Mohsen K. Mahdawi arrived at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, Vermont, on Monday. A Palestinian student at Columbia University, he hoped that, after 10 years in the U.S., he would pass the test to become a naturalized citizen. 

Instead, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him and began the process to deport him to the occupied West Bank. Mahdawi, a leader of the campus protest movement against Israel’s war on Gaza, became yet another green card holder arrested and facing removal.

“Mohsen Mahdawi was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” Mahdawi’s attorney Luna Droubi said in a statement to The Intercept. “He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech.” 

Mahdawi’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on Monday morning challenging the legality of his detention, alleging the government was violating his statutory and due process rights by punishing him for speech related to Palestine and Israel. The filing said it appears that Mahdawi was facing deportation under the obscure provision used in other recent cases that gives Secretary of State Marco Rubio the right to unilaterally declare immigrants as threats to American foreign policy.

EXCLUSIVE FOOTAGE: Columbia student and Palestinian Mohsen Madawi was just arrested during a visit to the immigration office here in Colchester, VT. More to follow. Footage by: Christopher Helali pic.twitter.com/I9JvPS2DLn

— Christopher Helali (@ChrisHelali) April 14, 2025

Mahdawi was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestine student protest movement until spring 2024, when he said he took a step back from the movement to focus on building bridges with Jewish and Israeli communities on campus.

In December 2023, Mahdawi asked Columbia professor Shai Davidai, a controversial pro-Israel figure at the school, to get coffee. The two met, but Mahdawi later said that Davidai left in the middle of the coffee. Less than two months after the meeting, Davidai posted a video of Mahdawi to Twitter in a thread characterizing him and other protest organizers as antisemitic and pro-Hamas. (Davidai did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) 

Since then, Mahdawi became a focus of attacks from a member of Congress and Zionist groups like Canary Mission and Betar.

With Donald Trump’s inauguration, groups like Betar and Canary Mission have been at the center of a push to place scrutiny on foreign students active in campus pro-Palestine movements. At Columbia, one behind-the-scenes push came from a WhatsApp group that included alumni and faculty who organized to get the students deported. Davidai was a member of the group, though there’s no indication he participated in talk of deportation, whether about Mahdawi or other students.

Even before his friend and fellow Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration authorities, Mahdawi asked university administrators to help him find a safe place to live so he would not be taken by ICE agents, according to emails reviewed by The Intercept. The school did nothing in response, Mahdawi said.

After ICE abducted Khalil last month, Mahdawi sheltered in place for more than three weeks for fear of being picked up himself. 

Instead of taking him off the street, however, immigration authorities scheduled the citizenship test at the Colchester USCIS office and took Mahdawi into custody when he arrived.

Now, Mahdawi is facing an order to deport him to the occupied West Bank, where escalating attacks from both the Israeli military and Jewish settlers have led to increased casualties among Palestinians.

“It’s kind of a death sentence,” Mahdawi said. “Because my people are being killed unjustly in an indiscriminate way.” 

His fears arise from the toll Israel’s attacks and occupation have taken on Mahdawi’s family. Growing up in the West Bank, his community has suffered losses for years. He said he lost his childhood best friend, his uncle, two cousins, several of whom were killed in the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against occupation that lasted from 2000 to 2005. 

“I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system.”

More recently, he lost two cousins in the growing violence in the occupied Palestinian territories since the October 7 attacks, Mahdawi said. His aunts and uncles’ homes have been destroyed, and his father’s store was blown up as part of the violence in the West Bank city of Jenin.

Now, he is the ninth Columbia student targeted for deportation as hundreds across the country have had their visas revoked under the Trump administration’s sweeps and abductions of immigrants. Mahdawi is one of the few cases of legal permanent residents arrested, meaning he did not have a student visa revoked but is facing an effort by the government to cancel his green card. Other permanent residents have faced deportation over allegations that they violated immigration law or had their residency revoked over pro-Palestinian views.

“This is the outcome,” Mahdawi said. “I will be either living or imprisoned or killed by the apartheid system.” 

Attacks and Government Scrutiny

In December 2023, Mahdawi appeared in a “60 Minutes” segment focused on antisemitism on college campuses. 

Mahdawi criticized how Columbia’s then-President Minouche Shafik had responded to the October 7 attacks, saying that she was ignoring the plight of Palestinians. And, a past leader of Columbia’s Palestinian student union, Mahdawi said pro-Israel factions on campus wanted to silence those protesting genocide. 

In the wake of the interview, he became the subject of increasing surveillance and attacks from Zionist groups. He said he also started receiving death threats. Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism, two Zionist groups that have become hubs for doxing and bullying of Palestine solidarity activists, created profiles for him. The profiles claimed that Mahdawi — whose activist work centered on finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts between Israelis, American Jews, and Palestinians — was anti-Israel and pro-Hamas.

By late 2024, Mahdawi was visited at his apartment by an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force official. Mahdawi said he is still unsure of the purpose of the FBI visit. Mahdawi said Columbia refused to provide him with video footage of his apartment complex capturing the visit. (Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Then, in early 2025, Trump formalized his plans to deport pro-Palestine student protesters with an executive order.

Shortly after, Betar, which said it sent a list of students it wanted deported to the White House, posted about Mahdawi. So did the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at ColumbiaU, which is run by a member of the pro-Israel WhatsApp group that worked to deport students. The group posted multiple times about Mahdawi and other organizers, tagging law enforcement agencies.

Shortly afterward, Mahdawi went into hiding. In response to a final email last month pleading with the school to move him to a safe location, a high-ranking official in the Columbia administration wrote, “The University’s outside counsel will be in touch with your counsel.” Mahdawi’s lawyer said Columbia responded and said they could not give him safe campus housing where he would be better insulated from ICE.

Last month, Betar posted about Mahdawi again. The group said Mahdawi was part of a group of students Betar was confident would “shortly be deported.” 

Earlier this month, Mahdawi received an email from USCIS notifying him that he was scheduled to conduct an interview to obtain his U.S. citizenship. He said he was expecting the interview to take place in December or January, in line with the expected timeline to move from his green card status through the naturalization process. When he received the email, however, he was worried it might be a trap. 

In anticipation of the worst, Mahdawi contacted his representatives in Congress, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., as well as Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., to make them aware of his situation and ask them to intervene if possible. 

Mahdawi said he spoke personally with Welch, who said his office would be on standby pending what happened with Mahdawi’s case. Offices for Sanders and Balint said they would remain on standby pending news of Mahdawi’s status after the interview. (Welch, Sanders, and Balint did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Mahdawi said the government’s efforts to chill speech went beyond issues related to Israel or Palestine. 

“That’s why they’re crushing universities now, it’s not only about Palestine,” Mahdawi said. 

As for his hopes of becoming a U.S. citizen one day and continuing his master’s degree studies at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Mahdawi’s future is unclear. 

“People ask me why I would want to become a citizen of a country committing genocide,” Mahdawi said. “I have faith in the people living in this country. The government is not the people.”

Update: April 14, 2025, 1:42 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a filing made by Mohsen Mahdawi’s legal team challenging his detention by the government.

The post Palestinian Student Leader Was Called In for Citizenship Interview — Then Arrested by ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

A few days after she announced that the Trump administration will seek the death penalty against alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sat down for an interview with Fox News Sunday, where she was asked to respond to fears that the country is in a constitutional crisis. Her answer was predictable. The real constitutional crisis, Bondi said, is the barrage of legal challenges to Trump’s agenda.

“The president is going to comply with the law,” Bondi insisted before making clear that the law is irrelevant in the face of Trump’s mission to Make America Safe Again. Her Department of Justice had just indefinitely suspended a federal prosecutor who admitted in court that there was no evidence against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man exiled to a Salvadoran prison as a result of an “administrative error” — and whose continued imprisonment was decried by a federal judge as “wholly lawless.” To Bondi, the real problem was the prosecutor. “He shouldn’t have taken the case,” she told the Fox News host. “He shouldn’t have argued it if that’s what he was going to do.”

