A dozen or more masked men, some with long guns, tried to enter a men’s homeless shelter without identifying themselves in a rural town with a long-standing immigrant community on eastern Long Island in New York. Officials from the local police department later admitted they didn’t know where the masked men came from — only adding to local residents’ concerns.

At the same time, 50 miles to the west, six unmarked cars with masked agents from U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, parked within hundreds of feet of an elementary school in a working-class town with a large Latino population. In response, a group of residents gathered to shame the agents, accusing the agents with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, of lying in wait to snatch the parents of students when school let out.

The Long Island communities in New York City’s suburbs are the latest to be wracked by chaos as the Trump administration ramps up large-scale deportation operations. ICE raids using a hodgepodge of masked federal agents and varying degrees of assistance from local law enforcement agencies are escalating as part of the raids — leaving local immigrants in fear and other residents enraged.

On Long Island, the two federal raids on Tuesday saw emergency communiqués from schools to parents, incorrect information distributed to area media by local authorities, a confrontation with angry demonstrators, and a car accident.

Last week, top ICE officials ordered officers to increase arrests and to get “creative” in their methods, including trying to nab people the officers happen to encounter in what are known as “collateral arrests.” The orders come in the wake of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller setting a quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day, along with a sharp rise in protests against the crackdown.

“No Son Padres Ustedes?”

Late Tuesday morning in Westbury, in western Nassau County, parents and nearby residents noticed what they immediately recognized as unmarked federal agent vehicles parked within feet of Park Avenue Elementary School, two eyewitnesses told The Intercept. One of those residents, Allan Oscar Sorto, picked up his phone and began streaming live on Facebook.

As he streamed, a dozen or so people began congregating near the cars, two Nissan Altimas and several Ford SUVs with flashers. People can be heard explaining that they’ve seen these cars around the neighborhood in recent weeks, part of immigration raids. Now the sight of the cars parked so close to the elementary school seemed to spark heightened outrage and fear that federal immigration agents were lurking to surprise parents going to pick up their children from school.

Sorto, from nearby Hempstead, estimated that there were four cars near the school, some within 10 feet of the schoolyard fence, and two other cars on the next block. Another eyewitness, who asked not to be named out of fear of law enforcement retaliation, told The Intercept that he could see uniformed HSI agents sitting in all the cars, most masked.

“No son padres ustedes?” a woman in the video says to the closed window of one of the parked Nissans: “Are you not parents?”

People on the sidewalk yelled at the cars in Spanish and English. “Show your face!” “You feel proud?” “None of us are criminals, we work, we pay taxes like you do.” “Leave the school grounds!”

The Westbury residents’ fears seemed well-founded, considering reports from around the country. In California, ICE agents arrested and detained a fourth grader, separating the boy from his father; they were both deported to Honduras. Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said DHS agents lied to school principals that they had permission from children’s parents to gain access to schools.

The Car Crash

In Westbury, the HSI agents didn’t respond to the gathered crowd. After a few minutes, the agents drove away. A commotion erupted down the road, off-camera, and onlookers began rushing toward the corner.

One of the Nissans, carrying two of the HSI agents, had crashed into a black pickup truck that happened to be passing through the intersection. Three eyewitnesses told The Intercept that the agents’ car had sped away. Two of the witnesses believe the Nissan blew a stop sign, causing the crash. (Nassau County police referred questions about the accident to ICE, which did not respond to an inquiry.)

After the accident, the crowd gathered around the scene, according to the video stream. The two agents got out of the crashed car, seemingly panicked and, witnesses told The Intercept, appearing to avoid eye contact with bystanders. The agents got into another HSI vehicle.

A third agent, an unmasked man with a black polo shirt covering his tactical vest, stood near the crashed car, remaining stoic as people questioned him on the livestream.

“You’re looking for criminals in the school?” one bystander asked, as the agent remained expressionless.

Then Sorto, the man streaming, said, “I’m a dad, I have a son waiting for me at home.” The agent gave a slight nod — what Sorto said was the only response to the crowd during the incident.

“You guys need to have feelings, man,” Sorto said.

Nassau County police began arriving in short order, eventually swelling to at least two dozen officers, some on horseback, closing the street and barricading residents onto sidewalks.

Nassau County Police Department, located in one of the country’s safest countries, is one of the most well-funded departments in the nation, with a notoriously opaque transparency record. In March, the department signed a controversial agreement with ICE giving deputized county police officers the ability to interrogate people about their immigration status and make arrests without a warrant.

During the Westbury incident, one of the HSI agents, wearing a mask, stood hidden behind several Nassau police officers as the residents appealed to them for information.

Soon, the federal agents left, leaving the smashed Nissan with the passenger side airbag deployed behind, and many in the crowd dispersed.

The driver of the pickup truck involved in the accident was placed in a stretcher and left in an ambulance. (Neither the police nor ICE offered information on the driver’s identity or condition in response to inquiries from The Intercept.)

