Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-08-25 Tuesday

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Headlines for August 25, 2026; U.S. Threatens New Economic War on Iran by Targeting China & Tehran’s Other Top Trading Partners; Illinois Is a Sanctuary State, But Cops & Prosecutors Still Secretly Work with ICE: Injustice Watch; Meet Prairieland Protester Autumn Hill: How Her “Act of Solidarity” Became a 50-Year Prison Sentence

From New York, this is Democracy Now. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone. The Trump administration has announced plans to escalate its economic war against Iran by issuing new sanctions and targeting Iran's trading partners. We'll speak to Cornell Professor Nicholas Mulder, author of The Economic Weapon, The Rise of Sealand, sanctions as a tool of modern war. Then we look at how local officials in Illinois are collaborating with federal immigration agents, despite a state law barring the practice.

Well, it might not surprise you to learn that police are still working with ICE. Documents now reveal that county prosecutors are also feeding the agency information. We will speak to Aura Bogado of Injustice Watch, and then we'll go inside a Texas jail to hear from Autumn Hill, an activist sentenced to 50 years in prison for protesting outside the Prairie Land Ice Facility in Texas. If you resist the Trump administration in any way, if you resist police, if you resist the mass incarceration of immigrants,

they are going to bury you. We will also talk to reporter Jack, Crosby about his new rolling stone piece, incarcerated for life in Trump's war on the left. All that and more coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Anjali Khammet. The Pentagon says it has resumed strikes on boats in the eastern Pacific in the Caribbean after a two-month pause.

On Monday, U.S. Southern Command said two people were killed after it carried out a, quote, lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Pacific Ocean. Once again, the Pentagon provided no evidence the boat was carrying drugs. Since President Trump launched a boat bombing campaign nearly a year ago, Southcom says it's killed at least 223 people. Amnesty International has condemned the strikes as extrajudicial killings, a form of murder, saying they amount to crimes under international law.

The Trump administration has outlined plans to tighten sanctions on Iran, warning that businesses, banks, and other nations could lose access to the U.S. financial system if they continue doing business with Tehran. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant announced Operation Economic Outcast, which includes secondary sanctions on trade related to Iran's oil, shipping, cryptocurrency, gold, and aviation industries. Besson said, countries have a timeline to sever ties with Iran, but provided no details on which countries would be targeted or when. We are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? We believe that it is important to level set and give people a cure period, but they should know that that will move very quickly and that we are serious. Iran's key trading partners include the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Iraq, India, Pakistan, and China, which is the largest foreign market for Iranian oil. On Monday, China's foreign ministry called in the U.S. to return to dialogue and negotiations.

Sanctions and pressure will not resolve disputes. They will only exacerbate tensions and escalate the situation, which is not in the interest of any party. China calls on the relevant parties to act rationally and with the United States. restraint and avoid taking any measure that may further escalate tensions or deal blow to the global economic growth and financial stability. Iran has condemned the sanctions as an act of war. A spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said they show the U.S. is resorting to economic warfare after it was defeated on the battlefield. We'll have more on this story after headlines. The Supreme Court has lifted

a lower court's injunction on President Trump's executive order seeking to limit mail-in voting ahead of November's mid-term elections. Trump's order directs the Department of Homeland Security to create state-by-state lists of eligible voters who are citizens. The U.S. Postal Service would then use the list provided by states to assess if voters should be allowed to vote by mail. On Monday, justices ruled six to three that California and 22 other states lacked standing to sue over the issue.

The ruling, however, did not address whether Trump had authority to impose the rules. The court's three liberal justices dissented. Justice Katanji Brown-Jackson warned that the majority opinion, quote, needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections. Meanwhile, a separate nationwide injunction against parts of the same order remains in place. This all comes as Trump seeks Senate confirmation for four loyalists has nominated to vacancies on the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service. Three of them have expressed doubts that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

President Trump on Monday threatened to increase U.S. tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks, and auto parts to 50% starting next year. Trump's threat came just days after the U.S. imposed 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion of other Canadian goods, prompting Prime Minister Mark Carney to announce plans to impose retaliatory tariffs beginning on September 8th. On Monday, Carney said Canada would return to trade talks only if the Trump administration changes tactics. When the Americans go to the negotiation table first with the right attitude towards our industries and a true partnership, of course we'll come to the negotiating table. In Gaza, Israel launched a wave of attacks on Monday, hitting a mosque, a water desalination plant, and tents housing displaced Palestinians. At least seven people were killed, including two children. In central Gaza and Israeli strike hit a house in the Borej refugee camp, killing a four-year-old boy.

In Khan Yunus, another child died from gunshot wolves. after Israeli forces fired on her. This is Abu Amra, a Palestinian man at the site of the damaged mosque. This mosque has been here since the day we were born. Today I am about 48 years old, and I have always seen this mosque just as it was. The Israeli occupation is just hitting blindly. What are they hitting? They're hitting.

