Citing “civil unrest” in American cities, the Department of Homeland Security has accelerated new regulations meant to expand the powers of a little-known federal police force.

The new rules drew scant notice when they were first proposed during the twilight of the Biden administration. Now, using language about “rioters” at federal facilities, the Trump administration is fast-tracking the rule changes — which critics say DHS could use as a pretext to go after protesters wearing frog costumes or making a racket on the streets of Chicago and Portland, Oregon.

The new regulations could empower the Federal Protective Service, a little-known police force under DHS tasked with securing federal facilities, to pursue more arrests outside of federal property itself. The Federal Protective Service has played has played an outsized role in Trump’s crackdown on Democratic-majority cities, where protests against U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement have turned into scenes of brutal crowd dispersal and arrests.

“It is clear that DHS sees what is in this regulation as a go-ahead to operate well off federal property.”

“It is clear that DHS sees what is in this regulation as a go-ahead to operate well off federal property, including potentially in private homes and businesses and the like,” said Spencer Reynolds, a former Homeland Security lawyer turned critic. “We are seeing that play out on U.S. streets. Federal agents are taking a really aggressive hand to protesters who are largely peaceful.”

Among the new rules was the criminalization of protesters wearing masks. The mask ban ostensibly applies only to those trying to conceal their identity during a crime, but the Trump administration has taken an expansive view of criminal behavior in protests that includes an array of First Amendment-protected activity.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a written filing Tuesday that it was bypassing the standard notice process and moving up the effective date of the new rules by two months to address a “cascade of violence, which is threatening the lives of federal law enforcement officers and the safety of federal property on a daily basis.” On Wednesday, the agency announced the expedited changes.

“Under President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem, we will not tolerate violence perpetuated by Antifa and other domestic extremists who are targeting federal property and law enforcement. Law and order will prevail,” Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in the announcement.

The Federal Protective Service has the power to deputize agents from Customs and Border Protection and ICE to enforce the regulations, which carry the force of law.

Rushed Rule Change

When the Department of Homeland Security proposed the new regulations on January 15, five days before Trump’s inauguration, they drew little attention. Only a single person submitted a comment to the rule-making docket.

Perhaps that was because the Federal Protective Service has long flown under the radar. With roughly 900 officers, the agency is charged with protecting thousands of federal buildings and their grounds. Its mission and staffing were expanded after the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing and the September 11 attacks.

Moreover, the Department of Homeland Security cast the new rules as mostly a matter of bureaucratic housekeeping. Yet they could give the Trump administration new tools to go after protesters, as the department seemed to acknowledge in the Tuesday notice that it was moving up their effective date from January 1, 2026.

“DHS finds that there is ‘good cause’ to bypass notice-and-comment rulemaking and a delayed effective date, because such procedures are impracticable here,” the agency said. “There is an immediate need for DHS to move up the effective date of the June 2025 rule, because of the recent increase in civil unrest, targeting of federal law enforcement officials, and destruction of federal property across U.S. jurisdictions.”

The new rules expand the number of buildings where the Federal Protective Service can issue citations, and they create new categories of misdemeanor violations. Perhaps most notably, they also purport to expand the police force’s ability to investigate and enforce violations of “off-property misconduct.”

Under previous rules, unless there was either a specific federal criminal statute or a memorandum of understanding that would allow the Department of Homeland Security to enforce state and local laws, the agency’s hands were tied when it came to some types of “off-property” activity.

The changes, the department said in January, “serve to fill the void where there is no applicable federal statutory charge applicable to the conduct and no MOU permitting DHS to charge state or local offenses.”

Unmasking Protesters

Newly banned “off-property” activities include wearing disguises, creating loud noises that disrupt government employees, or blocking the entrances and exits to federal property. While some of that behavior was previously banned on federal grounds, the mask provision is entirely new.

The Department of Homeland Security said in January that the mask ban would be “expressly limited to instances when a person is concealing his/her identity to avoid detection while violating an applicable law.”

Still, the provision is ripe for abuse, said Reynolds, the former Homeland Security attorney who now serves as a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s liberty and national Security program.

“There is a significant risk that this will become another basis for targeting activists.”

“There is a significant risk that this will become another basis for targeting activists who may be wearing masks or full-body frog costumes, as we have seen in the past few months,” he said. “It gives another justification for federal agents to build a questionable narrative that these people are dangerous, and also for them to incorporate that in citations and criminal charges.”

The new regulations seem to be part of a larger push from the Trump administration to unleash the Federal Protective Service. In a memo last month obtained by journalist Marisa Kabas, the Homeland Security acting general counsel said there is “no legal barrier to FPS taking action off federal property where a reasonable nexus to protecting that property exists.”

No matter what the new regulations purport to do, they cannot give the Department of Homeland Security more powers than Congress or the Constitution have granted, said Athul Acharya, executive director of the Portland-based nonprofit law firm Public Accountability.

Acharya in 2020 helped win an injunction barring federal agents from targeting journalists for arrest during the George Floyd protests.

He said, “Whatever powers the Trump administration may have, or think it has, or tries to give itself, it can’t authorize the use of excessive force, it can’t stop people from exercising their right to free speech, and it can’t stop reporters from reporting on what’s happening at federal properties.”

Trump’s Crackdown Cops

Since Trump’s first term, the Federal Protective Service has stood at the center of legal debates over the extent of his authority to crack down on defiant American cities.

In 2020, Federal Protective Service officers faced off against demonstrators in Portland during the racial justice protests there. Bolstered by deputized agents from Border Patrol, the federal government’s response included grabbing people into unmarked vans.

Three years ago, Federal Protective Service officers were accused of instigating a confrontation with abortion rights protesters in Los Angeles, half a mile away from the courthouse where a protest against a pending Supreme Court decision began.

More recently, the Justice Department was caught overstating the number of Federal Protective Service officers who were shuffled to Portland in response to this year’s protests against mass deportation, in an effort to bolster the legal case for sending the National Guard to backstop them.

Reynolds, the former Homeland Security lawyer, has called for limiting the agency’s powers to ensure that it cannot be used for political repression. He acknowledged that is a long shot with this Congress, but he says local governments can take actions such as limiting data sharing in the meantime.

“Cities and states,” he said, “are absolutely in their right to opt out from helping the Federal Protective Service and other agencies go after their residents who are protesting and expressing dissent.”

The post Trump’s Federal Cops Just Gave Themselves Expansive Anti-Protest Powers Targeting Masks appeared first on The Intercept.

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and staff have administered what experts said was shoddy medical treatment to at least a dozen detainees at its Batavia, New York, facility in the past two years, according to the findings of a new investigation.

Serious injuries went untreated, medications were denied or scaled back, and needed medical appointments were delayed at the ICE detention center, the state’s largest, located near Buffalo.

In one case, a Nigerian migrant arrived in February at the Batavia ICE detention facility suffering frostbite. A doctor who provided emergency care ordered that he see a specialist within a week before releasing him into ICE’s custody. Agents in Batavia never took him to the appointment. By the time he saw a doctor, it was too late to save his fingers; parts of six were later amputated.

In another case, a Gambian man with numerous heart issues was detained by ICE in February after he showed up for a routine check-in appointment. The man went two weeks without his medications. He suffered a stroke-like syndrome as a result, according to a doctor.

“It certainly appears to be a violation of ICE’s own detention standards.”

Attorneys and other detainee advocates said in interviews that the cases documented by this reporting are indicative of a wider problem. And a 2023 investigation by NPR found similar problems across ICE’s network of detention centers.

Sophie Dalsimer, an attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest who has studied medical treatment in ICE facilities in New York, said the agency’s treatment of detainees amounts to “medical neglect in a legal sense.”

