The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior has sailed into Auckland to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original Rainbow Warrior in 1985.
Greenpeace’s vessel, which had been protesting nuclear testing in the Pacific, sank after French government agents planted explosives on its hull, killing Portuguese-Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira.
Today, 40 years on from the events on July 10 1985, a dawn ceremony was held in Auckland.
Author Margaret Mills was a cook on board the ship at the time, and has written about her experience in a book entitled Anecdotage.
Author Margaret Mills tells TVNZ Breakfast about the night of the Rainbow Warrior bombing 40 years ago. Image: TVNZ
The 95-year-old told TVNZ Breakfast the experience on board “changed her life”.
“I was sound asleep, and I heard this sort of bang and turned the light on, but it wouldn’t go on.
She said when she left her cabin, a crew member told her “we’ve been bombed”.
‘I laughed at him’
“I laughed at him, I said ‘we don’t get bombs in New Zealand, that’s ridiculous’.”
She said they were taken to the police station after a “big boom when the second bomb came through”.
“I realised immediately, I was part of a historical event,” she said.
TVNZ reporter Corazon Miller talks to Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Russel Norman (centre) and journalist David Robie after the Rainbow Warrior memorial dawn service today. Image: TVNZ
Journalist David Robie. who travelled on the Rainbow Warrior and wrote the book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior published today, told Breakfast it was a “really shocking, shocking night”.
“We were so overwhelmed by the grief and absolute shock of what had happened. But for me, there was no doubt it was France behind this.”
“But we were absolutely flabbergasted that a country could do this.”
He said it was a “very emotional moment” and was hard to believe it had been 40 years since that time.
‘Momentous occasion’
“It stands out in my life as being the most momentous occasion as a journalist covering that whole event.”
Executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa Russel Norman said the legacy of the ship was about “people who really stood up for something important”.
“I mean, ending nuclear testing in the Pacific, imagine if they were still exploding bombs in the Pacific. We would have to live with that.
“And those people back then they stood up and beat the French government to end nuclear testing.
“It’s pretty inspirational.”
He said the group were still campaigning on some key environmental issues today.
Anduril Industries is a major beneficiary of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes a section that essentially grants the weapons firm a monopoly on new surveillance towers for U.S. Customs and Border Protection across the southern and northern borders.
The legislation, signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4, provides significant spending increases to military and law enforcement projects, including over $6 billion for various border security technologies. Among these initiatives is expanding the ever-widening “virtual wall” of sensor-laden surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border, where computers increasingly carry out the work of detecting and apprehending migrants.
Anduril, today a full-fledged military contractor, got its start selling software-augmented surveillance towers to CBP. Anduril has pitched its Sentry Tower line on the strength of its “autonomous” capabilities, which use machine learning software to perpetually scan the horizon for possible objects of interest — i.e. people attempting to cross the border — rather than requiring a human to monitor sensor feeds. Thanks to bipartisan support for the vision of a border locked down by computerized eyes, Anduril has become a dominant player in border surveillance, edging out incumbents like Elbit and General Dynamics.
Now, that position looks to be enshrined in law: A provision buried in the new mega-legislation stipulates that none of the $6 billion border tech payday can be spent on border towers unless they’ve been “tested and accepted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deliver autonomous capabilities.”
The bill defines “autonomous” as “a system designed to apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, or other algorithms to accurately detect, identify, classify, and track items of interest in real time such that the system can make operational adjustments without the active engagement of personnel or continuous human command or control.”
Anduril is now the country’s only approved border tower vendor.
That reads like a description of Anduril’s product — because it might as well be. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that under the new law, Anduril is now the country’s only approved border tower vendor. Although CBP’s plans for border surveillance tend to be in flux, Homeland Security presentationdocuments have cited the need for hundreds of new towers in the near future, money that for the time being will only be available to Anduril.
Anduril did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement to The Intercept, Dave Maass, investigations director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a longtime observer of border surveillance technologies, raised concerns about the apparent codification of militarized AI at the border. “I was cynically expecting Trump’s bill to quadruple-down on wasteful surveillance technology at the border, but I was not expecting language that appears to grant an exclusive license to Anduril to install AI-powered towers,” he said. “For 25 years, surveillance towers have enriched influential contractors while delivering little security, and it appears this pattern isn’t going to change anytime soon. Will this mean more towers in public parks and AI monitoring the everyday affairs of border neighborhoods? Most likely. Taxpayers will continue footing the bill while border communities will pay an additional price with their privacy and human rights.”
“Taxpayers will continue footing the bill while border communities will pay an additional price with their privacy and human rights.”
The law’s stipulation is not only a major boon to Anduril, but a blow to its competitors, now essentially locked out of a lucrative and burgeoning market until they can gain the same certification from CBP. In April, The Intercept reported on a project to add machine learning surveillance capabilities to older towers manufactured by the Israeli military contractor Elbit, and General Dynamics has spent years implementing an upgraded version of its Remote Video Surveillance System towers. The fate of these companies’ border business is now unclear.
Elbit did not respond to a request for comment. General Dynamics spokesperson Jay Srinivasan did not respond directly when asked about Anduril’s border exclusivity deal, stating, “We can’t speculate on the government’s acquisition strategy and the different contracts it intends to use to exercise the funding,” and pointed to the company’s existing surveillance tower contracts.
Towers like Anduril’s Sentry have proven controversial, hailed by advocates in Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill as a cheaper and more humane way of stopping illegal immigration than building a physical wall, but derided by critics as both ineffective and invasive. Although border towers are frequently marketed with imagery of a lone edifice in a barren desert, CBP has erected surveillance towers, which claim to offer detailed, 24/7 visibility for miles, in populated residential areas. In 2024, the Government Accountability Office reported CBP’s surveillance tower program failed to address all six of the main privacy protections that were supposed to be in place, including a rule that “DHS should collect only PII [Personally Identifiable Information] that is directly relevant and necessary to accomplish the specified purpose(s).”
The new Trump spending package emphasizes the development and purchase of additional autonomous and unmanned military hardware that could prove favorable for Anduril, which has developed a suite of military products that run on machine learning-centric software. One section, for instance, sets aside $1.3 billion for “for expansion of unmanned underwater vehicle production,” an initiative that could dovetail with Anduril’s announcement last year that it would open a 100,000–150,000 square foot facility in Rhode Island dedicated to building autonomous underwater vehicles. Another sets aside $200 million for “the development, procurement, and integration of mass-producible autonomous underwater munitions,” which could describe Anduril’s Copperhead line of self-driving torpedoes, announced in April.
The bill also earmarks billions for suicide attack drones and counter-drone weaponry, technologies also sold by Anduril. Anduril is by no means the only contractor who can provide this weaponry, but it already has billions of dollars worth of contracts with the Pentagon for similar products, and enjoys a particularly friendly relationship with the Trump administration.
Trae Stephens, Anduril’s co-founder and executive chairman, served on Trump’s transition team in 2016 and was reportedly floated for a senior Pentagon position late last year. Michael Obadal, Trump’s nominee for Under Secretary of the Army, worked at Anduril until June, according to his Linkedin, and has come under fire for his refusal to divest his Anduril stock.
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey is also longtime Trump supporter, and has hosted multiple fundraisers for his presidential campaigns.
Following Trump’s reelection last fall, Luckey told CNBC he was sanguine about his company’s fortunes in the new administration. “We did well under Trump, and we did better under Biden,” he said of Anduril. “I think we will do even better now.”
The Trump administration’s efforts to deport students and campus activists have been cloaked in secrecy, whether it’s the masked agents that snatched Rümeysa Öztürk off the streets, the arrest of Mohsen Mahdawi at what should have been his citizenship interview, or the government’s shifting legal arguments to detain them.
The troubling lack of transparency extended to court battles, too. In the cases of both Öztürk and Mahdawi, an obscure court rule required an in-person visit to a Vermont federal courthouse to review key materials, including the Trump administration’s briefs and exhibits defending their detention.
These cases are critical tests of free speech and the constitutional limits on targeting noncitizens over their dissent. So The Intercept fought to make the full dockets public. So far, we’ve been successful in eight federal courts, six districts, and two federal appellate circuits — and we’re doing the same in other cases across the country.
In every case, The Intercept started by reaching out to the plaintiff’s legal team.
The docket access restrictions in these historic court cases come from Rule 5.2(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which aims to protect immigrants’ privacy as they challenge detention and deportation orders in court. This means that the strongest argument in favor of lifting the restrictions is that the plaintiffs themselves want the public to have full access to court filings, or at least don’t oppose it. In some cases, the plaintiffs and their legal teams were already publishing court documents online, although there was often a lag between when a document was filed in court and when it was accessible to the press.
After The Intercept reached out, many plaintiffs filed motions to lift the docket restrictions, including Öztürk and class-action plaintiffs challenging their deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. Judges quickly granted many of these motions.
In other cases, The Intercept sent letters to the judges and clerks to underscore the importance of court transparency and urge them to lift the restrictions. Some judges and clerks ignored these letters, while others took these concerns quite seriously.
In one pivotal case regarding arbitrary visa revocations, for example, federal district judge Ana Reyes noted The Intercept’s request on the case docket and asked if there was any opposition to making records in the case available to the public. When the plaintiff and the government confirmed there was no objection, Reyes ordered the clerk to lift the docket restrictions.
In May, The Intercept sent similarletters to the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals about the Öztürk and Mahdawi cases. Öztürk had previously asked the trial court to lift the restrictions, but the judge didn’t rule on that request before the Trump administration appealed. The Second Circuit clerk’s office quickly docketed The Intercept’s letters, and within two days the full appellate record was publicly accessible in both cases. Soon after, the trial court judges lifted the restrictions in both cases, too.
Finally, in some cases, opening dockets to the public required The Intercept to file formal court motions.
In the case of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who is still in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in Texas, The Intercept filed a motion with pro bono representation from the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law. In Massachusetts federal court, The Intercept filed a motion in the case of Efe Ercelik, a Turkish student at Hampshire College, with pro bono representation from Albert Sellars LLP. And most recently, in late June, The Intercept filed a motion in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the case of Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University, with pro bono help from attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
In each case, judges quickly lifted restrictions following The Intercept’s motions.
As the Trump administration continues its historic deportation campaign and targets immigrants for their dissent, new cases are being filed everyday with similar docket restrictions under Rule 5.2(c). And The Intercept is working to ensure the public and other members of the press have full, transparent access to court records in these historic battles over dissent, immigrants’ rights, and state power.
Tomorrow marks 40 years since the bombing and sinking of the Rainbow Warrior — a moment that changed the course of New Zealand’s history and reshaped how we saw ourselves on the world stage.
Two French agents planted two explosives on the ship, then just before midnight, explosions ripped through the hull killing photographer, Fernando Pereira and sinking the 47m ex-fishing trawler.
The attack sparked outrage across the country and the world, straining diplomatic ties between New Zealand and France and cementing the country’s anti-nuclear stance.
Few people are more closely linked to the ship than author and journalist Dr David Robie, who spent eleven weeks on board during its final voyage through the Pacific, and wrote the book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, which is being published tomorrow. He joins Emile Donovan.
On a muggy evening in mid-May, Lorenzo Sarabia Morales was driving home with his co-worker from a 12-hour shift at a poultry farm when the lights of a Georgia State Patrol car flashed behind him. Sarabia and his co-worker, Abraham Mendez Luna, were both concerned about recent rumors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Moultrie, an agricultural town in southwest Georgia’s Colquitt County. But as they pulled over to the side of the road, they didn’t sense any immediate danger. These seemed to be police officers, not federal agents, and Sarabia hadn’t been speeding.
What the men didn’t know was that they were about to be swept up in a stunning wave of targeted yet imprecise immigration enforcement. At the time, the Trump administration claimed it was after violent criminals who posed serious threats — so the men, who had no criminal records, were shocked when they were arrested and transferred to Stewart Detention Center, a privately owned ICE facility notorious for allegations of abuse and neglect.
The Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office presented the night’s arrests as a successful collaboration between the sheriff’s investigations unit, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Georgia State Police. The operation’s primary goal, as the sheriff’s office put it in a May 13 press release posted on Facebook, was to serve warrants against 11 people for crimes against children.
Through interviews, press statements, and emails concerning Sarabia and Mendez’s case, The Intercept found a gulf between how the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office presented the operation to the public and what actually happened. Rather than serving existing criminal warrants, local authorities conducted traffic stops, arrested people without licenses, and sent information about the detainees to DHS. Only then, after the men were in custody, did the federal agency issue warrants for their arrest.
Ronald Jordan, a lieutenant at the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office, told The Intercept in a statement that 19 people were arrested across Moultrie on the night of May 12, and that DHS placed immigration detainers on 13 of them.
“The 13 detainers issued by DHS were received after the subjects were taken into custody,” Jordan wrote.
Georgia State Patrol and DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
“The people we’ve spoken with so far were randomly pulled over or profiled and just arrested on the spot, either for not having a driver’s license or for no charge at all,” said Meredyth Yoon, an attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Atlanta who has been investigating the May 12 operation. “That’s not a targeted operation based on people having outstanding warrants.”
“The 13 detainers issued by DHS were received after the subjects were taken into custody.”
There was some effort to serve existing warrants from DHS, the sheriff’s office wrote in its release. But the operation hit a snag when “information regarding the presence of DHS personnel began circulating on social media,” forcing DHS to end the operation early.
Rather than abandon their efforts entirely, the sheriff’s office wrote, officers shifted to a “concentrated patrol throughout Colquitt County,” during which they arrested people with charges ranging from child molestation to false imprisonment and methamphetamine possession.
Sarabia and Mendez did not have any such charges — nor did at least three more men arrested and transferred to ICE custody, Yoon said.
According to Jordan, “Only one person on the original target list wound up being detained during the operation.”
The May 12 operation was mired in secrecy and confusion. Yoon told The Intercept she tried to obtain the Colquitt County Sheriff’s incident reports from that night, but a records clerk said there weren’t any.
“They didn’t write any reports in cases that day where ICE was involved, even in cases where the person was arrested by local police and charged locally with a traffic offense,” Yoon said.
Sarabia and Mendez’s arrest borethe classic signs of a pretextual traffic stop, Yoon said. The state troopers cycled through a series of reasons for pulling the car over, all of which Sarabia denies — he had been swerving, he was on his cellphone, he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt — then finally arrested him on a charge of driving without a license and failure to maintain lane.
Though neither man had a criminal warrant, and Mendez was never charged with a crime, the cops detained both men that night at the crowded Colquitt County Jail.
“At the briefing before the operation, all deputies and troopers were informed that any traffic stop made as part of the operation would have to [be] based upon probable cause,” Jordan wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Abrahama Mendez-Luna [sic] had no criminal charges which make be [sic] believe he was a passenger in the vehicle.”
Sarabia’s family paid a $900 bond, but instead of being released, he was placed on an ICE hold. Yoon sent a letter with two National Immigration Project lawyers urging the local sheriff to release Mendez. “Neither Georgia nor federal law nor the Constitution provides any authority to hold an individual for DHS who has no detainer and is not charged with any offense,” they wrote.
It was too late: By the time Colquitt County Sheriff Rod Howell received the letter, Sarabia and Mendez were already in ICE custody, en route to Stewart Detention Center.
In the days following Sarabia and Mendez’s arrests, videos of other farmworkers arrested on their way home from work in Moultrie spread across social media. But at the United Farm Workers Foundation, Sarabia’s arrest in particular raised red flags.
Sarabia has been a leader on farmworker advocacy campaigns for the past two years, speaking out about extreme heat conditions on south Georgia farms. In 2023, he submitted testimony to the Department of Labor as part of the UFW Foundation’s comment on a proposed to improve working conditions for laborers on temporary agricultural visas. (That rule went into effect last year, but the Trump administration suspended enforcement of all its provisions on June 20.)
“We’ve had other leaders that have been vocal in the past, but none like Lorenzo. Lorenzo has been our most known and visible leader so far,” said Alma Salazar Young, Georgia state director at the UFW Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the United Farm Workers Union. “I wouldn’t put it past them to target labor leaders, and especially with Lorenzo being front and center of a campaign for heat regulations.”
Young pointed to other immigration enforcement actions this year that have targeted farmworkers and UFW leaders, such as the Border Patrol raids in California’s agricultural Central Valley in January. That operation sparked a Fourth Amendment lawsuit against DHS and Border Patrol, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the UFW and five Kern County residents. In April, a judge granted the ACLU’s motion for a preliminary injunction and barred Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration arrests in the region. In May, The Intercept reported that ICE had arrested 14 farmworkers in western New York, several of whom had been involved in prominent UFW organizing efforts.
“We’ve seen a sharp increase this year in immigration enforcement operations that have targeted immigrant workers, especially in rural areas,” said Zenaida Huerta, government affairs coordinator at the UFW Foundation. The backlash against that increase — recent polling shows that less than a quarter of Americans support deporting immigrants who haven’t committed any crimes — appeared to have some effect on the administration’s priorities: On June 12, Trump vowed to stop dragnet roundups of farmworkers.
Whether the administration adheres to that promise remains to be seen, but it didn’t arrive in time for Abraham Mendez Luna. At an immigration court hearing on June 25, Mendez requested voluntary departure to Mexico, where he’ll be reunited with his wife and children. Since he didn’t receive a deportation order, Mendez hopes his choice will allow him to return to the U.S. one day.
Sarabia, a husband and father of two who has been in the U.S. for nearly a decade, is fighting his deportation. At a recent hearing, the judge agreed to postpone Sarabia’s pleadings until August 19 to allow him more time to find a lawyer.
“Even though he’s not a citizen of the U.S., I do consider him to be a model citizen,” said UFW Foundation’s Young. “He works hard, takes care of his family, and we think he has a pretty good chance of winning his case. But we don’t really know.”
The events in Colquitt County underscore the risks of deputizing state and local police officers to act as immigration enforcement agents, legal advocates told The Intercept. The 287(g) program, which has become increasingly widespread as the Trump administration enacts its mass deportation agenda, offers states and municipalities three models for empowering local law enforcement to carry out immigration operations.Georgia is among the states that have emerged as 287(g) hotspots.
Government watchdogs have long warned that the 287(g) program lacks oversight policies, making it ripe for abuse.
Last year, after an undocumented immigrant killed 22-year-old Laken Riley in Athens, Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law mandating that local police departments enter into memorandums of agreement with DHS, including through the 287(g) program.
The Georgia Department of Corrections has held an agreement with DHS since 2020 under the program’s Jail Enforcement Model, which deputizes corrections officers in local jails to identify undocumented immigrants and turn them over to ICE custody. In March, Kemp expanded the state’s collaboration to the Department of Public Safety — this time under the Task Force Model, which allows Georgia State Patrol officers to act as “force multipliers” for ICE.
Jordan, the lieutenant, said the Colquitt County Sheriff does not have its own 287(g) agreement with DHS, but it acts in accordance with state and federal law.
As those agreements have come into effect, arrests of undocumented immigrants have surged.
“Being undocumented in the U.S doesn’t make you a criminal. It’s a civil violation. It’s no different than getting a traffic ticket.”
“The Task Force Model is different from jail-based enforcement, because they actually deputize officers to go out into the streets and make arrests,” said Yoon, the Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Atlanta attorney. “We’re still looking into what the training entails, but we’ve been told that it’s a kind of online-based, expedited program — so a little concerning to be deputizing officers to go make immigration arrests with just an online course.”
Tracy Gonzalez, Georgia state director of American Families United, said that the uptick in local law enforcement activities in collaboration with ICE has pushed communities into hiding.
“Being undocumented in the U.S doesn’t make you a criminal. It’s a civil violation. It’s no different than getting a traffic ticket,” Gonzalez said. “You have hardworking people that deserve a path to citizenship, and it’s time.”
Colquitt County is in Georgia’s top region for agricultural production. The estimated 40,000 laborers in the area harvesting food for the rest of Georgia and the United States, working out in the open, are easy targets for ICE raids.
“From California to Georgia, local police departments are increasingly coordinating with DHS and ICE and funneling people into detention through everyday traffic stops or license checkpoints,” said Huerta, the UFW Foundation coordinator. “What we see in this case mirrors what we’re seeing across the country, where farmworkers are being caught in the crosshairs of a system that offers them no protection, no matter how essential they are.”
When eight men in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement boarded a plane in May, officials told them that they were being sent on a short trip from Texas to another ICE facility in Louisiana.
Many hours later, the plane landed in Djibouti. The men were held in shipping containers for weeks, shackles on their legs. This past weekend, they were expelled to the violence-plagued nation of South Sudan.
This deception, revealed by an Intercept investigation, highlights the lengths to which the U.S. government will go to further its anti-immigrant agenda and deport people to so-called third countries to which they have no connections.
Lawyers for three of the men said that their clients were told, after resisting deportation to Africa, that they were instead being transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana. ICE then hustled them onto a plane, in the wee hours of the morning, and flew them out of the country without their knowledge or consent. This account was further corroborated by the wife of one of those same men who was told about ICE’s tactics in real time.
“This underscores just how abysmal and reprehensible the government’s treatment of these men has been from the very beginning, and the fact that the government made no genuine attempt to comply with the district court injunction in place prior to shipping them out of the United States,” said Glenda Aldana Madrid, a staff attorney at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project who is representing one of the men, Tuan Thanh Phan.
Aldana Madrid added, “Tuan and the other men had the right to know where they were going, and yet the government did not have the basic decency to do even that before putting them on a plane bound for a country none of them knew, and that is on the brink of civil war.”
The Intercept sent numerous requests to ICE for comment. Spokesperson Miguel Alvarez acknowledged receipt of the questions but did not reply.
While the men were in transit in May, a federal judge intervened. Citing a prior nationwide injunction requiring the administration to give deportees advance notice of their destination and a “meaningful” chance to object if they believed they’d be in danger of harm, the eight men were not flown directly to South Sudan. They were instead imprisoned for weeks at a U.S. military base, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, shackled at the feet in a converted shipping container.
The men had been convicted of violent crimes, many had served lengthy prison sentences, and had “orders of removal,” meaning the government had the legal authority to deport them. But most of the men — who hail from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, South Korea, and Vietnam — have no ties to South Sudan. An eighth man is South Sudanese but left Africa when he was a baby, before the nation of South Sudan even existed.
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that the expulsion to South Sudan could go forward, the latest in a recent spate of decisions that have paved the way for the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime — and have restricted immigrants’ rights to object on the grounds that they might be abused or face death.
“The United States may not deport noncitizens to a country where they are likely to be tortured or killed. International and domestic law guarantee that basic human right,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a bitter dissent to the Thursday decision. “In this case, the Government seeks to nullify it by deporting noncitizens to potentially dangerous countries without notice or the opportunity to assert a fear of torture.”
More than a decade of intermittent political turmoil and outright civil war has left South Sudan politically unstable and ravaged by violence. Recent clashes between armed groups drove more than 165,000 people to flee their homes in three months, according to a June United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report.
The country is subject to a U.N. warning about the potential for full-scale civil war. South Sudan is also under a U.S. State Department “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory and the department advises those who choose to go there to draft a will, establish a proof of life protocol with family members, and leave DNA samples with one’s medical provider.
“After weeks of delays by activist judges that put our law enforcement in danger, ICE deported these 8 barbaric criminals [sic] illegal aliens to South Sudan,” Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Intercept in an email after the Trump administration succeeded in deporting the eight men to South Sudan on Saturday.
Interviews with family members and lawyers of the eight deportees, as well as contemporaneous documents, provide insights into the confusion and deception sowed by ICE before the immigrants were expelled to Africa.
A relative of one of the deportees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect himself and his family member, said the men were bombarded with contradictory information. His family member, now in South Sudan, said the men were told they would be sent to Africa but received conflicting details. “I do not think they gave him enough information about what was going on,” he told The Intercept.
