Atlanta, Georgia’s attempt to erect a law enforcement officer training center in Atlanta was met by months of concerted protests. As the months stretched into years (the center was announced in 2021 but did not complete construction until 2025), opposition efforts ranged from peaceful protests to heated exchanges during public comment sessions to attacks on construction equipment by people seeking to shut the project down.
The government has been pursuing criminal charges against protesters since 2023 — efforts that included the state of Georgia ringing up 61 protesters on RICO charges. That case stalled out last spring, but both state and federal prosecutors are still hoping to ring up a few headline-making arrests that might make it easier to depict anti-government protests as terrorism when engaging in prosecutions.
The desire to turn protesters into terrorists is generating collateral damage. With the prosecution of Cop City protester Sam Tunick, the federal government is apparently hoping to convert a cell phone operating system into de facto evidence of criminal intent.
Sam Tunick was stopped for interrogation at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport on 24 January last year, after vacationing in the Dominican Republic. Unbeknown to him, federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.
What happened next was even more fucked up (from Tunick’s motion to suppress evidence):
The two CBP officers conducting the initial interrogation of Mr. Tunick never read him his Miranda rights and, further, Mr. Tunick stated early in the interview that he did not want to continue speaking without a lawyer. Yet the officers repeatedly ignored Mr. Tunick’s requests to speak with his lawyer, continued to question him, and declared: “because you’re refusing to talk, which is your right, we have the authority to go through your phone to see what we’re looking for.” [Timestamp 20:00:40].
After the officers requested Mr. Tunick’s cell phone password a second time, Mr. Tunick asked again why he was not allowed to call his lawyer, and the officers responded: “when it comes to immigration and customs, right, it’s a whole different ballgame. . . and we have search authority, we don’t need a warrant.” [Timestamp 20:05:09].
The CBP officers explained that Mr. Tunick would have to give the officers access to his phone, whether it was done with his cooperation or not and, eventually, Mr. Tunick provided a password to his cell phone and e-reader.
Also this:
The interrogation, including the questions about child sexual abuse images, was “a pretext for a fishing expedition into Mr Tunick’s connections” to the movement against Cop City, according to the motion.
The officers made it clear they would either seize Tunick’s phone or return it to him after they’d searched with the aid of his provided passcode. Either way, the officers were going to search his phone.
So, Tunick gave the officers what they asked for: a passcode. And then this happened:
Agent Findley and several others repeatedly asked Tunick to open his phone during the interrogation, telling him they would seize it if he did not. When he finally provided a passcode, “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart”, according to the motion.
What the agents were witnessing (and were apparently unaware was a third option they hadn’t considered) was the triggering of cell phone operating system GrapheneOS responding to a “duress mode” passcode entry.
GrapheneOS users have this option…
GrapheneOS provides users with the ability to set a duress PIN/Password that will irreversibly wipe the device (along with any installed eSIMs) once entered anywhere where the device credentials are requested (on the lockscreen, along with any such prompt in the OS).
The wipe does not require a reboot and cannot be interrupted.
…which somewhat mitigates the deleterious effects of thisgovernment option:
Officers demanded a passcode. Tunick provided them with one.
This did not involve Tunick physically interacting with his phone at any time. And while we’re going to have to wait to see how this plays out in court, it seems like compliance (however malicious that compliance might be) is still compliance. It seems extremely vindictive to punish someone for the end result of the government’s actions.
At any point, the officers could have dropped the CSAM pretext and/or given Tunick access to his constitutional rights. Instead, the government leveraged its “Constitution-free zone” privileges in an attempt to intimidate someone into full cooperation, all while pretending this was about illicit images, rather than Tunick’s activism against the government.
And the government knows its case against Tunick is weak. It’s not charging him with destroying evidence or obstruction. Instead, it’s relying on a seldom-used statute that criminalizes destroying property the government wants to seize.
That is some weak sauce. But it’s the sauce the government wants to use. If the court allows this to proceed without suppression, the government will be allowed — and encouraged! — to consider the mere existence of GrapheneOS on a person’s phone as evidence of criminal intent.
“It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.
This is the DOJ trying to open the Overton Window while simultaneously trying to convert a lot of protected speech into acts of terrorism.
I would hope the court rejects any counteroffers from the government. Agents demanded a passcode and a passcode was provided. That it didn’t provide them access to the phone’s contents is on them. And it’s pretty clear the government knows it barely has a case here. If it thought it could connect the legal dots convincingly, it would have gone for an obstruction charge, rather than the bullshit it’s pulling here. The government could still seize the “property.” That it now contains nothing it might use to generate more charges against Tunick is on the officers who decided to abuse the “border” privilege to cheat an American out of his constitutional rights while pretending to give a fuck about CSAM.
The authoritarianism has been out in the open pretty much since day one with this presidency. Things that leak out around the edges — unaccompanied by official statements, announcements, or randomly-capitalized Truth Social posts — would embarrass any normal administration. But with this administration, new information about new awfulness rarely manages to provoke even a shrug from government officials.
And in this case, why would the administration care that the public now knows who’s been put in charge of carrying out Trump’s plans to see his political opponents and public critics jailed? After all, Trump went on full main with this blast last September with a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), informing Americans that lots of them were now going to be treated as enemies of the state:
Supporting immigration reform? Terrorist. LGBTQ+ rights? Terrorist. Criticizing his failures? Terrorist! Calling out his authoritarianism? All terrorism, apparently.
The intent was never in question. What mattered was whether or not the administration could make this a reality. And it did. The Trump DOJ (let’s not pretend it has any independence) managed to secure terrorism convictions against people involved in an anti-ICE protest in Texas. One suspect was charged with providing material support simply because he drove boxes full of “leftwing magazines” from one place to another.
Thanks to Trump unilaterally declaring most forms of opposition to his particular government to be terrorism, the person who transported the anti-fascist, left-leaning magazines in his car has now been sentenced to thirty years in prison, thanks to terrorism sentencing enhancements.
These are charges that have stuck. Most haven’t. And apparently the administration feels it might have the wrong people handling the politically motivated prosecutions of Trump’s opponents. Plenty of turnover has already happened as Trump DOJ appointees find out it’s pretty much impossible to push Trump’s authoritarian desires past grand juries and the criminal courts beyond. High-profile failures in high-profile prosecutions mean Trump constantly has to find someone else willing to throw themselves under the bus, along with whatever integrity or career plans they might have on them.
But Trump also wants the little people punished, even if all he knows about them is that they’re opposed to his practices and policies. Talking Points Memo is naming names, being the first to discover who’s now leading the charge to create a whole new class of political prisoners.
The Department of Justice has tapped two prosecutors with expertise in organized crime and terrorism prosecutions to implement a White House directive to crack down on its political opponents, a department spokesperson confirmed to TPM.
[…]
Brian W. Lynch, a Violent Crime and Racketeering Section prosecutor since 2020 with experience on the Guantanamo prosecution team, and Jason Kellhofer, a longtime counterterrorism prosecutor in Raleigh, North Carolina, are running the initiative as co-directors. They’re likely to bring extensive experience with tools used to take down sophisticated and violent criminal organizations, as well as to nip terrorist plots in the bud: real-time interception of communications, aggressive use of conspiracy statutes, confidential informants. They’re now running a task force whose purpose is to implement NSPM-7, which directed law enforcement to treat beliefs like “anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as warning signs for political violence.
The administration’s willingness to confirm TPM’s information makes it clear it doesn’t care what anyone thinks about its actions or shifting of priorities. Not only does this show that the administration cares more about locking up protesters than going after actually dangerous criminals and terrorists, it also thinks moving these people into these positions will somehow make its bogus prosecutions sustainable. To date — with the notable exception of the terrorist charges discussed earlier — almost every effort to convert arrests of protesters to felony convictions has failed.
