said that he raped and murdered a 62-year-old woman at a Florida convenience store in 1988. The more she read about his case, she confessed, “I wasn’t sure I wanted to know him.”

“I’ve never had anyone in my family do anything like this. Never had anyone in my family incarcerated — definitely not on death row,” she said. The violence of his crime made her want to disavow him. “For me to say, ‘That’s my child’ was like, ‘Oh no.’ And that’s just the way I felt at the time. I’ve since changed my mind.”

A few weeks later, Sandra got a letter from her son in the mail. It was handwritten and read like he had carefully planned what to say. He wanted her to know that he wasn’t angry at her for giving him up — but he did want to know why. His childhood had been painful. Case records described his adoptive parents as ill-equipped to raise him; his mother drank heavily and his father was physically abusive. But he wanted to make clear that he didn’t blame Sandra. “He said that he didn’t hold it against me,” she said.

“The idea of giving him up for adoption was so that he would get a better home,” Sandra said. Instead, he’d been traumatized. According to the lawyers, her son had developed a serious problem with crack cocaine, which helped pave the way to his crime. But the explanation felt inadequate. Plenty of people struggled with addiction without committing such violence, she thought. “I don’t know what caused him to do that,” she said. Yet she found herself thinking, “What can I do to help you?”

In October 2025, a few days before her 80th birthday, Sandra answered a call from her son. By then, they had been talking for nearly three years. “They just signed the warrant,” he said — and she knew from their previous conversations what this meant. Florida’s governor had set an execution date. He was scheduled to die by lethal injection on November 20.

“‘I want you to stay strong,’” Sandra recalled him saying. “And then he apologized for it being my birthday week.”

Today, Richard Randolph is 63 years old and has been on death row for nearly 37 years. He converted to Islam decades ago and took the name Malik Abdul-Sajjad. Barring last-minute intervention, he will die by lethal injection on Thursday night at Florida State Prison in Raiford — the 17th person killed in the state’s execution chamber this year.

Florida has led a resurgence of executions across the country in 2025. Since May, it has averaged about two executions per month, far outpacing any state in the country. Although Florida has always been a leading death penalty state — it has the second largest death row in the U.S. — the current execution spree is unprecedented. “We had one last week and then this week and then there’s another one in December,” said capital defense attorney Maria DeLiberato, former executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, in a phone call on Monday. On Tuesday night, Florida announced yet another execution date for December. If all the executions go through, the state will end the year having killed 19 people — more than the previous 10 years combined.

The execution spree is the handiwork of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has presided over a systemic dismantling of the legal framework that once governed Florida’s death penalty. He has transformed the state Supreme Court, handpicking judges willing to discard long-standing precedents, including critical guardrails to prevent wrongful executions. Meanwhile, DeSantis’s position gives him more power than most to carry out death sentences. While other states require courts to schedule execution dates at the request of a state attorney general or local district attorney, in Florida the governor can do it himself. “He just picks somebody,” DeLiberato says, “and then 30 days later they’re dead.”

The executions have been driven by politics. DeSantis reactivated Florida’s death chamber in 2023 — just a few months before announcing his run for president. It was part of a broader death penalty push triggered in part by the long-awaited conviction of Nikolas Cruz, who slaughtered 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Prosecutors had refused to allow Cruz to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty, insisting on a costly, protracted capital trial, only for jurors to reject a death sentence, opting instead for life without parole.

Today, Florida only requires eight jurors to send a defendant to die.

DeSantis seized on the backlash. Florida had only recently reformed its death penalty law to require juries to unanimously agree on a death sentence. For much of its history, a defendant could be sent to death row by a vote of just 7 to 5. But in 2016, the state Supreme Court declared the statute unconstitutional, and lawmakers reformed the law to bring Florida in line with other states, requiring all 12 jurors to agree. After learning that three jurors held out against a death sentence in Cruz’s case, conservative lawmakers accused the holdouts of “derailing the full administration of justice” — and DeSantis vowed to change the law back to the way it was before. In 2023, he signed legislation to lower the threshold. Today, Florida only requires eight jurors to send a defendant to die.

Donald Trump’s reelection has since generated what DeLiberato describes as a “perfect storm.” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has spent the year carrying out orders to aggressively pursue the death penalty on all fronts, with her home state quick to comply. Florida is now making a name for itself as “the deadliest state in the country,” DeLiberato said. “And that’s just something they’ve decided to own.”

Florida’s capital defense lawyers have been unable to hold back the tide of DeSantis’s execution spree. For Malik’s attorney, Marie-Louise Samuels Parmer, a veteran lawyer at the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, his death warrant came just weeks after the execution of her longtime client Victor Jones, the 13th man put to death this year. Notice of the warrant arrived at 4:59 p.m. on October 21. The Florida Supreme Court set an expedited scheduling order to fast-track any final litigation. Whereas other states provide months or even years from a death warrant to execution, Florida gives 30 days.

Samuels Parmer was comparatively new to Malik’s case when her client learned the identity of his biological parents in 2022. She hoped the discovery might give him a shot at getting back into court based on new evidence. The adoption records unlocked a story that his jury never heard. Although the sole witness at his sentencing trial testified that Malik had been adopted, the witness erroneously said his birth parents were college students — “and that’s as far as we know about his early life.” To Samuels Parmer, it was clear that her client’s traumatic childhood set him on a tragic path. She firmly believed that if he’d been raised in a family more like Sandra’s, “he never would have ended up on death row,” she said.

