It was almost 10 a.m. and the eighth-floor courtroom in downtown Oklahoma City was nearly empty, save for a few onlookers and reporters. A Thursday morning hearing had been scheduled in the case of Richard Glossip, but he wasn’t there — neither were his attorneys nor the attorneys for the state. Minutes later, the gaggle of lawyers emerged from a door leading to the judge’s chambers, and Don Knight, Glossip’s longtime lead attorney, approached Glossip’s wife Lea in the front row of the gallery to deliver some news: Judge Heather Coyle had just recused herself from Glossip’s case. There was no explanation why.

The recusal came as a surprise — not only because trial judges rarely willingly step away from a case, but also because there was no recusal request on the official court docket. Coyle was previously a prosecutor in the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office under the former DA who sent Glossip to death row, and the recusal was likely rooted in concern about those ties. It was the latest twist in Glossip’s case since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction at the urging of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond — only for Drummond to announce that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder.

Glossip was twice convicted of the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside room 102 of the rundown motel his family owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but insisted Glossip put him up to it. Sneed, who is currently serving a life sentence, escaped the death penalty by becoming the star witness against Glossip.

Glossip, who has always maintained his innocence, faced execution nine times as the Oklahoma courts repeatedly denied his appeals. He may well have been executed if Drummond hadn’t intervened. In early 2023, Drummond ordered an independent investigation into the case, which concluded that rampant prosecutorial misconduct had infected Glossip’s conviction. Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the case, and, when that failed, joined Glossip in asking the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that Sneed — that the state has described as its “indispensable witness” — had lied on the witness stand.

Drummond’s concessions about the flaws in the state’s case and his unprecedented advocacy in support of overturning Glossip’s conviction made his announcement in June that he would seek to retry Glossip for murder all the more shocking. According to Glossip’s lawyers, the decision also betrayed a long-standing agreement with Drummond to resolve the case and set Glossip free.

The alleged agreement, first reported by The Intercept, was at the heart of an explosive court filing last month, which included a 2023 email exchange between Drummond and Knight laying out the deal. According to the email, Glossip would agree to plead guilty to a lesser charge and would be immediately released in exchange for a promise that Glossip would not sue the state for anything related to his “arrest and incarceration.”

“We are in agreement,” Drummond replied.

The state has since denied that any deal was ever reached, writing in a court filing that the first anyone in the AG’s office had heard about it was just before Glossip’s team filed their brief that included the email exchange. “Needless to say, the defendant is not entitled to enforcement of a non-existent plea agreement,” prosecutors wrote.

Thursday’s court hearing was meant to figure out how to proceed with the matter.

In anticipation of the hearing, Glossip’s attorneys on August 11 filed a lengthy affidavit from Knight that outlined his ongoing communications with Drummond and members of his staff regarding the deal. The filing shed new light on the negotiations, including that Drummond, who is currently running for governor, told Knight that the timing for carrying out the deal “was based on his own political calculus.”

In fact, it was Drummond who initially approached Knight in the spring of 2023 asking if they could strike a deal, Knight recalled. Drummond was preparing to admit that Glossip’s trial had been tainted by prosecutorial misconduct and to ask the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the conviction.

Drummond’s “big fear was that the court would grant it,” Knight told The Intercept, and that Glossip would walk free and would sue the state. “So Drummond did what a good lawyer does for his client and looked for an insurance policy. This agreement was that insurance policy.” Knight noted that if Glossip had been released as planned and then had gone on to sue the state, “the shoe would be on the other foot, and Drummond would be asking for this agreement to be enforced now, instead of me.”

In his affidavit, Knight lays out how after the Supreme Court ruled in Glossip’s favor in February, Drummond was quick to lay out a plan to follow through with the deal in a way that would avoid too much publicity — by releasing Glossip on the Friday before Easter. “I was informed that AG Drummond planned to effectuate the agreement on April 18, 2025,” Knight wrote. Knight recalled that he told Drummond’s solicitor general that he had shoulder replacement surgery scheduled in March, which would preclude him from traveling. Knight said he’d be willing to put off the surgery if Glossip’s release date was firm and was told that it was. “Having been assured that it was a firm plan, I rescheduled my surgery to May 13, 2025,” Knight wrote.

During a phone call in early April, however, Drummond told Knight that he would need additional time, but assured him the deal was still on. Just days before Knight’s surgery, the two talked again, and Drummond “reaffirmed he was still working on timing,” Knight wrote. Instead, a few weeks later, Drummond put out a press release announcing he would be retrying Glossip for first-degree murder.

Drummond’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In their most recent brief, Glossip’s legal team argues that prosecutors’ characterization of the deal merely reveals their own ignorance about what was happening behind the scenes.

“The thing that makes me kind of chuckle about the situation,” Knight told The Intercept, “is that I believe the people in Drummond’s office who are writing these petitions are learning about the truth of this matter from us … rather than from Gentner Drummond.”

The post Court Filings Reveal New Details About Oklahoma AG Flip-Flopping on Freeing Richard Glossip appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump is preparing to revoke eviction protections for people living in federal public housing and project-based rental assistance programs — increasing the risk for millions of Americans to fall into homelessness. 

Last week, the Trump administration posted on the Office of Management and Budget’s website that it is reviewing a new rule eliminating a Housing and Urban Development Department requirement that property owners and public housing agencies provide a 30-day eviction notice for people they intend to kick out of certain types of federally subsidized housing for lack of payment.

If the rule change takes effect, public housing tenants could receive as little as 14 days of notice prior to eviction proceedings beginning, and in some jurisdictions, people in project-based rental assistance programs could receive no notice at all before formal eviction procedures begin.

The 30-day notice rule was drafted during the Biden administration to give tenants facing eviction for nonpayment time to pay the amount due to stop the eviction or secure new housing. It requires property owners and public housing authorities to give tenants a month’s notice in writing, and mandates that property managers include a monthly breakdown of overdue rent charges, the deadline for paying overdue rent, and instructions on how the tenant can pay their fees. 

The 30-day notice rule only took effect in January, but housing experts say that it has already made a significant difference for people facing eviction. Experts told The Intercept that should the Trump administration move ahead with the rule change, millions of people could be at risk of losing their housing to benefit Trump’s corporate allies. 

“It would be really a huge step backwards to see this protection be taken away at a time like this when people are really concerned about the ability to make rent and the ability to stay housed,” said Marie Claire Tran-Leung, the Evictions Initiative Project Director and a senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project.

Some 2 million people live in project-based rental assistance housing, and an additional 1.6 million in public housing. Some housing assistance programs, such as the Housing Choice Voucher programs, were excluded from the 30-day notice, said Tran-Leung. 

The 30-day notice period significantly decreased evictions, said Tara Raghuveer, founding director of the Tenant Union Federation. “For many households, that notice initiates a process of figuring out how they’re going to make rent, so that the eviction doesn’t happen,” she said. “Many of the households impacted, disproportionately, these households are made up of single parents and children. And this will have devastating consequences.” 

“It’s not an easy thing to find an apartment to rent in just a few weeks.” 

The more notice, the better chance a family has to find alternative housing. “Without the full 30 days, it’s going to make it a lot more challenging,” said Sonya Acosta, a senior policy analyst with the housing and income security team for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Given the rental markets across the country, it’s not an easy thing to find an apartment to rent in just a few weeks.” 

Eviction doesn’t just impact the immediate stability of a family. It has devastating long-term consequences, explained Tran-Leung. 

“Being evicted … can create a record that often leads to barriers down the line when you’re trying to find other housing because of eviction record screening practices that landlords are increasingly using in the private rental market,” said Tran-Leung. 

