Protests against Trump and Musk spring to life — with a mass demonstration set for April 5

Along with rallies held by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, #TeslaTakedown and #HandsOff protests are giving people the opportunity to voice their displeasure with the administration.

David Knowles

YAHOO News Editor
 Tue, March 25, 2025 

Sen. Bernie Sanders with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Denver, a stop on their "Fighting Oligarchy Tour," March 21. (David Zalubowski/AP)

As President Trump and Elon Musk continue their plan to dramatically reshape the federal government, a growing protest movement is emerging to try to stop them.

Over the past few days, thousands of people have gathered to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York castigate the current administration.

“We will not allow America to become an oligarchy,” Sanders told a crowd of 34,000 in Denver. “This nation was built by working people, and we are not going to let a handful of billionaires run the government.”

At five stops in three states — Arizona, Colorado and Nevada — Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez drew crowds that exceeded expectations.

The rallies by the two high-profile politicians have proven to be the biggest demonstrations of the first months of Trump’s second term, but numerous others have been popping up nationwide. On March 7, a “Stand Up for Science” rally drew thousands of people to Washington, D.C., and other cities to demand a restoration of federal scientific funding cut by the Trump administration.

Yet compared with the Women’s March of 2017, which drew millions of citizens to the streets the weekend after Trump’s first-term inauguration to protest what many saw as the newly elected president’s pattern of sexist rhetoric, the second-term protests have, so far, been much smaller.

#TeslaTakedown

Protesters at a downtown Manhattan Tesla dealership decry Elon Musk's powerful role in the Trump administration, March 22. (Andrea Renault/Star Max)

To hear Musk tell it, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the advisory group Trump has tasked him to lead, is playing a crucial role in addressing what Republicans see as out-of-control spending.

“The country is going bankrupt,” Musk said last week in an interview with Fox News in reference to the growing national debt. “If we don’t do something about it, the ship of America is going to sink.”

But in response to Musk’s efforts to slash the federal workforce and pare back popular social programs, so-called Tesla Takedown protests have entered their fifth week at Tesla dealerships across the country. On Saturday, hundreds gathered at Tesla dealerships in Arizona, New Jersey, New York, California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington, Colorado and multiple other states.

Organizers are planning a “global day of action” at Tesla dealerships on March 29.

“Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he's using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it. We are taking action at Tesla to stop Musk's illegal coup,” reads the text on ActionNetwork.org, a website that says it “empowers individuals and groups to organize for progressive causes.”

The protests against Musk’s actions as the head of DOGE have sometimes turned violent. Over the weekend, the FBI issued an alert warning that acts of vandalism, including gunfire, have occurred at Tesla dealerships in at least nine states. The FBI warned citizens to “exercise vigilance” and to “look out for suspicious activity” on or around dealership locations. On Monday, the agency announced it was creating a task force to investigate recent attacks on the company.

"The FBI has been investigating the increase in violent activity toward Tesla, and over the last few days, we have taken additional steps to crack down and coordinate our response," FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X. "This is domestic terrorism. Those responsible will be pursued, caught, and brought to justice."

Tesla Takedown organizers, however, have distanced themselves from any acts of vandalism.

“Tesla Takedown is a peaceful protest movement. We oppose violence, vandalism and destruction of property. This protest is a lawful exercise of our First Amendment right to peaceful assembly,” Action Network said on its website.
‘Hands Off!’

Another test of the strength of the protest movement against Trump will come on April 5, when a coalition of liberal groups is planning nationwide demonstrations, including one at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They’re taking everything they can get their hands on, and daring the world to stop them,” Indivisible, the organization running the so-called Hands Off! protests, said in a social media post.”

Will the demonstrations draw enough people to have an impact on Trump’s agenda? Not according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

“Anyone who thinks protests, lawsuits, and lawfare will deter President Trump must have been sleeping under a rock for the past several years," Leavitt told USA Today last week in a statement. "President Trump will not be deterred from delivering on the promises he made to make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers across the country who overwhelmingly reelected him.”

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AOC, Sanders erase Biden as progressive movement moves on

David Weigel
Mon, March 24, 2025

SEMAFOR




The Scene

DENVER, Colo. — Now we know what they really thought.

On Friday afternoon, at the biggest rally of his political career, Sen. Bernie Sanders encouraged some 32,000 people here to organize against “oligarchy,” dismantle the private campaign finance system, and maybe run for office themselves.

He never ran as a Democrat — and they wouldn’t need to, either. The party hadn’t earned it.