“Just following orders,” as they say. Except that’s not what the DOJ is supposed to be doing. But because it’s decided it serves a king, rather than a country, the failures it has repeatedly experienced were always to be expected.
[Trump has] personally directed prosecutors to charge his critics; the DOJ helped deliver a settlement in which the IRS agreed to never audit Trump for any past tax returns. Prosecutors have pursued hundreds of cases against anti-Trump protesters across the country that they were then forced to drop after the evidence failed to sustain the charges in court.
Of additional interest is the fact that one of the prosecutors elevated to handle Trump’s personal revenge plans (Brian Lynch) spent years contributing to MAGA-adjacent site American Thinker, including engaging in some COVID denialism and claiming the “media” would “stop at nothing” to prevent Trump from being re-elected in 2020. One assumes he will bring this same enthusiasm to his new position, which will allow him to go after Trump critics — a cross-section of America that will likely include members of the press at some point.
These acts endanger the country and democracy itself. And they’re being done by people who have (falsely) claimed for nearly a decade now that loving Trump is the equivalent of loving this country.
It’s no secret ICE officers are using their phones and their tech toys to do way more than they’ll openly admit to doing. Tech tools that can be abused will be abused. And ICE has plenty of those, including an app that’s supposed to be used for “verification” of migrant status, but is just facial recognition tied to whatever other information ICE has access to.
The cameras come out and the harassment begins, as detailed here in this NPR report. Shortly after Portland, Maine resident Xenia Pantos stopped her car to observe some ICE activity in her neighborhood, their spouse, Carly Williams got a call from a blocked number. The caller identified himself as calling from the Department of Homeland Security.
Williams said the caller asked if anyone else drives her vehicle. When Williams mentioned her spouse sometimes did, the caller asked Williams if she knew her spouse had stopped at an incident that morning.
“What he basically said was, ‘You should let her know to not do that anymore because people who are doing that type of thing are getting added to a domestic terrorist watch list,'” Williams recalled in an interview with NPR.
ICE continues to deny it targets anti-ICE protesters with its surveillance tools. According to the report, it has “repeatedly denied” utilizing its tools and databases to find out more about those who protest or observe its anti-migrant efforts.
Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., cited a well-circulated clip of an ICE agent in Portland, Maine, telling a person videotaping that she would be added to a “nice little database.”
“I can’t speak for that individual,” said Todd Lyons, who serves as acting director of ICE. “But I can assure you that there is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.”
Lyons doubled down on his denials about the database’s existence during a Senate hearing Thursday. When asked if ICE is giving protester information to any other agency, Lyons said: “We do not.”
That’s what Todd Lyons said in February. And it’s definitely not true. ICE has a database that is definitely capable of “tracking American citizens,” because it has access to plenty of law enforcement databases filled with information about American citizens. One needs to look no further than the heat it has drawn by asking local law enforcement to perform searches of things like Flock’s ALPR databases on its behalf.
And it’s definitely not true because the same Todd Lyons said as much in a written response [PDF] to congressional queries that has only recently been made public.
Lyons in February: “There is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.”
Lyons in April: “Well… except for this one.”
Your letter asks what specific personal information DHS officers collect. ICE collects information to identify the person(s) with whom the officer or agent is engaging. During these interactions, a variety of data may be collected by ICE law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration and criminal law. ICE collects essential biographic and biometric information and situational details required to support criminal investigations, safety, and immigration concerns.
If individuals who interact with ICE officers are not arrested or detained, any information collected during those encounters is maintained consistent with applicable law and DHS and ICE policies and is treated as an official government record.
That sounds like a database is being created and maintained — one that deals solely with people who are not targets of immigration enforcement effort. And most of those people would be (1) US citizens and (2) protesters and observers engaging with ICE officers.
Further down in the letter, Lyons offers up another phrase that sounds like a denial, but really isn’t:
DHS is not creating or maintaining a separate, standalone database for individuals encountered that haven’t been arrested or detained.
That would mean something if no information was collected on these people. But Lyons has already stated that officers collect this information. If DHS is not “creating or maintaining a separate database,” that only means exactly what that says. However, it does not mean DHS is not collecting and storing information about people ICE officers “encounter” who are not “arrested or detained.”
Even if all applicable laws and retention standards are being followed (and DHS has given us little reason to believe it follows laws and standards), this information is still being collected, stored, and — because it’s there — accessed by federal officers.
And even if we choose to believe Lyons’ dissembling, we’re still left with the fact that people identifying themselves as federal employees are calling up citizens who’ve done nothing more than exercise their First Amendment rights and threatening them with being added to government databases. So, even if Lyons ain’t lying, the people who worked for him (until he stepped down) aren’t doing what Lyons thinks they’re doing. They’re doing the other thing: collecting information on protesters and observers for the sole reason of keeping an eye on them, if not actually tracking them down to harass them.
As we near the halfway point in the second Trump presidential term, there’s something that is worth remembering: Donald Trump, like most nasty viruses, is a temporary condition. Trumpism may not be, though I have my doubts as to how long a cult of personality can survive without that specific personality leading the cult. But Donald Trump as president will come to an end in the not too distant future.
The millions and millions of people who have been negatively impacted by him and by those who have decided to bow at his cultish altar, are not temporary. They are not going to go away. And they will remember the actions of many during this time.
And I imagine the American Diabetes Association, and specifically those currently leading it, will be in the memories of its members and many others for a long, long time. It’s been nearly a week since the ADA had five diabetes scientists, including its own former president, involuntarily removed from outside the ADA’s annual conference by police. Their crime? Distributing a copy of an editorial from the April edition of the ADA’s own journal.
The scientists were distributing the editorial outside the conference’s opening speech, which was originally scheduled to be given by Jay Bhattacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health under Trump. Bhattacharya canceled at the last minute, and senior NIH official Rick Woychik took his place.
Within minutes of beginning to hand out the editorial, police reportedly escorted the scientists out of the conference, which was held in New Orleans. The police reportedly shoved at least one scientist, took all of their conference badges, and threatened to arrest them if they tried to return. Louisiana State Police later told media that they acted at the request of the ADA. The ADA subsequently barred the five scientists from the rest of the conference.
The editorial just so happened to be very critical of the Trump administration and RFK Jr.’s funding at NIH and other health agencies and groups. It’s quite obvious that the ADA feared repercussions from the Trump administration if it wouldn’t allow these scientists to hand the article out while members of the administration were speaking and tried to use the police to silence them. And then, when this whole thing went viral, the ADA offered up justifications for its actions. Justifications that kept changing, as it turns out.
In an email to ADA members Saturday, the association said the scientists were removed because they didn’t have prior approval to distribute material at the conference and that it was “not because of the viewpoints expressed in those materials,” according to reporting from Science.
In a statement Sunday, the organization, which is a nonprofit, said it removed the scientists because it was complying with federal regulations for 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which requires “maintaining a strictly nonpartisan environment at all organizational events and functions while engaging across party affiliations to advance our mission.” However, the federal regulations do not restrict leaders of organizations from sharing political views in a personal capacity or from speaking on important public policy issues.
And from there, the Streisand Effect took over. The editorial, which you can find right here, went somewhat viral itself, getting a ton more attention than it had to date. But the real backlash came from the public and from within the medical community itself. There have been resignations in protest of the ADA’s actions. An open letter to the ADA signed by 40 members was written to torch leadership’s actions and treatment of the scientists at the conference. Another open letter was also written, likewise demanding an apology.
And, finally, the ADA did in fact apologize days later.