“Now you’re clogging up the street and people have to work,” one of the remaining bystanders can be heard to say during the stream. “How is this making America great again?”

Fear Grips Nassau

Late Tuesday night, Park Avenue Elementary School took an unprecedented step that reflected the fear in Westbury.

“We want to inform you that due to an incident that occurred near the school vicinity today, we will be providing transportation home for all students who are typically walkers,” the principal, Robert Chambers, wrote in a message to the school community relayed in English and Spanish. “This is being done out of an abundance of caution to ensure the safety and well-being of all our students.”

Sorto told The Intercept he had family members who were too afraid to send their children to school the next day. (Park Avenue Elementary did not respond to a request for comment.)

The Long Island newspaper Newsday first reported the Westbury incident with a quote from Nassau County police that the action was not immigration-related and that the agents were not working for ICE on Tuesday afternoon.

Late Tuesday, however, an ICE spokesperson issued a statement that contradicted the Nassau police.

“ICE Homeland Security Investigations Long Island personnel were conducting an operation associated to an ongoing federal investigation,” the statement said. “During the operation special agents were confronted by multiple anti-law enforcement agitators, which prohibited the enforcement action. ICE HSI personnel departed the location and, shortly thereafter, a member of the law enforcement team was involved in a motor-vehicle collision.”

News 12, a local TV station, went back to local authorities for clarification, and police replied that “the agents on scene identified themselves to Nassau police as Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, agents and not as ICE.”

Homeland Security Investigations is one of two divisions at ICE. While Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, enforces civil immigration matters, HSI is tasked with investigating transitional crimes. HSI’s enforcement is not limited to undocumented immigrants, but its investigations and operations, including workplace raids, frequently touch upon immigration matters.

In responses to ICE’s allegation that residents were the ones creating chaos, Sorto denied that the residents on hand were agitators.

“We just are people that got together as community because we saw the cars outside the school,” he told The Intercept. “But we don’t belong to any group or anything. We just are good and hard-working people that want to have a regular life like anybody else.”

Homeless Shelter Raid

As the chaos erupted in Westbury, another alarming scene was unfolding an hour to the east, in Riverhead, on the outskirts of the New York City suburbs. A group of suspected ICE agents could be seen staging their vehicles in the Riverhead Fire Department parking lot, according to video and photographs shared with The Intercept by a community advocacy group.

A week earlier, ICE raids using another Long Island fire department sparked outrage in the community. The fire department subsequently issued a statement that fire officials were not previously informed that ICE would be using their parking lot.

Several hours after the men were seen at the Riverhead Fire Department, they were spotted again. Twelve to 14 of the masked men, some reportedly carrying long guns, were trying to get into a Riverhead men’s homeless shelter, according to a video shared by several immigrant advocates in the area. They would not identify themselves, a shelter employee told local news outlet RiverheadLOCAL.

A shelter resident told RiverheadLOCAL that one of the men, wearing a black U.S. Marshals vest, came to the front door seeking entry but would neither show credentials or a warrant, nor give his name. (A representative for the shelter did not respond to inquiries.)

A representative for the Riverhead Fire Department told The Intercept,
“We had no idea who they were.”

In the East End towns of Long Island, where the rich enclaves of the Hamptons coexist alongside working agricultural communities, authorities have largely opposed helping ICE operations. Riverhead Town Supervisor Tom Hubbard, for example, said in January that town police would not get involved in immigration enforcement, and the majority-Hispanic Riverhead School District also sent a strong message that it would resist unlawful actions by immigration authorities at schools.

The president of an Eastern Suffolk BIPOC advocacy group told The Intercept that a network of immigrants’ advocates have been closely monitoring the activities of ICE in the area. She believes the Riverhead police were mistaken that the agents at the shelter were not affiliated with ICE.

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“I have received information indicating that ICE’s New York City Field Office is actively investigating immigration-related offenses across Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley,” Marylin Winter, of the group the African American Educational Cultural Festival, said. (Neither the Riverhead town supervisor nor Riverhead police returned requests for comment.)

Winter said her group plans to disseminate “know your rights” material for immigrants.

“We are resolute in our opposition to the illegal enforcement of immigration without a judicial warrant, asserting that no arrest should occur under such circumstances,” she said. “Our commitment extends to ensuring that the innocent, particularly children and their families, are fully aware of their legal rights.”

Meanwhile, the confusion around ICE actions on Long Island continued. One Wednesday morning, Glen Cove city police, a small local force in Nassau County, responded to a call from a business owner about a possible assault, according to local media reports. When the police arrived, however, they found ICE officers holding a group of men on the ground.

Following the outburst of opposition to ICE’s presence in Nassau County, the county executive and police chief said that their forces would not be assisting ICE in operations inside schools or houses of worship.

“Raids on schools are not something we do unless there’s an emergency or a threat, and if there’s an emergency or threat, we’re coming in regardless of the situation,” Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman told reporters. “So the bottom line is, there is no program to raid schools here in Nassau County.”