Health outcomes for children who’ve faced eviction are also poor. “Children suffer a lot after evictions, like increased food insecurity and higher rates of anxiety and depression,” she said. “So it just reverberates throughout the household, through different members, and really impairs housing in the future.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to respond to a request for comment. 

Because the Trump administration introduced the rule change as an interim final rule rather than as a proposed rule, it could take effect on an accelerated timeline, said Acosta. 

Generally, as part of the federal rulemaking process, an agency issues a proposed rule that goes into the federal register and is open for comment, Acosta said. In the case of HUD, comments are typically open for 60 days to give various stakeholders the opportunity to weigh in. “The interim final rule skips all of that public input stage and just goes straight to ‘This is what we’re going to do,’” she said. 

The rule still has to be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, but it could go into effect swiftly post-review.

That means tenants are going to feel the consequences sooner. “This is going to be a lot trickier for everyone on the ground to make sure that people understand what can and cannot happen if they find themselves in that situation of facing eviction,” said Acosta.

Tran-Leung said that this is a part of a larger push from corporate landlords who have lobbied the Trump administration to reduce eviction protections for tenants. “Housing providers right now are looking for ways to speed up the eviction process to make it easier to get tenants out,” she said.

Trump and other Republicans ran a platform of making America more affordable, but in practice they’ve spent the months since the election doing the opposite, said Acosta. 

“You have them then pushing policies like this, where it’s giving people less time to just get things together in the event of an eviction, while they’re also pushing for major cuts in all of these different rental assistance programs that make housing more affordable,” said Acosta. “You just have all of these things piling up, particularly on people with low incomes, just completely contradictory to what they are trying to message.” 

The post Trump Is Trying to Make It Easier to Evict People From Public Housing appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump is preparing to revoke eviction protections for people living in federal public housing and project-based rental assistance programs — increasing the risk for millions of Americans to fall into homelessness. 

Last week, the Trump administration posted on the Office of Management and Budget’s website that it is reviewing a new rule eliminating a Housing and Urban Development Department requirement that property owners and public housing agencies provide a 30-day eviction notice for people they intend to kick out of certain types of federally subsidized housing for lack of payment.

If the rule change takes effect, public housing tenants could receive as little as 14 days of notice prior to eviction proceedings beginning, and in some jurisdictions, people in project-based rental assistance programs could receive no notice at all before formal eviction procedures begin.

The 30-day notice rule was drafted during the Biden administration to give tenants facing eviction for nonpayment time to pay the amount due to stop the eviction or secure new housing. It requires property owners and public housing authorities to give tenants a month’s notice in writing, and mandates that property managers include a monthly breakdown of overdue rent charges, the deadline for paying overdue rent, and instructions on how the tenant can pay their fees. 

The 30-day notice rule only took effect in January, but housing experts say that it has already made a significant difference for people facing eviction. Experts told The Intercept that should the Trump administration move ahead with the rule change, millions of people could be at risk of losing their housing to benefit Trump’s corporate allies. 

“It would be really a huge step backwards to see this protection be taken away at a time like this when people are really concerned about the ability to make rent and the ability to stay housed,” said Marie Claire Tran-Leung, the Evictions Initiative Project Director and a senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project.

Some 2 million people live in project-based rental assistance housing, and an additional 1.6 million in public housing. Some housing assistance programs, such as the Housing Choice Voucher programs, were excluded from the 30-day notice, said Tran-Leung. 

The 30-day notice period significantly decreased evictions, said Tara Raghuveer, founding director of the Tenant Union Federation. “For many households, that notice initiates a process of figuring out how they’re going to make rent, so that the eviction doesn’t happen,” she said. “Many of the households impacted, disproportionately, these households are made up of single parents and children. And this will have devastating consequences.” 

“It’s not an easy thing to find an apartment to rent in just a few weeks.” 

The more notice, the better chance a family has to find alternative housing. “Without the full 30 days, it’s going to make it a lot more challenging,” said Sonya Acosta, a senior policy analyst with the housing and income security team for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Given the rental markets across the country, it’s not an easy thing to find an apartment to rent in just a few weeks.” 

Eviction doesn’t just impact the immediate stability of a family. It has devastating long-term consequences, explained Tran-Leung. 

“Being evicted … can create a record that often leads to barriers down the line when you’re trying to find other housing because of eviction record screening practices that landlords are increasingly using in the private rental market,” said Tran-Leung. 

Health outcomes for children who’ve faced eviction are also poor. “Children suffer a lot after evictions, like increased food insecurity and higher rates of anxiety and depression,” she said. “So it just reverberates throughout the household, through different members, and really impairs housing in the future.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to respond to a request for comment. 

Because the Trump administration introduced the rule change as an interim final rule rather than as a proposed rule, it could take effect on an accelerated timeline, said Acosta. 

Generally, as part of the federal rulemaking process, an agency issues a proposed rule that goes into the federal register and is open for comment, Acosta said. In the case of HUD, comments are typically open for 60 days to give various stakeholders the opportunity to weigh in. “The interim final rule skips all of that public input stage and just goes straight to ‘This is what we’re going to do,’” she said. 

The rule still has to be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, but it could go into effect swiftly post-review.

That means tenants are going to feel the consequences sooner. “This is going to be a lot trickier for everyone on the ground to make sure that people understand what can and cannot happen if they find themselves in that situation of facing eviction,” said Acosta.

Tran-Leung said that this is a part of a larger push from corporate landlords who have lobbied the Trump administration to reduce eviction protections for tenants. “Housing providers right now are looking for ways to speed up the eviction process to make it easier to get tenants out,” she said.

Trump — a landlord who inherited his real estate empire from his father — has repeatedly sided with the interests of corporate landlords and property owners.

Trump and other Republicans ran a platform of making America more affordable, but in practice they’ve spent the months since the election doing the opposite, said Acosta. 

“You have them then pushing policies like this, where it’s giving people less time to just get things together in the event of an eviction, while they’re also pushing for major cuts in all of these different rental assistance programs that make housing more affordable,” said Acosta. “You just have all of these things piling up, particularly on people with low incomes, just completely contradictory to what they are trying to message.” 

The post Trump the Landlord Plans to Speed Up Evictions From Public Housing appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently removed a long-standing five-week Spanish-language training program requirement for new recruits.

The removal of the requirement, which was confirmed by the Department of Homeland Security, reflects both collapsing non-English government services and the softening of qualifications to become an immigration agent.

“This is consistent with DHS under this administration,” said Scott Shuchart, a former ICE assistant director under the Biden administration, “lowering hiring standards to prioritize getting warm bodies behind masks and guns, rather than getting qualified and vetted people into a job that can be dangerous and demands real training and skill.”

Though ICE doesn’t release information on languages spoken by detainees, available statistics show that the vast majority of arrestees hail from primarily Spanish-speaking countries.

On Reddit threads, people claiming to be potential ICE recruits met rumors of the change in requirement with a mix of support and disdain.

ICE is on a hiring spree following a boost of $175 million to immigration enforcement in President Donald Trump’s budget. ICE’s budget for officers is now higher than the FBI’s.

In recent months, after Trump’s executive order designating English as the official language of the U.S., government agencies have cut back on services for other languages.

Though Trump’s diktat says that nothing in the order “requires or directs any change in the services provided by any agency,” several agencies have nonetheless reduced non-English-language support. The Department of Homeland Security, for instance, will no longer provide translation services for those calling in with questions about their employment status or benefits.

In an email to The Intercept, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin confirmed the five-week Spanish-language training was no longer required.