“The lack of medical care, and with ICE being deliberately indifferent to people’s medical needs, could, in many of these instances, rise to the level of a constitutional violation,” she said. “It certainly appears to be a violation of ICE’s own detention standards.”

Those standards include providing prescribed medications, timely responses to medical complaints, and hospitalization as needed. 

The Batavia facility, officially called the Buffalo (Batavia) Service Processing Center, lacks a doctor and dentist working on-site, this investigation found.That’s for a 650-bed detention center that’s been overcapacity for months due to the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants.

A Department of Homeland Security inspector general report published in June noted that “staffing shortages caused delays in dental and off-site specialty care.” Between September 2024 and February 2025, the report said, ICE had a 150-person backlog of detainees who required outside medical treatment and were waiting for appointments.

That problem was noted previously in a 2018 Civil Rights and Civil Liberties investigation into medical care at Batavia. That audit gave the facility a passing grade but also found “several examples of detainees waiting for various specialty health care services for more than a month.” In one case, a detainee waited 168 days for an endocrinology appointment. In another case, the auditor found that a detainee requested an outside doctor appointment for blood in his stool, but that ICE deleted the request from its internal system.

“It’s just freak luck that no one has died in Batavia in the last two years,” said Aaron Krupp, the regional coordinator at Justice for Migrant Families. “But the way that they have treated people, people really easily could have died.”

This story is based on a review of nearly 600 pages of court filings from seven lawsuits, medical records, and other documents, as well as interviews with a dozen people including detainees, attorneys, and other experts. Neither ICE nor DHS, its parent agency, responded to detailed questions and requests for about each case in this story.

Injuries Go Untreated

Chidi Nwagbo moved from Nigeria to the U.S. in 1988, living for 37 years as a “model resident” with no criminal history, according to his attorney. When Donald Trump took office in January, he said in a July interview, “things just went helter-skelter, like raids everywhere, and I didn’t know what to do.”

He made a plan to move to Canada to live with his brother and paid a smuggler $2,000 to shepherd him and three other migrants into Quebec. The final leg of the journey required them to cross the border on foot, but Nwagbo said he was unprepared for freezing temperatures and waist-deep snow. He and a woman in his party eventually called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to rescue them.

After a hospital stint, he was released into federal immigration custody on February 10 with orders from a doctor that he see a specialist at Kessler Burn and Trauma Center in Rochester, New York, to treat his frostbitten fingers within a week. Nwagbo’s medical records, which he shared for this investigation, show the physician made a referral to a specific specialist. ICE never took him to the appointment, according to Nwagbo’s medical records. By the time he saw a different doctor at a different practice 16 days later, his fingers were too far gone. Amputations would be necessary, the doctor told him. He’s now missing portions of six fingers.

“I shouldn’t have lost my fingers,” he said.

The case of Tim, another Nigerian, is similar.

In April this year, Tim, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution against his family, was days away from finishing a federal prison sentence for a fraud conviction when he fell down a set of stairs. He suffered a major concussion and was taken to a Massachusetts hospital. Upon discharge, he was prescribed nine drugs, ordered to attend inpatient physical therapy, and transferred to the Batavia detention center. Once at the detention center, he went at least a month without medication and received only one physical therapy session before being deported this summer. By that point, Tim required a walker.

“I suffer a lot of mental health issues. I cannot sleep. I am on zero medications.”

“I’m very traumatized at the moment,” he said during an interview in May, several weeks after his injury. “I suffer a lot of mental health issues. I cannot sleep. I am on zero medications.”

Reached recently by email, Tim said his condition has only deteriorated since his return to Nigeria.

He wrote, “I am dire need of a comprehensive mental health/neurological treatment in order to get my life back to where it used to be before my detention in the United States.”

Medications Denied

ICE, in some cases, denied detainees access to needed medications. In other cases, the agency allowed lapses in their medication schedules.

That was the case with Sering Ceesay, the Gambian man with heart conditions. He was detained by ICE in New York City on February 19 after what he expected to be a routine immigration appointment.

Instead, ICE placed him in shackles and chains and transported him to Batavia. He went two weeks without his medications. On March 4, he attended a legal clinic hosted by attorneys from the legal advocates at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, who quickly realized Ceesay needed medical attention, according to court filings from a later lawsuit by Ceesay alleging he was being held in violation of his rights.

“I was feeling very weak, and my entire body just hurt,” Ceesay said in a filing. “I felt like when I had my heart attacks.”

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo later ordered Ceesay released, but not before he was diagnosed with a stroke-like syndrome because he had missed so many days of his medicine.

“Without … strict adherence to these medications, [Ceesay] is likely to suffer from recurrent heart attacks, worsening peripheral artery disease and strokes and increasing his risk of further disability and avoidable premature death,” Dr. Joseph Shin, a physician and professor with Weill Cornell Medicine, wrote in a letter submitted as part of Ceesay’s lawsuit.

In Owen Simms’s case, ICE provided him with medication but lowered his dosages, he said, leaving him at risk of a seizure.

An extensive immigration and criminal history landed Simms in the Batavia detention center last March, where he remained until he was transferred to an out-of-state facility earlier this month. During a previous deportation to his home country, Jamaica, Simms was struck in the head with a machete, he and his wife testified in immigration court filings, which left him suffering from seizures. An immigration judge later ruled that he should not be deported due to the likelihood he’d be attacked again if he returned to Jamaica.

In an interview, Simms said his detention by ICE caused him to miss several days of his anti-seizure medication. He said the agency then lowered his daily dosage from 1,500 mg to 1,000 mg. He now worries he’ll suffer another seizure, which in the past has put him in a coma.

“My seizures come on to me when I’m sleeping, and if you’re not next to me, you can’t even know that I am having a seizure,” he said. “It’s scary, like it’s really scary.”

Five other detainees have claimed that ICE denied or delayed them receiving prescribed medication. ICE’s standards call for all detainees to be provided prescribed medications, including a week’s supply before a deportation.

• In March 2024, an ICE transfer from Florida to Batavia caused Raheem Fulton, a Jamaican immigrant suffering from end-stage renal disease, to miss a regularly scheduled dialysis appointment. He went five days without the treatment and had to be rushed to Buffalo’s Erie County Medical Center. A spokesperson for RFK Human Rights said ICE caused additional lapses in his dialysis treatment in the past and delayed other medical appointments too. Attorneys for the group are currently suing ICE and have alleged the agency has delayed other treatments Fulton needs, including a cardiology appointment. (Fulton’s lawyers are appealing to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after a Buffalo judge dismissed it in January, agreeing with the government’s argument that the court lacked jurisdiction.)
• In October 2024, ICE attempted, unsuccessfully, to deport Naim Qasemi to his native Afghanistan. Against its protocols, ICE failed to provide Qasemi with medications for his diagnosed bipolar disorder, his attorneys allege in a lawsuit to stop his deportation. Qasemi, they wrote, “was unmedicated and was not receiving any kind of therapeutic treatment in advance of his removal.” In court filings, Justice Department officials did not address Qasemi’s claim. (A judge dismissed the case last month after Afghanistan cleared Qasemi’s return, paving the way for his deportation.)
• In a July letter to ICE officials in Batavia, advocates with Justice for Migrant Families wrote that a Honduran man was not receiving a prescribed medical cream to treat a skin condition. The man also suffers from chronic pain, and ibuprofen was no longer working, Jennifer Connor, the organization’s executive director, and Krupp wrote. They demanded ICE take the man to a specialist and administer a different pain medication. Krupp said that hasn’t happened.
• Arzou Hami, an Iranian woman suffering from “serious mental health issues” was detained in June, as part of a sweep of Iranian migrants shortly after the U.S. bombed Iran. Matthew Borowski, her attorney, alleged in court filings that her detention has prevented her from receiving medications. She was detained by Buffalo ICE agents at the Niagara County Jail before being transferred to Texas where “she is being denied adequate mental health care,” Borowski wrote in a court filing. In an interview, he said his client has now gotten “some medication, but it’s not the same thing that she was on before.” (Officials have not responded to those claims in court yet; the case was transferred to Texas last month.)
• In a fifth case, a detainee known only as K.U. in court filings alleged he has not received proper medical care for “numerous life-threatening health conditions.” His lawsuit states an independent physician reviewed the man’s case and “expressed extreme concern that he is ‘not receiving the standard of appropriate medical care.’” (Officials have yet to address his medical claims in court, and a judge ordered him released in August.)