Blakeman had been at the forefront of the effort in Nassau County to deputize local police to carry out immigration enforcement and work with ICE.

The post ICE Agent Fled From Angry Residents Outside New York School — and Got in a Car Crash appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

It was after 10 a.m. on Monday morning when Richard Glossip was led into an eighth-floor courtroom in the Oklahoma County Courthouse by three sheriff’s deputies. Wearing orange prison scrubs and Crocs, and shackled at the waist and ankles, Glossip, now 62, looked small compared to the hulking deputies around him. His hair, now almost entirely gray, was long and combed to the side. Though his expression was impassive as he entered the room, his face softened into a smile when he caught sight of his wife Lea and other supporters sitting in the front row.

It was the first time in years that Glossip had been in a courtroom, and it was the first hearing in his case since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in late February that prosecutorial misconduct had so tainted Glossip’s case that his death penalty conviction should be overturned. It was a victory not only for Glossip but also for Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who had taken unprecedented steps to block Glossip’s execution — and fought alongside him to secure the high court’s decision. 

“The high court has validated my grave concerns with how this prosecution was handled,” Drummond said shortly after the ruling. “I am thankful we now have a fresh opportunity to see that justice is done.”

Drummond wasn’t in court on Monday morning. But his proxy Jimmy Harmon, chief of the AG’s criminal division was — and signaled that the office is ready to prosecute Glossip for a third time. While Harmon did not publicly announce what the charge would be, Judge Heather Coyle noted that the state has said it would not be seeking the death penalty — suggesting that the state will try Glossip for murder yet again.

The state’s plans were confirmed in a statement released by Drummond’s office shortly after the hearing. “While it was clear to me and to the U.S. Supreme Court that Mr. Glossip did not receive a fair trial, I have never proclaimed his innocence,” Drummond said. “After the high court remanded the matter back to district court, my office thoroughly reviewed the merits of the case against Richard Glossip and concluded that sufficient evidence exists to secure a murder conviction. … Unlike past prosecutors who allowed a key witness to lie on the stand, my office will make sure Mr. Glossip receives a fair trial based on hard facts, solid evidence and truthful testimony.”

Drummond’s announcement that the state would retry Glossip for first-degree murder was a shocking reversal of his recent public statements about the case. Drummond, who is running for governor, made the rounds in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, boasting about his success at the high court. Asked at a press conference how he might resolve the case, Drummond said “everything is on the table; a jury trial, all the way down.” But he noted that it “would be difficult” to retry Glossip after so many years. 

More recently, in an April interview on the CBS Evening News, Drummond reemphasized his support of the state’s death penalty, reminding viewers that he has witnessed every execution carried out during his tenure, while making clear that Glossip’s case had jumped out as problematic from the start. Glossip “didn’t murder the victim,” Drummond said. 

In court, Andrea Miller, legal director of the Innocence Project at the Oklahoma City University School of Law and one of several lawyers now representing Glossip, was blunt with the judge.

“Frankly, given the history of this case, we don’t think there can be a fair trial,” she said. Nevertheless, the defense team is preparing for another high-profile murder trial. Miller told the judge that famed death penalty lawyer Judy Clarke would be joining Glossip’s team.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to die for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s live-in manager, to the crime. The case against him was based almost entirely on the testimony of a 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed, who admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but insisted it was Glossip’s idea. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed escaped the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole.

At issue before the Supreme Court was Glossip’s and Drummond’s contention that prosecutors knew that Sneed, the key witness against Glossip, had lied on the witness stand but had failed to correct his testimony as the state was constitutionally required to do. This failure had violated Glossip’s rights and fundamentally altered the case, the justices found. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the majority opinion. Sneed’s credibility was central to the case and would have been undermined if the jury had learned the truth. “A prosecutor’s midtrial revelation that Sneed lied on the stand would have significantly undercut” his account, Sotomayor wrote.

Since being sentenced to death, Glossip has faced execution nine times. In 2015, he came within moments of lethal injection but was spared after officials realized they had the wrong drugs on hand. A moratorium on executions followed, pushing any new execution date well into the future and giving Glossip’s attorney Don Knight, who had already uncovered compelling evidence of Glossip’s innocence, crucial time to investigate further. 

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The decade since has brought a steady series of explosive revelations, including that the state destroyed key evidence before Glossip’s 2004 retrial and also hid evidence that Sneed had attempted to recant his testimony implicating Glossip. A slew of new witnesses also came forward to challenge the state’s depiction of Sneed as a meek follower who was under Glossip’s control when he violently murdered Van Treese. They instead described Sneed as dangerous and unpredictable — and entirely capable of killing on his own. Another said that while Sneed was locked up in the Oklahoma County jail, he had bragged about setting up Glossip to take the fall. 

The new witnesses offered accounts of the night Van Treese died that flipped the script on the state’s case. According to these witnesses, Sneed often worked in concert with a girlfriend, one of the many sex workers who occasioned the Van Treese’s motel, luring targets into a room to rob them. The woman in question was also said to be in a relationship with Van Treese. Instead of submitting on the night in question, Van Treese fought back, ultimately prompting Sneed to kill him. 