“ICE simply replaced the 5-week in-person Spanish course with a more robust translation service for all officers regardless of when they entered on duty,” she said. “We are using technology not only to save U.S. taxpayer dollars but to also broaden our ability to communicate with illegal aliens we regularly encounter from countries across the globe.”

McLaughlin did not respond to a follow-up on what the technology in question would be, but regular law enforcement suppliers have been rolling out translation tools in recent years.

Axon, for instance, the company made famous for making the Taser stun gun, has a $5.1 million contract to provide Homeland Security with body-worn cameras. The firm advertises that its latest body camera has real-time “push-to-talk voice translation” in over 50 languages.

The decision to replace language skills with technology could create problems, said Shuchart, who is currently a lawyer in private practice.

“It bespeaks a real disrespect for ICE officers and agents, and noncitizens,” he said, “to think that their life-and-death encounters can just be mediated by commercial AI tools that have never been tested in a law enforcement environment.”

“Misunderstandings on Both Sides”

The history of ICE’s Spanish-language training requirement crisscrosses with the agency’s winding history.

The Office of Detention and Removal Operations, the main deportation division of what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, had the requirement in place until March 2003, when the agency was subsumed by ICE under the aegis of the newly created Department of Homeland Security. ICE went on to reinstate the requirements in 2007. In 2010, Detention and Removal Operations was renamed to Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, the name the office bears today.

That same year, in 2010, Congress’s official research agency, the Government Accountability Office, produced a report on the dangers of Homeland Security’s failures to assess its language needs.

“According to DHS officials, foreign language skills are an integral part of the department’s operations,” the report said. “These officials told us that while Spanish language proficiency may be identified as an existing capability, it may not always be available and generally the levels of proficiencies vary.”

In a 2007 memo, ICE described its Spanish Language Training Program as a five-week course designed to reinforce four skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing Spanish.

“Emphasis is placed on speaking and listening; the two skills most needed by DRO Law Enforcement Officers,” the ICE memo said.

By 2016, the document had been revised to remove reading from the core skills list. The two most-needed skills were also changed from speaking and listening to “grammar concepts and the ability to perform an arrest of an alien and complete the requisite corresponding documentation, which are the two skills most needed by ERO Law Enforcement Officers.”

An ICE press release from 2018, which mentioned the Spanish-language program, touted ICE officers as being “among the most highly trained federal law enforcement officers in the United States.” (A disclaimer at the top of the press release points out that the 2018 release is now outdated and is “not reflective of current practice.”)

Amid a huge increase in its budget, ICE is on making a recruitment push to add 10,000 new agents.

In August, DHS announced that ICE is removing age restrictions for new applicants so that “even more patriots will qualify to join ICE.” The starting age for ICE agents is being lowered from 21 to 18, and the age cap, previously ranging from 37 to 40, is being removed entirely.

“If ICE agents lack the basic language skills, they put at risk both themselves, citizens, and lawful immigrants as well.”

The DHS announcement also unveiled several incentives to join ICE, including a signing bonus of up to $50,000 and student loan repayment for ICE officers.

The announcement didn’t mention that the Spanish Language Training Program requirement had also been removed for new officers.

Fielding immigration enforcement agents without direct Spanish-language skills could create dangers to all involved, said Richard Seifman, a former World Bank adviser and Foreign Service officer who has written on the degradation of foreign language capabilities in government.

“If not clearly stated and papers shown to a person who is strictly a Spanish speaker or with limited language skill in English, the situation can be fraught with misunderstandings on both sides,” he said. “If ICE agents lack the basic language skills, they put at risk both themselves, citizens, and lawful immigrants as well.”

The post ICE Removes Spanish-Language Training Requirement for New Recruits appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

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

From her room on the third floor of the Sonesta Chicago O’Hare Airport Rosemont hotel, Valentina Galvis could see flight crews and travelers coming and going. Families enjoyed summer dining on the outdoor patio. Friends snapped selfies commemorating their stays. Children fidgeted as they waited for shuttles to deliver them to the nearby airport.

But for Galvis and her seven-month-old son, the hotel was not a vacation — it was a jail. The phone had been removed from the room, and Galvis had no way to contact the outside world. Private guards contracted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stood watch at all times. She had no idea when she and her son Naythan, who is a U.S. citizen, would ever get to leave.

Galvis and her son were detained at the Sonesta for five days in early June after they were apprehended at the Chicago Immigration Court by federal agents.

“I was sad, confused, and often terrified,” Galvis said. “I wanted to call my husband, my attorney, or anyone at all to let them know where I was.”

In screenshots taken by family members and reviewed by Injustice Watch and The Intercept, Galvis appeared on the ICE locator to be held over 700 miles away in Washington, D.C.

Galvis’s detention at the airport hotel came as federal immigration authorities have rounded up more than 100,000 immigrants nationwide in an effort to meet arrest targets set out by the Trump administration. The spike in immigration arrests has overwhelmed detention centers around the country: Immigrants have been packed into overcrowded holding cells, forced to sleep on floors, and subjected to “unlivable” conditions at a hastily built detention camp in the Florida Everglades.

Though a hotel may seem preferable to these conditions, advocates said Galvis’s detention raises concerns about what types of facilities are being turned into de facto detention centers and how many people are quietly held in Illinois.

Xanat Sobrevilla, who works with Organized Communities Against Deportations, says it’s not the first time she’s heard of an Illinois mother of an infant baby appearing to be in Washington, D.C. — which has no detention center.

“We know we can’t trust the ICE detainee locator,” she said. “People get lost in this system.” 

Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., called the false location listing “chilling” and likened the secretive hotel detention to a “kidnapping.”

Illinois and Chicago have some of the nation’s strongest laws aimed at protecting immigrants like Galvis by prohibiting state and local agencies from cooperating with ICE. But her and Naythan’s detention at the Sonesta shows the limits of the state’s efforts to block ICE detention. The federal government can still use commercial facilities like hotel rooms to hold individuals and families in its custody.

“Nothing that the states or local governments can do will stop ICE from carrying out its operations,” said Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel at Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has backed legislation that defends immigrants in the state, declined to comment.

Ramirez said private companies are violating the spirit of sanctuary legislation — and she called for a state investigation into what happened with Galvis.

“This requires the [Illinois] attorney general to conduct an investigation and to consider what legal action must be taken in the state of Illinois” against the security company that detained Galvis and Naythan as well as the hotel they were confined in, Ramirez said.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement to Injustice Watch, Sonesta, one of the world’s largest hotel chains, asserted it “has no knowledge of any illegal detentions at any hotels in the Sonesta portfolio.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment.

ICE Detention by Another Name

Galvis doesn’t remember the name of the company the civilian guards said they worked for. But she recognized a photo of JoAnna Granado, an employee for MVM Inc., a longtime ICE contractor with active contracts to transport children and families and a track record of confining unaccompanied migrant children in office buildings as well as in hotels. Granado confirmed to Injustice Watch and The Intercept that she transported Galvis and her son from the Sonesta O’Hare. MVM did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

Since fiscal year 2020, MVM has entered into contracts worth more than $1.3 billion from ICE — the vast majority of it for the transportation of immigrant children and families.

In 2020, when an attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project attempted to reach unaccompanied children being held in a McAllen hotel, he was physically turned away. ICE acknowledged MVM was at the hotel in question. The Texas Civil Rights Project and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Trump administration, and the government ultimately transferred the children out of the hotel.

More recently, attorneys filed suit against MVM last year for enforced disappearance, torture, and child abduction — among other claims — for its role during the first Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy that separated thousands of children from their parents near the border. The company’s effort to get the case dismissed failed.

