A graphic posted to the website for former Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino’s 2028 presidential exploratory committee on June 4, 2028. (Graphic from Bovino2028.com)
Bovino’s plan to purge the country of one-third of its population has been described as an “ethnic cleansing” proposal. He recently discussed it at a conference with European neo-Nazis.
Fresh off his appearance at a fascist conference in Portugal focused on “remigration,” President Donald Trump’s ex-Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino has teased a run for US president in 2028 centered around his fantasy of deporting 100 million people from the United States.
Amid public backlash following the killing of two US citizens by his federal agents in Minneapolis, Bovino was kicked from the helm of Trump’s mass deportation crusade in January and sent into early retirement.
But as he later discussed with The New York Times, he departed with a sense of unfinished business, unfulfilled that he could not exact what was described as a “master plan” to purge a third of the country.
As News Nation reported on Monday, Bovino is not one to give up on dreams easily. The 30-year Border Patrol veteran told the network that he was launching an exploratory committee for a White House run in 2028 and planned to move ahead with a formal campaign “if it all comes together.”
The website for his committee, Bovino2028.com, which features an image of Bovino in his signature SS-style trenchcoat flanked by the phrase “House Bovino. Men Fight Back,” gives a sense of the campaign he seeks to run.
Gregory Bovino being the first 2028 candidate to launch an exploratory committee — with this, um, interesting graphic on his website, no less — was not on my Bingo card. https://t.co/QxLMDwKj4Lpic.twitter.com/I3WQcFFRJK
The website describes a future President Bovino leading the US with a “warrior mindset,” “quelling the foreign hordes that have subsumed our nation’s cities,” and creating a “department of youth masculinity” to turn young men into “warriors for freedom,” and calls for the reestablishment of Elon Musk’s failed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
His website also does not shy away from acknowledging his role in a conference in late May were he appeared alongside representatives of the global far-right. As Charles R. Davis described late last month for The Redoubt:
The “Remigration Summit 2026,” so called, was held May 30 at the Salmanha Residence hotel just south of Porto, Portugal, and its organizers were not subtle.
“Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions,” argues Afonso Gonçalves, chief organizer of the event. He’s the founder of the far-right group Reconquista, so named for the mass expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. That’s who Bovino was photographed standing next to after he landed in Europe.
Martin Sellner, an extremist from Austria, is best known for pushing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory— that Jewish elites are seeking to exterminate the white race via mass migration—that has motivated mass shooters from Pennsylvania to New Zealand.
He was the other man standing next to Bovino.
Other speakers included a Belgian fascist convicted of Holocaust denial and the founder of a Swiss neo-Nazi group called “Junge Tat” who is quite open about his fondness for “National Socialism.”
Bovino is not looking to hide his affiliations with prominent neo-Nazis. The site prominently features a photo of himself with Sellner, who at a previous summit outlined a plan for the forced expulsion of “non-assimilated” citizens of immigrant backgrounds from Germany.
The ex-Border Patrol commander said during the conference that his and Sellner’s ideas “mirror each other.”
Gregory Bovino poses with Martin Sellner in an image posted to his 2028 website.(Photo from Bovino2028.com)
Confirming that he was considering a presidential run on Monday, Bovino wrote on social media: “My one and only priority is deporting the 106 million illegals who are here. That’s it.”
According to May data from the Center for Migration Studies, the number of undocumented immigrants actually in the United States was only about 14.6 million as of 2024, meaning that what Bovino is actually proposing is the mass expulsion of tens of millions of legal immigrants, as well as naturalized and US-born citizens.
David J. Bier, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, testified about this plot by Bovino in front of the Senate Budget Committee in March, describing it as a plan for “ethnic cleansing”—and pushing back when one Republican senator dismissed the claim as “hyperbole.”
Cato Institute Immigration Studies Director @David_J_Bier: "They're trying to deport U.S.-born citizens…These are not hyperbolic statements!"
Polls indicate Americans have overwhelmingly turned against Trump’s crusade to round up millions of immigrants, with strong majorities having negative views of his tactics and of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In early March, just over a month after Bovino’s tenure ended, a record 50% of Americans said in a YouGov poll that they would support abolishing ICE.
But Bovino said the “grassroots support” he’s seeing indicates that “the polls are completely wrong.”
