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The Intercept
30-05-2025
- Politics
- The Intercept
How Student Protesters and Immigrants Became Targets of Trump's Surveillance Tech
'Catch and revoke' — the phrase sounds like something from a dystopian thriller, but it's Secretary of State Marco Rubio's very real characterization of the Trump administration's new one-strike visa cancellation policy targeting foreign students. A State Department spokesperson said that 'full social media vetting' will be used for visa interviews and will be ongoing while the student remains in the U.S. for studies. On this week's episode of The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to anthropologist Sophia Goodfriend and Chris Gelardi, a reporter for New York Focus investigating surveillance and the criminal legal system. They unpack how AI and surveillance technology are being weaponized to silence dissent on American campuses and fuel the deportations of immigrants nationwide. 'In the past few months, as we see the expansion of government surveillance, the crackdown of ICE on both legal residents and undocumented people in this country, we see these technologies lending a veneer of algorithmic efficiency to increasingly draconian policies,' says Goodfriend. The effort is powered by more companies than most people realize. 'To enforce all of that and to bolster those efforts are a host of different kinds of both small AI startups, of data brokers, of large tech conglomerates like Meta, OpenAI, Palantir, and the like. So it is really this kind of enormous dragnet of surveillance that's bolstered by the tech industry that's increasingly aligned with the Trump administration,' she says. But this surveillance machine extends well beyond university campuses. The same technologies are being deployed against immigrant communities across the country. This means every digital footprint becomes potential evidence for deportation proceedings. Social media posts, location data, facial recognition from community events, and even routine traffic stops feed into massive databases. Gelardi explains that one of the more concerning sources of information comes from state police gang databases, which are rife with mistakes. 'I think all evidence suggests that these are very under-regulated and that they operate in a way where they're really ripe for garbage data and inaccuracies,' he says. He cites some gang databases that had children under 5 listed. Gelardi explains that local law enforcement enters names into state databases that feed to the national crime information center run by the FBI. Law enforcement at all levels — local, state, and federal — can access it on their phones. 'Anything that the state police funnels to the feds is immediately available to pretty much any ICE agent,' he says. To understand more about the tech infrastructure powering deportations and what this digital crackdown means for everyone, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
The Intercept
23-05-2025
- Politics
- The Intercept
She Exposed Government Abuse. Now She's Locked up in an El Salvador Prison.
LATE SUNDAY NIGHT, police in El Salvador arrested one of President Nayib Bukele's sharpest critics, Ruth Eleonora López, an anti-corruption attorney who has spent years exposing government abuses. '[She] is one of the strongest voices in defense of democracy,' says Noah Bullock, her colleague and the executive director of Cristosal, a human rights group operating in northern Central America, including El Salvador. López, a university professor and former elections official, heads Cristosal's anti-corruption unit. She has also been an outspoken critic of Bukele's crackdown on gang violence that has resulted in 'arbitrary detentions, human rights violations,' and the imprisonment of people not connected to gangs, according to Cristosal. The organization has documented widespread abuses in the country's prison system. 'There's a clear pattern of physical abuse, and on top of that, a clear pattern of systematic denial of basic necessities like food, water, bathrooms, medicine — medical care in general,' says Bullock. 'Those two factors have combined to cause the deaths of at least 380 people' in custody in recent years. That's a prison system 'that's been contracted by the U.S. government,' Bullock adds. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Bullock speaks to host Jessica Washington about López's continued imprisonment and what her work and detention reveals about the Trump administration's interest in El Salvador's prison system. Facing vague corruption charges, López has seen her family and lawyer but not yet a judge. The U.S. is paying El Salvador $6 million to detain immigrants, including about 250 Venezuelan and Salvadoran men mainly at the infamous megaprison CECOT. 'The type of jails and the prison system that the United States has contracted is one of a dictatorship — one that operates outside of the rule of law,' says Bullock. But El Salvador isn't the only country the U.S. is looking to partner with to outsource immigration detention. 'Now in addition to El Salvador, the U.S. has reportedly explored, sought, or struck deals with at least 19 other countries,' says Nick Turse, national security fellow for The Intercept. The countries include: Angola, Benin, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Kosovo, Libya, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Panama, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security sent eight immigrants to South Sudan, in defiance of a federal judge's order, according to court filings. 