In other words, DOJ prosecutors must fall in line or pay the consequences.

The exchange was a chilling glimpse of what lies on the horizon when it comes to Trump’s broader priorities. As Trump revamps the DOJ to better suit his agenda, the decision to seek death against Mangione reflects his long-standing desire to ramp up capital punishment. In an executive order immediately following his inauguration, Trump proclaimed his intention to “pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” As Bondi told the Fox News host, “We’re gonna seek the death penalty whenever possible.”

Mangione, 26, is facing trial in three different jurisdictions for the murder of Brian Thompson last December. In addition to state charges in New York and Pennsylvania, Mangione is being prosecuted in the Southern District of New York based on federal gun laws and the allegation that he crossed state lines to stalk and kill Thompson. Although lawyers on both sides have said that Mangione will be tried first in state court, it’s possible this could change. In a statement earlier this month, defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo argued that “Luigi is caught in a high-stakes game of tug-of-war between state and federal prosecutors, except the trophy is a young man’s life.”

It’s too soon to tell what Mangione’s case might reveal about Trump’s pursuit of death sentences going forward. But Mangione’s lawyers argue that Bondi has trampled the usual process. In a motion filed April 11, they asked a federal judge to block the Trump administration from seeking death against their client, citing its lawless conduct in the Abrego Garcia case. “These are not normal times,” they wrote.

“One of my biggest questions is whether the Department of Justice followed its own policies in making this decision to seek death for Mr. Mangione,” Robin Maher, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, told me in early April. According to the defense motion, the answer is adamantly no. The prosecution is “a political stunt,” the lawyers argue, accusing Bondi of ignoring “the established Department of Justice death penalty protocol, which she has wholly abandoned.”

Although the attorney general retains the authority to decide whether to seek a death sentence, such prosecutions usually originate with a recommendation from a local U.S. attorney. The process includes soliciting input from defense lawyers, who are given a chance to meet with the DOJ’s Review Committee on Capital Cases in Washington D.C., in order to provide any mitigating evidence that would render a death penalty prosecution inappropriate. But Mangione’s lawyers say they were afforded only a single “hastily assembled” video meeting in the last days of Joe Biden’s administration. After Trump took office, there was no word on a final decision. Instead, Bondi issued a press release announcing her goal of executing their client.

This was in stark contrast to the Biden DOJ, which “often took months and in some cases, more than a year” to decided whether or not to seek a death sentence, Maher said. “And I think that timing reflected a cautious approach that is appropriate for any use of the federal death penalty.”

Trump, of course, is not known for his careful deliberation about anything. Fueled by resentments and revenge fantasies, his executive order on the death penalty was itself a rebuke of the Biden DOJ’s reluctance to seek new death sentences — and especially of Biden’s decision to grant clemency to 37 men on federal death row. Although Bondi is wrong to claim, as she did in her Fox interview, that prosecutors never pursued the death penalty under Biden tenure, his DOJ chose only once to seek a new death sentence, against Payton Gendron, the declared white supremacist who in May 2022 slaughtered 10 Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

The Buffalo case has yet to go to trial in federal court. Mangione, who has not yet been indicted, is likely to wait years, too. The unique demands of a capital case are both time-consuming and expensive. In addition to the investigative resources required for the guilt phase of any trial, an adequate death penalty defense also involves a separate, in-depth mitigation investigation. The cost can run millions in taxpayer dollars.

No matter how fast Bondi hopes to make an example of Mangione, a death sentence must still ultimately be handed down by a jury. And there’s a world of difference between charging someone like Mangione with a death-eligible crime and persuading 12 people to send him to death row. The last federal defendant who went on trial for his life in a Manhattan courtroom was Sayfullo Saipov, who drove a truck into a crowded bike path on Manhattan’s West side, killing eight people and injuring many more. The horrific attack, carried out in the name of the Islamic State, took place in 2017, Trump’s first year in office. In an all-caps tweet, Trump immediately called for the death penalty. But Saipov did not go to trial until after Trump left office. Although then-Attorney General Merrick Garland pushed forward in seeking death, the jury ultimately deadlocked. Saipov was sentenced to life in prison.

It would be an understatement to say that Mangione is a more sympathetic figure than Saipov among most Americans. Mangione’s folk hero status is such that his defense team has set up a website complete with an FAQ section and a note from their client expressing regret that he cannot respond to every letter he receives. Whatever Trump’s DOJ does to bring him to trial, there is a significant chance a jury will spare his life.

The same is likely to be true of Trump’s future prosecutions. Although there has recently been a resurgence of executions — and an expansion of new methods — in states across the country, jurors continue to reject the death penalty year after year. “The American public has made a very decisive turn away from the death penalty during the last 20 years,” Maher said. “This hasn’t changed, even with President Trump’s enthusiasm for the death penalty.”

What’s Past Is Prologue

In ordinary times, Trump’s ambitions of expanding the death penalty might have been dismissed as a dream whose time has passed. It would be hard to imagine Trump beating the record of his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, whose 1994 crime bill created 60 death-eligible crimes with the stroke of a pen. It was this expansion of the federal death penalty that set the stage for Trump’s execution spree, allowing him to carry out 13 executions in the last six months of his term.

Yet there is a less-discussed flipside to this decades-long history, one that reveals how rarely federal death penalty prosecutions have actually culminated in an execution. The DOJ’s dubious track record is captured in statistics collected by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel, which tracks completed cases dating back to 1988, the year the federal death penalty was reinstated. As of June 2024, 4,983 federal defendants had been charged with death-eligible crimes. Of those, the DOJ authorized a death penalty prosecution for 541 people. In the vast majority of these cases, the outcome was something other than death: 146 people entered a guilty plea before or at trial. Another 151 went to trial but received a life sentence from a jury. In 110 cases, the government withdrew its death penalty authorization before trial or after a death sentence was reversed.

In total, 83 defendants — 15 percent — of the 541 were sentenced to die. And of those 83, 16 have been executed. Today there are only three people remaining on federal death row.

Such figures mirror the history of the so-called “modern” death penalty as a whole. In state after state, the majority of death sentences never lead to an execution. The federal system has only ever represented a small fraction of the nation’s death sentences. Even the most aggressive death penalty push is unlikely to reverse this trend.

As her handling of Mangione’s case suggests, Bondi appears ready to keep pushing prosecutions in non-death penalty states. Last week, the DOJ announced a second death penalty prosecution in Colorado, which abolished capital punishment in 2020. But such a project is neither unprecedented nor a guarantee of success. Some 25 years ago, under George W. Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft made it a point to aggressively seek death sentences in states without the death penalty. What followed was a bipartisan era of increased capital prosecutions in non-death penalty jurisdictions, with little to show for it.

In New York, the DOJ sought a wave of new death sentences after the state’s death penalty law was overturned in 2004. A Staten Island man named Ronell Wilson had faced the death penalty in state court for murdering two undercover New York police officers in 2003. But after the New York Court of Appeals struck down the death penalty law, the Bush administration swooped in to try the case instead. Wilson became the first federal defendant sentenced to die in New York in 50 years.

Wilson’s trial judge, Eastern District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis, would later raise alarm over the high costs of federal death penalty cases. In 2010, he wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder about his decision to continue a death penalty prosecution inherited from the Bush administration. The cost of seeking death against the defendant, a mobster who was already serving life in prison, had already reached $3 million before trial, Garaufis wrote. But Holder pressed forward. In 2011, jurors deliberated for just two and a half hours before rejecting a death sentence.

By then, Wilson’s death sentence had been vacated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit due to prosecutorial misconduct. Holder sought a new death sentence and, this time, succeeded: In 2013, a second jury sentenced Wilson to die. But that sentence, too, was overturned after the 2nd Circuit ordered Garaufis to reconsider defense lawyers’ contention that their client had an intellectual disability. In 2016, Garaufis resentenced Wilson to life.

Today, Wilson is the only person in the modern era to receive a federal death sentence in New York. In the Southern District alone, the DOJ has authorized a death penalty prosecution in 17 cases, according to Mangione’s defense team. None of those defendants are facing execution. The odds remain firmly on Mangione’s side.