In yet another case, a Jordanian man named Mohammed Saleh had treatment for a massive brain tumor and a chronic eye condition delayed by ICE between the fall of 2023 and 2024, when he was deported.

He arrived in Batavia in September 2023 following a federal prison sentence for his involvement in a failed bombing plot and began complaining of “tingling sensations in his fingers and toes” several weeks later. An MRI and a CT scan revealed the tumor. Krupp, of Justice for Migrant Families, said Saleh eventually attended follow-up appointments for his tumor but was only given ibuprofen and Tylenol as treatment. Saleh also had a prescribed injection for his eye condition delayed by three months.

Harmed While in Custody

Some detainees were not properly treated for an injury or illness they suffered while detained, this investigation found.

Lansine Sidibe, a Malian man, alleged he was beaten by seven guards at the Batavia facility in February 2024 after he refused to sign some paperwork. According to a human rights complaint his attorneys filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in December, he alleged the guards broke his fingers, a claim an ICE doctor denied, according to the complaint. Nonetheless, it took a month before the agency agreed to X-ray his fingers.

“The abuses are consistent across all the facilities.”

Renny Arcaya-Ventura, a Venezuelan man, said in an interview that he suffered a severe allergic reaction and body pains after he was booked into the ICE facility and didn’t receive adequate medical care.

“I am in intense pain every day,” he said. “Every day I have a fever, pains in my body [and] I can’t even walk. I have even lost a lot of weight.”

His attorney, Guanlin Yang, shared photos of Arcaya-Ventura that appear to show swelling in his hands and rashes on his arms. (Arcaya-Ventura was deported in August.)

Dalsimer, of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, has studied medical care at the Orange County Jail — the second largest ICE detention facility in New York. Through her research and legal work, she’s concluded that medical care offered by ICE is “almost always subpar.”

“The abuses are consistent,” she said, “across all the facilities.”

The post New York’s Largest ICE Prison Dogged by Allegations of Shoddy Medical Care appeared first on The Intercept.

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For the first half of the summer, the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement field office in Medford, Oregon, remained relatively quiet. It was out of the way, tucked up against the regional airport and next to a preschool, a laundromat, and an undeveloped lot. 

A group of local volunteers monitoring ICE activity noticed something new on July 30. Vehicles from the Federal Protective Service, a law enforcement agency that secures federal facilities, were parked outside. Behind the barbed-wire fence, a long, white bus with tinted windows idled behind the gates with the words “GEO Transport Inc.” emblazoned on its side.

Grace Warner, a volunteer who just arrived that morning to spot at the ICE facility, was immediately concerned.

“We’d never seen a bus like that there before,” she said. If GEO Group, a major private prison and ICE contractor was there, then immigration agents must be too.

Five miles away, she soon learned, federal, state, and local law enforcement, led by the Drug Enforcement Administration, were raiding cannabis farms. She drove to one of the farms, owned by a company called HempNova Lifetech Corp.

“This is not an ICE raid. This is just a drug bust.”

Outside, Warner was immediately approached by a spokesperson from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, which is barred from participating in most federal immigration enforcement by Oregon sanctuary laws.

“This is not an ICE raid,” Warner recalled the officer saying. “This is just a drug bust.”

That explanation would be echoed by spokespeople for other law enforcement agencies.

By the end of the operation, however, activists monitoring the facility saw federal agents loading people onto the GEO bus. Seventeen workers from the raids were detained and, as night fell, hurtled north toward the Northwest ICE Processing Center, in Tacoma, Washington, an ICE detention center owned by GEO Group. (GEO Group referred a request for comment to ICE, which did not respond.)

According to emails obtained by local researchers at Information for Public Use and shared with The Intercept, local and state police were involved the raids at many levels: According to an internal sheriff’s office email ahead of the operation, seven of the locations raided had Jackson County sheriff’s deputies listed as the “primary” officials; a local police official was the “primary” at another site; a state trooper on a ninth site; and an official from the DEA on the 10th.

“While there were individuals taken into custody by ICE, we had no part in those activities.”

When asked by The Intercept, however, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office denied knowing of any ICE activity that day.

“The DEA was the lead agency for this investigation,” Sheriff Nathan Sickler said. “The focus of this case was not immigration violations. While there were individuals taken into custody by ICE, we had no part in those activities.”

“We did not detain anybody for immigration purposes.”

Who Knew What When?

Oregon’s sanctuary laws, which prevent local coordination on federal immigration enforcement without a signed judicial warrant, are a point of pride.

Though local agencies denied any direct cooperation with ICE — and, in case of the sheriff’s office, denied knowing about ICE’s involvement — federal authorities appeared to have pre-planned immigration enforcement as part of the raids in the Medford area. Under Donald Trump’s administration, situations like this are raising concerns about how Oregon’s sanctuary laws are being upheld.

“When collaborating with federal agencies, it is not good enough to trust things to be business as usual without verifying,” said Kelly Simon, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. “We know the agenda, and it’s on our local leaders to take no part in it.”

Asked if local law enforcement detained workers during raids, Jackson County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Aaron Lewis said it was “not outside the realm of possibility.”

The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office was assisting with a large, ongoing federal drug investigation through a regional “Illegal Marijuana Enforcement Team,” said Sickler, the sheriff.

“We follow the Oregon laws,” Sickler said. “We don’t communicate with ICE for those purposes.“

Capt. Kyle Kennedy, a spokesperson for the Oregon State Police, didn’t comment on whether the agency had any knowledge of ICE involvement or planning before the raid but said State Police had seized one of the raided properties and arrested people there, then handed over control to the DEA.

“OSP did not have a role at the off-site location where the presumed transfer of DEA custodies to ICE may have occurred,” Kennedy said. (The DEA declined to comment.)

In the Medford area raids, however, federal agents had anticipated ICE’s involvement ahead of time. Not only was the GEO bus staged in Medford before the raid, the Federal Protective Service had also been called in beforehand to provide extra security.

A Federal Protective Service official wrote in an incident report obtained by The Intercept that the support was necessary because of the potential for “collateral” detainees — the term used for undocumented immigrants who are not the targets of criminal enforcement, but are swept up in raids. The federal security was there, according to the official writing the report, to ensure ICE could carry out its activities in the event of demonstrations. (The Federal Protective Service declined to comment.)

The DEA has been ramping up its role in immigration enforcement. In January, Benjamine Huffman, then-acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, wrote a memo authorizing the DEA to carry out the “functions” of an immigration officer. Since then, collaboration has been close. A raid at a rural Kentucky restaurant in May, led by the DEA, was also shrouded in the language of “active investigation” and led to immigration detentions with no explanation of how it happened.

For three months, no further information was released about the July 30 raids and the ICE detentions, including the role played by local police.

Regional media has yet to cover the raids and detentions, and communication from government officials has remained opaque, leaving community members without answers.

