Police gang databases are known to be faulty. The secret registries allow state and local cops to feed civilians’ personal information into massive, barely regulated lists based on speculative criteria — like their personal contacts, clothing, and tattoos — even if they haven’t committed a crime. The databases aren’t subject to judicial review, and they don’t require police to notify the people they peg as gang members.

They’re an ideal tool for officials seeking to imply criminality without due process. And many are directly accessible to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

An investigation by The Intercept found that at least eight states and large municipalities funnel their gang database entries to ICE — which can then use the information to target people for arrest, deportation, or rendition to so-called “third countries.” Some of the country’s largest and most immigrant-dense states, like Texas, New York, Illinois, and Virginia, route the information to ICE through varied paths that include a decades-old police clearinghouse and a network of post-9/11 intelligence-sharing hubs.

Both federal immigration authorities and local police intelligence units operate largely in secret, and the full extent of the gang database-sharing between them is unknown. What is known, however, is that the lists are riddled with mistakes: Available research, reporting, and audits have revealed that many contain widespread errors and encourage racial profiling.

The flawed systems could help ICE expand its dragnet as it seeks to carry out President Donald Trump’s promised “mass deportation” campaign. The administration has cited common tattoos and other spurious evidence to create its own lists of supposed gang members, invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison, also known as CECOT. Gang databases The Intercept identified as getting shared with ICE contain hundreds of thousands of other entries, including some targeted at Central American communities that have landed in the administration’s crosshairs. That information can torpedo asylum and other immigration applications and render those seeking legal status deportable.

“They’re going after the asylum system on every front they can,” said Andrew Case, supervising counsel for criminal justice issues at the nonprofit LatinoJustice. “Using gang affiliation as a potential weapon in that fight is very scary.”

Information supplied by local gang databases has already driven at least one case that became a national flashpoint: To justify sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT in March, federal officials used a disputed report that a disgraced Maryland cop submitted to a defunct registry to label him as a member of a transnational gang. The report cited the word of an unnamed informant, Abrego’s hoodie, and a Chicago Bulls cap — items “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture,” it said.

Related

The Evidence Linking Kilmar Abrego Garcia to MS-13: A Chicago Bulls Hat and a Hoodie

The case echoed patterns from Trump’s first term, when ICE leaned on similar information from local cops — evidence as flimsy as doodles in a student’s notebook — to label immigrants as gang members eligible for deportation. As Trump’s second administration shifts its immigration crackdown into overdrive, ICE is signaling with cases like Abrego’s that it’s eager to continue fueling it with local police intelligence.

Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, argued that this kind of information-sharing boosts ICE’s ability to target people without due process.

“This opens the door to an incredible amount of abuse,” she said. “This is our worst fear.”

In February, ICE arrested Francisco Garcia Casique, a barber from Venezuela living in Texas. The agency alleged that he was a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang at the center of the latest anti-immigrant panic, and sent him to CECOT.

Law enforcement intelligence on Garcia Casique was full of errors: A gang database entry contained the wrong mugshot and appears to have confused him with a man whom Dallas police interviewed about a Mexican gang, USA Today reported. Garcia Casique’s family insists he was never in a gang.

It’s unclear exactly what role the faulty gang database entry played in Garcia Casique’s rendition, which federal officials insist wasn’t a mistake. But ICE agents had direct access to it — plus tens of thousands of other entries from the same database — The Intercept has found.

Under a Texas statute Trump ally Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in 2017, any county with a population over 100,000 or municipality over 50,000 must maintain or contribute to a local or regional gang database. More than 40 Texas counties and dozens more cities and towns meet that bar. State authorities compile the disparate gang intelligence in a central registry known as TxGANG, which contained more than 71,000 alleged gang members as of 2022.

Texas then uploads the entries to the “Gang File” in an FBI-run clearinghouse known as the National Crime Information Center, state authorities confirmed to The Intercept. Created in the 1960s, the NCIC is one of the most commonly used law enforcement datasets in the country, with local, state, and federal police querying its dozens of files millions of times a day. (The FBI did not answer The Intercept’s questions.)

ICE can access the NCIC, including the Gang File, in several ways — most directly through its Investigative Case Management system, Department of Homeland Security documents show. The Obama administration hired Palantir, the data-mining company co-founded by billionaire former Trump adviser Peter Thiel, to build the proprietary portal, which makes countless records and databases immediately available to ICE agents. Palantir is currently expanding the tool, having signed a $96 million contract during the Biden administration to upgrade it.