In the video Wednesday, ADA CEO Charles Henderson personally apologized to the five scientists, including Aaron Kelly, pediatrics professor at the University of Minnesota; Justin Ryder of Northwestern University; and Irl Hirsch, also of the University of Washington, in addition to Kahn and Schatz.
“What transpired is not reflective of who I am, the values I hold, or the way I was raised,” Henderson said. “I will work hard to bring our community back together to build on the progress we have collectively made for those affected by diabetes.”
In addition to apologizing to the five ejected scientists, Henderson apologized to the community as a whole, saying that the ADA would commission a “thorough independent review of the events that occurred as well as the policies, procedures, and decision-making process that guided our actions.”
Yeah, no, not good enough. The fish stinks from the head down, as the saying goes, and there have been days worth of attempts to make this stupidity anyone’s fault but leadership at the ADA. This was a clear attempt to lick the Trump administration’s boots, at the very moment when clear leadership from medical groups is so sorely needed, and that’s a bell that cannot be un-rung.
Henderson needs to go. And I have little doubt that he will before too long. Trump and RFK Jr. will eventually be gone, as well.
But we won’t forget how groups like the ADA, and the people leading them, acted during this time.
If federal officers are going to murder another person, it will likely happen here.
Newark, New Jersey is the newest battleground for the administration, as Trump goes to war with his own constituents. The foundation was laid months ago, when ICE officers assaulted, arrested, and illegally refused to grant access to detention facilities to congressional reps.
Now, there’s a war being fought at the Delaney Hall detention facility, overseen by ICE and run by private prison contractor, GEO Group. The protests have been steadily getting more intense. The city’s mayor, Ras Baraka, has been on the Trump administration’s radar ever since officers arrested him for… um… standing on a public sidewalk as New Jersey congressional reps demanded access to the facility.
The crisis remains a volatile, early test of Ms. Sherrill and her administration, with the potential for political fallout that could reverberate far beyond Newark. Ms. Sherrill, a moderate Democrat, has already faced criticism from the left, which has pointed to her decision to send in New Jersey State Police troopers to quell disturbances outside Delaney Hall as evidence of cooperation with the Trump administration’s divisive immigration crackdown.
Seems like that might be a job that would be better handled by vastly better-funded federal agencies, like the Federal Protective Service which is overseen by the flush-with-cash DHS.
But given what’s happening outside of Delaney Hall, it might make more sense to expend state resources on protecting protesters, legal observers, and (especially!) journalists from federal officers, not to mention the locals who are supposed to be serving and protecting.
According to a report by amNewYork, there have been allegations from multiple photojournalists who say they were injured while documenting clashes near the detention center, with some reporting damaged camera equipment and physical injuries, including broken fingers.
Reuters photojournalist Ryan Murphy tells amNewYork that he was struck with a baton over several nights of coverage and said agents targeted his camera during an incident on Thursday. Murphy said he believes the strike broke one of his fingers.
[…]
Photographer Madison Swart, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, also alleged that she was deliberately pushed to the ground while documenting the protests. Swart says an agent struck her with a baton during the confrontation. According to amNewYork, another photographer was reportedly seen curled in the fetal position as agents moved over her, while another prominent photographer, who requested anonymity, says the top of his camera was smashed.
Mostafa Bassim, a photojournalist for Turkey’s Anadolu Agency, was struck with a baton by a federal officer, damaging his camera lens, while covering protests outside a private immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, on May 28, 2026.
[…]
Bassim told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he arrived at the detention facility shortly before nightfall. He said that even before he was able to start documenting the scene, federal officers noticed his camera and began shining high-powered lights directly at him.
“The second they see you with a camera they just start doing that to you,” Bassim said.
Any officer who’s only interested in doing what’s necessary to maintain the peace wouldn’t deliberately target journalists, especially before the protests themselves start to get out of hand. And when it is actually time to step in to protect federal employees (or government contractors), force should be applied to those whose actions demand a forceful reaction. Deliberately targeting journalists and the tools of their trade is nothing more than being shitty just because you know no one will stop you.
[P]hotojournalist, Angelina Katsanis, 25, dropped her camera bag after she was injured at the protest on Saturday, she said in an interview. The bag contained roughly $10,000 worth of equipment, according to astatement from the state attorney general, Jennifer Davenport.
The bag was later tracked using an Apple AirTag to the home of Darryl Brown, 43, a sergeant with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, the statement said. Sergeant Brown, of Sparta Township, N.J., had been deployed to Delaney Hall during the protest, prosecutors said.
On top of the theft (which is a felony, given the value of items stolen), there’s the officer’s attempt to cover up the crime:
From a hospital bed, she watched on her phone as the AirTag in her camera bag traveled across northern New Jersey — on the highway, then to a private residence, and then to a bar close to that home, she said.
Ms. Katsanis said her boyfriend and the other photographer went out to track the AirTag and found that it had been removed from her bag and was on the side of the road. She said that her name and contact information were still clearly written on the AirTag.
Unfortunately, the officer is still employed, albeit not working at the moment… and better yet not being paid for not working. Suspended without pay. It’s a start. Somehow, the prosecutor’s office can’t help but shift into the exonerative tense when discussing this alleged crime, even as moves forward with its prosecution:
The prosecutors also received footage from Sergeant Brown’s body-worn camera, which they said “shows him interacting with a dark-colored bag consistent with the description of the victim’s belongings.”
“Interacting” is a pretty coy term for “rifling through a bag’s contents before deciding to steal the bag and everything in it.” It’s like describing molestation as “interacting with a minor” or a carjacking as “interacting with a vehicle’s driver.” Tell it like it is: the officer was digging through someone’s bag and shortly thereafter took it back to his home where it was recovered during the execution of a search warrant.
Only one of these two things looks like a trend, that being the deliberate targeting of journalists and their expensive equipment. The camera theft is probably a one-off, but possibly only because federal officers are making sure journalists’ cameras are too broken to be worth stealing.
Scott Pelley just gave an interview to the NY Times that reveals two damning things at once: Bari Weiss tried to get him to falsely describe a shooting victim as driving toward the officer who killed her — and Pelley had already bent over backwards to make protesters look as bad as possible before she even asked. That second part is the part most people are glossing over.
To understand why none of this is surprising, you need to understand what Weiss has actually been doing at CBS. Indeed, we’ve covered a bit of the Bari Weissification of CBS News over the past few months. Remember, Weiss had no real reporting experience (she was a columnist, not a reporter) and zero broadcast experience. She was picked because, as my colleague Karl keeps reminding people, she’s mastered the ability to comfort the powerful by telling them exactly what they want to hear.
Of course, Weiss understands perfectly well the moment we’re in. She knows she wasn’t put in charge of CBS News because of her skeptical nature or keen journalistic eye. She was put in charge because she has shown that she can leverage a carefully crafted image as an iconoclast and teller of truths to launder MAGA propaganda so that it’s more palatable to centrists. She was put in charge because the Ellisons need Trump’s blessing for their mega merger – and if ever there was a favor tailor-made to win Trump’s approval, it’s kneecapping a major news network and toppling one of the last remaining pillars of broadcast journalism in the process.
Balko’s piece details how Weiss has done this with immigration:
He goes through, in detail, how that one reporter, Madeline Rowley, completely misrepresented issues related to refugee resettlement in a manner that not only pleased the Trump administration, but set up a sort of mutual back-scratching between the Free Press and the Trump administration.
There’s a lot more in Balko’s piece, and it’s well worth reading (and should give you pause before ever trusting anything that a Weiss-controlled news organization puts out).