He said: “If I’m getting this much energy, it’s probably because 90% of the country wants mass deportations, and the media just isn’t asking the right questions.”
While it is difficult to see Bovino achieving mass appeal on the back of an immigration crusade even more extreme than Trump’s, Oliver Willis, a writer for the Daily Kos said it was a sign of where the base of the GOP could be heading.
“The Republican Party has increasingly tied itself to the white supremacist movement through continued support of Trump and the rising influence of figures like conservative podcaster and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes,” he wrote. “Bovino considering a 2028 presidential bid shows that the party—and the wider conservative movement—isn’t moderating at all.”
Kicking out Palantir, experts warn, may not solve the problems its Federated Data Platform has created.
NHS England’s Federated Data Platform, run primarily by controversial US military contractor Palantir, would give a future UK government the ability to use patients’ healthcare data to unleash unprecedented mass surveillance, experts and technologists have warned openDemocracy.
“We have already seen in the US how Palantir’s reach into so many different areas of government has allowed it to build a system that provides detailed profiles of people to enable ICE raids,” said Duncan McCann of the Good Law Project, referring to how President Donald Trump’s mass deportation programme has used Palantir’s tools. “The exact same thing is being enabled by the integration of Palantir into the UK public sector.”
This risk is only exacerbated by the fact that nearly three years after Palantir was awarded the £330m contract to run the FDP, it remains unclear what patient data it gathers, on what basis and to what end. Despite this, 69% of regional NHS Trusts have already adopted the platform, which provides the health service with a new operating system intended to link up otherwise unconnected databases and disparate software across different NHS services and regions.
This lack of clarity was laid bare this week, when the UK’s cross-party Science, Innovation and Technology Committee urged the government to break the NHS’s contract with Palantir. Its report contained a stark recommendation to the government: reveal “the exact nature of Palantir’s access to identifiable and non-identifiable patient data, on what statutory basis this was authorised, when, and by whom.”
McCann and the Good Law Project are part of an unusually wide coalition demanding the UK cut ties with Palantir, but technologists who have worked closely on the FDP warn that the genie is now out of the bottle; kicking the US giant out of the NHS may not be enough to solve the data privacy problems its Federated Data Platform has created.
“You know you could pull Palantir out,” Tom Bartlett, an NHS technologist who worked on the FDP and has spoken publicly in favour of the project, told openDemocracy. “But the danger remains.”
“You still might get a government that says, ‘We need to have the data from the NHS and the data from the Home Office connected, and we want to use it for the purpose of denying people healthcare or deporting people or whatever’.”
Coalition of Resistance
To understand how deeply Palantir is enmeshed in the UK’s public sector, consider the coalition opposed to it.
NHS data analysts and chief data and analytical officers have spoken out against the FDP. The British Medical Association, a union representing doctors and medical students, has urged GPs to reject it. The Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board, which oversees NHS services for 2.8 million people, has refused to sign up to the platform, claiming outstanding security risks haven’t been addressed, and that it has better technology in-house.
It’s not just the NHS, either. London’s mayor has blocked a £50m Palantir contract with the Metropolitan Police, arguing that it was improperly awarded. The housing ministry replaced a Palantir system to match British hosts with Ukrainian refugees with its own technology. In Coventry, local politicians and unions are protesting the renewal of a £750,000 Palantir contract with the council’s children’s services department. Financial Conduct Authority employees are seeking to orchestrate a cross-union campaign against a 12-week trial contract with Palantir that they fear could expose the UK’s sensitive financial data to US law enforcement authorities.
“Our pilot with Palantir allows the Met for the first time to bring together data it already lawfully holds in one place to identify potential standards, welfare or cultural concerns,” said a spokesperson for The Met over email. “It also allows us to identify early issues so we can act more fairly and consistently, ensuring officers receive support or face appropriate action before problems escalate.” In April, Met officers expressed outrage at the “intrusive” use of Palantir’s technology to assess them for misconduct.
The Financial Conduct Authority’s contract with Palantir involves testing an AI search tool for its data. “The data used in the trial will be fully encrypted and under our control,” wrote a spokesperson for the regulator over email. “No-one is able to access the unencrypted data without our authorisation.”
Coventry City Council did not respond to questions about its Palantir contract.