There was a lot that Malik’s trial attorney could have learned about his client’s upbringing if he’d had the time or motivation to investigate it. If Malik’s case were to be tried today, it would likely take at least two years to go to trial — and his defense team would include at least two lawyers and a mitigation specialist, who would investigate his early life for any signs of trauma, neglect, abuse, or mental illness. But that’s not how things worked in 1989. Malik was tried five months after the murder and represented by a court-appointed attorney who insisted on working alone. At a post-conviction hearing years later, the lawyer conceded that he presented “not much of a defense at all.”

Yet the jury was split on his punishment, voting 8 to 4 in favor of the death penalty. The jury was majority white, with only four Black jurors, although it is unclear from the available record whether this included alternates. In their challenges to Malik’s death sentence, his attorneys have pointed to the divided vote as proof that his life could have been spared if not for his defense attorney’s failures. But Florida courts have disagreed.

As Malik’s execution nears, there is no remaining venue to ask for mercy. Any decision to spare his life would have to come from DeSantis: the same man who set his execution date in the first place. While other states give the condemned a chance to file a clemency petition close to their execution date — with some clemency hearings open to the public — this is not the case in Florida. In fact, many of the people now facing execution had their clemency review years, even decades, ago.

“Mr. Randolph is not the same person who was sentenced to death in 1989.”

Malik’s clemency application was submitted in 2014. Since then, his attorneys argue, the case for mercy has only become stronger. “Mr. Randolph is not the same person who was sentenced to death in 1989,” Samuels Parmer wrote in a legal filing last month. He is a “model inmate,” with no rule infractions over more than 14 years. He is also a mentor among the younger men on death row. And he has family who supports him, including his newfound relatives. In addition to his birth mother, he recently connected with a younger brother on his biological father’s side. That brother was willing to travel from California to meet Malik this week. But the prison denied his visit.

Florida’s execution assembly line has left little opportunity for the public to learn about the individuals being killed in its death chamber. But the cases are emblematic of the death penalty as a whole. While Malik’s story is unique in some ways, the problems in his case are all-too familiar, hallmarks of a “modern” death penalty that remains stuck in the past.

The city of Palatka sits on the St. Johns River, some 60 miles south of Jacksonville, a “rural band of the state that is reminiscent of the South of the 1950s,” as one news article put it in 1994. Once known for its paper mill, a 55-acre facility that provided critical jobs while filling the river and air with pollutants, the population in 1988 was roughly 11,000 people, about half of them Black. A 20-foot Confederate monument stood on the lawn of the county courthouse, with an inscription on its base: “The principles for which they fought will live eternally.”

In August of that year, 62-year-old Minnie Ruth McCollum arrived at the Handy Way convenience store in East Palatka, across the river from downtown. She usually arrived at 5:30 a.m. to open the store at 6, going out to prepare the gas pumps before customers started to arrive. But when employees got to the store just past 7 that morning, they found the doors locked. Police would force their way in to find McCollum in a pool of blood and undressed from the waist down. She was alive but had been badly beaten and was unable to speak beyond a moan. She died at the hospital several days later.

A suspect was identified almost immediately: 26-year-old Richard Randolph, known as Barry. He once worked at the store, and was seen by three witnesses leaving that morning. His girlfriend, who later testified for the state, said he had shown up at her house later that morning driving McCollum’s car.

According to the case records, Malik gave two statements confessing to police that same day. The interviews were not recorded. Instead, officers took notes on what he said. Investigators said he rode there on a bike that morning with a plastic water pistol and a plan to rob the store. He waited until he thought McCollum was at the gas pumps to dash inside but ran into her unexpectedly. He beat, stabbed, and strangled her, then sexually assaulted her, giving a nonsensical explanation for the latter: No one would believe he was capable of such a thing. “I’m not sure what to say. I’m ashamed,” he reportedly told police.

McCollum’s murder took place amid a contentious election season in Palatka, the seat of Putnam County. The local sheriff, who had been in office since the 1950s, was running for reelection while mired in a sexual harassment scandal. According to media stories at the time, he gave a press conference after McCollum’s murder that would raise the ire of the NAACP. He said he had been asked whether the murder in Palakta might be linked to a convenience store robbery elsewhere in the county. Claiming to quote a Black man, the sheriff answered, “It don’t make no difference; those Puerto Ricans and n-ggers is all alike anyhow.”

As the trial approached in February 1989, newly elected Florida State Attorney John Tanner announced that he would “personally prosecute” Malik, calling the murder “a case of significant impact on the county.” Tanner, a former defense lawyer and bombastic born-again Christian, had been elected the previous fall on a vow to go after drug dealers and pornography, while pledging that his office “will not be used for political purposes.” But he immediately came under fire for his unlikely relationship with Ted Bundy, whom Tanner had visited on death row dozens of times as part of a prison ministry program. As Bundy’s January 1989 execution approached, Tanner was accused of trying to delay the execution, leading to rumors of a recall. Some questioned his commitment to the death penalty itself.

Malik’s case became a shield against the political attacks. “We’re putting the thugs on notice, if they harm or rape a convenience store clerk or any other citizen, we’re going to seek the maximum punishment,” Tanner announced at the trial. “If they kill their victims, we’re going to put them in the electric chair.”

Malik’s case became a shield against the political attacks.

