Police, prison and abolition

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Prison Labor: The Last Stronghold of Slavery in the US
Posted on September 18, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This post not only provides some facts about the history and present state of prison labor in America, but also the costs that incarceration imposes on families.

And let us not forget:



Kamala locked up so many people, the Supreme Court ruled her prisons were unconstitutionally overcrowded.

She not only refused to release folks, she argued that her prison labor (legal slavery, by definition), was too profitable to give up. 6/



Harris was remarkably open about her priorities. But as you will see, she has plenty of company.

By Bianca Tylek, the author of The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits, and the Founder and Executive Director of Worth Rises, a national non-profit dismantling the prison industry and ending the exploitation of those it touches Originally published at openDemcracy

In the United States, freedom has never been free. For Black Americans, in particular, the price of freedom has been immense, paid through generations of impossible decisions and forced compromises with the loss of history, family unity, financial stability, and privacy.

Costs that emerged in efforts to escape chattel slavery now continue as many fight to escape its legacy in our carceral system, revealing an ongoing scheme of racialised community destabilisation and economic extraction. In this context, efforts to establish a universal basic income in the United States must not be seen as charity or even policy innovation, but as necessary reparations and redress.

The 13th Amendment did not abolish slavery – it revised it and shrouded it in secrecy. By including an exception clause allowing slavery “as punishment for a crime”, Congress preserved the legal grounds for forced labor. In the aftermath of emancipation, Southern lawmakers used the clause to criminalise everyday Black life through Black Codes and funnel newly freed people into profitable “convict leasing” programmes.

The US prison population quickly went from predominantly white to predominantly Black, with labor exploitation at the system’s core. This laid the groundwork for today’s carceral state, a brutal system that now cages over two million people. They remain unprotected from slavery, and Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans.

Slavery is not just the carceral system’s history. It is its present.

Slavery Behind Prison Walls

Behind the cover of prison walls, people are forced to work in unsafe conditions for little to no pay under the threat of further punishment, including the loss of family visits – a common antebellum punishment for disobedience. Incarcerated people toil on farms, fight wildfires, sew uniforms, clean public buildings, manufacture state furniture and more, all while being denied basic labor rights and protections.

Organising is reframed as rioting to justify violent retorts that demand obedience. Just as enslaved people were reduced to tools of labor, incarcerated people are treated as disposable assets of the state – valuable only to the extent that they demonstrate compliance and generate returns.

The language used throughout our carceral system reinforces these dynamics and pays homage to the system’s roots in slavery, intentionally. Uniforms read “Sheriff’s Inmate” and paperwork labels people “Property of the State”. Solitary confinement, another common punishment for refusing to work in prison, is commonly referred to by incarcerated people and staff alike as “the hole” or “the box” – both plantation-era references to similar punishments during chattel slavery.

Even when incarcerated people are paid for their labor, they typically earn less than a dollar per hour, rates that amount to a systemic theft of labor value. A recent cost-benefit analysis estimated that between $11.6 billion and $18.8 billion is stolen from incarcerated workers in wages every year. These stolen wages represent not only lost income for incarcerated individuals, but also lost support for their children, families, and communities – further entrenching financial instability, undermining rehabilitation, and perpetuating cycles of poverty and incarceration.

The Human Cost

The cost of this centuries-long institutional racism has been devastating to Black Americans. As detailed in a new report by FWD.us, We Can’t Afford It, incarceration is costing families with incarcerated loved ones almost $350 billion each year in lost earnings and new costs, like those for phone calls, commissary goods, and medical care.

Today, nearly 50% of adults in the US have had an immediate family member incarcerated. Among Black Americans, that number is even higher: 63% have had a family member imprisoned. Black families also spend two-and-a-half times more than white families supporting incarcerated loved ones. Little changes upon release, as the over 600,000 people that return home each year in the US often find themselves burdened with debt, stripped of income, and locked out of jobs and housing.

As a result, these families are routinely forced to choose between providing for their own basic needs and supporting incarcerated loved ones. Mothers, who often serve as the primary financial and emotional support system for families impacted by incarceration, go into debt trying to do both.

One in three families with an incarcerated loved one takes on debt to pay for calls and visits alone. Children suffer the fallout in the form of housing instability, food insecurity, and eventually lost parental guidance. Nearly half of Black children in the US have had a parent incarcerated – a figure that reflects deliberate state design and intergenerational economic warfare.

The Long Road to Repair

To confront the unfinished business of abolition, Worth Rises launched the #EndTheException campaign, calling for an end to the exception in the 13th Amendment that has fuelled forced prison labor and mass incarceration more broadly since the formal abolition of chattel slavery. By demanding that the Constitution reflect a true and final end to slavery, #EndTheException lays the groundwork for broader reparative policies.

Repairing this most enduring form of racialised harm in the US requires more than acknowledgment; it demands redistribution. Reparations are the minimum, and a targeted basic income – regular, unconditional cash payments to people most impacted by incarceration – is an obvious and effective vehicle. These payments would represent a historic reversal, with public funds finally flowing into the hands of people whose wealth has been systematically stolen by state violence for generations.

The legacy of slavery cannot be separated from the institutions that followed it: convict leasing,

Redlining (the denial of services to specific neighbourhoods), Jim Crow segregation, and mass incarceration. These are not isolated chapters of history – they represent a continuous process of exploitation, extraction, and control.