With his next federal hearing on April 18 — and his next state hearing not scheduled until June — Mangione faces a long legal saga, as does the family of his victim, who will likely wait several years before his federal death penalty trial to begin. The trial itself will last at least several months from jury selection to the sentencing phase. And in the event that federal prosecutors do convince 12 people to sentence him to die, his appeals will likely stretch out over at least a decade, if not two.

Trump, who is now 78, will be long gone by then.

The post Trump Will Be Long Gone Before Luigi Mangione Faces Execution appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are trying to track down undocumented immigrants, they seek out all the data they can find. In Arizona, they’ve found a special trove that’s ripe for abuse.

The Transaction Record Analysis Center, or TRAC, database offers a rare glimpse into the financial lives of millions of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. The database contains details about more than 340 million wire transfers sent via Western Union and more than two dozen other companies that immigrants rely on to send money back home.

The database contains a record of every transfer of $500 or more sent using these services to or from Mexico, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. For each transaction, TRAC captures the name and home address for both the sender and the recipient, plus dozens of other sensitive data points.

“This database is a loaded weapon lying around for the taking.”

“This database is a loaded weapon lying around for the taking,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, which has called for TRAC to be shut down. “This is a data collection program that disproportionately sweeps in the records of poor people and immigrants, groups that the Trump administration is going out of its way to target.”

TRAC is unusual in many ways.

The data dragnet is powered by Arizona’s state attorney general using administrative subpoenas, which do not require a judge’s sign-off. But TRAC operates as a nonprofit and a clearinghouse for ICE and hundreds of other law enforcement agencies around the country to access the data. The current Arizona attorney general, Kris Mayes, a Democrat, is aggressively suing the Trump administration on numerous fronts — yet the database is an invaluable potential resource for its anti-immigrant campaign. And despite being a target of privacy advocates and lawsuits for years, TRAC has continued to suck up data.

ICE has played an outsized role in TRAC over the years, chipping in data of its own at times. ICE agents have also been top users of the database, served on TRAC’s board, and even funded its operations.

But Mayes’s office and TRAC downplayed concerns that ICE might use the data to target immigrants for deportation. The database does not contain details about immigration status, they noted, and it’s intended exclusively to investigate money laundering along the border, which was how TRAC first started more than a decade ago. Before searching the data, agents must promise not to abuse their access and declare the “underlying predicate offense” for a given query, under an agreement Mayes’s office signed with TRAC in 2023. 

“TRAC offers officials a massive grab-bag of data to root around in.”

But privacy advocates told The Intercept that TRAC has insufficient safeguards and unacceptable risks, particularly under President Donald Trump. The Trump administration has been shifting agents at ICE and other agencies away from investigating money launderers, with orders to prioritize deportations and raids. Agents who are grabbing U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and visa holders off the streets on pretext; shipping people to a mega-prison in El Salvador based on “administrative errors”; and filing questionable search warrant applications might simply lie to access data that makes the deportation machine run a bit more smoothly. On Monday, ICE inked an agreement with the IRS to obtain data about undocumented workers, including their home addresses.

“The Trump administration has already shown that it is acting recklessly at best with who it deports and why,” said Abigail Kunkler, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “TRAC offers officials a massive grab-bag of data to root around in for transactions it can label suspicious, and there isn’t currently any oversight.”

“Limitless” Investigative Power

TRAC’s origin story is a testament to that familiar bipartisan itch to expand surveillance powers. Despite an early loss in state court over the dragnet, Mayes and her predecessors — one fellow Democrat and two Republicans — used settlement agreements and administrative subpoenas to build the database into a go-to resource for cops and federal agents nationwide.

It started with one subpoena to a single company. In 2006, then-Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat and former mayor of Phoenix, demanded data from Western Union about all wire transfers of $300 or more to any location in the Mexican border state of Sonora from any location worldwide over a three-year period. He did this under the state racketeering law, A.R.S. § 13-2315, which requires financial institutions to produce records in response to “reasonable” requests from the attorney general’s office.

Western Union initially proposed providing partially anonymized data to protect its customers’ privacy.

This wasn’t acceptable to Goddard and a task force of federal and state agencies, which wanted as much data as possible — including about innocent customers’ transactions — to establish “control groups.”

Western Union fought the subpoena, and in 2007 a state appellate court ruled Goddard had exceeded his authority under the racketeering law. The Arizona Court of Appeals was concerned at the subpoena’s sheer breadth, especially its geographic coverage far beyond Arizona state lines, and ruled it was not “reasonable” under the law. 

“It would provide a justification for requesting financial data from anywhere in the world.”

“The argument the Attorney General makes here would make the investigative power granted in A.R.S. § 13-2315 limitless,” the court found. “It would provide a justification for requesting financial data from anywhere in the world merely because it might serve to provide a baseline of ‘innocent data.’”

After losing the court battle over the subpoena, Goddard turned up the pressure on Western Union by suing it directly. In 2010, Western Union settled with the attorney general’s office and agreed to comply with subpoenas for data about wire transfers above $500.

Beside the higher threshold amount, the scope of data sharing under the settlement agreement was even broader than what Goddard had previously sought. Western Union agreed to share five years’ worth of historical data and give Goddard’s office “near real time” data about transactions sent to or from “the area within 200 miles north and south of the United States/Mexico border,” plus all of Arizona. Unlike the prior subpoena, this included portions of every state on both sides of the border.

The state attorney general’s office now had a data pipeline from one of the biggest players in the wire transfer industry. And it was just the beginning.

 “Unorthodox Arrangement”

In early 2014, Western Union signed a second settlement with Goddard’s successor, Republican Tom Horne. This agreement expanded the data sharing to its current scope: all wire transfers above $500 to and from the entire country of Mexico plus the entirety of four U.S. southern border states — Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas — regardless of proximity to the border.

By this point, the dragnet had expanded beyond Western Union too. Horne’s office sent subpoenas to at least five of its competitors in late 2013, records show, including to MoneyGram, Sigue, and Continental Exchange Solutions.

The 2014 agreement also marked the establishment of TRAC as a separate nonprofit entity, initially bankrolled by Western Union and under the control of the attorney general’s office through its board. TRAC’s first director and president served simultaneously as a special agent supervisor at the agency, records show. 

In 2015, Republican Mark Brnovich took over as Arizona’s attorney general. An early advocate for the argument that undocumented immigrants constitute an “invasion” under the U.S. Constitution, Brnovich was recently tapped as Trump’s ambassador to Serbia.

During Brnovich’s tenure, TRAC expanded rapidly, from 75 million transaction records compiled from 14 different companies in 2017 to 145 million records from 28 firms in early 2021, according to meeting minutes of TRAC’s board. In 2021 alone, TRAC added a “25% increase of data,” other minutes show. TRAC’s user base also exploded, from 300 different law enforcement agencies and 600 users in 2017 to nearly 700 agencies and 11,600 users in late 2021.

As of 2018, ICE was the top agency using the database.

As of 2018, ICE was the top agency using the database, with almost 950 active user accounts, records show. During the Brnovich years, the agency became a key player in other ways. A top ICE agent in Phoenix joined TRAC’s board in 2017. In summer 2019, when the Western Union settlement concluded and the company was no longer on the hook to finance TRAC, ICE kicked in a year of funding.

Around this time, ICE also started contributing data about millions of wire transfers to TRAC using its own legally dubious administrative subpoenas, according to findings published by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. in 2022 and 2023. Between 2019 and 2021, agents at two different offices of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations sent a type of federal subpoena called a “customs summons” to multiple companies, including Western Union. By law, this type of subpoena is limited to investigations related to merchandise imports and customs duties, a limitation which agents at ICE and other DHS components have flagrantly ignored before.

Some of ICE’s subpoenas covered transactions thousands of miles from the U.S.–Mexico border, demanding data for more than a dozen additional countries spanning from the Caribbean to China and parts of Europe.

The Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI had also demanded data from certain companies, Wyden found.