Like many death penalty defendants in that era, Malik was represented by a lawyer who would become notorious in his own right: assistant public defender Howard Pearl. Pearl presented no witnesses during the guilt phase of the trial; when it came time for his closing statement, he repeatedly conceded his client’s guilt, prefacing his remarks by expressing admiration for Tanner. “We’ve been friends for years,” he said, “and he has certainly acted in this case in a gentlemanly and professional manner.”

Post-conviction attorneys would later find evidence that Pearl enjoyed an uncomfortably cozy relationship with law enforcement agencies. At the time of the trial, Pearl had been designated as a “special sheriff’s deputy” in a nearby county — a position he’d held since 1970. Although Pearl explained that the sole purpose was to be allowed to carry a concealed weapon, he did not disclose his position to his clients.

Pearl said that he deliberately chose to work alone, rejecting any need for a second lawyer, which is standard in today’s capital case.

But most devastating for Pearl’s clients was his approach to defending them in the courtrooms where they went on trial for their lives. At a 1997 post-conviction hearing in Malik’s case, Pearl said that he deliberately chose to work alone, rejecting any need for a second lawyer, which is standard in today’s capital cases. “I was sole counsel,” he said. “No one ever sat with me. I did not permit it.”

Pearl did not investigate Malik’s case for mitigating evidence. Instead he followed his usual modus operandi: Rather than put witnesses on the stand who might do a poor job on cross-examination, he relied on a psychologist to interview his client, get names of people who might be important, and incorporate any information they might provide into his own testimony. “He selects those things which he feels are relevant to the testimony he wants to give,” Pearl explained.

Such an approach is shockingly inadequate compared to the mitigation investigations in most modern death penalty trials. Asked at the post-conviction hearing if he considered sending an investigator to learn more about his client’s life with his adoptive family in New York, Pearl said no. “I have never done that. And I would not. If I thought it was that important, I would have gone myself.”

Yet his assessment of what counted as important evidence in the case was dismissive. There were questions surrounding the sexual assault — a major factor in the case, especially in a prosecution of a Black man charged with killing at white woman. But Pearl didn’t seem to agree. Given the violence of the rest of the crime, “whether or not he raped her was not really all that important.”

As Sandra got to know her son over the past few years, she realized there were times when they lived within a few short miles of one another in New York City. “He could have seen me and I could have seen him and not known,” she said.

Malik’s adoptive father worked as a cab driver in the city, while his mother worked at an insurance company. Although they’d been thrilled to bring a baby home, it was an unhappy household. “There was chaos, there was confusion, there was abuse,” one expert witness testified at Malik’s 1997 post-conviction hearing. Case records show that Malik struggled emotionally from the start, having trouble sleeping, throwing “temper tantrums,” and biting his fingers and hands.

The trauma that stems from adoption was not as well understood as it is today. According to Malik’s adoptive father, who testified at the hearing, he and his wife told Malik that he was adopted at the direction of a book recommended by the adoption agency. But the revelation was devastating — and his parents struggled to handle the fallout. They divorced when Malik was 10. After living with his mother for a time, he moved in with his father, who is described in case records as demanding and brutal in his discipline: “tying him and beating him with his hands, a broomstick, and a belt.”

A bright spot in Malik’s life was his brother, Jermaine, who was born after his father remarried. Despite their age difference, the two formed a tight bond. Jermaine remembers looking up to his brother; in a phone call, he said Malik instilled in him a love of music, which inspired him to become a DJ for awhile. And while Jermaine remembers Malik starting to get in trouble as he got older, he also tried to set a good example. “He always did that away from me,” he said. “Always taught me the right and wrong things to do.”

Malik eventually left New York for North Carolina, where he met the girlfriend who would later testify against him at trial. As she would tell the jury, he was “a nice young man” when they met. But things changed when they moved to Florida, where he “started hanging out with the wrong crew,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to him.” He became quick to anger, “wanting to fight.”

Addiction was a big part of the problem. Although his trial expert testified that Malik struggled with crack cocaine, post-conviction attorneys unearthed further evidence showing that he had been on the drug the morning of the murder. His adoptive father, who also moved his family to Florida upon retiring in 1985, recalled finding Malik asleep in his car one morning and knowing something was wrong. He testified that he would have been willing to take the stand at the trial “in a heartbeat.” But Malik’s lawyer never contacted him.

Jermaine concedes that their father was harsh with Malik. But he also remembers him being devastated by the death sentence. Jermaine was 12 years old when he attended the sentencing in 1989 with his father and uncle, a New York police officer. “We drove up to Palatka and heard the verdict,” he said. “And that was the first time I ever seen my dad cry.”

Jermaine has visited and kept in touch with Malik over his years on death row. They talk about their families and follow sports. After the New York Knicks were eliminated from the NBA playoffs last year, he recalled, laughing, “I got an email with nothing but sad emojis on it.”

Florida does not allow family of the condemned to witness the execution.

Jermaine’s last visits with his brother have taken place behind glass. He could not attend the execution if he wanted to: Florida does not allow family of the condemned to witness. In the hours leading up to the execution, he’ll be at the country club in Lakeland, Florida, where he works as a chef — the same place he was where he heard about the warrant.