Through that lens, it is easy to see that the carceral system is not broken, but functioning precisely as it was meticulously designed. Ending the exception in the 13th Amendment and providing a basic income to those impacted by it are two ways we can begin to stop and repair its harm, past and present.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09 ... he-us.html

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Lawyers Report Disappearance of Hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz Detainees From ICE Database: ‘It’s a Black Hole’
September 26, 2025


The entrance to the state-managed immigration detention center dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, located at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in the Florida Everglades on August 03, 2025 in Ochopee, Florida. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

By Pedro Camacho – Sep 18, 2025

The Miami Herald reported that by late August about 800 detainees no longer appeared in ICE’s database, while another 450 were listed with no location

Hundreds of people once held at the Alligator Alcatraz immigration processing center in Florida have vanished from federal records, prompting lawyers to accuse U.S. authorities of running a detention “black hole,” as a new sprawling report from El País has revealed.

Immigrant advocacy groups told the news site that detainees formerly at the facility west of Miami disappeared from Immigration and Customs Enforcement‘s online locator and searches now yield the message: “Call the Florida Department of Corrections for details.” Luis Sorto of Sanctuary of the South, which has challenged restrictions on attorney access at the site, said plaintiffs in a lawsuit were moved elsewhere but never appeared in ICE’s tracking system.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which filed the case, described the center to El Pais as a “black hole,” noting that some people were “missing,” effectively “off the radar” of the immigration system, and “their lawyers and families often don’t know where they are or how to contact them.”

Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told the site that ICE’s “persistent refusal” to update detainee locations “is a significant obstacle to effective attorney-client communication, undermines due process, and is yet another hallmark of the detention system’s cruelty.”

The Miami Herald on Tuesday reported that by late August about 800 detainees no longer appeared in ICE’s database, while another 450 were listed with no location, only the instruction “Call ICE for details.” Attorneys said this vague notation could mean transfer, deportation, or continued detention without transparency.

The Herald described one particular case of a Guatemalan man deported before his bond hearing and a Cuban man who vanished for more than a week after ICE told his family he was in California, only to turn up deported to Mexico. “This is like psychological torture,” his mother told the news site.

Alligator Alcatraz, constructed in just over a week on a former airstrip in the Everglades, began operating in July with President Donald Trump’s endorsement. Allegations of poor conditions surfaced almost immediately. A judge ordered the camp dismantled in August, but an appeals court has allowed it to remain open while litigation continues.

https://orinocotribune.com/lawyers-repo ... lack-hole/

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Protesters line the highway in the Florida Everglades to oppose the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz,” June 2025. (Photo: Carlos Ochoa/Shutterstock/Progressive Magazine)

Iced Out
Originally published: The Progressive Magazine on October 6, 2025 by Anna Lekas Miller (more by The Progressive Magazine) | (Posted Oct 09, 2025)

An Indigenous nation of fewer than 1,000 people in South Florida, the Miccosukee Tribe doesn’t often get involved in local politics. But then private contractors showed up to an abandoned airport and started erecting a detention center in the middle of the Everglades. The Miccosukee leapt into action, realizing that the behemoth structure would drastically change the fragile wetlands that they call home.

It didn’t take long for the so-called Alligator Alcatraz to also develop a reputation for egregious human rights abuses. Billed as an immigration detention center for the “most dangerous criminals,” reports started quickly circulating that detainees were experiencing medical neglect and didn’t have access to basic hygiene. More than thirty men were detained in a single cage, with only three toilets to share. Immigration lawyers reported that they could not communicate with their clients, with some detainees even disappearing within the system.

“We found out that Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity were putting together a lawsuit,” says Curtis Esteban Osceola, an attorney and senior policy adviser to the chair of the Miccosukee Tribe. The tribe joined this environmentally focused suit a few weeks later.

While the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had organized a lawsuit that outlined civil rights abuses at Alligator Alcatraz, the environmental lawsuit focused on the ecological impact of the detention center. The groups pointed out that the private contractors that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hired to build the facility had started construction without the necessary environmental reviews mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and could jeopardize already endangered species. When the Miccosukee Tribe joined, they added that the barbed wire fences around the facility cut them off from ancient burial grounds, and that the construction had gone ahead without consultation with tribal leaders.

Faced with this evidence, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams issued a temporary restraining order and then a ruling, which halted construction on the facility, including an immediate shutdown of the sewage and waste management system, which was deemed unfit for use.

“It effectively shuts the facility down because without sewage management and waste receptacles, the facility can’t operate,” Osceola explains.

Since then, Alligator Alcatraz has been steadily dismantled, marking a major blow to one of the Trump Administration’s most hostile experiments in immigration detention. However, Trump’s assault on immigrant communities has continued with an unprecedented number of ICE raids sweeping cities across the nation, forcing families to stay home out of fear of being picked up and becoming a part of the record number of 61,226 people currently in immigration detention across the country.

“People aren’t going to doctors’ appointments,” says Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney and policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “When immigration raids happen, they aren’t sending their kids to school.”

Already, communities like the heavily immigrant-populated Boyle Heights in Los Angeles are experiencing the economic fallout of Trump’s raids as shoppers stay home and street vendors and other local businesses lose customers. Even the Las Vegas Strip has experienced a downturn as hospitality workers stay home, citing fears of similar raids.

If Alligator Alcatraz is any indication, local communities and interest groups can come together to challenge Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, bringing together environmental, economic, and local interests to chip away at his deportation machine.

“Local advocates have spent a lot of time preparing for the second Trump Administration, even before he took office,” Bush-Joseph says. In some cases, she explains, this means understanding decision-making hierarchies in local politics and forging relationships with key decision-makers, such as sheriffs and local politicians.