“Oregon has one of the longest standing and strongest sanctuary laws in the country,” said Simon from the ACLU of Oregon. “It is imperative that our local law enforcement agencies are taking great care to protect local resources from being commandeered and used for this administration’s cruel deportation machine.”

ICE Detentions

The raids near Medford were part of a DEA-led federal drug investigation into psychoactive products sold at smoke shops around the country. Local, state, and federal agencies were serving a warrant targeting a licensed cannabis company called HempNova Lifetech Corp., according to a copy of the warrant shared with The Intercept.

Sickler, the Jackson County sheriff, said the raids were part of an investigation into, among other things, illegal trade of cannabis vape cartridges. (HempNova did not respond to a request for comment.)

According to a list of seized items from one raid, the DEA found cannabis products packaged for brands that sell gummies and vape cartridges online and across the country.

The list of “primary” officials for each of the raids came in an email from Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy Jesus Murillo-Garcia ahead of the operation. Out of 10 raid locations connected to the investigation, Jackson County Sheriff’s deputies are listed as the “primary” officials on seven. Central Point Police Department, from a nearby city, had an officer in charge of one, and the Oregon State Police brought in their SWAT team to lead operations on one location. (Central Point Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

Sickler described his office’s involvement as “area liaisons” to help “out of area” agents.

The authorities seized videotapes, tested and destroyed plants, and broke into safe boxes. Three people connected to the HempNova farms were booked at the Jackson County jail and later extradited on undisclosed federal charges to North Carolina, which has been a focus of the nationwide DEA investigation.

Seventeen other workers were loaded into unmarked vans, according to activist observers on site, and eventually transferred to ICE.

Detainees’ families scrambled to locate their loved ones. At one raid led by the Jackson County sheriff, an immigrant worker sent a video to his family that showed him being zip-tied. The family went to the sheriff’s office to locate the worker and got no answers: The officials at the office said they couldn’t discuss the case.

The family then called 911 to file a missing person report. Dispatch records obtained by local researchers reveal confusion at his whereabouts.

“That doesn’t make sense,” the dispatcher says at one point when confronted about the disappeared family member. “I am not seeing anything here.”

The emergency dispatcher called the Jackson County jail with the family on the line, but the administrator there was perplexed. Neither was certain where the workers went.

“He never came to the jail,” the jail administrator said in a recording of the call shared with The Intercept. “I think they took a group up to Washington — I don’t know.”

“I think they took a group up to Washington — I don’t know.”

According to activists, who monitored the raids and the federal facility in Medford, the agents loaded two groups of people from the vans onto the idle bus at the federal facility, which set out for Washington shortly thereafter.

One protester was arrested at the Medford facility for laying down in front of the bus.

For weeks, it was unclear how many — let alone who — was detained by ICE and sent to Washington. Eventually, Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, which runs a statewide hotline, confirmed that a detainee arrested during the July 30 raids arrived at the Washington ICE facility.

Only two months later was The Intercept able to confirm the number of the people bused across state lines to ICE’s detention facility.

Blurring the Mission

In the past, federal law enforcement officials working on issues surrounding Oregon’s cannabis industry said their focus was on “human trafficking.”

Since the Huffman memo expanded the purview of DEA operations, however, the line between drug and immigration enforcement is blurring.

“I think it’s fair to say that ICE is doing whatever it can to raise its arrest numbers,” said David Hausman, co-director of the Deportation Data Project and a law professor at University of California, Berkeley. “Overall, that is sweeping in more people who would never have been priorities for enforcement in the past.”

In Oregon, cannabis farms often operate outside established legal markets. Oversupply and cratering prices left farmers to turn to more profitable gray and black markets. Inconsistent regulation across the country created loopholes for businesses to sell psychoactive products — marketed as hemp-derived — across state lines.

In a recent statewide report in Oregon, all “hemp“ flowers bought and tested by the Oregon and Cannabis Commission were in excess of legal limits on THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis that is banned in some state, complicating interstate trade.

“What we have seen from this administration is the emphasis on crime as a pretext to make immigration arrests.”

Why the DEA picked the raid at HempNova is unclear. Federal enforcement in southern Oregon’s cannabis industry is rare, and raids and investigations are handled largely by local law enforcement agencies.

Simon, of the ACLU of Oregon, warned of the consequences of the blurring missions of local and federal law enforcement agencies.

“What we have seen from this administration is the emphasis on crime as a pretext to make immigration arrests,” she said. “It would be twisting the intent of Oregon sanctuary law to rely on the pretext of some other purpose being present to justify participating in immigration enforcement.”

The post Feds Kept Local Sheriff in Dark About ICE Role in Cannabis Raid — Straining Oregon Sanctuary Laws appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

For the first half of the summer, the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement field office in Medford, Oregon, remained relatively quiet. It was out of the way, tucked up against the regional airport and next to a preschool and an undeveloped lot. 

A group of local volunteers monitoring ICE activity noticed something new on July 30. Vehicles from the Federal Protective Service, a law enforcement agency that secures federal facilities, were parked outside. Behind the barbed-wire fence, a long, white bus with tinted windows idled behind the gates with the words “GEO Transport Inc.” emblazoned on its side.

Grace Warner, a volunteer who just arrived that morning to spot at the ICE facility, was immediately concerned.

“We’d never seen a bus like that there before,” she said. If GEO Group, a major private prison and ICE contractor was there, then immigration agents must be too.

Five miles away, she soon learned, federal, state, and local law enforcement, led by the Drug Enforcement Administration, were raiding cannabis farms. She drove to one of the farms, owned by a company called HempNova Lifetech Corp.

“This is not an ICE raid. This is just a drug bust.”

Outside, Warner was immediately approached by a spokesperson from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, which is barred from participating in most federal immigration enforcement by Oregon sanctuary laws.

“This is not an ICE raid,” Warner recalled the officer saying. “This is just a drug bust.”

That explanation would be echoed by spokespeople for other law enforcement agencies.

By the end of the operation, however, activists monitoring the facility saw federal agents loading people onto the GEO bus. Seventeen workers from the raids were detained and, as night fell, hurtled north toward the Northwest ICE Processing Center, in Tacoma, Washington, an ICE detention center owned by GEO Group. (GEO Group referred a request for comment to ICE, which did not respond.)

According to emails obtained by local researchers at Information for Public Use and shared with The Intercept, local and state police were involved the raids at many levels: According to an internal sheriff’s office email ahead of the operation, seven of the locations raided had Jackson County sheriff’s deputies listed as the “primary” officials; a local police official was the “primary” at another site; a state trooper on a ninth site; and an official from the DEA on the 10th.

“While there were individuals taken into custody by ICE, we had no part in those activities.”

When asked by The Intercept, however, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office denied knowing of any ICE activity that day.

“The DEA was the lead agency for this investigation,” Sheriff Nathan Sickler said. “The focus of this case was not immigration violations. While there were individuals taken into custody by ICE, we had no part in those activities.”

“We did not detain anybody for immigration purposes.”

Who Knew What When?

Oregon’s sanctuary laws, which prevent local coordination on federal immigration enforcement without a signed judicial warrant, are a point of pride.

Though local agencies denied any direct cooperation with ICE — and, in case of the sheriff’s office, denied knowing about ICE’s involvement — federal authorities appeared to have pre-planned immigration enforcement as part of the raids in the Medford area. Under Donald Trump’s administration, situations like this are raising concerns about how Oregon’s sanctuary laws are being upheld.

“When collaborating with federal agencies, it is not good enough to trust things to be business as usual without verifying,” said Kelly Simon, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. “We know the agenda, and it’s on our local leaders to take no part in it.”