He co-founded the company with $2 million from the venture capital arm of the CIA in the early 2000s, when the failure to prevent 9/11 was being debated across Washington and Silicon Valley. It was suspected, and would be confirmed by the public report a year later, that the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency had separately held the data required to have foreseen the terror attacks, but had “failed to connect the dots”.
That finding has since been the basis of much of Palantir’s success. It argues that governments, militaries, law enforcement authorities and businesses already have much of the data they need to make decisions, but that it is not readily available in the forms needed.
Palantir, it tells them, is the solution.
“The actual thing that’s difficult is organising all your data together,” Alex Bores, a member of the New York State Assembly and a former Palantir employee turned critic, told The New York Times. “That requires hard work, and there’s no magic to do that yet. The software, plus engineers going on site and doing a lot of that hard work to do the manual hookups, was always going to be the true source of value.”
Databasing the Nation
In the NHS, Palantir’s work involves organising, hooking up, and streamlining vast troves of patient data currently scattered across, by one count, 44,000 healthcare IT systems in 26,000 organisations. “The fragmentation is absolutely massive,” said Bartlett, who helped build the FDP. “There’s all this information, and it’s all sat in different pockets.”
Palantir’s solution has two layers. Bartlett describes one layer as an “operating system” analogous to the software that runs your iPhone, which will allow NHS Trusts and third-party developers to create applications (or what Palantir calls “products”) that allow for efficiency gains. An ambulance crew, for example, could input information about an accident victim to a product that would pass it onto the hospital, so that “the A&E department could prepare, rather than being sort of hit in the face” with information when the ambulance arrives, he said.
Yet, much like how your iPhone decisively locks you into the ecosystem of Apple products, running this system efficiently requires as much of the NHS as possible to sign on to the Palantir system – something experts call “vendor lock-in” – and to draw on a staggering library of data held across the health service.
The FDP’s public documentation reveals that the platform is already in the process of ingesting several hundred databases, covering a vast array of variables that include mental healthcare contact activity, mortality, flu vaccination status, covid vaccination status, emergency services data, race and ethnicity, aggregated data for persons held in secure mental health facilities in adult prisons and immigration removal centres, and much more.
As the cross-party committee of MPs noted in their report last week, there is little clarity around exactly what data will make it into the FDP, and how it will be accessed. The debate around patient data held by GP practices offers a useful illustration.
Back in 2023, the then secretary of state for health and social care, Victoria Atkins, told the House of Commons: “No new data will be collected, and GP data will not be part of the national platform.” However, an NHS FAQ page last updated in April 2026 admits that “some of the data” in the FDP “may have been sourced from GP records”, and GP data lawfully shared with NHS trusts that use the FDP could end up on the platform.
More worryingly, the FDP uses all this data to create detailed profiles of individual patients that it calls the ‘Person Ontology’. To quote from an NHS Data Protection Impact Assessment: “The Person Ontology serves as the single source of the truth for pseudonymised patient level datasets”.
Elsewhere, the document says that “the Person Ontology currently holds activity data for citizens in different care settings”, explaining that the platform assigns individual patients a unique ID that can be cross-referenced across multiple databases.
The NHS says that as the data held in the FDP is pseudonymised, it does not directly identify individuals. But pseudonymisation, as has been pointed out by the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection watchdog, is a reversible process. “Take care not to confuse pseudonymisation with anonymisation,” the ICO warns.
A person’s healthcare data is their “most intimate information,” said a spokesperson and legal officer at Privacy International, a UK-based charity focusing on technology and rights. “We’re talking about the breadth of the data, how personal it is, and the severity of what could be done with it if it were to land in the wrong hands.”
Big Data Means Big Brother
Consolidating so much data brings very real risks of surveillance, say those familiar with the platform, particularly since Palantir also holds contracts with police forces in the UK. In principle, all that’s stopping the Home Office from accessing NHS data are legal safeguards that can be reversed.
Here in the UK, Palantir UK CEO Louis Mosley has said that if Nigel Farage’s Reform comes into power, the company will follow the party’s professed directives to use NHS data to target individuals based on their immigration status.
Such a scenario played out in the US when Trump first became president in 2016, as Bores, the former Palantir employee, told The New York Times.
“Palantir had signed a contract with a department within ICE called HSI, Homeland Security Investigations. During the Obama administration, it was focused on anti-human trafficking, anti-drug trafficking, sometimes counterfeiting,” Bores said. “Then, when Trump comes in in 2017, they try to change the nature of that work. They try to get another part of ICE called ERO, Enforcement and Removal Operations – the part that everyone thinks of as ICE – to get access to the software and to use it for deportations.”