Calls to the Sonesta O’Hare in June and July after Galvis’s release confirmed that MVM had rooms there.

 

ICE’s standards for temporary housing allow for the use of hotel suites to hold noncitizens “due to exigent circumstances including travel delays, lack of other bedspace, delay of receipt of travel documents, medical issues, or other unforeseen circumstances.” The standards require ICE or its contractors to explain to the detainee why they are at the hotel and how long they will be there, and to inform the detainee of the right to file a grievance, as well as “unlimited availability of unmonitored telephone calls to family, friends, and legal representatives” and various oversight agencies. Galvis said she wasn’t allowed to make any calls and was never told she was able to file a complaint. 

In its statement, Sonesta said that “all guest rooms at the property have a telephone and seating” at the O’Hare hotel. 

Two Sonesta O’Hare workers said they were familiar with MVM — one added that the company had a special rate there. (In a phone call with Injustice Watch, Sonesta O’Hare’s general manager, Sandra Wolf, said she was “unaware” of MVM or the confinement of detainees at her hotel.)

Calls to other airport Sonesta hotels suggest that MVM’s detention of immigrants may be more widespread.

When called in June, a front-desk worker at the Sonesta Atlanta Airport South in Georgia said that MVM usually has rooms at the hotel. On a call, an attendant at the Sonesta Select Los Angeles LAX El Segundo immediately recognized the company name and explained that MVM books rooms at a nearby property.

A front-desk agent at the nearby Sonesta Los Angeles Airport LAX acknowledged by phone that MVM regularly has rooms at the hotel. The hotel’s general manager Robert Routh later said he’d never heard of MVM and wasn’t familiar with the practice of holding ICE detainees in his hotel.

In a written statement, Sonesta wrote that it “does not condone illegal behavior of any kind at its hotels, and we endeavor to comply with the law and with law enforcement in the event of any suspected illegal behavior at any property within the Sonesta portfolio.” The company declined to answer questions about whether it has any contractual obligations to MVM or whether MVM received a special rate at its hotels.

Snatched From Immigration Court

Galvis knew before she went to Chicago’s immigration court on Thursday, June 5, from news and social media reports that ICE had been arresting people like her when they had shown up to court for their immigration cases.

But her husband, Camilo, a long-haul truck driver, had been granted asylum in the same court just two weeks earlier. The facts of their cases were almost identical. They had come to the U.S. together in 2022, fleeing far-right paramilitary violence in their native Colombia. Galvis had also survived a brutal assault from the paramilitary group.

So she came to the court at 55 E. Monroe Street with her infant son, Naythan, hoping to walk out without incident.

Instead, as with thousands of other immigrants in recent months, federal prosecutors asked the judge to dismiss her case, ending the asylum process. Plainclothes agents were waiting to detain her the moment she left the courtroom.

The agents shuttled Galvis and Naythan first to a nearby building, where she was fingerprinted and her phone and documents — including Naythan’s U.S. passport and birth certificate — were seized. Mother and son were then taken to an initial hotel where they spent several hours late into Thursday night. She was told that they would be flown to Texas before dawn on Friday — the sole detention center, ICE claimed, that could accommodate families. She was allowed one call to her husband; in a call that lasted a few seconds, she told him she was heading to Texas. 

The terror that Naythan might be torn away consumed her thoughts. She could endure detention and deportation alongside her son, Galvis said. Without him, she believed grief alone might kill her.

Around 2:30 a.m., two people dressed in civilian clothing arrived. They said their names were Alejandro and Lori and told Galvis in Spanish that they worked for a private company, though Galvis doesn’t remember which one. They encouraged her to ask any questions about her case to the ICE agents while she still had the chance, because the two of them wouldn’t be able to answer them.

Soon after, they brought Galvis and Naythan to the Sonesta, where they would spend the next five days cut off from the outside world.

They were held in a two-room suite and monitored at all times by one or two civilian guards, sometimes Alejandro and Lori and sometimes others. They were given fast food: Panera Bread, Subway, McDonald’s; Galvis picked out little pieces of vegetables to feed to her son, who was just beginning to eat solid foods.

On Friday, the day after she and Naythan were detained by ICE, Galvis’s attorney William G. McLean III filed a writ of habeas corpus, petitioning for her release. U.S. District Judge Franklin Valderrama soon ordered that the Trump administration “shall not remove Petitioners from the jurisdiction of the United States, nor shall they transfer petitioners to any judicial district outside the State of Illinois” before June 12. Judge Valderrama set an afternoon hearing for Tuesday, June 10, on the matter.

In emails reviewed by Injustice Watch and The Intercept, McLean pleaded with an ICE field officer for days to know his client’s whereabouts. “We do not know where they are located,” he wrote on Saturday. “I feel that it is very important to know that everything is OK,” he wrote the following Monday. ICE didn’t reveal his client’s location.

Galvis, meanwhile, had no idea about her lawyer’s efforts to release her. One day, she was told by one of the civilian guards that she would be deported with her son to Colombia. Other days, she said, she was told they’d be taken to Texas. She continued to fear that her son would be taken from her.

Finally, on the fifth day, Granado and another guard loaded Galvis and Naythan in a car but wouldn’t divulge where they were headed, Galvis said. While the airport was only minutes away, she noticed the navigation system indicated a 40-minute drive. Her heart sank, thinking they were taking her to a new location where her son could be taken from her.

Galvis kept quiet in the car, caressing Naythan and silently praying. As they approached their destination, Granado turned to her, Galvis said. 

“I think they’re going to let you go,” Galvis remembered her saying.

Galvis didn’t believe her. But moments later, she was at the Department of Homeland Security’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program office in Chicago. Agents gave her paperwork, including some of Naythan’s documents, and placed an electronic bracelet monitor on her wrist. Relief overcame her, mixed with uncertainty about what could happen next.

“I was obviously very scared of being deported, but my principal fear was being deported without my baby,” Galvis said. “I don’t think I could have survived that.” 

The dismissal in Galvis’s original immigration case is on appeal, and she now has a new asylum case with a new immigration judge in the same court. Galvis has regular online and in-person check-ins. Her next immigration court date is scheduled for January.

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A young man locked up in a notorious U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention center in Pennsylvania took his life on Tuesday by hanging himself, according to a release from the government and communications between first responders reviewed by The Intercept. His is the first known death in ICE detention facilities in the Northeast this fiscal year.  

The facility where the suicide occurred is the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, a privately run immigration jail in an isolated, rural area about 300 miles west of New York City. Since President Donald Trump began his second term, the detention center has become a major warehouse for immigrants apprehended by ICE in and around New York and Philadelphia.

The dead man was 32-year-old Chaofeng Ge, originally from China. He was living in New York City last year when he was arrested in Pennsylvania for trying to use credit card numbers that did not belong to him to buy gift cards at a CVS Pharmacy. According to an ICE statement released late Wednesday after The Intercept’s inquiry, he pleaded guilty and was handed over to ICE by local authorities.

Ge had been detained at the Moshannon detention facility, which is run by the private prison firm GEO Group, for five days before taking his own life. (GEO Group spokesperson Christopher Ferreira referred questions to ICE.)

The largest ICE detention center in the Northeast, the Moshannon Valley Processing Center opened in 2021 and, by 2023, it was drawing scores of complaints about abusive conditions. Among other complaints, detainees and civil rights advocates noted a serious lack of language services and an oppressive environment that seemed more like a prison for convicted criminals than a temporary holding center for immigrants.

“Language translation services are really lacking, so people feel isolated.”