They claim... Look at what the occupation is hitting. Look, look. They say they are bombing. the book of our Lord. They are bombing our mosque where we pray. Despite last October's so-called ceasefire, Israeli forces have killed nearly 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza. In Canada, the Montreal City Council passed a resolution in solidarity with Palestinians on Monday after counselors removed much of the motion's original language, which included calls to suspend institutional and diplomatic ties

with Israel. The original provision would have also seen the city of Montreal officially recognize and denounce Israel's assault on Gaza as a, quote, genocide and its treatment of Palestinians as, quote, apartheid. This is Alex Norris, a Praje Montreal city councillor who co-sponsored the motion. One reason Gaza has had such an impact is that we have watched it unfold in real time. On our phones and on our screens, we have seen civilians attacked. We have seen neighborhoods erased. We have even seen perpetrators celebrating what they have done. That is why Gaza has been so often described as the world's first live stream genocide. What Israel has done in Gaza and the role Western governments have played in enabling it has become one of the defining moral tests of our time. Today, this

council has the opportunity to say enough. In Haiti, a heavily armed gang killed dozens of people overnight Monday in a raid on Kenskov, a farming community near Haiti's capital, Porto-Prince. The UN reports at least 47 people were killed and 22 more wounded with homes set ablaze, prompting outrage from survivors over the Haitian government's failure to protect them from repeated deadly attacks. We live in humiliation. The government has done nothing for us. The blood of the population does not stop flowing in Kenskopf.

The prime minister has to say something to the... the people in Kenskhov now. We cannot take it anymore. The UN's Human Rights Agency reports hundreds of criminal groups in Haiti have killed over 16,000 people since early 2022. That's compounded an existing humanitarian crisis with 6.4 million Haitians requiring assistance and nearly 1.5 million internally displaced. Despite that, the U.S. last week announced twice weekly deportation flights to Haiti. After a Supreme Court ruling, allowed the Trump administration to end temporary protected status for an estimated 350,000 Haitians. The Trump administration has announced plans to revoke the visas of asylum seekers.

The State Department will revoke so-called B-1 and B-2 visas, issued for business and tourism travel between 2016 and 2026, whose holders have applied for or are now seeking asylum. The Associated Press puts the number of affected people at 200,000. If the administration follows through with its plans, it would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history. Meanwhile, the Trump administration again announced plans to charge employers a fee of over $103,000 to hire skilled foreign workers through the H-1B visa program. The revenue would be used to fund ICE. President Trump had tried to implement a six-figure fee last year through a presidential proclamation, but a judge ruled against it in June. In Florida, ICE arrested a mother and daughter who were seriously injured in a car crash and brought to a hospital.

According to family members, Grace Stephanie Calero Cabanilla and her 19-year-old daughter, Juliana Mia Cariel Calero, were placed in separate rooms after arriving at the hospital, and a sheriff's deputy began questioning the mother about her immigration status shortly after she arrived, while she was wearing a neck brace and had been given medication. According to family members, the mother had applied for political asylum and her daughter's visa document was valid till 2030. Democratic Congress member Al Green filed articles of impeachment Monday against President Trump over his violent mass deportation campaign. In his resolution, Green argues, quote, President Trump is abusing the powers of the presidency by operating United States immigration and customs enforcement and customs and border protection as his vicious quota-driven, unaccountable paramilitary police forces, transgressing with anonymity and secrecy,

assaulting people, committing and covering up unjustified killings of civilians. This comes as a U.S. airman, Major Jason Watson, was arrested twice for calling for the impeachment of President Trump. He was officially criminally charged Monday for his comments. He faces three violations for contemptuous remarks about Trump, five violations for allegedly disobeying orders, and two violations for alleged conduct unbecoming of an officer. And Palestinian artist Suleiman Mansour has died at the age of 79. He was one of the leading figures in contemporary Palestinian art. He helped create a visual language of Palestinian identity,

revisiting the land, exile, and occupation in works that frequently featured olive trees and traditional embroidery. He was born in Birzaitz, near Ramallah in 1947, and attended the Bezellel Academy of Arts and Design, in Jerusalem in 1970. In 1994, he co-founded the Al-Wasiti Art Center in East Jerusalem to preserve Palestinian art and connect artists living in Palestine with other Palestinians in exile. This is Mansoor in an interview with Al Jazeera in 2021.

I believe art in our situation where when you don't have homeland, when you don't have, I mean, a country, a political thing. And when people deny your existence, you know, in Israel and many, many places in the West, they deny your existence. So art is a form of saying that we are here. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Anjali Kammeth in New York with Juan Gonzalez in Chicago. Hi, Juan.

Hi, Anjali, and welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country. and around the world. The Trump administration has outlined plans to tighten sanctions on Iran, warning that businesses, banks, and other nations could lose access to the U.S. financial system if they continue doing business with Tehran. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant announced Operation Economic Outcast, which includes secondary sanctions on trade related to Iran's oil, shipping, cryptocurrency, gold and aviation industries.