In the US, Palantir already uses data from the Department of Health and Human Services to track people targeted for deportation by ICE. Here in the UK, junior doctor Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne, who is organising against Palantir in the NHS with health justice organisation Medact, described what she said was a disturbing pattern: “Reform’s policy ‘Operation Restoring Justice’ wants to create a powerful immigration surveillance system by mining data from health, police and financial databases. Louis Mosley said his company would comply with this.
“Palantir’s police contracts in the UK include collating highly sensitive information on victims of crime, including sexual orientation and trade union membership. The home secretary says she wants to create a panopticon of state surveillance. The synergy between Palantir and governments who use data to abuse human rights is deeply alarming, and a sign of what could be coming in the UK.”
This is a real risk, conceded Bartlett. “Let’s take [a] Reform government and the immigration question coming in, I do worry about that scenario,” he said – but he questioned whether that means the NHS doesn’t need a Federated Data Platform. “So is the answer to that bad scenario playing out to keep the data in such a bad state that nobody could ever use it at all for good or bad?”
Palantir, NHS England, the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health and Social Care and The Reform Party did not respond to requests for comment.
Critics of the FDP, however, have pushed back against what they see as a narrative that the NHS’s systems are so hopelessly complex and tangled that the only way to solve them is with a mass surveillance tool built by Palantir.
“There’s no magic here,” Sam Smith, a technologist with patient rights organisation medConfidential, said of the FDP. “It’s not like Palantir is doing anything that other people can’t do… They’re just doing the thing because they have the mythos that they can do the thing.”
Andrew Holway, the founder of UK-based medical software startup Darwinist, told the cross-party committee that “the primary barrier to NHS innovation” is mega contracts with companies such as Palantir. These, he said, hold the NHS “hostage, preventing the implementation of modern productivity tools that could save tens of billions of pounds”.
Some in the NHS have also questioned whether the service has tried different approaches that are less intrusive and data-centric. The NHS Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board, for instance, uses its own Analytics and Data Science Platform because it believes it offers better technology and access to better data.
“Public trust isn’t a side issue for the Federated Data Platform,” wrote Matt Hennessey, the chief data and analytics officer at Manchester Integrated Care Board, in a post on LinkedIn. He outlined the “effect that ethical concern, moral unease or perceived opacity has on trust–and, in turn, on participation.”
The platform’s “main problem is that it isn’t clear what it actually is,” he wrote. “Where trust is eroded, people disengage, patients opt out, and clinicians become cautious about involvement.”
Ultimately, as Osborne said, “any NHS data system must be built on public trust, buy-in from staff, and most importantly, protection from abuse by private corporations and governments themselves”.
This photo shows a view of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Camp East Montana detention center at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas. (Photo by Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matter)
“The conditions here in this ICE tent camp in a desert are inhumane and cruel,” said one Cameroonian plaintiff in the suit. “No human being should ever have to go through this.”
A group of legal advocacy groups on Friday sued US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies and officials over “inhumane” conditions at the country’s largest concentration camp for immigrants detained during the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, Texas Civil Rights Project, Human Rights Watch, and the law firm Farella Braun + Martel LLP filed suit against ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and associated officials, in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas in El Paso.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four people seeking to represent a class action for all others held at Camp East Montana, a 60-acre facility located in the Chihuahuan Desert on the grounds of Fort Bliss, an Army base and the site of one of the concentration camps where Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals were imprisoned during World War II. Approximately 2,500 immigrants are being detained there.
Citing “a Civil Rights catastrophe,” a group of legal and civil rights organizations in Texas sued the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Friday over conditions at Camp East Montana in El Paso, the country’s largest immigration detention facility.More: substack.com/@shero/note/…
The lawsuit documents accounts of what the ACLU called “horrific rights violations” at the facility, including:
Severe medical neglect and disease outbreaks, including a months-long measles outbreak that infected at least 14 people;
Violent uses of force by officers against detained immigrants and coercive threats of deportation;
Excessive and arbitrary use of solitary confinement to punish people for requesting basic needs like medical care or hygiene;
Inadequate and rancid food that have caused detained people to lose extreme amounts of weight;
Exposure to dust storms through openings in tent walls that subjects people to respiratory disease; and
Dangerous and unsanitary living conditions in the tent camp, among other rights violations.