A persistent problem for Glossip has been his documented behavior and statements in the wake of Van Treese’s death. Oklahoma City cops became suspicious of Glossip in part because he’d failed to give them information that tied Sneed to the murder. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, Sneed had woken him up around 4 a.m. by knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel’s office. Standing outside with a black eye, Sneed told Glossip he had chased off some drunks who had broken a window in one of the motel rooms. According to Glossip, he asked Sneed about his black eye, and Sneed flippantly replied, “I killed Barry.” It wasn’t until the next morning, when no one could find Van Treese, that Glossip realized Sneed might have been serious. 

Still, Glossip didn’t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested waiting until they figured out what was going on. After Glossip finally confessed this to police, he was charged as an accessory after the fact to Van Treese’s murder — an acknowledgment that Glossip had nothing to do with the killing, but had withheld material information about it. That charge was escalated to capital murder after Sneed told detectives that Glossip had masterminded the crime.

There was good reason to be skeptical of this story. Not only was there no evidence to support it, Sneed implicated Glossip after a highly coercive interview by Oklahoma City homicide detectives, who repeatedly named Glossip as a possible conspirator before asking Sneed for his version of events.

Nearly 30 years after the murder — and with the credibility of their star witness irrevocably destroyed — the most logical course of action would have been for the state to offer Glossip a plea to a lesser charge, and finally end his legal ordeal once and for all. Sneed, who is now 47 and remains incarcerated on a life sentence, has changed his story numerous times over the years, making him a terrible witness if prosecutors were to put him on the stand. In an ordinary case, the Supreme Court’s ruling would leave the question of a new trial to the elected district attorney in Oklahoma City, Vicki Behenna, who would decide how to proceed. But Drummond’s announcement on Monday made it clear that the ultimate decision is his to make. 

For now, Glossip is being held in isolation at the Oklahoma County Detention Center, where he was moved in April. The jail is notoriously chaotic and violent: Seven people have died inside since the beginning of the year alone. On Monday morning, Judge Coyle scheduled a hearing to consider the defense’s request that Glossip be released from jail on bond pending a new trial.

In an email to Drummond’s office, The Intercept asked how Drummond reconciled the new murder charge with his previous statements and with his various legal briefs which conceded that the case against Glossip “hinged almost entirely” on Sneed, whose credibility had been fatally compromised. The Intercept also asked if the state had uncovered new evidence implicating Glossip in the crime.

AG spokesperson Phil Bacharach did not answer the questions. “Because it is an active case, we are unable to comment beyond the news release.”

The post In Shocking Move, Oklahoma AG Decides to Retry Richard Glossip for Murder appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

A provision buried deep in the House budget bill allocates $40 million toward President Donald Trump’s plan for a vast garden of larger-than-life statues — and it could get built on sacred Native land.

The House version of the budget reconciliation bill passed last month contains funding for Trump’s proposed National Garden of American Heroes, which would lionize figures ranging from Andrew Jackson to Harriet Tubman.

While the garden does not have an official location yet, one candidate is minutes from Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the iconic carvings of presidential faces in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Trump first announced his plan for a national statue garden during a July 4, 2020, address at Mount Rushmore in response to the racial justice protesters toppling Confederate statues.

“I’m quite sure that Harriet Tubman would not be pleased.”

The potential statue garden site near Mount Rushmore belongs to an influential South Dakotan mining family that has offered to donate the land, an offer that has support from the state’s governor.

The Black Hills, however, are sacred land to the region’s Indigenous peoples, and its ownership following a U.S. treaty violation is contested. One Native activist decried the idea of building another monument in the mountain range.

“I’m quite sure,” said Taylor Gunhammer, an organizer with the NDN Collective and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, “that Harriet Tubman would not be pleased that people trying to build the statue of her on stolen Lakota land have apparently learned nothing from her.”

From Columbus to Trebek

Trump’s vision has had a rocky road to realization. Trump’s announcement was meant to offer his own competing vision to the activists who sought to remove statues — by force or by politics — of figures like Andrew Jackson or Confederate generals.

In one of the final acts of his first term, he issued a list of potential figures that alternately baffled, delighted or outraged observers. They included divisive — but inarguably historic — figures such as Jackson, who signed the Indian Removal Act that began the Trail of Tears. Also listed, however, were unexpected choices such as Canadian-born “Jeopardy” host Alex Trebek, who was naturalized in 1998.

Some of the names never got American citizenship at all — including Christopher Columbus.

Joe Biden canceled the idea after taking the presidency, but Trump quickly revived it after his second inauguration.

The National Endowment for the Humanities was placed in charge of commissioning artists, who are required to craft “classical” statues in marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass and barred from abstract or modernist styles.