TxGANG isn’t the only gang database ICE can access through its Palantir-built system. The Intercept trawled the open web for law enforcement directives, police training materials, and state and local statutes that mention adding gang database entries to the NCIC. Those The Intercept identified likely represent a small subset of the jurisdictions that upload to the ICE-accessible clearinghouse.

New York Focus first reported the NCIC pipeline-to-immigration agents when it uncovered a 20-year-old gang database operated by the New York State Police. Any law enforcement entity in the Empire State can submit names to the statewide gang database, which state troopers then consider for submission to the NCIC. The New York state gang database contains more than 5,100 entries and has never been audited.

Related

CBP Agents Can Have Gang Tattoos — as Long as They Cover Them Up

The Wisconsin Department of Justice, which did not respond to requests for comment, has instructed its intelligence bureau on how to add names to the NCIC Gang File as recently as 2023, The Intercept found. Virginia has enshrined its gang database-sharing in commonwealth law, which explicitly requires NCIC uploading. In April, Virginia authorities helped ICE arrest 132 people who law enforcement officials claimed were part of transnational gangs.

The Illinois State Police, too, have shared their gang database to the FBI-run dataset. They also share it directly with the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s umbrella agency, through an in-house information-sharing system, a local PBS affiliate uncovered last month.

The Illinois State Police’s gang database contained over 90,000 entries as of 2018. The data-sharing with Homeland Security flew under the radar for 17 years and likely violates Illinois’s 2017 sanctuary state law.

“Even in the jurisdictions that are not inclined to work with federal immigration authorities, the information they’re collecting could end up in these federal databases,” said Gupta.

Aside from the National Crime Information Center, there are other conduits for local police to enable the Trump administration’s gang crusade.

Some departments have proactively shared their gang information directly with ICE. As with the case of the Illinois State Police’s gang database, federal agents had access to the Chicago Police Department’s gang registry through a special data-sharing system. From 2009 to 2018, immigration authorities searched the database at least 32,000 times, a city audit later found. In one instance, the city admitted it mistakenly added a man to the database after ICE used it to arrest him.

The Chicago gang database was full of other errors, like entries whose listed dates of birth made them over 100 years old. The inaccuracies and immigration-related revelations, among other issues, prompted the city to shut down the database in 2023.

Other departments allow partner agencies to share their gang databases with immigration authorities. In 2016, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used the statewide CalGang database — itself shown to contain widespread errors — to help ICE deport undocumented people. The following year, California enacted laws that prohibited using CalGang for immigration enforcement. Yet the California Department of Justice told The Intercept that it still allows the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office to share the database, which contained nearly 14,000 entries as of last year, with the Department of Homeland Security.

“Each user must document their need to know/right to know prior to logging into CalGang,” and that documentation is “subject to regular audit,” a California Department of Justice spokesperson said.

Local police also share gang information with the feds through a series of regional hubs known as fusion centers. Created during the post-9/11 domestic surveillance boom, fusion centers were meant to facilitate intelligence-sharing — particularly about purported terrorism — between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Their scope quickly expanded, and they’ve played a key role in the growth of both immigration- and gang-related policing and surveillance.

The Boston Police Department told The Intercept that agencies within the Department of Homeland Security seek access to its gang database by filing a “request for information” through the fusion center known as the Boston Regional Intelligence Center. In 2016, ICE detained a teenager after receiving records from the Boston gang database, which used a report about a tussle at his high school to label him as a gang member. Boston later passed a law barring law enforcement officials from sharing personal information with immigration enforcement agents, but it contains loopholes for criminal investigations.

In the two decades since their creation, fusion center staff have proactively sought to increase the upward flow of local gang intelligence — including by leveraging federal funds, as in the case between the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, which works directly with the Department of Homeland Security. An email from 2013, uncovered as part of a trove of hacked documents, shows that an employee at the Maryland fusion center threatened to withhold some federal funding if the D.C. police didn’t regularly share its gang database.

“I wanted to prepare you that [sic] your agency’s decision … to NOT connect … may indeed effect [sic] next years [sic] funding for your contractual analysts,” a fusion center official wrote. “So keep that in mind…………..”

Four years later, ICE detained a high schooler after receiving a D.C. police gang database entry. The entry said that he “self-admitted” to being in a gang, an Intercept investigation later reported — a charge his lawyer denied.

For jurisdictions that don’t automatically comply, the Trump administration is pushing to entice them into cooperating with ICE. The budget bill Trump signed into law on the Fourth of July earmarks some $14 billion for state and local ICE collaboration, as well as billions more for local police. Official police partnerships with ICE had already skyrocketed this year; more are sure to follow.