“These conditions are longstanding, pervasive, and well-documented, and defendants’ continued inaction in the face of known risks shows their deliberate indifference—not mere negligence—to detainees’ constitutional rights,” the lawsuit states.
At least three detainees have died at Camp East Montana, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban who, according to witnesses, died after being handcuffed and placed in a chokehold by guards. The El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Lunas Campos’ death a homicide by asphyxia.
Detained immigrants have reported beatings and sexual abuse, medical neglect, hunger and insufficient food, and denial of access to attorneys at the facility.
“The conditions here in this ICE tent camp in a desert are inhumane and cruel. No human being should ever have to go through this,” case plaintiff Gerald Akari Angye said in a statement Friday.
I have already experienced torture in my home country of Cameroon and I never thought I would experience such severely violent treatment by guards here in the United States of America,“ he continued. ”I have been beaten here and even today, I still have a brace on my hands and wrist. I am in pain and I am scared to be here.“
“No one deserves such cruel treatment,” Akari Angye added. “We are all humans and deserve to be treated like it.”
Kyle Virgien, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, called Camp East Montana “nothing short of a civil rights catastrophe.”
“Since the day it opened, the facility has repeatedly made headlines for horrific rights violations and even the deaths of three detained people, yet ICE has still evaded accountability for its conduct,” Virgien added. “We’re suing to ensure that no other human being has to endure the inhumane treatment that the Trump administration has inflicted on our clients.”
Another case plaintiff, named in the suit as Navdeep, said, “It feels like we are just political pawns taken from our jobs and families and forced into a temporary tent that is not designed for human life.”
“We could die here, and it feels like no one here would care,” they continued. “With everything happening behind closed doors, I worry the people running this place might cover up the truth about a death or the other injustices that happen here.”
“It’s important for people to know the truth of what is happening here,” Navdeep added. “Being part of this lawsuit is important to me because many people are vulnerable or they become weak because of the conditions here. Even though we come from many different places, we are all human. I want to be a voice for everyone here.”
After receiving “numerous credible reports of torture, killing, and inhumane treatment” of detainees, 35 Democratic Texas state lawmakers earlier this year demand a probe into alleged abuses at Camp East Montana.
Democratic members of US Congress have also sounded the alarm over conditions at Camp East Montana. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) has also called out profiteering by the private contractors running the camp.
This is misinformation. I visited the Dilley Detention Center in Frio County, Texas, and witnessed firsthand the facility’s inhumane conditions. Despite ICE’s claim that detainees receive “world-class” care, people I spoke with described untreated wounds, serious medical… https://t.co/daGpf9BKEl
— Congressman Christian D. Menefee (@RepCDMenefee) May 27, 2026
Amentum Services Inc. took over operations from Acquisition Logistics LLC earlier this year. The latter was never registered to operate in Texas and the former “has a history of health, safety, and other violations of federal law,” according to the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen.
The Trump administration is currently moving forward with a plan to convert industrial warehouses into more ICE concentration camps. The agency has already purchased or contracted for at least 11 warehouses in eight states as part of the $38 billion plan.
While some critics take exception to the concentration camp description, the ICE facilities fit the dictionary definition of the term. The US has a long history of operating concentration camps, with imprisoned peoples ranging from Indigenous tribes during the Trail of Tears and Long Walk to escaped and freed slaves—officially called “contraband” in the Civil War—to Filipinos, Okinawans, and Vietnamese during three different 20th century wars, to Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals during World War II.
“Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem,” talk show host and author Thom Hartmannwrote earlier this year for Common Dreams. “And that’s exactly what ICE is building now. History isn’t whispering its warning: It’s shouting.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
A protestor with an American flag walks towards a police line during a protest against federal immigration arrests, on June 11, 2025 in Seattle, Washington. Protests against ICE raids have spread to cities across the nation after beginning in Los Angeles last weekend. (Photo by Rio Giancarlo/Getty Images)
“We were guinea pigs,” said the father of one of the convicted protesters. “They brought the swamp of Washington, DC, into our area to stop American citizens from exercising our rights that are guaranteed.”
With the conviction of three anti-ICE protesters in Spokane, Washington on federal “conspiracy” charges Thursday, civil rights advocates and legal experts fear that the Trump administration may have just been handed a powerful tool to criminalize dissent.