Court documents and emails examined by The Intercept show that one of the eight men, Nyo Myint, an immigrant from Myanmar referred to in the documents as “N.M.” — who has limited proficiency in English — was served a “notice of removal” which said that ICE intended to deport him from a detention center in Port Isabel, Texas, to South Africa, not South Sudan. The certificate shows that the notice was read to Myint in English, without an interpreter, at 10:59 a.m. on May 19 and that Myint refused to sign the document.
Ngoc Phan, the wife of Tuan Thanh Phan, who hails from Vietnam, offered a similar account from contemporaneous conversations with her husband. Ngoc spoke with Tuan by telephone while he, Myint, and others were facing deportation, and she offered a narrative that corroborated the legal documents and accounts by lawyers who spoke with The Intercept.
“Everyone protested because no one from that group was from South Africa. They said, ‘We don’t know anybody there. We’re not from there. We don’t want to go there.’ And no one signed the paperwork that the officers gave them,” said Ngoc, relaying what Tuan told her on May 19.
Tuan Phan and Ahmer Shaikh — another ICE prisoner ultimately separated from the group who spoke to the New York Times — offered nearly identical accounts. Both said that everyone refused to sign the forms. An ICE agent told them something to the effect of, “I’ve got good news for you and bad news for you. The good news is we are not going to deport you to South Africa. The bad news is we are going to deport you guys to South Sudan.” Ngoc Phan told The Intercept that Tuan replied, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me there. I don’t want to go there.”
Documents show that at 5:48 p.m. on May 19, Myint was served another removal notice, which he also refused to sign, that said ICE intended to send him to South Sudan.
Lawyers for Tuan Phan and another of the men, Cuban national Jose Rodriguez, told The Intercept that, following the men’s protests against being sent to Africa, ICE seemingly relented and told them that they would be transferred to another detention facility within the United States. Ngoc Phan said the same.
“The U.S. government deceived these men up to the very last minute,” Ngoc told The Intercept. “Around three or four in the morning on Tuesday the 20th, they gathered this group up, which included my husband. They said ‘We’re going to transfer all of you guys to a detention center in Oakdale, Louisiana, instead.’”
ICE does not have a publicly listed detention center in Oakdale, Louisiana, though the federal prison complex in the town was formerly listed as an ICE facility, and an immigration court still operates on the premises. When ICE announced that Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old citizen of Haiti, had died in ICE custody in Florida this spring, the agency wrote that she was previously held at “Richwood Correctional Center in Oakdale, Louisiana,” though that facility is located in Monroe, two hours away.
Aldana Madrid, of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said that her client told her that he was even given a form to sign. “He said that the men were told about, and they were actually given a piece of paper to sign for, the transfer. Tuan said, ‘I saw the paper and it said Oakdale, Louisiana,’ so I signed it. But he says they were not given a copy of it.”
Aldana Madrid explained that after the men left the Texas facility, the deception continued, according to Tuan: “They were told, ‘Oh, it takes about 10 hours to drive there, but if we fly, it’s faster. So we’re flying.’” But it wasn’t until they were on the plane for more than 45 minutes that Tuan recalls having heard them say something about being sent somewhere else, said Aldana Madrid. A few hours later, the men were told that they would be landing in Ireland to refuel. “Then they were like, ‘Wait, where are we going?’ And they were told Djibouti. Tuan asked, ‘Djibouti, where’s that?’ And ICE was like, ‘In Africa.’ But 45 minutes into the flight, they still thought they were going to Louisiana,” said Aldana Madrid.
Matthew Archambeault, who represents Rodriguez, said his client offered a near-identical account.
“They were given a piece of paper that said they were going to South Africa. According to my client, everyone said, ‘Fuck that! We’re not signing.’ And then they went to their cells,” Archambeault told The Intercept. “He said that maybe two hours later, they called them back and told them, ‘Hey we have good news and bad news. The good news is you’re not going to South Africa. The bad news is you’re going to South Sudan.”
Later, said Archambeault, the men were told: “‘We’re gonna fly you to Oakdale.’” When they were boarding the plane, one of the men apparently voiced concerns that the charter jet was an unlikely choice for the short flight from Texas to Louisiana. Rodriguez told Archambeault that the men eventually realized they had been airborne too long to be heading to Louisiana. When they landed in Ireland to refuel, they knew for certain they had been expelled from the United States.
A third member of the group was also told by an ICE official he would be sent to Louisiana, according to his lawyer who spoke on the condition that neither of their identities would be revealed to protect their privacy. “I can confirm that directly prior to being removed, my client was told that the men were being sent to Louisiana,” the attorney told The Intercept by email.
Experts said that the type of deception perpetrated by ICE was nothing new, that the government frequently failed to act in good faith, and that agents regularly deceived immigrants in the course of their work. Trina Realmuto, a lawyer for the immigrants expelled to South Sudan and executive director at the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said the deception was far from exceptional. “We constantly hear about DHS officers lying to noncitizens about what is happening in their cases and where they are going, or telling them to sign papers based on wrong information,” she told The Intercept. “This has been happening for years.”
The Trump administration deported the men to South Sudan as part of a globe-spanning effort to expel immigrants to so-called third countries in cases where U.S. law bars them from being sent to their home countries, when their home countries will not accept them, or seemingly, as a punitive measure and a means to frighten other immigrants or potential immigrants with the possibility of being expelled to dangerous nations.
Last month, McLaughlin, the ICE spokesperson, claimed that ICE was unable to deport the eight men to their home countries. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that the U.S. government did not inform her government that Mexican national Jesus Munoz Gutierrez was sent to Djibouti. She also did not oppose his repatriation to Mexico.
Experts say that these recent efforts to expel Mexicans to crisis zones like Libya and now South Sudan demonstrate the casual cruelty of the Trump administration.
“I’ve been doing immigration detention work for a very long time. I’ve never in my life seen Mexico refuse to take back one of its nationals, ever,” Anwen Hughes, the senior director of legal strategy for refugee programs at Human Rights First, told The Intercept last month. The Port Isabel detention center, where the men were held before being flown to Africa, is less than 30 miles from the Mexican border. “The U.S. appears to be looking for really implausible destinations to send people. It’s not just punitive, it’s deliberately terrifying and honestly perverse,” said Hughes.
The Trump administration has been employing strong-arm tactics with dozens of smaller, weaker, and economically dependent nations to create a global network of deportee dumping grounds. The administration has explored deals with more than a quarter of the world’s nations to accept so-called third-country nationals — deported persons who are not their citizens.
The negotiations are being conducted in secret, and neither the State Department nor ICE will discuss them. With the green light from the Supreme Court, thousands of immigrants are in danger of being disappeared into this global gulag.
“Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent last month. “That use of discretion is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.”
When eight men in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement boarded a plane in May, officials told them that they were being sent on a short trip from Texas to another ICE facility in Louisiana.
Many hours later, the plane landed in Djibouti. The men were held in shipping containers for weeks, shackles on their legs. This past weekend, they were expelled to the violence-plagued nation of South Sudan.
This deception, revealed by an Intercept investigation, highlights the lengths to which the U.S. government will go to further its anti-immigrant agenda and deport people to so-called third countries to which they have no connections.
Lawyers for three of the men said that their clients were told, after resisting deportation to Africa, that they were instead being transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana. ICE then hustled them onto a plane, in the wee hours of the morning, and flew them out of the country without their knowledge or consent. This account was further corroborated by the wife of one of those same men who was told about ICE’s tactics in real time.
“This underscores just how abysmal and reprehensible the government’s treatment of these men has been from the very beginning, and the fact that the government made no genuine attempt to comply with the district court injunction in place prior to shipping them out of the United States,” said Glenda Aldana Madrid, a staff attorney at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project who is representing one of the men, Tuan Thanh Phan.
Aldana Madrid added, “Tuan and the other men had the right to know where they were going, and yet the government did not have the basic decency to do even that before putting them on a plane bound for a country none of them knew, and that is on the brink of civil war.”
The Intercept sent numerous requests to ICE for comment. Spokesperson Miguel Alvarez acknowledged receipt of the questions but did not reply.
While the men were in transit in May, a federal judge intervened. Citing a prior nationwide injunction requiring the administration to give deportees advance notice of their destination and a “meaningful” chance to object if they believed they’d be in danger of harm, the eight men were not flown directly to South Sudan. They were instead imprisoned for weeks at a U.S. military base, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, shackled at the feet in a converted shipping container.
The men had been convicted of violent crimes, many had served lengthy prison sentences, and had “orders of removal,” meaning the government had the legal authority to deport them. But most of the men — who hail from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, South Korea, and Vietnam — have no ties to South Sudan. An eighth man is South Sudanese but left Africa when he was a baby, before the nation of South Sudan even existed.
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that the expulsion to South Sudan could go forward, the latest in a recent spate of decisions that have paved the way for the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime — and have restricted immigrants’ rights to object on the grounds that they might be abused or face death.
“The United States may not deport noncitizens to a country where they are likely to be tortured or killed. International and domestic law guarantee that basic human right,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a bitter dissent to the Thursday decision. “In this case, the Government seeks to nullify it by deporting noncitizens to potentially dangerous countries without notice or the opportunity to assert a fear of torture.”
More than a decade of intermittent political turmoil and outright civil war has left South Sudan politically unstable and ravaged by violence. Recent clashes between armed groups drove more than 165,000 people to flee their homes in three months, according to a June United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report.
The country is subject to a U.N. warning about the potential for full-scale civil war. South Sudan is also under a U.S. State Department “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory and the department advises those who choose to go there to draft a will, establish a proof of life protocol with family members, and leave DNA samples with one’s medical provider.
“After weeks of delays by activist judges that put our law enforcement in danger, ICE deported these 8 barbaric criminals [sic] illegal aliens to South Sudan,” Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Intercept in an email after the Trump administration succeeded in deporting the eight men to South Sudan on Saturday.
Interviews with family members and lawyers of the eight deportees, as well as contemporaneous documents, provide insights into the confusion and deception sowed by ICE before the immigrants were expelled to Africa.
A relative of one of the deportees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect himself and his family member, said the men were bombarded with contradictory information. His family member, now in South Sudan, said the men were told they would be sent to Africa but received conflicting details. “I do not think they gave him enough information about what was going on,” he told The Intercept.
Court documents and emails examined by The Intercept show that one of the eight men, Nyo Myint, an immigrant from Myanmar referred to in the documents as “N.M.” — who has limited proficiency in English — was served a “notice of removal” which said that ICE intended to deport him from a detention center in Port Isabel, Texas, to South Africa, not South Sudan. The certificate shows that the notice was read to Myint in English, without an interpreter, at 10:59 a.m. on May 19 and that Myint refused to sign the document.
Ngoc Phan, the wife of Tuan Thanh Phan, who hails from Vietnam, offered a similar account from contemporaneous conversations with her husband. Ngoc spoke with Tuan by telephone while he, Myint, and others were facing deportation, and she offered a narrative that corroborated the legal documents and accounts by lawyers who spoke with The Intercept.
“Everyone protested because no one from that group was from South Africa. They said, ‘We don’t know anybody there. We’re not from there. We don’t want to go there.’ And no one signed the paperwork that the officers gave them,” said Ngoc, relaying what Tuan told her on May 19.
Tuan Phan and Ahmer Shaikh — another ICE prisoner ultimately separated from the group who spoke to the New York Times — offered nearly identical accounts. Both said that everyone refused to sign the forms. An ICE agent told them something to the effect of, “I’ve got good news for you and bad news for you. The good news is we are not going to deport you to South Africa. The bad news is we are going to deport you guys to South Sudan.” Ngoc Phan told The Intercept that Tuan replied, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me there. I don’t want to go there.”
Documents show that at 5:48 p.m. on May 19, Myint was served another removal notice, which he also refused to sign, that said ICE intended to send him to South Sudan.
Lawyers for Tuan Phan and another of the men, Cuban national Jose Rodriguez, told The Intercept that, following the men’s protests against being sent to Africa, ICE seemingly relented and told them that they would be transferred to another detention facility within the United States. Ngoc Phan said the same.
“The U.S. government deceived these men up to the very last minute,” Ngoc told The Intercept. “Around three or four in the morning on Tuesday the 20th, they gathered this group up, which included my husband. They said ‘We’re going to transfer all of you guys to a detention center in Oakdale, Louisiana, instead.’”
ICE does not have a publicly listed detention center in Oakdale, Louisiana, though the federal prison complex in the town was formerly listed as an ICE facility, and an immigration court still operates on the premises. When ICE announced that Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old citizen of Haiti, had died in ICE custody in Florida this spring, the agency wrote that she was previously held at “Richwood Correctional Center in Oakdale, Louisiana,” though that facility is located in Monroe, two hours away.
Aldana Madrid, of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said that her client told her that he was even given a form to sign. “He said that the men were told about, and they were actually given a piece of paper to sign for, the transfer. Tuan said, ‘I saw the paper and it said Oakdale, Louisiana,’ so I signed it. But he says they were not given a copy of it.”
Aldana Madrid explained that after the men left the Texas facility, the deception continued, according to Tuan: “They were told, ‘Oh, it takes about 10 hours to drive there, but if we fly, it’s faster. So we’re flying.’” But it wasn’t until they were on the plane for more than 45 minutes that Tuan recalls having heard them say something about being sent somewhere else, said Aldana Madrid. A few hours later, the men were told that they would be landing in Ireland to refuel. “Then they were like, ‘Wait, where are we going?’ And they were told Djibouti. Tuan asked, ‘Djibouti, where’s that?’ And ICE was like, ‘In Africa.’ But 45 minutes into the flight, they still thought they were going to Louisiana,” said Aldana Madrid.
Matthew Archambeault, who represents Rodriguez, said his client offered a near-identical account.
“They were given a piece of paper that said they were going to South Africa. According to my client, everyone said, ‘Fuck that! We’re not signing.’ And then they went to their cells,” Archambeault told The Intercept. “He said that maybe two hours later, they called them back and told them, ‘Hey we have good news and bad news. The good news is you’re not going to South Africa. The bad news is you’re going to South Sudan.”
Later, said Archambeault, the men were told: “‘We’re gonna fly you to Oakdale.’” When they were boarding the plane, one of the men apparently voiced concerns that the charter jet was an unlikely choice for the short flight from Texas to Louisiana. Rodriguez told Archambeault that the men eventually realized they had been airborne too long to be heading to Louisiana. When they landed in Ireland to refuel, they knew for certain they had been expelled from the United States.
A third member of the group was also told by an ICE official he would be sent to Louisiana, according to his lawyer who spoke on the condition that neither of their identities would be revealed to protect their privacy. “I can confirm that directly prior to being removed, my client was told that the men were being sent to Louisiana,” the attorney told The Intercept by email.
Experts said that the type of deception perpetrated by ICE was nothing new, that the government frequently failed to act in good faith, and that agents regularly deceived immigrants in the course of their work. Trina Realmuto, a lawyer for the immigrants expelled to South Sudan and executive director at the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said the deception was far from exceptional. “We constantly hear about DHS officers lying to noncitizens about what is happening in their cases and where they are going, or telling them to sign papers based on wrong information,” she told The Intercept. “This has been happening for years.”
The Trump administration deported the men to South Sudan as part of a globe-spanning effort to expel immigrants to so-called third countries in cases where U.S. law bars them from being sent to their home countries, when their home countries will not accept them, or seemingly, as a punitive measure and a means to frighten other immigrants or potential immigrants with the possibility of being expelled to dangerous nations.
Last month, McLaughlin, the ICE spokesperson, claimed that ICE was unable to deport the eight men to their home countries. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that the U.S. government did not inform her government that Mexican national Jesus Munoz Gutierrez was sent to Djibouti. She also did not oppose his repatriation to Mexico.
Experts say that these recent efforts to expel Mexicans to crisis zones like Libya and now South Sudan demonstrate the casual cruelty of the Trump administration.
“I’ve been doing immigration detention work for a very long time. I’ve never in my life seen Mexico refuse to take back one of its nationals, ever,” Anwen Hughes, the senior director of legal strategy for refugee programs at Human Rights First, told The Intercept last month. The Port Isabel detention center, where the men were held before being flown to Africa, is less than 30 miles from the Mexican border. “The U.S. appears to be looking for really implausible destinations to send people. It’s not just punitive, it’s deliberately terrifying and honestly perverse,” said Hughes.
The Trump administration has been employing strong-arm tactics with dozens of smaller, weaker, and economically dependent nations to create a global network of deportee dumping grounds. The administration has explored deals with more than a quarter of the world’s nations to accept so-called third-country nationals — deported persons who are not their citizens.
The negotiations are being conducted in secret, and neither the State Department nor ICE will discuss them. With the green light from the Supreme Court, thousands of immigrants are in danger of being disappeared into this global gulag.
“Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent last month. “That use of discretion is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.”
A prominent academic has criticised the New Zealand coalition government for compromising the country’s traditional commitment to upholding an international rules-based order due to a “desire not to offend” the Trump administration.
Professor Robert Patman, an inaugural sesquicentennial distinguished chair and a specialist in international relations at the University of Otago, has argued in a contributed article to The Spinoff that while distant in geographic terms, “brutal violence in Gaza, the West Bank and Iran marks the latest stage in the unravelling of an international rules-based order on which New Zealand depends for its prosperity and security”.
Dr Patman wrote that New Zealand’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, emphasised partnership and cooperation at home, and, after 1945, helped inspire a New Zealand worldview enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and norms such as multilateralism.
Professor Robert Patman . . . “Even more striking was the government’s silence on President Trump’s proposal to own Gaza with a view to evicting two million Palestinian residents.” Image: University of Otago
“In the wake of Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, the National-led coalition government has in principle emphasised its support for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza and the need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank,” he wrote.
However, Dr Patman said, in practice this New Zealand stance had not translated into firm diplomatic opposition to the Netanyahu government’s quest to control Gaza and annex the West Bank.
“Nor has it been a condemnation of the Trump administration for prioritising its support for Israel’s security goals over international law,” he said.
Foreign minister Winston Peters had described the situation in Gaza as “simply intolerable” but the National-led coalition had little specific to say as the Netanyahu government “resumed its cruel blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza in March and restarted military operations there”.
Silence on Trump’s ‘Gaza ownership’
“Even more striking was the government’s silence on President Trump’s proposal to own Gaza with a view to evicting two million Palestinian residents from the territory and the US-Israeli venture to start the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in late May in a move which sidelined the UN in aid distribution and has led to the killing of more than 600 Palestinians while seeking food aid,” Dr Patman said.
While New Zealand, along with the UK, Australia, Canada and Norway, had imposed sanctions on two far-right Israeli government ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar ben Gvir, in June for “inciting extremist violence” against Palestinians — a move that was criticised by the Trump administration — it was arguably a case of very little very late.
“The Hamas terror attacks on October 7 killed around 1200 Israelis, but the Netanyahu government’s retaliation by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) against Hamas has resulted in the deaths of more than 56,000 Palestinians — nearly 70 percent of whom were women or children — in Gaza.
Over the same period, more than 1000 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank as Israel accelerated its programme of illegal settlements there.
‘Strangely ambivalent’
In addition, the responses of the New Zealand government to “pre-emptive attacks” by Israel (13-25 June) and Trump’s United States (June 22) against Iran to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities were strangely ambivalent.
Despite indications from US intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran had not produced nuclear weapons, Foreign Minister Peters had said New Zealand was not prepared to take a position on that issue.
Confronted with Trump’s “might is right” approach, the National-led coalition faced stark choices, Dr Patman said.
The New Zealand government could continue to fudge fundamental moral and legal issues in the Middle East and risk complicity in the further weakening of an international rules-based order it purportedly supports, “or it can get off the fence, stand up for the country’s values, and insist that respect for international law must be observed in the region and elsewhere without exception”.
The Trump administration succeeded in its quest to deport the eight men it imprisoned on a U.S. military base in Djibouti to violence-plagued South Sudan on Saturday, expanding its globe-spanning effort to expel immigrants to so-called third countries.
“After weeks of delays by activist judges that put our law enforcement in danger, ICE deported these 8 barbaric criminals [sic] illegal aliens to South Sudan,” Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Intercept in an email. The Trump administration reveled in a Thursday 7-2 Supreme Court decision granting its request to expel the men from Camp Lemonnier to the restive East African nation.
Their deportation marked a dramatic win for the Trump administration’s efforts to exile immigrants to countries other than the ones they hail from and which are notorious for violence and human rights violations.
More than a decade of intermittent political turmoil and outright civil war has left South Sudan politically unstable and ravaged by violence. Recent clashes between armed groups drove 165,000 people to flee their homes in three months, according to a June United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report. The country is subject to a U.N. warning about the potential for full-scale civil war and a U.S. State Department “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory.
The Trump administration abdicated the safety and legal fates of the eight men, only one of whom is South Sudanese, to the East African nation. The men were transported to a hotel in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, where they are under government supervision, according to Edmund Yakani, a longtime human rights defender in South Sudan and executive director of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, or CEPO.
Yakani told The Intercept that the men arrived by U.S. military flight on July 5 around 5 a.m. local time. A photo of the men released by the Department of Homeland Security shows them onboard a transport plane, handcuffed and shackled at the feet, surrounded by camouflage-uniformed personnel.
“DHS deported these eight men to South Sudan, one of the most dangerous countries on the planet, without any opportunity to contest their deportations based on their fears of torture or death there. The U.S. State Department advises people to draft a will and to establish a proof of life protocol before traveling there,” Trina Realmuto, a lawyer for the immigrants in the case and executive director at National Immigration Litigation Alliance, told The Intercept.
Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling allowing the transfer added to a recent spate of decisions that have paved the way for the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime — and have restricted immigrants’ rights to object on the grounds that they might be tortured or killed. With Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, the court lifted an order from U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy that had blocked the men’s expulsion to South Sudan.
“The United States may not deport noncitizens to a country where they are likely to be tortured or killed. International and domestic law guarantee that basic human right,” Sotomayor wrote in a bitter dissent. “In this case, the Government seeks to nullify it by deporting noncitizens to potentially dangerous countries without notice or the opportunity to assert a fear of torture.”
All of the men deported to South Sudan had been convicted of serious crimes, and many had finished serving lengthy prison sentences. Most of the men – who hail from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, South Korea, and Vietnam – have no ties to South Sudan. An eighth is South Sudanese but left Africa when he was a baby – and a decade before the nation of South Sudan existed as its own country.
A Justice Department attorney told a federal judge Friday that South Sudan informed the U.S. it would offer the deportees temporary immigration status, but the lawyer could not confirm whether they would be detained on arrival. The Trump administration has said in court filings that South Sudanese officials have offered assurances that the men will not face torture.
Earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked all visas for South Sudanese passport holders, citing the country’s past refusal to accept deported nationals.
Yakani, a lawyer who once investigated atrocities in Darfur for the U.N., said that South Sudan was obligated to ensure that the deportees are not mistreated or tortured.
“We are demanding the governments of South Sudan and the United States be transparent and open on this arrangement in terms of any deal reached between Juba and Washington, D.C.,” he told The Intercept. Yakani stressed that the government should immediately ensure that the deportees are put in touch with their families and lawyers.
Sources in South Sudan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of government retribution, said that the government was planning to reach out to the countries of origin of deportees who wished to return to their homelands.
The successful expulsion of the eight men to South Sudan was the latest in the Trump administration’s pursuits to expel immigrants to so-called third countries when U.S. law bars them from being sent to their home countries, when their home countries will not accept them, or, seemingly, as a punitive measure and a means to frighten other immigrants or potential immigrants with the possibility of being expelled to dangerous nations.