Meanwhile, Malik will never have a chance to meet his other brother, the son of his biological father, Hayves Streeter Sr. As with Sandra, Malik’s lawyers tracked down Streeter in California, but he fell out of touch. His son, Hayves Streeter Jr., was at work in San Diego last month, preparing for an all-hands meeting with his staff, when he got a phone call from a member of Malik’s legal team, asking about his father. And that’s how he learned he had a brother on death row.

“Whatever I was doing,” he said, “I was stuck in that spot.” His father, a nuclear engineer who married three times, had never said anything about having another son. It was not until he was in the throes of an aggressive form of dementia that he made a comment that struck Hayves as bizarre. “He made mention that, ‘Hey, you might have a brother,’” he said. “I kind of laughed it off.” His father said that the man was in jail, which made Hayves worry that he might be getting scammed for money. But then, he said, his father was saying a lot of things that didn’t make sense at the time.

“We’ve got to get years of information to each other in this short amount of time.”

On the phone with the legal team, Hayves realized what his father was saying had been real. In the weeks that followed, he received phone calls from Malik. They asked each other questions and shared whatever they could. He tried to get permission to visit Malik before his execution but was denied. In one of their last phone calls, they were allowed to talk longer than usual — 20 minutes — and covered as much ground as possible. “We’ve got to get years of information to each other in this short amount of time,” he said. “So we’re just shooting questions off left and right, trying to make the most of it, because neither one of us knew when the guard was gonna say, ‘All right, it’s time.’”

Sandra once hoped to meet her son in person too. As his execution approached, she was still grappling with the question of why his life turned out the way it did. It is especially painful when she looks at her nieces and nephews. “They’re successful, happy, married with their own families,” she said. She doesn’t expect to find an answer. But it will be harder once the state takes her son’s life.

Malik’s lawyers arranged for Sandra to visit him before his execution. She planned to fly out this week. But she canceled the visit days before, saying she was having health issues. In our phone call, she said she did not want to see him on the day he was scheduled to die — and he did not want her to see him like that either. Last night, on the eve of the execution, Sandra was at home instead.

“I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “But I know I’m going to have to.” She knows it will affect her, but she’s afraid to find out how. “I really don’t want to think about it.”

The post At 17, She Gave Up Her Son. Sixty Years Later, She Found Him on Death Row. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Cal Poly Humboldt students had been occupying a campus building in solidarity with Palestine for three days when then-university President Tom Jackson decided to bring the demonstration to an end. But he didn’t think the university could break the occupation, some two dozen members strong, on its own. In an email to the sheriff of the Humboldt Police Department on April 25, 2024, Jackson asked to tap a pool of policing cash clothed in the language of anarchist solidarity: the “law enforcement mutual aid system.”

In California, the Law Enforcement Mutual Aid Fund sets aside $25 million annually to let law enforcement agencies work across jurisdictions to fight natural disasters and other major emergencies. In a briefing obtained by The Intercept, acceptable LEMA use cases are listed as fires, storms, flooding, earthquakes, natural or man-made disasters, and “other extra ordinary events requiring emergency law enforcement mutual aid on a case by case basis.”

Leadership at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt — part of the California State University public school system — was able to tap these funds to bring outside law enforcement onto campus, The Intercept found in an investigative series on the university playbook for crushing pro-Palestine protests. Among more than 20,000 pages of documentation The Intercept obtained via public records requests, email after email from April and May 2024 show chiefs of police and administrators in California’s public universities asking outside law enforcement agencies to enter their campuses and clear encampments.

As “Gaza solidarity” encampments popped up across college campuses in April and May 2024, Jodi Lopez, staff services manager at California’s Office of Emergency Services, informed the leadership of at least 30 public universities — including Cal Poly Humboldt — that if they were to require mutual aid assistance, LEMA would be available to reimburse their expenses, attaching a flyer that detailed eligible costs.

Cal Poly Humboldt students first entered and staged a peaceful sit-in at Siemens Hall on April 22. According to the documents obtained by The Intercept, leadership at the university was promptly in contact with local police departments about bringing the demonstration to an end. That day, police in riot gear attempted to enter the building and clear out the protesters, but students held them off. In an incident that would go viral on social media, a student could be seen on surveillance footage hitting officers on their helmets with an empty plastic water jug. The cops eventually withdrew from the building, marking the start of what would turn into an eight-day occupation.

Enlisting the help of Humboldt County’s Office of Emergency Services, the Eureka Police Department, and the University of California Police Department, Jackson’s email on April 25 requested assistance with “Reestablish[ing] control of university buildings and other property” and “eliminating the threat of domestic violent extremism and criminal behavior” on the part of the students — setting into motion the plan with which the cops ultimately cleared the hall. Ryan Derby, then head of the county OES, added in his mutual aid request that Cal Poly Humboldt would require the assistance of a total of 250 law enforcement officers, with “personnel for entry team trained in tactical room clearing and arrest and control.”

In a statement emailed to The Intercept, Cal Poly Humboldt spokesperson Aileen S. Yoo confirmed that the university “formally requested from the state Law Enforcement Officer support through the LEMA request process” and noted that “Cal Poly Humboldt remains firmly committed to upholding the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, ensuring that all members of our community can speak, assemble, and express their views.”

A Cal OES spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Intercept that “Local law enforcement who provided that support to Cal Poly Humboldt were reimbursed through the LEMA Fund program.” The statewide office “is committed to protecting Californians and supporting local partners in times of crisis, regardless of political views or affiliation,” the spokesperson wrote.