Revelations about gang database-sharing show how decades of expanding police surveillance and speculative gang policing have teed up the Trump administration’s crackdowns, said Gupta of the American Immigration Council.

“The core problem is one that extends far beyond the Trump administration,” she said. “You let the due process bar drop that far for so long, it makes it very easy for Trump.”

The post State Cops Quietly Tag Thousands as Gang Members — and Feed Their Names to ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Two years before the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Richard Glossip’s conviction and death sentence, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond sent an email to Glossip’s attorney, agreeing to a plan for Glossip’s release should a court rule in his favor.

“Once the conviction is vacated,” Glossip’s attorney Don Knight wrote to Drummond on April 1, 2023, the state would bring a new charge against his client: “a single count of being an Accessory After the Fact.” Glossip “will plead guilty to this charge” and be given credit for time served. Under the terms, Glossip would be entitled to immediate release.

“We are in agreement,” Drummond replied.

Instead of following through with the agreement, Drummond, a Republican who is currently running for governor, reversed course and announced in June that Oklahoma would again prosecute Glossip for first degree murder in the 1997 death of motel owner Barry Van Treese.

The email exchange was filed as part of an unusual motion by Glossip’s defense team in Oklahoma County District Court on Wednesday. The filing asks the court to enforce the previous agreement, which the lawyers describe as a binding contract.

“As Mr. Glossip remains in custody despite the Attorney General’s agreement that he should have been released at least two years ago, this matter is of the utmost importance and needs to be heard before any other matters are determined,” Glossip’s lawyers wrote.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for murdering 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 had originally been charged as an accessory after-the-fact for initially failing to give police information about the murder. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, Sneed had woken him up around 4 a.m. by knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel’s office. Standing outside with a black eye, Sneed told Glossip he had chased off some drunks who had broken a window in one of the motel rooms. According to Glossip, he asked Sneed about his black eye, and Sneed flippantly replied, “I killed Barry.” It wasn’t until the next morning, when no one could find Van Treese, that Glossip realized Sneed might have been serious. Still, Glossip didn’t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested waiting until they figured out what was going on.

The 2023 email exchange between Drummond and Knight is extraordinary not only because of its content, but also because of its timing. The agreement came less than a week before Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn Glossip’s conviction.

Drummond had assumed office that January and almost immediately appointed a special investigator to review Glossip’s case. The review found numerous flaws – including that prosecutors had hidden key evidence from Glossip’s defense and that Sneed had lied on the stand – and prompted Drummond’s filing with the OCCA.

The email exchange reveals that Drummond and Knight had discussed Drummond’s plan and strongly suggests that the attorneys believed the OCCA would grant Drummond’s motion. Knight’s email lays out a step-by-step process for what would happen next. Once the conviction was overturned and sent back to Oklahoma County, Drummond would retain control over the case rather than returning it to the local district attorney; he would effectuate the plea deal.

“The parties agree that Mr. Glossip will receive a sentence of 45 years,” Knight wrote, noting that this was the maximum sentence for accessory after the fact at the time of the murder. “The State agrees to give Mr. Glossip credit for all time he has served” since 1997. He would also get credit for good behavior. “The parties stipulate and agree that, with this credit being applied, Mr. Glossip is eligible for immediate release as his sentence was completed in 2016.” In exchange, Glossip would agree not to sue the state for anything related to his “arrest and incarceration.”

Knight told Drummond that he would send a document memorializing the full terms of their deal. “If I have misstated anything, or left anything out of this agreement, please let me know so I can be sure to include it,” Knight wrote. Drummond offered no notes, simply replying that the two were in agreement.

But in a shocking move, the OCCA rejected Drummond’s motion, setting Glossip up for yet another execution date. Drummond then took the unprecedented step of urging the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board to intervene, writing in a letter that, while he believed that Glossip is guilty of being an accessory, the record “does not support that he is guilty of first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt.” Testifying at Glossip’s clemency hearing in April 2023, Drummond said, “I’m not aware of any time in our history that an attorney general has appeared before this board and argued for clemency. I’m also not aware of any time in the history of Oklahoma when justice would require it.”

Despite Drummond’s pleas, the Board rejected Glossip’s clemency bid. With Glossip’s execution just weeks away, Drummond joined the defense attorneys in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. The court halted Glossip’s execution and agreed to review his conviction. In February, the justices ruled in Glossip’s favor, agreeing that prosecutorial misconduct had tainted the case and that Sneed was not credible.

In the wake of the ruling, Drummond made the rounds, boasting about his success before the high court. Asked at a press conference how he might resolve the case, Drummond said, “everything is on the table; a jury trial, all the way down,” but noted it “would be difficult” to retry Glossip after so many years.