“Make no mistake about it, these deportations were punitive and unconstitutional,” Realmuto said. “Yet the Supreme Court’s procedural ruling — on the shadow docket and devoid of any reasoning — prevented the district court from enforcing its order which had provided basic due process rights.”
Murphy, the District Court judge, had issued a nationwide injunction in a prior case requiring the administration to give deportees advance notice of their destination and a “meaningful” chance to object if they believed they’d be in danger of harm. He intervened in the case of the eight men despite a Supreme Court ruling last month that put his injunction on hold.
On Friday, Murphy said the latest Supreme Court ruling required him to deny claims raised in a last-ditch lawsuit the men filed to prevent their expulsion to South Sudan, deciding that the new suit raised “substantially similar claims” to their previous case. The eleventh-hour lawsuit argued that expulsion to South Sudan would be “impermissibly punitive” under an 1896 Supreme Court precedent that bars deporting immigrants to countries when doing so “inflicts an infamous punishment.”
The Supreme Court’s recent decisions have been a boon to the government’s mass deportation regime.
The administration has already explored deals with more than a quarter of the world’s nations to accept so-called third-country nationals — deported persons who are not their citizens. It has been employing strong-arm tactics with dozens of smaller, weaker, and economically dependent nations to expand its global gulag for expelled immigrants.
The deals are being conducted in secret, and neither the State Department nor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will discuss them. With the green light from the Supreme Court, thousands of immigrants are in danger of being disappeared into this network of deportee dumping grounds.
“Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent last month.
This article includes images of law enforcement violence and medical emergencies.
SInce June 6, federal agents have embarked on a militarized rampage and terror campaign across the greater Los Angeles area.
Pursuing the Trump administration’s daily quota of 3,000 arrests, federal agents have ripped through predominantly Latino cities and neighborhoods. In “roving patrols,” as the government has described them in court filings, agents without warrants have abducted day laborers, street vendors, car wash workers, and others swept up in the government’s dragnet.
Despite the Trump administration’s pledge to target “violent criminals,” the vast majority of those detained do not havecriminal records. That has not stopped the government from deploying violence against those in its path.
Throughout the first month of its focused operation in and around Los Angeles, federal agents regularly used force against unarmed individuals, many of them U.S. citizens.
The Intercept analyzed more than a dozen immigration operations since June 6 involving federal agents from a hodgepodge of agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Marshals Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By reviewing footage and interviewing people who the authorities detained and those who witnessed raids, The Intercept identified several violent patterns.
Agents have aimed firearms and sprayed chemical irritants at onlookers and protesters. They have launched tear gas and flash bang grenades into crowds. They have beaten the people they detain, struck them with batons, and restrained them face down in a prone position, pressing them into the pavement and restricting their abilities to breathe.
Agents often deployed these violent tactics against the targets of immigration raids — people they presumed to be undocumented immigrants. In the majority of cases reviewed for this story, federal agents used force against U.S. citizens who were attempting to document raids or intervene by putting their bodies between the agents and their neighbors.
Legal experts said video evidence shows the government response is disproportionate and a violation of constitutional rights, particularly in cases where bystanders were filming or yelling at agents without intervening.
“There’s a pattern of reacting violently and excessively against people that aren’t interfering or otherwise causing harm to law enforcement,” said attorney Matthew Borden.
“If I say, ‘I don’t like the fact that you’re in my community and you’re kidnapping people or breaking apart families,’ I got a right to say that, and the government can’t suppress that right,” said Borden, who is representing journalists, legal observers, and protesters injured by federal agents in Paramount and across Southern California, in a lawsuit. “Once you do, it’s like Tiananmen Square.”
The Trump administration defends its practices in the Los Angeles area, claiming that federal agents are under attack and that videos analyzed by The Intercept fail to capture key moments. Federal prosecutors are also filing criminal charges against a growing number of protesters who have confronted agents. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said those who attempt to slow ICE operations would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Violent Arrests
Adrian Martinez sat in his car during his lunch break at Walmart. It was June 17, and videos of ICE raids snatching immigrants off the street flooded his social media feeds. On his way to the bank to get some cash for lunch, Martinez saw a janitor from his work sprinting across the parking lot.
The janitor looked terrified. Behind him was a masked man carrying an AR-15-style assault rifle.
The armed man caught up to the janitor, grabbed him, and started “manhandling him like very aggressively for no reason,” Martinez told The Intercept.
Martinez drove up to the altercation. By the time he hopped out of the car, more armed agents had emerged from trucks, including some wearing CBP uniforms. He remembered agents cocking their rifles, which Martinez interpreted as an attempt to intimidate him and the growing group of bystanders who had gathered in the parking lot, filming, yelling, and honking their horns.
“They don’t give me no explanation, they just started attacking me — for sticking up for a poor man, just using my words.”
“What is he doing? He’s a fucking hard worker,” Martinez yelled at agents, according to video recorded by a bystander. Security footage from a nearby business shows Martinez slowly pulling a cart containing a trash can and cleaning supplies, which the janitor had abandoned, in front of a government vehicle. Moments later, an agent approached Martinez, knocked down the trash can, and pushed him to the asphalt.
The bystander video captures a second moment when three armed agents slammed Martinez to the ground. During that scuffle, another agent knocked the bystander’s phone out of his hands. The bystander, Oscar Preciado, said the agent also tried to detain him, but he was able to escape.
According to Preciado, as well as security and bystander video, federal agents initiated physical contact with Martinez.
Video: Oscar Preciado
PICO RIVERA, June 17
LA County
Walmart employee Adrian Martinez, 20, was taken into custody by federal agents after standing up for a janitorial worker targeted in an immigration raid. Martinez suffered a knee contusion, bruises, and scrapes.
Outcome of raid: Two people detained, including Martinez, a U.S. citizen.
During the arrest, the group of agents wrestled Martinez to the ground, twisting his arm and grabbing him by the neck. At one point, an agent drove his hand into Martinez’s neck to force him into a CBP truck.
“I was just confused,” Martinez said. “They don’t give me no explanation, they just started attacking me — for sticking up for a poor man, just using my words.”
He was dragged into custody at around 9 a.m., with his car still running in the parking lot. Martinez, who was born in Huntington Park, insisted to agents that he was a U.S. citizen as they brought him to the basement of a federal building in downtown LA along with detained immigrants.
Martinez’s attorneys and relatives didn’t know where he was for more than 12 hours. His mother said officials at a federal detention facility initially turned her away, saying her son wasn’t there.
“If they’re doing that to him in broad daylight, what are they going to do behind closed doors?”
“So many things were going through my head, like, is he OK? What did they do to him?” Martinez’s mother, Myra Martinez, told The Intercept. “Like, if they’re doing that to him in broad daylight, what are they going to do behind closed doors?”
Martinez was released after four days in detention on $5,000 bond. While detained, he did not receive medical care for his injuries. He was later diagnosed with a knee contusion and placed in a leg brace. He had bruises and scrapes across his body.
Newly appointed U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California Bill Essayli initially accused Martinez in a statement of “punching a Border Patrol agent in the face.” In a statement to The Intercept, a DHS spokesperson said one agent was also punched in the arm. But in court filings, prosecutors seemed to walk back those allegations. Martinez was charged with the lesser felony of “conspiracy to impede” a federal officer, but not of assault.
Attorneys for Martinez with the Miller Law Group called the charge “trumped up” and said it was used “to justify the federal agents’ violent treatment of Adrian.”
“He did nothing to justify being grabbed by the throat by heavily-armed and masked agents and thrown into a Border Patrol vehicle,” the attorneys said.
Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, helped Martinez’s attorneys and relatives locate him. Salas acknowledged that community members have responded to the raids with impassioned resistance, but she said their pushback has been justified. It has often been federal agents who initiate violence, she pointed out, roughing up their targets — at times tackling people to the ground or shattering car windows to yank them out.
CHIRLA helped file a July 2 class-action lawsuit against DHS on behalf of individuals detained by immigration authorities. The lawsuit challenges the legality of southern California’s recent immigration sweeps, which, according to the complaint, “look less like lawful arrests and more like brazen, midday kidnappings.”
The complaint lists numerous examples of people being “chased and pushed to the ground, sometimes even beaten, and then taken away” after they try to avoid agents. Such violence, Salas said, is what community members are fighting.
“They’re using their bodies, their words to try to stop something, and that’s what they have,” Salas said of protesters objecting to the raids. “They don’t have the guns — let’s keep in mind who actually has the ability to deny a person their liberty or their life.”
On Juneteenth, two days after Martinez’s arrest, federal agents fanned out across LA for an especially aggressive day of raids targeting department store parking lots. Nearly 40 people were detained.
Among them was electrician Arturo Hermosillo, 36, who is a U.S. citizen. He was driving his company van that morning in the Pacoima neighborhood when he saw masked federal agents surrounding a woman lying on the ground near a Lowe’s and Costco, he told The Intercept.
Agents were attempting to detain the woman, a 57-year-old street vendor, when she suffered a heart attack. She was later hospitalized.
Hermosillo recognized her as a fixture in the neighborhood who sells tamales in the same spot every day. He parked his van and began recording. “I wanted to have video of what was happening to this older lady,” Hermosillo said. “She’s a member of the community.”
Within seconds, two agents tapped on his window, ordering him to move his van and leave.
Hermosillo said he was trying to comply with the order but accidentally backed into a white unmarked car behind him. Agents in tactical gear suddenly swarmed his van. Hermosillo opened his door, trying to explain that he wasn’t able to leave and was blocked in. He insisted he wasn’t doing anything illegal.
That’s when three agents tried to rip Hermosillo out of his van. By this point, bystanders began to record the altercation. One woman streamed it live on TikTok. “Let him go, he’s not doing nothing wrong!” she shouted at the agents. “Why do you guys act like animals?”
As Hermosillo clung to his steering wheel, agents pulled on his hair, forcefully yanked his arm, grabbed him by the neck, and punched his arms, the livestream footage shows. He recalled one of the agents pulling him by the necklace and shared photos with The Intercept of a red wound encircling his neck.
“I was holding on because I was scared and they were going to pull me out and just throw me straight on the ground,” Hermosillo said.
Eventually overpowering him, the agents slammed Hermosillo onto the pavement, the video shows. As they placed him in handcuffs, one agent knelt on his back.
Video: Handout
PACOIMA, June 19
Neighborhood in LA
Federal agents detained Arturo Hermosillo, a U.S. citizen, who was recording a raid. Agents pulled him from his car as one agent beat him.
Outcome of raid: Nine people detained in Pacoima and nearby San Fernando, including Hermosillo.
He was detained for hours before being released without charges. The squabble left him with bruises along his arms and neck.
That same day, Job Garcia, a 37-year-old graduate student and part-time delivery worker, was picking up an item at a Home Depot in Hollywood when he spotted immigration agents and started filming.
He followed them as they chased workers around the store’s parking lot. According to a video Garcia posted on his Instagram, he called out “Don’t tell them anything” in Spanish to two workers being detained. He filmed five agents surrounding a day laborer sitting inside his van and caught one of the agents shattering the van’s window on video.
“Are you fucking serious?” Garcia yelled.
Seconds later, several agents wrestled him to the ground and placed him in cuffs.
“You want it, you got it sir, you fucking got it,” one agent yelled as Garcia lay face down on the floor, according to his own recording, obtained and reviewed by The Intercept. “You want to go to jail, fine, you got it.”
Acknowledging that its agents went after Garcia in part for his speech, DHS told The Intercept he was arrested after he “verbally harassed and assaulted a Border Patrol agent.” He was released the following day without charges. On July 2, he filed a claim against DHS, seeking $1 million in damages, alleging he was unlawfully arrested and assaulted.
Garcia said agents had pressed their hands against his neck and their knees against his back while lying on the floor. “I thought, ‘This is probably what George Floyd felt,’” he wrote in a post on Instagram following his release, “and I wondered if this was the end for me because I started to notice a disruption in my breathing.”
Video: Job Garcia
HOLLYWOOD, June 19
Neighborhood in LA
After bystander Job Garcia, a U.S. citizen, recorded federal agents smashing a car window to detain a worker outside a Home Depot, agents tackled him and took him into custody.
Outcome of raid: At least 30 people detained, including Garcia.
Attorney Andrew G. Celli Jr., who reviewed the footage for The Intercept, expressed concern about the violent tactics shown in the videos, including the use of the prone position. Celli said the technique killed one of his clients in an earlier case.
“It can be deadly,” said Celli, a founding partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel who has represented victims in law enforcement brutality cases in New York. “Ordinary police are trained that it’s an extremely dangerous thing to do — it does happen in some circumstances, but it’s a massive red flag.”
Even so, federal agents have commonly used the technique when detaining individuals during immigration operations throughout the Los Angeles area. They used the arrest tactic on June 24, when four federal agents piled on top of another U.S. citizen, Luis Hipolito, after he confronted them while they apprehended a street vendor in downtown L.A.
One bystander video shows Hipolito yelling at an agent, then suddenly turning his head away and swinging his arm. His family told the Los Angeles Times that he had been sprayed by a chemical agent and raised his arm in reaction.
Other bystander videos capture subsequent moments. One shows an agent kneeling on Hipolito’s back, while another grabbed his neck, and a third agent restrained his arms. A fourth agent pinned his lower body, later punching one of Hipolito’s legs. Agents forced Hipolito into a prone position for more than two and a half minutes.
After they cuffed him and sat him upright, one agent could be seen wiping the sweat from his eyes when Hipolito appeared to have a seizure. While he convulsed, agents once again placed him face down on his stomach. First aid guidance advises a seizing person should be placed on their side.
Video: Rabbi Mordechai Teller
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, June 24
Federal agents piled atop Luis Hipolito, a U.S. citizen, in a prone position. After agents sat him up, Hipolito began to convulse. He had confronted agents who were attempting to detain street vendors. The government accused him of assaulting an agent.
Outcome of raid: Two people detained, both U.S. citizens; targets of the raid escaped.
Hipolito was detained and released on $10,000 bond and was charged with assaulting a federal officer.
Agents arrested another U.S. citizen, Andrea Guadalupe Velez, during the incident, accusing her of impeding an agent. Velez, her attorneys, and witnesses dispute the claim. After her release several days later, she said she was targeted for being brown and Latina.
DHS said that the incident involving Hipolito and Velez “kept ICE law enforcement from arresting the target illegal alien of their operation.”
Days later, on June 29 in the Orange County city of Santa Ana, bystanders recorded Border Patrol agents violently detaining two men. A small crowd gathered at an intersection to demand medical treatment for a detainee who was being led by agents into an unmarked sedan. “Why would you have to make him bleed?” one man asked them.
The government identified the target of the raid as Apoloniol Arreola-Solario, who officials said had run a quarter-mile before agents apprehended him. DHS told The Intercept “a mob” had thrown rocks at agents and that one individual tried to prevent Arreola-Solario’s capture and another kicked the doors of an agent’s vehicle.
Bystander video shows a different scene, in which observers can be seen objecting to the raid but not initiating contact with agents. Rather, several agents are shown charging toward one of the protesters, grabbing him by the neck and slamming him headfirst into the pavement. “He’s a U.S. citizen,” an onlooker said.
Another agent struck a separate victim with a baton several times in the legs while a third agent tackled him to the ground. The baton-wielding agent struck the man once more while he lay on the ground. “Why are you hitting him?” screamed a woman. “He’s already down.”
Brandishing Firearms
Though federal agents involved in the Los Angeles campaign seldom wear uniforms or badges, most carry service weapons. The Intercept documented four instances in a three-day span, from June 18 to June 21, in which agents appeared to aim their firearms at unarmed civilians — in some cases at point-blank range. An additional case arose the following week.
This tally is likely an undercount, as it only includes incidents made public in bystander recordings. An earlier instance on June 11 that was not caught on video took place at a church in Downey, where a pastor reported that a masked agent pointed an assault rifle at her when she approached a federal vehicle. The previous day, a day laborer and green-card holder at a Home Depot in Santa Ana said an agent had held him at gunpoint while asking for his ID.
“Pulling a weapon on an unarmed civilian in a crowded situation is just extremely dangerous.”
While there have been no known cases of agents firing live ammunition during the ongoing operations in Southern California, legal experts and advocates for immigrants fear it’s only a matter of time.
The use-of-force policy for immigration officers says an officer “shall always use the minimum non-deadly force necessary to accomplish the officer’s mission” and should only escalate to greater uses of force if “such higher level of force is warranted by the actions, apparent intentions, and apparent capabilities of the suspect, prisoner, or assailant.”
In the videos showing federal agents pointing guns at civilians, Celli and Borden said the individuals or crowds there presented no legitimate threats to necessitate such an escalation.
“The idea of pointing a firearm at somebody for taking down a license plate number, or refusing to back up in a crowd situation — that’s just not appropriate,” Celli said. “Pulling a weapon on an unarmed civilian in a crowded situation is just extremely dangerous.”
“If you’re already amped up on adrenaline,” Borden added, “it doesn’t take very much to pull the trigger.”
DHS did not comment specifically on cases in which agents brandished firearms on unarmed individuals.
On June 17, hours after agents grabbed six workers who were waiting at a bus stop in front of a Winchell’s donut shop in Pasadena, a crowd of concerned community members gathered at the site of the abduction. Video of the raid from the donut shop had been circulating online.
Among those who heard of the June 17 raid was Yoselyn Chicas, who was born and raised in Pasadena. While out running errands, she drove by the donut shop to scout whether agents were still in the area. She figured her friends and family, many of whom are in the U.S. without documentation, could use some peace of mind.
She saw a black Dodge Challenger with tinted windows exiting a nearby parking lot, pursued by a small group of people yelling, “You’re a coward — how dare you!” The Challenger pulled in front of Chicas’s car. She grabbed her phone and hit record.
Video: Yoselyn Chicas
PASADENA, June 18
LA County
When neighbors arrived at the scene of an earlier immigration raid at a donut shop, a federal agent aimed his firearm at an unarmed man attempting to document his license plate number.
Outcome of raid: Six people detained.
At a red light, a member of the crowd ran into the street to snap a photo of the Challenger’s license plate number, which had been obscured by a plastic covering — a possible violation of California traffic law. That’s when the driver emerged from the Challenger, dressed in a gray shirt, brown pants, green hat, and a black tactical vest that read “Police.”
He quickly pulled out what appeared to be a handgun and aimed it at the man, who retreated toward the sidewalk, a video Chicas recorded shows. Unseen in the video was the crowd of protesters — a group of local pastors, attorneys, immigrant rights advocates, and concerned neighbors — gathered down-range from the agent.
“I thought for that moment that the young man was going to get killed,” said Salas, who was among the crowd. She and others had been there as a part of the Los Angeles Raids Rapid Response Network, a coalition of volunteers to protect immigrants and document raids. “We all saw it — in that instant it just felt like the time froze.”
Chicas said she feared for the man’s life but also for her own. A mother of young children, she began to anticipate the worst-case scenario if she were shot. Still she kept filming.
“I was like, regardless, it’s going to be on my phone as evidence, when my husband gets my phone he’ll see it — they’ll be able to send it out and there would be proof that there was no probable cause for him to react in such a dramatic way,” Chicas told The Intercept. “I was scared.”
After several seconds, the agent holstered his weapon, got back into his car, and drove off into oncoming traffic, running a red light at the busy intersection with his emergency lights on.
Two days later, in Santa Ana, a bystander driving past a market saw four masked federal agents detaining a group of men.
When the onlooker rolled down their window and began to record video, one of the masked agents raised a handgun and pointed it at them, footage shared with The Intercept shows. “You better get out of here,” another agent yelled. The bystander yelled back, “Why?” continuing to record, later saying to themself, “¿Qué están llorando?” – “What are they crying about?”
Handout
SANTA ANA, June 19
Orange County
A passerby began recording when they saw agents detaining two men outside a market. One agent pointed a gun at the car. Another agent warned: “You better get out of here.”
Outcome of raid: Two people detained.
Also in Santa Ana, on June 21, federal agents chased a landscaper, Narciso Barranco, across traffic at an intersection with guns drawn, according to video of the incident. As the agents made chase, one pointed his handgun, holding it sideways, at a bystander’s vehicle to halt it from turning into the intersection.
A separate video reviewed by The Intercept showed seven agents surrounding Barranco as he lay face down in a prone position on the asphalt. One agent repeatedly punched Barranco as two others held him down. After they stood him up, another agent pressed a baton against Barranco’s throat to force him into a gray SUV.
The video spread widely, drawing widespread condemnation after his children — reportedly current and former U.S. Marines — spoke out against their father’s detention.
ICE officials claimed Barranco had assaulted agents with a weed whacker, which contradicts bystander video of the incident. Footage shows Barranco tilting the weed whacker to shield himself from an agent spraying him with a chemical irritant.
Video: SantaAnaProblems
SANTA ANA, June 21
Orange County
Federal agents beat Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and father of three, while pinning him down. Agents also brandished firearms at bystanders and sprayed a chemical substance.
Outcome of raid: One person detained.
DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that agents used “the minimum amount of force necessary” during this arrest.
That same day, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westlake, federal agents raided a Home Depot. The store had been the target of the larger June 6 raid in which federal agents abducted dozens of day laborers. Since then, organizers with the LA Tenants Union–Koreatown worked shifts outside the shop to deter raids and spread awareness of immigrants’ rights.
When they saw federal agents return on June 21, volunteers and concerned neighbors sprung to action: recording the raid, getting names of two workers who were being detained, and attempting to block the federal vehicles from leaving the area.
A federal agent wearing a tactical vest, with a black neck gaiter pulled over his mouth and nose, aimed his handgun at point-blank range at two teenage girls who agents were attempting to detain, according to video shared with The Intercept.
Video: Handout
WESTLAKE, June 21
Neighborhood in LA
While a small crowd of community members recorded and confronted an immigration raid outside a Home Depot, a federal agent aimed a firearm at them. Another sprayed a chemical substance.
Outcome of raid: Two people detained.
The girls managed to escape when one of the agents’ SUVs began rolling forward, according to witnesses. Video from the scene suggests the driver had forgotten to place the vehicle in park.
Agents continued the practice of brandishing firearms on June 27 in nearby Historic Filipinotown, where one pointed a firearm at a motorist in a red pickup truck, threatening, “Don’t fucking move — I’ll fucking shoot you,” before lowering his gun and letting the motorist drive away.
Gas, Grenades, and Explosives
After community members protested a raid at a car wash in the southeast LA County cities of Bell and Maywood on June 20, the Trump administration claimed its agents “were violently targeted during lawful operations,” posting photos of trucks with broken windows on X.
Missing from the post was any acknowledgment that federal agents had deployed tear gas in Bell and flash bang grenades in Maywood on crowds that had gathered to protest or film immigration operations. Over the last month, such tactics have become a common method to clear the way for immigration operations.
Agents fired tear gas at about half a dozen people in Pico Rivera, in the same shopping plaza where Martinez was detained; at bystanders in Ladera Heights on June 22, after detaining a vendor who clung to a tree to try and avoid arrest; and at bystanders in downtown LA after nabbing a fruit seller on June 27.
On June 27, in perhaps the greatest show of force by federal agents in the present terror campaign, federal agents used an explosive device to blow open the front door of a home in Huntington Park while a mother and her baby slept inside. Ring camera footage published by NBC LA showedthe explosion and at least eight Border Patrol agents in tactical gear storming the house with rifles pointed forward. Agents also reportedly used a drone to clear the house.
They were attempting to arrest a man suspected of rear-ending a federal vehicle during an immigration operation in Bell the previous week. The man wasn’t home during the raid but later turned himself in. He faces a charge of destroying government property.