If there were ever a social contract between students and administrators at U.S. universities that allowed for the operation of insulated, on-campus police departments thought to be better attuned to the needs of students, that contract was shattered when universities nationwide brought in outside law enforcement to crush the student-led movement for Palestine, argued civil liberties advocates who spoke with The Intercept. A year before the Trump administration would step up efforts to use police power against public protest, the Palestine solidarity encampments made universities a test case for the tolerance of dissent — one that universities overwhelmingly failed.

“ I don’t even know if we can talk about the trust that students have in their universities. But if there was any trust, you ruin it when you bring in outside police to harm your own students,” said Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal.

“If campus closure is required through the weekend, revenue loss will grow considerably.”

As Jackson stated in his email, Cal Poly Humboldt’s budget was at stake. “Three large events and a dozen smaller events on campus have been canceled. Athletic events have been either canceled or moved off main campus,” he wrote. “If campus closure is required through the weekend, revenue loss will grow considerably.”

University and outside law enforcement would go on to arrest 25 students at Siemens Hall. Alongside over a dozen wildfires — including the deadly Palisades Fire, which destroyed more than 6,000 homes — the raid is currently listed on the LEMA website as an example of a case for which funding can be requested.

While it is far from a secret that outside law enforcement agencies were involved in the clearing of university pro-Palestine encampments, these terms of operation — and compensation — have never previously been reported on in detail. Communications between university officials and the outside agencies show that the process took shape in the smooth functioning of bureaucracy, with polite, breezy exchanges preceding violent crackdowns and raids.

As the pro-Palestine demonstrations continued, the practice of bringing outside law enforcement officers onto campus became increasingly normalized in the University of California system. On May 5, 2024, Lamine Secka, chief of police at UC San Diego, wrote to the California Highway Patrol: “Attached, please find a request for assistance to clear out a protest encampment on the UC San Diego campus.” CHP, acting with UCSD and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, would enter the campus in full riot gear on May 6, arresting dozens of student protesters. (It was not clear if LEMA funds covered that deployment, and UCSD did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

The presence of outside law enforcement officers on campus fundamentally alters the power dynamics of a protest, said Ahamed of Palestine Legal. “ These police officers who are trained in violent tactics, you bring them to campus and they’re deploying those tactics against students. That is really dangerous,” she said.

In some cases, that meant radicalizing students who watched militarized police forces haul their classmates away. In others, it meant injuring peaceful protesters — especially at the University of California Los Angeles, according to students and faculty who spoke with The Intercept. At UCLA, university administrators tapped state emergency services funds to bring in outside law enforcement officers and arrest countless students, with many injured. UCLA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“They were showing us the level of militarization within these departments,” Dylan Kupsh, a fifth-year Ph.D. student at UCLA, told The Intercept. “Even since the encampment, they’ve been more and more present and bringing in other departments.”

In the face of this repression, said Corey Saylor, the research and advocacy director at Council on American-Islamic Relations, “This generation of college students is extraordinarily brave and principled. They’ve been willing to sacrifice education and career to stand on a very simple human value that genocide is wrong, that occupation is wrong, that apartheid is wrong.”

The pro-Palestine encampments presented university leaders with a publicity crisis, forcing them to choose between options ranging from letting the peaceful protests play out to quashing them with the full force of the police. Universities almost exclusively chose the latter. With encouragement from the state government, California public universities responded to the student protests less like dissent and more like a natural disaster.

Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

The post How California Spent Natural Disaster Funds to Quell Student Protests for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

From her perch on the witness stand, 81-year-old Fern Smith cast a flinty stare at the defense attorney standing before her. Once a veteran prosecutor at the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office, she wore a black chiffon scarf, gold earrings, and an obstinate air, her gray hair pulled back in a tight bun. She did not look at Richard Glossip, sitting across the Oklahoma City courtroom alongside his lawyers. Smith had last seen him more than two decades earlier, not long after convincing a jury to sentence him to die.

“You’re here under a subpoena, correct?” defense attorney Corbin Brewster began. It was October 30, 2025. Smith was the last witness at an evidentiary hearing that started at 10 a.m. The U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Glossip’s conviction eight months earlier, only for Oklahoma’s attorney general to announce he would retry Glossip for murder. But two criminal court judges had since recused themselves from the case, both on the grounds that, as former Oklahoma County prosecutors, they might appear too close to the office that sent Glossip to death row. Now Glossip’s attorneys were seeking the recusal of a third judge, Susan Stallings for the same reason — and in particular, due to her links to Smith, the original prosecutor in the case.

Stallings had already conceded that she worked under Smith in the early 1990s and credited her as a formative influence. She’d also reluctantly volunteered that she traveled with Smith on a group trip to Spain in 1997 — the same year Glossip was charged with a murder he swore he did not commit. But Stallings insisted that this was the extent of her relationship with Smith. And she maintained that she did not need to step down from the case.

Glossip’s lawyers were unconvinced. Although Stallings said she hadn’t spoken to her old mentor in decades, the two had seen each other as recently as April 2025, at a court hearing to investigate alleged misconduct in the case of a different man Smith sent to death row, 46-year-old Tremane Wood. Testifying at that hearing, Smith denied she’d done anything wrong — and Stallings, the presiding judge, found her testimony persuasive, ruling against Wood and setting him up for execution. He is scheduled to die on November 13.