'Many of these countries,' says Turse, 'have been excoriated by not only human rights groups and NGOs, but also the U.S. State Department.' He continues, 'Places like Equatorial Guinea, which is a notorious, kleptocratic dictatorship in West Africa — one of the most corrupt countries on the planet; and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is another human rights pariah.' ' These policies did not leap fully formed from the head of Donald Trump,' says Turse. They have a legacy largely stemming from the post-9/11 counterterrorism policies of the George W. Bush administration. 'The Bush administration created this worldwide network of secret prisons and torture sites as part of its global war on terror.' These are places outside of the jurisdiction of international law — legal black holes. 'The Trump administration has expanded the Bush and Obama-era terrorism paradigm to cast immigrants and refugees as terrorists and as gang members,' says Turse. 'It's reconceptualized this idea from the post-9/11 era of extraordinary rendition to seek to disappear people to sites … even further beyond the reach of U.S. law.' Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
The Intercept
16-05-2025
- Business
- The Intercept
The Last Line of Defense: The Courts vs. Trump
As Elon Musk steps away from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the chaotic legacy of his aggressive assault on federal agencies continues to reverberate throughout the government. Musk's goal — slashing $1 trillion from the federal budget — has fallen far short. At most, it has cut $31.8 billion of federal funding, a number that the Financial Times reports is 'opaque and overstated.' Notably, the richest man on Earth's businesses have received a comparable amount of government funding, most of it going to SpaceX, which remains untouched by DOGE's budget ax. Stepping in to carry the torch is Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and a key architect of Project 2025, the sweeping conservative playbook to consolidate executive power. Under his stewardship, DOGE will continue its mission to dismantle the federal government from within. 'Access to all of this information gives extraordinary power to the worst people,' says Mark Lemley, the director of Stanford Law School's program in law, science, and technology. Lemley is suing DOGE on behalf of federal employees for violating the Privacy Act. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Lemley and Intercept newsroom counsel and reporter Shawn Musgrave join host Jordan Uhl to take stock of the legal challenges mounting against the Trump administration's agenda. As the executive branch grows more hostile to checks on its powers, the courts remain the last, fragile line of defense. From slashing cancer research funding to firing employees responsible for guarding the nation's nuclear arsenal, DOGE's reckless tactics have triggered a legal firestorm. Bloomberg Politics reports that DOGE's action has sparked 'more than three dozen lawsuits alone' out of 328 cases challenging the Trump administration's expansive use of executive authority. ' There have now been hundreds of court decisions on issues, some involving the Privacy Act, but a wide variety of the Trump administration's illegal activities,' says Lemley. In partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and State Democracy Defenders, Lemley's suit accuses the U.S. Office of Personnel Management of violating the federal Privacy Act by handing over sensitive data to DOGE without consent or legal authority. That data breach occurred shortly after Trump returned to office, when Musk reportedly dispatched DOGE operatives into government agencies and demanded access to federal systems and files. One of the systems they accessed was OPM's, which contains records for every current and former government employee. Those records include Social Security numbers, bank records, disability status, and more. In short, DOGE got access to lots of confidential information. As the Republican-held Congress abdicates its oversight responsibilities, the courts have stepped up. 'Courts are, so far, being the sort of bastion and holding the line for the Constitution,' says Lemley. 'They're taking this very seriously. They're writing incredibly detailed opinions in very short periods of time,' he adds, especially 'as it has become harder and harder to justify the positions the government is taking.' Those positions have the Department of Justice under Attorney General Pam Bondi behaving more like the personal lawyers of Donald Trump and his administration, rather than an agency independent of the White House. ' We're seeing this in things like Attorney General Bondi's recent memo about leak investigations,' says Musgrave. 'If you read that thing,' he adds, '[it's] half just screeds from President Trump himself, rather than any coherent statement of policy. You have to really get past a lot of vitriol and spite straight from President Trump's mouth before you understand what the Justice Department policy is.' ' One of the lessons that Donald Trump took from the first administration was: An independent justice department was a problem for him,' says Lemley. In this second term, we're seeing just how vulnerable the system is when norms collapse, Lemley explains. 'Checks and balances depended not on the actual letter of the law and the way the Constitution is written, but on a series of norms and on good-faith behavior by parties to the government,' he says. 'And as we see those norms just wiped away, it turns out that it's much harder to actually control the effort of a president who is determined to make himself a dictator.' Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
The Intercept
08-05-2025
- Politics
- The Intercept
A Trumped Up Police State Is Coming