During a separate arrest tied to an immigration raid on June 11, Homeland Security agents in unmarked trucks rammed into a white BMW at an intersection in the LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights, according to security camera footage from a nearby business. Christian Damian Cerno-Camacho, his wife, and their young child were in the car.
Cerno-Camacho was arrested on suspicion of punching a federal agent at a June 7 protest in Paramount against Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents who were preparing to conduct an immigration raid.
After the agents hit his car, Cerno-Camacho surrendered as agents drew their guns on the family. With guns aimed at the car, they also deployed tear gas.
Video: DHS on X
BOYLE HEIGHTS, June 11
Neighborhood in LA
To detain Christian Damien Cerno-Camacho, agents struck his car, fired tear gas at it, and drew their guns. Inside the vehicle were his wife and young child. Prosecutors accused Cerno-Camacho of punching an agent days earlier while protesting an immigration operation.
Outcome of raid: One person detained.
“Hunting Us Like Animals”
These militarized attacks have left residents of predominantly Latino cities and county areas in south and southeast LA County — such as Huntington Park, Pico Rivera, Bellflower, or Pico Union — feeling like their communities are being invaded by an occupying force, said Salas, the head of CHIRLA. She described the raids as “adrenaline-filled” and “war-like” operations.
Salas said the agents “have a mindset, a kind of war mentality, where we’re the enemy and they’re bringing this on at all costs.”
Many Latino immigrants in Los Angeles fled armed conflict, whether the Guatemalan government’s U.S.-backed genocide of its Indigenous population, the civil war in El Salvador of the 1980s and 1990s, or cartel and state violence in Mexico. The recent military-style raids, Salas said, have proved re-traumatizing for many.
She often hears the phrase “Nos están cazando como animales,” or “They are hunting us like animals.”
Trump has described anti-ICE protesters in LA who wave flags of other countries at protests as “animals” and has also referred to them as “a foreign enemy,” vowing a crackdown against dissent.
Borden said such rhetoric from Trump, along with his government’s deportation quotas, are emboldening agents to act with less regard for the safety of those who object to their operations.
Both Borden and Celli said the violence deployed by federal agents against those who oppose the immigration raids are signs of agents’ lack of training and experience.
Former Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Gil Kerlikowske, who served in the Obama administration, came to similar conclusions in a recent court filing. He said that Department of Homeland Security agents should be able to protect the public without violating the rights of those recording or observing an incident, “even in the heat of a volatile protest.”
“Any difficulties to federal authorities arise from lack of training and experience working in dense urban environments,” Kerlikowske wrote in a declaration to support the journalists and protesters’ lawsuit against DHS, “and lack of leadership that is experienced in urban civil disturbances/unrest.”
The consequences could prove deadly.
Even as the mainstream news cycle has moved on from daily coverage of LA’s immigration raids, the government’s tactics of warrantless arrests, racial profiling, and violence remain a daily occurrence throughout the region.
Still, sustained resistance from a coalition of groups and grassroots activists continues. They keep responding to raids, documenting what they see, and protesting the deportation operations.
Legal advocates are also continuing to defend immigrants in the July 2 class-action lawsuit against DHS. The lawsuit requests an injunction that would halt warrantless arrests throughout much of Southern California, require agents to identify themselves while making arrests, ensure due process rights, and guarantee those detained have access to attorneys.
A federal judge in California’s Central Valley granted a similar injunction in April after farmworkers sued the government. Legal advocates in Southern California hope for a similar remedy.
Mentioned within the complaint was the raid at the Pico Rivera Walmart, during which agents detained Martinez. Many of the conditions alleged by plaintiffs — including Jason Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen forcefully detained in Montebello by Border Patrol agents during an immigration sweep — closely mirror Martinez’s case.
In the days since his release, Martinez has been waking up in the middle of the night, he told The Intercept. He said he is still struggling to process the arrest and the conditions he faced afterward.
On their drive downtown inside a Border Patrol van, Martinez heard agents taunting the janitor they targeted. “We wouldn’t have got this man if he wouldn’t have ran — it was his dumb-ass fault,” the agents said, as Martinez recalled.
The janitor felt guilty that Martinez was also detained. Martinez said he tried to reassure the man in broken Spanish. The janitor started to cry, sharing that he has an 18-month-old daughter and that he is her main source of financial support.
While inside the federal holding facility downtown, Martinez said he and others stood in line for hours waiting to be processed. Martinez was barefoot, having lost his shoes while detained. He struggled to walk with his bloodied and injured knee.
A pile of detainees’ personal belongings sat out of reach of the shackled men; cellphones rang nonstop. Martinez assumed it was likely their families trying in vain to reach them.
Martinez, a U.S. citizen, said he was placed in a cell by himself. The other men were crammed into what he described as a cage, with two skinny benches, a single bathroom, and wet floors. As agents continued to fill the cell, it became cramped to the point where some were forced to stand, he said.
Many still wore their work clothes. Some wore Crocs or sandals and seemed like they had been taken from their homes. Everyone’s hands and ankles were shackled; several individuals were held in upper-body restraints with their arms crossed over their chests.
“They had these people in conditions that was worse than animals,” Martinez said.
At the June 20 hearing for Martinez’s release, his mother, other family members, friends, and his girlfriend packed the downtown LA federal courtroom. U.S. Marshals led nine people, shackled at the hands and feet, into the courtroom. With his head held high but his face sullen, Martinez entered last. He appeared to wear the same black T-shirt and dark jeans he had on when he was detained. His face lit up when he noticed his family, and he gave a smile and slight wave from the defendant’s table. After the judge ordered his release, his relative commented on how it was hard to see him shackled.
While Martinez is confident his physical injuries will heal and that he will receive the support he’ll need to process the trauma, he worries about how his case is hurting his family.
Martinez lives with his mother, father, aunt, and four sisters in Huntington Park. He said the case has been causing a lot of stress at home. After he got out, Walmart sent him a letter announcing his termination for apparent workplace violence. Martinez had hoped the job would help support his family as they saved to buy a home. Keeping a job is also among the terms of his release.
“I just want everything to go back to normal,” Martinez said.
This article includes images of law enforcement violence and medical emergencies.
SInce June 6, federal agents have embarked on a militarized rampage and terror campaign across the greater Los Angeles area.
Pursuing the Trump administration’s daily quota of 3,000 arrests, federal agents have ripped through predominantly Latino cities and neighborhoods. In “roving patrols,” as the government has described them in court filings, agents without warrants have abducted day laborers, street vendors, car wash workers, and others swept up in the government’s dragnet.
Despite the Trump administration’s pledge to target “violent criminals,” the vast majority of those detained do not havecriminal records. That has not stopped the government from deploying violence against those in its path.
Throughout the first month of its focused operation in and around Los Angeles, federal agents regularly used force against unarmed individuals, many of them U.S. citizens.
The Intercept analyzed more than a dozen immigration operations since June 6 involving federal agents from a hodgepodge of agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Marshals Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By reviewing footage and interviewing people who the authorities detained and those who witnessed raids, The Intercept identified several violent patterns.
Agents have aimed firearms and sprayed chemical irritants at onlookers and protesters. They have launched tear gas and flash bang grenades into crowds. They have beaten the people they detain, struck them with batons, and restrained them face down in a prone position, pressing them into the pavement and restricting their abilities to breathe.
Agents often deployed these violent tactics against the targets of immigration raids — people they presumed to be undocumented immigrants. In the majority of cases reviewed for this story, federal agents used force against U.S. citizens who were attempting to document raids or intervene by putting their bodies between the agents and their neighbors.
Legal experts said video evidence shows the government response is disproportionate and a violation of constitutional rights, particularly in cases where bystanders were filming or yelling at agents without intervening.
“There’s a pattern of reacting violently and excessively against people that aren’t interfering or otherwise causing harm to law enforcement,” said attorney Matthew Borden.
“If I say, ‘I don’t like the fact that you’re in my community and you’re kidnapping people or breaking apart families,’ I got a right to say that, and the government can’t suppress that right,” said Borden, who is representing journalists, legal observers, and protesters injured by federal agents in Paramount and across Southern California, in a lawsuit. “Once you do, it’s like Tiananmen Square.”
The Trump administration defends its practices in the Los Angeles area, claiming that federal agents are under attack and that videos analyzed by The Intercept fail to capture key moments. Federal prosecutors are also filing criminal charges against a growing number of protesters who have confronted agents. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said those who attempt to slow ICE operations would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Violent Arrests
Adrian Martinez sat in his car during his lunch break at Walmart. It was June 17, and videos of ICE raids snatching immigrants off the street flooded his social media feeds. On his way to the bank to get some cash for lunch, Martinez saw a janitor from his work sprinting across the parking lot.
The janitor looked terrified. Behind him was a masked man carrying an AR-15-style assault rifle.
The armed man caught up to the janitor, grabbed him, and started “manhandling him like very aggressively for no reason,” Martinez told The Intercept.
Martinez drove up to the altercation. By the time he hopped out of the car, more armed agents had emerged from trucks, including some wearing CBP uniforms. He remembered agents cocking their rifles, which Martinez interpreted as an attempt to intimidate him and the growing group of bystanders who had gathered in the parking lot, filming, yelling, and honking their horns.
“They don’t give me no explanation, they just started attacking me — for sticking up for a poor man, just using my words.”
“What is he doing? He’s a fucking hard worker,” Martinez yelled at agents, according to video recorded by a bystander. Security footage from a nearby business shows Martinez slowly pulling a cart containing a trash can and cleaning supplies, which the janitor had abandoned, in front of a government vehicle. Moments later, an agent approached Martinez, knocked down the trash can, and pushed him to the asphalt.
The bystander video captures a second moment when three armed agents slammed Martinez to the ground. During that scuffle, another agent knocked the bystander’s phone out of his hands. The bystander, Oscar Preciado, said the agent also tried to detain him, but he was able to escape.
According to Preciado, as well as security and bystander video, federal agents initiated physical contact with Martinez.
Video: Oscar Preciado
PICO RIVERA, June 17
LA County
Walmart employee Adrian Martinez, 20, was taken into custody by federal agents after standing up for a janitorial worker targeted in an immigration raid. Martinez suffered a knee contusion, bruises, and scrapes.
Outcome of raid: Two people detained, including Martinez, a U.S. citizen.
During the arrest, the group of agents wrestled Martinez to the ground, twisting his arm and grabbing him by the neck. At one point, an agent drove his hand into Martinez’s neck to force him into a CBP truck.
“I was just confused,” Martinez said. “They don’t give me no explanation, they just started attacking me — for sticking up for a poor man, just using my words.”
He was dragged into custody at around 9 a.m., with his car still running in the parking lot. Martinez, who was born in Huntington Park, insisted to agents that he was a U.S. citizen as they brought him to the basement of a federal building in downtown LA along with detained immigrants.
Martinez’s attorneys and relatives didn’t know where he was for more than 12 hours. His mother said officials at a federal detention facility initially turned her away, saying her son wasn’t there.
“If they’re doing that to him in broad daylight, what are they going to do behind closed doors?”
“So many things were going through my head, like, is he OK? What did they do to him?” Martinez’s mother, Myra Martinez, told The Intercept. “Like, if they’re doing that to him in broad daylight, what are they going to do behind closed doors?”
Martinez was released after four days in detention on $5,000 bond. While detained, he did not receive medical care for his injuries. He was later diagnosed with a knee contusion and placed in a leg brace. He had bruises and scrapes across his body.
Newly appointed U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California Bill Essayli initially accused Martinez in a statement of “punching a Border Patrol agent in the face.” In a statement to The Intercept, a DHS spokesperson said one agent was also punched in the arm. But in court filings, prosecutors seemed to walk back those allegations. Martinez was charged with the lesser felony of “conspiracy to impede” a federal officer, but not of assault.
Attorneys for Martinez with the Miller Law Group called the charge “trumped up” and said it was used “to justify the federal agents’ violent treatment of Adrian.”
“He did nothing to justify being grabbed by the throat by heavily-armed and masked agents and thrown into a Border Patrol vehicle,” the attorneys said.
Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, helped Martinez’s attorneys and relatives locate him. Salas acknowledged that community members have responded to the raids with impassioned resistance, but she said their pushback has been justified. It has often been federal agents who initiate violence, she pointed out, roughing up their targets — at times tackling people to the ground or shattering car windows to yank them out.
CHIRLA helped file a July 2 class-action lawsuit against DHS on behalf of individuals detained by immigration authorities. The lawsuit challenges the legality of southern California’s recent immigration sweeps, which, according to the complaint, “look less like lawful arrests and more like brazen, midday kidnappings.”
The complaint lists numerous examples of people being “chased and pushed to the ground, sometimes even beaten, and then taken away” after they try to avoid agents. Such violence, Salas said, is what community members are fighting.
“They’re using their bodies, their words to try to stop something, and that’s what they have,” Salas said of protesters objecting to the raids. “They don’t have the guns — let’s keep in mind who actually has the ability to deny a person their liberty or their life.”
On Juneteenth, two days after Martinez’s arrest, federal agents fanned out across LA for an especially aggressive day of raids targeting department store parking lots. Nearly 40 people were detained.
Among them was electrician Arturo Hermosillo, 36, who is a U.S. citizen. He was driving his company van that morning in the Pacoima neighborhood when he saw masked federal agents surrounding a woman lying on the ground near a Lowe’s and Costco, he told The Intercept.
Agents were attempting to detain the woman, a 57-year-old street vendor, when she suffered a heart attack. She was later hospitalized.
Hermosillo recognized her as a fixture in the neighborhood who sells tamales in the same spot every day. He parked his van and began recording. “I wanted to have video of what was happening to this older lady,” Hermosillo said. “She’s a member of the community.”
Within seconds, two agents tapped on his window, ordering him to move his van and leave.
Hermosillo said he was trying to comply with the order but accidentally backed into a white unmarked car behind him. Agents in tactical gear suddenly swarmed his van. Hermosillo opened his door, trying to explain that he wasn’t able to leave and was blocked in. He insisted he wasn’t doing anything illegal.
That’s when three agents tried to rip Hermosillo out of his van. By this point, bystanders began to record the altercation. One woman streamed it live on TikTok. “Let him go, he’s not doing nothing wrong!” she shouted at the agents. “Why do you guys act like animals?”
As Hermosillo clung to his steering wheel, agents pulled on his hair, forcefully yanked his arm, grabbed him by the neck, and punched his arms, the livestream footage shows. He recalled one of the agents pulling him by the necklace and shared photos with The Intercept of a red wound encircling his neck.
“I was holding on because I was scared and they were going to pull me out and just throw me straight on the ground,” Hermosillo said.
Eventually overpowering him, the agents slammed Hermosillo onto the pavement, the video shows. As they placed him in handcuffs, one agent knelt on his back.
Video: Handout
PACOIMA, June 19
Neighborhood in LA
Federal agents detained Arturo Hermosillo, a U.S. citizen, who was recording a raid. Agents pulled him from his car as one agent beat him.
Outcome of raid: Nine people detained in Pacoima and nearby San Fernando, including Hermosillo.
He was detained for hours before being released without charges. The squabble left him with bruises along his arms and neck.
That same day, Job Garcia, a 37-year-old graduate student and part-time delivery worker, was picking up an item at a Home Depot in Hollywood when he spotted immigration agents and started filming.
He followed them as they chased workers around the store’s parking lot. According to a video Garcia posted on his Instagram, he called out “Don’t tell them anything” in Spanish to two workers being detained. He filmed five agents surrounding a day laborer sitting inside his van and caught one of the agents shattering the van’s window on video.
“Are you fucking serious?” Garcia yelled.
Seconds later, several agents wrestled him to the ground and placed him in cuffs.
“You want it, you got it sir, you fucking got it,” one agent yelled as Garcia lay face down on the floor, according to his own recording, obtained and reviewed by The Intercept. “You want to go to jail, fine, you got it.”
Acknowledging that its agents went after Garcia in part for his speech, DHS told The Intercept he was arrested after he “verbally harassed and assaulted a Border Patrol agent.” He was released the following day without charges. On July 2, with representation from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he filed a claim against DHS seeking $1 million in damages, alleging he was unlawfully arrested and assaulted.
Garcia said agents had pressed their hands against his neck and their knees against his back while lying on the floor. “I thought, ‘This is probably what George Floyd felt,’” he wrote in a post on Instagram following his release, “and I wondered if this was the end for me because I started to notice a disruption in my breathing.”
Video: Job Garcia
HOLLYWOOD, June 19
Neighborhood in LA
After bystander Job Garcia, a U.S. citizen, recorded federal agents smashing a car window to detain a worker outside a Home Depot, agents tackled him and took him into custody.
Outcome of raid: At least 30 people detained, including Garcia.
Attorney Andrew G. Celli Jr., who reviewed the footage for The Intercept, expressed concern about the violent tactics shown in the videos, including the use of the prone position. Celli said the technique killed one of his clients in an earlier case.
“It can be deadly,” said Celli, a founding partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel who has represented victims in law enforcement brutality cases in New York. “Ordinary police are trained that it’s an extremely dangerous thing to do — it does happen in some circumstances, but it’s a massive red flag.”
Even so, federal agents have commonly used the technique when detaining individuals during immigration operations throughout the Los Angeles area. They used the arrest tactic on June 24, when four federal agents piled on top of another U.S. citizen, Luis Hipolito, after he confronted them while they apprehended a street vendor in downtown L.A.
One bystander video shows Hipolito yelling at an agent, then suddenly turning his head away and swinging his arm. His family told the Los Angeles Times that he had been sprayed by a chemical agent and raised his arm in reaction.
Other bystander videos capture subsequent moments. One shows an agent kneeling on Hipolito’s back, while another grabbed his neck, and a third agent restrained his arms. A fourth agent pinned his lower body, later punching one of Hipolito’s legs. Agents forced Hipolito into a prone position for more than two and a half minutes.
After they cuffed him and sat him upright, one agent could be seen wiping the sweat from his eyes when Hipolito appeared to have a seizure. While he convulsed, agents once again placed him face down on his stomach. First aid guidance advises a seizing person should be placed on their side.
Video: Rabbi Mordechai Teller
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, June 24
Federal agents piled atop Luis Hipolito, a U.S. citizen, in a prone position. After agents sat him up, Hipolito began to convulse. He had confronted agents who were attempting to detain street vendors. The government accused him of assaulting an agent.
Outcome of raid: Two people detained, both U.S. citizens; targets of the raid escaped.
Hipolito was detained and released on $10,000 bond and was charged with assaulting a federal officer.
Agents arrested another U.S. citizen, Andrea Guadalupe Velez, during the incident, accusing her of impeding an agent. Velez, her attorneys, and witnesses dispute the claim. After her release several days later, she said she was targeted for being brown and Latina.
DHS said that the incident involving Hipolito and Velez “kept ICE law enforcement from arresting the target illegal alien of their operation.”
Days later, on June 29 in the Orange County city of Santa Ana, bystanders recorded Border Patrol agents violently detaining two men. A small crowd gathered at an intersection to demand medical treatment for a detainee who was being led by agents into an unmarked sedan. “Why would you have to make him bleed?” one man asked them.
The government identified the target of the raid as Apoloniol Arreola-Solario, who officials said had run a quarter-mile before agents apprehended him. DHS told The Intercept “a mob” had thrown rocks at agents and that one individual tried to prevent Arreola-Solario’s capture and another kicked the doors of an agent’s vehicle.
Bystander video shows a different scene, in which observers can be seen objecting to the raid but not initiating contact with agents. Rather, several agents are shown charging toward one of the protesters, grabbing him by the neck and slamming him headfirst into the pavement. “He’s a U.S. citizen,” an onlooker said.
Another agent struck a separate victim with a baton several times in the legs while a third agent tackled him to the ground. The baton-wielding agent struck the man once more while he lay on the ground. “Why are you hitting him?” screamed a woman. “He’s already down.”
Brandishing Firearms
Though federal agents involved in the Los Angeles campaign seldom wear uniforms or badges, most carry service weapons. The Intercept documented four instances in a three-day span, from June 18 to June 21, in which agents appeared to aim their firearms at unarmed civilians — in some cases at point-blank range. An additional case arose the following week.
This tally is likely an undercount, as it only includes incidents made public in bystander recordings. An earlier instance on June 11 that was not caught on video took place at a church in Downey, where a pastor reported that a masked agent pointed an assault rifle at her when she approached a federal vehicle. The previous day, a day laborer and green-card holder at a Home Depot in Santa Ana said an agent had held him at gunpoint while asking for his ID.
“Pulling a weapon on an unarmed civilian in a crowded situation is just extremely dangerous.”
While there have been no known cases of agents firing live ammunition during the ongoing operations in Southern California, legal experts and advocates for immigrants fear it’s only a matter of time.
The use-of-force policy for immigration officers says an officer “shall always use the minimum non-deadly force necessary to accomplish the officer’s mission” and should only escalate to greater uses of force if “such higher level of force is warranted by the actions, apparent intentions, and apparent capabilities of the suspect, prisoner, or assailant.”
In the videos showing federal agents pointing guns at civilians, Celli and Borden said the individuals or crowds there presented no legitimate threats to necessitate such an escalation.
“The idea of pointing a firearm at somebody for taking down a license plate number, or refusing to back up in a crowd situation — that’s just not appropriate,” Celli said. “Pulling a weapon on an unarmed civilian in a crowded situation is just extremely dangerous.”
“If you’re already amped up on adrenaline,” Borden added, “it doesn’t take very much to pull the trigger.”
DHS did not comment specifically on cases in which agents brandished firearms on unarmed individuals.
On June 17, hours after agents grabbed six workers who were waiting at a bus stop in front of a Winchell’s donut shop in Pasadena, a crowd of concerned community members gathered at the site of the abduction. Video of the raid from the donut shop had been circulating online.
Among those who heard of the June 17 raid was Yoselyne Chicas, who was born and raised in Pasadena. While out running errands, she drove by the donut shop to scout whether agents were still in the area. She figured her friends and family, many of whom are in the U.S. without documentation, could use some peace of mind.
She saw a black Dodge Challenger with tinted windows exiting a nearby parking lot, pursued by a small group of people yelling, “You’re a coward — how dare you!” The Challenger pulled in front of Chicas’s car. She grabbed her phone and hit record.
Video: Yoselyne Chicas
PASADENA, June 18
LA County
When neighbors arrived at the scene of an earlier immigration raid at a donut shop, a federal agent aimed his firearm at an unarmed man attempting to document his license plate number.
Outcome of raid: Six people detained.
At a red light, a member of the crowd ran into the street to snap a photo of the Challenger’s license plate number, which had been obscured by a plastic covering — a possible violation of California traffic law. That’s when the driver emerged from the Challenger, dressed in a gray shirt, brown pants, green hat, and a black tactical vest that read “Police.”
He quickly pulled out what appeared to be a handgun and aimed it at the man, who retreated toward the sidewalk, a video Chicas recorded shows. Unseen in the video was the crowd of protesters — a group of local pastors, attorneys, immigrant rights advocates, and concerned neighbors — gathered down-range from the agent.
“I thought for that moment that the young man was going to get killed,” said Salas, who was among the crowd. She and others had been there as a part of the Los Angeles Raids Rapid Response Network, a coalition of volunteers to protect immigrants and document raids. “We all saw it — in that instant it just felt like the time froze.”
Chicas said she feared for the man’s life but also for her own. A mother of young children, she began to anticipate the worst-case scenario if she were shot. Still she kept filming.
“I was like, regardless, it’s going to be on my phone as evidence, when my husband gets my phone he’ll see it — they’ll be able to send it out and there would be proof that there was no probable cause for him to react in such a dramatic way,” Chicas told The Intercept. “I was scared.”
After several seconds, the agent holstered his weapon, got back into his car, and drove off into oncoming traffic, running a red light at the busy intersection with his emergency lights on.