An immigrant who was incarcerated at Moshannon Valley Processing Center in late 2023 and later released told The Intercept that he remains in touch with detainees who are still there. He said that being jailed at Moshannon is especially hard on detainees who are Chinese.

“Language translation services are really lacking, so people feel isolated,” said the immigrant, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from immigration authorities. “And after they are judged removable, ICE takes five or six months to collect enough of them to fill a deportation flight for China. The stress of the waiting is bad.” 

Ge was last seen alive at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday and was discovered an hour later hanging by a ligature in a shower room, in cardiac arrest, according to recordings on Broadcastify, an archive of communications among first responders nationwide. He was “cut down,” as first responders put it, administered CPR, and subjected to other aggressive medical interventions. Ge was pronounced dead at about 6 a.m.

“Unnecessary and Cruel”

Among ongoing problems at many ICE detention centers, the Moshannon immigration jail is especially notorious.

ICE pays the GEO Group, one of the two private prison giants in the country and a major immigration detention contractor, over $3 million a month to run the Moshannon jail. The facility has over 1,800 beds, putting it on the larger side of ICE jails.

Since the Trump administration started increasing arrests of immigrants — including many with no criminal histories — those beds have been filling up. Detainee populations nationwide have risen at least 25 percent since Trump was inaugurated, and the Moshannon jail is now the largest immigration detention center in the Northeast. The speed of its growth risks creating dangerous conditions for detainees, including crowding and lack of sufficient medical and mental health resources.

Responding to the complaints, the Department of Homeland Security started investigating in 2024. In a memo, the agency’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office acknowledged receiving 88 complaints about the facility, including a 59-page memo, prepared in part by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania that described “egregious and unconstitutional conditions.”

One of the examples presented by the ACLU in its suit on the “unnecessary and cruel” detention concerned a man who became so depressed at the Moshannon jail that he attempted to take his own life.

The Homeland Security civil rights office then wrote to ICE that it would be going onsite to do an investigation. The civil rights office subsequently drafted a findings and recommendations report and noted that it had been submitted to ICE. Then the report sank into oblivion, as the Trump administration largely shuttered the Department of Homeland Security’s oversight office earlier this year.

Fiscal years run from October to the end of September. From last October until late June of this year, 12 people nationwide had died in ICE facilities — more than the total deaths in all of the last fiscal year, with three months remaining in this cycle. It was the highest number of ICE detainee deaths since the Covid pandemic in 2020.

Among the 12 deaths were at least two suicides. Ge’s death at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center was the third.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing difficulties or those close to them, by chat or by telephone at 988.

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As day laborers and street vendors selling breakfast lined the parking lot of the MacArthur Park Home Depot in Los Angeles early Wednesday morning, a yellow Penske moving truck pulled into the lot. Its driver claimed he was looking for movers, according to organizers, security guards, and a day laborer who witnessed the event and spoke to The Intercept.   

That’s when a group of at least seven Border Patrol agents dressed in tactical gear stormed out of the back of the truck and rushed toward the day laborers and street vendors gathered outside. 

Chief Border Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino dubbed the raid “Operation Trojan Horse,” sharing video on social media from a Fox News reporter who was embedded with agents inside the moving truck.

Agents detained at least 16 people during the raid, which appears to be in direct defiance of a temporary restraining order a federal judge put in place in early July after immigrants rights groups sued the government. After a month of militarized raids and racial profiling throughout Southern California, Federal Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of California’s Central District, in response to a class-action lawsuit filed by community organizations and detained workers, delivered the Trump administration a major blow. She issued an order that prohibits federal agents from targeting individuals based on their race and ethnicity; whether they speak Spanish or English with an accent; their location such as a car wash, department store parking lot, or other worksite; or their occupation, such as landscapers or street vendors. 

The Trump administration appealed, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld the temporary restraining order. The order had brought relative calm to the region in recent weeks, slowing what had been near-daily operations to occasional isolated incidents. But the Trump administration’s Southern California campaign was not over.

Since Friday’s decision to uphold the temporary restraining order, federal agents have raided at least five other worksites in Los Angeles County, according to organizers and witnesses who spoke to The Intercept. Though it’s unclear whether federal agents had warrants for the operations, the raids did not appear to be aimed at any specific individuals and took place at worksites that had been previously targeted, all with predominantly immigrant and Latino workforces.

“Basically everything that they said not to do in the [temporary restraining order] was on a to-do checklist for today,” said a day laborer organizer at the MacArthur Park Home Depot on Wednesday who was not authorized to speak with the media. “Racial profiling, check. Going to a Home Depot, check. That was on purpose to undermine the courts and to undermine the power of the law.”

The organizer said witnesses had reported seeing agents brandishing firearms at bystanders in front of the Home Depot, including at U.S. citizens. “There’s so many violations to the Constitution, not just to migrants,” he said

Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

Penske said it was not aware its truck would be used in Wednesday’s immigration operation and said its policy “strictly prohibits the transportation of people in the cargo area of its vehicles under any circumstances.” The company said it planned to reach out to the Department of Homeland Security to “reinforce its policy to avoid improper use of its vehicles in the future.”

Since Friday’s decision upholding the temporary restraining order, federal agents raided a car wash in Lakewood, detaining two workers on Saturday; a Superior Grocers in Lynwood on Sunday; another Home Depot in Hollywood on Monday, where at least two individuals were taken; and the Magnolia Car Wash in Fountain Valley, Orange County, where agents on Tuesday detained four workers, according to CLEAN Carwash Worker Center.

Among those taken in Fountain Valley was a father originally from El Salvador who was the main financial supporter for his mother, according to a GoFundMe page set up by a relative. 

Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California, or IDEPSCA, which advocates for the rights of day laborers and immigrants, said it is still working to confirm how many people were detained at the Hollywood Home Depot on Monday. During that raid, federal agents used a horn that tamaleros use to call people over to buy tamales in an attempt to lure people to detain them, said Maegan Ortiz, executive director of IDEPSCA, in a video posted on social media.

Deceptive tactics used by immigration authorities were recently banned in the context of home raids as a part of a settlement in a separate class-action lawsuit based in Los Angeles. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of people who were lured out of their homes by ICE agents who claimed they were local law enforcement officers.

The Penske moving truck plot on Wednesday may have been beyond the scope of that settlement, but still prompted concern from organizers. 

“They had a lot of officers and did it quickly, and did not present warrants, and were targeting people indiscriminately,” said Zoie Matthew, an organizer with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which has run a community defense center at the store since the initial June 6 raid. “They were violating the TRO completely — which it seems like has been the case for the past several Home Depots they’ve hit this week.”

Even after the restraining order was granted, Bovino, who is heading Border Patrol operations across California, doubled down, promising to deliver on Trump’s pledge to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in history with a daily quota of 3,000 arrests per day.

“Different day, different illegal aliens, same objective,” Bovino wrote on his X account on Wednesday, alongside an edited video montage of agents detaining workers at a car wash. “We’re on a mission here in Los Angeles. And we’re not leaving until we accomplish our goals.”

The Fox News reporter who embedded with agents, Matt Finn, quoted DHS on his X account, saying that “MS 13 has a chokehold on this area, which is one reason they’re carrying out the highly optic immigration raids.” The government and Fox News have both evoked MS-13 to justify a previous raid in MacArthur Park in early July in which ICE agents, alongside military service members, surrounded and swarmed soccer fields and other recreation areas where a summer camp was taking place — but made zero arrests. Even so, Wednesday’s raids appeared to target only workers. The majority of people detained during immigration operations in the LA area in recent months do not have criminal records.