Support Us © THE INTERCEPT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Photo collage: The Intercept / Photo: KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images Donald Trump's all-caps executive order on policing — 'STRENGTHENING AND UNLEASHING AMERICA'S LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PURSUE CRIMINALS AND PROTECT INNOCENT CITIZENS' – is less about policy and more about intent. And that intent is clear: To give Trump direct control over local law enforcement and further shield police from accountability. As journalist and author of 'Rise of the Warrior Cop' Radley Balko puts it, 'It's a statement of intent and whether or not Trump is able to do a lot of the more pernicious and unconstitutional things he wants to do.' The executive order calls for 'military and national security assets' to assist in local policing, directs federal resources and protections for state and local law enforcement, and enhances police protections, among other proclamations. But it reflects a deeper ambition. 'He wants more federal militarized law enforcement under his thumb instead of under the thumb of governors or mayors,' says Balko. 'He wants to use them to help with immigration deportations. He wants help with cracking down on protest.' And the concern and fear, says Balko, is that Trump will also 'use law enforcement to go after his critics and people he perceives to be his enemies.' This week on The Intercept Briefing, Balko joins senior reporter Akela Lacy and host Jessica Washington to break down the Trump administration's push to federalize local law enforcement and 'unleash' police who already face minimal meaningful restraint. 'We're really getting to the point where law enforcement officers have almost no accountability at all,' says Balko, who writes the newsletter The Watch. He adds, 'All of this is based on a premise that isn't true, which is that we're in some sort of massive crime wave that's been sweeping the country.' The fearmongering, Lacy notes, is that cities run by Democrats — San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Baltimore — are dangerous. But as Balko points out, 'When [Trump] took office for the first time he had actually inherited the lowest crime rate of any president since like Eisenhower. And [he] was the first president in 40 years to leave office with a higher homicide rate than when he entered it.' While crime spiked during the pandemic under Trump, Balko continues, 'Under Biden it started going down over the last two years of [his] administration and it continues to go down.' 'The narrative,' Lacy adds, 'is extremely detached from reality.' But that narrative serves to justify a sweeping law-and-order agenda. 'The vision is for police to respond to everything,' says Lacy. It's a vision for a militarized police force with no accountability under the discretion of the president that 'they can deploy to enforce any and every part of their agenda beyond criminal issues, and then further criminalize participation in the public's sphere and exercise of constitutional rights.' Read our complete coverage Over the last few months, Balko adds, the federal government has increasingly used masked, unidentified agents to snatch people off the streets — not for violent crimes, but for political speech, protests, and civil offenses 'in a deliberate effort to evade judicial review.' 'They're snatching people off the street and taking them to an overseas prison that's more like a gulag and imposing on them what's effectively a life sentence with no due process,' Balko continues. 'No habeas corpus, no judicial review whatsoever. These are very classic characteristics of a police state.' Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Join The Conversation
The Intercept
02-05-2025
- Politics
- The Intercept
Rep. Jayapal: Democrats Need a Bold Agenda, Starting With Medicare for All
This week, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., joined forces with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., to introduce ambitious Medicare for All legislation that would provide comprehensive coverage to every American without premiums, co-payments, or deductibles. The move comes at a striking moment — with Donald Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, the bill's passage remains unlikely. In this week's episode of The Intercept Briefing, Jayapal delivers a candid assessment of Democratic strategy in the Trump era. 'You can't just be an opposition party. You do have to also be a proposition party.' It's why Medicare for All was so important, she explains. 'We have to show people that we are willing to un-rig the system.' Jayapal acknowledges critical missteps by her party. 'A lot of my colleagues may have gotten scared off and somehow thought that what the American people wanted was for us to play footsie with Donald Trump instead of go toe to toe with him,' she says. 'And I think it is very clear now, after the first three months of destruction and chaos and cruelty, that that is not the way to go. This is not an administration that you want to try and get in bed with. This is an administration that we have to fight if we want to preserve our democracy.' She has been particularly frustrated by her colleagues in the Senate. 'The Senate had the ability to confirm Trump's Cabinet, and you saw many Democrats going along with those confirmations as if somehow this was OK to put these people who are completely incompetent and have no understanding whatsoever, and even worse have lots of things in their backgrounds that never should have allowed them to be confirmed as Cabinet members.' The Senate, she adds, had 'a certain power to stand up early that they didn't use.' Now is the time, says Jayapal, to offer a clear roadmap for resistance. 'My job now is to use the platform I have and the relationships I have to build the resistance movement on the outside and on the inside. And that is really on every level from Congress to the courts to the public.' Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