One of the ways that this federal crackdown is being carried out on a local level is through 287(g) agreements, which enable ICE to train and deputize local police forces to carry out immigration enforcement. While these agreements have technically been around since the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has capitalized on them as a means to supercharge immigration enforcement, pressuring jurisdictions across the country to enter into them. Under Trump, the number of these agreements has ballooned from just 135 at the beginning of 2025 to almost 900 by mid-August, with states like Florida and Texas leading the nation in approving such partnerships.

“In the past, these agreements have meant that there are fewer resources for local public safety efforts and that communities will be afraid of reporting crimes to the police,” Bush-Joseph says, citing a 2018 study from the libertarian Cato Institute that found these agreements had no impact on crime statistics. Conversely, they might hinder local law enforcement’s ability to fight crime.

“Opportunity costs might be one of the most important,” Bush-Joseph continues, explaining that along with eroding trust with immigrant communities, a lot of time will be spent on immigration enforcement when it could be spent on other law enforcement needs.

While there are three kinds of 287(g) agreements, the most prominent is the Task Force Model, which enables local police officers to inquire about someone’s immigration status and call ICE during routine enforcement duties.

Since the passage of H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, in July—which earmarks more than $170 billion for immigration and border control—and the DHS announcement in August of generous signing bonuses for new ICE recruits, a number of sheriffs have spoken out against these agreements, accusing immigration enforcement of betraying partnerships and now poaching their best officers.

Given that these agreements are made on a local level, community members are able to push back at town hall meetings and with local decision-makers—including sheriffs and city council members. While the Trump Administration has made an aggressive push for counties to adopt these agreements, some communities have successfully stopped them from going forward. In Maine, the town of Wells paused its agreement with ICE while the state considers legislation to ban these kinds of contracts. Camden’s police department in Delaware rescinded its agreement with ICE after backlash from residents. Even in Florida’s Key West, residents were able to suspend the program, although it was recently reinstated following pressure from the state attorney general.

“There are so many resources being poured into immigration that we have to ask about inertia,” Bush-Joseph says. “What happens when this ramp-up occurs and we have so much more funding going toward immigration detention that it becomes harder to roll back?”

This inertia can be seen in the sheer number of immigration detention centers being built—or in some cases, repurposed. When Alligator Alcatraz became a legal target, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis turned his attention to another shuttered facility with plans to reopen as an immigrant detention center outside of Jacksonville, a former state prison now dubbed “Deportation Depot.” An Indiana state complex near the venue for the Indianapolis 500 has been nicknamed the “Speedway Slammer” as it prepares to allocate one-third of its beds to immigrant detainees. A similar facility in Nebraska has been named the “Cornhusker Clink.” Most recently, the Trump Administration opened a tent camp for immigrant detainees at the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas, which Trump hopes will someday be the largest immigration detention center in the country.

Some cities—such as Elizabeth, New Jersey—have successfully resisted ICE building prisons in their neighborhoods.

“You have to organize with people,” says Nedia Morsy, the executive director of Make the Road New Jersey, who helped mobilize a local push to keep Elizabeth’s Union County Jail from contracting with ICE and other private prisons.

“It’s not like county officials came to us and told us that they were thinking about [contracting with ICE],” she laughs. “We found out because we have a strong base that feels confident in our leadership and shared what they heard swirling around the city.”

By the time Morsy and her team were able to confirm the rumors, the vote to put up a bid for the jail was happening within the next ninety-six hours. Still, the community was able to organize a mass mobilization of more than 200 people that turned out to protest the vote, with thirty people offering testimony at the meeting.

Even then, the vote passed, which allowed the county to advance to the next stage and put the jail up for auction. Instead of backing down, Morsy and her team continued mobilizing to keep the pressure on by organizing meetings and op-eds in the local newspapers, coupled with calls to the county commissioner’s office. “We had an election coming up, so we wanted to make a connection about how important the jail was to the voters,” she says, explaining that the jail is right in the middle of Elizabeth’s downtown. “We also wrote up a legal memo to explain to the county how it was totally feasible for them to edit their bid so that ICE or a federal prison could not be considered.”

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence was the ongoing abuses of detainees being documented at Delaney Hall, another federal immigration detention facility in nearby Newark. During a Congressional visit to Delaney Hall in May, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested and charged with trespassing. While the charges were eventually dropped, the arrest showed just how brazen ICE could be.

“We leveraged this moment to draw attention to the fact that there are no rules or regulations when it comes to working with ICE,” Morsy explains. The outrage generated support for the mayor and solidarity across the city.

Many local officials started to testify alongside other community members at the monthly meetings, and the tide started to turn. By the time of the next vote, there was broad support for refusing to contract with ICE or any other private prison.

For anyone trying to organize against ICE building or repurposing an existing prison as an immigration detention center, Morsy recommends becoming very clear about the objective.

“Our goal is not just to shut down the Union County Jail or shut down detentions,” she explains. “Our goal is to make it untenable for ICE detentions and ICE jails and ICE camps to operate here.”

That requires understanding the various ways different community members can participate.

“Everybody has a role to play, right?” she says. Some of the more affluent members of the community, for example, have personal relationships with the commissioner.

“For the working class, we have to recognize the power of our testimonies and think about the ways that local communities are impacted by these decisions,” she continues. “We need to get these people in a room with elected officials.”

If there is a structure being built, “you have to look at the land that you’re on,” Osceola suggests, explaining that depending on where you are, there might be different state, federal, or environmental laws that can help make the case. In the case of Alligator Alcatraz, contractors started constructing fences without permits in a fragile ecosystem with no review of the environmental impact.

“Everything was on the record,” he says, noting that these violations were what ultimately swayed the judge in their favor. “The state didn’t do anything. The feds didn’t do anything. They just decided that they were going to build a detention center in the middle of this fragile ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, Morsy recommends keeping an eye on buildings that could be repurposed.