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The statue-making process has drawn its own skeptics about whether Trump can fulfill a vision of having the garden ready by July 4, 2026, the nation’s 250th birthday. The process of selecting a site and building Trump’s vision of a “vast outdoor park” in time could be just as daunting, however.

The Interior Department declined to comment on the site selection process, with a spokesperson saying that the garden was still in the “planning and discussion phase.”

“We are judiciously implementing the President’s Executive Order and will provide additional information as it becomes available,” spokesperson J. Elizabeth Peace said.

One of the few publicly known site candidates emerged in March, when Republican South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden issued a press release flagging the Black Hills as a potential location. In his announcement, he noted that the Lien family of Rapid City, South Dakota, had already offered land it owns near Mount Rushmore.

The Lien family, which has major interests in South Dakota mining projects, is also developing a theme park resort in Rapid City and a lodge nearby in the Black Hills. The family owns dozens of acres near the historic Doane Robinson tunnel, which offers motorists a framed view of Mount Rushmore.

Sacred and Profane

The vision of another monument in the Black Hills, however, would place South Dakota politicians on a collision course with some Native tribal members who have long lamented the creation of Mount Rushmore.

The Lakota Sioux called the mountain the Six Grandfathers and ventured to it for prayer and devotion, according to National Geographic. The entire Black Hills were sacred ground for the Lakota and other tribes.

The Black Hills were promised to the Oceti Sakowin peoples as part of a Great Sioux Reservation in an 1868 treaty, but the U.S. government broke its promise when gold was discovered there.

“The fact that it was built in the Black Hills was not an accident or happenstance.”

The Oceti Sakowin Oyate, commonly known as the Sioux Nation, won a 1980 Supreme Court case finding that they had been wrongfully deprived of the land. They rejected the court’s finding that they should receive monetary compensation and continued to seek return of the land. (Several tribes involved in the case did not respond to requests for comment about the proposed statue garden.)

Some Indigenous people in South Dakota see the carved faces on Mount Rushmore as a defacement of land that rightfully belongs to them.

“The fact that it was built in the Black Hills was not an accident or happenstance,” Gunhammer said. “It is representative of the exact colonial presence that the settler colonial project has always been trying to have in the Black Hills.”

Mount Rushmore is a point of pride for other South Dakotans, as well as an economic boon. Sam Brannan, a Lien family member who supports the project, said she was hopeful that the White House would take them up on their offer to build another patriotic attraction nearby.

“We’re just honored and hopeful that they will consider our site,” she said. “The people they have selected are amazing. I hope everybody goes through those 250 names. They are very representative of the United States.”

“Great Neighbors to the Lakotans”

The statue garden proposal comes at the same time as a family-owned company, Pete Lien and Sons, seeks to conduct exploratory drilling for graphite in the Black Hills near Pe’ Sla, another sacred ceremonial site for the Lakota.

Gunhammer has been active in organizing tribal members against the proposed mining activity, which would happen on U.S. Forest Service land.

“The same company trying to build this national hero garden in order to preserve history is currently trying to undertake a project that destroys history for everyone,” he said.

Brannan referred questions about the mining project to Pete Lien and Sons, which did not respond to a request for comment sent through its website.

With regards to the national garden, Brannan said that Native tribes have not been consulted on the family’s offer yet. “Why would we? It’s been privately held for 60 years,” she said.

Still, Brannan said the tribes could be consulted if the project advances. She said no one organization can claim to speak for all the Lakota people, and that her family maintains warm relations with Native leaders.

“We have been in mining for 80 years in the Black Hills, so we have been great neighbors to the Lakotans here,” she said, referring to one of the subgroups that makes up the Oceti Sakowin people.

In a statement, Josie Harms, the press secretary for the South Dakota governor, noted that the potential list of figures to be honored includes Native leaders such as Sitting Bull, the Lakota leader who defeated George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

“The tract of land in question is private property owned by Chuck Lien and his family,” said Harms, referring to the family patriarch who died in 2018. “As a result, it will cause no disruption to either state or tribal land. As a federal project, the state will be a partner with the federal government as it seeks to comply with its regulations or consultation, as needed.”

“Real Chance to Win”

The Trump administration has yet to detail how it will select the site for the statue garden, although numerous states and counties pitched the Interior Department five years ago.

Brannan said it was her understanding that more than 20 sites are being considered. Her family has not had direct contact with the Trump administration, she said.

One factor in the Black Hills site’s favor is that the garden is gaining momentum at a high-water mark for the political influence of the twin Great Plains states of North and South Dakota.

Former South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who first championed the idea, is serving as Trump’s Homeland Security secretary. South Dakota Sen. John Thune is the upper chamber’s majority leader. Former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is serving as the secretary of the Interior Department, the executive tapped with finding the location for the garden.

South Dakota’s lone U.S. representative, Dusty Johnson — like Noem, Thune, and Burgum, a Republican — told The Intercept that the Black Hills have a strong shot. He has been pushing the idea with the Trump administration.