Given his public posture, there was every reason to expect that once the case returned to Oklahoma County, Drummond would seek to resolve it – even without a previous agreement. But instead, he did an about-face, announcing in June that the state would seek another first-degree murder conviction for Glossip. At a bond hearing on June 17, the state presented no new evidence to support such a prosecution.

Related

Oklahoma Seeks New Conviction of Richard Glossip Using Old Evidence

In the new motion, Glossip’s attorneys emphasize the lack of new evidence, saying that nothing has changed about the state’s case that would invalidate the 2023 agreement between Drummond and Knight. The conditions necessary to fulfill the contract have been met, the lawyers note – Glossip’s conviction was overturned and sent back to Oklahoma County. Still, they wrote, “General Drummond has refused to complete his end of the bargain.”

Drummond’s office did not have an immediate response to The Intercept’s request for comment.

This isn’t the first time Drummond has been accused in court filings of reneging on an agreement to resolve a criminal case. On June 30, Stephen Jones, a powerhouse and politically connected Oklahoma attorney, filed a scathing motion in an unrelated case, complaining that Drummond had weaseled out on a deal to defer prosecution of his client, a former judge suffering from dementia. According to Jones, on two separate occasions Drummond told him they had a deal, then ceased communications and instead assigned an underling to move forward with the case in violation of their agreement.

Jones, who describes himself as a “strong supporter of the Attorney General’s political ambitions,” accuses Drummond of playing politics and asks the court to enforce their agreement. Ultimately, Jones contends that whatever happens, forcing his client to go to trial would end up being a public embarrassment for Drummond and his office. “No jury … is going to convict a terminally ill man with dementia in the middle to final stages of his disease and it will not be well-taken by the jury or the public if the Defendant is actually put to trial,” Jones wrote.

Glossip’s lawyers have long argued that the same outcome is inevitable if Drummond persists in retrying Glossip for first-degree murder. Drummond has conceded that the state destroyed key evidence in the case and that Sneed’s credibility has been unalterably damaged.

It’s hard to predict how District Judge Heather Coyle will rule on the motion. But the 2023 emails are explosive on their own – and could have a decisive impact on the case regardless of her decision. Under the terms of the deal, Glossip would have been eligible for immediate release. It’s hard to imagine how Drummond’s office can proceed with a murder trial after agreeing that Glossip should already be free.

“General Drummond has publicly stated that ‘a handshake is my word, and my word is my bond,’” Glossip’s lawyers wrote in their motion. “On more than just a handshake—in fact by written acceptance—General Drummond promised to resolve this case.”

The post Emails Reveal Oklahoma Attorney General Agreed to Release Richard Glossip appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Two years before the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Richard Glossip’s conviction and death sentence, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond sent an email to Glossip’s attorney, agreeing to a plan for Glossip’s release should a court rule in his favor.

“Once the conviction is vacated,” Glossip’s attorney Don Knight wrote to Drummond on April 1, 2023, the state would bring a new charge against his client: “a single count of being an Accessory After the Fact.” Glossip “will plead guilty to this charge” and be given credit for time served. Under the terms, Glossip would be entitled to immediate release.

“We are in agreement,” Drummond replied.

Instead of following through with the agreement, Drummond, a Republican who is currently running for governor, reversed course and announced in June that Oklahoma would again prosecute Glossip for first degree murder in the 1997 death of motel owner Barry Van Treese.

The email exchange was filed as part of an unusual motion by Glossip’s defense team in Oklahoma County District Court on Wednesday. The filing asks the court to enforce the previous agreement, which the lawyers describe as a binding contract.

“As Mr. Glossip remains in custody despite the Attorney General’s agreement that he should have been released at least two years ago, this matter is of the utmost importance and needs to be heard before any other matters are determined,” Glossip’s lawyers wrote.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for murdering 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 had originally been charged as an accessory after the fact for initially failing to give police information about the murder. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, Sneed had woken him up around 4 a.m. by knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel’s office. Standing outside with a black eye, Sneed told Glossip he had chased off some drunks who had broken a window in one of the motel rooms. According to Glossip, he asked Sneed about his black eye, and Sneed flippantly replied, “I killed Barry.” It wasn’t until the next morning, when no one could find Van Treese, that Glossip realized Sneed might have been serious. Still, Glossip didn’t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested waiting until they figured out what was going on.

The 2023 email exchange between Drummond and Knight is extraordinary not only because of its content, but also because of its timing. The agreement came less than a week before Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, or OCCA, to overturn Glossip’s conviction.