To Glossip’s attorneys, the Wood hearing was a cautionary tale. To probe whether Stallings had disclosed the full details of her relationship with Smith, they sent Smith a subpoena in advance of Glossip’s October hearing that included a request for emails, text messages, and any other documented communications between the two women since Stallings was elected to the bench in 2018. “Did you bring any documents with you?” Brewster asked.

No, Smith replied. “I don’t have any of the documents that you requested.” In fact, she didn’t bother to look. “I don’t have to,” she told Brewster matter-of-factly. “I know I didn’t have any.”

Smith’s casual disregard of the subpoena was startling. But then, it had already been a strange, tense day in court. Stallings was both the subject of the recusal hearing and the presiding judge, which made for an uneasy — sometimes bizarre — dynamic. Although the hearing primarily concerned her own judicial obligations, the discussion repeatedly returned to the question of Smith’s ethical lapses. It was Smith, after all, who “originated the State’s theory, decided to pursue the death penalty, oversaw key early investigative decisions, and controlled the flow of evidence to the defense” in Glossip’s case, defense lawyers wrote in their recusal motion. The result was a prosecution that had been flimsy and corrupted from the start.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally murdered at the Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of Oklahoma City in January 1997. A 19-year-old handyman named Justin Sneed admitted to fatally beating Van Treese with a baseball bat but insisted that Glossip bullied him into doing it. His account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip – and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. At Glossip’s 1998 trial, Smith told jurors that he’d taken advantage of the younger, more vulnerable Sneed, offering him money to kill their boss so that Glossip could take over the motel. “Glossip encouraged, aided and abetted and sent Mr. Sneed off to do his dirty work,” she said.

But this story began falling apart not long after Glossip arrived on death row. A video of Sneed’s police interrogation cast serious doubt on the state’s version of events, revealing coercive questioning by Oklahoma City detectives who pressured Sneed into implicating Glossip. At the recusal hearing, one of Glossip’s previous appellate attorneys recalled the significance of the discovery, which debunked Smith’s claim at trial that Sneed’s account “has remained consistent from day one.” In reality, the lawyer testified, “the tape revealed this to be false.”

The defense’s failure to present the tape to the jury would lead an Oklahoma court to overturn Glossip’s first conviction based on ineffective assistance of counsel. Although a second jury convicted him and sent him to die in 2004, doubts over Glossip’s guilt continued to grow. Some of the most explosive revelations pointing to his innocence came in after Glossip’s near-execution in 2015, among them, evidence that Sneed had tried to recant his testimony and that Oklahoma County prosecutors ordered the destruction of key evidence in Glossip’s case between the first and second trial. Glossip’s attorneys were certain that the order to destroy evidence came directly from Smith. (Smith did not respond to emails from The Intercept.)

Throughout the hearing, both Stallings and lawyers for the state questioned why the defense kept invoking Smith’s alleged misconduct rather than focusing on her own capacity to be impartial. But the issues were inextricable. Prosecutorial misconduct had indelibly shaped Glossip’s case — it was the reason the high court finally threw out Glossip’s conviction — and the details of Smith’s alleged misconduct would be used by Glossip’s defense to challenge the evidence against him. “You will be the gatekeeper for this,” Glossip’s longtime attorney, Don Knight, told Stallings in his opening statement.

Brewster was prepared to ask Smith about her alleged misconduct. But first, he needed to address the trip to Spain. Smith had been asked to provide records of any travel she’d done with Stallings. Did she take any photos during their vacation? “I didn’t take photographs then, I don’t take photographs now,” Smith replied.

Brewster pressed on. “Other than that trip to Spain, what other trips have you been on with her?”

Suddenly, Smith was a lot more forthcoming. “We went to Las Vegas,” she said. That was in October 1996, which she only remembered because her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died that same year, she explained. The trip included Stallings and “several other ladies from the DA’s office.”

“OK,” Brewster said. “Other than the Vegas trip and the trip to Spain with Judge Stallings,” were there any more trips?

“I believe there was one more trip to England. And I believe we went to London and Paris.”

“I believe there was one more trip to England. And I believe we went to London and Paris,” Smith said. That was a larger group of people, she went on, including several members of her own family: her mother and sister, along with Smith’s late husband and mother-in-law. Stallings was there too, Smith said. But “it was a group trip and I didn’t see her very much.”

Among the spectators in the gallery, all eyes turned to Stallings. The judge had apparently been caught in a lie of omission. Stallings only disclosed one vacation with Smith to Glossip’s attorneys. Now there were three. As Brewster would later tell the judge, “any person might reasonably question whether you can be impartial going forward in this case given the evolving disclosures about trips with Fern Smith.”

Deputy Attorney General Jimmy Harmon would try to soften the impact of the revelations. “It sounds like that was kind of a common theme during that era of the DA’s office, that a group of co-workers may have traveled together,” he told Smith on cross-examination. “Did that mean you were best friends with that person?” No, Smith replied.

“Were you ever close personal friends with Susan Stallings?”

“No,” Smith said. “I considered her a friend but not a close personal friend.”

Smith went on, stammering a bit. “I mean, I don’t know, but I consider her like I would any other person that I worked with in the DA’s office, as a friend.” This included Harmon. “I consider you a friend,” she told him. She scanned the room and spotted a different veteran prosecutor she recognized, who had nothing to do with the case, but was watching from the jury box. “I hope I’m his friend. I hope he’s my friend,” Smith said. The prosecutor smiled, stood up, and interjected without hesitation. “I’ll stipulate that we are, Your Honor.”