Two days later, in Santa Ana, a bystander driving past a market saw four masked federal agents detaining a group of men.
When the onlooker rolled down their window and began to record video, one of the masked agents raised a handgun and pointed it at them, footage shared with The Intercept shows. “You better get out of here,” another agent yelled. The bystander yelled back, “Why?” continuing to record, later saying to themself, “¿Qué están llorando?” – “What are they crying about?”
Handout
SANTA ANA, June 19
Orange County
A passerby began recording when they saw agents detaining two men outside a market. One agent pointed a gun at the car. Another agent warned: “You better get out of here.”
Outcome of raid: Two people detained.
Also in Santa Ana, on June 21, federal agents chased a landscaper, Narciso Barranco, across traffic at an intersection with guns drawn, according to video of the incident. As the agents made chase, one pointed his handgun, holding it sideways, at a bystander’s vehicle to halt it from turning into the intersection.
A separate video reviewed by The Intercept showed seven agents surrounding Barranco as he lay face down in a prone position on the asphalt. One agent repeatedly punched Barranco as two others held him down. After they stood him up, another agent pressed a baton against Barranco’s throat to force him into a gray SUV.
The video spread widely, drawing widespread condemnation after his children — reportedly current and former U.S. Marines — spoke out against their father’s detention.
ICE officials claimed Barranco had assaulted agents with a weed whacker, which contradicts bystander video of the incident. Footage shows Barranco tilting the weed whacker to shield himself from an agent spraying him with a chemical irritant.
Video: SantaAnaProblems
SANTA ANA, June 21
Orange County
Federal agents beat Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and father of three, while pinning him down. Agents also brandished firearms at bystanders and sprayed a chemical substance.
Outcome of raid: One person detained.
DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that agents used “the minimum amount of force necessary” during this arrest.
That same day, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westlake, federal agents raided a Home Depot. The store had been the target of the larger June 6 raid in which federal agents abducted dozens of day laborers. Since then, organizers with the LA Tenants Union–Koreatown worked shifts outside the shop to deter raids and spread awareness of immigrants’ rights.
When they saw federal agents return on June 21, volunteers and concerned neighbors sprung to action: recording the raid, getting names of two workers who were being detained, and attempting to block the federal vehicles from leaving the area.
A federal agent wearing a tactical vest, with a black neck gaiter pulled over his mouth and nose, aimed his handgun at point-blank range at two teenage girls who agents were attempting to detain, according to video shared with The Intercept.
Video: Handout
WESTLAKE, June 21
Neighborhood in LA
While a small crowd of community members recorded and confronted an immigration raid outside a Home Depot, a federal agent aimed a firearm at them. Another sprayed a chemical substance.
Outcome of raid: Two people detained.
The girls managed to escape when one of the agents’ SUVs began rolling forward, according to witnesses. Video from the scene suggests the driver had forgotten to place the vehicle in park.
Agents continued the practice of brandishing firearms on June 27 in nearby Historic Filipinotown, where one pointed a firearm at a motorist in a red pickup truck, threatening, “Don’t fucking move — I’ll fucking shoot you,” before lowering his gun and letting the motorist drive away.
Gas, Grenades, and Explosives
After community members protested a raid at a car wash in the southeast LA County cities of Bell and Maywood on June 20, the Trump administration claimed its agents “were violently targeted during lawful operations,” posting photos of trucks with broken windows on X.
Missing from the post was any acknowledgment that federal agents had deployed tear gas in Bell and flash bang grenades in Maywood on crowds that had gathered to protest or film immigration operations. Over the last month, such tactics have become a common method to clear the way for immigration operations.
Agents fired tear gas at about half a dozen people in Pico Rivera, in the same shopping plaza where Martinez was detained; at bystanders in Ladera Heights on June 22, after detaining a vendor who clung to a tree to try and avoid arrest; and at bystanders in downtown LA after nabbing a fruit seller on June 27.
On June 27, in perhaps the greatest show of force by federal agents in the present terror campaign, federal agents used an explosive device to blow open the front door of a home in Huntington Park while a mother and her baby slept inside. Ring camera footage published by NBC LA showedthe explosion and at least eight Border Patrol agents in tactical gear storming the house with rifles pointed forward. Agents also reportedly used a drone to clear the house.
They were attempting to arrest a man suspected of rear-ending a federal vehicle during an immigration operation in Bell the previous week. The man wasn’t home during the raid but later turned himself in. He faces a charge of destroying government property.
During a separate arrest tied to an immigration raid on June 11, Homeland Security agents in unmarked trucks rammed into a white BMW at an intersection in the LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights, according to security camera footage from a nearby business. Christian Damian Cerno-Camacho, his wife, and their young child were in the car.
Cerno-Camacho was arrested on suspicion of punching a federal agent at a June 7 protest in Paramount against Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents who were preparing to conduct an immigration raid.
After the agents hit his car, Cerno-Camacho surrendered as agents drew their guns on the family. With guns aimed at the car, they also deployed tear gas.
Video: DHS on X
BOYLE HEIGHTS, June 11
Neighborhood in LA
To detain Christian Damien Cerno-Camacho, agents struck his car, fired tear gas at it, and drew their guns. Inside the vehicle were his wife and young child. Prosecutors accused Cerno-Camacho of punching an agent days earlier while protesting an immigration operation.
Outcome of raid: One person detained.
“Hunting Us Like Animals”
These militarized attacks have left residents of predominantly Latino cities and county areas in south and southeast LA County — such as Huntington Park, Pico Rivera, Bellflower, or Pico Union — feeling like their communities are being invaded by an occupying force, said Salas, the head of CHIRLA. She described the raids as “adrenaline-filled” and “war-like” operations.
Salas said the agents “have a mindset, a kind of war mentality, where we’re the enemy and they’re bringing this on at all costs.”
Many Latino immigrants in Los Angeles fled armed conflict, whether the Guatemalan government’s U.S.-backed genocide of its Indigenous population, the civil war in El Salvador of the 1980s and 1990s, or cartel and state violence in Mexico. The recent military-style raids, Salas said, have proved re-traumatizing for many.
She often hears the phrase “Nos están cazando como animales,” or “They are hunting us like animals.”
Trump has described anti-ICE protesters in LA who wave flags of other countries at protests as “animals” and has also referred to them as “a foreign enemy,” vowing a crackdown against dissent.
Borden said such rhetoric from Trump, along with his government’s deportation quotas, are emboldening agents to act with less regard for the safety of those who object to their operations.
Both Borden and Celli said the violence deployed by federal agents against those who oppose the immigration raids are signs of agents’ lack of training and experience.
Former Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Gil Kerlikowske, who served in the Obama administration, came to similar conclusions in a recent court filing. He said that Department of Homeland Security agents should be able to protect the public without violating the rights of those recording or observing an incident, “even in the heat of a volatile protest.”
“Any difficulties to federal authorities arise from lack of training and experience working in dense urban environments,” Kerlikowske wrote in a declaration to support the journalists and protesters’ lawsuit against DHS, “and lack of leadership that is experienced in urban civil disturbances/unrest.”
The consequences could prove deadly.
Even as the mainstream news cycle has moved on from daily coverage of LA’s immigration raids, the government’s tactics of warrantless arrests, racial profiling, and violence remain a daily occurrence throughout the region.
Still, sustained resistance from a coalition of groups and grassroots activists continues. They keep responding to raids, documenting what they see, and protesting the deportation operations.
Legal advocates are also continuing to defend immigrants in the July 2 class-action lawsuit against DHS. The lawsuit requests an injunction that would halt warrantless arrests throughout much of Southern California, require agents to identify themselves while making arrests, ensure due process rights, and guarantee those detained have access to attorneys.
A federal judge in California’s Central Valley granted a similar injunction in April after farmworkers sued the government. Legal advocates in Southern California hope for a similar remedy.
Mentioned within the complaint was the raid at the Pico Rivera Walmart, during which agents detained Martinez. Many of the conditions alleged by plaintiffs — including Jason Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen forcefully detained in Montebello by Border Patrol agents during an immigration sweep — closely mirror Martinez’s case.
In the days since his release, Martinez has been waking up in the middle of the night, he told The Intercept. He said he is still struggling to process the arrest and the conditions he faced afterward.
On their drive downtown inside a Border Patrol van, Martinez heard agents taunting the janitor they targeted. “We wouldn’t have got this man if he wouldn’t have ran — it was his dumb-ass fault,” the agents said, as Martinez recalled.
The janitor felt guilty that Martinez was also detained. Martinez said he tried to reassure the man in broken Spanish. The janitor started to cry, sharing that he has an 18-month-old daughter and that he is her main source of financial support.
While inside the federal holding facility downtown, Martinez said he and others stood in line for hours waiting to be processed. Martinez was barefoot, having lost his shoes while detained. He struggled to walk with his bloodied and injured knee.
A pile of detainees’ personal belongings sat out of reach of the shackled men; cellphones rang nonstop. Martinez assumed it was likely their families trying in vain to reach them.
Martinez, a U.S. citizen, said he was placed in a cell by himself. The other men were crammed into what he described as a cage, with two skinny benches, a single bathroom, and wet floors. As agents continued to fill the cell, it became cramped to the point where some were forced to stand, he said.
Many still wore their work clothes. Some wore Crocs or sandals and seemed like they had been taken from their homes. Everyone’s hands and ankles were shackled; several individuals were held in upper-body restraints with their arms crossed over their chests.
“They had these people in conditions that was worse than animals,” Martinez said.
At the June 20 hearing for Martinez’s release, his mother, other family members, friends, and his girlfriend packed the downtown LA federal courtroom. U.S. Marshals led nine people, shackled at the hands and feet, into the courtroom. With his head held high but his face sullen, Martinez entered last. He appeared to wear the same black T-shirt and dark jeans he had on when he was detained. His face lit up when he noticed his family, and he gave a smile and slight wave from the defendant’s table. After the judge ordered his release, his relative commented on how it was hard to see him shackled.
While Martinez is confident his physical injuries will heal and that he will receive the support he’ll need to process the trauma, he worries about how his case is hurting his family.
Martinez lives with his mother, father, aunt, and four sisters in Huntington Park. He said the case has been causing a lot of stress at home. After he got out, Walmart sent him a letter announcing his termination for apparent workplace violence. Martinez had hoped the job would help support his family as they saved to buy a home. Keeping a job is also among the terms of his release.
“I just want everything to go back to normal,” Martinez said.
Correction: July 7, 2025, 3:00 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Yoselyne Chicas’s first name.
Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Russel Norman today recalled New Zealand’s heyday as a Pacific nuclear free champion in the 1980s, and challenged the country to again become a leading voice for “peace and justice”, this time for the Palestinian people.
He told the weekly Palestinian solidarity rally in Auckland’s central Te Komititanga Square that it was time for New Zealand to take action and recognise the state of Palestine and impose sanctions on Israel over its Gaza atrocities.
“From 1946 to 1996, over 300 nuclear weapons were exploded across the Pacific and consistently the New Zealand government spoke out against it,” he said.
“It took cases to the International Court of Justice, supported by Australia and Fiji, against the nuclear testing across the Pacific.
“Aotearoa New Zealand was a voice for peace, it was a voice for justice, and when the French government bombed the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior here and killed Fernando Pereira, it spoke out and took action against France.”
New Zealand will this week be commemorating the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 and the killing of Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira.
Dawn vigil on Greenpeace III
Greenpeace plans a dawn vigil on board their current flagship Rainbow Warrior III at Halsey Wharf.
He spoke about the Gaza war crimes, saying it was time for New Zealand to take serious action to help end this 20 months of settler colonial genocide.
“There are millions of people [around the world] who are trying to end this colonial occupation of Palestinian land,” Norman said.
“And millions of people who are trying to stop people simply standing to get food who are hungry who are being shelled and killed by the Israeli military simply for the ‘crime’ of being born in the land that Israel wants to occupy.”
Rocket Lab . . . a target for protests this week against the Gaza genocide. Image: David Robie/APR
Norman’s message echoed an open letter that he wrote to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters earlier this week criticising the government for its “ongoing failure … to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel”.
He cited the recent UN Human Rights Office report that said the killing of hundreds of Palestinians by the Israeli military while trying to fetch food from the controversial new “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” aid hubs was a ‘likely war crime”.
“Israel’s ongoing blockade of aid to Gaza has placed over 2 million people on the precipice of famine. Malnutrition and starvation are rife,” he said.
Israel ‘weaponising aid’
“Israel is weaponising aid, using starvation as a tool of genocide and is now shooting at civilians trying to access the scraps of aid that are available.”
He said this was “catastrophic”, quoting Luxon’s own words, and the human suffering was “unacceptable”.
Labour MP for Te Atatu and disarmament spokesperson Phil Twyford also spoke at the rally and march today, saying the Labour Party was calling for sanctions and accountability.
He condemned the failure to hold “the people who have been enabling the genocide in Gaza”.
“It’s been going on for too long. Not just the last [20 months], but actually the last 77 years.
“And it is time the Western world snapped out of the spell that the Zionists have had on the Western imagination — at least on the political classes, government MPs, the policy makers in Western countries, who for so long have enabled, have stayed quiet in the face of the US who have armed and funded the genocide”
For the Palestinian solidarity movement in New Zealand it has been a big week with four politicians — including Prime Minister Luxon — and two business leaders, the chief executives of Rocket Lab and Rakon, who have been referred by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation over allegations of complicity with the Israeli war crimes.
This unprecedented legal development has been largely ignored by the mainstream media.
On Friday, protesters picketed a Rocket Lab manufacturing site in Warkworth, the head office in Mount Wellington and the Māhia peninsula where satellites are launched.
Harvard Divinity School refused to publish this year’s commencement speech after one of its speakers went off-script to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza, as The Intercept reported last month. Now, The Intercept is publishing recent Divinity School graduate Zehra Imam’s part of the speech for the first time.
The suppression of the speech came as Harvard University received public praise for refusing to abide with demands from the Trump administration in its stated crusade against antisemitism at the nation’s universities, which the administration has used to justify a crackdown on speech advocating for Palestinian rights. Earlier this week, Trump again threatened to cut Harvard’s federal funding — this time, all of it — after the administration found that the school had violated the Civil Rights Act and tolerated antisemitism on campus.
The school had “been in some cases deliberately indifferent, and in others has been a willful participant in anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism argued in a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber on Monday. Harvard said it disagreed with the administration’s findings and took allegations of antisemitism on campus seriously.
It was the latest development in a monthslong, multiagency battle between President Donald Trump and Harvard over his sweeping demands for changes at the school, including an end to all practices designed to address diversity and equity, censorship of its curriculum, and punishment of pro-Palestine student protesters. The school has been hailed for its proclaimed resistance to these efforts and for its lawsuit against the Trump administration over the president’s order to bar would-be international students, which a judge indefinitelyblocked earlier this week.
In private, however, Harvard has quietly capitulated to Trump’s threats. Students and staff at the Divinity School who spoke to The Intercept connected the school’s refusal to publish the commencement speech to its efforts to dismantle a program that offered a trip to the West Bank and coursework on Israel and Palestine, among other topics. While the U.S. government and much of the mainstream media fixates on Harvard’s handling of antisemitism, findings from a concurrent investigation into anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian bias at the school have received far less attention. In January, Harvard settled a lawsuit alleging discrimination by the school against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.
Harvard declined to publish the video of Imam’s speech due to “security concerns,” as The Intercept previously reported, and made a password-protected version temporarily available to users with Harvard logins. Students and staff at the Divinity School called the decision unusual, noting that past speeches had been made public. Several raised concerns that the school was forsaking its pledges to address anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias on campus in the name of fighting antisemitism.
Imam told The Intercept that her goal was to shift attention to unlivable conditions that Palestinian people continue to suffer in Gaza, and said it was the responsibility of Divinity School students studying religion and the world not to look away. Despite Harvard’s decision not to publish its video of Imam’s speech, clips quickly circulated online and on social media. The Intercept has chosen to publish the video and full transcript of her speech, which discusses centuries-old Islamic history alongside the contemporary experiences of Palestinian students and children.
“There are no safe zones left in Gaza after 600 days and 77 years of genocide,” Imam said in her commencement speech in May. “I center these students with urgent desperation because time is running out — no meaningful aid has entered Gaza since March 2, and this is on our account. I center Palestine today not just because of its scale of atrocity but because of our complicity in it.”
Imam’s speech is below.
Bismillah ir rahman ir raheem — in the name of God the most beneficent the most merciful
Who are the people who accompany you when you find yourself in the wilderness? Who are the people who hold you accountable when you have wronged someone? Who are the people who remind you of your worth and give you the courage to try again? And who are the people who sit with you as we witness the moral injuries of our time? From Somerville and Cambridge to Palestine, Congo, Kashmir, Arakan, Armenia, Sudan and beyond.
For me, it is my students. For me, it is my grandmother.
When I was a child, during the holy month of Muharram, my grandmother would lead me by the hand to gatherings that would become a gift for me in moments of moral chaos, teaching me what it means to grieve extreme loss and how to stand with those who long for justice, even if you find yourself standing alone on the sand dunes of a final destination called Karbala.
On 10 October, 680 CE, in that place called Karbala, there was a family that refused to be ruled by a tyrant. Imam Hussain, grandson of Prophet Muhammad, and his family did not submit to a political power because his conduct was unjust and unethical. For this, 72 members of the Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) family were martyred in battle by an army of thousands.
And yet, even in facing these odds, Imam Hussain gave water to his enemies.
Moved by this act of humanity, Hurr, the commander of the army on the opposing side, sought out Imam Hussein that night.
Imam Hussein rose to greet him, saying, “I had been waiting for you to arrive.”
And Hurr, whose name means freedom, switched sides.
A full accounting of the Battle of Karbala is this: Seventy-two lives lost. But one soul gained.
Who are the people we are giving water to? Who are the people we are withholding water from?
Last year, I had the privilege and honor of offering a class called “Poetry of the Camps” to students in besieged Gaza. We came together to write poetry as fires raged across the north of Gaza, ignited by an onslaught of Israeli airstrikes. In the wilderness of their genocide, working with these students was the only thing that got me out of bed because it was one small way I could grieve their extreme loss and stand with each of them as we continue to fight for their freedom and justice.
One of them, Hend, is a medical student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. Like us, Hend loves learning. “I was raised to love books,” she wrote, “I never thought I would have to feed them to a fire so I could have a meagre meal. Genocide has pushed us to do things we never imagined in our darkest nightmares.”
This week, I witnessed a 6-year-old Palestinian girl named Ward — a flower amongst the flames — run to save herself after Israel bombed every family member she knew at a school serving as a shelter.
Earlier this month, as Pakistan faced airstrikes from Israeli-made drones, it was Esraa from Gaza who checked in with me about my family’s safety. When I thanked her, she said, “Living through hardships and suffering doesn’t mean that we can underestimate other people’s suffering. I wish you safety.”
There are no safe zones left in Gaza after 600 days and 77 years of genocide.
I center these students with urgent desperation because time is running out — no meaningful aid has entered Gaza since March 2, and this is on our account. I center Palestine today not just because of its scale of atrocity but because of our complicity in it.
Class of 2025, Palestine is waiting for you to arrive. And you must be courageous enough to rise to the call because Palestine will keep showing up in your living rooms until you are ready to meet its gaze.
Here, I must acknowledge that, together in the wilderness, we have witnessed the risks that have come with speaking up for this very genocide to be far-reaching. Yet no matter how charged with punishments the scroll, again and again, we witness too the enormous hearts, unwavering courage, and profound wisdom of students like Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and countless others who are in this very audience with us today, such as Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, our friend and classmate who continues to show up not just for Palestine but for each of us by extending to us the water we need in our most vulnerable moments.
Together, we must refuse to be ruled by the tyrants of our time because our liberations are intertwined.
We gather now to take our second census.
The three of us stand before you not because it was easy to do this together but because it was absolutely vital in a world that has given us chasms so wide no bridge seems to want to meet us along the path. We chose to do this anyway and carve our own path by not lying to one another on the journey. These moments when we dream together in the wilderness are when we absolutely need each other. An honest reckoning is what can prepare us for those dreams of humanity that will endure.
My final poetry session with students in Gaza was on freedom. I asked them: What would the first day of freedom look like? How would it feel on a sensory level? What colors would the day bear; who would they embrace; what scents would come alive on this day of liberation; what tastes would be fulfilled? I leave us with a response from my student and Palestinian writer Duha Hasan’s dream of freedom:
I had a dream
I went back home
Slept on my bed
Felt warmth again
I had a dream
I went to college
Nagged all day
How hectic it was
I had a dream
I wanted to live
I had a dream
I had my favourite meal
I had a dream
My ears forgot the war’s sounds
shouting, bombardment, mother’s sobs, and losses
I had a dream
My eyes forgot the blood, the loss, the patience
Obligatory patience
My nose forgot the smoke smell, the deaths, the corpse rotten
Author David Robie and Little Island Press are about to publish next week a 40th anniversary edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, a first-hand account of the relocation of the Rongelap people by Greenpeace’s flagship Rainbow Warrior in 1985.
Dr Robie joined what turned out to be the ill-fated voyage of the Rainbow Warrior from Hawai’i across the Pacific, with its first stop in the Marshall Islands and the momentous evacuation of Rongelap Atoll.
After completing the evacuation of the 320 people of Rongelap from their unsafe nuclear test-affected home islands to Mejatto Island in Kwajalein Atoll, the Rainbow Warrior headed south via Kiribati and Vanuatu.
After a stop in New Zealand, it was scheduled to head to the French nuclear testing zone at Moruroa in French Polynesia to protest the then-ongoing atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by France for decades.
But French secret agents attached bombs to the hull of the Rainbow Warrior while it was tied up at a pier in Auckland. The bombs mortally damaged the Warrior and killed Greenpeace photographer Fernando Peirera, preventing the vessel from continuing its Pacific voyage.
The new edition of Eyes of Fire will be launched on July 10 in New Zealand.
“This edition has a small change of title, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, and has an extra 30 pages, with a new prologue by former Prime Minister Helen Clark,” Dr Robie said in an email to the Journal.
“The core of the book is similar to earlier editions, but bookended by a lot of new material: Helen’s Prologue, Bunny McDiarmid’s updated Preface and a long Postscript 2025 by me with a lot more photographs, some in colour.”
Dr Robie added: “I hope this edition is doing justice to our humanitarian mission and the Rongelap people that we helped.”
He said the new edition is published by a small publisher that specialises in Pacific Island books, often in Pacific languages, Little Island Press.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has called on countries to cut off all trade and financial ties with Israel — including a full arms embargo — and withdraw international support for what she termed an “economy of genocide”, reports Al Jazeera.
Albanese made the comments in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday as she presented her latest report, which named dozens of companies she said were involved in supporting Israeli repression and violence towards Palestinians.
“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is apocalyptic,” she said. “Israel is responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history.”
Nearly 57,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the war — now in its 22nd month — began, hundreds of thousands have been displaced multiple times, cities and towns have been razed, hospitals and schools targeted, and 85 percent of the besieged and bombarded enclave is now under Israeli military control, according to the UN.
Al Jazeera’s Federica Marsi reports that Albanese’s latest document names 48 corporate actors, including United States tech giants Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. — Google’s parent company — and Amazon.
“[Israel’s] forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech — providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability — while investors and private and public institutions profit freely,” the report said.
“Companies are no longer merely implicated in occupation — they may be embedded in an economy of genocide,” it said, in a reference to Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.
In an expert opinion last year, Albanese said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel was committing genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The report stated that its findings illustrate “why Israel’s genocide continues”.
“Because it is lucrative for many,” it said.