“If you know of any abandoned buildings, you should contact your local elected officials to understand what is happening with them,” she adds. “I can guarantee you that the administration is looking at buildings that can easily be converted into a jail.”

https://mronline.org/2025/10/09/iced-out/

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Easterling Correctional Facility in Clio, Alabama. (Photo: HBO)

‘The Alabama Solution’ takes no prisoners as incarcerated workers struggle for their humanity
Originally published: The Progressive Magazine on October 10, 2025 by Ed Rampe (more by The Progressive Magazine) | (Posted Oct 21, 2025)

“How is it possible that journalists can go into a warzone,” Alabama inmate Melvin Ray asks onscreen in Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s new documentary, The Alabama Solution,

but can’t go into a prison in the United States of America?

The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) has long shrouded itself in secrecy, with entry tightly restricted for reporters and other visitors. Still, Jarecki and Kaufman have managed to join forces with incarcerated people in Alabama to create a startling exposé of the lethal prison conditions and forced unpaid labor that run rampant within ADOC—with a stunning plot twist that takes a page from the labor movement.

Much of the documentary’s footage from inside multiple prisons was filmed surreptitiously by crafty inmates with contraband cellphones. The prisoners’ “you-are-there” footage captures the brutal violence and hardship they face on the inside and is effectively pieced together with Jarecki and Kaufman’s original material from the outside—including footage of protest rallies led by prisoners’ families as well as interviews with attorneys and other advocates—to form a chilling portrait of these houses of horrors.

Jarecki—a veteran documentarian known for his Oscar-nominated 2003 film Capturing the Friedmans and his acclaimed HBO docuseries The Jinx— says in the film’s press notes that this documentary’s inspiration came from a trip to Montgomery, Alabama, in 2019, during which he managed to gain access to a revival meeting held by a church ministry in a prison yard near Montgomery. “During our filming of this seemingly beautiful and inspiring gathering,” he writes,

men took us aside and began to tell us shocking stories of what was really going on in areas of the prison we hadn’t been allowed to see. Once we heard those stories, we felt compelled to investigate and consider making a film.

And what a powerhouse of a film The Alabama Solution is! The documentary graphically exposes alleged beatings and killings of inmates by corrections officers, prolonged stints in solitary confinement, and rat-infested facilities in what the press notes calls “America’s deadliest prison system.” According to the film, Alabama’s short-staffed, brutal penal system is not only a hotbed of cruelty, but a corrupt profitmaking enterprise: The state reaps $540 million annually for prison labor that is often unpaid or compensated at as little as $2 per hour, with prisoners leased out as laborers for both corporations and the state. In one sequence, prisoners are shown doing lawn work and other chores at the Alabama Governor’s mansion.

Incarcerated Black community leader Robert Earl Council, a self-taught jailhouse lawyer and cofounder of an inmate rights organization called the Free Alabama Movement, denounces the ADOC in his onscreen interview as a “slave camp.” “You’re going to work for free [in an] unconstitutional prison,” he says. Meanwhile, intercutting news clips announce that Alabama Governor Kay Ivey has proposed redirecting money intended for Alabama public schools to cover cost overruns for new prison facilities, whose construction budgets exceed $1 billion.

Although the majority of prisoners are Black, as are some of the prison guards, a focal point of The Alabama Solution is the case of a white prisoner named Steven Davis, who was allegedly beaten to death with metal batons by corrections officers at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in 2019. The guards claim to have acted in self-defense against Davis, who they say attacked them with two homemade blades. Roderick Gadson, the corrections officer allegedly responsible for Davis’s killing, is believed by the prisoners and close observers to be a member of the prison’s so-called “wrecking crew”—guards noted for their brutal excessive use of force.

Much like Mamie Till-Mobley publicly displayed her son Emmet Till’s disfigured face after his death by lynching in 1955, Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray of Uniontown, Alabama, circulates a graphic photo of her son’s face beaten to a pulp as she seeks justice for her son. James Sales, Davis’s cellmate, intimates on camera that once he’s safely released from prison, he intends to disclose further details to Sandy about what he witnessed regarding her son’s death, suggesting that he has seen evidence of foul play. But this reveal never comes to pass, as Sales dies mysteriously behind bars mere months before his parole date—a turn of events that the film strongly suggests may have been orchestrated to prevent him from speaking out.

On the outside, Governor Ivey and Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall appear as recurring villains who resist efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed a lawsuit against the state in 2020, to implement reforms at ADOC. Their tactics are reminiscent of the state’s segregationist former Governor George Wallace, who infamously stood in a doorway at then all-white University of Alabama to prevent integration of Alabama’s public schools in 1963.

Despite the stark injustices and the immense odds stacked against them, the prisoners eventually strike back in an extraordinary way. Led by Ray and Council, the prisoners make countless phone calls on their contraband phones to organize a general strike across ADOC’s fourteen statewide prisons, uniting 20,000 exploited prison workers in a three-week-long work stoppage. Their breathtaking industrial action succeeds in gaining national media attention, and results in a mix of wins and defeats in their push for reforms.

The Alabama Solution closes with a title sequence stating that since the Department of Justice’s 2020 lawsuit against the state of Alabama, “there have been over 1,000 deaths inside the Alabama prison system.” It’s a chilling, gloves-off close to Jarecki’s and Kaufman’s documentary—the latest powerful entry in a long lineage of prison films, including narrative features such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), and The Green Mile (1999), as well as Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry’s Oscar-nominated 2021 documentary Attica.