All of that is useful background as you read the interview that just fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley gave to the NY Times this weekend. There’s a lot in there, but here’s the bit that I wanted to discuss:
You’ve now accused Weiss of injecting “falsehoods and bias” into at least one of your politically sensitive stories. What did she specifically ask for? What story? That’s February, and my team and I are doing a story about the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown there. We’ve interviewed Senator Rand Paul, Republican, because he’s going to hold hearings into this, and the fact that a Republican was going to do that was quite newsworthy. So, we interviewed Senator Paul and then built out a story about what had happened — the killing of Renee Good, the killing of Alex Pretti, the protests. I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because we were going to talk about the killing of Pretti and the killing of Good, and it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this. We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did.
So, the story goes through screenings. It’s very well received. There are notes as always and we do rewrites as always. But this is on a very tight deadline. It’s Sunday; we’re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.
This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.
We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.
There’s a lot in there, and many people are (understandably) focused on the ridiculous demands that Weiss made to inject clear bias and falsehoods into the report. But what should stand out even more is that Pelley here freely admits that he and the team at 60 Minutes had already inserted massive bias into the report, deliberately searching out footage that showed protesters in the worst possible light — “I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively” — even if that was an outlier from the rest of the protests. He even made sure to include the fact that Pretti had, on a previous occasion at a different protest, kicked out a taillight on a federal agent’s car — information that has zero bearing whether or not CBP officers were justified in murdering him.
But Pelley insists that he had to do this to make the piece as “fair” as possible.
He doesn’t mean “fair.” He means the poisonous “view from nowhere” form of “fairness” — the one where if one side does something bad (say, murder a random person for protesting violent government agents kidnapping their neighbors) you have to show something to suggest “well, maybe they deserved it.”
That is already ridiculous, and should be a clear condemnation of where CBS News and 60 Minutes already have their heads at. The same company that had previously paid a bribe to the president to get its merger with Paramount approved has long been chickenshit about reporting accurately on anything that might make MAGA sad.
Weiss’s hiring was never about taking a “leftist” news organization and making it more balanced or right-leaning. It was always about taking a news organization that has been appeasing authoritarians for decades and ramping up that effort — making it even better at laundering MAGA bullshit to an unsuspecting public.
And, as Balko notes in his piece, that’s one thing Weiss has shown she’s truly experienced at doing.
Iran’s internet has been intermittently disrupted for months. After years of bombardment, Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure remains fragile. In India, recurring shutdowns and throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Across dozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized—cut, slowed, or selectively restored to shape what people can see, say, and share. In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded.
In 2011, when protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond used social media to broadcast their uprisings to the world, many observers heralded a new era of networked freedom. Governments, however, responded quickly by developing and refining systems of control that have only grown more sophisticated over time. Today’s landscape of regulation, blackouts, and degraded networks reflects that trajectory, as early experiments in censorship and disruption have hardened into a durable system of control—what began as an emergency measure has become a normalized infrastructure of control.
A Brief History of Internet Shutdowns
Egypt’s 2011 internet shutdown wasn’t the first. Although the government’s heavy-handed response after just two days of protests caught the world’s attention, Guinea, Nepal, Myanmar, and a handful of other countries had previously enacted shutdowns. But Egypt marked a turning point. In the years that followed, shutdowns increased sharply worldwide, suggesting that governments had taken note—adopting network disruptions as a tactic for suppressing dissent and limiting the flow of information within and beyond their borders.
On January 28, 2011, at 12:34 a.m. local time, five of Egypt’s internet service providers (ISPs) shut down their networks. At least one provider—Noor, which also hosted the Egyptian stock exchange—remained online, leaving only about 7% of the country connected.
In the aftermath of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, rights groups sought to understand how such a sweeping shutdown had been possible—and how future incidents might be prevented. There was no centralized “kill switch.” Instead, authorities leveraged the country’s highly consolidated telecommunications sector, which all operate by government license. With only a handful of ISPs, a small number of directives was enough to bring most of the network offline.
In the years following Egypt’s 2011 shutdown, telecommunications companies—many of which had been directly implicated in enabling state-ordered disruptions—began to organize around a shared set of human rights challenges. Beginning that same year, a group of operators and vendors quietly convened to examine how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights applied to their sector, particularly in contexts where government demands could translate into sweeping restrictions on access. By 2013, this effort had formalized into the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue, bringing together major global firms to develop common principles on freedom of expression and privacy and, through a partnership with the Global Network Initiative, engage more directly with civil society. The initiative reflected a growing recognition that telecom companies—unlike platforms—operate at a critical chokepoint in the network. But it also underscored the limits of voluntary approaches: while the Dialogue helped establish shared norms, it did little to constrain the legal and political pressures that continue to drive shutdowns—or to prevent companies from complying with them.
From Emergency Measure to Legal Authority
If the early aughts were defined by improvised shutdowns, the years since have seen governments formalize their power to control networks. What was once exceptional is now often embedded in law.
In India, the 2017 Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules—issued under the Telegraph Act—provided a clear legal pathway for cutting connectivity. The Telecommunications Act, 2023, further entrenched the government’s ability to enact shutdowns, granting the central and state governments, or “authorised officers” the power to suspend telecommunications services in the interest of public safety or sovereignty, or during emergencies. The government has used these measures repeatedly, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir. India’s Software Freedom Law Centre’s Shutdown Tracker shows India as instigating more than 900 shutdowns, 447 of which were in Jammu and Kashmir.
In Kazakhstan, shutdowns have also become common. Over the years, the government has passed legislation that allows state agencies to shut down the internet. The 2012 law on national security enabled the government to disrupt communications channels during anti-terrorist operations and to contain riots. In 2014 and 2016, laws were further amended to expand the number of actors able to shut down the internet without a court decision, and a government decree in 2018 enabled shutdowns in the event of a “social emergency.”
Elsewhere, governments have built or expanded legal and technical frameworks that enable similar control over information flows. Ethiopia’s state-dominated telecom sector has facilitated sweeping shutdowns during periods of conflict, including the war in Tigray, where the internet was disconnected for more than two years. In Iran, authorities have developed regulatory and infrastructural capacity to isolate domestic networks from the global internet, allowing them to restrict external visibility while maintaining limited internal connectivity. This year alone, Iranians have spent one third of the year offline. And amidst the ongoing war, Iranian officials have made it clear that the internet is a privilege for those who toe the government’s official line.
Even where laws do not explicitly authorize shutdowns, broadly worded provisions around national security or public order are routinely used to justify them. The result is a growing legal architecture that treats network disruptions not as extraordinary measures, but as standard tools for managing populations.
When that authority is exercised over a population beyond a state’s own citizens, the consequences can be even more severe. Israel’s Ministry of Communications controls the flow of communications in and out of Palestine and has used that power to shut down internet access during periods of conflict. Over the past two and a half years, Gaza has experienced repeated outages, and experts now estimate that roughly 75% of its telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged—leaving essential services severely disrupted.
Elections and the Expansion of Control
Historically, most blackouts have occurred during moments of intense political tension. But authorities are increasingly using them as a tool to preempt dissent.
In 2024, as more than half the world’s population headed to the polls, shutdowns followed. That year alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded, surpassing the previous record set just a year earlier. The geographic spread also widened significantly, with shutdowns affecting more countries than ever before. The Comoros imposed a shutdown for the first time, while other countries, such as Mauritius, instituted broad bans on social media platforms during elections.
What stands out is not just the scale, but the normalization. Notably, the number of shutdowns in 2025 broke the record set the year prior. Whereas network disruptions were once a rare occurrence, they are now a routine measure, increasingly treated by authorities as a standard response to periods of heightened political sensitivity.
Civil Society Fights Back
Governments use all sorts of justifications—national security, curbing the spread of disinformation, and even preventingstudents from cheating on exams—for internet shutdowns. But civil society is watching, and documenting, network disruptions and their impact on citizens.