“This unorthodox arrangement between state law enforcement, DHS and DOJ agencies to collect bulk money-transfer data raises a number of concerns about surveillance disproportionately affecting low-income, minority and immigrant communities,” Wyden wrote in a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

After Wyden raised concerns about the legality of their subpoenas, ICE withdrew them. A few months later, an HSI agent received an award from the White House for his “innovation, creativity, and foresight” in getting TRAC access to “an additional stream of millions of financial transaction records.”

TRAC Under Mayes

Mayes narrowly won the state attorney general’s race in 2022, and she was sworn in as Wyden and the ACLU brought renewed scrutiny to TRAC. Once a Republican, Mayes switched parties in 2019, a change she attributed recently to her revulsion at the first Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

From the beginning of her administration, Mayes has defended TRAC. Like her predecessors, Mayes has overseen its continued expansion using administrative subpoenas under A.R.S. § 13-2315, but her office declined to comment on how the agency squares these subpoenas with the state appellate court’s decision from 2007. As of July 2024, 22 companies were “actively producing records” to TRAC, according to an HSI newsletter.

“The subpoenas are just as illegal now as they were several years ago,” the ACLU’s Wessler said.

Mayes has also taken steps to protect TRAC against legal challenges.

Shortly before she took office, four people whose data was swept up in TRAC filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court against Western Union, MoneyGram, and other companies the plaintiffs used to send money to family abroad, as well as DHS and ICE. The plaintiffs alleged TRAC’s data sharing violates both federal and California financial privacy laws. In their defense, the companies pointed to the subpoenas they received over the years, including from Mayes’s staff.

TRAC wasn’t a defendant in the lawsuit, nor was the Arizona attorney general’s office. But in September, Mayes submitted a letter to the court defending TRAC. Mayes emphasized that she had “embraced and furthered” the program and claimed her office’s success at combating transnational criminal groups was “highly dependent” on her “ability to issue and enforce the subpoenas.” 

“Because a primary issue before this Court is the legality of the Defendant [companies’] compliance with these subpoenas, it is difficult to identify a party more interested in such litigation than the State of Arizona,” Mayes wrote.

Wessler called the letter a “pretty aggressive attempt to shut litigants out of court,” particularly since this was “private litigation in a different court in a different state.”

Mayes’s letter cited a handful of federal prosecutions in which TRAC has played a role. One in particular, which resulted in drug trafficking and money-laundering convictions in California last October, shows the sheer scope of the database.

In December 2020, two informants told federal agents that they used a small money transmitter business in Oakland to launder drug proceeds to Mexico. Cashiers had been using an unsuspecting victim’s ID and personal information as cover for the transactions.

A table included in court filings shows the data that TRAC already had on this innocent third party, along with the fraudsters. There were more than a dozen entries for wire transfers she sent to “family or friends in Mexico,” as an IRS agent wrote, as early as five years prior and for amounts between $650 and almost $3,000.

“I would be worried about whose hands this data would get into,” said Sarah Lopez, a migration scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied remittances from Mexican immigrants to their communities back home, of the detailed data compiled by TRAC. “There are millions of people sending repeat transactions” via wire transfers each year between Mexico and the U.S., she said, “then multiply it by two because people are being tracked on both sides of border.”

Lopez was skeptical that the $500 threshold amount in the TRAC subpoenas — unchanged for more than a decade — was a meaningful screen to prevent excessive surveillance of immigrants’ remittances. “Five hundred dollars is not a lot of money to send,” she said, noting that immigrants often send money to help with significant one-time expenses like housing and health care, and that service fees incentivize larger transfers.

TRAC’s president, Rich Lebel, defended the $500 threshold as “striking the right balance” based on recent data about average remittance amounts to Mexico and recent discussions he had with companies that share their data. Two companies told TRAC that, in 2024, “nearly 80% of all of their transactions are below $500, which means TRAC only has insight into approximately 20% of all transactions,” Lebel wrote in an email.

Mayes’s letter to the court proved fatal to the class-action lawsuit over TRAC. In late September, the court dismissed the case entirely, ruling that her office had “a legally protected interest” in defending the subpoenas but could not be added to the case. In November, shortly after the election, Mayes submitted a similar letter in another federal lawsuit regarding TRAC, which is ongoing.

“Despite the lawsuit and the public scrutiny of its actions, AG Mayes’ office is doubling down on its surveillance tactics,” said Daniel Werner, a senior staff attorney with Just Futures, which represented the plaintiffs in the dismissed class action lawsuit.

A Model of Secrecy

When it comes to TRAC, Mayes has distinguished herself from Brnovich, her Republican predecessor, in one key respect: secrecy.

Under Brnovich, the attorney general’s office released hundreds of documents about TRAC’s internal operations to the ACLU. These included nearly 140 subpoenas sent to more than 20 companies, meeting minutes from the TRAC board, and user lists.

Over the past year, The Intercept submitted multiple records requests to Mayes’s office, seeking updated versions of many of these materials plus other records. The agency sent the same documents it released to the ACLU and materials about TRAC’s operations under prior administrations. But it refused to release almost any records about how TRAC currently works, including documents that would show how its database has grown and shed light on its relationship with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

Mayes’ office now claims it would violate A.R.S. § 13-2315 itself to disclose any more of the TRAC subpoenas. “We are correcting the previous administration’s error and following the law,” wrote Richie Taylor, Mayes’s communications director, in an email.

“Their argument is wrong and borderline frivolous,” Wessler told The Intercept, noting that the statute clearly shields the data obtained by the subpoenas but says nothing about the subpoenas themselves. “An attempt to shield these subpoenas behind a spurious claim of secrecy is galling.”

For basic materials like TRAC’s meeting minutes, Mayes’s office now claims that it has no obligation under Arizona law to provide them since TRAC is formally a separate entity. When The Intercept asked TRAC directly for these same materials, it claimed, in turn, not to be subject to public records requests given its nonprofit status.

“The Public Records Law is an important part of Arizona law, but it simply doesn’t apply to TRAC,” wrote attorney Andy Gaona, which represents TRAC, in a letter in December.

Although a distinct creature on paper, TRAC has been “supervised directly” by the attorney general’s office, as a 2019 manual described the relationship. For years, TRAC’s bylaws gave the attorney general the power to personally select its board of directors and designate its chair. These provisions were still in TRAC’s bylaws as of September 2019, the most recent copy released by the attorney general’s office.

The current TRAC board chair, defense attorney Andrew Pacheco, who took the role in 2022, was chief of the attorney general’s criminal division before going into private practice. While working at the agency, he “supervised the activities of the Transaction Record Analysis Center,” according to his firm bio. The prior TRAC chair, Paul Ahler, served simultaneously as the agency’s criminal division chief.

“It just can’t be that the AGO can shield these public records by creating a nonprofit entity whose board it controlled, and that exists solely to ingest records obtained by the AGO,” Wessler argued, referring to the attorney general’s office.

Mayes’s office said that the attorney general no longer has this level of authority over TRAC but said it did not have a copy of the current bylaws to substantiate this. “TRAC is governed entirely independent of the Attorney General’s Office,” Lebel, TRAC’s president, wrote. TRAC declined to provide its current bylaws as part of The Intercept’s records request.

Other records show close coordination over the years between agency officials and TRAC staff — who sometimes used official government email addresses — including on the subpoenas that fuel the database.

TRAC’s deputy director, Liz Barrick, who joined TRAC in 2018 after several years working at the attorney general’s office, drafted many of the administrative subpoenas herself, records show, which she would forward to her former colleagues at the agency to review and sign before they were sent to the companies.

At one point in early 2018, Lebel and Barrick worked up subpoenas for wire transfers to and from an entirely new state: Georgia, which TRAC wanted to investigate as a “hub of racketeering activities.” For weeks, the pair emailed the attorney general’s office about the proper scope of the subpoenas. When one of the companies expressed concerns, Barrick responded with the agency’s position about modifying the subpoena. 