Besant said countries have a defined timeline, to sever ties with Iran, but provided no details on which countries would be targeted or when. Treasury has mapped every node, every facilitator, and every network that Iran has used to smuggle oil and evade sanctions. Beginning today, the actions of Treasury and other agencies will tighten the noose and block every potential source of revenue that funds the IRGC and the evil Iranian regime. We are enforcing a zero-leakage approach. There will be no minimal breathing space for the regime to rebuild its capacity to inflict terror against America and the world.

The final refuge of this regime is a mistaken conclusion of nations that still finance the Iranian threat in the hopes of evading it. It is no longer acceptable to operate in the gray spaces of this conflict. countries cannot claim they are blind to enabling this activity. After Treasury Secretary Scott Besson finished his remarks, he took questions from reporters. He described this as an economic D-Day, but D-Day wasn't a threat of an invasion, and the U.S. didn't give a timeline to Germany. So why not impose the sanctions today?

Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? Iran has threatened to retaliate against the U.S. in a, quote, seismic manner. Iranian officials have said that any country supporting the new U.S. economic restrictions would be considered an enemy. This is Iran's economy minister, Ali Madanizade. Naturally, they want to wage economic terrorism against us, and we have our own tools as well.

We know how to play this game. This time they should not think their response will be purely defensive and that we will only defend ourselves. They should also expect us to go on the offensive. The era of an unpopular world is over. As you have seen, two of the world's major countries rejected these new sanctions and this new plan and refused to go along with them. We are almost certain that many other countries, whether officially or unofficially, will also refuse to accept them. And, God willing, they will fail. To talk more about the U.S. economic war against Iran, we are joined now by Nicholas Mulder.

He's an associate professor of history at Cornell University and a specialist in sanctions. He's the author of The Economic Weapon, The Rise of Sanctions, is a Tool of Modern War. Nicholas Mulder, welcome to Democracy Now. Your response to this announcement yesterday, there's not a lot of details on enforcement. And what does this mean for China? China is Iran's largest economic trading partner, buys over 80% of its oil. And President Trump is set to meet with the Chinese Premier next month. Yeah, thank you for having me.

I think that this announcement really shows that the United States is trying to increase the pressure on Iran, but is primarily doing so at the moment by rhetorical means and a kind of psychological warfare. Of course, Iran has been under a naval blockade imposed by the United States since June. The Iranian economy is feeling the pressure of that. And the announcement yesterday was very short, as you mentioned, mentioned all details. There was a hint that a major global financial institution might be designated under the sanctions soon, but that too was left very vague. It could have been a veiled threat towards China. It could have been a sort of general attempt to create a chilling effect around

these transactions. The reality is that at this point, there are relatively few sanctions that the United States can take that directly affect Iran. There were some things thrown in to the announcement and to the designations by the Treasury, such as a ban on all remaining remittances to Iran, a ban on remaining academic and sports exchanges. But these really just seem gratuitous ways to try and show that this is an attempt to isolate Iran even further. They weren't really materially all that meaningful. To the extent that they are, they hurt ordinary Iranians and not the government. The real way that the U.S. is going to try and enforce these sanctions is by putting pressure on third countries training with Iran. And I think that's where it's going to be an open

question whether these sanctions will be as forceful as best it wants them to be. The big training partners, you already mentioned, is China, but we're also talking about Pakistan, Turkey, India, and a number of other countries that trade a lot with Iran. And, you know, that see that they have every right to that these are, at the end of the day, just American sanctions. They're not international legal measures. And these countries claim and for themselves, the right to make sovereign decisions about who they can trade with and who they cannot. The Chinese have already announced that they're going to not just ignore them, but even make sure that countries and companies within China will not comply with them. And recently, Chinese courts

have also begun to put sanctions on companies that complied with American sanctions. So I think that this is no longer an empty counter threat either. And the stakes are pretty high when it comes to the relationship with China because, of course, the United States is in a very fragile truce, if you could still call it that, on the trade war. So any excessive pressure on China, I think, it's going to be very likely to reopen that. And there's already been a tit for tat spate of measures in the last few weeks dealing with tariffs about overcapacity, restrictions on drone exports and imports that suggests that this US-China trade truce might be unraveling. And I think this Iran's sanctions episode is really likely to further unravel that if the U.S. goes through with

secondary sanctions enforcement. Professor Mulder, about this issue of potential sanctions on large financial institutions. Most people are not aware that about four of the 10 largest banks in the world are headquartered, our Chinese banks, headquartered in China, if you include HSBC, which is in Hong Kong, it's half of the largest financial institutions of the world have direct ties with China. So what would be the impact of any attempt to sanction, for instance, a major Chinese bank or institution? So initially, it would depend on what kind of sanctions are placed on that bank, whether this is blocking them from participation in dollar markets or whether it's done through a full