In 2016, as shutdowns became an increasingly common tool of state control, Access Now launched the #KeepItOn campaign to coordinate global advocacy against network disruptions. The campaign includes a coalition composed of 345 advocacy groups (including EFF), research centers, detection networks, and others who work together to report on, and fight back against, internet shutdowns. Anyone can get involved by signing on to campaign action alerts, sharing their story, or reporting a shutdown in their jurisdiction.
Ending this harmful practice remains the goal. In 2016, the UN passed a landmark resolution supporting human rights online and condemning internet shutdowns, and UN agencies have continued to warn against the practice. But the fight to change government practices remains an uphill battle, leading civil society—and even companies—to get creative.
During repeated shutdowns in Gaza, grassroots efforts mobilised to distribute eSIMs so Palestinians could stay connected. In 2024, EFF recognized Connecting Humanity, a Cairo-based non-profit providing eSIM access in Gaza, with its annual award for its vital work. Satellite internet such as Starlink has been supplied to people in Ukraine and Iran, though it, too, is not immune to state control. Alongside these efforts, civil society continues to share practical guidance on circumventing shutdowns and maintaining access to information.
EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world—and we’ll continue to fight back against internet shutdowns wherever they occur.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog. This is the fourth installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Read the rest of the series here.
The National Guard soldiers in desert camo piled out of unmarked vans in East Los Angeles last June, cordoning off East Sixth Street, a residential street lined with single family houses, and blocking a nearby road leading to an elementary school.
A squad of federal agents moved in flinging flash-bang grenades — explosives designed to disorient — into a small home before storming inside. They’d come for Alejandro Orellana, a Marine Corps veteran and UPS employee accused of being a central figure in a secret confederacy of insurrectionists. A news video had shown the 30-year-old distributing water, food and face shields to people protesting the Trump administration’s immigration roundups in Los Angeles.
Bill Essayli, a former state legislator who leads the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles, joined the raid along with a Fox News crew.
With cameras rolling, Orellana, his parents and brothers were led out in handcuffs as agents searched their home.
On Fox News, Essayli, sporting a blue FBI windbreaker, hyped the arrest of Orellana, a quiet, wiry man with a long mane of coal-black hair. “It appears they’re well-orchestrated and coordinated, and well-funded,” he said. “And today was one of the first arrests — first key arrests — that we did.”
Essayli would charge Orellana with conspiracy — under a federal statute typically used to build cases against drug traffickers and organized crime — and with aiding and abetting civil disorder.
Within weeks, the prosecutor’s marquee case would quietly fall apart. Agents who searched Orellana’s house found little that could be considered incriminating, and prosecutors never charged anyone else as part of the supposed conspiracy. By late July, they moved to have the charges dismissed.
It wouldn’t be the only such case.
Over the past 10 months, President Donald Trump’s administration has made much of its success in sweeping through U.S. cities, capturing unauthorized immigrants and arresting people who publicly oppose the operations, routinely accusing dissenters of being domestic terrorists or extremists. Federal agents have arrested hundreds of U.S. citizens like Orellana — including protesters, activists observing the immigration enforcement operations, bystanders and, in some cases, the family members of people targeted for deportation.
Less clear to the public is what has happened to those charged.
To find out, ProPublica and FRONTLINE combed through social media, court records and news stories. Reporters identified more than 300 protesters and bystanders who were arrested by federal agents during immigration sweeps and were accused of crimes such as assaulting or interfering with law enforcement.
But over and over those accusations fell apart under scrutiny. Our reviews of court files found that statements made by the arresting officers were repeatedly debunked by video footage. In more than a third of the cases, prosecutors quickly dismissed charges that couldn’t be substantiated, refused to file charges at all, or lost at trial. The tally of cases that end this way will likely climb as many of the arrests remain unresolved.
“What’s happening now is not comparable to anything that’s happened in the past,” said
Cuauhtémoc Ortega, the chief federal defender for the Central District of California, who personally represented Orellana and other protesters. “We’ve never had a situation where it seems like you arrest first and then try to justify the reasons for the arrests later.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which includes Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the arrests and declined to answer detailed questions from ProPublica and FRONTLINE.
But in a statement in response to an earlier story, DHS said, “The First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly — not rioting. DHS is taking reasonable and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers.”
Watch FRONTLINE and ProPublica’s Documentary: “Caught in the Crackdown”
Given the unprecedented nature of the urban sweeps, it is difficult to compare the rate of failed cases to another time period or context. But current and former federal prosecutors and other legal experts said having that number of arrests come to nothing is particularly striking in the federal system, where U.S. attorneys usually secure convictions or guilty pleas in more than 90% of the cases they bring; only 8.2% of federal criminal cases were dismissed in 2022, according to data compiled by that court system.
The failures highlight the challenges of sending large numbers of federal agents into major cities to conduct roving immigration sweeps: They aren’t accustomed to dealing with crowds of angry protesters
Border Patrol agents are typically stationed at the border where their day-to-day work entails scooping up people who have crossed illegally. ICE agents, who often work in urban settings, had little prior experience handling hostile crowds. And FBI agents, who have aided in the immigration sweeps, would normally spend months or years painstakingly amassing evidence before making arrests.
That lack of experience in street policing and crowd control, coupled with the Trump administration’s demand for huge numbers of deportations, led agents to make a wave of unjustified arrests, legal experts say.
To be sure, protesters have often engaged in hostile behavior, hurling expletives, getting in agents’ faces and occasionally becoming violent. A woman in Minnesota is accused of biting off part of an agent’s finger during a scuffle after the killing of Alex Pretti in late January; in Los Angeles, an officer outside an immigration detention facility suffered a dislocated finger after a protester allegedly grabbed his bulletproof vest and shook him.
“The agents, they don’t know how to operate in these situations,” said Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department attorney who spent years investigating misconduct by law enforcement. Their behavior, she said, “is on par with the worst protest policing and just law enforcement that I’ve seen from any department, even in their worst days.
In its earlier statement, DHS said that “rioters and terrorists” have repeatedly attacked immigration agents, but ICE and Customs and Border Protection personnel “are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and themselves.”
The arrests are not without consequence. Even unsuccessful prosecutions can be costly and emotionally taxing for defendants, said Jared Fishman, a former career prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. The aggressive tactics of the agents and the gleeful social media posts by DHS accusing protesters of serious crimes, Fishman said, affect people’s willingness to publicly challenge the mass deportation policies.
“If the goal of the Trump administration is to keep people out of the streets, then it doesn’t matter if the people are getting convicted,” said Fishman, now the executive director of the Justice Innovation Lab, a nonprofit focused on creating a more equitable and effective justice system. “I’m sure it’s having a chilling effect.”
After reviewing data and some court records for ProPublica and FRONTLINE, Fishman said, “The numbers seem to indicate a pattern and practice of illegal arrests.”
“We Must Identify Him”
The crackdown on protesters began in June of 2025, when the Department of Homeland Security launched its wave of major immigration sweeps in Southern California. The campaign was led by Gregory Bovino, a veteran Border Patrol chief who normally presided over a remote stretch of sand and scrub deep in the state’s Imperial Valley.
Bovino from the start encouraged his agents to shut down or arrest protesters.
“Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. Those are the general orders, all the way to the top,” Bovino told his officers, footage from an agent’s body-worn camera shows. “Everybody fucking gets it if they touch you.”
He went on to remind them that their actions should be “legal, ethical, moral” while encouraging them to use so-called less lethal weapons on protesters.
“We’re gonna look at shipping tractor trailers full of that shit in here,” he said.
Bovino’s aggressive tactics sparked intense opposition from Angelenos, including those gathered in the streets in front of the sprawling federal office complex in downtown Los Angeles on June 9.