While The Alabama Solution is as gripping as any of these films, it is made even more unique and effective by the substantial involvement of prisoners in its development; Jarecki and Kaufman, along with their incarcerated collaborators, are arguably pioneering an innovative hybrid film form for the digital age. The result of their savvy and diligent work is a compelling depiction of life inside an unthinkably cruel institution, and the brave struggle of prisoners fighting for their rights—and their humanity—in the face of an inhumane carceral system.

The Alabama Solution opens in select New York and Los Angeles theaters on October 3, and streams on HBO Max starting October 10.

https://mronline.org/2025/10/21/the-ala ... -humanity/

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The AI Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities

Nate Bear
Oct 31



AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.

The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.

The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.

Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.

And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.

According to my research almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the ‘No Kings’ protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.

In Miami, Skydio drones are being used to spy on spring breakers, and in Atlanta the company has partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation to install a permanent drone station within the massive new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Detroit recently spent nearly $300,000 on fourteen Skydio drones according to a city procurement report. Last month ICE bought an X10D Skydio drone, which automatically tracks and pursues a target. US Customs and Border Protection has bought thirty-three of the same drones since July.

The AI system behind Skydio drones is powered by Nvidia chips and enables their operation without a human user. The drones have thermal imaging cameras and can operate in places where GPS doesn’t work, so-called ‘GPS-denied environments.’ They also reconstruct buildings and other infrastructure in 3D and can fly at more than 30 miles per hour.

The New York police were early adopters of Skydio drones and are particularly enthusiastic users. A spokesman recently told a drone news website that the NYPD launched more than 20,000 drone flights in less than a year, which would mean drones are being launched around the city 55 times per day. A city report last year said the NYPD at that time was operating 41 Skydio drones. A recent Federal Aviation Authority rule change, however, means that number will undoubtedly have increased and more generally underpins the massive expansion in the use of Skydio drones.

Prior to March this year, FAA rules meant that drones could only be used by US security forces if the operator kept the drone in sight. They also couldn’t be used over crowded city streets. An FAA waiver issued that month opened the floodgates, allowing police and security agencies to operate drones beyond a visual line of sight and over large crowds of people. Skydio called the waiver ground-breaking. It was. The change has ushered in a Skydio drone buying spree by US police and security forces, with many now employing what is called a ‘Drone As First Responder’ program. Without the need to see the drone, and with drones free to cruise over city streets, the police are increasingly sending drones before humans to call outs and for broader investigative purposes. Cincinnati for example says that by the end of this year 90% of all call outs will be serviced first by a Skydio drone.

This extensive level of coverage is enabled by Skydio’s docking platform hardware. These launch pads are placed in locations around a city enabling drones to be remote charged, launched and landed many miles away from police HQs. After launch, all the information gathered by these flights is both saved to an internal SD card and automatically uploaded to special software configured for law enforcement. This software is made by Axon, a major financial backer of Skydio and the controversial maker of Tasers and ‘less-lethal weapons’ used by police departments in the US and across the west. The software, Axon Evidence, enables, in the words of an Axon press release, ‘the automatic uploads of photos and video footage from drones into a digital evidence management system.’

Axon’s equipment is also central to Israel’s infrastructure of apartheid, with the company providing body cameras and Tasers to Israeli police forces and prison guards who routinely torture Palestinians. Axon, which participated in a $220 million Series E round of funding in Skydio, is just one of the many entities backing Skydio who serve a Zionist agenda.

Skydio’s first investor in 2015 was Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) which provided $3 million of seed capital to the three-man team behind the drone maker. They have since invested tens of millions across numerous funding rounds. The founders of a16z, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, are both notorious Zionists. The firm was the most active venture capital investor in Israel in 2024 and this summer Andreessen and Horowitz visited Israel to meet with tech companies founded by ex-IDF and Unit 8200 war criminals.

Other Skydio investors include Next 47, which has an office in Israel headed by Moshe Zilberstein who worked in the IDF’s computer spy centre Mamram, and Hercules Capital whose managing director Ella-Tamar Adnahan is an Israeli-American described by Israeli media as “Israel’s go-to tech banker in the US.”

The saturation of US police departments with drone technology so closely connected to Israel, technology used to carry out war crimes is a frightening, if not unsurprising, development. Skydio drones will be central to the rapidly advancing proto-fascism in the US and the crack down on Antifa and other so-called ‘domestic terrorists’ by the Trump administration. In this context, the bigger surprise is that the rapid expansion of Israel-linked surveillance drone technology across America has so far gone largely under the radar.

Skydio should also make it on to the agenda of Zohran Mamdani. Recently criticised for saying “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” Skydio is just another example that shows he’s right. If he has the courage of his convictions, he could do worse than use his powers as mayor to shut down the NYPD’s Skydio deal.

Skydio is also a large supplier to the Department of Defence, recently signing a contract to provide the US Army with reconnaissance drones. As a significant supplier to both military and civilian security forces, it raises questions about what information is or will be shared between the US military and domestic security agencies via the Skydio-Axon digital evidence management system.

Skydio shows once again how Gaza is the laboratory for weapons makers, the place where new surveillance and apartheid technologies are tested, before being refined and used in the west. And next year Skydio is rolling out new indoor drones. We can only speculate as to what extent these new drones were informed by the ‘learnings’ accrued via genocide.

The story of Skydio shows that what happens in Gaza doesn’t stay in Gaza.

The logic of capitalist imperialism means these technologies will always find their way home.

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-ai-dr ... dium=email

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FBI Is Making an Enemies List—and Most Corporate Media Didn’t Even Check It Once
Jim Naureckas

“For months, major media outlets have largely blown off the story of NSPM-7, thinking it was all just Trump bluster and too crazy to be serious. But a memo like this one shows you that the administration is absolutely taking this seriously—even if the media are not.”