blocking order. There's a different range of sanctions that the US could take. The impact for the Chinese would be that they would have difficulty immediately accessing the US financial system, but that cuts both ways. They have a lot of reserves saved up, and it would almost automatically also have a major effect on Asian financial markets. These Chinese banks hold large amounts of reserves in Hong Kong, but also in Singapore and other markets, and that will cause liquidity the issues there. So I think that this is something that can't really be sized up that quickly. Like you mentioned, the largest bank, industrial and commercial bank of China, ICVC, it's the single largest financial institution by assets. And so we're dealing really with

hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. I very much doubt that the American government at this particular moment would choose to put sanctions on China's largest bank, given that the Chinese have also shown that they will immediately retaliate with rare earth export controls. They could retaliate by taking measures against all kinds of U.S. foreign investments in China. There is still, of course, a significant degree of American capital in China. So they could counter-freeze, and that could very quickly escalate. And at this moment, of course, we should sketch the broader picture here, which is that the United States has entered a period where its own sovereign debt.

The treasury market is no longer as stable as it once was. the rates are very high and Bessett has spent the last two weeks desperately trying to talk down the treasury yield, trying to make sure that American government debt remains an attractive asset class to invest in. But bigger question marks have really emerged over that. So if he puts really aggressive sanctions on Iran, it will very quickly tend to backfire against American economic conditions. And there's two ways one of them could be through the China channel. The other one could be by further removing oil from global markets. If there is a significant oil importer, say India, that is immediately and quickly cut off by American secondary sanctions, then what you

might see is an immediate pass-through into US inflation, expectations that interest rates are going to go up. We're coming up against the Federal Reserve meeting soon in the coming week and an announcement by Kevin Warsh at the Jackson Hole Symposium about interest rates. And that is certain to feed into the treasury market immediately, and that would be exactly the opposite of what Besson is trying to achieve. So I see that announcement of him yesterday and the way that he handled the questions as of a piece with his broader attempt to talk the bond market into submission or at least a kind of quietude to try and get the bond vigilantes off the back of the American Treasury. The issue is, of course, here that, you know, the bond market as well as other countries get a vote

as well, and the space for maneuver that the U.S. has in using these tools, a very coercive economic state graft has narrowed. And I'm wondering also the issue of the United Arab Emirates, just before Besson's announcement, the UAE announced that it was ending trade relations with Iran. Can you talk about the significance of this? And in fact, while all these hostilities have been going on, trade across the Persian Gulf between the UAE and Iran has continued for, all of these months.

Yes. So the UAE has always been an important trading partner for Iran. There's also a very large Iranian diasporic community there and people who move back and forth between Iran and the Emirates. And it has long been a hub for a lot of commercial companies, but that also includes the IRGC, Iranian state companies, as well as private entities. So that's long being the case.

It's also been the case that the Emirates, of course, was a major target of the initial Italian, sorry, Iranian retaliation against the American and Israeli attack after February. But then in the last six to eight weeks, Iranian attacks on the Emirates really fell off dramatically. And there's been quite plausible speculation that this was because there was an arrangement that was reached between the Emirates and the Iranian government. And a certain modicum of trade was reallowed in exchange, perhaps also for Emirati payments or unfreezing of frozen Iranian assets there. Now, if the Trump administration, as the Emirates appear to signal, has now reimposed these

sanctions and the Emirates at least want to suggest that they are complying, two things can be happening. Either they have reimposed these restrictions, in which case they would invite pretty prompt Iranian retaliation, or they're trying to take action against a certain big headline set of commercial activities. while allowing under the surface some of it to continue. I think one should not underestimate the fact that the Gulf countries have been forced in recent months to really recalibrate their relationships both to the United States,

but also to China and to a number of other countries. And they realize that the United States is less able to protect them, that American actions against Iran expose them to retaliation, that that means both increased assertiveness on their own part, militarily and geopolitically, but also developing their own. own relations with regional powers. And that includes eventually, I think, some kind of modus for Vendee with Iran. So there's definitely been, I think, a lot of signaling, but we cannot take the Emirati announcement completely at face value either. The proof will have to be in analyzing

commercial data and trade data in the months to come. And only in time can we tell if this is really what's happening. And Nicholas Mulder, how is this playing out in Iran? I mean, yesterday the Iranian Rial dropped to a record low of nearly two million to the dollar. But Iranian government officials continue to dismiss the Trump administration's sanctions announcement. Is there a disconnect between the political defiance we're seeing from the Iranian government and the actual impact of the sanctions on the ground? Well, the sanctions have definitely had an impact.