“For the last 30 or 40 years, Democrats have turned their backs on the working class of this country,” said Sanders.

The Vermont independent shared the stage with New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called for “a Democratic Party that fights harder for us.” They were introduced by Jimmy Williams, the president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, who denounced Democrats for not raising the minimum wage or expanding Social Security when they held the House, Senate, and White House.

“For the Democratic Party to ever win back the majority, they have to represent the working class and not the corporate class,” said Williams.

The blunt talk barely made ripples in Washington, where Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are often covered as problems for their party. But as they reboot their movement, progressives who traded loyalty to Joe Biden for big policy victories — from the Green New Deal to clemency for Leonard Peltier — are breaking ranks with the Democratic Party and its feeble brand. Sanders is stepping up efforts to recruit Democratic and independent candidates, and Ocasio-Cortez is taking a larger role in responding to the Trump administration.

And unencumbered from their 2024 task — to make a progressive case for Biden, and then, for Kamala Harris — they are no longer selling his presidency as a success.
Know More

When he secured the 2020 Democratic nomination, Biden made a deal with Sanders and other progressives, giving them a role in drafting the party platform and incorporating their ideas into his campaign and administration. To progressives’ surprise, he often responded to their direct actions; climate activists protested with Ocasio-Cortez for a New Deal-style “climate conservation corps,” and he created one by executive order.




“When it comes to domestic policy, President Biden probably would go down as one of the most effective presidents that centered the working class,” Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times in January.

But Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza smothered progressives’ good will. In Denver, Sanders mentioned the former president just once by name, when he denounced Trump for maintaining “the horrific Biden policy of giving more money to Netanyahu to destroy the Palestinian people.”

Now Biden, who’s made just two public appearances since leaving Washington, is a non-factor in his party. His achievements, including trillions of dollars of infrastructure, health care and climate spending, are being pulled down by his successor. Democrats rarely talk about Biden’s role in those programs as they fight (and sue) to save them.

The erasure started before Biden left office, with Sanders crediting Trump’s victory to “Democratic leadership” that defended the “status quo” and lost working class votes.Sanders and other progressives had taken another tone during the campaign, defending Biden and his record. (So had Williams: IAPUT endorsed Biden, then Harris, in the 2024 election, and he praised “Union Joe” as the best president for labor in generations.)

“We came out of that economic downturn a lot faster than anyone dream we would have, and you can thank President Biden for that,” Sanders told a crowd in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on June 28 — the day after the disastrous CNN debate with Trump that unraveled Biden’s campaign and damaged Democrats’ argument that voters could overlook his age. “Biden’s policies, by and large, are for the working class of this country, and we’ve got to appreciate that.”

In conversations on Monday, progressive strategists said that there was no upside to mentioning Biden at all, even when defending programs he funded or created. In Denver, Ocasio-Cortez spoke more positively of the Democrats than Sanders did, praising the state’s senators and Democratic members of Congress by name for opposing the GOP’s spending packages.

“I want you to look at every level of office around you, and support Democrats who actually fight, because those are the ones that can win against Republicans,” she said.

David’s view

Why does it matter if Democrats and progressives wrap up Biden’s presidency into a story of Democratic failure? It explains the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez project, which in part is about disentangling their politics from a toxic brand and turning it into an anti-establishment cause.

“Trump basically said the system is broken, and I’m going to fix it,” Sanders told me before his “Fight Oligarchy” tour began last month. “Democrats more or less said: You know, the status quo is not perfect, but we’re gonna tinker with it around the edges.”

The senator’s new electoral project is recruiting progressives to run against Republicans and beat them, whether they want to run as Democrats or independents.

“There are a whole lot of people, who voted Republican, who are not crazy about the Republican Party,” Sanders told me in Greeley. “Working-class Republicans don’t want tax breaks for billionaires and cuts to veterans programs.” In the story he’s telling, those voters did not have an ally in the White House who did the right thing for four years; neither party has answered those voters’ concerns.

But Republicans have not forgotten about Biden. During his address to Congress last month, Trump mentioned Biden, “the worst president in American history,” 14 times. In remarks to reporters, the president frequently blames Bidens for problems he didn’t leave him, like a stock market correction. The story Trump and the GOP are telling is that their party is delivering for the working class, rescuing it from the costs and failures inflicted by their last president and the Democratic Party.