Video taken by residents who live in an apartment directly overlooking the MacArthur Park Home Depot parking lot showed two Border Patrol agents yanking one man toward the pavement, while other agents pulled three women from a row of tables topped with food and drinks. The workers and vendors were led toward a white van parked in front of the Penske truck. 

A day laborer told The Intercept he managed to run inside the Home Depot with other workers during the raid and hid for a half-hour. He immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala a year ago to stay with his cousin and to find work.

“I’m nervous,” said the man, who goes to the Home Depot every day to find work. “I’m nervous because I feel like they’re going to come back again,” he said. Even so, the man said he plans to continue returning to the store, the only place he knows where to find a job. 

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One by one, the media witnesses approached the microphone to describe what they saw at the execution of Byron Black. Speaking at a podium outside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, each said a version of the same thing: Black, 69, had suffered before he died.

The lethal injection had been scheduled for 10 a.m. The curtain to the death chamber opened a half hour later, revealing Black strapped down tight to the gurney and covered with a white sheet. Minutes after the massive dose of pentobarbital started to flow, “he began breathing loudly and sighing,” said a reporter from the local NPR station WPLN. Black raised his head and looked around, then said, “It’s hurting so bad.”

“I’m so sorry,” his spiritual adviser replied. 

Another reporter said she saw Black lift his head multiple times. “I can’t do this,” he said. After that, he “audibly gasped.”

Of the seven media witnesses, several had also attended Tennessee’s last execution, carried out in May. This one was different. “It was unanimous among all of us that we saw him in distress,” said Steve Cavendish, editor-in-chief of the Nashville Banner. “We heard him in distress.”

Lawyers for Black had repeatedly warned about the risks of executing their client, a man whose physical and mental health had significantly deteriorated over the years. In addition to a diagnosed intellectual disability, Black had dementia, brain damage, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure. For much of July, Supervisory Assistant Federal Public Defender Kelley Henry had fought to require the state to deactivate Black’s implanted defibrillator/pacemaker. A judge held a hearing in Davidson County Chancery Court and ultimately ruled in Black’s favor, concluding after two days of expert testimony that the lawyers had proved their case: There was a risk that the device would attempt to restart Black’s heart during his execution, sending painful shocks through his body. “This risk can be completely avoided by deactivating [the device],” the judge wrote.

But the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office appealed to the state Supreme Court, which invalidated the ruling. As the execution approached, a Nashville hospital put out a statement saying that it had never agreed to deactivate the device and emphasizing that its staff “has no role in State executions.” On the eve of the execution, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, and Gov. Bill Lee rejected a plea for clemency.

Ultimately, Black’s death appeared to have fulfilled the very fears of his attorneys and advocates.

Black spent 36 years on death row for the murder of his girlfriend, Angela Clay, and her two young daughters, Latoya and Lakeisha. The family was found shot to death in their South Nashville home in 1988. Although Black maintained he was innocent, investigators quickly seized on him. Clay’s relatives said he had been angry at Clay after she told him she planned to reconcile with her ex.

Questions of Black’s competence had been raised since before his 1989 trial and both the U.S. Supreme Court and Tennessee Supreme Court would eventually rule that people with intellectual disabilities were exempted from execution. But Black’s legal challenges were blocked at every turn. In 2022, the same office that sent Black to death row acknowledged that he was intellectually disabled and, under a new state law, filed a motion with a Nashville judge saying that he should be resentenced to life. But the judge rejected the motion, finding that because Black had been previously given a chance to prove his intellectual disability in court, he was not entitled to do so again.

Henry, who represented Black for 25 years, was emotional as she approached the mic. She filled in gaps in the reporters’ accounts, describing the moment Black was removed from his death watch cell at 10 a.m. Although her view was obstructed, “we could hear the cuffs being placed on his arms and legs,” she said. “And then we saw him being led from the cell.” Guards had to hold him up from both arms since Black could not walk unassisted. Then “they lifted him onto the gurney.”

At 10:15, the IV team entered. They found a vein on his right side relatively quickly, although “there was a lot of blood,” she said. But on the left side, they struggled, eventually bringing out medical equipment to assist in the process.

In an email after the execution, Ohio surgeon Jonathan Groner, a critic of lethal injection and author of a forthcoming book “The Hippocratic Paradox: How the Healing Profession Kept the Death Penalty Alive Over the Past Two Centuries,” said he suspected the execution “was possibly botched.” Watching the press conference, he found numerous red flags. “Pentobarbital should cause rapid unconsciousness,” he said. “It sounds like this did not occur.”

At the podium, Henry did not mince words. “My client was tortured today,” she said. The pentobarbital itself is painful, she said, and autopsies have shown that people executed using the drug consistently show evidence of pulmonary edema, in which lungs become filled with fluid, causing a sensation akin to drowning. Whether the pentobarbital had not worked as intended or the implanted heart device repeatedly shocked Black as predicted was not clear. The lawyers would know more after an autopsy and after extracting data from the heart device. “But this is a classic case of a person who was put through extreme pain through a process of lethal injection. And it’s what we’ve been saying in court for years,” said Henry. She read a statement from the podium, decrying the execution as an act of “unbridled bloodlust and cowardice.”

“Today, the State of Tennessee killed a gentle, kind, fragile, intellectually disabled man in violation of the laws of our country simply because they could,” Henry said. “No one in a position of power, certainly not the courts, was willing to stop them. And if you think that what happened is just about one man, you are wrong. We are witnessing the erosion of the rule of law and every principle of human decency on which this country was founded. Today, it is Byron. Tomorrow, it will be someone you care about.”

Black’s execution was the ninth carried out in Tennessee since the state resumed executions in 2018. On previous occasions, demonstrators had gathered in a field on prison grounds while the executions were carried out. But following a pause in executions, the state had toughened its security protocols. On Tuesday morning, additional checkpoints were in place; a K-9 handler circled vehicles with his German shepherd, and people were patted down before being allowed into the fenced-in area. Phones were now forbidden. Even credentialed reporters had been barred from bringing pens into the area.

Activists had demonstrated against the planned executions over the previous days. On Sunday, a group marched from Riverbend to the state Capitol, joined by one of Black’s sisters as well as his adult son, Samson Childs. The next morning, Childs visited the governor’s office alongside local death row advocates and activists with the abolitionist group Death Penalty Action. They delivered petitions along with a letter to Lee inviting him to pray with the men on death row, an invitation they have extended before every execution. They have yet to receive a response.

Introduced as Black’s son, Childs shook hands with an aide to the governor. “We’re hoping and praying for a callused heart to be uncalloused,” Childs told him. The aide said he would deliver the message. Lee denied clemency later that day.

At the vigil during the execution, participants stood in a circle and prayed for everyone connected to the case and to the execution. “We pray for Angela Clay and her daughters Latoya and Lakeisha Clay, who died violent deaths,” they said. After the execution, members of Clay’s family stood under the media tent, where two large photographs of Clay and her daughters had been set up behind the podium. A victims liaison from the Tennessee Department of Correction delivered statements on their behalf.

“I am thankful and grateful to see this day, Clay’s sister Linette Bell said. Black’s family “is going through the same thing now that we went through 37 years ago. I can’t say I’m sorry because we never got an apology. He never apologized and he never admitted it.”

Shortly after noon, Carolyn Weaver, who had participated in the Sunday march from Riverbend to the Capitol, got a text message from her loved one Gary Sutton, one of Black’s most devoted neighbors and caretakers on death row. “Well I just seen the van go out with Byron’s body,” he wrote. Before the execution that morning, a prison staffer had delivered a message from Black. “He said to tell me that he loved me because I was his brother,” Sutton wrote to Weaver. “He said to tell you that he seen you on TV walking for him.”