TRAC staff also coordinated with ICE as the agency prepared to send its own data demands to Western Union, emails show. In 2019, Barrick emailed an ICE official some “language to be included in the subpoena.” A few months later, Ahler checked in with Barrick: “What is the status of our federal administrative subpoena to Western Union?”

And in 2021, when Western Union’s lawyer requested a meeting with the attorney general’s office about a recent subpoena, Barrick was added to the call.

TRAC and Mayes’s office both declined to answer whether their staff still collaborate on the subpoenas.

“TRAC really appears to operate more like a department of the AGO and not an independent organization,” said EPIC’s Kunkler. “The AG’s attempt to weaponize technicalities to avoid disclosing information looks an awful lot like intentionally laundering their actions through a nonprofit to avoid disclosure.”

The post The Unusual Nonprofit That Helps ICE Spy on Wire Transfers appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The Trump administration’s case to deport Columbia University graduate and activist leader Mahmoud Khalil rests solely on a letter written by Secretary of State Marco Rubio which repeats the baseless claim that Khalil engaged in “antisemitism,” according to an individual who has reviewed the government’s filing.

The Department of Homeland Security submitted Rubio’s letter, a 1 ½-page declaration, on Wednesday evening at a Louisiana immigration court at the LaSalle ICE facility, a source familiar with the legal proceedings who has seen the letter told The Intercept. Khalil has been imprisoned at the ICE facility since March 9, a day after his arrest. 

On Tuesday, Judge Jamee Comans ordered the government to present evidence by Wednesday to justify its attempt to deport Khalil. Rubio’s letter was the sole piece of evidence provided by DHS attorneys, the source said.

Comans will preside over a hearing on Friday to decide whether the government’s evidence is sufficient to deport Khalil. If Comans rules against the government, Khalil could be released as early as Friday. 

“If he’s not removable, I don’t want him to continue to be detained – I will have him released,” Comans told attorneys for Khalil and the government during Tuesday’s hearing, according to multiple reports.

Rubio’s letter does not include new allegations or new evidence to support its deportation claim against Khalil, a legal permanent resident, the source said.

Instead, the source said the letter cites the “adverse foreign policy” provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act, the same provision cited by the government when it imprisoned Khalil in Louisiana. The Trump administration’s attorneys have referred to the provision in multiple court documents in Khalil’s separate habeas petition case in New Jersey, in which Khalil’s legal team has been pushing for his release. 

The rarely-used immigration law provision gives the Secretary of State the authority to request the deportation of an individual, who is not a U.S. citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country harms U.S. foreign policy interests.

The letter filed Wednesday asserts that Khalil engaged in “antisemitism” and that it is U.S. foreign policy to keep people out of the country who engage in such activities, the source said, adding that the government continues to conflate Khalil’s advocacy for Palestine with antisemitism. Rubio makes the determination in the letter without providing any further analysis, the source said.

The State Department did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

In previous public statements, Rubio has called Khalil “a supporter of Hamas,” the Palestinian militant group which governs over Gaza, a common and baseless claim made by the Trump administration about student protesters who oppose U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Khalil was a lead negotiator between the Palestinian solidarity encampment at Columbia University and school administrators in the spring of 2024. The student-led movement demanded the university disclose and withdraw its investments in companies that profit off of Israel’s war in Gaza.

The Trump administration’s attorneys have previously accused Khalil of hiding certain employment experience from the government when applying for his green card. They claimed that Khalil failed to mention that he had previously worked for the Syria office of the British Embassy in Beirut as well as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian Refugees. Khalil was an unpaid intern at UNRWA for a brief time in 2023.

The government, however, did not include these allegations in its filing in immigration court on Wednesday, the source said. 

After Tuesday’s hearing, Marc Van Der Hout, a lead attorney on Khalil’s legal team, said the government has yet to provide “a single shred of evidence to date to support any of its allegations or charges in this case including its outrageous position that Mahmoud’s mere presence and activities in this country have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” He also criticized Judge Comans for moving too quickly on the case without giving the legal team more time to bolster its defense of Khalil against deportation.

“Yet the Immigration judge today stated she intends to rule Friday on the merits of this outlandish charge with no realistic opportunity for Mahmoud and his lawyers to contest this baseless charge,” Van Der Hout said in a statement on Tuesday. “If this turns out to be what happens Friday, it would be an uncalled for rush to judgement that would completely deprive Mahmoud of any due process, which is a foundation of our legal system.”

The post Source: Final Case Against Mahmoud Khalil Hinges on Vague “Antisemitism” Claim appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The Trump administration’s case to deport Columbia University graduate and activist leader Mahmoud Khalil rests solely on a letter written by Secretary of State Marco Rubio which repeats the baseless claim that Khalil engaged in “antisemitism,” according to a copy of the letter shared with The Intercept.

The Department of Homeland Security submitted Rubio’s letter, a 1 ½-page declaration, on Wednesday evening at a Louisiana immigration court at the LaSalle ICE facility. The letter from Rubio is undated and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Khalil’s arrest on March 8. Khalil has been imprisoned at the Louisiana ICE facility since the day after his arrest. 

On Tuesday, Judge Jamee Comans ordered the government to present evidence by Wednesday to justify its attempt to deport Khalil. Rubio’s letter was the sole piece of evidence provided by DHS attorneys, the source said.

Comans will preside over a hearing on Friday to decide whether the government’s evidence is sufficient to deport Khalil. If Comans rules against the government, Khalil could be released as early as Friday. 

“If he’s not removable, I don’t want him to continue to be detained — I will have him released,” Comans told attorneys for Khalil and the government during Tuesday’s hearing, according to multiple reports.

Rubio’s letter does not include new allegations or new evidence to support its deportation claim against Khalil, a legal permanent resident.

Instead, the letter cites the “adverse foreign policy” provision in the Immigration Nationality Act, the same provision cited by the government when it imprisoned Khalil in Louisiana. The Trump administration’s attorneys have referred to the provision in multiple court documents in Khalil’s separate habeas petition case in New Jersey, in which Khalil’s legal team has been pushing for his release. 

The rarely used immigration law provision gives the secretary of state the authority to request the deportation of an individual, who is not a U.S. citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country harms U.S. foreign policy interests.

The letter filed Wednesday asserts that Khalil engaged in “antisemitism” and that it is U.S. foreign policy to keep people out of the country who engage in such activities. The letter also includes a second person targeted for deportation, but their name was redacted by the government. The government regularly conflates Khalil’s advocacy for Palestine with antisemitism.

“The public actions and continued presence of [redacted name] and Khalil in the United States undermine U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States,” Rubio wrote. He then cited Trump’s “America First” executive order that calls on the secretary of state to “always put America and American citizens first” in foreign policy. 

“Condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective,” Rubio wrote.

The State Department did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

In previous public statements, Rubio has called Khalil “a supporter of Hamas,” the Palestinian militant group which governs over Gaza, a common and baseless claim made by the Trump administration about student protesters who oppose U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. During an interview with CBS News one week after Khalil’s arrest, Rubio refused to answer a question about whether the government has evidence linking Khalil to Hamas. Instead, Rubio deflected by accusing Khalil of leading protesters in “taking over” Columbia’s campus. 

Khalil was a lead negotiator between the Palestinian solidarity encampment at Columbia University and school administrators in the spring of 2024. The student-led movement demanded the university disclose and withdraw its investments in companies that profit off of Israel’s war in Gaza. Protesters briefly occupied Hamilton Hall, renamed Hind’s Hall, before NYPD officers raided the building, violently arresting dozens of students. Khalil was not among those arrested and faced a short suspension, which school officials quickly apologized for and rescinded after one-day

The Trump administration’s attorneys have previously accused Khalil of hiding certain employment experience from the government when applying for his green card. They claimed that Khalil failed to mention that he had previously worked for the Syria office of the British Embassy in Beirut as well as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. Khalil was an unpaid intern at UNRWA for a brief time in 2023.

The government, however, did not include these allegations in its filing in immigration court on Wednesday. 