“I don’t want to speak for the administration, other than I would tell you every conversation I have had with them, they understand the value of this particular parcel, and that they are going to give the Black Hills of South Dakota a full and complete look,” he said. “We’re going to have a real chance to win.”

Native Projects Lose Out

The House’s plan to spend tens of millions of dollars on the garden is laid out in the same reconciliation bill that would kick 11 million people off health insurance, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office estimate.

To make it into law, the spending provision would have to win Senate approval. Thune’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The House bill does not specify whether the money should be spent on the site or the statues. Money from hundreds of National Endowment for the Humanities grants that the Trump administration canceled could be redirected to pay for the statues, the New York Times reported in April.

The National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts have jointly committed $34 million for the project, including $30 million from this year’s budget for the statues.

Some of the National Endowment for the Humanities grants that were canceled would have supported Native cultural projects in South Dakota.

The roster of grants killed includes $60,000 for an anthology of Lakota and Dakota literature in translation and $205,000 for an Oglala language archiving project, according to a list maintained by the Association for Computers and the Humanities.

The post Trump Could Use Sacred Native Land for a Monument to… Columbus appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

A provision buried deep in the House budget bill allocates $40 million toward President Donald Trump’s plan for a vast garden of larger-than-life statues — and it could get built on sacred Native land.

The House version of the budget reconciliation bill passed last month contains funding for Trump’s proposed National Garden of American Heroes, which would lionize figures ranging from Andrew Jackson to Harriet Tubman.

While the garden does not have an official location yet, one candidate is minutes from Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the iconic carvings of presidential faces in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Trump first announced his plan for a national statue garden during a July 4, 2020, address at Mount Rushmore in response to the racial justice protesters toppling Confederate statues.

“I’m quite sure that Harriet Tubman would not be pleased.”

The potential statue garden site near Mount Rushmore belongs to an influential South Dakotan mining family that has offered to donate the land, an offer that has support from the state’s governor.

The Black Hills, however, are sacred land to the region’s Indigenous peoples, and its ownership following a U.S. treaty violation is contested. One Native activist decried the idea of building another monument in the mountain range.

“I’m quite sure,” said Taylor Gunhammer, an organizer with the NDN Collective and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, “that Harriet Tubman would not be pleased that people trying to build the statue of her on stolen Lakota land have apparently learned nothing from her.”

From Columbus to Trebek

Trump’s vision has had a rocky road to realization. Trump’s announcement was meant to offer his own competing vision to the activists who sought to remove statues — by force or by politics — of figures like Andrew Jackson or Confederate generals.

In one of the final acts of his first term, he issued a list of potential figures that alternately baffled, delighted or outraged observers. They included divisive — but inarguably historic — figures such as Jackson, who signed the Indian Removal Act that began the Trail of Tears. Also listed, however, were unexpected choices such as Canadian-born “Jeopardy” host Alex Trebek, who was naturalized in 1998.

Some of the names never got American citizenship at all — including Christopher Columbus.

Joe Biden canceled the idea after taking the presidency, but Trump quickly revived it after his second inauguration.

The National Endowment for the Humanities was placed in charge of commissioning artists, who are required to craft “classical” statues in marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass and barred from abstract or modernist styles.

Related

Expect Trump’s Military Parade to Cost More Than the Army Says

The statue-making process has drawn its own skeptics about whether Trump can fulfill a vision of having the garden ready by July 4, 2026, the nation’s 250th birthday. The process of selecting a site and building Trump’s vision of a “vast outdoor park” in time could be just as daunting, however.

The Interior Department declined to comment on the site selection process, with a spokesperson saying that the garden was still in the “planning and discussion phase.”

“We are judiciously implementing the President’s Executive Order and will provide additional information as it becomes available,” spokesperson J. Elizabeth Peace said.

One of the few publicly known site candidates emerged in March, when Republican South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden issued a press release flagging the Black Hills as a potential location. In his announcement, he noted that the Lien family of Rapid City, South Dakota, had already offered land it owns near Mount Rushmore.

The Lien family, which has major interests in South Dakota mining projects, is also developing a theme park resort in Rapid City and a lodge nearby in the Black Hills. The family owns dozens of acres near the historic Doane Robinson tunnel, which offers motorists a framed view of Mount Rushmore.

Sacred and Profane

The vision of another monument in the Black Hills, however, would place South Dakota politicians on a collision course with some Native tribal members who have long lamented the creation of Mount Rushmore.

The Lakota Sioux called the mountain the Six Grandfathers and ventured to it for prayer and devotion, according to National Geographic. The entire Black Hills were sacred ground for the Lakota and other tribes.

The Black Hills were promised to the Oceti Sakowin peoples as part of a Great Sioux Reservation in an 1868 treaty, but the U.S. government broke its promise when gold was discovered there.

“The fact that it was built in the Black Hills was not an accident or happenstance.”

The Oceti Sakowin Oyate, commonly known as the Sioux Nation, won a 1980 Supreme Court case finding that they had been wrongfully deprived of the land. They rejected the court’s finding that they should receive monetary compensation and continued to seek return of the land. (Several tribes involved in the case did not respond to requests for comment about the proposed statue garden.)