And the U.S. naval blockade, to be more specific, more still, since the beginning of June. For ordinary Iranians, of course, this war, which did not spare them in the least has been horrific. On top of that, there's major reconstruction costs that are now very difficult to finance because of Iran's relative isolation. And what exports had been getting out of Iran in the form of oil and other exports now have also dropped off. So Iran is no longer as free to trade as it wants. There are a number of overland routes that have been activated with neighboring countries, but those have a much reduced volume in terms of what they can sustain. And I do think you're right to suggest that the Iranian government, certainly the people

that now seem to be having the most influence over decision making, a number of IRGC and military figures, believe that this economic blockade shows that the Americans are out of military options and that actually they interpret this is a sign of American weakness, so they're not afraid to up the ante further and to threaten retaliation. And they seem also quite capable of carrying it out if they so choose. The question is whose negotiating position is going to strengthen further by that kind of escalation. Will time be on the side of the Trump administration? Or is the Trump administration actually itself racing against the economic clock with, like I said, rising inflation in the U.S., deteriorating bond market, midterms coming up. In Iran, the government

seems determined to write this out, even if it means that the population will continue to suffer further. in the near term. So yeah, that's how I see the delay of the land as it stands right now. Nicholas Mulder is an associate professor of history at Cornell University and a specialist in sanctions is the author of The Economic Weapon, The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. Thank you so much for joining us. Coming up, we look at how local officials in Illinois

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Now studio This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Anjali Khamuth in New York with Juan Gonzalez in Chicago. In more than a third of counties in the state of Illinois, local police, sheriffs, and even prosecutors have collaborated with federal immigration agents leading to the detention and deportation proceedings of at least 150 people since President Trump returned to office despite a state law barring the practice. Details of these secretive partnerships have been revealed in two new sweeping investigations by reporter Aura Bogado of Injustice Watch.

As part of her investigation, Aura Bogado obtained police body camp footage from April 2025 when Riverton, Illinois police officer Brad Herzog pulled over 31-year-old Guatemalan national Daniel Torres-Perez. Herzog ran Torres' name through a law enforcement database. Then Herzog's phone rang. It was the FBI. Hello. Officer, how are you?

Good. you. Good, man. Hey, my pencil just back, or my FBI, that every bell and whistle went off, saying you ran Daniel Torres, D.S. He's wrapping down. Just encountered him? Uh, yes, I've got him on a traffic stop right now. I'm sorry. You broke up. Can you say that again? I have him on a traffic stop right now. And I know that he has a ice warrant, which is what I was helping him out on, but I know you can't act on that. But I was under the impression. He also had a state bench warrant. I just read his call.

Okay, let me check and confirm it. Sangamon 734. Sir? Yeah, I'm good. Okay, yeah, everybody missed it. I don't see how, but yeah, there is an active warrant for him for DUI, no bond. So he will be going to... I need that guy for an ice warrant.

Okay. But I think you can take him under the state warrant and that would hold him overnight and say him, correct? That is correct, sir. For more, we go to Chicago, where we're joined by Aura Bogado, senior immigration reporter at Injustice Watch. Her two new investigations out today are titled, Illinois promised to protect immigrants, local officials help deport them anyway, co-published with The Intercept, and the county prosecutors who became ICE informants, co-published with Wired. Aura, welcome back to democracy now, astounding investigation, incredible revelations, talk about the role of cops, sheriffs, and prosecutors in sharing information with federal immigration agents. In Illinois, a state that's supposed to be a sanctuary state. I mean, the Trust Act expressly prohibits this, or so one would expect.

How is this collaboration happening and is it legal? Yeah, those are great questions. Thanks for having me, Anjali. You know, part of the reason that I came to Chicago was to really investigate how much of, not only the Trust Act, but the many promises that are made by the state's leaders to its immigrant communities and to residents at large about protecting these communities was true. And what I found was a pattern over and over and over again, as you mentioned, in more than one in three counties, an agency, whether that's a police department, Sheriff's Department or even a county prosecutor has worked with federal immigration officials to flag, detain, and deport at least 150 people. Those are 150 individuals whose lives were very often changed. You know, communities completely split apart. I've spent a lot of time, not only, you know, going through records and paperwork and talking to the law enforcement side of

this, but also with families. I've talked with more than 20 people who, you know, were in these records. A lot of them have been deported mostly to Central America and with their families. You know, this week, I think, you know, and a lot of our families, kids are going back to school, whether that's, you know, pre-K or college. And I've been talking with children sort of this whole year. and sometimes they contact me when they miss their dad because mostly the people who have been affected are overwhelmingly men. There are some women, but it's overwhelmingly men. And their children miss them, particularly at a time of change, you know, in the fall, not only here in Chicago, but throughout Illinois. In terms of what is and isn't legal, you know, it probably doesn't surprise a lot of people to know that law enforcement agents, you know, police and

and sheriff's deputies continue to work with ICE. What was surprising to me, and I think to a lot of people that I spoke with, is that county prosecutors who are prosecuting defendants for a variety of misdemeanor crimes and also more serious felony crimes get in contact with ICE agents and often flagged someone who wasn't already on ICE's radar, resulting in deportation. Sometimes the only reason that they reach out to ICE is because they say, for example, this person is homeless or this person doesn't speak English.