The Trump FBI is drawing up an enemies list that could encompass well over half the US public: Do you “advance…opposition to law and immigration enforcement”? Do you have “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders”? Show an “adherence to radical gender ideology,” meaning you think trans people exist? Do you exhibit (what the Trump administration would interpret as) “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-Christianity”? Do you display “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion and morality”?

Congratulations—you may be headed for Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism.” “Terrorism,” of course, is the magic word that strips you of all sorts of legal protections, especially in the post-9/11 era.

This is from a Justice Department memo obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein (12/6/25)—which goes on to instruct the FBI to set up “a cash reward system” for people who turn in those promoting such thoughtcrime, and “establish cooperators to provide information and eventually testify against other members” of groups with these dangerous ideas.

This is the implementation of the Trump administration’s avowed policy of criminalizing dissent—in the words of the NSPM-7 decree, outlawing “organized campaigns of…radicalization…designed to…change or direct policy outcomes” (FAIR.org, 10/3/25; CounterSpin, 10/17/25)—and as such is another giant step towards authoritarianism. Establishment media didn’t see it that way, however.

Reuters‘ Sarah N. Lynch (12/4/25) reported on the DoJ memo entirely from the point of view of the DoJ.

As Klippenstein (12/9/25) pointed out, virtually no corporate media outlets covered this catastrophic memo, and those who did report on it did a generally poor job. The Guardian headline (12/5/25) was “Pam Bondi Tells Law Enforcement Agencies to Investigate Antifa Groups for ‘Tax Crimes,’” and Bloomberg Law (12/5/25) had “Bondi Orders FBI Extremism Intelligence Review with Antifa Focus”—completely misleading framing that suggests that if you’re not “Antifa,” the memo isn’t about you.

Here’s Reuters‘ entirely unhelpful “summary” (12/4/25):

Bondi orders FBI to prioritize domestic terrorism investigations
Memo targets antifa and similar groups
FBI to develop strategies to disrupt criminal networks
DoJ calls for prosecuting extremist groups for tax crimes
The DoJ is issuing marching orders for a witch hunt, and Reuters presents it with a straight face as an effort to go after “domestic terrorism,” “criminal networks” and “extremist groups” who commit “tax crimes.” Who could object to that?

The Lever (12/8/25) reports that the DoJ memo “encourages the bureau to investigate incidents as old as five years “to map the full network of culpable actors.”

Among corporate media outlets, only The Hill (12/5/25), a specialty outlet aimed at congressional staffers and lobbyists, conveyed the enormity of the directive. Its second paragraph read:

Bondi’s memo could be the starting point for charges against a number of left-leaning advocacy groups and nonprofits the Trump administration has accused without evidence of having ties to extremists.

The Hill‘s Rebecca Beitsch quoted Andrew Bataj of the group Whistleblower Aid, “This memo expressly seeks to redefine political dissent against the president as domestic terrorism.”

But beyond that, to get actual coverage of the threat DoJ is posing to civil liberties and democracy itself, you had to go to independent outlets like Democracy Now! (12/8/25) and the Lever (12/8/25). The counter-revolution will not be televised.

https://fair.org/home/fbi-is-making-an- ... k-it-once/

[blindpig]

The Turtle Island Liberation Front Warning for Activists

Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 17 Dec 2025


Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel appear at a news conference at the Justice Department on Dec. 4 in Washington. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

Arrests of members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front are the latest in a decades-long effort to criminalize the left and to make examples of anyone who might fit the profile of being a “designated terrorist.”

The United States has a long history of using informants and entrapment as tools to discredit or to defeat leftist movements. There are other objectives as well, as Black Agenda Report explained in 2010, “The object is to terrify the public into surrendering their civil liberties in a twilight struggle with a mostly nonexistent domestic enemy.” It is important to remember the many examples of state repression as we learn of the arrest of members of a little-known and newly formed organization called the Turtle Island Liberation Front, who stand accused of planning New Year's Eve bombings in Southern California. It is an understatement to say that the charges against them should not be accepted at face value.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has traditionally used paid informants to undermine movements or even to justify its existence by convincing the public they are in danger of terrorist attacks with high-profile cases that they and their informants create out of whole cloth. There were many such instances in the years after the September 11 attacks, and two of the most infamous were those of the “Newburgh Four” and the “Liberty City Seven.” In both cases, paid informants entrapped Black men who actually had no discernible political activity or ideology. In the 2009 case of the Newburgh Four, they were charged with planning to blow up a Bronx, New York synagogue in a plot that was hatched entirely by the FBI informant. They stated they never intended to carry out the deed, but merely hoped to be paid for doing nothing at all. In 2023, a federal judge ordered compassionate release for three of the four men, describing them as “... hapless, easily manipulated and penurious petty criminals." A fourth defendant was released in 2024, and the judge added that he and the others were victims of an “FBI-orchestrated conspiracy.”

In Florida, the Liberty City Seven also fell under the sway of an informant in 2006, but two juries were deadlocked before a third convicted them, under circumstances similar to those of the Newburgh Four. The thinness of the case was revealed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the FBI Deputy Director when they took questions at the press conference announcing the arrests.

“Question: Did any of the men have any actual contact with any members of al-Qaeda that you know of?

Attorney-General: The answer to that is "No".

Question: Did they have any means to carry out this plot? I mean, did you find any explosives, weapons?

Attorney-General: You raise a good point ... We took action when we had enough evidence.

Question: Was there anything against the Sears Tower other than this one apparent, just, kind of mention of the Sears Tower? It doesn't look like they ever took pictures or ...