In his opening statement that morning, Knight, Glossip’s longtime attorney, made clear that the hearing was about much more than Stallings or Smith — or even Glossip himself. The case was the product of an entrenched prosecutorial culture that had never been reckoned with in Oklahoma City. “It’s not a great culture,” Knight said bluntly. “Honestly, Your Honor, it’s got a bad reputation around the country. There’s a lot of death sentences here, a lot of death sentences that were overturned here.” What they were asking for, Knight said, was a judge not steeped in this culture.

The prosecutor who pledged his friendship with Smith in open court only underscored the problem. Although Glossip’s legal team included some of the most seasoned defense attorneys in the country — including legendary capital defense attorney Judy Clarke — they were outsiders in Oklahoma City. “You guys are all friends,” Knight told Stallings.

The state, meanwhile, sought to cast Glossip’s attorneys as “judge shopping” while trampling over judicial rules and norms. Harmon objected at every turn, including to the delivery of an opening statement, during which Stallings and Knight had engaged in a back-and-forth. “It is unlike any opening statement I have ever seen,” he complained.

Much of the day was spent on Glossip’s first witness, Georgetown University law professor Abbe Smith, who explained that the question of recusal was based on the appearance of bias, rather than bias itself — and opined that, based on the evidence, Stallings should disqualify herself from Glossip’s case. In an aggressive cross-examination, Harmon led Professor Smith on a performative parsing of Oklahoma’s Code of Judicial Conduct to determine where, exactly, it said that a judge in Stallings’s position was required to disqualify herself from a trial.

At times, Harmon’s questions served as an awkward reminder that his boss, Attorney General Gentner Drummond, spent years lambasting Glossip’s conviction and death sentence — joining Glossip’s attorneys in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in his favor — before reversing himself to retry him for murder. Noting that former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement argued on behalf of the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office at the high court — and that Clement once clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia — Harmon demanded to know whether Glossip’s lawyers had requested that Scalia recuse himself from the case. “Your honor, I’m not sure that Justice Scalia was alive at the time,” Clarke interjected. “Good point,” Harmon said.

Throughout the hearing, Glossip sat in the courtroom in an orange jumpsuit, a blue shawl laying awkwardly over his chest to keep him warm. He’d lost weight since his last court appearance, and he had dark circles under his eyes. Over the last decades, he had survived nine execution dates and seen more than 100 of his neighbors put to death. He was 35 years old when he’d arrived on death row. Now he was 62.

Although he was no longer living under a death sentence, Glossip’s daily life was in many ways worse than before. The Oklahoma County jail, where he’d been transferred to await trial, was a site of endless chaos: loud, filthy, and often deadly. His health had deteriorated, and he was struggling to get medical attention for his symptoms. And while his weekly contact visits with his wife had sustained him over his last few years on death row, Glossip could not see her in person at the jail.

Still, compared to his old neighbors, Glossip was lucky. While he watched his powerhouse legal team fight for an unbiased judge to preside over his third trial, Tremane Wood was back at the state penitentiary in McAlester staring down an execution date. His case, too, was a product of the culture Knight described, along with a disastrous legal defense by a court-appointed attorney who later admitted he had failed his client while struggling with addiction.

Convicted under Oklahoma’s felony murder statute in 2004, Wood was sentenced to die despite his brother’s insistence that he, not Wood, was responsible for fatally stabbing the victim in the case. An in-depth HuffPost investigation of Wood’s case recounted how the brothers were tried back to back, with the state offering shifting theories of the crime. At Wood’s trial, then-Assistant District Attorney Fern Smith pushed back on the claim. “Isn’t it true that you are only testifying here to save your brother’s life?” she asked Wood’s brother, Jake. But when it came time for Jake’s trial, Smith and her co-counsel flipped the script, arguing that he indeed had stabbed the victim. His admission of guilt had come straight “from the defendant’s mouth,” Smith said.

Concerns over the prosecution’s conduct were enough to prompt the notoriously conservative Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to grant an evidentiary hearing, which took place in April 2025. Although it did nothing in the short term to stop Wood’s execution, it did produce evidence that would prove to be decisive for Glossip at his hearing six months later.

Glossip’s attorneys cited Wood’s hearing in their argument for recusal. At the hearing, they called Wood’s attorney, Assistant Federal Public Defender Amanda Bass Castro Alves, who described the proceeding in her client’s case. “I would characterize Ms. Smith’s demeanor as hostile,” she testified. Stallings, on the other hand, had described it as “resolute” and credible upon ruling against Wood.

It was getting late in the day when Brewster finally broached the question of Smith’s alleged misconduct; it did not go smoothly. Presented with her own handwritten notes from a hearing in 2001, Smith said they did not refresh her memory about being the lead prosecutor at the time. Brewster asked if she was suggesting it might be possible that another prosecutor was in charge then. “Anything is possible,” Smith said.

“Do you understand that while you were lead attorney there were several items of material evidence from the crime scene of this homicide in your possession in the DA’s office that were ordered to be destroyed?” Brewster asked, interrupted by another objection. Brewster eventually grew exasperated. “We’re at a point, Judge, where the last, probably, 10 questions I’ve asked, you’ve sustained objections to,” he told Stallings. “I wouldn’t have to object if he would ask relevant questions,” Harmon shot back.