You know, they have no premise to even know what a person's immigration status is, but they continue to reach out to ICE here in Illinois. And Otto, what was surprising to me, I mean, there was a lot in your reporting on this that was really shocking. But this almost like real-time communication between the local police on a traffic stop and ICE and what's federal authority is almost monitoring what's going on. And because clearly in many of these so-called sanctuary states,

there's a big difference between what happens in the major cities and what happens in the more rural areas. And in Illinois, for instance, Chicago was very different than downstate. Illinois, the prosecutors and the police and those parts of the state. But this whole issue of how closely interlocked the ICE and federal authorities are with local police, can you talk about that a little more? Sure. Prior to doing this reporting, I knew that, you know, there's sort of these data loopholes if someone is booked into custody, a fingerprint will absolutely make its way to ICE and ICE will try and do what it can to apprehend that that person.

What surprised me, and you know, as we all saw in that video, and that's not the only example of it that we have, is that when someone is pulled over and an officer enters that name into dispatch, the dispatch then sends it to the Illinois State Police, which sends it to the FBI. The FBI then sends it to DHS. that's where ICE can sort of see that a person is there. And then the information that ICE may have, an administrative request, administrative warrant, administrative detainer request, is then routed all the way back to that officer in real time.

And that can prove very consequential. The person who's pulled over in the video that we just saw, Daniel, while he was deported a few months after that incident. He was never able to go back home to his family in Illinois. And, you know, so it's the stakes are really, really high. I also assumed that, you know, outside of Chicago, it would look very different. We have found here in Cook County that there are a lot of incidents that are similar. For example, in Tinley Park, which is here in Cook County, it's a little ways from Chicago.

but you know, you can take a train there. You can drive over there. There are officers who also interacted with immigration agents in real time. They didn't detain the person on site, but they provided crucial information to immigration agents, including, for example, when and where a person was working, their home address, in one incident a mother's name. And so it's a lot of personal data that one would imagine. imagine wouldn't be shared because of the statutes that we have here in Illinois. And again,

the many promises that, for example, our governor J.B. Pritzker has made to these communities. But it continues to happen. And it does happen, like you said, in real time. And the consequences are really, really detrimental for families. I wanted to ask you about that. This whole, has there been any response from Governor Pritzker or the Illinois State Police Director, Brendan Kelly, to some of the stuff that you found, did you attempt to reach the governor's office? I did. I did. Unfortunately, I didn't hear back from Governor Pritzker's office. I also didn't hear back from Brendan Kelly. Brendan Kelly is the director of the Illinois State Police. He is handpicked by J.B. Pritzker. And so what happens in his office, you know, comes down in some ways from the top.

He serves in Pritzker's cabinet, and so, you know, he enjoys that position. But the Illinois State Police, Brendan Kelly, did not get back to me, and neither did J.B. Pritzker. Unfortunately, you know, I don't know, more than 60 offices or so did not respond to my many requests for comment. I took a long time working on this investigation, and I made sure that these agencies had plenty of time to respond. Unfortunately, Pritzker's office didn't. And Aura, you know, your piece for Wired has these incredible story about prosecutors, local prosecutors sharing information with federal immigration agents. And it's unclear whether they are covered by Illinois law.

Is that right? Talk about the scale at which this is happening and also tell the story of the person you profile in that story. Rolando Perez Samayoa. Yeah. So in one in six Illinois counties, I found evidence that county prosecutors are indeed sharing information with ICE and federal immigration agents. It essentially happens in one of two ways. Sometimes they will respond, a staffer or even the elected state county prosecutor here in Illinois will respond to a request either. from an immigration court, an ICE agent, et cetera.

They very often send, you know, different police records, information about, you know, when and where to find someone. But oftentimes we found that these staffers, these assistant prosecutors and even the county prosecutors themselves, will reach out to ICE. No one has to ask. The information is turned over. Some of what's shared there, for example, is when and where someone will be released from jail, when someone will appear at court. And again, these are the very defendants that their own offices are trying.

Something important to remember is that, you know, when someone is accused of a crime, no matter how big or small in the United States, there are constitutional rights for everybody that is afforded to every person, right? those rights are suspended in the immigration context. The bar that is needed to sort of prove a case for deportability is so much lower. You're also not afforded counsel as you are in a criminal case. And so the rights just could not be more different. They're really on different ends of the spectrum. And in the case that I write about, Rolandos Samayoa, he was in a DUI. He told me that it's like one of his biggest regrets in life.

He felt very, very bad about it. The first time we talked, he told me, you know, I moved to Illinois because it's supposed to be a sanctuary. He was originally going to go to Alabama and heard from social media, from friends and from family that this is the place to be. This is a place that was going to keep someone like him and his family safe. Instead, what happened was an assistant prosecutor in the county in which he was a defendant. reached out to a Homeland Security agent and shared a lot of details. You know, the agent's first response was like, okay, we're on it. Later, he asked for more details.