Asked if local law enforcement detained workers during raids, Jackson County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Aaron Lewis said it was “not outside the realm of possibility.”

The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office was assisting with a large, ongoing federal drug investigation through a regional “Illegal Marijuana Enforcement Team,” said Sickler, the sheriff.

“We follow the Oregon laws,” Sickler said. “We don’t communicate with ICE for those purposes.“

Capt. Kyle Kennedy, a spokesperson for the Oregon State Police, didn’t comment on whether the agency had any knowledge of ICE involvement or planning before the raid but said State Police had seized one of the raided properties and arrested people there, then handed over control to the DEA.

“OSP did not have a role at the off-site location where the presumed transfer of DEA custodies to ICE may have occurred,” Kennedy said. (The DEA declined to comment.)

In the Medford area raids, however, federal agents had anticipated ICE’s involvement ahead of time. Not only was the GEO bus staged in Medford before the raid, the Federal Protective Service had also been called in beforehand to provide extra security.

A Federal Protective Service official wrote in an incident report obtained by The Intercept that the support was necessary because of the potential for “collateral” detainees — the term used for undocumented immigrants who are not the targets of criminal enforcement, but are swept up in raids. The federal security was there, according to the official writing the report, to ensure ICE could carry out its activities in the event of demonstrations. (The Federal Protective Service declined to comment.)

The DEA has been ramping up its role in immigration enforcement. In January, Benjamine Huffman, then-acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, wrote a memo authorizing the DEA to carry out the “functions” of an immigration officer. Since then, collaboration has been close. A raid at a rural Kentucky restaurant in May, led by the DEA, was also shrouded in the language of “active investigation” and led to immigration detentions with no explanation of how it happened.

For three months, no further information was released about the July 30 raids and the ICE detentions, including the role played by local police.

Regional media has yet to cover the raids and detentions, and communication from government officials has remained opaque, leaving community members without answers.

“Oregon has one of the longest standing and strongest sanctuary laws in the country,” said Simon from the ACLU of Oregon. “It is imperative that our local law enforcement agencies are taking great care to protect local resources from being commandeered and used for this administration’s cruel deportation machine.”

ICE Detentions

The raids near Medford were part of a DEA-led federal drug investigation into psychoactive products sold at smoke shops around the country. Local, state, and federal agencies were serving a warrant targeting a licensed cannabis company called HempNova Lifetech Corp., according to a copy of the warrant shared with The Intercept.

Sickler, the Jackson County sheriff, said the raids were part of an investigation into, among other things, illegal trade of cannabis vape cartridges. (HempNova did not respond to a request for comment.)

According to a list of seized items from one raid, the DEA found cannabis products packaged for brands that sell gummies and vape cartridges online and across the country.

The list of “primary” officials for each of the raids came in an email from Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy Jesus Murillo-Garcia ahead of the operation. Out of 10 raid locations connected to the investigation, Jackson County Sheriff’s deputies are listed as the “primary” officials on seven. Central Point Police Department, from a nearby city, had an officer in charge of one, and the Oregon State Police brought in their SWAT team to lead operations on one location. (Central Point Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

Sickler described his office’s involvement as “area liaisons” to help “out of area” agents.

The authorities seized videotapes, tested and destroyed plants, and broke into safe boxes. Three people connected to the HempNova farms were booked at the Jackson County jail and later extradited on undisclosed federal charges to North Carolina, which has been a focus of the nationwide DEA investigation.

Seventeen other workers were loaded into unmarked vans, according to activist observers on site, and eventually transferred to ICE.

Detainees’ families scrambled to locate their loved ones. At one raid led by the Jackson County sheriff, an immigrant worker sent a video to his family that showed him being zip-tied. The family went to the sheriff’s office to locate the worker and got no answers: The officials at the office said they couldn’t discuss the case.

The family then called 911 to file a missing person report. Dispatch records obtained by local researchers reveal confusion at his whereabouts.

“That doesn’t make sense,” the dispatcher says at one point when confronted about the disappeared family member. “I am not seeing anything here.”

The emergency dispatcher called the Jackson County jail with the family on the line, but the administrator there was perplexed. Neither was certain where the workers went.

“He never came to the jail,” the jail administrator said in a recording of the call shared with The Intercept. “I think they took a group up to Washington — I don’t know.”

“I think they took a group up to Washington — I don’t know.”

According to activists, who monitored the raids and the federal facility in Medford, the agents loaded two groups of people from the vans onto the idle bus at the federal facility, which set out for Washington shortly thereafter.

One protester was arrested at the Medford facility for laying down in front of the bus.

For weeks, it was unclear how many — let alone who — was detained by ICE and sent to Washington. Eventually, Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, which runs a statewide hotline, confirmed that a detainee arrested during the July 30 raids arrived at the Washington ICE facility.

Only two months later was The Intercept able to confirm the number of the people bused across state lines to ICE’s detention facility.

Blurring the Mission

In the past, federal law enforcement officials working on issues surrounding Oregon’s cannabis industry said their focus was on “human trafficking.”

Since the Huffman memo expanded the purview of DEA operations, however, the line between drug and immigration enforcement is blurring.

“I think it’s fair to say that ICE is doing whatever it can to raise its arrest numbers,” said David Hausman, co-director of the Deportation Data Project and a law professor at University of California, Berkeley. “Overall, that is sweeping in more people who would never have been priorities for enforcement in the past.”

In Oregon, cannabis farms often operate outside established legal markets. Oversupply and cratering prices left farmers to turn to more profitable gray and black markets. Inconsistent regulation across the country created loopholes for businesses to sell psychoactive products — marketed as hemp-derived — across state lines.

In a recent statewide report in Oregon, all “hemp“ flowers bought and tested by the Oregon and Cannabis Commission were in excess of legal limits on THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis that is banned in some state, complicating interstate trade.

“What we have seen from this administration is the emphasis on crime as a pretext to make immigration arrests.”

Why the DEA picked the raid at HempNova is unclear. Federal enforcement in southern Oregon’s cannabis industry is rare, and raids and investigations are handled largely by local law enforcement agencies.

Simon, of the ACLU of Oregon, warned of the consequences of the blurring missions of local and federal law enforcement agencies.

“What we have seen from this administration is the emphasis on crime as a pretext to make immigration arrests,” she said. “It would be twisting the intent of Oregon sanctuary law to rely on the pretext of some other purpose being present to justify participating in immigration enforcement.”

Correction: November 3, 2025, 1:34 p.m. ET
This story has been corrected to remove an errant reference to a business adjacent to the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement field office in Medford, Oregon.

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More than a month after he was arrested for sharing a meme on Facebook, 61-year-old Larry Bushart Jr. walked out of the Perry County jail in Linden, Tennessee, on Wednesday, where his wife was waiting to take him home. He wore a weary smile and the same white T-shirt he had on the night he was jailed. A reporter from a local news station, which had previously splashed his mugshot on its website, approached for an interview.

“Thanks to all and any supporters out there,” Bushart said. “And very happy to be going home.”

“I didn’t seek to be a media sensation,” he added. “But here we are. Yeah, that’s about all I can say right now.”

Bushart’s case raised a firestorm of controversy after he was arrested, jailed, and slapped with a $2 million bail for a social media post. His supposed crime: making a threat of mass violence against a school in a neighboring county. In reality, all he had done was repost a meme. On Saturday, September 20, he had visited a community page, “What’s Happening in Perry County, TN,” and trolled a thread about an upcoming vigil honoring Charlie Kirk.