That day Orellana drove his Ford F-150 pickup truck loaded with bottled water, snacks and cardboard boxes containing Uvex brand face shields — clear plastic masks designed to protect industrial workers from flying debris and chemical splashes — to the protest.
When he arrived in front of the federal building, another person hopped into the bed and began handing out the supplies to protesters gathered outside the entrance.
Orellana told FRONTLINE and ProPublica that he decided to help distribute the supplies after watching federal agents fire tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds at an earlier demonstration.
“A bunch of us took it upon ourselves to, you know, go downtown and give out these resources — the food, water and of course the PPE,” he said, referring to personal protective equipment.
Video and photos quickly made their way onto social media. An X user with more than 30,000 followers posted a photo of Orellana. “A photograph of the man delivering boxes of gas masks to the rioters has emerged,” wrote the poster. “We must identify him, so we can track down who is funding this coordinated attack.”
From there the thread was picked up by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has a vast audience on the platform. Jones, who repeatedly claimed that financier and philanthropist George Soros was funding the protests, eventually named Orellana as the driver of the pickup. More than two million people saw the post.
Within 48 hours, the soldiers and federal agents arrived to arrest Orellana.
Over the next five months, they arrested more than one hundred U.S. citizens in Los Angeles and other cities in Southern California — most of them demonstrators — charging them with assaulting federal law enforcement personnel or interfering with agents’ activities. Others were accused of damaging government property. At least 16, like Orellana, were charged with conspiracy, which can carry a sentence of up to six years in prison.
ProPublica and FRONTLINE found that more than a third of those cases crumbled. In eight instances, juries acquitted defendants at trial. But more frequently, prosecutors dropped charges when the claims made by immigration officers and agents didn’t match video evidence or other inconsistencies emerged. In several cases, prosecutors declined to file charges at all.
There have been some successful prosecutions: 32 of the 116 people whose arrests in California we reviewed have been convicted, many pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges. And in late February, jurors convicted two activists on stalking charges after they livestreamed themselves following an immigration agent to his home; the pair were acquitted of conspiracy.
Today 38 cases are still pending.
Essayli has stated on social media that his office brought more than 100 cases and secured convictions in more than half of them. When asked about the discrepancy between his claims and the data compiled by ProPublica and FRONTLINE, he declined to comment.
“The U.S. attorney’s office does not lose cases because they’re bad lawyers,” said Carley Palmer, who spent eight years as a federal prosecutor in the office Essayli now runs. “They are excellent trial attorneys. So if they’re losing a case, it may mean that the evidence isn’t there, or it may mean that the community doesn’t believe it should be a federal crime.”
Palmer, who is now in private practice, said the glut of protest and low-level criminal immigration cases have shifted resources away from the complex prosecutions the DOJ is uniquely equipped to handle: environmental crimes, public corruption, financial fraud, cyberscams, civil rights violations.
Essayli declined to be interviewed for this story or an accompanying FRONTLINE documentary set to air Tuesday. He was appointed by the Trump administration in early 2025, but he has never been confirmed by the Senate, raising ongoing questions about the legality of his role as top prosecutor for the region. His office did not respond to detailed questions sent by email.
Like Orellana, Julian Pecora Cardenas, 31, was charged with conspiracy last summer after following a convoy of federal agents in his car.
On the morning of July 5, Pecora Cardenas followed vans full of Border Patrol agents after they left a Coast Guard station in San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, livestreaming their movements on Instagram. “It’s every citizen’s duty to conduct oversight of their government,” he said. “I was within my First Amendment rights.”
After roughly 30 minutes, the agents stopped, pulled Pecora Cardenas from his Hyundai and slammed him to the pavement. “I honestly thought it was going to be like a George Floyd moment,” Pecora Cardenas recalled in an interview, alleging that multiple agents pinned him to the asphalt with their knees. He suffered a concussion, needed stitches over his left eye and wore an orthopedic collar to stabilize his injured neck.
Federal prosecutors charged Pecora Cardenas and another activist with conspiracy to impede the federal agents, saying that they “were illegally maneuvering their vehicles through traffic, stop lights, and stop signs to stay behind the agent’s vehicles,” that they tried to block the Border Patrol vehicles, and that they created “hazardous conditions on the road.”
Pecora Cardenas’ own video of the day’s events told a different story. The footage, which ProPublica and FRONTLINE have reviewed, contradicts the claims that the men had interfered with the agents. Within days of seeing the images, Essayli’s office jettisoned the charges “in the interest of justice.”
Pecora Cardenas hasn’t tried to observe federal agents or participate in a protest since his arrest. “I don’t want to be assaulted again. I don’t want to wind up back in federal prison for something that I didn’t do.”
“They Were Just Randomly Grabbing People”
When Bovino, the Border Patrol chief, left California and took his forces to Illinois last fall, their focus on protesters intensified.
In roughly one month, federal agents arrested more than a hundred American citizens, many of them activists participating in demonstrations or documenting the movements of immigration agents as their convoys of rented SUVs rolled through the streets of Chicago and surrounding communities.
On the morning of Oct. 3, 2025, about two hundred demonstrators gathered near the ICE facility in Broadview, a small town in the western suburbs of Chicago. Tucked away in a quiet industrial park, the nondescript building had become the locus of ongoing protests since Bovino and his forces had arrived in Illinois.
Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, accompanied by a DHS video team, was on site that day wearing a baseball cap and a black ballistic vest.
Also present was Benny Johnson, a prominent podcaster and online influencer who is close to the Trump administration. Johnson, who had brought his own camera crew to shoot video for his YouTube channel and other social media accounts, was effectively embedded with Noem, Bovino and the immigration agents.
At about 9 a.m., Bovino and a phalanx of heavily armed agents in combat gear began striding down Harvard Street toward the protesters. “Walk slowly,” Bovino told his men.
Without a bullhorn or any sort of amplification, Bovino informed the crowd that they were being dispersed. Then he and his colleagues began shoving people to the ground and arresting them.
In a matter of minutes, a dozen protesters had been handcuffed. Three arrestees interviewed by ProPublica and FRONTLINE told us they were confused because they’d been standing in a “free speech zone” set up by state officials.
“I felt somebody grab my shoulder and pull me to the ground,” said Juan Muñoz, a business owner and elected leader in nearby Oak Park Township. “And once I fell onto my back, that’s when I saw it was Greg Bovino.”
Kyle Frankovich, a Harvard data scientist and Chicago resident, was also arrested. “They were just randomly grabbing people,” he recalled. “There was nowhere to go, people were falling all over the place, and several of the people they arrested simply had the misfortune of tripping over all of the other protesters” as federal agents surged into the crowd.
Frankovich said FBI agents who questioned him asked who had paid for him to participate in the demonstration and who “covered the transportation cost for you to be here today.”
Johnson’s video team and a DHS camera crew filmed the arrested protesters as they were lined up outside the ICE building, while Noem looked on. DHS posted photos of Frankovich in handcuffs on X and Facebook with the message, “We will NOT allow violent activist to lay hands on our law enforcement.”
Johnson, who has more than more than 4 million followers on X and more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube, posted a video on X panning across the arrested protesters and wrote: “I saw dozens of Democrat domestic terrorists arrested today for VIOLENT ASSAULT on federal law enforcement. Every activist here attacked ICE agents in broad daylight just for enforcing American law.” He made the same claim in a nearly 13-minute-long YouTube video.
Such social media content had become a central feature of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. DHS, Border Patrol and a raft of allied social media influencers regularly produced slick videos showing agents in action: riding in helicopters, striding through city streets clutching rifles, breaking down doors, and apprehending immigrants and activists.
But on that day in Chicago, DHS had strayed far from the facts. And so had Johnson, a 38-year-old former journalist who turned to social media after being embroiled in plagiarism scandals at BuzzFeed and the Independent Journal Review.