Defeated parties have been here before. George W. Bush vanished from Republican politics after leaving the presidency in 2009; apart from a few “Miss Me Yet?” memes and Dick Cheney’s criticism of the Obama presidency’s anti-terrorism strategy, that team played no role in the Tea Party-era GOP rebrand. Republicans built space to attack their former president’s legacy, with conservative candidates taking down incumbents who had supported Bush’s Wall Street bailout. The party won the presidency again with Trump, who has mocked Bush as a failure.

Parties have also swung hard in the other direction. In 2021, when Trump was beaten but able to run again, his party retconned his presidency into a success. They were boom years, with no new foreign wars, undermined only by a deranged anti-Trump deep state and the COVID-19 pandemic. The few Republicans who criticized Trump over his handling of that pandemic, like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, lost to him and endorsed him.

This was never going to happen for Biden, who left office when voters held a far darker view of the economy than they did in 2020. But it’s significant that the progressives are skipping right past it. Democrats’ argument about how they can win back working class voters might start with Biden, who implemented some big progressive ideas and watched more of those voters walk away.

Room for Disagreement

As Biden left office, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel called him a “remarkably consequential one-term president” who “orchestrated the best recovery in the industrial world” and “consolidated the break with the failed market fundamentalism of the conservative era that Trump began.” It’s the sort of analysis many progressives had of Biden — Gaza record aside — until the results came in from Pennsylvania on Election Night.

Notable

In an interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Sanders said that Biden “should have done much better” to control the U.S.-Mexico border, and that “when the Democrats had control of the Senate, they did virtually nothing for working people.”

The best story on Biden’s first attempts to get back into the conversation and defend his legacy is this NBC News three-hander, which covers a meeting between Biden and the new DNC chair (inconclusive) and the ex-president’s brooding about how the party lost even after forcing him to give up the nomination.

What We Can Learn From Leonard Peltier:

 ‘I Rise Only When I Help You Rise’

The release of Leonard Peltier after nearly half a century in prison offers a chance for a reflection on the nature of justice and how we treat each other.


Leonard Peltier was released from a federal prison in Florida on Tuesday, February 18, 2025.
(Photo: Angel White Eyes / NDN Collective)

Robert C. Koehler
Feb 20, 2025

Common Dreams

“...I write today from a position rare for a former prosecutor: to beseech you to commute the sentence of a man I helped put behind bars.”

Thus begins one of the most stunning letters I have ever read, written almost four years ago by former U.S. Attorney James H. Reynolds to then-President Joe Biden, pleading with him to exonerate former American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Leonard Peltier, who had been convicted of murdering two FBI agents at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975.

In one of his last acts before leaving office, Biden did so: freeing Peltier, now 80 years old and beset with health problems, after nearly half a century in federal prison, allowing him to serve the rest of his sentence—lifetime imprisonment—from the Chippewa reservation in North Dakota that is his home. Peltier was released from prison on February 18.

Hey, big news—kind of. Much of the mainstream coverage has been careful to present it as simply a kind-hearted act by the U.S. Department of Justice, allowing an elderly, convicted murderer to spend his final years under home incarceration. It has downplayed not only the serious flaws in the case against Peltier and the worldwide demands for his release—from Amnesty International, from Pope Francis, from Nelson Mandela, and so many others—it has avoided any mention of the larger context: that white America has long been at war with the continent’s Native population, taking their land and attempting to obliterate their culture, essentially declaring them to be subhuman.

For that reason, the fact that Reynolds’ letter is now poking itself into the present news cycle is utterly mind-boggling.

The Pine Ridge shootings occurred on June 26, 1975, when two FBI agents entered the reservation to arrest a resident for stealing a pair of cowboy boots. According to Peltier-supporters’ account, the agents entered private property without identifying themselves. Many AIM members happened to be present at the time. A shootout took place—the reason uncertain—and the two agents, along with a Pine Ridge resident, were killed. The reservation was soon surrounded by about 150 police and FBI officers. Peltier, a Native rights activist, was among those arrested and eventually became the focal point of the government’s case.

Reynolds’ letter to Biden continues: “Leonard Peltier’s conviction and continued incarceration is a testament to a time and a system of justice that no longer has a place in our society. I have been fortunate enough to see this country and its prevailing attitudes about Native Americans, progress dramatically over the last 46 years.”

He then goes into detail about the case itself, explaining: “We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation. As a result, we shifted our stance on the theories of guilt throughout the prosecution and appeal.”