Three weeks after that assistant prosecutor reached out to this Homeland Security agent, Rolando's home was raided. He was coming out. He had just had a birthday, and he was supposed to celebrate, and he was going out to dinner. As soon as he stepped out, ICE agents sort of surrounded him. His son saw this happening and was like coming forward. Ice agents perceived that as some kind of threat and aimed eight guns at this child, a 17-year-old.

And, you know, you can imagine what kind of trauma for anyone, you know, could incur from something like that. Again, this is a child. ICE did not deny that that happened. and instead, you know, issued a statement about how it uses force and what kinds of situations. And that, you know, within a couple of hours, they were taken out of Illinois and to a St. Louis immigration office. Rolando has told me that he felt incredible pressure to sign a voluntary departure. They were put on a plane to El Paso and spent a night there. The very next day they were walked over to Ciudad Juarez.

in Mexico and they had to raise the money to head back to Chiapas, which is their native state. And again, those are the consequences. You can have someone who makes a mistake, you know, is in a DUI, is trying to do his part to rectify what happened. And, you know, unbeknownst to him, he always thought it could be like police that was looking out for him. For some reason, he didn't get on ICE's radar. It appears until this assistant prosecutor let Homeland Security know. Aura Bogado, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us and for this work.

Senior Immigration Reporter at Injustice Watch will link to your two new investigations. Coming up, incarcerated for life in Trump's war on the left. Stay with us. Wish I could tell you. I've got so much to say. if I could only find a way I let you know how I feel wish I could ask you

Have you ever thought of me If you have you must agree The future is a black Love's got a hold by Alicia Anderson and Lawrence Hobbs This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org I'm Anjali Kam at the New York with Juan Gonzalez in Chicago.

We end today's show with Autumn Hill an activist who was sentenced to 50 years in prison earlier this summer on charges stemming from an anti-ice protest outside the Prairiel in Alvarado, Texas. In June, a federal judge in Texas handed down prison sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years to Hill and eight other protesters who are collectively known as the Prairie Land Nine. They were convicted of terrorism-related charges after federal prosecutors accused them of being members of an Antifa terror cell.

Antifa stands for anti-fascist. During the July 4th, 2025 demonstration, fireworks were set off, and a police officer was shot and wounded. Former U.S. Marine Corps reservist Benjamin Song, who was convicted of the shooting, received a hundred-year sentence. In a statement, he said he only fired his rifle because he believed the officer was about to shoot another activist. One activist, who wasn't even at the protest, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of anti-fascist magazines and pamphlets. Our guest, Autumn Hill, says she left the protest before the police officer was shot, but she was still charged and convicted of rioting, providing material support to terrorists, conspiring to use and carry explosives and using and carrying explosives. Hill and other activists had brought fireworks to stage a noise demonstration to show support for people detained in the ice jail.

She's profiled in a recent piece in Rolling Stone, headlined, Incarcerated for Life in Trump's War on the Left. In a few minutes, we'll speak to Rolling Stone. Stone reporter Jack Crosby. But first, let's turn to Autumn Hill in her own words. Democracy Now spoke to her by phone last week from the Johnson County Correctional Facility. Growing up Christian, I was deeply moved by the radical love tradition of Jesus Christ. And I saw civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. in American history and like the abolitionists of the Civil War era as being inheritors of that.

I've always seen those as being, you know, those political goals as having a basis in a spirituality that is founded in radical love and that is founded in seeing every human being as equal, as equally worthy of love, as equally worthy, not just of love in kind of a lovey-dovey, like feeling sort of a way, but real material love, love that works itself out in actions of care and tenderness, and sometimes in acts of fierce protection and defense of the bodies and the rights of others from those who would seek to deprive them of those rights. Being outside of fairyland on the night of July 4th was for me an act of radical love. You know, it was an act of solidarity with the immigrant community in the United States of America. Scripture talks about this idea that, you know, you love the alien, you love the stranger, you love the sojourner in the land, because that's who you are, actually. You know, I'm not a Christian per se anymore. I am part of what I see as being an inter-religious, you know, tradition of radical love that includes, you know, Christians like Dr. King and his friend Vincent Harding and Muslims like Malcolm X and Dr. Omid Safi and Buddhists like Tikh Khan.

You know, this radical love tradition to me is about the idea that justice is bringing love into the public space. The fact that this happened in Texas, in one of the most conservative parts of the country, this was the perfect storm for the Trump administration to finally be able to push through a case. to make an example out of activists and to kind of create this warning, you know, that if you resist the Trump administration in any way, if you resist police, if you resist the mass incarceration of immigrants, they are going to bury you. I am absolutely being. imprisoned, you know, for a political agenda. That was Autumn Hill, speaking to Democracy Now's Nicole Salazar from Johnson County

Correctional Facility. Autumn Hill was sentenced in June to 50 years in prison and charges stemming from an anti-ice protest outside the Prairiel in Texas. We're joined now by Jack Crosby, senior writer at Rolling Stone Magazine. His recent feature on the Prairland case is headlined, incarcerated for life in Trump's war on the left. and his latest is how Trump's war on the left will come for the center. Welcome to Democracy Now.