Some Indigenous people in South Dakota see the carved faces on Mount Rushmore as a defacement of land that rightfully belongs to them.

“The fact that it was built in the Black Hills was not an accident or happenstance,” Gunhammer said. “It is representative of the exact colonial presence that the settler colonial project has always been trying to have in the Black Hills.”

Mount Rushmore is a point of pride for other South Dakotans, as well as an economic boon. Sam Brannan, a Lien family member who supports the project, said she was hopeful that the White House would take them up on their offer to build another patriotic attraction nearby.

“We’re just honored and hopeful that they will consider our site,” she said. “The people they have selected are amazing. I hope everybody goes through those 250 names. They are very representative of the United States.”

“Great Neighbors to the Lakotans”

The statue garden proposal comes at the same time as a family-owned company, Pete Lien and Sons, seeks to conduct exploratory drilling for graphite in the Black Hills near Pe’ Sla, another sacred ceremonial site for the Lakota.

Gunhammer has been active in organizing tribal members against the proposed mining activity, which would happen on U.S. Forest Service land.

“The same company trying to build this national hero garden in order to preserve history is currently trying to undertake a project that destroys history for everyone,” he said.

Brannan referred questions about the mining project to Pete Lien and Sons, which did not respond to a request for comment sent through its website.

With regards to the national garden, Brannan said that Native tribes have not been consulted on the family’s offer yet. “Why would we? It’s been privately held for 60 years,” she said.

Still, Brannan said the tribes could be consulted if the project advances. She said no one organization can claim to speak for all the Lakota people, and that her family maintains warm relations with Native leaders.

“We have been in mining for 80 years in the Black Hills, so we have been great neighbors to the Lakotans here,” she said, referring to one of the subgroups that makes up the Oceti Sakowin people.

In a statement, Josie Harms, the press secretary for the South Dakota governor, noted that the potential list of figures to be honored includes Native leaders such as Sitting Bull, the Lakota leader who defeated George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

“The tract of land in question is private property owned by Chuck Lien and his family,” said Harms, referring to the family patriarch who died in 2018. “As a result, it will cause no disruption to either state or tribal land. As a federal project, the state will be a partner with the federal government as it seeks to comply with its regulations or consultation, as needed.”

“Real Chance to Win”

The Trump administration has yet to detail how it will select the site for the statue garden, although numerous states and counties pitched the Interior Department five years ago.

Brannan said it was her understanding that more than 20 sites are being considered. Her family has not had direct contact with the Trump administration, she said.

One factor in the Black Hills site’s favor is that the garden is gaining momentum at a high-water mark for the political influence of the twin Great Plains states of North and South Dakota.

Former South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who first championed the idea, is serving as Trump’s Homeland Security secretary. South Dakota Sen. John Thune is the upper chamber’s majority leader. Former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is serving as the secretary of the Interior Department, the executive tapped with finding the location for the garden.

South Dakota’s lone U.S. representative, Dusty Johnson — like Noem, Thune, and Burgum, a Republican — told The Intercept that the Black Hills have a strong shot. He has been pushing the idea with the Trump administration.

“I don’t want to speak for the administration, other than I would tell you every conversation I have had with them, they understand the value of this particular parcel, and that they are going to give the Black Hills of South Dakota a full and complete look,” he said. “We’re going to have a real chance to win.”

Native Projects Lose Out

The House’s plan to spend tens of millions of dollars on the garden is laid out in the same reconciliation bill that would kick 11 million people off health insurance, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office estimate.

To make it into law, the spending provision would have to win Senate approval. Thune’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The House bill does not specify whether the money should be spent on the site or the statues. Money from hundreds of National Endowment for the Humanities grants that the Trump administration canceled could be redirected to pay for the statues, the New York Times reported in April.

The National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts have jointly committed $34 million for the project, including $30 million from this year’s budget for the statues.

Some of the National Endowment for the Humanities grants that were canceled would have supported Native cultural projects in South Dakota.

The roster of grants killed includes $60,000 for an anthology of Lakota and Dakota literature in translation and $205,000 for an Oglala language archiving project, according to a list maintained by the Association for Computers and the Humanities.

The post Trump Could Use Sacred Native Land for a Monument to… Christopher Columbus appeared first on The Intercept.

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Newly unsealed records provide new details about the Trump administration’s failed effort this spring to obtain a search warrant for an Instagram account run by student protesters at Columbia University.

The FBI and federal prosecutors sought a sweeping warrant, the records show, that would have identified the people who ran the account along with every user who had interacted with it since January 2024.

Between March 15 and April 14, the FBI and the Department of Justice filed multiple search warrant applications and appeared numerous times before two different judges in Manhattan federal court as part of an investigation into Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD, a student group. A magistrate judge denied the application three times in March, a decision which a district court judge later affirmed in April.