One of his posts was a photo of President Donald Trump, along with the quote “We have to get over it,” drawing from his response to a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, in 2024. The post caught the attention of Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems, who had publicly mourned Kirk and shared information about the vigil. Armed with a Tennessee law that was aimed at preventing school shootings but which has ensnared numerous people for their social media activity, the sheriff got a warrant for Bushart’s arrest. According to Weems, the words “Perry High School” in the meme were interpreted by locals as a threat to a high school in Perry County. In statements to the press, Weems claimed Bushart had caused “mass hysteria.”

Yet there was no evidence of any hysteria. The local school district had not received any communications from the sheriff’s department warning them of a threat, nor had it sent any warnings to the school community. Although the sheriff insisted that parents and teachers had been gripped with fear by the meme, he has shown zero evidence to support his claims.

Bushart’s case attracted several rounds of media attention, from the days immediately following his September arrest to this past week, when Weems sat down for a TV interview to defend his actions. But the Intercept was instrumental in publicizing his case; it was the first to provide a detailed account of the response to the meme within the closed Facebook group — which showed no reaction to the meme in question, let alone panic or fear — and to report that the local school district had no records of any communications with the sheriff over an alleged threat. The Intercept was also the first to obtain body camera footage undermining the sheriff’s claims, in which officers from the Lexington Police Department appeared to distance themselves from the prosecution in the neighboring county.

The tipping point came less than a week later, after Nashville’s CBS affiliate NewsChannel 5 aired a sit-down interview with Weems, conducted by veteran investigative reporter Phil Williams. Sitting at his desk in front of a huge “thin blue line” American flag painted on his office wall, Weems defended the arrest, insisting that there were people “scared to send their kids to school” as a result of Bushart’s post. But he also put a new spin on the case, casting Bushart as a callous man who had rebuffed reasonable attempts by the police to deescalate the situation.

“We tried to take a different approach and go and speak to this guy and say, ‘Hey, look, this is what you’re doing,’” Weems told Williams, apparently referring to an initial visit by Lexington police. According to the sheriff, the officers asked him to take down the offending post. “Whenever we sent Lexington Police Department out to speak to him and he refused to do that, I mean, what kind of person does that?” Weems asked Williams. “What kind of person just says he don’t care?”

Weems repeated the claim to Nashville’s ABC affiliate, WKRN, saying that he “coordinated” with the Lexington Police Department to offer Bushart a chance to “clarify his public messages and calm the situation that was causing multiple, reasonable citizens to be in fear of their children’s safety at school.” But when the news outlet asked the Lexington Police chief whether his department had been involved in this way, “the chief responded, ‘No.’”

“It’s just control over people’s speech.”

To Chris Eargle, who launched a Facebook group called “Free Larry Bushart” in early October, the sheriff’s account made no sense. By Weems’s logic, the supposed threat would have been somehow nullified if Bushart had just taken down the post. “If you think it was a threat, why would removing it make any difference?” he told Williams.

“Nick Weems basically threw out any semblance of a case,” Eargle told The Intercept. The sheriff’s account amounted to: “If you say something I don’t like, and you don’t take it down, now you’re going to be in trouble,” he said. “I mean, it’s just control over people’s speech.”

It isn’t clear why the office dropped the charge against Bushart when it did. The prosecutor in charge of the case, 32nd Judicial District Attorney Hans Schwendimann, did not respond to messages from The Intercept. But the media attention and Facebook group undoubtedly played a role by generating public pressure to abandon the case. Eargle galvanized members of the group to contact the sheriff’s department as well as Schwendimann’s office. He posted the DA’s phone number, urging followers to “Tell him (politely!) to drop this farce of a case. … No threats. No abuse. Just truth. Let’s make noise the right way.”

“A free country does not dispatch police in the dead of night to pull people from their homes because a sheriff objects to their social media posts.”

On Wednesday morning, before the charge was dropped, Weems posted an update on his personal Facebook page. “I was elected to serve and protect Perry County. Not a biased, one sided news outlet and definitely not people that’s not even from this community.” He insisted he is “100% for protecting the 1st amendment. However, freedom of speech does not allow anyone to put someone else in fear of their well being.”

But as Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told The Intercept, “People’s performative overreaction is not a sufficient basis to limit someone else’s free speech rights.” FIRE closely monitored the case and filed open records requests, including the ones that revealed there was no communication with the school district about the supposed threat. In a statement following Bushart’s release, Steinbaugh said, “We are relieved that Larry Bushart has been freed after nearly 40 days in jail, and subject to a $2 million bond, over a Facebook post clearly protected by the First Amendment. A free country does not dispatch police in the dead of night to pull people from their homes because a sheriff objects to their social media posts.”

Reached by The Intercept on Tuesday afternoon, Bushart’s wife declined to comment on her husband’s release. But Eargle said she called him earlier that day just before 2 p.m. “She was beyond ecstatic.”

“I got a message from Larry’s wife — it seemed really urgent — saying ‘Call me,’” he said. “I was worried something had happened, and I called her. And she told me she’s on her way to pick up Larry.”

Bushart’s incarceration has already taken a toll. Although he retired from a decadeslong career in law enforcement last year, he was working as a medical driver before his arrest — a job that he has since lost. In Perry County, meanwhile, the sheriff’s actions have put residents on notice that they may be targeted for their speech. According to Eargle, who does not live in Tennessee, the Free Larry Bushart Facebook group includes numerous members who have been posting anonymously: “There’s a lot of people that are actually afraid of speaking out because of retribution.”

Back home, Bushart is back to posting again. By early Thursday morning, he had posted nearly a dozen times. His first two posts were not political. He shared a celebratory post about his new grandchild, who was born while Bushart was in jail. Then he posted a live Elton John video from 1985: “I’m Still Standing.”

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Inside her chambers at the Oklahoma County Courthouse, Judge Susan Stallings was defending her refusal to step down from the third trial of Richard Glossip when she made a startling admission to his defense attorneys.

It was September 4, 2025, and Glossip’s legal team had just persuaded a different judge to recuse herself from the case — the second Oklahoma City judge to do so since August. Like Stallings, both judges were former prosecutors. Both had stepped down due to their ties to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office. Now Stallings was explaining why she believed that she could be impartial in presiding over the high-profile trial.

To do so, however, Stallings needed to address her relationship with Fern Smith, the former Oklahoma City prosecutor who first sent Glossip to death row. Glossip’s lawyers already knew that Stallings had worked for Smith during her own time at the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office in the early 1990s. And they knew that Stallings had gone on to praise Smith as a formative influence. “When I started in the DA’s office right out of law school, Fern Smith taught me that we were to seek justice — not just convictions,” Stallings told Briefcase, a publication of the Oklahoma County Bar Association, upon taking the bench in 2019. “I’ve never forgotten that.”

But now Stallings was volunteering a new bit of information about her connection to Smith. 

“We got a really good deal on the airfare.”

“We took a trip,” Stallings told the lawyers. “There was a group of us that took a trip.” The year was 1997, and Glossip had recently been charged with masterminding the brutal killing of his boss, Barry Van Treese, at an Oklahoma City motel. The evidence against Glossip was thin; prosecutors were relying on the word of a 19-year-old motel employee named Justin Sneed, who admitted to beating Van Treese to death with a baseball bat but claimed that Glossip had coerced him into doing it. As Glossip sat in the county jail insisting he was innocent, Stallings was apparently vacationing in Spain with Smith, the lead prosecutor in the case.

If the judge’s revelation supported the case for her recusal, Stallings seemed intent on downplaying its significance. The vacation had included a bunch of people from the DA’s office, she explained. “We got a really good deal on the airfare.” The colleagues landed in Madrid and rented cars to drive to Costa del Sol and Gibraltar. During the ride to Gibraltar, Stallings said, Smith “wasn’t even in the same car with me.”