Why did you choose to write about Autumn Hill? And tell us more about her. You had several conversations with her, and she's been in jail for almost a year now. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I've been writing about left-wing movements for a number of years, and I had some experience reporting in the specific communities that Autumn was a part of. I had never met her before, but I had met other activists in the Dallas-Fort Worth scene in past stories that I had done. But what I really feel like I've been tracking for several years now is a sort of organized growing campaign by not just the Trump administration.

Some of this started during the Biden years, but by conservative forces in various governments around the country to create kind of a new playbook for criminalizing dissent. And Autumn's case, and I think more broadly, the case of all of the Prairieland defendants, was one of the most extreme examples of this. It was, you know, if you were a federal prosecutor trying to establish that, you know, anti-fascists were all violent and they, and you kind of, it's not what the facts of the case said, but if you were trying to push that narrative on an all violent, audience that doesn't understand the full context of everything that is happening, you know, this was a goldmine for those federal prosecutors. And so I wanted to look further into that, and I wanted to look at the precedent that they were trying to set and what they might try to do with that precedent. And also what the ramifications of that meant for very normal, politically engaged people like Autumn Hill, who's now serving effectively the rest of her life in prison.

And she has been in jail since last July. What's her life in detention like? And she's going to be transferred to a federal prison soon, is that right? Yeah, the timing on when she'll be transferred to federal prison and sort of the chain of custody is all kind of up in the air. She often does not know at all when these things are going to happen. When you're incarcerated, I think your life depends very much on people coming into your very, isolated living situation and just sort of telling you how it's going to be. And that's very much been her life for the past year.

For a lot of her time in Johnson County, for some of her time in Tarrant County, and some of her time in FMC Fort Worth, which is the only federal facility she's been in, she's been held in what's called administrative segregation. Sometimes there have been reasons put for this. Sometimes it's been because as a trans woman, because of her gender identity in certain facilities. Sometimes they're held in administrative segregation for security reasons, but what this effectively is

is it's solitary confinement. And she's been in different stretches in effectively solitary confinement for months at a time. She's not at the moment. As far as I know, I haven't spoken to her in a few days. But earlier this week, last week, when I spoke to her, she was in a 26-person pod in Johnson, county. So, you know, not a huge general population, but a much more, I guess, normal, given the

circumstances, living situation. And Jack Crosby, I wanted to ask you, this whole, what did the government have to prove this charge of material support for terrorism? What did it exactly mean? And also, how were these defendants, the impact of the Charlie Kirk assassination, which happened in September of 2025? Did that have any impact on how they were prosecuted? Yeah, it had a huge impact. So the timing of this case is really interesting. It happens sort of at one of these turning points in American history. So the incident at the Prairie Land Detention Facility happens on July 4th, 2025. Charlie Kirk isn't shot until several weeks later. So Autumn's lawyer told me that in

the beginning when the charges first came down and they were arrested, this was much more a case that was focused on the shooting of a police officer. A few weeks after this, Charlie Kirk is shot, and after his shooting, the government kind of goes into overdrive in pushing to further criminalize sort of left-wing organizing within the United States. There's a presidential memorandum that's written and some executive orders. The most consequential of this is known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, I believe, or NSPM 7 for short. And in this memo, it basically lays out how the Trump administration, A, considers the umbrella term of Antifa to not only be an actual contiguous group, which it is not, it is an ideology.

But it considers that group to be a terrorist organization. And what NSPM 7 does as well is it outlines a sort of framework for how the government can go at breaking up that organization. And what we see in Hill's case is that after NSPM 7 comes out, the prosecution's entire sort of narrative about what happened in the case changes. and they start referring to the defendants in Prairieland as an Antifa cell. And that really becomes the thing that I would say that they're trying to prove in this case. But as Autumn's lawyer has explained to me, the government doesn't really have a burden of proof in these things. NSPM 7 is not a legal framework. It's not something that has been, you know, precedent has been set by any courts on this.

It is just something that the president has said and that prosecutors can then rely. on to try and push a narrative to a jury, to the public. And there's no real burden of proof. They can just say that you're Antifa. And that becomes sort of gospel, according to the government, if they say it. Jack Crosby is a senior writer at Rolling Stole magazine. We will link to your piece, incarcerated for life, and Trump's War on the Left. We're going to continue this discussion and post it online at DemocracyNow.org, and we'll learn more about material support for terrorism and how that relates to this case. And that does it for today's show.

Democracy Now is produced with Mike Burke, Dina Guzder, Messiah, Rhodes. Nicole Salazar, Nermine Sheikh, Maria Tarasena. I'm Anjali Kometh. Thanks for joining us for another edition of Democracy Now.