After Tuesday’s hearing, Marc Van Der Hout, a lead attorney on Khalil’s legal team, said the government has yet to provide “a single shred of evidence to date to support any of its allegations or charges in this case including its outrageous position that Mahmoud’s mere presence and activities in this country have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” He also criticized Judge Comans for moving too quickly on the case without giving the legal team more time to bolster its defense of Khalil against deportation.

“Yet the Immigration judge today stated she intends to rule Friday on the merits of this outlandish charge with no realistic opportunity for Mahmoud and his lawyers to contest this baseless charge,” Van Der Hout said in a statement on Tuesday. “If this turns out to be what happens Friday, it would be an uncalled for rush to judgement that would completely deprive Mahmoud of any due process, which is a foundation of our legal system.”

Update: April 10, 2025, 3:54 p.m. ET
This article has been updated with additional details from the government filing in the case.

The post The Case Against Mahmoud Khalil Hinges on Vague “Antisemitism” Claim appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

In partnership with

This story was first published by Arizona Luminaria.

The number of international students at Arizona State University who have had their visas revoked is now at least 50, according to an attorney representing the students.

Last week, Arizona Luminaria reported on eight students at ASU who had their visas revoked. That number has increased quickly, with at least three students facing some time in immigration detention, according to senior attorney Ami Hutchinson, with Green Evans-Schroeder, the Tucson, Arizona-based law firm representing the students. She said students she’s spoken to are confused. 

“They’re really, really afraid.”

“They still seem to think that someone made a mistake. That it shouldn’t have happened and this was just all a misunderstanding,” Hutchinson said.

“They’re really, really afraid,” she added.

One ASU student remains in detention, and has been locked up for about 10 days, according to Hutchinson. 

An ASU spokesperson would not confirm the number of students. Hutchinson told Arizona Luminaria she estimates the total number of revoked international student visas across the country to be around 1,000, based on other attorneys and firms working in Arizona and other states.

Hutchinson told Arizona Luminaria that ASU is “being supportive” of the students and has been paying Green Evans-Schroeder for a portion of their consultation fees with the students. ASU did not immediately respond about paying the consultation fees.

A spokesperson for the University of Arizona did not comment last week on whether any UA students have had their visas revoked, saying, “we care deeply about the safety and well-being of our campus community.”

Arizona Luminaria reached out again to the media office and directly to UA’s president, Suresh Garimella, for comment about possible visa revocations. The offices did not immediately respond.

A message March 31 informed UA students: “Be sure to check your email regularly for updates from U.S. Department of State (DOS). Some messages may include time-sensitive information related to your immigration status, visa compliance requirements, or the impact of any policy changes.”

The UA has recommended that all international students carry a copy of their passport, their visas, and proof of their immigration status on them at all times.

Notice of the visa revocations has been coming to the students via email, Hutchinson said. That has left students confused and unsure of what to do next.

Should they go to class? Should they prepare to leave the country, keep an eye out for federal immigration officers on campus?

Students at ASU who have had their visas revoked may still be able to go to classes, but Hutchinson said multiple students were set to graduate this spring and will not be able to obtain their degree. 

“They can’t do that now, and so it just throws away many years of their studies,” Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson laid out other potential options for the students. They can wait and see what happens next, even if that risks possible detention and/or deportation. Or they can file a lawsuit, claiming that the U.S. government didn’t follow the proper procedures in canceling their visas. They can also request to have their status reinstated, though Hutchinson said that may not be viable for many of the students given the current political climate.

“The growing number of visa revocations at Arizona universities and across the country is part of the Trump administration’s disturbing efforts to silence dissent, target immigrants, and undermine the pillars of a free society,” Noah Schramm, a policy strategist at the ACLU of Arizona, told Arizona Luminaria. “The ACLU of Arizona unequivocally condemns the targeting of non-citizen students through the abuse of immigration authority and as punishment for protected expression.”

Wanting to Leave

The student who remains in immigration detention had a known conviction for driving under the influence from years ago, according to Hutchinson.

Hutchinson said the student was nearly done with their studies. At this point, they are willing to go home if that means they can get out of detention.

According to Hutchinson, the student said they want to leave the country and never come back because they want to go somewhere where they are treated with dignity and respect.

Arizona Luminaria reached out to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that issues visas, as well as the State Department, for comment. Luminaria also asked for the students’ nationalities and why their visas were revoked.

Officials with the federal agencies did not immediately respond.

“Bizarre and Unlawful” 

In March, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent a letter to 60 colleges and universities “warning them of potential enforcement actions” if they don’t protect Jewish students on campus.

Hutchinson said attorneys in Arizona and other states representing students with revoked visas are wondering whether students who protested the war in Gaza, or engaged in other forms of political activity, at these institutions are being targeted.

She added that all of the students they’ve worked with are from India, China, or Muslim-majority countries.

Applying for a student visa to study in the United States is a complex process that is both expensive and laborious. Besides paying hundreds of dollars in fees, getting interviewed, and obtaining the visa and booking travel, students must acquire and maintain active status in the “Student and Exchange Visitor Information System” database, known as SEVIS.

A lawsuit filed April 5 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California alleges that hundreds of students across the country have had their SEVIS status “abruptly and unlawfully terminated.”

“Until recently, government policy generally allowed these students to remain in the United States and continue their studies.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement revoked the SEVIS status of several of the ASU students. They were told that was because of their failure to maintain legal status in the country, Hutchinson said. That’s because, in a sort of circular logic, the State Department canceled their student visas. 

A letter developed by Green Evans-Schroeder explaining to students why their visa may have been revoked offers a bit of recent historical context. 

“In the past, it has been relatively common for international students who were arrested, charged, or even convicted of minor offenses — typically misdemeanors — to receive notices that their student visas had been revoked,” according to the letter. “However, until recently, government policy generally allowed these students to remain in the United States and continue their studies until their Form I-20 expired.”

Hutchinson said Green Evans-Schroeder and other firms were considering joining or filing lawsuits, as well as possibly filing a class-action suit.

The hope is to bring these lawsuits not only saying that the government messed up and “did not do what they’re supposed to do, but also, the underlying basis is bizarre and unlawful,” Hutchinson said. 

The post At Least 50 Arizona State Students Have Now Had Visas Revoked, Lawyer Says appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

A mother and her three children swept up in an immigration raid in the hometown of border czar Tom Homan have been released following an outpouring of support from locals outraged at their detention.

The release of the family was confirmed Monday by immigration activists working on the family’s behalf and by Jennifer Gaffney, the superintendent of the Sackets Harbor Central School District, where the three children are enrolled.

“My colleagues and I are relieved and grateful to share that, after eleven days of uncertainty, our students and their mother are returning home,” Gaffney said in a statement.

“In the midst of this difficult time, the strength, compassion, and resilience of our community have shone through. We are very thankful to everyone who has reached out with kindness and offered support.”

The family was taken into custody in a March 27 raid at a large dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, New York. Customs and Border Protection agents say the target of their operation was a South African national charged with trafficking in child sexual abuse material, who they apprehended. But authorities also detained the family as well as three other immigrants without documentation. By March 30, the family had been whisked away to the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, a privately run detention facility in Texas.

The response in Sackets Harbor and the surrounding Jefferson County, located on the shores of Lake Ontario on the western edge of New York’s North Country Region, was one of disbelief and anger — not least because Homan hails from the area and owns a home in Sackets Harbor.

In initial statements about the detention of the family, a CBP spokesperson indicated the family was in the process of deportation. But amid the backlash, Homan told a local news channel last week that the family was merely being questioned for their own safety, due to the nature of the allegations against the man targeted in the raid.

On Saturday, as many as 1,000 people attended a rally in Sackets Harbor, demanding the return of the family and marching past Homan’s house, according to local news reports. It was that pressure that ensured the family’s return, according to Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition.

“The Sackets Harbor community’s steadfast concern, care and love for their neighbors is what brought this family home,” Awawdeh said in a statement Monday. “However, this incident will cause lasting trauma for the family, school and community affected. Donald Trump, Tom Homan and ICE must stop this campaign of cruelty, and the harm they are causing our local communities.”