Drummond had assumed office that January and almost immediately appointed a special investigator to review Glossip’s case. The review found numerous flaws — including that prosecutors had hidden key evidence from Glossip’s defense and that Sneed had lied on the stand — and prompted Drummond’s filing with the OCCA.

The email exchange reveals that Drummond and Knight had discussed Drummond’s plan and strongly suggests that the attorneys believed the OCCA would grant Drummond’s motion. Knight’s email lays out a step-by-step process for what would happen next. Once the conviction was overturned and sent back to Oklahoma County, Drummond would retain control over the case rather than returning it to the local district attorney; he would effectuate the plea deal.

“The parties agree that Mr. Glossip will receive a sentence of 45 years,” Knight wrote, noting that this was the maximum sentence for accessory after the fact at the time of the murder. “The State agrees to give Mr. Glossip credit for all time he has served” since 1997. He would also get credit for good behavior. “The parties stipulate and agree that, with this credit being applied, Mr. Glossip is eligible for immediate release as his sentence was completed in 2016.” In exchange, Glossip would agree not to sue the state for anything related to his “arrest and incarceration.”

Knight told Drummond that he would send a document memorializing the full terms of their deal. “If I have misstated anything, or left anything out of this agreement, please let me know so I can be sure to include it,” Knight wrote. Drummond offered no notes, simply replying that the two were in agreement.

But in a shocking move, the OCCA rejected Drummond’s motion, setting Glossip up for yet another execution date. Drummond then took the unprecedented step of urging the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board to intervene, writing in a letter that, while he believed that Glossip is guilty of being an accessory, the record “does not support that he is guilty of first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt.” Testifying at Glossip’s clemency hearing in April 2023, Drummond said, “I’m not aware of any time in our history that an attorney general has appeared before this board and argued for clemency. I’m also not aware of any time in the history of Oklahoma when justice would require it.”

Despite Drummond’s pleas, the Board rejected Glossip’s clemency bid. With Glossip’s execution just weeks away, Drummond joined the defense attorneys in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. The court halted Glossip’s execution and agreed to review his conviction. In February, the justices ruled in Glossip’s favor, agreeing that prosecutorial misconduct had tainted the case and that Sneed was not credible.

In the wake of the ruling, Drummond made the rounds, boasting about his success before the high court. Asked at a press conference how he might resolve the case, Drummond said, “everything is on the table; a jury trial, all the way down,” but noted it “would be difficult” to retry Glossip after so many years.

Given his public posture, there was every reason to expect that once the case returned to Oklahoma County, Drummond would seek to resolve it — even without a previous agreement. But instead, he did an about-face, announcing in June that the state would seek another first-degree murder conviction for Glossip. At a bond hearing on June 17, the state presented no new evidence to support such a prosecution.

Related

Oklahoma Seeks New Conviction of Richard Glossip Using Old Evidence

In the new motion, Glossip’s attorneys emphasize the lack of new evidence, saying that nothing has changed about the state’s case that would invalidate the 2023 agreement between Drummond and Knight. The conditions necessary to fulfill the contract have been met, the lawyers note — Glossip’s conviction was overturned and sent back to Oklahoma County. Still, they wrote, “General Drummond has refused to complete his end of the bargain.”

Drummond’s office did not have an immediate response to The Intercept’s request for comment.

This isn’t the first time Drummond has been accused in court filings of reneging on an agreement to resolve a criminal case. On June 30, Stephen Jones, a powerhouse and politically connected Oklahoma attorney, filed a scathing motion in an unrelated case, complaining that Drummond had weaseled out on a deal to defer prosecution of his client, a former judge suffering from dementia. According to Jones, on two separate occasions Drummond told him they had a deal, then ceased communications and instead assigned an underling to move forward with the case in violation of their agreement.

Jones, who describes himself as a “strong supporter of the Attorney General’s political ambitions,” accuses Drummond of playing politics and asks the court to enforce their agreement. Ultimately, Jones contends that whatever happens, forcing his client to go to trial would end up being a public embarrassment for Drummond and his office. “No jury … is going to convict a terminally ill man with dementia in the middle to final stages of his disease and it will not be well-taken by the jury or the public if the Defendant is actually put to trial,” Jones wrote.

Glossip’s lawyers have long argued that the same outcome is inevitable if Drummond persists in retrying Glossip for first-degree murder. Drummond has conceded that the state destroyed key evidence in the case and that Sneed’s credibility has been unalterably damaged.