Jac Archer, Justice Forral, and Bajun Mavalwalla II, nicknamed the “Spokane 3,” were indicted last year for their actions at a protest in June 2025, where they attempted to physically obstruct ICE agents from transporting two Venezuelan immigrants to an ICE processing facility in Tacoma.
Both of the men reportedly entered the US legally under a humanitarian parole program that had been terminated by the Trump administration, leading advocates to protest their detention.
As Spokesman-Review, a Spokane newspaper, described:
Protesters that day eventually began linking arms around vans and in front of agents’ cars. The event grew chaotic. ICE agents entered a crowd of people standing outside the facility’s parking lot gate and began grabbing people by the necks and arms, pushing them to the ground. Protesters also slashed tires of vans meant to transport the detainees.
But where such activity would usually lead to charges against specific protesters for discrete illegal actions like trespassing, property damage, or other public order offenses, the Department of Justice (DOJ)—as part of a nationwide effort to crack down on protests against ICE—charged nine protesters with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers,” even though no officers were actually injured during the protest.
— Buffalo Brian Breen News (@MCUBuff) May 29, 2026
Legal experts described it as a novel approach that wrapped many people involved in the protest into a single “conspiracy” regardless of whether they committed specific criminal acts.
“Usually if a protest gets out of hand and people are hurt or property is hurt, you see charges based on that,” Mary Fan, a former federal prosecutor and a University of Washington law professor, told The New York Times earlier this month. “They’re not going after people based on specific harm done. They’re stretching conspiracy charges to target protesters and people who organize protests.”
Facing pressure from the federal government to bring the case following a national memo sent from the DOJ to prioritize and publicize cases against ICE agents, then-acting US Attorney for Eastern Washington Richard Barker resigned last year rather than bring charges against the protesters.
He said at the time he was grateful he “never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that [he] didn’t believe in.” His successor, Stephanie Van Marter, however, did sign the order.
Six of the defendants pleaded guilty to the charges to avoid federal prison time. But Archer, Forral, and Mavalwalla chose to fight them, believing the case was part of an unjust attempt to criminalize their right to protest.
After a trial that lasted seven days, a jury found the three defendants guilty of conspiracy. But the defense has argued that the trial was marred by problems that rendered the verdict faulty.
In February, a federal judge ordered the release of a Venezuelan migrant whose transportation for deportation the protesters sought to block, ruling his arrest violated the constitution.
But the jury, drawn from conservative eastern Washington state, did not hear those facts at trial, thanks to rulings by Judge [Rebecca] Pennell. Pennell, a former federal public defender and appointee of the Democratic president Joe Biden, also ruled the protesters on trial could not use the First Amendment as a defense, though they were allowed to state their reasons for demonstrating.
Instead, the jury watched hours of law enforcement body camera video and heard from a parade of ICE agents… Jeremy Burlingame, an ICE agent who testified, had authored social media posts that called Black politicians “lying ghetto garbage” and transgender people “mentally ill.” He boosted a post showing ICE arresting a pregnant woman at gunpoint that called her a “pregnant invader.”
Federal prosecutors deemed the posts troubling enough to recall Burlingame to impeach him, despite the fact that he was their witness…
But Burlingame’s online posts, the lack of injury to ICE officers, and the absence of evidence showing communication between the three defendants prior to the protest were not enough to sway the jury.
The defendants now face potential sentences of up to six years in prison and a $250,000 fine. However, they are expected to appeal the verdict and have filed a rarely used motion allowing their attorneys to argue that no rational juror could find their clients guilty.
“I question whether justice truly was served by today’s verdict,” Barker told the Spokesman-Review. “This was the first conspiracy prosecution in Eastern Washington history under… a Civil War-era law dusted off to punish members of the Spokane community who stood up for two young men who were unlawfully detained by ICE.”
Video by KREM 2 News/Youtube
Looking beyond the details of the trial itself, many observers questioned the very premise of the DOJ’s prosecution.
Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown said from the start of the trial she believed it was “politically motivated.”
“It was meant to make an example out of people who disagreed with federal immigration policy,” she said.
City council member Sarah Dixit, who said she took part in the protest, said: “Based on the evidence that was shown, I personally didn’t see evidence of what they were accused of. Conspiracy is a charge that feels complicated to prove, and I don’t believe that the government made a strong case for that.”