A CBP spokesperson referred questions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A spokesperson for ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Family Detained in Immigration Raid in Tom Homan’s Hometown Is Released appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The curtain shrieked as it was yanked open to reveal a 67-year-old man tied to a chair. His arms were pulled uncomfortably behind his back. The red bull’s-eye target on his chest rose and fell as he desperately attempted to still his breathing.

The man, Brad Sigmon, smiled at his attorney, Bo King, seated in the front row before guards placed a black bag over his head. King said Sigmon appeared to be trying his best to put on a brave face for those who had come to bear witness.

That was the kind of person Sigmon had become after his decades on death row, the kind who fretted over other people’s comfort at his own execution. Sigmon had agonized over the fact that his loved ones would have to see him die like this, gunned down, mere feet away from them.

“It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.” 

He had been faced with an impossible choice, if you can call it that. Die by lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad? Firing squad, he concluded, seemed the most humane. Now, he found himself strapped down, waiting for those three rifles pointed at his beating heart to fire.

Sigmon struggled in the chair as the sound of gunfire erupted and bullets tore through his chest. “He was pulling on the restraints so hard … I feel he was trying to cover the wound,” said King, who serves as chief of the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit. “It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.” 

But within three minutes, the nightmarish ordeal was over. Blood glistened off of Sigmon’s black shirt, as the medical examiner called a time of death.

“6:08 p.m.”

Only later did King realize why his client was really dressed in black. Not for its slimming properties, as Sigmon had joked moments earlier, but because it hid the distinctive dark-red color of blood. 

On March 7, 2025, Sigmon, who was convicted of a 2001 double homicide, became the first man executed by firing squad in the United States in 15 years. Others are expected to follow.

In July, the South Carolina Supreme Court resumed executions after a 13-year pause. Prior to the ruling, state lawmakers passed a law allowing people set to be executed to choose between lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad. The law was passed as a way to skirt shortages of lethal injection drugs and arguments that the death penalty was a cruel or unusual punishment because, in theory, people on death row were given options. Only, as King notes, the choice between being effectively cooked alive, drowning in your own blood and fluids as a result of a mystery cocktail of drugs that repeatedly fails, or being shot to death isn’t much of a choice.

This is especially true because despite Sigmon’s legal team’s best efforts, the state refused to share information about the drug protocol with his attorneys, leaving him to make the critical decision about his execution method without enough information on the drugs being used, how it would impact him, or even if they were expired or not.

Four men have already been executed in South Carolina in the last seven months. The first three men were executed by lethal injection, while Sigmon was executed by firing squad. Fifteen more executions are expected to take place nationwide over the next year.

Firing squad executions are rare in the U.S., with only four since 1976 — three of them in Utah. By the time the lethal injection protocol was introduced in the 1980s, firing squad executions had grown to be considered antiquated and inhumane. Death by electrocution has also become less common, as witnesses have described gruesome scenes of prisoner’s effectively cooked from the inside out, with their flesh swelling and stretching until their heart gives out. Yet mounting evidence suggests lethal injection may be similarly brutal. Research suggests the paralytic involved in lethal injections merely masks the pain, and that those killings are indeed among the most painful and frequently botched methods of execution.

On April 11, Mikal Mahdi is set to be the second man executed by firing squad in the state’s history. Mahdi was accused of multiple killings, including the murder of a police officer. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2004, but his attorneys argue that he never should have been given the death penalty because his extensive history of abuse, mental illness, and trauma wasn’t properly presented to the judge. They also argue that since his sentencing, society has gained a deeper understanding of how these issues impact decision-making.

One of his attorneys, David Weiss, noted that since his arrest at the age of 21, Mahdi has become practically a different person. Weiss said that Mahdi loves to read nonfiction, keep up with current events, and even paint for his fellow death-row inmates upon request.

“If South Carolina does move forward with executing Mikal, they’re not going to be executing the same person.”

“If South Carolina does move forward with executing Mikal, they’re not going to be executing the same person,” said Weiss. “And you see that a lot in capital cases where people get older, oftentimes in cases like Mikal’s where people were very young at the time that their crimes were committed, they changed a tremendous amount over the years in prison.”

There are parallels between Mahdi’s story and Sigmon’s. Both men suffered from unaddressed trauma, and both appear to have changed dramatically as the years stretched on with them behind bars.

Sigmon had always been a deeply religious man. “He expressed deep remorse at his jury trial, and he arrived on death row and just threw himself into study and prayer,” said King. “He was spending a lot of time trying to work toward some redemption through repentance and also an understanding of his faith.”

King said that he served as a sort of unofficial chaplain for his fellow death-row members, who he called “brothers.” For his last meal, he’d even requested three buckets of original-recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken to share with his “brothers.” His request was ultimately denied.

As for Mahdi, his request for mercy is still ongoing.

Attorneys for Mahdi note that at his original trial, the arguments made in favor of a life sentence over the death penalty only lasted for 30 minutes, which couldn’t begin to cover the lifetime of trauma Mahdi suffered. As a young child, his mother was forced to leave after suffering abuse at the hands of his father. From there, his life continued to get worse. His father pulled him from school in fifth grade. Mahdi was in and out of juvenile facilities and prison, where he was subjected to solitary confinement, up until his final arrest at 21.

The fact that this wasn’t properly explained to the judge at the time is at the heart of Mahdi’s case. “This goes well beyond a typical claim about ineffective assistance of counsel and was just really an egregious miscarriage of justice,” said Weiss.

In Sigmon’s final words, read aloud by King, he prayed for a world where Mahdi and his other brothers on death row would never have to die the way he did.

“I want my closing statement to be one of love,” he wrote, “and a calling to my fellow Christians to end the death penalty.”

The post Lethal Injection, Electric Chair, or Firing Squad? An Inhumane Decision for Death Row Prisoners appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The curtain shrieked as it was yanked open to reveal a 67-year-old man tied to a chair. His arms were pulled uncomfortably behind his back. The red bull’s-eye target on his chest rose and fell as he desperately attempted to still his breathing.

The man, Brad Sigmon, smiled at his attorney, Bo King, seated in the front row before guards placed a black bag over his head. King said Sigmon appeared to be trying his best to put on a brave face for those who had come to bear witness.

That was the kind of person Sigmon had become after his decades on death row, the kind who fretted over other people’s comfort at his own execution. Sigmon had agonized over the fact that his loved ones would have to see him die like this, gunned down, mere feet away from them.

“It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.” 

He had been faced with an impossible choice, if you can call it that. Die by lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad? Firing squad, he concluded, seemed the most humane. Now, he found himself strapped down, waiting for those three rifles pointed at his beating heart to fire.

Sigmon struggled in the chair as the sound of gunfire erupted and bullets tore through his chest. “He was pulling on the restraints so hard … I feel he was trying to cover the wound,” said King, who serves as chief of the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit. “It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.” 

But within three minutes, the nightmarish ordeal was over. Blood glistened off of Sigmon’s black shirt, as the medical examiner called a time of death.

“6:08 p.m.”

Only later did King realize why his client was really dressed in black. Not for its slimming properties, as Sigmon had joked moments earlier, but because it hid the distinctive dark-red color of blood. 

On March 7, 2025, Sigmon, who was convicted of a 2001 double homicide, became the first man executed by firing squad in the United States in 15 years. Others are expected to follow.

In July, the South Carolina Supreme Court resumed executions after a 13-year pause. Prior to the ruling, state lawmakers passed a law allowing people set to be executed to choose between lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad. The law was passed as a way to skirt shortages of lethal injection drugs and arguments that the death penalty was a cruel or unusual punishment because, in theory, people on death row were given options. Only, as King notes, the choice between being effectively cooked alive, drowning in your own blood and fluids as a result of a mystery cocktail of drugs that repeatedly fails, or being shot to death isn’t much of a choice.

This is especially true because despite Sigmon’s legal team’s best efforts, the state refused to share information about the drug protocol with his attorneys, leaving him to make the critical decision about his execution method without enough information on the drugs being used, how it would impact him, or even if they were expired or not.