Deputy Director of the FBI: One of the individuals was familiar with the Sears Tower, had worked in Chicago, and was familiar with the tower. But in terms of the plans, it was more aspirational than operational.”

Despite the obviously flimsy case, the men were convicted and were freed after serving their sentences, which ranged from six to thirteen years.

Donald Trump has spoken of an “enemy within” and of what he calls domestic threats. He wants to frighten anyone who might oppose his policies into silence by threatening them with legal action. His definition of what makes a person or group a terrorist is quite broad and may serve to criminalize any opposition that he chooses.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s leaked December 4 memo, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” lays out how the Trump administration defines a group or individual as being domestic terrorist. “These domestic terrorists use violence or the threat of violence to advance political and social agendas, including opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality; and an elevation of violence to achieve policy outcomes, such as political assassinations.”

Political assassinations, like any murder, are illegal, and so is overthrowing the government. But mostly, Bondi has produced a list of rights that are allegedly protected by the First Amendment. We are told that we have the right to hold the opinions of our choice regarding law enforcement, and we have the right to oppose capitalism or Christianity or any other religion. As for “anti-Americanism,” we can also have any opinion we want about this country or its government. Trump wants obedience and has created a definition of domestic terrorism that applies to millions of people in this country.

But there are many people who cannot be fooled so easily and arresting members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front would only be acceptable to the public if they were charged with a crime. The FBI made sure of that with the help of a paid informant and an undercover FBI agent. It isn’t clear when or how the informant and the agent came into contact with the group and that vagueness is a key issue in determining whether the accused can claim to have been entrapped. But the bar for that claim is high and even if the informant and the agent suggested making bombs, the suspects may still be convicted.

Activist groups must always be on alert and must assume that any member, whether new or old, who suggests committing an illegal act is an informant being paid to get them arrested. It has always been true that the state, whether under Trump or another president, wants to shut down leftists or use marginalized people to justify the continued existence of law enforcement and a carceral state.

The existence of informants and turncoat snitches can make organizing difficult and activists are often paranoid about the wrong things, which serves the goals of the FBI. Those goals have changed little since the worst days of COINTELPRO. Perhaps Trump will revive the idea of the Black Identity Extremist or some other such designation. The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) was used against the Uhuru Three and can be used against anyone who has contact with individuals or groups abroad.

In recent congressional testimony, General Gregory Guillot, commander of the U.S. Northern Command, was asked if he would target any domestic “designated terror organizations.” He replied, “If I had questions, I would elevate that to the chairman and the secretary. … And if I had no concerns and I was confident in the lawful order, I would definitely execute that order.”

That statement is shocking, but perhaps it should not be. The military, FBI, and local police can and do target anyone they want. Seemingly innocuous activity can make one a target. But forewarned is forearmed and people in movement spaces would do well to keep this history top of mind.

https://blackagendareport.com/turtle-is ... -activists

*****

JOHN KIRIAKOU: US Prison Horror Show Plays On
December 16, 2025

A year into President Trump’s second term in office, hopes for inmates across the country have dimmed. Deadly abuses have continued in full swing.


President Donald Trump taking questions from the press aboard Air Force One en route to Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 9. (White House / Molly Riley)

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
CN at 30

Hopes for a major restructuring of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) a year into President Donald Trump’s second term in office have come to naught.

Trump in June named former federal prisoner Josh Smith as the BOP’s deputy director. It was a bold and, in my view, progressive move. While greeted with hostility from the union representing federal corrections officers, it inspired hope among the tens of thousands of prisoners in federal custody.

Many of us thought that the next step would be something equally bold — perhaps to turn away from private prisons, which have cost the government millions of dollars in lawsuits because of wrongful deaths in custody, or perhaps to institute programming that would better prepare prisoners for release and for reintegration into society. But none of that has happened. And it’s unlikely that it will.


Joshua J. Smith, deputy director, Federal Bureau of Prisons. (BOP)

The problem is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sure, Josh Smith as deputy director of the BOP is a great idea. He spent five years in a federal prison following a drug conviction before founding a non-governmental organization that helps newly-released prisoners, and he brings a perspective that the BOP has never had before — from a former prisoner.

But that hasn’t changed any of the day-to-day problems that the BOP has experienced for decades. A small sampling of recent events includes:

In Virginia — a state that has long been known for its broad disregard for the rights of prisoners at the federal, state and local levels — an ongoing collection of at least five federal lawsuits paints a picture of senseless violence against prisoners and petty retaliation by BOP officials.
Multiple prisoners at the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) Lee have alleged that guards beat them unprovoked over a period of years, in several cases while in shackles, leading to broken bones, ruptured organs, and mental breakdowns. Guards also wrongly accused one trans female prisoner of being a child molester so that other prisoners would beat her.
Across the country at the deeply troubled Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) at Dublin, California, which is now closed, at least 22 female prisoners were granted compassionate release after at least 100 were repeatedly sexually assaulted by as many as 10 prison employees, including the facility’s warden, assistant warden, chaplain, and doctor, all of whom are now incarcerated.
Rather than address the culture in which senior BOP employees believed that it was appropriate to rape prisoners at will, something that became known as the “rape club,” the BOP elected to simply shut the place down and transfer the prisoners to other prisons.
In July, a BOP guard received an eight-year prison sentence for raping three prisoners at the federal detention center in Honolulu. Mikael Rivera received a sentence longer than he otherwise would have because he elected to abscond while out on bond. He was recaptured after a three-day manhunt.


Federal Detention Center, Honolulu as seen from Honolulu International Airport, 2017. (293.xx.xxx.xx/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0)

These events haven’t taken place in a vacuum. State and local department of corrections and county jails have watched as the federal courts have turned a blind eye toward BOP wrongdoing.