Brewster said he was trying to lay a foundation for his argument. “Whoever is presiding over this case is going to be either granting or denying relief on these issues,” he said. Stallings interrupted. “This is not an evidentiary hearing as to how the court is going to rule in the future,” she said. “And I promise you I am scratching the surface of this issue,” Brewster replied. “If I was going to get into the misconduct of Fern Smith, we’d need another day.”

Stallings remained unmoved. “That’s not why we’re here today,” she said.

Brewster returned to something Smith said at the start of her testimony. Despite denying any correspondence with Stallings, Smith did recall receiving one email from the judge. “She sent me a copy of the findings of fact and conclusions of law in the Tremane Wood case,” Smith said. She could not pull up the email, Smith said, since it was on her computer at work. And she demurred when asked if the email included any kind of greeting. “I might have said thank you,” she said.

Now Brewster had one last question — not for Smith but for Stallings. “Judge, at this time I’d ask the court to produce the email and Ms. Smith’s response to the email that was referenced in her testimony,” he said.

“I can check,” Stallings said, and called for a recess.

Stallings returned carrying copies of the email, which had included the ruling in Wood’s case as an attachment. Brewster read the response from Smith to Stallings out loud. “Thank you so much!! Amazing!! I don’t know when I’ve seen a more thorough analysis and well reasoned opinion,” it said.

“Thank you so much!! Amazing!! I don’t know when I’ve seen a more thorough analysis and well reasoned opinion.”

Brewster began to read Stallings’s response but was interrupted. “I think the exhibit speaks for itself,” Smith said. “It probably does, Brewster replied. “But if you’ll indulge me.” He read the reply. “Which I can’t take credit for,” Stallings had written. “It’s the proposed findings from the AG’s Office. They did do an outstanding job.”

The words seemed to hang in the air. Wood’s execution was fast approaching. And it had just been revealed that the judge in his case had emailed a witness — the original prosecutor and her own mentor — lavishing praise on the lawyers who were seeking to kill him.

It would not take long for Stallings to announce her decision from the bench. She did not bother to hide her indignation. “It’s obvious from today’s long hearing that the defense wishes to make the court a distraction in this case to get what they want,” she said. “In order to move this case along, in order to stop this dog and pony show so that they can continue on their journey to get the judge they want, the court is going to recuse.”

A few days after the hearing, Wood’s lawyers sought a stay of execution based on the revelations in court. “The new evidence reveals that Judge Stallings concealed the full extent of her relationship with Fern Smith from Mr. Wood’s counsel,” they wrote. Stallings had emailed Smith “to celebrate absolving Ms. Smith” of the misconduct allegations. On November 6, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3–2 to recommend clemency for Wood.

Wood’s life now lies in the hands of the governor. If he does not intervene, Wood will soon die by lethal injection. In the meantime, a new judge has been assigned to Glossip’s case. She, too, is a former Oklahoma County prosecutor.

The post Judge Failed to Disclose Personal Ties to Prosecutor in Two Death Row Cases appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., says he has “grave concerns” over a plan by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to award monetary bonuses to private bounty hunters, according to a letter reviewed by The Intercept.

ICE is currently considering awarding contracts to companies interested in providing “skip tracing” services that would deploy privatize investigators to track down immigrants residing inside the U.S. The plan, first reported by The Intercept, states that these bounty hunters will be tasked with conducting surveillance and ultimately pinpointing the home address of “aliens,” defined by the Department of Homeland Security as “a person who is not a citizen or national of the United States.” They could earn bonus payments based on how many immigrants they help the government in apprehending, and how quickly.

In a letter sent Monday to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Rep. Krishnamoorthi states that the outsourcing proposal raises worrying questions about accountability.

“Once the state begins contracting out its power to police, it invites the very abuses, secrecy, and corruption our founders sought to prevent.”

“Allowing private contractors to perform enforcement activities under a system of performance-based financial incentives, essentially bounty hunting, outsources one of the government’s most coercive powers to actors who operate with little oversight and limited public accountability,” Krishnamoorthi writes. “These contractors are not subject to the same scrutiny, discipline, or transparency that restrains federal officers, and entrusting them with powers of investigation and surveillance risks creating an enforcement apparatus that functions beyond the reach of ordinary checks and balances. Once the state begins contracting out its power to police, it invites the very abuses, secrecy, and corruption our founders sought to prevent.”

Krishnamoorthi also notes his worries about how the plan will further blur the line between federal authority and the private sector, adding more corporate profit motive to the government’s increasingly chaotic and freewheeling domestic immigration operations. “In such a system built on quotas and cash rewards with minimal oversight, mistakes are not just possible — they are certain. The pressure to hit numbers replaces the judgment, training, and accountability that should define real law enforcement.”

In addition to registering his alarm over the proposal, Krishnamoorthi is asking Noem to clarify outstanding questions about how the private bounty hunter system would work, including whether contractors will be required to identify themselves as agents of the federal government.

ICE did not respond to questions about Krishnamoorthi’s inquiry, but said in a statement that “The Request for Information is solely for information and planning purposes and does not constitute a Request for Proposal nor does it restrict the Government to any acquisition approach. As part of its market research, ICE is issuing this RFI to determine the estimated number of interested vendors capable of meeting this requirement. The government may use the responses to this RFI for information and planning purposes.”

The post Lawmaker Challenges ICE Plan to Hire Bounty Hunters appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.