Defense attorney Corbin Brewster asked Stallings if she had discussed any of the cases Smith was handling at the DA’s office while they were in Spain. “Good Lord no,” Stallings replied. “That’s not the point of a vacation.”

The exchange between Stallings and Glossip’s attorneys took place during a closed-door proceeding known as a Rule 15 hearing, whose purpose is to ask a judge to recuse themselves from a case. A transcript is attached to a subsequent defense motion reiterating the recusal request and arguing that “there is an objectively and constitutionally intolerable risk that Judge Stallings cannot impartially judge issues that must be addressed before this case can proceed.” Under Oklahoma’s Code of Judicial Conduct, judges are supposed to be disqualified from cases “whenever the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” But the decision to recuse is up to the judge.

All trials are supposed to be overseen by an independent arbiter who can be fair to both sides. This would seem especially urgent in Glossip’s case, which has famously laid bare disturbing misconduct in the Oklahoma County DA’s office. Twice convicted and sentenced to die for a crime he swore he did not commit, Glossip spent 27 years facing execution before finally seeing his conviction vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that his case was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. Not only did prosecutors fail to correct false testimony by Sneed, the justices also found that “additional conduct by the prosecution further undermines confidence in the verdict.”

This conduct includes the destruction of evidence between Glossip’s 1998 trial and his 2004 retrial that defense lawyers trace back to Smith. Smith “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,” they wrote in the recusal motion. At the Rule 15 hearing, Brewster told Stallings that Glossip’s legal team planned to challenge the state’s case through pretrial hearings — and that the defense would argue that Smith told Oklahoma City detectives to destroy the evidence. “Do you have any concerns about being impartial with respect to Fern Smith’s credibility or whether she engaged in misconduct?” he asked.

No, Stallings said. “I went from being an advocate at the District Attorney’s Office to being an impartial arbiter on this bench,” she told Brewster. “And I take that very seriously in the very marrow of my bones.”

The question of Stallings’s impartiality will be at the heart of an evidentiary hearing on October 30 in Oklahoma County District Court, where Glossip’s attorneys plan to probe the judge’s connections to the Oklahoma County DA’s office. “The extent of Judge Stallings’s true relationship with Fern Smith is unclear,” they wrote in a filing on October 20. The hearing is necessary “to discern the extent of this relationship.”

The hearing is peculiar in that Stallings will be considering testimony about her own ability to be impartial — and ultimately rule on whether or not to recuse herself from Glossip’s case. Under Oklahoma law, if she again refuses to step down, Glossip’s legal team can turn to the “chief judge of the county where the case is pending,” followed by the state Supreme Court.

Although the court docket shows several subpoenas sent to unnamed witnesses, it is not entirely clear who will take the stand at the hearing. Among the most significant potential witnesses is Smith herself, as well as her former boss, former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater, who once called Glossip’s innocence claim a “bullshit PR campaign.” Prater, who served as elected DA from 2007 until 2022, hired Stallings as a prosecutor in 2010 — the second time she was employed at the office. Stallings worked under Prater until 2018, the year she won her election to Oklahoma County’s criminal court.

Stallings will be considering testimony about her own ability to be impartial — and ultimately rule on whether or not to recuse herself from Glossip’s case.

It was during these same years that Prater went to extreme lengths to keep Glossip’s conviction intact. The case dates back to a notorious era in Oklahoma City, when the DA’s office was under the leadership of Robert “Cowboy Bob” Macy, who won 54 death sentences during his tenure and became known for his overzealous prosecutions. Prater, who worked under Macy, took it upon himself as DA to defend Glossip’s conviction at all costs, using the same kinds of tactics that made his predecessor so controversial. As Glossip faced execution in 2015, Prater was accused of intimidating witnesses who came forward with new information.

Glossip’s defense team does not claim that Stallings had anything to do with Prater’s actions at the time. But they argue that her broader relationship with Prater is cause for concern. Although Stallings insisted at the Rule 15 hearing that she would treat Prater “like I do anybody else,” Glossip’s lawyers argue that, as with Smith, Stallings cannot be impartial in determining Prater’s credibility if and when he is called to answer for his conduct in the case.

The evidentiary hearing comes nearly five months after Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, stunned Glossip’s advocates by announcing that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder. After spending years fighting to prevent Glossip’s execution — testifying on his behalf at a 2023 clemency hearing, then joining his attorneys in challenging the case before the Supreme Court — Drummond’s decision came despite a lack of reliable evidence to prove the state’s case. It was also an apparent betrayal of a secret deal the attorney general had previously made with Glossip’s attorney Don Knight to swiftly resolve the case and let his client walk free.

Glossip’s attorneys have repeatedly argued that their client cannot receive a fair trial — let alone in a courtroom where the presiding judge once worked for the very same office behind his discredited conviction. The corruption at the root of Glossip’s case was part of a “longstanding culture of misconduct in the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office,” they write. During the Rule 15 hearing, Brewster said the defense team is “seeking to recuse any judge who served in the Oklahoma County DA’s Office.”

In their reply to Glossip’s recusal motion, prosecutors argue that his legal team vastly overstates Stallings’s connection to Prater. Glossip’s attorneys invoke Stallings’s “friendship and admiration” for her former boss, they write, but such a description is a “leap.” As for Stallings’s connection to Smith, the prosecutors write that “the defendant has conjured an enduring friendship” that is “simply incompatible with reality.” Putting aside a court appearance in a different case earlier this year, they write, Stallings and Smith were last in contact 28 years ago, “when both happened to be members of a group trip abroad.”

Yet the court appearance cited by prosecutors is a good example of the potential conflict Glossip’s lawyers describe. Before Stallings was assigned to preside over Glossip’s retrial, her impartiality had already been questioned in the case of Tremane Wood, who was also sentenced to death in Oklahoma City in 2004 — and who faces execution on November 13. Wood won an evidentiary hearing earlier this year to determine whether prosecutors committed misconduct in his case. The prosecutor in question was Fern Smith. Stallings was appointed to preside over the hearing.

Wood’s attorneys requested that Stallings recuse herself from the hearing. As in Glossip’s case, she refused. In an affidavit subsequently attached to Glossip’s recusal motion, federal public defender Amanda Bass Castro Alves described a scene with striking parallels to the Rule 15 hearing in Glossip’s case. During an “in-chambers discussion, Judge Stallings stated that she had been on a trip with Fern Smith,” Bass Castro Alves said. “I don’t specifically recall where they traveled to or the timeframe of the trip. However, I do recall that Judge Stallings referred to the trip as a ‘hen do.’”

It’s not clear whether the trip was the same international vacation Stallings disclosed to Glossip’s attorneys. A “hen do” is akin to a bachelorette party — a gathering of the closest friends of a bride-to-be — which is not at all how Stallings described the trip to Spain. “The contrast in two descriptions suggests that either the nature of the trip to Spain was different than what Judge Stallings disclosed, or that there have been multiple trips with different purposes and tone,” Glossip’s attorneys argue. “Under either circumstance, it is reasonable to conclude that Judge Stallings could not fairly and impartially rule on the credibility of Ms. Smith.”

Stallings presided over Wood’s evidentiary hearing in April 2025 and ultimately ruled against him. Glossip’s lawyers argue that Stallings’s opinion in the case evinces loyalty toward Smith, a position supported by attorney and scholar Abbe Smith, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in legal ethics. In a report attached as an exhibit to the latest defense filing, Professor Smith notes that Stallings “devotes more pages to Fern Smith’s testimony than anyone else’s … and does not merely find her testimony ‘credible,’ the terse description she uses for others, she ‘finds credible Ms. Smith’s resolute testimony,’ adding a flourish that suggests Ms. Smith was somehow more than credible.”