Four men have already been executed in South Carolina in the last seven months. The first three men were executed by lethal injection, while Sigmon was executed by firing squad. Fifteen more executions are expected to take place nationwide over the next year.

Firing squad executions are rare in the U.S., with only four since 1976 — three of them in Utah. By the time the lethal injection protocol was introduced in the 1980s, firing squad executions had grown to be considered antiquated and inhumane. Death by electrocution has also become less common, as witnesses have described gruesome scenes of prisoner’s effectively cooked from the inside out, with their flesh swelling and stretching until their heart gives out. Yet mounting evidence suggests lethal injection may be similarly brutal. Research suggests the paralytic involved in lethal injections merely masks the pain, and that those killings are indeed among the most painful and frequently botched methods of execution.

On April 11, Mikal Mahdi is set to be the second man executed by firing squad in the state’s history. Mahdi was accused of multiple killings, including the murder of a police officer. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2004, but his attorneys argue that he never should have been given the death penalty because his extensive history of abuse, mental illness, and trauma wasn’t properly presented to the judge. They also argue that since his sentencing, society has gained a deeper understanding of how these issues impact decision-making.

One of his attorneys, David Weiss, noted that since his arrest at the age of 21, Mahdi has become practically a different person. Weiss said that Mahdi loves to read nonfiction, keep up with current events, and even paint for his fellow death-row inmates upon request.

“If South Carolina does move forward with executing Mikal, they’re not going to be executing the same person.”

“If South Carolina does move forward with executing Mikal, they’re not going to be executing the same person,” said Weiss. “And you see that a lot in capital cases where people get older, oftentimes in cases like Mikal’s where people were very young at the time that their crimes were committed, they changed a tremendous amount over the years in prison.”

There are parallels between Mahdi’s story and Sigmon’s. Both men suffered from unaddressed trauma, and both appear to have changed dramatically as the years stretched on with them behind bars.

Sigmon had always been a deeply religious man. “He expressed deep remorse at his jury trial, and he arrived on death row and just threw himself into study and prayer,” said King. “He was spending a lot of time trying to work toward some redemption through repentance and also an understanding of his faith.”

King said that he served as a sort of unofficial chaplain for his fellow death-row members, who he called “brothers.” For his last meal, he’d even requested three buckets of original-recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken to share with his “brothers.” His request was ultimately denied.

As for Mahdi, his request for mercy is still ongoing.

Attorneys for Mahdi note that at his original trial, the arguments made in favor of a life sentence over the death penalty only lasted for 30 minutes, which couldn’t begin to cover the lifetime of trauma Mahdi suffered. As a young child, his mother was forced to leave after suffering abuse at the hands of his father. From there, his life continued to get worse. His father pulled him from school in fifth grade. Mahdi was in and out of juvenile facilities and prison, where he was subjected to solitary confinement, up until his final arrest at 21.

The fact that this wasn’t properly explained to the judge at the time is at the heart of Mahdi’s case. “This goes well beyond a typical claim about ineffective assistance of counsel and was just really an egregious miscarriage of justice,” said Weiss.

In Sigmon’s final words, read aloud by King, he prayed for a world where Mahdi and his other brothers on death row would never have to die the way he did.

“I want my closing statement to be one of love,” he wrote, “and a calling to my fellow Christians to end the death penalty.”

The post Lethal Injection, Electric Chair, or Firing Squad? An Inhumane Decision for Death Row Prisoners appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Environmental justice efforts at the 10 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional offices have stopped and employees have been placed on administrative leave, per an announcement from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin last month. Former EPA employees involved with environmental justice work across the country say rural communities will suffer as a result. 

Before being shuttered in early March, the EPA’s environmental justice arm was aimed at making sure communities were being treated fairly and receiving their due protection under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Zealan Hoover, former senior advisor to the EPA administrator under the Biden administration, told the Daily Yonder that this work had big implications for rural places since there are pollution concerns in rural areas across the country. 

“EPA was very focused on making sure that not just on the regulatory side, but also on the investment side, we were pushing resources into rural communities,” said Hoover. 

According to Hoover, most of the pollution challenges the U.S. faces are not new. He said that the employees, now on leave, who staffed the EPA’s regional environmental justice offices were deeply knowledgeable on the issues affecting communities in their regions — issues that can go on for decades. Hoover said he worries about recent changes to the agency under the Trump administration, which also include a series of deregulatory actions and a proposed 65 percent budget cut. 

“I trust that the great folks at EPA who remain will still try valiantly to fill those gaps, but the reality is that this administration is pushing to cut EPA’s budget, pushing employees to leave, and that’s going to restrict EPA’s ability to help rural communities tackle their most significant pollution challenges,” Hoover said. 

One rural community that has faced years of environmental challenges is where Sherri White-Williamson lives in rural Sampson County, North Carolina. In 2021, the county’s landfill ranked second on the list of highest methane emitters in the U.S. The county is also the second-largest producer of hogs nationwide, and in 2022, it accounted for nearly three percent of all U.S. hog sales. 

The hog industry is known for its pollution from open waste storage pits that emit toxic chemicals into nearby neighborhoods. For years, concerns about North Carolina’s hog industry have centered on the disproportionate harm that its pollution does to low-income communities and communities of color since hog farms frequently locate their operations adjacent to such communities in rural counties. 

White-Williamson is also an EPA veteran. She worked on environmental justice initiatives at the agency’s Washington, D.C., office for over a decade before moving back home to southeastern North Carolina. She is now the executive director of the Environmental Justice Community Action Network, or EJCAN, which she founded in Sampson County in 2020 to empower her neighbors amidst environmental challenges like those wrought by the hog farms and the landfill.

In her early work with EJCAN, White-Williamson said she noticed that conversations about environmental justice often centered on urban areas. Since then, White-Williamson said she has focused on educating the public about what environmental justice looks like in rural communities. 

“A lot of our issues have to do with what the cities don’t want or dispose of will end up in our communities,” said White-Williamson. “The pollution, the pesticides, the remnants of the food processing all ends up or stays here while all of the nice, clean, freshly prepared product ends up in a local urban grocery store somewhere.”

Another misconception about environmental justice, according to White-Williamson, is that it exists exclusively to serve communities of color. During her time at the EPA, White-Williamson said she spent time in communities with all kinds of racial demographics while working on environmental justice initiatives.

“I spent a lot of time in places like West Virginia and Kentucky, and places where the populations aren’t necessarily of color, but they are poor-income or low-income places where folks do not have access to the levers of power,” White-Williamson said. 

When pollution impacts local health in communities without access to such “levers of power,” the EPA’s regional environmental justice offices were a resource — and a form of accountability. Without those offices, it will be more difficult for rural communities to get the services they need to address health concerns, said Dr. Margot Brown, senior vice president of justice and equity at the Environmental Defense Fund. 

“They’re dismantling the ecosystem of health protections for rural Americans, and by dismantling them, they’ll make them more susceptible to future hazards,” Brown said of the Trump administration’s decisions at the EPA. “It will impair health and well-being for generations to come.”

Brown worked at the EPA for nearly 10 years under President Obama and then under President Trump during his first administration. Her time there included a stint as deputy director of the Office of Children’s Health Protection. She, along with Hoover and White-Williamson, said that community members will likely need to turn to their state governments or departments of environmental quality in the absence of the regional environmental justice offices.

But White-Williamson noted that state governments, too, receive federal funding. Frozen funds across federal agencies and cuts to healthcare programs, including Medicaid, could wind up compounding challenges for rural communities trying to mitigate environmental health impacts. 

“The communities that most need the assistance and guidance will again find themselves on the short end of the stick and end up being the ones that are suffering more than anybody else,” White-Williamson said. 

Hoover described it as a “one-two punch” for rural communities. On the one hand, he said, rural places are losing access to healthcare facilities because of budget cuts.

“And on the other hand, they are also sicker because the government is no longer stopping polluters from polluting their air and their water.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Closures of EPA’s regional environmental justice offices will hurt rural America on Apr 5, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.