Francesca Albanese v Israel’s lobby. Video: Al Jazeera
Military procurements Israel’s procurement of F-35 fighter jets is part of the world’s largest arms procurement programme, relying on at least 1600 companies across eight nations. It is led by US-based Lockheed Martin, but F-35 components are constructed globally.
Italian manufacturer Leonardo S.p.A is listed as a main contributor in the military sector, while Japan’s FANUC Corporation provides robotic machinery for weapons production lines.
The tech sector, meanwhile, has enabled the collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, “supporting Israel’s discriminatory permit regime”, the report said.
Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon grant Israel “virtually government-wide access to their cloud and AI technologies”, enhancing its data processing and surveillance capacities.
The US tech company IBM has also been responsible for training military and intelligence personnel, as well as managing the central database of Israel’s Population, Immigration and Borders Authority (PIBA) that stores the biometric data of Palestinians, the report said.
It found US software platform Palantir Technologies expanded its support to the Israeli military since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023.
The report said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the company provided automatic predictive policing technology used for automated decision-making in the battlefield, to process data and generate lists of targets including through artificial intelligence systems like “Lavender”, “Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy?”
Companies supporting Israel. Graphic: Al Jazeera/Creative CommonsOther companies identified in the report
The report also lists several companies developing civilian technologies that serve as “dual-use tools” for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.These include Caterpillar, Leonardo-owned Rada Electronic Industries, South Korea’s HD Hyundai and Sweden’s Volvo Group, which provide heavy machinery for home demolitions and the development of illegal settlements in the West Bank.Rental platforms Booking and Airbnb also aid illegal settlements by listing properties and hotel rooms in Israeli-occupied territory.
The report named the US’s Drummond Company and Switzerland’s Glencore as the primary suppliers of coal for electricity to Israel, originating primarily from Colombia.
In the agriculture sector, Chinese Bright Dairy & Food is a majority owner of Tnuva, Israel’s largest food conglomerate, which benefits from land seized from Palestinians in Israel’s illegal outposts.
Netafim, a company providing drip irrigation technology that is 80-percent owned by Mexico’s Orbia Advance Corporation, provides infrastructure to exploit water resources in the occupied West Bank.
Treasury bonds have also played a critical role in funding the ongoing war on Gaza, according to the report, with some of the world’s largest banks, including France’s BNP Paribas and the UK’s Barclays, listed as having stepped in to allow Israel to contain the interest rate premium despite a credit downgrade.
Which are the main investors behind these companies? The report identified US multinational investment companies BlackRock and Vanguard as the main investors behind several listed companies.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is listed as the second largest institutional investor in Palantir (8.6 percent), Microsoft (7.8 percent), Amazon (6.6 percent), Alphabet (6.6 percent) and IBM (8.6 per cent), and the third largest in Lockheed Martin (7.2 percent) and Caterpillar (7.5 percent).
Vanguard, the world’s second-largest asset manager, is the largest institutional investor in Caterpillar (9.8 percent), Chevron (8.9 percent) and Palantir (9.1 percent), and the second largest in Lockheed Martin (9.2 percent) and Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems (2 percent).
New Zealand referrals to the International Criminal Court
Meanwhile, the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa yesterday released a report saying that it was referring two New Zealand businessmen along with four politicians, including Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, to the International Criminal Court for investigation over alleged policies relating to Gaza.
The PSNA accused the six individuals of complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by “assisting Israel’s mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza”.
In a statement, PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said the referral “carefully outlines a case that these six individuals should be investigated” by the Office of the Prosecutor for their knowing contribution to Israel’s crimes in Gaza.
“The 103-page referral document was prepared by a legal team which has been working on the case for many months,” said Minto and Nazzal.
“It is legally robust and will provide the prosecutor of the ICC more than sufficient documentation to begin their investigation.”
Which NZ politicians and business leaders have been referred by the PSNA to the ICC? Image: NZH screenshot APR
I wish U.S. academics would spend less time fantasizing choices between various murders with trollies, or playing games with theories about how greedy robots might do diplomacy, and more time on the impeachment problem.
The United States has an impeachment problem. Impeachment was put into a Constitution that made no mention of, allowance for, or plans to survive the existence of political parties. Presidents are now generally not impeached for any abuse or outrage unless there is one party that doesn’t itself engage in that same abuse or outrage and that party is in the majority in the House. The use of a sex scandal for the impeachment of Bill Clinton was part of the process of destroying the impeachment power, but we’re now probably past sex scandals, for better or worse. We’re reduced to obscure or even fictional offenses, or physical attacks on Congress Members. And even those can be impeachable only when the non-presidential party has a House majority. And even then, the same party would have to have a two-thirds majority in the Senate to get a conviction, since a president’s party’s members will do virtually anything a president commands.
This impeachment problem, unless it is solved, effectively means that a popular nonviolent movement to oust a lawless dictator from the throne on Pennsylvania Avenue must turn out the entire government and start over. The reason the proper course is not the one everyone has been conditioned to mindlessly follow, namely waiting for a distant election, is the same reason impeachment was put into the Constitution: some abuses and outrages should never be tolerated. They do too much massive damage, and they set precedents that are very hard to undo. When Bush-Cheney and then Obama were allowed to finish out and not be removed, warmaking became more acceptable than ever, as did warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment, torture, murder by missile, etc. Criminal thuggery became firmly a policy choice, not an impeachable or prosecutable offense — unless of course you’re not the president. The top impeachable offenses by Bush are in this list of 35. Partway into the Obama presidency, I documented his continuation of 27 of those 35.
The Trump-Biden-Trump era has iced the cake of acceptable and legalistic monstrosities. In 2019, RootsAction put together a list of 25 articles of impeachment for Trump:
One could go on piling up the articles of impeachment or documenting their continuation and expansion. But what’s missing is not the documentation. Here’s a guy who incited violence at his campaign events prior to his first stint on the throne. RootsAction proposed his impeachment for open financial corruption on his first inauguration day. The case was beyond solid, and has been built up ever since. Every weapons shipment for genocide by Biden, Trump, or a harmoniously bipartisan Congress violates numerous U.S. laws. The corruption is gradiose, fantastic, megalithic. The wars, the lies, the kidnappings by masked thugs, the environmental destruction, the promotion of bigotry and hatred — it’s a festival of flagrantly overly justified grounds for removal from office. But what’s missing is the will to make removal happen. On June 24, a huge, happy, bipartisan majority voted not to impeach Trump for making himself a king, just 10 days after huge demonstrations all across the country denouncing Trump for having made himself a king.
I’m afraid of what will happen instead of impeachment. President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And there is nobility in that idea. But there is no such thing as making nonviolent revolution impossible. And the powers of nonviolent action are virtually unknown in U.S. culture. Mildly objecting to mass murdering foreign people is a lot for us. The notion that we might actually learn from the successes of foreign people could be asking too much. And so the vast panoply of options between demanding impeachment and hitting Capitol Police officers with flag poles may be lost on too many of us. It may be lost on us beyond our ability to recognize the absurd insufficiency of choosing between two disastrous candidates every four years. We may realize what a scam this so-called democracy is, but not realize our latent power to take it over without counterproductive violence. That does not bode well.
In an unprecedented legal move in Aotearoa New Zealand, a national Palestine solidarity advocacy group has filed a referral against the prime minister, three other ministers in the coalition government and two business leaders, alleging complicity with Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza.
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has accused the six individuals of complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by “assisting Israel’s mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza”.
The PSNA movement has led 90 consecutive weeks of protest at multiple locations across New Zealand in the country’s biggest humn rights campaign since the war began in October 2023.
In a statement, PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said the referral “carefully outlines a case that these six individuals should be investigated” by the Office of the Prosecutor for their knowing contribution to Israel’s crimes in Gaza.
“The 103-page referral document was prepared by a legal team which has been working on the case for many months,” said Minto and Nazzal.
“It is legally robust and will provide the prosecutor of the ICC more than sufficient documentation to begin their investigation.”
The six people named in the referral documentation are Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, Minister for Defence and Space Judith Collins, Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour, and businessmen Rocket Lab chief executive Sir Peter Beck and Rakon Limited chief executive Dr Sinan Altug.
Spy satellites
According to PSNA, Rocket Lab launches spy satellites from Māhia, which PSNA claims Israel uses go target civilians in Gaza, while Rakon exports military-grade crystal oscillators to the US “to be put in missiles which Israel can deploy in Gaza and elsewhere”.
“This is a grave step which we have not taken lightly,” Minto and Nazzal said.
PSNA co-chair John Minto … “This is a grave step which we have not taken lightly.” Image: PMC
“The government’s ongoing and meaningful support for Israel, despite its horrendous war crimes, is not only egregious to most New Zealanders, but is also criminal conduct under international law.”
The PSNA referral follows an open letter by one of the country’s largest environmental organisations two days ago that called on the government to impose sanctions on Israel amid mounting criticism in New Zealand over war crimes allegations against the state over its 20-month war.
Greenpeace’s sanctions open letter to NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Image: Greenpeace screeshot APR
Greenpeace Aotearoa’s executive director Dr Russel Norman, a former Green Party co-leader, said in an open letter addressed to Prime Minister Luxon and Foreign Minister Peters that he was expressing grave concerns about the “ongoing genocide in Gaza being carried out by Israeli forces, and the ongoing failure of the New Zealand government to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel.”
Norman cited a statement by the UN Human Rights Office last week that “at least 410 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to fetch from controversial new aid hubs in Gaza”.
The office said this was “a likely war crime”.
‘Killing field’
He also cited Ha’aretz, a respected Israeli newspaper, quoting an Israeli soldier describing the Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHC) aid hubs as a “killing field”.
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal . . . “This has brought shame on the whole country.” Image: APR
In March last year, Sydney law firm Birchgrove Legal referred a case to ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan consisting of 92 pages of documented evidence, alleging that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and several other high level local politicians were complicit in the Gaza genocide.
‘Letter of demand’
The New Zealand referral to the ICC followed a “letter of demand” issued to the government last year actions that a “reasonable government” would take to prevent and punish the crime of genocide, and the actions a government should take to avoid criminal complicity with Israel.
The ICC referral document from PSNA against the New Zealand coalition government individuals. Image: PSNA screenshot APR
“For 20 months these political and business leaders have supported Israel to commit crimes which have shocked the human conscience,” Minto and Nazzal said.
“This has brought shame on the whole country.”
It is understood that this is the first time that New Zealand political or business leaders have been referred to the ICC for investigation.
There were no immediate responses. However, a growing number of such cases are being filed around the world.
In July 2024, the UN’s highest global court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion declaring that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Gaza and East Jerusalem, was illegal.
It called on Israel to halt all settlements and withdraw settlers from the territory. The court is also investigating Israel over a case brought by South Africa alleging genocide.
The Catholic Church has strongly warned against Papua New Guinea’s political rhetoric and push to declare the nation a Christian country, saying such a move threatens constitutional freedoms and risks dangerous implications for the country’s future.
Speaking before the Permanent Parliamentary Committee on Communication on Tuesday at Rapopo during the ongoing Regional Parliamentary Inquiry into the Standard and Integrity of Journalism in Papua New Guinea, Archbishop Rochus Tatamai of the Rabaul Archdiocese delivered a firm but thoughtful reflection on the issue, voicing the Catholic Church’s opposition to the notion of a legally enshrined Christian nation.
“When talking about freedom of media and PNG, a Christian country, we must be clear,” said Archbishop Tatamai. “The claim that PNG is a Christian country is not supported by law.
“The Catholic Church disagrees with this. It conflicts with our Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.”
The archbishop’s remarks were part of a broader presentation on the influence of evolving technology on church authority, but he took the opportunity to confront what he called one of the major topics in PNG today.
He raised concerns about the legal, social, and theological implications of attempting to legislate Christianity into state law, stating that politicians were not theologians and risked entering spiritual territory without the understanding to handle it responsibly.
“If we declare PNG a Christian nation,” he asked, “whose version of Christianity are we referring to? We’re not all the same.”
Legal obligation
He warned of a future where attending church could become a legal obligation, not a matter of faith.
“If PNG is supposedly a Christian nation, police could walk into your village and tell you: it’s not just a sin to skip church on Sunday, it’s illegal and get you arrested.’ That’s how dangerous this path could be.”
Archbishop Tatamai also referenced the Chief Justice, who had recently stated that if PNG were truly a Christian nation, then principles like honesty would become enforceable laws: “You should not steal. And if you do, you’re not only sinning you’re breaking the law.”
But the archbishop warned that such a conflation of morality and legality opens up deep conflicts.
“History has shown us the dangers of blurring the line between church and state. Blood has been spilled over this in other parts of the world. Are we ready for that?”
He stressed that the founding fathers of PNG had been wise to embed freedom of religion and conscience into the Constitution, ensuring that the state remained neutral in matters of faith.
“Now, we risk undoing their vision by imposing a national religion,” he said.
Challenged Parliament
The archbishop also challenged Parliament and national leaders to think beyond symbolism.
“Yes, Parliament can pass declarations. Yes, politicians can make the numbers. But have they truly thought through the implications and applications of these decisions?”
He concluded his presentation with a sharp warning against hypocrisy and selective morality under a Christian state:
“You cannot use Christianity as a legal framework and continue with corruption. You cannot justify wrongdoing and expect forgiveness simply because now, in a confessional state, sin becomes crime and crime must have consequences.”
Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.
In July 1985, Australia’s Pacific territory of Norfolk Island (pop. 2188) became the centre of a real life international spy thriller.
Four French agents sailed there on board the Ouvéa, a yacht from Kanaky New Caledonia, after bombing the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, killing Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira.
The Rainbow Warrior was the flagship for a protest flotilla due to travel to Moruroa atoll to challenge French nuclear tests.
Australian police took them into custody on behalf of their New Zealand counterparts but then, bafflingly, allowed them to sail away, never to face justice.
On the 40th anniversary of the bombing (10 July 2025), award-winning journalist Richard Baker goes on an adventure from Paris to the Pacific to get the real story – and ultimately uncover the role that Australia played in the global headline-making affair.
The programme includes an interview with Pacific journalist David Robie, author of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior. David’s article about this episode is published at Declassified Australia here.
Earlier this week, California lawmakers passed among the most sweeping reforms to the state’s environmental regulations in more than half a century. The measures were primarily intended to boost housing construction and urban density in the Golden State, which faces among the most severe housing shortages in the U.S.
Though the move was celebrated by Governor Gavin Newsom as he signed the bills into law, it has exposed tensions between the progressive priorities that motivate Democratic lawmakers. Housing affordability advocates have clashed with those promoting environmental justice, with the former boosting the bills and the latter remaining wary. More broadly, the move exposes divisions between those who want more tools to mitigate climate change and environmentalists who would rather maintain strict limits on what can be built and how.
The reforms target the California Environmental Quality Act, which then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed more than 50 years ago. Known as CEQA, the legislation requires public agencies and decision-makers to evaluate the environmental impact of any project requiring government approval, publicize any effects and mitigate them if feasible.
Supporters say the law has prevented or altered scores of projects that would have been detrimental to the environment or Californians’ quality of life. But CEQA has also become the basis for a regular stream of formal complaints and lawsuits that pile substantial costs and delays onto projects that are ultimately found to have minimal harmful effects — sometimes killing them entirely. In one infamous instance, opponents of student housing near the University of California Berkeley argued that the associated noise would constitute environmental pollution under CEQA, which led to a three-year legal battle that the university only won after it went to the state supreme court. Examples like this have led CEQA, which was once a national symbol of environmental protection, to become vilified as a cause of the state’s chronic housing shortage.
After this week’s reforms, most urban housing projects will now be exempt from the CEQA process. The new legislation also excepts many zoning changes from CEQA, as well as certain nonresidential projects including health clinics, childcare centers and advanced manufacturing facilities, like semiconductor and nanotech plants, if they are sited in areas already zoned for industrial uses. (A related bill also freezes most updates to building efficiency and clean energy standards until 2031, angering climate advocates who otherwise support the push for denser housing.) Governor Newsom used a budgetary process to push long-debated changes into law, with strong bipartisan support.
Some activists welcomed the changes, saying they will lead to denser “infill” housing on vacant or underutilized urban land, slower growth in rents and home prices, and shorter commutes — with the welcome byproduct of fewer planet-warming emissions.
“For those that view climate change as one of the key issues of our time, infill housing is a critical solution,” read one op-ed supporting the measures. Other environmentalists, however, lambasted the changes as environmentally destructive giveaways to developers. After Newsom signed the legislation, the Sierra Club California put out a statement calling the changes “half-baked” measures that “will have destructive consequences for environmental justice communities and endangered species across California.”
At a time when President Donald Trump’s assaults on climate policy and environmental protections have galvanized opposition from the left, what unfolded in California serves as a reminder that, even among Democrats, a divide remains on the extent to which regulation can help — or hurt — the planet. It’s the type of pickle that liberals across the country may increasingly face on issues ranging from zoning to permitting reform for renewable energy projects, which can face costly delays when they encounter procedural hurdles like CEQA. (Indeed, in California, CEQA has been an impediment to not just affordable housing but also solar farms and high-speed rail.)
“How do we make sure the regulations we pass to save the planet don’t harm the planet?” asked Matt Lewis, director of communications for California YIMBY, a housing advocacy organization and proponent of the CEQA reforms. Transportation accounts for the largest portion of California’s carbon footprint, and Lewis argues that denser housing will be key to keeping people closer to their jobs. But, he said, people with a “not in my backyard” attitude have abused CEQA to slow down those beneficial projects. (His organization’s name is a play on this so-called NIMBY disposition, with YIMBY standing for “yes in my backyard.”)
“One of the leading causes of climate pollution is the way we permit or do not permit housing to be built in urban areas,” Lewis said, adding that more urban development could reduce pressure to build on unused land in more sensitive areas. He pointed to other legal backstops, like state clean water and air laws, that can accomplish the environmental protection goals often cited by supporters of the CEQA process. “CEQA isn’t actually the most powerful law to make sure that manufacturing facilities and other industrial facilities protect the environment,” he said.
In short, Lewis believes that any downsides of the new reforms pale in comparison to their benefits for both people and the planet. “Did we fix it perfectly this time? I’m willing to admit, no,” he said, adding that any shortcomings that environmentalists are concerned about could be repaired in future legislative sessions.
But many environmentalists contend that the downsides in the new legislation are too large.
“We put one foot forward but we take another step back,” said Miguel Miguel, director of Sierra Club California, noting his opposition to the nonresidential exemptions. He said that CEQA often acts as a first line of defense that allows community input on development projects. Without it, he argues, community voices will be marginalized. Miguel speaks from personal experience: CEQA helped save the mobile home park where he grew up from being replaced by more expensive apartments.
Kim Delfino, an environmental attorney and consultant who followed the legislation, said that the scope of the reforms expanded from simple support for urban housing development to become “a potpourri of industry and developer desires.” She added that CEQA requires biological surveys that can be the first step to invoking other environmental protections.
“If you never look, you will never know if there are endangered species there,” she said. “We’ve decided to take a head in the sand approach.”
This impasse between environmentalists and housing-focused advocates like Lewis is now decades-old and among the reasons that CEQA reforms — or rollbacks, depending on who you ask — have taken so long to come about. As the fight has drawn out, skepticism has become entrenched.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” California YIMBY’s Lewis said of his optimism that the latest changes can thread the needle between the state’s housing needs and environmental priorities. But, he added, he’d rather defer to elected lawmakers than environmentalists, who have long opposed his housing advocacy. “The environmental movement in California has been fundamentally dishonest about housing,” he charged.
The Sierra Club’s Miguel, for his part, hopes for more cooperation between the competing parties, lest the disagreements poison future legislative efforts. At the end of the day, all parties involved share the same broad goals, if with different levels of emphasis.
“We have to do everything and anything all at once,” he said, referring to climate and environmental policy. “That is fine art.”
A Tongan cybersecurity expert says the country’s health data hack is a “wake-up call” for the whole region.
Siosaia Vaipuna, a former director of Tonga’s cybersecurity agency, spoke to RNZ Pacific in the wake of the June 15 cyberattack on the country’s Health Ministry.
Vaipuna said Tonga and other Pacific nations were vulnerable to data breaches due to the lack of awareness and cybersecurity systems in the region.
“There’s increasing digital connectivity in the region, and we’re sort of . . . the newcomers to the internet,” he said.
“I think the connectivity is moving faster than the online safety awareness activity [and] that makes not just Tonga, but the Pacific more vulnerable and targeted.”
Since the data breach, the Tongan government has said “a small amount” of information from the attack was published online. This included confidential information, it said in a statement.
Reporting on the attack has also attributed the breach to the group Inc Ransomware.
Vaipuna said the group was well-known and had previously focused on targeting organisations in Europe and the US.
New Zealand attack
However, earlier this month, it targeted the Waiwhetū health organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. That attack reportedly included the theft of patient consent forms and education and training data.
“This type of criminal group usually employs a double-extortion tactic,” Vaipuna said.
It could encrypt data and then demand money to decrypt, he said.
“The other ransom is where they are demanding payment so that they don’t release the information that they hold to the public or sell it on to other cybercriminals.”
In the current Tonga cyberattack, media reports say that Inc Ransomware wanted a ransom of US$1 million for the information it accessed. The Tongan government has said it has not paid anything.
Vaipuna said more needed to be done to raise awareness in the region around cybersecurity and online safety systems, particularly among government departments.
“I think this is a wake-up call. The cyberattacks are not just happening in movies or on the news or somewhere else, they are actually happening right on our doorstep and impacting on our people.
Extra vigilance warning
“And the right attention and resources should rightfully be allocated to the organisations and to teams that are tasked with dealing with cybersecurity matters.”
The Tongan government has also warned people to be extra vigilant when online.
It said more information accessed in the cyberattack may be published online, and that may include patient information and medical records.
“Our biggest concern is for vulnerable groups of people who are most acutely impacted by information breaches of this kind,” the government said.
It said that it would contact these people directly.
The country’s ongoing response was also being aided by experts from Australia’s special cyberattack team.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
When advocates and defenders of a nuclear-free Pacific condemned the AUKUS military pact two years ago and warned New Zealand that the agreement would make the world “more dangerous”, a key speaker was Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua.
He was among leading participants at a Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement teachers’ wānanga, which launched a petition against the pact with one of the “elders” among the activists, Hilda Halkyard-Harawira (Te Moana Nui a Kiwa), symbolically adding the first signature.
Speaking about the petition declaration in a ceremony on the steps of the Auckland Museum marking the 10 July 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior, Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua explained that the AUKUS agreement was a military pact between Australia-UK-US that was centred on Canberra’s acquisition of nuclear propelled submarines.
Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua and the NFIP petition has been featured in a new video report by Nik Naidu as part of a “Legends of NFIP” series by Talanoa TV of the Whanau Community Centre and Hub.
In the new weekly political podcast, The Bradbury Group, last night presenter Martyn Bradbury talked with visiting Palestinian journalist Dr Yousef Aljamal.
They assess the current situation in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and what New Zealand should be doing.
As Bradbury, publisher of The Daily Blog, notes, “Fourth Estate public broadcasting is dying — The Bradbury Group will fight back.”
Gaza crisis and Iran tensions. Video: The Bradbury Group/Radio Waatea
Also in last night’s programme was featured a View From A Far Podcast Special Middle East Report with former intelligence analyst Dr Paul Buchanan and international affairs commentator Selwyn Manning on what will happen next in Iran.
Martyn Bradbury talks to Dr Paul Buchanan (left) and Selwyn Manning on the Iran crisis and the future. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Political Panel:
Māori Party president John Tamihere,
NZ Herald columnist Simon Wilson
NZCTU economist Craig Renney
Topics:
– The Legacy of Tarsh Kemp
– New coward punch and first responder assault laws — virtue signalling or meaningful policy?