It’s hard to predict how District Judge Heather Coyle will rule on the motion. But the 2023 emails are explosive on their own — and could have a decisive impact on the case regardless of her decision. Under the terms of the deal, Glossip would have been eligible for immediate release. It’s hard to imagine how Drummond’s office can proceed with a murder trial after agreeing that Glossip should already be free.

“General Drummond has publicly stated that ‘a handshake is my word, and my word is my bond,’” Glossip’s lawyers wrote in their motion. “On more than just a handshake — in fact by written acceptance — General Drummond promised to resolve this case.”

The post Emails Reveal Oklahoma Attorney General Agreed to Release Richard Glossip appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Four adjunct professors at the City University of New York say the university fired them because of their activism for Palestine. The administration’s decision to cut ties came as a surprise to both the faculty and their department heads, who had already recommended their reappointment and assigned them classes in fall — some of which had student waitlists. The affected professors, and faculty in support of them, said they remained in good standing with their academic departments and had great reviews from students. 

The university has not given an official reason for ending its relationship with the professors, who all taught at Brooklyn College, and did not clarify their decision in a request for comment from The Intercept. The university terminated one professor and did not reappoint three of them. 

“We’re filling in the blanks because they’ve told us nothing,” said one of the four affected professors, who requested anonymity for fear of being doxxed and harassed. “The only reason we know it’s related to Palestine is because that’s the only thing we have in common.” She and three others are fighting for reappointment and have filed grievances with Brooklyn College. 

When she first received a notification in June from human resources that she would not be reappointed to teach, she flagged the person in her department who assigned her classes. “He thought it was a mistake — and that we must have checked the wrong box,” she said. That confusion made her believe the decision had nothing to do with her teaching ability. “The decision made by our departments was to hire us. The decision made by the Administration was to fire us,” she said. “It’s just sending a message that no one’s job is safe.” 

The Professional Staff Congress, or PSC — the main labor union for CUNY faculty — and the CUNY chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine have both said the professors’ removal violates due process and free speech rights. The union said it has written at least four times to the college administration requesting more information and has not received clarity on why these professors were let go. 

In a June 30 letter to CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, PSC President James Davis demanded the professors’ reinstatement and noted their non-reappointment and termination as “highly irregular.” Davis noted that the classes remained on the schedule, even when the instructors were let go. “In no case was the job performance of the instructor evaluated as unsatisfactory. In no case did the college inform the instructor or the department chair of a misconduct finding that could warrant such an action. In no case was it the department chair who notified the instructor of the non-reappointment, nor was the chair notified in advance,” he wrote. “While the unexplained nonreappointment of teaching adjuncts is not unusual at CUNY, this fact pattern is deeply concerning. What the four instructors who lost their CUNY jobs at the same time have in common is their public protest against Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights.”

A separate letter from more than 100 Jewish CUNY faculty and staff, addressed to Matos Rodríguez, condemned the removal of the four professors and argued that the decision violated departmental academic autonomy to determine staffing for scheduled classes. “Firing them does not make CUNY, New York City, New York State, nor the United States safer for Jews,” they wrote. “Firing our colleagues is an abhorrent act setting a dangerous precedent.”

The staffing changes at CUNY came in the lead-up to a congressional hearing Tuesday morning probing claims of antisemitism on college campuses. University leaders from CUNY, University of California, Berkeley, and Georgetown University testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee. 

On July 9, New York City Councilmember Inna Vernikov called the termination of the four professors and the recent suspension of student organizer Hadeeqa Arzoo Malik, who leads City College of New York’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, a “last ditch attempt … to save face.” In 2023, Vernikov was arrested after she openly carried a gun at a pro-Palestinian protest at Brooklyn College; the charges were later dismissed. Both she and Rep. Elise Stefanik, D-N.Y., accused CUNY’s chancellor of trying to back out of testifying.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Stefanik launched baseless attacks on other CUNY faculty members. She pushed for disciplining law professor Ramzi Kassem on the grounds that he represented Mahmoud Khalil, and Saly Abd Alla, the university’s chief diversity officer, over her past work as a civil rights director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Minnesota. “Does it concern you that New York taxpayers are paying for the legal defense fund of Mahmoud Khalil?” she asked Matos Rodríguez.

Matos Rodríguez said he was not familiar with those individual employees, but stressed that any employee who violates CUNY’s rules will be investigated. He said CUNY had no complaints related to Abd Alla and that she is not directly involved with handling cases related to students and faculty.

Pro-Palestinian protesters repeatedly interrupted the hearing. As Matos Rodríguez spoke, one person yelled: “Israel is burning children alive.” Later in the hearing, another protester also shouted to disrupt Matos Rodríguez’s remarks, prompting Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., to say: “Shut up and get out of here … get out of here you loser.”