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On the Sunday before Byron Black was moved from his death row cell to the isolation pod where he would await execution, Carolyn Weaver entered Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, where she regularly visits a different man on death row. Weekend visitation usually takes place in a room limited to four families at a time, and she was used to seeing Black’s younger sister Freda. But that morning, the guards said, “We’re going to do it a little different today.” More of Black’s relatives were coming, and they would have their own room. It was one of the family’s last opportunities to visit Black. He was scheduled to die two weeks later, on August 5.

Black was born and raised in Nashville, less than 20 minutes from the prison. In 1988, when he was 33 years old, he was arrested for murdering his girlfriend and her two young daughters. Though he maintained his innocence, Black was swiftly convicted and sentenced to die. By the time Weaver met him at Riverbend, he had been on death row for over 30 years.

Weaver started visiting the prison in 2021 after reconnecting with an old boyfriend, Gary Wayne Sutton, who has been on death row since 1996. Almost immediately, she learned about Black. “I’ve known about Byron since I started talking to Gary,” she said. “He would call me, and he’d say, ‘I just fixed Byron something for dinner.’ Or he would say, ‘I gotta go get Byron something to eat.’ He was always taking care of Byron.”

Among his neighbors, Black was known as someone who needed help with basic tasks, including bathing and getting dressed. Weaver remembers being taken aback when she first saw him at visitation. “When he first came out, he didn’t have a wheelchair,” she recalled. “They had to put him in one of those office roller chairs and roll him down to visitation. And another inmate did that.”

It was obvious to her that Black’s disabilities were not just physical. “Gary will tell you he’s like a kid,” Weaver said. “He doesn’t even understand how to put a sandwich together.” Interacting with Black, she learned what he meant. “I feel like when I do talk to him, I am talking to a child.” While she found it hard to imagine he could have committed such a heinous crime in his younger days, it was clear to Weaver that he did not pose a threat to anyone now.

Weaver didn’t want to interrupt Black’s visit with his relatives. But she briefly got permission to approach their room to say goodbye. “He feels like a family member that we’re gonna lose,” she said. She hugged him and “told him how much we loved him and that we’re still praying that this is not gonna happen.” Two days later, on July 22, Black was taken away. That night, Weaver got a call from Sutton. “He goes, ‘It doesn’t seem right. He’s not here. And I’m not fixing his supper.’”

A Relic Of Another Age

Black is 69 years old and in increasingly poor health. Along with psychological exams that have repeatedly found him to have an intellectual disability, medical records show brain damage, dementia, diabetes, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure. Death row advocate Dan Mann echoes what Weaver described, saying that Black’s neighbors treat him with care. “They protect him,” he said. Those who know Black say he is a “people-pleaser”: “He’ll tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear, whether or not that thing is grounded in reality.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has held for more than 20 years that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In its landmark 2002 decision Atkins v. Virginia, the court ruled that “because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses,” people with intellectual disabilities “do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct. Moreover, their impairments can jeopardize the reliability and fairness of capital proceedings.”

But the protections of Atkins have been far from a guarantee. The justices left it to individual states to decide how to apply the ruling, leaving lower courts free to make life and death decisions based on arbitrary, often unscientific standards. This problem has been compounded by the onerous procedural barriers that routinely prevent people on death row from getting back into court. While our understandings of intellectual disability have continued to evolve in the past few decades, death sentences rooted in flawed and discriminatory ideas have remained intact. Although 144 people have seen their death sentences vacated under Atkins, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, dozens have been executed in spite of it.

Lawyers for Black have spent decades fighting to prove his intellectual disability in court. Just a few years ago, they had good reason to believe his life might be spared. Propelled by the high-profile case of Pervis Payne — whose death sentence was eventually reduced to life amid concerns about his intellectual disability and alleged innocence — Tennessee lawmakers passed legislation in 2021 to amend existing law prohibiting the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. The provision offered access to a hearing before a trial court to decide, under prevailing legal standards, whether a person should be barred from execution due to an intellectual disability.

“Mr. Black finds himself in a constitutional Catch-22.”

In 2022, the Davidson County district attorney general filed a motion acknowledging that Black “does, in fact, meet the criteria for a diagnosis of intellectual disability,” and arguing that his death sentence should be reduced to life. But a Nashville judge — the same judge who presided over Black’s 1989 trial — rejected the motion on procedural grounds, concluding that because he’d already received a hearing on the matter years earlier, he was not entitled to one now. Black is now on the verge of being executed on a technicality, his advocates argue. “Mr. Black finds himself in a constitutional Catch-22,” Kelley Henry, chief of the Capital Habeas Unit in Nashville, wrote in a clemency petition to the governor. “If he had simply delayed in filing his claim, without a doubt, he would obtain relief under the 2021 statute.”

“If the execution is allowed to move forward, Byron Black would be the first intellectually disabled person executed by Tennessee in the modern era of the death penalty,” Henry wrote. She also warned that his execution will be a “grotesque spectacle.” Not only will prison staff “have to pick him out of his bed to place him on the gurney,” the heart defibrillator/pacemaker device implanted in his chest to regulate cardiac function will “cause his heart to restart multiple times during the execution, causing him extreme pain and distress.”

To his advocates and attorneys, executing Black would be gratuitous cruelty. “Every day his brain and body continue to deteriorate at a rapid rate,” Henry wrote. “He is absolutely no threat to anyone. The fact that the courts have slammed their doors shut to his righteous intellectual disability claim is not only unconstitutional, it is inhumane.”

Nevertheless, absent intervention from the governor or U.S. Supreme Court, Black will die in the execution chamber shortly after 10 a.m. on Tuesday. He will be the second man executed in Tennessee this year. In May, the state killed the oldest man on death row, 75-year-old Oscar Smith, who was sentenced to die in Nashville in 1990.

Like Smith’s case, Black’s conviction and death sentence are, in many ways, a relic of another age. Prosecutors at the time were seeking death sentences at an unprecedented rate; in Nashville, Black’s 1989 trial made headlines for being the fifth death penalty prosecution in six months. Although Davidson County District Attorney General Torry Johnson cited a “rash” of terrible crimes at the time, the trend was largely driven by the tough-on-crime politics of the era.

Johnson, who retired in 2014 after 27 years as Nashville’s top prosecutor, has supported death penalty reforms since leaving office. But he did not wish to comment on the litigation in Black’s case. “While I did approve seeking of the death penalty against Byron Black, I did not handle the case personally and was not involved in the trial,” he wrote in an email. At the time, his office was “seeking to focus on the worst of the worst,” he added, and “most of those cases involved multiple victims and often child victims like in the case of Mr. Black.”

The crime that sent Black to death row was unquestionably heinous.

Angela Clay and her two young daughters were found dead in their home on Monday, March 28, 1988. The 29-year-old single mom lived with her children in a modest two-story apartment building in South Nashville. Nine-year-old Latoya was found with her mother in one bedroom, while her six-year-old sister Lakeisha was found in a separate bedroom. All three had been shot to death.

Black became an immediate suspect. That weekend, he had been out on furlough from the Metropolitan Workhouse, where he had been sentenced to work-release for shooting Clay’s estranged ex-husband. On Sunday, he had picked Clay up from her job at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, then picked up her children at her mother’s home. Relatives who spoke to Clay later that night said she had told Black she planned to return to her husband.