Others expressed fear for the precedent that had been set. La Rond Baker, the legal director of the Washington ACLU, said the Trump administration “has a demonstrable history of using the Department of Justice to silence and punish its critics.”
The administration has pursued similar sweeping conspiracy charges against other groups of anti-ICE protesters around the country—including in Los Angeles, Broadview, Illinois, and North Texas.
“The verdict was painfully disappointing,” said Archer’s attorney, Carl Oreskovich. “I think it was an extraordinarily aggressive approach to prosecution of protests. And it certainly is going to chill people who want to utilize their First Amendment right to dissent against government actions that they don’t agree with.”
In a comment to The Guardian, Robert Chang, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and executive director of its Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, said the verdict was “frightening.”
“By this logic, any protest could be a conspiracy,” he said. “The goal posts keep moving.”
BREAKING: All three defendants in the Spokane Three Trial were found guilty. There is a press conference being held outside the federal courthouse building right now. @kxly4newspic.twitter.com/AfTkIa4vzj
Bajun Mavalwalla Sr., a retired US Army intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan, said his son—also a veteran of the same war—and the other two defendants were standing for “the freedoms that separate this country from the dictatorships.”
“People in Spokane and people in Eastern Washington need to understand that we were guinea pigs. That they brought the swamp of Washington, DC, into our area to stop American citizens from exercising our rights that are guaranteed,” the elder Mavalwalla said after his son was convicted.
“It was the whole point of the Constitution, the right to protest, the right to dissent, the right to assemble, all of those things are now in question because of this case,” he said. “My son has taken the brunt of the entire weight of the United States government onto their shoulders.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents depart the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building on February 4, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
“In Minnesota, we believe in equal justice under the law,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. “That means nobody is above the law, including agents of the federal government.”
A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was arrested in Texas on Friday after he was charged by Minnesota officials for allegedly shooting a Venezuelan immigrant during an ICE operation in Minneapolis and lying about what happened.
Christian Castro, 52, was deployed as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push in the Twin Cities, dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” and was charged by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty earlier this month with four counts of felony assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime.
The charges stem from the shooting of Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis at his home on January 14 as ICE agents pursued his roommate, another Venezuelan immigrant named Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna.
According to The New York Times, Castro was arrested Friday after being tracked down by investigators with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Texas Rangers and agents with the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General carried out the arrest, according to the Minnesota-based Sahan Journal.
“Today’s arrest is a critical step forward in our prosecution of Mr. Castro,” Moriarty said. “The BCA’s investigative work was instrumental in this process, and we’re grateful for their collaboration as we pursue accountability for this incident on behalf of Mr. Sosa-Celis, his family, and our community.”
[Embedded X video not found in article at Common Dreams.]
Sosa-Celis and Aljorna were originally charged by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), after Castro claimed that he had shot in self-defense when the men assaulted him with a broom and a shovel, claims that were parroted by then-Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem and department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
But the charges were later dropped after video of the incident and an examination of X-ray evidence demonstrated that Castro’s claims were false. Castro and another agent were subsequently placed on administrative leave by DHS while they were investigated internally for lying under oath.
“In Minnesota, we believe in equal justice under the law. That means nobody is above the law, including agents of the federal government,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison following news of Castro’s arrest on Friday. “I am pleased to hear Christian Castro has been taken into custody and will stand trial for the crimes he allegedly committed in Minnesota. Justice demands no less.”
Castro is the second ICE agent to be charged by Moriarty’s office for their role in Operation Metro Surge, which civil rights groups and Minnesota officials have characterized as a lawless immigration crackdown involving racial profiling, warrantless arrests, violent raids, and multiple shootings by federal agents.
Another agent, Gregory Morgan Jr., was charged last month with two counts of felony second-degree assault after he allegedly pulled a gun on two local residents during a traffic stop. Morgan turned himself in to local authorities last week and was released on bond.
Ellison also sued the Trump administration in March for refusing to cooperate with the state investigation into the shooting of Sosa-Celis, and other probes into the fatal shootings of two US citizens.
Moriarty’s office has not yet brought charges against ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who fatally shot Minneapolis mother Renee Good in January, or Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez in connection with the deadly shooting of Department of Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti later that month.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says disinhibition and swearing are typical and common symptoms