– Cost of living crisis and the failing economy
The Supreme Court often releases one or two big, splashy environmental decisions each term. Last year it was overruling a decades-old legal precedent called the “Chevron deference,” which allowed courts to defer to the expertise of a federal agency when interpreting ambiguous statutes. The year before that, Sackett v. EPA limited the definition of bodies of water that are protected under the federal Clean Water Act.
This year’s term, which began in October and ended last week, was a bit different. The justices issued a number of decisions related to climate and the environment, but none of them was a “blockbuster,” according to University of Vermont Law and Graduate School emeritus professor Pat Parenteau.
Arguably, the decisions that will have the greatest potential consequences for climate and environmental policy came from cases that weren’t explicitly about the planet at all.
Rather, they were decisions that legitimized the executive branch’s actions to fire personnel and block funding already appropriated by Congress. These actions may have far-reaching effects on federal agencies that work on climate and environmental issues, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, and the Department of Agriculture, which have already been affected by layoffs and funding cuts, as well as early retirement offers intended to get longtime staffers to voluntarily leave their posts.
“What’s being done is irredeemable,” Parenteau added. “The brain drain, the firing of people, the defunding — those are causing really, really long-term damage to the institutional capabilities of the federal government to implement and enforce environmental law.”
Three of the court’s decisions help illustrate what has happened.
Two of them — Trump v. Wilcox and Office of Personnel Management v. American Federation of Government Employees — which came earlier in the session, have made it possible for decisions by President Donald Trump to move forward while they are being litigated in lower courts, reversing orders from federal judges that had temporarily paused them. These decisions have effectively allowed firings without cause at the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, and have stopped six federal agencies from bringing back probationary employees that the Trump administration had fired.
Then last week, on the last day of its term, the Supreme Court issued a sweeping decision in Trump v. CASA that limits the power of the country’s more than 1,000 district court judges to issue nationwide injunctions against presidential orders. Those judges’ injunctions are now supposed to target only the plaintiffs in a given case.
“Trump is the big winner in this decision,” Parenteau said.
One of the the decision’s most immediate consequences is that it will allow Trump’s unconstitutional limits to birthright citizenship to go into effect in July. In theory, it also means that Trump could issue an executive order illegally rolling back some environmental policy, and district courts would have less power to stop it while a legal challenge makes its way through the courts. District court judges can still issue nationwide injunctions against rules from federal agencies, and they can issue nationwide injunctions against executive orders that are challenged by a large number of plaintiffs, as in a class action lawsuit. Circuit court judges’ injunction powers remain unchanged.
In Ohio v. EPA the court decided not to temporarily block an EPA policy requiring fossil fuel-fired power plants to lower their greenhouse gas emissions.
Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA Law, said the court’s decisions affecting funding and personnel have “giant implications.” They raise “huge questions about the balance between the executive branch and Congress, and the executive branch’s ability and authority to simply ignore what Congress has appropriated.”
Kirti Datla, director of strategic legal advocacy for the nonprofit Earthjustice, said this term’s Supreme Court decisions have been “enabling” the Trump administration in its attempts to shrink the size of the government and eliminate institutional expertise. “It’s hard to quantify, but it’s impossible to deny.”
Although the justices didn’t release any landmark environmental decisions this term, the court took up multiple “unusual cases” that showed its continued interest in environmental statutes and administrative actions, according to Datla. For example, in Ohio v. EPA the court decided not to temporarily block an EPA policy requiring power plants to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, and in Diamond Alternative Energy LLC v. EPA it decided to allow oil company plaintiffs to sue the EPA for having allowed California to set its own stricter auto emissions standards than the federal government’s.
The Ohio case was “just a regular decision,” Datla said — ”getting deep into the weeds of the record and ultimately disagreeing with what a lower court had done, which is not usually how the Supreme Court spends its time.” Neither case changed existing law or resulted in a big-picture pronouncement about how to apply or interpret the law. And the Diamond case may become irrelevant anyway, since the Senate recently voted — controversially — to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke California’s auto emissions waiver.
Other notable decisions from the Supreme Court’s term included Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which limited the scope of environmental reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. The court essentially said that such reviews don’t have to look at upstream consequences of a given project — such as oil drilling and refining, for projects like railroads that are only directly associated with transporting these fuels — and that courts should defer to federal agencies when deciding what to include in environmental impact statements.
City and County of San Francisco v. EPA found that some of the EPA’s pollution permits under the Clean Water Act are unenforceable unless the EPA writes out specific steps that water management agencies should take to comply with them. But Datla said this was a “quite narrow case” whose national implications are unclear.
The justices have not yet added any explicitly climate- and environment-related cases to their docket for its next session. But Parenteau, the emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, said he’s nervous that the court will take up a challenge to Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. That decision from 2000 said residents of South Carolina had legal standing to sue an industrial polluter, even without proving they had been harmed in a particular way. They just had to show that the pollution had impacted the “aesthetic and recreational values” of the river they liked to swim in. Overturning the case could make it more difficult for environmental advocates to file similar lawsuits. “The Laidlaw case has me very worried,” Parenteau said.
For Carlson, the UCLA Law professor, a longer-term worry is that the court’s conservative supermajority will eventually overturn the “endangerment finding,” a precedent set in 2009 saying that carbon dioxide and several other greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated by the EPA. “It’s going to get challenged, and it will get challenged up to the Supreme Court,” Carlson said.
Overall, the outlook isn’t good. The executive branch and the Supreme Court “are exhibiting extraordinary hostility to actions on climate change at a time when the planet is burning,” she said. “It’s a pretty depressing story overall.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Dozens of immigrants are detained by ICE agents inside the Federal Plaza courthouse in New York City on June 26, 2025, following their legal proceedings. Photo: Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images
There’s nothing subtle about the Gestapo-style tactics of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Armed gangs of officers, often masked and anonymous, are openly engaged in a white nationalist mission to kidnap many thousands of people — stalking court houses, farms, construction sites, and retail stores, and ripping apart the fabric of communities nationwide.
The Trump administration wants America paying attention to this sickening spectacle of mass deportations: broadcasting ICE raids featuring television personality Dr. Phil; meme-postingchained men sent to a gulag in El Salvador; and sharing Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s various “ICE Barbie” photo ops.
What the Trump administration doesn’t want, however, is for anyone to hold ICE agents accountable. Attempts by the public to keep tabs on ICE are provoking predictable and pathetic responses from the government.
The latest cause of outrage is ICEBlock, an app that lets users share local ICE sightings. On Monday, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons condemned the app and called CNN “reckless and irresponsible” for broadcasting a brief interview with its developer.
“Advertising an app that basically paints a target on federal law enforcement officers’ backs is sickening,” said Lyons. “My officers and agents are already facing a 500% increase in assaults, and going on live television to announce an app that lets anyone zero in on their locations is like inviting violence against them with a national megaphone.”
CNN did not, of course, advertise the app. The network interviewed its developer, Joshua Aaron, because it is newsworthy that 20,000 users, many based in Los Angeles, are looking for ways to share information and keep people safe. Public ICE sightings are just that: public. ICEBlock is just one example of a larger story of autonomous, community efforts nationwide to share such information, be it in large Signal threads or social media alerts. Sharing this information is protected speech and a public service.
The Trump administration has shown its readiness to take extreme measures against efforts to share information about ICE’s troops. In early May, federal agents stormed a home in Irvine, California, in a massive, military-style raid based on suspicions that the residents’ son may have been involved with the placement of posters around Los Angeles that shared information about ICE officers.
ICE watch groups and rapid-response networks have proliferated as a necessary response to Trump’s supercharged deportation agenda. Such efforts are not new but sit in the honorable tradition of the sanctuary movement of the 1980s to protect and shelter refugees, as well as local Copwatch networks, which have existed for over three decades as community efforts against law enforcement violence and impunity.
The agency’s response is itself in line with a storied tradition in U.S. law enforcement and broader efforts to shore up a white supremacist order. Namely, painting the oppressor as the victim and the real victim as the dangerous threat. In his statement about CNN’s ICEBlock segment, Lyons regurgitated the all-too-typical law enforcement claim that “the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day” are endangered when their total impunity is threatened.
The “500% increase in assaults” against ICE officers that Lyons cited has been a statistic repeated ad nauseam by Trump administration officials as grounds for agents covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves as they grab people from the street or tear them from the arms of their neighbors and loved ones. The number remains completely unverified.
Keep in mind, too, that “assault” in this context is a term practically evacuated of meaning. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, said that New York City Comptroller Brad Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer” when he was detained by masked federal agents while accompanying a person out of immigration court in June. The Justice Department charged New Jersey Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver with “assaulting” an ICE officer when the member of Congress attempted to conduct an oversight visit at an ICE detention facility. Both incidents were filmed, and claims that federal officers were assaulted by either politician are nonsense.
Trump administration officials have touted footage on social media purporting to show assaults against ICE officers. What these videos overwhelmingly show are unarmed civilians swarmed by militarized forces. During a workplace raid in Santa Ana, California, for example, three federal agents brutally tackled a man, pinned him to the floor, and repeatedly punched his head and neck in a now viral video. The Department of Homeland Security later posted a video on X of the man holding a weed wacker tool in the air while attempting to move away from a heavily armed, masked agent who was spraying some sort of pepper spray in his direction. “He ASSAULTED federal law enforcement with a WEED WHACKER [sic],” DHS wrote above the video, which showed nothing of the sort.
The abject performance of victimhood is absurd, but it’s also the foundation of our entire border regime and criminal legal system, which rest on treating poor Black and brown people as a constant threat. Calls for accountability have long been met with patently melodramatic and false claims of danger to law enforcement officials in defense of racist policing. Police departments and unions have for decades employed the strategy of “blue flu” strikes to protest even minor calls for reform. Hundreds of police officers in New York famously turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio during a fellow officer’s funeral in 2014, because the mayor had dared to acknowledge he understood the reasons to protest racist police killings. Such is the entrenched culture of expected impunity.
The danger of American immigration policy is faced by immigrants.
Being a well-armed officer carrying out state violence is, however, not even in the top 10 most dangerous professions; roofers, loggers, and garbage collectors all have higher rates of fatal injury than regular police officers. Working as an ICE officer is even less dangerous than being an ordinary cop. Yet the entire mass deportations project relies on the lie that poor immigrants of color are a social danger — a myth bolstered by years of bipartisan policies around “criminal” migrants and anti-immigration discourse. Despite the fact that 65 percent of the 60,000-plus ICE arrests during Trump’s second term have been of immigrants with no criminal convictions, Trump’s servants like Lyons are nonetheless framing ICE targets as “dangerous criminal aliens.”
The danger of American immigration policy is faced by immigrants. As many as 80,000 people have reportedly died trying to cross into the U.S. through the Southern border in the last decade — each a victim of migration deterrence policies. Thirteen people have died in ICE custody in 2025 alone. A 75-year-old Cuban national died in an ICE detention center just last week; he had lived 60 years of his life in the U.S. When asked by a reporter on Monday about the latest death on his watch, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan shrugged. “I’m unaware of that,” he said. “I mean people die in ICE custody, people die in county jail, people die in state prisons.”
It takes the blind conviction of white nationalism, or the no-less-evil pretenses of a cynical propagandist, to claim that it is federal agents, rather than the immigrants they hunt, who are at risk.
So what’s the real reason for the masks? ICE agents, of course, have reasons they’d prefer not to be located or identified. They have no desire to face protesters who mobilize in response to reports of their presence. They wear masks to avoid being held personally responsible for carrying out the regime’s desired acts of cruelty.
Keep in mind that the mask isn’t the core problem but a tool that worsens it. Were ICE agents carrying out the project of whitening America with bare faces and name badges, their activities would be just as fascist. Racist policing and border rule did not begin this year and has never been reliant on law enforcement agents acting in secret.
But ICE’s new tendency to act in anonymous uniformity, without even the possibility for personal responsibility or individual consequences, no doubt helps when carrying out orders that require the extreme dehumanization of others.
If we stick to the liberal parlance of transparency and accountability, there should be nothing radical about public oversight and information-sharing, or protest against unpopular state actions. There should also be nothing radical about protecting vulnerable neighbors from fascist round-ups, either.
Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end.
I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde.
Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933.
It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in the Second World War. German soldiers used food, as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps.
“There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.
This tactic is as old as warfare itself.
Ordered to shoot
The report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Israeli soldiers are ordered to shoot into crowds of Palestinians at aid hubs, with 580 killed and 4,216 wounded, is not a surprise. It is the predictable denouement of the genocide, the inevitable conclusion to a campaign of mass extermination.
Israel, with its targeted assassinations of at least 1400 health care workers, hundreds of United Nations (UN) workers, journalists, police and even poets and academics, its obliteration of multi-story apartment blocks wiping out dozens of families, its shelling of designated “humanitarian zones” where Palestinians huddle under tents, tarps or in the open air, its systematic targeting of UN food distribution centers, bakeries and aid convoys or its sadistic sniper fire that guns down children, long ago illustrated that Palestinians are regarded as vermin worthy only of annihilation.
The blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, is reducing Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they must crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they are stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This is by intent.
Yousef al-Ajouri, 40, explained to Middle East Eye his nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The hubs are not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south.
Israel, which on Sunday again ordered Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, is steadily expanding its annexation of the coastal strip. Palestinians are corralled like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points which are overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They receive, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food.
Al-Ajouri, who before the genocide was a taxi driver, lives with his wife, seven children and his mother and father in a tent in al-Saraya, near the middle of Gaza City. He set out to an aid hub at Salah al-Din Road near the Netzarim corridor, to find some food for his children, who he said cry constantly “because of how hungry they are.”
On the advice of his neighbour in the tent next to him, he dressed in loose clothing “so that I could run and be agile.” He carried a bag for canned and packaged goods because the crush of the crowds meant “no one was able to carry the boxes the aid came in.”
Massive crowds
He left at about 9 pm with five other men “including an engineer and a teacher,” and “children aged 10 and 12.” They did not take the official route designated by the Israeli army. The massive crowds converging on the aid point along the official route ensure that most never get close enough to receive food.
Instead, they walked in the darkness in areas exposed to Israeli gunfire, often having to crawl to avoid being seen.
“As I crawled, I looked over, and to my surprise, saw several women and elderly people taking the same treacherous route as us,” he explained. “At one point, there was a barrage of live gunfire all around me. We hid behind a destroyed building. Anyone who moved or made a noticeable motion was immediately shot by snipers.
“Next to me was a tall, light-haired young man using the flashlight on his phone to guide him. The others yelled at him to turn it off. Seconds later, he was shot. He collapsed to the ground and lay there bleeding, but no one could help or move him. He died within minutes.”
He passed six bodies along the route who had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.
Al-Ajouri reached the hub at 2 am, the designated time for aid distribution. He saw a green light turned on ahead of him which signaled that aid was about to be distributed. Thousands began to run towards the light, pushing, shoving and trampling each other. He fought his way through the crowd until he reached the aid.
“I started feeling around for the aid boxes and grabbed a bag that felt like rice,” he said. “But just as I did, someone else snatched it from my hands. I tried to hold on, but he threatened to stab me with his knife. Most people there were carrying knives, either to defend themselves or to steal from others.
Boxes were emptied
“Eventually, I managed to grab four cans of beans, a kilogram of bulgur, and half a kilogram of pasta. Within moments, the boxes were empty. Most of the people there, including women, children and the elderly, got nothing. Some begged others to share. But no one could afford to give up what they managed to get.”
The US contractors and Israeli soldiers overseeing the mayhem laughed and pointed their weapons at the crowd. Some filmed with their phones.
“Minutes later, red smoke grenades were thrown into the air,” he remembered. “Someone told me that it was the signal to evacuate the area. After that, heavy gunfire began. Me, Khalil and a few others headed to al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat because our friend Wael had injured his hand during the journey.
“I was shocked by what I saw at the hospital. There were at least 35 martyrs lying dead on the ground in one of the rooms. A doctor told me they had all been brought in that same day. They were each shot in the head or chest while queuing near the aid center. Their families were waiting for them to come home with food and ingredients. Now, they were corpses.”
The organisation has also contracted anti-Hamas drug-smuggling gangs to provide security at aid sites.
As Chris Gunness, a former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) told Al Jazeera, GHF is “aid washing,” a way to mask the reality that “people are being starved into submission.”
Disregarded ICC ruling
Israel, along with the US and European countries that provide weapons to sustain the genocide, have chosen to disregard the January 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which demanded immediate protection for civilians in Gaza and widespread provision of humanitarian assistance.
“It’s a killing field” says a headline in the Ha’aretz newspaper. Image: Ha’aretz screenshot APR
“The distribution centers typically open for just one hour each morning,” Haaretz writes. “According to officers and soldiers who served in their areas, the IDF fires at people who arrive before opening hours to prevent them from approaching, or again after the centers close, to disperse them. Since some of the shooting incidents occurred at night — ahead of the opening — it’s possible that some civilians couldn’t see the boundaries of the designated area.”
“It’s a killing field,” one soldier told Ha’aretz. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”
“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces,” the soldier explained, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”
He said the deployment at the aid sites is known as “Operation Salted Fish,” a reference to the Israeli name for the children’s game “Red light, green light.” The game was featured in the first episode of the South Korean dystopian thriller Squid Game, in which financially desperate people are killed as they battle each other for money.
Civilian infrastructure obliterated
Israel has obliterated the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza. It has reduced Palestinians, half a million of whom face starvation, into desperate herds. The goal is to break Palestinians, to make them malleable and entice them to leave Gaza, never to return.
There is talk from the Trump White House about a ceasefire. But don’t be fooled. Israel has nothing left to destroy. Its saturation bombing over 20 months has reduced Gaza to a moonscape. Gaza is uninhabitable, a toxic wilderness where Palestinians, living amid broken slabs of concrete and pools of raw sewage, lack food and clean water, fuel, shelter, electricity, medicine and an infrastructure to survive.
The final impediment to the annexation of Gaza are the Palestinians themselves. They are the primary target. Starvation is the weapon of choice.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.
On 30 June, the UK High Court ruled that the government’s decision to continue exporting F-35 fighter jet components to Israel is lawful, despite Labour acknowledging that these parts could potentially be used in violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) in Gaza. This decision has sparked significant criticism from human rights organisations and legal experts who argue that it undermines the UK’s commitment to upholding international law and human rights.
F-35 exports are legal, says High Court
The case was brought forward by the Global Legal Action Network and the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, with support from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam.
They contended that the UK’s continued supply of F-35 components, which are part of a global spares pool accessible by Israel, makes the UK complicit in potential IHL violations committed by the Israeli military in Gaza.
UK industry makes 15% of every F-35, with the value of UK components in Israel’s F-35s estimated by CAAT to be well over £500m. This is by far the most significant part of the UK arms trade with Israel. At least 75 UK companies are involved in manufacturing components. For example, BAE Systems makes every rear fuselage for the F-35 and also makes its active interceptor system. Leonardo makes its targeting lasers and L3 Harris makes the weapons release cables.
Israel is using its 45 F-35s intensively to bomb the Palestinian people in Gaza, including using horrifically destructive 2,000lb bombs. By March this year, Israel had carried out 15,000 flight hours with the F-35 since the start of the war, using the planes in “beast mode”, with extra munitions attached to the wings.
A “cowardly ruling”
In their 72-page ruling, Lord Justice Males and Mrs. Justice Steyn stated that such matters are political and best left to the executive branch and Parliament, not the courts. They emphasised that the issue at hand was whether it is appropriate for the court to mandate the UK’s withdrawal from a multilateral defense collaboration, which ministers consider vital to national and international security, due to the possibility that UK-manufactured components might be used in serious IHL violations.
Critics argue that this ruling effectively allows the UK government to prioritise political and economic interests over its legal and moral obligations to prevent complicity in potential war crimes.
Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT’s) Media Coordinator Emily Apple said:
This is a cowardly ruling that absolves any responsibility from the court to rule on the UK government’s compliance with international law. International law exists to keep all of us safe. It should be the founding principle of our arms export criteria, not one the government can pick and choose when to implement.
Successive governments have claimed that our arms export licensing criteria are the most robust in the world. This claim is now in tatters.
This court ruling vindicates Palestine Action. Palestine Action are not terrorists – they have the courage our courts clearly lack. It shows the only option open to us is to take direct action against the arms trade, to stop the genocide profiteers in their tracks. We cannot rely on our institutions to uphold international law, we can only rely on ourselves and the power we have to create change.
When our government and our courts fail us, it is down to us, ordinary citizens, to take action. We cannot wait for the history books to vindicate us. We cannot wait for Israel to obliterate Gaza and the West Bank. We cannot wait and watch while Israel kills more Palestinian children with 2000lb bombs dropped by F-35s. We will not stand by and we will not stay silent while the government prioritises its relationship with a genocidal state and arms dealers’ profits over Palestinian lives.
A biased assessment
Furthermore, the government’s limited investigation into potential IHL breaches by Israeli forces raises concerns about the thoroughness and impartiality of its assessments.
Despite reports of at least 56,000 Palestinian deaths, the government identified only one case—the April 2024 World Central Kitchen strike—as a possible IHL violation. This narrow focus fails to account for the broader pattern of civilian casualties and destruction in Gaza.
theguardian.com
The ruling also highlights the UK’s significant role in the F-35 program, with British manufacturers supplying approximately 15% of the aircraft’s components. This involvement not only ties the UK economically to the program but also raises questions about the influence of defense industry interests on government policy decisions.
The government is committing war crimes with its F-35 exports
Human rights organisations and legal experts have expressed deep concern over the implications of this ruling. The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) said:
We are disappointed by the High Court’s refusal to grant permission for judicial review, but recognise the significant steps made in the course of this case so far. The Court accepted the government’s own finding that Israel is not committed to compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL). The Court accepted that there is a clear risk that UK-manufactured F-35 components may be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of IHL in Gaza. These findings are profoundly serious, and without Al-Haq’s claim the government may well have continued to deny these facts.
Yet despite those acknowledgements, the Court held that the legality of the UK’s decision to continue F-35 exports is not a matter that the courts can properly decide. We believe that the Court was wrong in law to conclude that the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the Arms Trade Treaty, or customary international law are non-justiciable. The government must be held to account – in the Courts and in the court of public opinion – on these well-evidenced risks of atrocity crimes.
ICJP commends the efforts of Al-Haq, the Global Legal Action Network, interveners in this case, and those who provided their eyewitness testimony. Without them, the troubling reality may not have been exposed: that the UK government can acknowledge the risk of war crimes, admit the likely involvement of British-supplied weapons, and still continue exports to the perpetrators – shielded from judicial scrutiny.
ICJP remains committed to pursuing all available legal avenues to end the UK’s complicity in serious violations of international law. We have worked to support this case for over 18 months and will continue to do so should an appeal be launched.
In light of this decision, there is a growing call for greater transparency and accountability in the UK’s arms export policies. Critics urge the government to reassess its commitments and ensure that its actions align with its legal and moral obligations to prevent complicity in serious violations of international humanitarian law.
The NGO Coalition on Human Rights in Fiji (NGOCHR) has called on Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka as the new chair of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) to “uphold justice, stability and security” for Kanaky New Caledonia and West Papua.
In a statement today after last week’s MSG leaders’ summit in Suva, the coalition also warned over Indonesia’s “chequebook diplomacy” as an obstacle for the self-determination aspirations of Melanesian peoples not yet independent.
Indonesia is a controversial associate member of the MSG in what is widely seen in the region as a “complication” for the regional Melanesian body.