After about eight hours in custody, Frankovich, Muñoz and nearly all the others were released without charges. In the end, only one person would be prosecuted.
Neither DHS nor Johnson have taken the posts down. Johnson did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
The lone person charged with a crime that day was Cole Sheridan, who was accused of attacking Bovino and sending him to the hospital with an injured groin muscle.
Sheridan spent three and a half days in jail — “probably the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever had to experience,” he said in an interview with FRONTLINE and ProPublica — before being released.
In court, a prosecutor said that Sheridan had thrown a punch at Bovino and pushed him, transcripts show.
The evidence presented by the Justice Department, though, was slim. Bovino didn’t wear a body camera, so prosecutors relied on video from the body camera of Border Patrol agent Jason Epperson. But it didn’t show Sheridan assaulting anyone — though he did call Bovino “a fucking idiot.” In statements to investigators, Bovino and Epperson had offered conflicting accounts of the encounter.
About a month after Sheridan was arrested, prosecutors moved to dismiss the case after a bystander video surfaced showing clearly that Sheridan hadn’t assaulted Bovino.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced something truly that bizarre and absurd as, like, seeing a law enforcement agent concoct a narrative to arrest me, to press charges against me,” said Sheridan, who describes himself as intensely private and was initially reluctant to talk publicly about his arrest. “That was extremely unnerving.”
He remains worried that he’ll be harassed or even physically attacked because of the inflammatory social media posts about him. “What a farce. Every element of it felt staged,” he said.
In a statement to ProPublica and FRONTLINE, Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros said, “Our willingness to be open-minded and dismiss cases — or not file charges in the first place — reflects our commitment to do the right thing even in those cases where a crime was committed and the conduct in question clearly falls outside any protected First Amendment activity.” He declined to comment directly on Sheridan’s case.
FRONTLINE and ProPublica showed video of Sheridan’s arrest to Lopez, the former Justice Department attorney. “It’s just a gross abuse of power,” she said. “And we’ve almost normalized that this is how federal law enforcement behaves now. They just arrest people.”
Of the 109 arrests that ProPublica and FRONTLINE documented in the Chicago area, federal prosecutors dropped charges in at least 75 cases.
Felony Charges Downgraded
When Bovino and his forces arrived in North Carolina last November, they were greeted by protesters opposed to the deportation sweeps, as they had been in previous cities.
Heather Morrow was one of them. She had joined a small group of demonstrators, chanting and banging on metal dishes outside an immigration facility in Charlotte when ICE officers confronted the group.
They handcuffed Morrow, 45, and another activist, stuffed them in the back of a federal vehicle and, according to Morrow, kept them there for hours before finally taking her to jail.
“I was so traumatized,” Morrow, a school bus driver and dog boarder, said in an interview. “I didn’t expect them to be so overly aggressive. I really showed up there expecting conversation, making them come to their senses.”
After a full day and night in custody, she was released to face federal felony assault charges. A Department of Justice press release accused her of attacking an ICE officer just as he showed up for his work shift, grabbing his shoulders and trying to jump on his back.
But a shaky phone video circulating on social media showed what appeared to be a very different scene. In it, an officer comes from behind and abruptly tackles Morrow to the pavement. The video doesn’t show her assaulting anyone.
When prosecutors saw the video, they dumped the felony charges. But they promptly filed a new misdemeanor case against Morrow and the other activist, alleging the pair impeded ICE officers and failed to follow their orders. It took a month for Morrow to get her phone back from federal custody, while her other confiscated possessions, including her keys, have been lost, Morrow’s attorney said. Because she’s on pretrial probation, the federal government has seized her passport. Morrow has pleaded not guilty, and her case is ongoing.
In Handcuffs and Intimidated
In early January, Bovino arrived in Minneapolis with his social media team. Within weeks, two activists — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were shot and killed by immigration agents. The Trump administration immediately portrayed Good as an extremist; Bovino claimed that Pretti was planning to kill federal personnel when he was shot to death.
The killings, which sparked national outcry, would prompt the administration to recalibrate. By Jan. 26, Bovino had been demoted and sent back to his home station in the California desert.
But immigration agents continued to roam the Twin Cities, and activists continued to get arrested.
Civil rights attorneys from around the country gathered in a Minneapolis conference room on Jan. 30 to discuss those arrests.
During a break for lunch, Jon Feinberg, president of the National Police Accountability Project, stepped out of the room and spoke to reporters. “To be charged with a federal crime is something that is life-altering,” said Feinberg, who is based in Philadelphia. “The consequences of being accused and possibly convicted of a federal offense are devastating, especially when people have not engaged in criminal conduct from any reasonable person’s perspective.”
ProPublica and FRONTLINE have identified nearly 80 arrests stemming from the Minnesota immigration sweeps. Most of the cases are still ongoing, though a handful have been dismissed.
Daniel Rosen, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, did not respond to requests for comment.
One of those arrested was Rebecca Ringstrom, who lives in Blaine, a quiet suburb north of Minneapolis.
Ringstrom, 42, is a member of an activist group that tracks immigration agents as they move around Blaine. “There was a vehicle with four agents inside that I could see. All four were in tactical gear,” she said in an interview with ProPublica and FRONTLINE. “I was able to look at the plate and see that it was a confirmed ICE vehicle.”
Behind the wheel of her Kia, she began following them; Ringstrom insists her driving was safe and lawful. But in a matter of minutes, she’d been arrested and accused of interfering with federal law enforcement.
Ringstrom said an agent at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where she was briefly held after her arrest, said he wished he’d arrested her — because he would’ve made the experience more unpleasant and violent. “There was no reason to say that. I’m already here. I’m in handcuffs. It’s just a way to intimidate,” she recalled.
She was charged with interfering with a federal agent and issued a notice of violation — essentially a ticket — for the misdemeanor offense. Since then, Ringstrom has lined up a pro bono lawyer, but she has also lost her job, “likely due to the ongoing coverage” of her arrest.
She is scheduled to make her first court appearance later this month.
“Exhaustion” is a legal term. It means plaintiffs need to explore the rest of their options before asking a court to handle their case or ask a higher court to handle a case the lower court has declared not quite exhausted enough.
“Exhaustion” is also a human term. And that’s where we are with this case, nearly nine years since a federal court first told the (then-anonymous) cop to GTFO with his weird-ass complaints against [checks original filing] Twitter, the entire Black Lives Matter social movement, and lifelong anti-police violence activist DeRay Mckesson.
The origin of this case is Mckesson’s appearance at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Baton Rouge, Louisiana all the way back in July of 2016. So, we’re a decade in and yet, this cop (now known as John Ford) gets to keep trying to make things worse for DeRay and the First Amendment. And the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court seems hellbent on letting him do this.
The 2019 ruling made it abundantly clear Officer John Ford could not sue Twitter, a Twitter hashtag, or Mckesson for injuries he sustained when someone who was not DeRay Mckesson lobbed a projectile and hit him in the head.
This should have been obvious to everyone, even someone recently recovering from a head wound. But on appeal, the Fifth Circuit simply feigned ignorance of the law. I am not even kidding. It said Mckesson had a duty of care during his peaceful protest that it would never apply to cops who hurl flashbangs into toddler’s cribs:
Given the intentional lawlessness of this aspect of the demonstration, Mckesson should have known that leading the demonstrators onto a busy highway was most nearly certain to provoke a confrontation between police and the mass of demonstrators, yet he ignored the foreseeable danger to officers, bystanders, and demonstrators, and notwithstanding, did so anyway. By ignoring the foreseeable risk of violence that his actions created, Mckesson failed to exercise reasonable care in conducting his demonstration.