Matos Rodríguez emphasized the university’s zero tolerance policy for encampments and said it had hired 150 full-time security employees and contracted with 250 security personnel. He said the university disciplined three students as a result of the encampments.

Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C., relayed to the chancellor CUNY faculty members’ concerns about professors who were not reappointed despite having fully enrolled classes scheduled for the fall. “As a former professor myself and a department chair — somebody who believes deeply in transparency and fairness — I want to ask you: would you be willing to follow up with my office and provide more information on the policies and procedures that guide faculty appointments and reappointments at CUNY?” she asked. Matos Rodríguez said he was willing to cooperate fully with the committee.

This was the ninth event held by Congress focused on claims of antisemitism on campus since October 7. None have been held to address Islamophobia or anti-Palestinian discrimination. Earlier high-profile hearings probed leaders from Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania; the presidents of those schools all resigned after testifying. 

The CUNY, Georgetown, and UC Berkeley chapters of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine signed off on a letter before the hearing calling on their respective presidents to “defend their institutions from baseless attacks and affirm principles of academic freedom and free speech.” 

“They must oppose the weaponizing of antisemitism through the equation of Jewish safety with the silencing and exclusion of those who speak up for Palestinian freedom and an end to genocide,” the statement read. The faculty argued in the letter that these congressional hearings have routinely shown university administrators inaccurate examples of antisemitism — and used that to pressure them to crack down on students and employees.

Free speech experts agree with that assessment. “These hearings are political theater. That’s all they are,” said David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor who testified in his capacity as an expert on the First Amendment at an earlier hearing in May. “It almost doesn’t matter what the university presidents say … there is no effort to even determine what the truth is, what actually happened, or whether any legal lines have been crossed.”

Professors across the country are worried about their speech and actions being policed under an overly broad definition of antisemitism. The American Association of University Professors, a union representing about 45,000 members nationwide, has criticized the conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel.

In the meantime, the professors who can no longer work with CUNY are scrambling to find another source of income and protect themselves from doxxing and harassment.  

One of the four CUNY professors said it feels as though CUNY’s administration is opposed to protecting student safety. She recalled trying to protect students at Brooklyn College’s encampment in May as faculty placed themselves strategically between police and students. 

“We just knew that something really bad was going to happen,” she said. Now, she’s scared to speak publicly. She also misses teaching. “It was not only the way I made my living but also what gave me purpose,” she said. Despite the costs, she is still committed to the Palestinian cause. “The reality is, it is working. What they’re doing is working,” she said. “This repression is repressive, but I feel strongly that I can’t let it stop me. The situation in Gaza is so extreme, we have to continue to fight — and I think it’s shameful for anyone to be fired for opposing a genocide … History will not treat this period kindly.”

Another of the professors is worried about covering their oldest child’s college tuition. “I don’t know if my family will have to move, what we’ll do about health insurance, or whether the right-wing groups now doxxing me will escalate their harassment,” they said.

“Though no reason was given for my firing, it’s impossible not to see this as retaliation — for supporting students and for exercising my lawful political expression outside the classroom,” they said.

They have no plans to slow their activism around Palestine. “Absolutely not. In the face of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, entire families wiped off the earth, every university destroyed, and the widespread obliteration of agricultural land and hospitals, I cannot and will not be silent.”

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Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers. 

“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime. 

As ICE agents across the country wear masks to raid workplaces and detain immigrants, government attorneys need not cover their faces to shield their identities. Legal experts who spoke to The Intercept agreed the practice of concealing the lawyers’ identities was both novel and concerning.

“I’ve never heard of someone in open court not being identified,” said Elissa Steglich, a law professor and co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin. “Part of the court’s ethical obligation is transparency, including clear identification of the parties. Not identifying an attorney for the government means if there are unethical or professional concerns regarding [the Department of Homeland Security], the individual cannot be held accountable. And it makes the judge appear partial to the government.”

The concealment shocked two lawyers who were representing immigrants in Xu’s courtroom. Attorney Jeffrey Okun, who was representing a client via video call, characterized the move as “bizarre.” Attorney Hugo Gonzalez Venegas called Xu’s behavior “a terrible lack of transparency on the part of officers of the court.” 

Immigration courts, which are run by the Executive Office for Immigration Review — part of the executive branch, not the judiciary — are far less transparent than most courts. Their prosecutors work for ICE and DHS; they have no obligation to provide defense lawyers; and their judges are appointed — and fired — by the president. 