Although there was significant circumstantial evidence against Black, the physical evidence was questionable. The key forensic evidence was provided by a firearm analyst who examined a bullet removed from the shoulder of Clay’s estranged husband and concluded that it had been fired by the same gun used to kill Clay and her daughters. (Although such claims remain ubiquitous among firearm analysts who testify in criminal trials, such forensic analysis is increasingly considered unscientific and unreliable.) Pivotal testimony would also come from now-infamous Davidson County medical examiner Charles Harlan, whose botched autopsies and record of misconduct have been linked to wrongful convictions.

Questions about Black’s competency were raised almost immediately. At a pretrial hearing, experts were divided about his mental functioning, with Davidson County Circuit Court Judge Walter Kurtz ordering additional psychological evaluations. But Assistant District Attorney Cheryl Blackburn successfully argued that Black “doesn’t have to be very sophisticated” to stand trial for capital murder. He may not be “a very bright guy,” she conceded, but “he is not psychotic and he is not delusional.”

But Black’s trial attorney, Ross Alderman, would later say in a sworn declaration that “Byron couldn’t understand how anything in the courtroom affected him, and he didn’t understand the implications of the witnesses’ testimony.” After the jury found him guilty, he leaned toward his attorney and asked, “Do I get to testify now?”

Today, a death penalty trial involves heavy preparation for the sentencing phase. One of the signatures of modern capital defense is a mitigation investigation, in which a legal team compiles deep research on a defendant’s background, including any evidence of poverty, abuse, mental illness, and generational trauma, to uncover information that may be used to persuade jurors to spare a defendant’s life. Black, who descended from enslaved people in Tennessee, attended segregated schools and grew up in an environment shaped by systemic racism. “As a toddler, he was exposed to toxic lead,” according to the clemency petition. There were also indications that his mother drank alcohol while she was pregnant with Black.

But, according to his trial lawyers, there was little time to probe such mitigating evidence. “Our ability to investigate the case was a function of the fast-track that we were on,” Alderman said in his declaration. “Ultimately, the case was tried about a year from the homicide in question, and approximately seven months after arraignment.”

Black’s sentencing hearing took place in just one day. A defense psychologist described Black as having “delusions of grandeur” as one reporter put it. Although his IQ was “not quite up into the normal range,” the psychologist said, it was clear he knew the difference between right and wrong. Prosecutors urged jurors to send him to the electric chair. “If you don’t give him the death penalty for what he did to those two little girls,” one argued, “then I submit that you’re rewarding him.” Jurors at first remained split about Black’s sentence; after the first five hours of deliberations, the foreman sent a note to the judge asking for more information. Jurors wanted to know how much time Black would spend in prison if they did not sentence him to die. But under Tennessee law at the time, the judge could not answer such questions. Kurtz instructed them to keep deliberating. The jury ultimately sentenced Black to death.

A National Consensus

A few months after Black was sent to death row, the U.S Supreme Court handed down a ruling in a Texas case, Penry v. Lynaugh, which would raise controversy over the death penalty and people with intellectual disabilities. Although the justices held that such evidence could be used to argue against a death sentence at trial, it should not forbid a death sentence. “While a national consensus against execution of the mentally retarded may someday emerge reflecting the ‘evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,’” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote using the parlance of the time, “there is insufficient evidence of such a consensus today.”

It was true that only one state at the time had passed a bill to prevent the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. In Georgia, the case of Jerome Bowden had sparked a firestorm of controversy. Bowden, a Black man convicted of killing a 55-year-old white woman, was given a last-minute IQ test before his 1986 execution. He scored a 65, which was considered good enough. “I would like to thank the people of this institution for taking such good care of me as they have,” he said, before he was killed in the electric chair.

Bowden’s execution, followed by the Supreme Court ruling in Penry, became a call to action for death penalty opponents. Activists urged legislators across death penalty states to make exemptions for people with intellectual disabilities. Even as executions and new death sentences ramped up throughout the 1990s, lawmakers began passing legislation to forbid such executions.

One of the first to do so was Tennessee, in 1990. “I favor the death penalty,” one Republican said during the legislative debate. “But in my view it is just not proper in a civilized society for the state to execute children and the [intellectually disabled].” The law ultimately laid out three factors to determine intellectual disability: an IQ of 70 or below, “deficits in adaptive behavior,” and evidence that the intellectual disability manifested before the age of 18.

The law did not help Black, since it was not made retroactive. But it helped turn the tide of public opinion. By the time Atkins was decided in 2002, 18 states had passed laws banning the execution of people with intellectual disabilities, a fact that led O’Connor to revisit her previous position and side with the majority. “In the light of the dramatic shift in the state legislative landscape that has occurred in the past 13 years, it is fair to say that a national consensus has developed,” the justice wrote.

By then, the Tennessee Supreme Court had already ruled in 2001 that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the state and federal constitutions. Months after Atkins, Black filed a new challenge to his case based on both rulings. At a 2004 evidentiary hearing before Black’s trial judge, multiple experts testified that he was clearly intellectually disabled, while also explaining that it is not uncommon for people to try to hide signs of his disability. One expert report described Black as “exceptionally polite and friendly” during his evaluation, as well as “concerned that he might have come across as less intelligent than he really is.”

But state experts testified that there was little evidence that Black’s intellectual disability had manifested before age 18. Nor had he shown sufficient deficits in adaptive behavior. He had played high school football, found a job as a courier, gotten married, and fathered a child. Although he had never lived independently of his family, including during his five-year marriage, this did not mean he was incapable of doing so.

Kurtz ruled against Black. But the decision would not age well. The notion that people with intellectual disabilities do not get married or hold jobs is rooted in old stereotypes rather than science. Over the years, additional relatives and family friends told Black’s lawyers that, while they had not previously thought of Black as having an intellectual disability, he had been “different” and dependent on his family. “Looking back on it … everyone sort of recognized and compensated for Byron’s inabilities,” one childhood friend wrote in a sworn declaration. “Byron needed his family to prop him up.”

In 2022, one of the state’s key experts, who had not examined Black before testifying for the state, told Black’s legal team that she had changed her mind. Under current diagnostic standards and Tennessee law, she wrote in a new report, Black “does meet the criteria for the diagnosis of intellectual disability.”

The report would help form the basis of a new motion to Kurtz, from the same office that sent him to death row in 1989. Davidson County District Attorney General Glenn Funk wrote, “the State stipulates that [Black] would be found intellectually disabled were a hearing to be conducted.” He had even met with Clay’s family to explain the change in the law. “These family members still want Mr. Black executed,” he wrote. “However, under current law and the medical reports before the Court, the State concedes that the [Black’s] capital sentence should be commuted to one of life in prison.”

But Kurtz rejected the motion, concluding that, because Black had already had a chance to present the evidence of his intellectual disability, he was barred from presenting it again. Today, Henry, the Capital Habeas Unit chief, argues, “every single expert who has actually evaluated Mr. Black has concluded that he is intellectually disabled.” But Tennessee is prepared to execute him anyway.

This past Saturday, Weaver drove to Nashville from her home in East Tennessee for her usual weekend visit. On Sunday morning, Black was moved to his death watch cell, which is adjacent to the execution chamber. At Riverbend, Weaver spotted prison guards carrying Black’s shower chair and his meal tray. Among advocates, there was mounting concern that Black did not fully comprehend what was about to happen to him. There was growing fear about what he might experience in the execution chamber. Weaver worried about Black’s neighbors, who have seen eight men taken to die since 2018.

Most of all, she felt anguish for Black’s family, especially his sisters, who have stayed devoted to him for 36 years. “This is their baby brother,” she said. “And that’s what a lot of people forget. Yes, we feel bad for the victims. But their family are victims as well. … They’re hurting, too.”

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