Yep, just because the protest closed off a roadway, Mckesson MIGHT be responsible for any other lawless activities other than his own. Mckesson was never criminally charged for blocking off a highway. Nevertheless, the court thought it might be possible that he was somehow responsible for someone else deciding to lob a chunk of concrete at nearby police officers.
The Fifth is a Circus, not a Circuit. Even the Supreme Court — as chock full of MAGA loyalists as it is — found this to be a bit too much, something it tends to find quite often when dealing with appeals bubbling up from the Fifth’s primordial ooze. It sent the case back down to the Fifth, which then decided it should make this a state law case, in obvious hopes of finding some way to keep this cop’s bullshit lawsuit alive.
The dissent in this ruling, which turfed it to the state’s top court, made it explicitly clear that the majority was twisting itself into legal pretzels just to give this aggrieved cop several more bites of this rotting apple:
Indeed, the lone “inciteful” speech quoted in Doe’s complaint is something Mckesson said not to a fired-up protestor but to a mic’ed-up reporter—the day following the protest: “The police want protestors to be too afraid to protest.” Tellingly, not a single word even obliquely references violence, much less advocates it. Temporally, words spoken after the protest cannot possibly have incited violence during the protest.And tacitly, the majority opinion seems to discard the suggestion that Mckesson uttered anything to incite violence against Officer Doe.
The case has now been returned to the Fifth Circuit. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that Mckesson’s actions could amount to the sort of negligence that might satisfy statutory requirements, but it never said one way or another whether or not it actually believed his presence at this protest approached these standards.
So, this case has been remanded (once) by the US Supreme Court due to the Fifth’s faulty logic. It has been sent back to the district level twice, with the court finding in both cases that Mckesson cannot be held liable for the actions of the person who hit the cop with a rock. A huge stack of adverse rulings have been generated by the Fifth’s refusal to respect the First Amendment and/or force the cop to sue the person who actually injured him.
And yet, the Fifth persists. Because it’s the Fifth. It draws heavily from the state Supreme Court ruling — one in which the court was only asked (1) whether such a charge might be plausible and (2) whether damages could be recovered if said accusation proved to be true. No certified question about the constitutional issues raised by suing a protester for being at a protest where someone else injured a cop. No question was asked as to whether or not it was constitutional to treat every person at a protest equally liable for any crime that might be committed during a protest.
Those questions weren’t asked because the Fifth Circuit didn’t want those answers. All it wanted was a reason to allow this cop to sue a Black protester because this was the only name the cop had managed to gather during his nine years of litigation.
And here’s a court that would move heaven and earth to prevent a lawsuit against a cop to be handled by a jury moving heaven and earth [PDF] to ensure it will happen when a cop sues a regular person. (h/t Gabriel Malor on Bluesky)
And what’s said by the court is disturbing — not just because it attempts to hold recognizable people who are easy targets for lawsuits responsible for other people’s actions, but also because it attempts to smear an entire movement (especially as personified by the defendant in this case) as inherently dangerous and unlawful. There’s a lot of loaded language here, which is especially suspect when the court is claiming the right thing to do is hand this off to an impartial jury:
[T]he district court erred because the evidence in the record corroborates Officer Ford’s testimony. As recounted above, the evidence demonstrates that Mckesson helped plan the protest, was a leader in many protests that have turned violent, amplified messages about the protest on social media, and gave orders to the crowd during the protest. Additionally, a video of Mckesson’s position near the police as they cut off the protestors from accessing the interstate substantiates the other evidence. This evidence all tends to support that Mckesson was a leader of the protest, if the jury so determines.
[…]
Mckesson supported these violent protests, and he refused to condemn the use of violence in a televised interview on CNN. Consequently, whether Mckesson breached his duty to Officer Ford and others raises a triable jury question.
The only supporting documents the court offers are those submitted by the officer. There are lots of things citing the officer’s complaint, but that’s not the stuff the court is supposed to be citing as supportive in this appeal. Remember, Doe/Ford was the losing party in the district court case. He’s the moving party, as the legal parlance goes. The appellate court is supposed to grant more deference to the non-moving party during appeals. But the Fifth has gone the other way… multiple times in the same case! The cop got his deference at the lower level as the plaintiff. He’s not supposed to get it again when he loses.
Having done the wrong thing at least twice, the court tosses it to what the majority must feel might be a sympathetic (to the cop) jury in Louisiana. While it’s always happy to terminate litigation when cops are the defendants, it’s seeming more than willing to extend litigation when it’s the cops who are suing citizens.
There’s a dissent that runs nearly as long as the majority ruling. It’s great that it’s there and that it recognizes the Fifth’s willingness to pretend the First Amendment doesn’t matter when it’s a cop that’s doing the complaining (in the legal sense of the word)[and also the regular sense of the word].
But the majority makes the rules. The Fifth has decided that — at least in this case — it will side with the moving party and pretend that holding protesters or protest organizers legally responsible for any criminal or civil violations committed by other protesters doesn’t have any affect on the First Amendment whatsoever. It’s a convenient abdication of its role of a check/balance — one delivered by court that has, for years, demonstrated it would rather see 100 innocent people punished than allow one guilty cop to suffer the consequences of their actions.
We are being led by deeply unserious people. Not only that, but people who are manufacturing cruelty upon their very own constituents. That’s how bad this has gotten.
This week, the DOJ arrested three people in Minnesota for protesting ICE’s goonish activity in a local church, where the pastor there also heads up the local ICE field office. Among the three is Nekima Levy Armstrong, former NAACP chapter president and a local activist who the DOJ claims organized the protest and instigated the group going into the church during services. Just how true any of that is is anyone’s guess, since it’s become impossible to believe a single thing this government says about ICE protests. For example:
There was no attack. There was no violence. There were words and chants being voiced in a place of worship. You can find that repugnant, if you like. It’s still not an attack.
The law being cited for the arrest makes Armstrong’s detention dubious at best.
The law Bondi cited in her announcement — 18 U.S. Code § 241 — describes it pertaining to when “two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
While many in the faith community are obediently clutching their figurative pearls over all of this, I’m struggling to understand how walking into a church that’s open to the public and saying words, even interrupting services, violates that law. I don’t think it does, but then I also laughed out loud when I read Bondi’s claim that this was an “attack.” The plain meaning of words doesn’t appear to matter to these people all that much.
But here’s the thing: that picture has been altered by AI. Here is the unaltered picture of Armstrong’s arrest as circulated by the administration’s very own Kristi Noem.
Yes, the White House decided to take an image of law enforcement improperly arresting an American citizen, one of their own constituents, and have AI alter it to make it appear that she is in distress. Oh, and they made her skin tone slightly darker as well. Because they want her to have been in distress. It eats them up inside that she wasn’t crying. That want her to be “blacker” because they want all of their enemies to be people of color. They’re showing you want they want to visit upon American citizens.
And until they are put in check, they will continue to behave like a toddler with unfettered access to the internet and a permanently shitty attitude.
Asked whether the image had been digitally altered, the White House responded by sending a post on X from Kaelan Dorr, the deputy communications director.
“YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he said.
And thank you, Kaelan, for going outside and playing hide and go fuck yourself.
Again, deeply unserious people. Shitposters. Internet trolls. These are the people in charge of the government. The ones sending their goon squads into our cities. The ones threatening to use the military against its own citizens. The ones that believe they are beyond accountability for all they are currently doing.
I worry seriously that the president’s health is such that he won’t be available to stand trial whenever our government returns to sanity and the time for accountability arrives. But the same can’t be said for those beneath him. Bondi, Noem, Dorr, and many others will be held to account for what they are doing in this administration. The ledger will be kept and debts satisfied through the legal system, once actual justice is back on the menu.
For now, the fight against the toddlers continues.