If there’s no downside to doing literally anything you want to do to a prisoner and get away with it, then why stop? That attitude has led to more horrors at the state and local levels:

The state of Minnesota was forced to pay the family of a hemophiliac prisoner, Dillon Bakke, $3.6 million after he died three days into a brain bleed, which the prison refused to treat. The prison also refused to allow Bakke to take his hemophilia medication.
Bakke had complained repeatedly of severe head pain, an inability to walk or stand and severe nausea. He was finally allowed to go to the jail’s medical unit, where he died 12 hours later. The 32-year-old was being held on a charge of “suspicion of drug possession.”
California’s attorney general is suing Los Angeles County and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office, alleging that the county’s jails are “inhumane” and that the sheriff has failed to improve conditions, despite the courts repeatedly demanding that he do so. The L.A. County Central Jail is designed to hold 3,509 people, but averages 4,632 on any given day.
Satellite jails are even more overcrowded, and independent inspectors have documented the widespread presence in all the facilities of feces, sewage, vermin, fire hazards, mold and stale air. The sheriff contends that “the situation is improving and the attorney general’s lawsuit is based on outdated information.”


Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department conducting a traffic stop in West Hollywood, 2021. (Chris Yarzab /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 2.0)

The tiny town of Issaquah, Washington, was forced to pay the families of two prisoners $5.5 million after 43-year-old Kevin Wiley and 48-year-old David McGrath died from “acute combined drug intoxication.” The men didn’t take drugs while incarcerated. They died while withdrawing from fentanyl and methamphetamine intoxication, having been refused any medical help.
Prison officials did nothing over the course of three days in the two separate cases, while watching the men vomit, convulse and beg for help. Wiley asked to see a nurse, but his request was never answered.
Three women held in Kansas’ Sedgwick County Detention Center split a $375,000 settlement after being raped by a guard. The guard, 22-year-old Dustin Burnett, had been thrown out of the military for possessing child pornography before being hired as a guard by the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office.
The Ohio attorney general has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate how and why a female double amputee died while being restrained in a jail medical unit. Tasha Grant, 39, had no legs, but was nonetheless strapped down to a medical unit bed. She began experiencing chest pains, but was ignored and died shortly thereafter.
When asked why a double amputee was restrained in such a way, a prison spokesman said disingenuously, “She threw herself on the floor and wouldn’t cooperate.” The spokesman apparently hadn’t been told that Grant was unconscious at the time.
I supposed that it’s not exactly true that Donald Trump hasn’t done anything with the BOP since naming Josh Smith as its deputy director.

On Sept. 25, the president abolished collective bargaining rights for the corrections officers’ union and he canceled their union contract. BOP Director William K. Marshall III said in an email to all BOP employees, “The whole purpose of ending this contract is to make your lives better.”

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/12/16/j ... -plays-on/

[blindpig]

Ken Klippenstein: FBI Making List of American “Extremists,” Leaked Memo Reveals
December 19, 2025 2
By Ken Klippenstein, Substack, 12/6/25

Attorney General Pam Bondi is ordering the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to a Justice Department memo published here exclusively.

The target is those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.”

Bondi Memo On Countering Domestic Terrorism And Organized Political Violence

151KB ∙ PDF file

Download https://www.kenklippenstein.com/api/v1/ ... c14c2d.pdf

That language echoes the so-called indicators of terrorism identified by President Trump’s directive National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, which the memo says it’s intended to implement. Where NSPM-7 was a declaration of war on just about anyone who isn’t MAGA, this is the war plan for how the government will wage it on a tactical level.

In addition to compiling a list of undesirables, Bondi directs the FBI to enhance the capabilities (and publicity) of its tipline in order to more aggressively solicit tips from the American public on, well, other Americans. To that end, Bondi also directs the FBI to establish “a cash reward system” for information leading to identification and arrest of leadership figures within these purported domestic terrorist organizations. (The memo later instructs the FBI to “establish cooperators to provide information and eventually testify against other members” of the groups.)

The payouts don’t end there. Justice Department grants are now to prioritize funding to programs for state and local law enforcement to go after domestic terrorism.

In a section titled “Defining the domestic terrorism threat,” the memo cites “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment” — indicators that federal law enforcement are instructed to refer to FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs). Those JTTFs are then instructed to “use all available investigative tools” in order to “map the full network of culpable actors involved” in both “inside and outside the United States.”

The memo also directs the FBI and JTTFs to retroactively investigate incidents going back five years, authorizing the JTTFs in particular to use everything at their disposal to do so.

“Upon receipt of these referrals, the JTTFs shall use all available investigative tools, consistent with law enforcement internal policies and statutory obligations, to map the full network of culpable actors involved in the referred conduct inside and outside the United States,” the memo says.

For months, major media outlets have largely blown off the story of NSPM-7, thinking it was all just Trump bluster and too crazy to be serious. But a memo like this one shows you that the administration is absolutely taking this seriously — even if the media are not — and is actively working to operationalize NSPM-7.

NSPM-7 was signed in September largely in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk, which was a 9/11-type event for the Trump administration, as I’ve reported. (Kirk’s assassination is referenced explicitly in the Justice Department memo.) As anyone who lived through 9/11 can remember, the government doesn’t always think rationally in moments like those, to say the least. And so here we are, with a new War on Terrorism — only this time, millions of Americans like you and I could be the target.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/12/ken ... o-reveals/

They have been keeping enemies lists all along. The difference here is the partisan culture war orientation. But when the tables are turned the Dems will not reciprocate, they never do. They are the Washington Generals of US politics.