“It is unusual for a magistrate judge to reject a search warrant application from the government.”

“It is unusual for a magistrate judge to reject a search warrant application from the government,” said F. Mario Trujillo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And it is even more unusual for the government to try and appeal that decision to a district court judge, who again rejected it. That speaks to the lack probable cause in the warrant application.”

The records — which include transcripts of hearings with the judges as well as the government’s filings — provide a rare blow-by-blow of the search warrant application process, which, in line with normal procedure, was initially conducted under seal. The materials were unsealed on Tuesday as part of a court action originally filed by the New York Times in May, which The Intercept supported.

Columbia University and CUAD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The government first sought a search warrant on March 15, the records show. The Times previously reported that the Department of Justice sought the search warrant after a top official, Emil Bove, ordered the department’s civil rights division to find a list of CUAD’s members.

For a month, the government argued to judges that a March 14 post on Instagram from @cuapartheiddivest — the group was banned from Instagram in late March for violating community standards — was a “true threat” against the university’s then-interim president Katrina Armstrong in violation of federal law. The post referred to the university’s use of the New York Police Department to break up campus demonstrations and the targeting of student activists by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“The people will not stand for Columbia University’s shameless complicity in genocide!” reads the post, in part, next to a photo of graffiti spray-painted onto a Manhattan mansion used as the president’s housing at Columbia. “The University’s repression has only bred more resistance and Columbia has lit a flame it can’t control. Katrina Armstrong you will not be allowed peace as you sic NYPD officers and ICE agents on your own students for opposing the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

“FREE THEM ALL” reads the graffiti in the photo, alongside an inverted triangle, a much-disputed symbol that pro-Palestine protesters in the U.S. and around the world have used. Hamas, the militant group that ruled the occupied Gaza Strip, has also used the inverted triangle to identify bombing targets, the FBI agent — whose name was redacted — wrote in an affidavit accompanying the search warrant application.

The FBI agent wrote that the photograph of the graffiti and message in the Instagram post were sufficient probable cause of an “interstate communication of a threat to injure, in violation of” the law.

The argument, made in multiple hearings over the following weeks, failed to convince two judges.

Reviewing the initial application, Chief Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn determined it was a “close call” and asked for more information about the “symbolism and context of the posting,” according to a letter from the government. On March 16, Netburn denied the search warrant application, finding the post “seemed like protected speech” under the First Amendment, the government letter said.

The Justice Department quickly appealed the rare denial of a search warrant application.

“Because Judge Netburn’s ruling significantly impedes an ongoing investigation into credible threats of violence against an individual, prompt reversal is necessary,” wrote Alec C. Ward, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, in a March 20 letter to a district court judge.

Following hearings on March 24 and March 25, which largely concerned the Justice Department’s procedural missteps, District Court Judge John Koeltl referred the search application back to Netburn. During a March 28 hearing, Netburn denied the request for a search warrant application once again.

Netburn criticized the government for failing to “clearly represent what the case law is” around the First Amendment and threats.

“Words that may reflect heated rhetoric, in the context in which they are made would not reasonably engender fear, do not constitute a true threat,” Netburn said, ruling that the government hadn’t met its burden to establish that the triangle symbol “in the context here and in the context of the statement that the president of Columbia University will not have peace, is a true threat, as the law identifies.”

The government also hadn’t indicated whether Armstrong, the interim Columbia president, herself actually interpreted the statements as threatening, which binding precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court requires.

“We have not had an opportunity to put that question directly to Ms. Armstrong at this point,” Ward told Netburn. The FBI had flagged the post to Armstrong’s office, Ward said at the hearing, “conveying its belief that the threat should be taken seriously from a security standpoint.”

Ward compared the post to burning a cross outside a residence, which is not protected speech under the First Amendment, saying the two were not “exactly equivalent” but still comparable as “symbolic threats.”

After denying the application, Netburn ordered that, if the government ever tried to get another court to authorize a search warrant for CUAD’s account, they had to include a transcript of the hearing before her.

“The accompanying text also does not contain an explicit or implicit threat of violence. It contains political opposition to Columbia’s policy.”

The government appealed Netburn’s third denial of the search warrant application. At an April 14 hearing, Koeltl agreed with Netburn’s denial.

“Context matters,” Koeltl said at the hearing. “There were no such explicit threats in the Instagram post about what was written on the wall on then-President Armstrong’s residence.”

“As for the explicit message on the wall—’FREE THEM ALL’—that phrase does not convey a threat,” Koeltl said, “nor is there any reason to conclude that the red paint was intended to convey a purported threat.”

“The accompanying text also does not contain an explicit or implicit threat of violence,” he ruled. “It contains political opposition to Columbia’s policy.”

In a final bizarre twist to the search warrant saga, when the New York Times sought to unseal the materials last month, the government did not oppose the request. On Tuesday evening, the Justice Department filed copies with minimal redactions.  

The post How the FBI Sought a Warrant to Search Instagram of Columbia Student Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.

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