The statement said that with Rabuka’s “extensive experience as a seasoned statesman in the Pacific, we hope that this second chapter will chart a different course, one rooted in genuine commitment to uphold justice, stability and security for all our Melanesian brothers and sisters in Kanaky New Caledonia and West Papua”.
The coalition said the summit’s theme, “A peaceful and prosperous Melanesia”, served as a reminder that even after several decades of regional bilaterals, “our Melanesian leaders have made little to no progress in fulfilling its purpose in the region — to support the independence and sovereignty of all Melanesians”.
“Fiji, as incoming chair, inherits the unfinished work of the MSG. As rightly stated by the late great Father Walter Lini, ‘We will not be free until all of Melanesia is free”, the statement said.
“The challenges for Fiji’s chair to meet the goals of the MSG are complex and made more complicated by the inclusion of Indonesia as an associate member in 2015.
‘Indonesia active repression’
“Indonesia plays an active role in the ongoing repression of West Papuans in their desire for independence. Their associate member status provides a particular obstacle for Fiji as chair in furthering the self-determination goals of the MSG.”
Complicating matters further was the asymmetry in the relationship between Indonesia and the rest of the MSG members, the statement said.
“As a donor government and emerging economic power, Indonesia’s ‘chequebook and cultural diplomacy’ continues to wield significant influence across the region.
“Its status as an associate member of the MSG raises serious concerns about whether it is appropriate, as this pathway risks further marginalising the voices of our West Papuan sisters and brothers.”
This defeated the “whole purpose of the MSG: ‘Excelling together towards a progressive and prosperous Melanesia’.”
The coalition acknowledged Rabuka’s longstanding commitment to the people of Kanaky New Caledonia. A relationship and shared journey that had been forged since 1989.
‘Stark reminder’
The pro-independence riots of May 2024 served as a “stark reminder that much work remains to be done to realise the full aspirations of the Kanak people”.
As the Pacific awaited a “hopeful and favourable outcome” from the Troika Plus mission to Kanaky New Caledonia, the coalition said that it trusted Rabuka to “carry forward the voices, struggles, dreams and enduring aspirations of the people of Kanaky New Caledonia”.
The statement called on Rabuka as the new chair of MSG to:
Ensure the core founding values, and mission of the MSG are upheld;
Re-evaluate Indonesia’s appropriateness as an associate member of the MSG; and
Elevate discussions on West Papua and Kanaky New Caledonia at the MSG level and through discussions at the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders.
The Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights (NGOCHR) represents the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (chair), Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, Citizens’ Constitutional Forum, femLINKpacific, Social Empowerment and Education Program, and Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji. Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is an observer.
Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark has warned the country needs to maintain its nuclear-free policy as a “fundamental tenet” of its independent foreign policy in the face of gathering global storm clouds.
Writing in a new book being published next week, she says “nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present.
Writing before the US surprise attack with B-2 stealth bombers and “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, Clark says “the Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons”.
The Doomsday Clock references the Ukraine war theatre where “use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia”.
Also, the arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals, she says.
“North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity.”
‘Serious ramifications’
Clark, who was also United Nations Development Programme administrator from 2009 to 2017, a member of The Elders group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, and is an advocate for multilateralism and nuclear disarmament, says an outright military conflict between China and the United States “would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.”
She advises New Zealand to be wary of Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States.
“There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry,” Clark says.
“This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.
“Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development
of more lethal weaponry.”
Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior . . . publication July 2025. Image: Little Island Press
In the face of the “current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.
Clark says that the years 1985 – the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 — and 1986 were critical years in the lead up to New Zealand’s nuclear-free legislation in 1987.
“New Zealanders were clear – we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”
Chronicles humanitarian voyage
The book Eyes of Fire chronicles the humanitarian voyage by the Greenpeace flagship to the Marshall Islands to relocate 320 Rongelap Islanders who were suffering serious community health consequences from the US nuclear tests in the 1950s.
The author, Dr David Robie, founder of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, was the only journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior in the weeks leading up to the bombing.
His book recounts the voyage and nuclear colonialism, and the transition to climate justice as the major challenge facing the Pacific, although the “Indo-Pacific” rivalries between the US, France and China mean that geopolitical tensions are recalling the Cold War era in the Pacific.
Dr Robie is also critical of Indonesian colonialism in the Melanesian region of the Pacific, arguing that a just-outcome for Jakarta-ruled West Papua and also the French territories of Kanaky New Caledonia and “French” Polynesia are vital for peace and stability in the region.
Greenpeace executive director Dr Russel Norman is launching Eyes of Fire at the Ellen Melville Centre Pioneer Women’s Hall at 6pm on the bombing anniversary day, July 10, following a memorial vigil in the morning on board the current flagship Rainbow Warrior III.
Michelle Taylor sat at the defense table during her sentencing hearing in St. Augustine, Florida, listening to a trio of forensic chemists lay out the scientific evidence to prove what she’d sworn for years: She had not set the fire that burned down her house and killed her own son.
It was the last Friday in May, and the St. Johns County courthouse was mostly empty.
The expert witnesses each testified via Zoom, their faces appearing on a pair of large monitors inside the wood-paneled courtroom. None of the experts knew Taylor personally. But they knew chemistry. And each made clear that the case against Taylor had been based on junk science: faulty analysis by a state lab worker who detected gasoline in fire debris samples where there was none.
The testimony was vindicating for Taylor. But it also came too late to prevent what she insisted was a wrongful conviction. More than six years after the fire, she had reluctantly accepted a plea deal at the urging of her defense attorney. It allowed her to maintain her innocence — and avoid a mandatory life sentence had she gone to trial and lost. But it had not cleared her name. Now Taylor hoped the hearing might.
Taylor’s home caught fire on the night of October 23, 2018. She and her 18-year-old daughter Bailey escaped through a window. But her 11-year-old son David went back for the family dog and died. Investigators became immediately suspicious of Taylor after a dog trained to detect accelerants alerted in several spots throughout the home. At the state fire marshal lab outside Tallahassee, fire debris analyst Dee Ann Turner examined samples collected from the scene and repeatedly found gasoline, a telltale sign of arson.
But Turner was disastrously wrong, the witnesses said. According to the experts, she had misidentified gasoline in 12 different samples taken from Taylor’s home. The samples were “very clearly not gasoline,” testified John Lentini, a renowned fire scientist who first reviewed the data and submitted his findings in a defense report in January 2024. Turner’s erroneous analysis had gone undetected for so long because investigators had little reason to suspect such sweeping mistakes — “nor did they have the expertise to question it,” he testified.
The faulty forensics became the basis for the entire case against Taylor, Lentini said. “Every time another possibility was considered, the [lead investigator] said, ‘Yeah but we’ve got gasoline here.’”
Prosecutors had long known that their forensic evidence was fatally flawed. Lentini’s report had been reviewed by a pair of chemists with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who agreed that the data did not show gasoline. Yet Seventh Judicial Circuit State Attorney R.J. Larizza had refused to drop the charges against Taylor, instead seizing on financial improprieties in her bank records as proof that she committed arson for profit. Taylor and her husband were behind in their mortgage at the time of the fire. Despite having money to pay for it, there was evidence that Taylor had defrauded area churches to cover the payments instead.
Such circumstantial evidence did not prove anything on its own. But Taylor’s attorney, John Rockwell, worried it may be enough for a jury to convict his client anyway. He worked out a plea deal with prosecutors, who agreed to drop the arson charge if Taylor pleaded no contest to manslaughter. Rockwell, a former prosecutor, began to prepare for the sentencing hearing the way he would for a criminal trial. If he could prove that the scientific evidence did not hold up, he could convince the judge to impose the lowest possible sentence.
The stakes remained high. Under the plea deal, Seventh Judicial Circuit Judge Lee Smith could still sentence her to as many as 13 years in prison. And while the scientific evidence was certainly on Taylor’s side, there was no guarantee Smith would be moved by it. At the start of the hearing, Lee asked Taylor: “And you still want to proceed today with the sentencing knowing the possible range of possible sentences that you’re facing?”
“Yes, sir,” Taylor said.
No Gray Area
I first wrote about Taylor in March, delving into the fire investigation in her case as well as the Florida lab, which had a record of faulty fire debris analysis. At that time, Taylor was scheduled to go to trial over the summer — and prosecutors had asked the judge to limit what Lentini would be allowed to say to the jury about the lab, arguing that its history was irrelevant.
Lentini had been raising alarm over the lab for years. The lab’s flawed gasoline findings had led numerous people to be wrongly accused of arson — including in a death penalty case. In 2016, he filed an ethics complaint against the lab, which led to an audit by a team of independent experts. The results were abysmal: Of 26 cases they selected for reanalysis, lab analysts had wrongly reported gasoline in 14 of them. The lab temporarily lost its professional accreditation but regained it after agreeing to a remedial plan, which included a self-review of work dating back to 2009. But the review was never completed, leaving some 8,000 cases unexamined.
“There is no gasoline in these samples.”
At the heart of the problem, Lentini argued, was that state lab analysts were not following the professional standards for fire debris analysis that had been in place for decades. Rules for identifying ignitable liquids in fire debris were developed in the 1990s by the American Society for Testing and Materials. A standard known as ASTM E1618 laid out specific parameters for identifying gasoline. The auditors had previously found that lab analysts were not following the standard, instead using an “unvalidated protocol that is not generally accepted in the scientific community.” Although the lab claimed to abide by ASTM E1618, Turner’s work showed that, in Taylor’s case, this was not true.
In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Florida Division of Criminal Investigations’ Bureau of Forensic Services said: “BFS adheres to industry standards, including ASTM E1618, to detect trace levels of ignitable liquids and ensure reliable, science-based conclusions. Moreover, the lab maintains a culture of continuous improvement, regularly evaluating its procedures, investing in advanced training, and participating in proficiency testing to uphold the highest integrity of its work.”
The evidence taken from Taylor’s home in the fall of 2018 had gone through a common procedure for testing fire debris. Samples were collected in metal cans, which were brought to the lab and heated in an oven. The resulting vapors were captured on charcoal strips suspended from the top of each can, which were then rinsed with a solvent, producing a solution to be injected into a machine called a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. The GCMS, as it is commonly known, produced a chromatogram: an electronic signature made of up peaks and valleys.
This process is straightforward until it comes to interpreting the data. The peaks on a chromatogram that indicate gasoline can easily be mistaken for peaks indicating other petroleum-based products. For this reason, ASTM E1618 dictates that lab analysts start their examination by ensuring there are five specific peaks on a chromatogram, which must appear at certain ratios in order to be labeled positive for gasoline.
According to Reta Newman, a veteran chemist and one of the independent auditors who uncovered problems at the state lab in 2016, the samples in Taylor’s case had not passed this first step. Testifying at the sentencing hearing that afternoon, she agreed with Lentini’s blunt assessment. “There is no gasoline in these samples,” she testified.
“There is no gasoline in these samples.”
Newman, the director of the Pinellas County Forensic Lab, gave a quick chemistry lesson. “Gasoline is a blended product,” she explained, full of components that are added to improve performance in internal combustion engines. These include a class of hydrocarbons known as aromatic compounds, which are ubiquitous in petroleum-based products, including materials used to furnish modern homes. Newman motioned toward the green courtroom carpet as an example. When such synthetic materials burn in a fire, they “unfortunately break down into aromatic products — the same compounds that we see in gasoline.”
On a chromatogram from a gasoline sample, aromatic compounds form a specific pattern that can be hard to differentiate from those produced by aromatics in burned synthetic materials. “Fortunately for us,” Newman said, there is another kind of hydrocarbon that analysts use to identify gasoline in a fire debris sample. “I apologize for being so nerdy. But isoalkanes are also added to gasoline,” she said. And unlike aromatics, isoalkanes generally do not turn up in burned synthetic material.
Turner had correctly identified aromatic compounds in the fire debris taken from Taylor’s home, Newman said, although the peak patterns “were much more consistent” with the burning of synthetic material rather than gasoline. But the data showed an absence of isoalkanes. Under ASTM E1618, this should have been disqualifying. Yet Turner had reported the samples positive.
Rockwell, Taylor’s attorney, asked whether this was a plain fact or a subjective opinion. “If two different scientists look at this, is it very easy to tell that this is either gasoline or not gasoline?” he asked. Newman acknowledged that many cases present samples where there are gray areas. But not here. “There is no gray area.”
A metal can used to collect fire debris samples from the Taylor home in 2018. The samples were tested at the Bureau of Forensic Services lab in Havana, Fla.Photo: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
The third and last expert witness for the defense was Laurel Mason, a veteran chemist and director of a Georgia lab called Analytical Forensic Associates. Unlike Lentini or Newman, who had only reviewed Turner’s reports and chromatographic data, Mason had actually reexamined the carbon strips used to test the fire debris from Taylor’s home. She found no proof of gasoline or any other ignitable liquid.
There was a haunting irony to Mason’s testimony. She had actually first encountered Taylor’s case in 2018, when one of her lab analysts had examined fire debris samples taken from the home on behalf of Taylor’s homeowner’s insurance company. That analyst found no evidence of an ignitable liquid. The insurance investigator concluded that the cause of the fire was undetermined — and Taylor’s insurance company paid the claim in full. Had Mason been the analyst first assigned to examine the evidence on behalf of the state rather than the insurance company, Taylor would almost certainly have never been arrested for arson.
Mason had found a number of things alarming about Turner’s work. There was the analysis itself, which was clearly flawed. But she was also concerned about the lab’s handling of evidence. Rockwell had asked for permission to retest the carbon strips after discovering that the fire debris samples themselves had been destroyed by the lab. But the lab resisted providing the strips, offering instead to cut them in two and allow the defense to test one half of each. Posting on a listserv for fire debris analysts in late January, Turner had solicited recommendations for any scientific literature that might support this plan. She was not successful, perhaps because, according to Mason, altering the carbon strips went against best practices for preserving evidence.
Rockwell asked Mason about a strange turn of events that followed her examination of the carbon strips. Shortly after Mason submitted her defense report in February 2025, Turner herself issued an amended report on behalf of the state lab, suddenly altering four of her original findings without explanation. Of the samples she had originally determined to be positive for gasoline, four were now negative. “The curious thing to me was the documentation,” Mason testified. On the data sheet accompanying the report, where Turner had crossed out four of the original findings, she had written her initials, along with the date: February 26, 2025. Yet the report itself was dated January 2025.
To Rockwell, it seemed clear that the amended report had been deliberately backdated to make it appear as if it had preceded Mason’s report — a stealth correction designed to circumvent any accountability for the lab’s mistakes.
The lab did not respond to specific questions about the backdated report, but said in a statement its “technicians are extensively trained and conduct rigorous reviews of their findings, often re-examining evidence in preparation for depositions or expert testimony.”
Whatever the truth of the timing, it was clearly unusual for an expert to go back and change their conclusions six and a half years later. “I have never seen that before,” Mason said.
“I Hope This Can Be Corrected”
In a teal blouse and freshly colored hair, 41-year-old Taylor listened to the expert testimony without expression. She’d lost weight since her last court date, the effect of stress, according to her most vocal advocate Megan Wallace, who Taylor had met at the county jail, and who wept in the back of the courtroom for much of the hearing.
Taylor’s arrest had made her a villain in the press. Yet almost no local media had shown up at the hearing. Though a TV reporter sat in the jury box alongside a cameraman, her subsequent report would make no mention of the flawed forensics at the center of the case.
Taylor’s husband Dennis and their daughter Bailey sat in the front of the gallery. The fire and its aftermath had torn their family apart. Dennis’s mother Lillian had blamed Taylor for David’s death, telling a police detective in an interview that she believed her daughter-in-law had set the fire for insurance money. But she had since disavowed her statements. In an email to the judge, she wrote, “I strongly disagree and contradict anything I said,” adding that she was “heavily medicated” at the time. “I hope this can be corrected and we can have a satisfactory outcome and closure to all parties involved.”
Other family members had written character letters on Taylor’s behalf, along with friends, neighbors, and co-workers who described Taylor as generous, hardworking, and completely committed to her children. David’s football coach described Taylor as “the most supportive and involved parent,” sharing an anecdote about David I had previously heard in my interviews. “I vividly remember moments in the middle of games when he’d run over to give her a kiss, not caring if his teammates saw,” he wrote. “Their bond was pure and inspiring.”
Several of the letters begged the judge to let Taylor go free. Although her supporters understood the plea deal in theory, they could not comprehend why she should serve any more time behind bars for a crime she did not commit.
Representing the state was Assistant State Attorney Sarah Thomas, who flatly rejected the notion that Taylor was innocent, telling the judge at the start of the hearing that prosecutors had agreed to the plea deal because they did not believe she had meant to kill her son. Thomas called a series of witnesses whose brief testimony seemed mainly aimed at casting Taylor in a suspicious light, from a uniformed sheriff’s deputy who said that Taylor had told Bailey not to speak to investigators at the hospital on the night of the fire, to a fraud expert who described the scam Taylor appeared to have been running against local churches — including, it turned out, his own.
With no witness to discredit the scientific testimony of the defense experts, Thomas instead sought to reframe the problem. It wasn’t that the lab had reported gasoline where there was none, she suggested. Rather, the necessary components in the contested samples were simply too low to fulfill the “threshold” necessary to report it as gasoline. This was highly misleading; as the experts had testified, the fire debris samples were actually missing the necessary components to be accurately classified as gasoline. And the whole purpose of a standard is to ensure accurate interpretation of forensic evidence. If the indicators were too low to report gasoline, a sample had to be classified as negative.
Nevertheless, Thomas cast this as a mere technicality. She called the former K-9 handler whose accelerant detection dog had alerted at the site of the fire — and who explained that just because a dog’s alerts are not always confirmed by a lab analyst, it does not mean that there is nothing there. “The lab has a level that they have to meet,” he said. “The experts will tell you that what the dog is picking up is below what they can call by their standards. It is gasoline. Everyone at the lab people kept telling us, ‘It is gasoline but it does not meet our level to be able to call it that for court.’”
Thousands of Samples
The last person to testify for the state was Dee Ann Turner herself. Her name had been visible on the TV monitors since the start of the hearing, suggesting that she’d heard the defense experts’ critiques of her work and would be well-positioned to respond. But this was not the case. “I’ve been sitting waiting to be let in,” she chuckled.
Turner had worked at the lab for a decade. She was hired in 2015, the year before the lab temporarily lost its accreditation. As the state’s sole scientific expert, she was the only witness who could conceivably rehabilitate the state’s case against Taylor. Instead, her testimony was unpersuasive and off-putting. She was awkward and halting, fumbling basic questions and laughing at uncomfortable moments. When Thomas asked when she submitted her amended lab report — a critical chance to clear up any suspicions that it had been purposefully backdated as Rockwell claimed — Turner shuffled clumsily through her paperwork for more than two minutes. She finally answered that she submitted the report in January 2025, explaining that her notes were dated February 2025 because she’d forgotten to date and initial them.
Thomas asked Turner why she had gone back to revise her 2018 findings to begin with. “After reading Mr. Lentini’s deposition I went back and looked at the data,” Turner replied. “I decided, you know, this data really isn’t sufficient for a positive call.”
The answer seemed to catch the prosecutor off guard. Thomas had cast Lentini as hopelessly biased — a man with a “vendetta” against the state lab. Now her own expert was saying that Lentini’s opinion had prompted her to reexamine her own work. In her closing argument, Thomas would go on to insist that, in fact, Turner had changed her findings on the basis of the other experts, who were more worthy of respect — never mind what Turner herself said on the stand.
On cross-examination, Rockwell probed further into the question of what had prompted Turner to revisit her analysis from 2018. Did anything change about her approach to fire debris analysis between 2018 and 2025? Turner said that the lab’s reporting requirements had become stricter after its accreditation was temporarily suspended. “We’re being more conservative in our calls,” she said. But Rockwell pointed out that the accreditation had been suspended and restored in 2016. Turner’s analysis in the case had taken place two years later. Turner was forced to concede that, in fact, nothing had changed.
Rockwell asked Turner if she was aware of Laurel Mason’s retesting of the carbon strips. Did it surprise her that Mason found no proof of an ignitable liquid in the fire debris samples? Yes, “I’m actually quite surprised,” Turner said. Would it surprise her to know that Reta Newman, “one of the preeminent authorities in the fire debris chemistry field also has the same opinion as Mr. Lentini and Ms. Mason?” Yes, Turner said. “I’m surprised by that as well.”
Rockwell pointed out that, in a total of 22 samples she’d examined in the case, Turner had reversed her determinations in four. This came out to 18 percent. Wasn’t this an unacceptable error rate for an expert like her? Turner hesitated. “It’s not wrong,” she said. “I still think that there’s gasoline in those samples that I changed. It’s just — the data’s just not sufficient for me to report it.”
Rockwell asked the question again, over the objection of the state. When her lab analysis is used by investigators “to arrest somebody for first-degree murder and arson, when that can change the course of someone’s life forever, do you think that’s an appropriate standard of error?” he asked.
“No,” Turner finally said.
Still, she objected to the characterization of her work. “This is one case,” she said. Over the course of her career, “I’ve analyzed thousands of samples.”
A view of the living room in the back of the Taylor home, believed to be the area where the fire started on Oct. 23, 2018.Photo: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
The Most Important Evidence
The last round of testimony came from Taylor’s family. Her mother tried to read a letter to the court but left the stand after becoming too emotional, leaving Rockwell’s co-counsel to read it instead. Bailey and her father, Dennis, both spoke briefly, holding their emotions at bay. But the trauma of the fire and its aftermath was written on their faces.
When Taylor stood to address the court, her words quickly gave way to anguished sobs. She talked about her three children, one of whom had died in a tragic accident just a few years before David. In the months leading to the fire, she said, her grandmother had died of cancer, which had led to Taylor’s financial problems. “When she didn’t have the money, I used my money,” she said. “I would’ve gave her every last dime I had to save her life.” Above all, she wanted the judge to know that she did everything she could to save David from the fire. “I lived for my son.”
Before delivering his closing argument, Rockwell flagged one last piece of evidence for the judge: a polygraph test given to Taylor in early May. Taylor had been asked three variations of a single question: Did she set a fire in her home in October 2018? Taylor had passed every time.
Polygraphs have long been known to be unreliable and thus inadmissible in criminal trials. Although the rules of evidence governing the sentencing hearing were different, Thomas was suddenly concerned about junk science, objecting to the polygraph, and arguing that the judge had to find “some reliability of the evidence” before it could be introduced. But Smith said that the polygraph results had been included in the binder he’d received prior to the hearing. She had not objected then. Besides, he said, “I’ve already reviewed it.”
In his closing, Rockwell called the case “the most difficult case I think I’ve ever worked on in my career.” He decried Turner’s laughter and “cavalier attitude” upon being confronted with her errors. Thomas countered that Turner’s laughter had been due to nerves, blaming Rockwell for pummeling her with the same question over and over again. She reiterated that Lentini was too biased to be believed. But when Smith asked Thomas whether she had any response to the other experts — or to the ATF chemists who had agreed with Lentini more than a year earlier — the prosecutor had little to say.
Smith was quiet for a few moments, then cleared his throat. “The most important piece of evidence, I think, in any arson case is the science,” the judge said. He was not an expert himself, he added, and declined to say which side was correct. But he was going to impose the lowest sentence: three years in prison, with credit for time served.
Taylor was taken into custody moments later. She embraced her lawyers, thanking Rockwell profusely, then hastily took off her watch to give to her family with the rest of her belongings before being handcuffed. Her mother asked a sheriff’s deputy permission to give her a hug but was denied.
On June 11, Taylor was transferred to the Florida Women’s Reception Center in Ocala. In an email this week, she said she would discuss her case after she gets out of prison, which should be in a matter of weeks given the nearly three years she spent in jail. She is scheduled for release in August.
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