Whether Stallings was persuaded to rule against Wood because she was secretly biased in Fern Smith’s favor is ultimately not the point. As the legal ethics professor notes, the question of recusal is not based on whether a judge is too biased to preside over a case, but whether a judge might look biased to an outside observer. “Appearances matter,” Abbe Smith writes. “The very first Canon in Oklahoma’s judicial code requires judges to avoid not only ‘impropriety,’ but the appearance of impropriety.”

This standard is rooted in the need to preserve the legal system’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public, Abbe Smith explains. But it serves a practical purpose too. “Lawyers are often reluctant to make recusal motions for fear of antagonizing judges,” she writes. “It is helpful for a lawyer to be able to point out that a recusal motion is not personal.” The standard also “relieves a judge from feeling that they are admitting to shameful prejudice and bias. Instead, it is a matter of appearances.”

In Oklahoma City, concerns over appearances have not traditionally proven to be much of a deterrent. The contentious fight over Glossip’s case — and the state’s death penalty in general — has frequently spilled into public view, particularly where the DA’s office has been involved. Among Prater’s final moves as DA was the targeting of Oklahoma’s board of pardon and parole for showing mercy to people facing execution; Prater repeatedly sought to disqualify individual board members from considering death penalty cases. In Glossip’s case, a newly retired Prater showed up at his 2023 clemency hearing to telegraph his anger over Drummond’s decision to testify on Glossip’s behalf.

With Drummond’s decision to retry Glossip, the attorney general has found common ground with the Macy-era prosecutors who sent Glossip to death row. The attorney general has insisted he “will make sure Mr. Glossip receives a fair trial.” But allowing Stallings to preside clearly undermines this commitment, defense lawyers argue. Both sides should want a presiding judge who can be seen as unbiased. Fighting for Stallings to stay on sends the message that “the game is already rigged.”

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On a quiet street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, a camera owned and operated by the New York City Police Department points directly at the bedroom window of Pamela Wridt and Robert Sauve.

“It can see potentially directly into any part of our house,” Sauve told The Intercept.

The camera is one of tens of thousands that feed into a massive warrantless surveillance system that police use to track and profile millions of New Yorkers each day.

Many of the cameras — including those mounted to drones and helicopters, as well as stationary cameras like the one just outside Wridt and Sauve’s bedroom and living room — are owned, operated, and bear the logo of the NYPD.

Footage from tens of thousands of other privately owned cameras, however, like those posted outside of shops, businesses, and banks, are also made available to the NYPD through a little-publicized tool that holds one of the world’s biggest networks of security cameras: the city’s Domain Awareness System.

Wridt and Sauve are plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed Monday against the city of New York, which holds responsibility for the NYPD, over the department’s expansive surveillance machine — one of the largest in the world — that their attorneys say violates their First and Fourth Amendment rights to free association, expression, and privacy. (TKTK NYPD COMMENT)

The suit is the first of its kind of take on the NYPD surveillance system.

“We see state and local police departments effectively being coopted, our data being used and abused by other government agencies,” said attorney Albert Cahn of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, one of the attorneys representing Sauve and Wridt in the case.

There’s at least one case the plaintiffs’ attorneys know of in which data originally collected in the Domain Awareness System was eventually shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch was an architect of the surveillance apparatus, which police use to join data from public and private sources across the city, collecting information on people’s identities, their biometric data, their daily movements, their social media activity, and people with whom they associate. The NYPD uses that information, combined with forms of machine learning, to build profiles that construct the activities, religious and political affiliations, and thoughts and beliefs of millions of people — and stores the information indefinitely.

The NYPD is “a model for the nearly 18,000 state and local police departments across the country that are increasingly acting like mini-NSA and CIA operations.”

Attorneys in the New York case hope it will be the start of a wider effort to take on police surveillance networks in other cities where police departments, with bipartisan support and unprecedented amounts of cash, have built up their surveillance capacity and weaponizing it to political ends.

“The NYPD may be the worst offender, but they’re also a model for the nearly 18,000 state and local police departments across the country that are increasingly acting like mini-NSA and CIA operations,” Cahn said. “American policing runs on data.”

“You Are Being Watched”

The reach of the surveillance is largely unknown to many city dwellers, but the Domain Awareness System received public scrutiny during the police search for Luigi Mangione, who was tracked using the multitude of cameras throughout the city to which the NYPD has access.

“You are being watched,” the plaintiffs wrote in their suit. “Today, throughout New York City, the police are monitoring, tracking, and cataloguing you. Nearly everywhere. Nearly all the time.”

All that surveillance is made possible by the Domain Awareness System, they wrote: “It is a voyeuristic policing platform that unifies into one centralized network more than a dozen technologies — public and private — including video camera systems, tracking technologies, biometric tools, data and financial aggregation analytics, and digital communications monitors.”

Companies like Microsoft, Clearview AI, Patternizr, and Dataminr have all bolstered the NYPD’s surveillance system, which feeds into controversial policing tools like the citywide gang database and ShotSpotter. Attorneys hope the lawsuit will shed light on other private companies and federal agencies that have access to data collected by the NYPD.

“There is no one firm that is really enabling this mass surveillance,” Cahn said. “That’s what’s key to this lawsuit.”

Through the system, the NYPD “collects the identity, location, banking details, vehicle information, social media activity, and friend groups of all who live in or enter the city. It combines these entries with civil and criminal records and converts them into digital profiles, reconstructing, in effect, the private lives of millions. It is virtually impossible to avoid,” according to the suit.

Previous lawsuits and legislative battles have targeted smaller pieces of the surveillance system, but the new case focuses on the broader constitutional harm that plaintiffs say is greater than the sum of its parts.

“Aggregated data enables the NYPD to uncover constitutionally protected activity,” says the suit, “such as political expression, religious practice, or private association, that would be unknowable from any single source.”

“Not a Hot Spot for Crime”

Since the camera was first installed outside Wridt and Sauve’s home in April 2022, the couple said it’s changed the character of her neighborhood and negatively affected their mental health and well-being.

“We had to mirror tint all our windows. We can’t open them because if we do, we’re exposed,” Sauve said. “There’s very hot days. I like having my windows open. I can’t even do that.”

Wridt said her house no longer feels like a home.

“Your home is supposed to be your safe space, and I feel very violated,” she said. “It’s constant. It never goes away, that level and feeling of violation.”

The couple said the surveillance has been a point of contention and disagreement among their neighbors. They’ve notified others who live on their block and engaged some of them in their efforts to get rid of the cameras.

Some people are uncomfortable with the cameras and don’t spend as much time outside on the block anymore, Wridt said. And, while their neighborhood hasn’t had an issue with crime, others see it as their own personal security system.

“Our approach has been to educate our neighbors and let them decide how they would like to proceed,” Wridt said. “There’s no crime on our block. This is not a hot spot for crime. So of course your brain is going to go in other directions — why is it there?”

“It’s like my greatest concern and my greatest fear was confirmed.”

At first, Sauve and Wridt weren’t sure where the cameras feeds went. When they learned that they were collected into the city’s wider surveillance network, they felt repulsed. Now, Suave worries that lack of public knowledge about the Domain Awareness System breeds complacency and gives authorities the space to entrench it.

“It’s like my greatest concern and my greatest fear was confirmed,” Sauve said. “People that are oblivious to the whole surveillance state we’re in — they’re getting more and more comfortable with it being there.”

The post An NYPD Camera Points Directly Into Their Bedroom. They’re Suing the City Over It. appeared first on The Intercept.

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