Related

ICE Agents Deserve No Privacy

On a Tuesday morning in late June, Xu was running through several brief, preliminary hearings known as “master calendars.” Nationwide, these proceedings always start out the same way. An immigrant will appear with their attorney — if they have the good fortune to retain one — often on Webex. A judge presides at a big desk in an actual courtroom, in this case in lower Manhattan. An ICE lawyer represents the government in its attempts to deport the immigrant. 

As each case commences, the judge recites their own name, followed by the immigrant’s name, the name of the immigrant’s attorney (if they have one), and finally, the name of the ICE lawyer. It’s an on-the-record census that enables due process. 

When Xu omitted the ICE lawyer’s name, Okun asked her to identify who was arguing to deport his client. She refused.

Xu attributed the change to “privacy” because “things lately have changed.” Xu told Okun that he could use Webex’s direct messaging function to send the ICE lawyer his email, and the ICE lawyer would probably respond with her own name and address. Okun accepted the arrangement.

When the next case commenced minutes later, Xu again refused to state the ICE lawyer’s name, and Gonzalez Venegas, also on Webex, argued that the legal record would be incomplete without it. Xu again said that the two attorneys could message each other confidentially.

The government’s mystery attorney, who was prosecuting both Okun’s and Gonzalez-Venegas’s clients, wore glasses and a navy blue suit; her hair was pulled back primly from her face. She spoke quietly, with a tinge of vocal fry. Her name, according to Gonzalez Venegas, was Cosette Shachnow.

Shachnow, 33, began working for ICE in 2021, shortly after she graduated from law school, according to public records and her LinkedIn account. The latter lists “Civil Rights and Social Action” among her “favored causes.”

Shachnow did not respond to an email from The Intercept seeking comment. Neither did the Executive Office for Immigration Review and the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, which oversees ICE lawyers. 

It is unclear how many immigration judges are failing to say ICE lawyers’ names, but The Intercept has witnessed the practice twice. On July 10, Judge James McCarthy in lower Manhattan neglected to identify the government’s attorney in several cases, referring to the lawyer instead as “Department.”

“Department, are we done with pleadings?” McCarthy asked. The word stood in for ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. Several immigration defense attorneys were attending the hearings by video. None objected.

Judge Shirley Lazare-Raphael, who is also a New York City immigration judge, told The Intercept that the new phenomenon of occluding ICE attorneys’ names has not been formalized via a directive or rule. “It’s up to the judges whether or not they want to do it,” she said.

“This is a very new and very disturbing turn of events,” said Daniel Kowalski, a former longtime immigration attorney who now edits the legal journal Bender’s Immigration Bulletin for LexisNexis. 

“Where does it stop?” asked Kowalski. “Are the immigration judges going to be unnamed? Behind a screen?” 

Lazare-Raphael said she had heard that some ICE attorneys have said they found it “dangerous to state their names publicly.”

That reasoning echoes DHS’s questionable claim that ICE agents need to mask up because of what the department described as an almost 700 percent increase in assaults against agents nationally during the first six months of this year. But as DHS revealed last week, the raw number of assaults this year is 79, compared to 10 in the same period last year. Given that ICE arrests have more than quadrupled since Trump took office — and the agency’s determination of what qualifies as an assault is often dubious — this uptick likely sounds more dramatic than it is.

Veronica Cardenas, who was an ICE prosecutor for six years before quitting in 2023, told The Intercept that she thinks the real threat these lawyers face is shame. She said that her mother came to the United States from Colombia without papers and was arrested at the southern border, and that while she was proud of her daughter when she started working for ICE, Cardenas came to realize the people she was seeking to deport were a lot like her family. Cardenas now works as an immigration defense attorney and counsels other ICE lawyers who want to leave their jobs — many of whom, she said, have backgrounds similar to hers. 

Adam Boyd, a former ICE attorney who resigned last month, according to a report in The Atlantic, said that many ICE lawyers feel frustrated about having to ask judges to dismiss cases so that ICE enforcement and removal officers can grab immigrants outside courtrooms and swell the Trump administration’s deportation numbers. Boyd said he left after making what he called “a moral decision.”

The asylum system has suffered a stunning collapse under President Donald Trump’s second term. In the past six months, judges’ denials of asylum have skyrocketed from rates of 62 to 80 percent — and immigration enforcement statistics expert Austin Kocher predicts that the figure could soon top out at 95 percent. 

As the Trump administration orders ICE to ramp up its removal operations, hundreds of immigrants to the United States are being arrested and beaten by people with their faces covered and no proof of who they are. Now, they may not know the names of the attorneys making the case to deport them, either.

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