Ultimately, the entirety of the case against Peltier, he writes, was that he was present at the reservation and was in possession of a weapon. There was no evidence that he shot the agents—or evidence against anyone else at the reservation. Indeed, The Guardian, writing about the case, notes that a witness who testified that she saw Peltier shoot the agents “later said she had been coerced into testifying and recanted her testimony.”

All of which sets the context for the largest point Reynolds makes to Biden, transcending the case itself and looking directly at the country’s evolving social consciousness:

“I believe,” he writes, “that a grant of executive clemency would serve the best interests of justice and the best interests of our country. In my opinion, to continue to imprison Mr. Peltier any longer, knowing what we know now, would serve to continue the broken relationship between Native Americans and the government.”

“I urge you to chart a different path in the history of the government’s relationship with its Native people through a show of mercy rather than continued indifference. I urge you to take a step toward healing a wound that I had a part in making. I urge you to commute Leonard Peltier’s sentence and grant him executive clemency.”

All I can do is let these words sit there for a moment. My God, this is a larger look at the nature of justice than I would expect from at actual member of the Department of Justice. Mr. President, let us take action now to begin healing our broken relationship with Native Americans. Let us look at ourselves!

It took Biden several years to take action on Peltier’s incarceration, and it’s not as though Biden’s commutation was also an exoneration—a declaration of his innocence... nor was it an apology for the nation’s, or for Europe’s, five centuries of land theft and cultural dehumanization of Indigenous people of the Americas.

But let me dig for a moment into the words of Peltier himself, who has written an account of how, as a nine-year-old boy, he (along with his sister and a cousin) were taken from their homes and sent off to... uh, boarding school, perhaps more accurately called dehumanization school, the point of which was to take away their language, their culture, their humanity. Upon arrival, the children were stripped naked, forced into hot showers, then “they put DDT all over us. The poison even got in our eyes and mouths.”

The children were told it was to kill lice and other insects—but in reality it was no doubt to eliminate the “Indian” in them. “They made it clear we were hated,” he wrote. “With every look, with every cruel word, they continued a war our ancestors had fought since their ancestors landed here back in 1492.” Some of the kids wound up committing suicide; they were buried in unmarked graves on the school grounds.

Peltier also noted: “We spoke our language. We sang our songs. And we prayed in our languages, all in secret.”

Proof of his guilt—he broke the rules!

He concluded his boarding school memories by writing: “You don’t treat people badly like that. I rise only when I help you rise. Despite all those beatings, I still believe it. It’s a law, like physics, and it’s true. You get nowhere being mean and disrespecting the feelings of others, especially the most vulnerable. I have seen both kinds of people and more than my share of evil ones, and I know I’m right. I rise only when I help you rise.”

This isn’t what the boarding school taught, but apparently this is what he learned. And now, his intention is to teach it to the world.

A Prayer for Leonard Peltier

Nick Estes

 February 19, 2025
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A portrait of Leonard Peltier at the entrance of Oceti Sakowin Camp, 2016.

Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier finally returns home. In the last moments of his presidency, Joe Biden commuted his two consecutive life sentences to home confinement. Many in Indian Country see this executive clemency as a significant victory in a decades-long campaign for his release. However, clemency is not the same as a pardon or exoneration, nor does it reclaim the five decades of life taken from elder Peltier or the time lost with his family. It also does not overturn what many consider a wrongful conviction or provide justice for decades of FBI misconduct. Yet, the 80-year-old member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa will spend the rest of his days surrounded by loved ones at home.

The entire history of Peltier’s campaign — with its twists and turns, betrayals and victories — has yet to be written. My involvement in the movement is minor compared to those who survived the shootout at Oglala in 1975 or lost their lives during the “reign of terror” that engulfed the Pine Ridge reservation after the 71-day siege at Wounded Knee in 1973. Others who devoted their entire lives fighting for his freedom didn’t live long enough to witness Peltier’s return home. His return home would not have happened without their sacrifices.

I became involved in the campaign to free Leonard Peltier in 2013. The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I attended graduate school. There were annual demonstrations advocating for his freedom at the federal courthouse. As Barack Obama’s administration ended, the drive for presidential clemency intensified. Additionally, the Water Protector Movement at Standing Rock, opposing the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, provided a rare chance to discuss Peltier’s case with a national audience and its impact on American Indian rights in the United States. I don’t remember a time before 2016 when there was an international platform and an open audience for what are often marginalized and easily dismissed “Indigenous stories” in corporate media.

The clemency campaign was invigorating. It linked the experiences of Water Protectors at Standing Rock to the previous generation of Red Power activists, many of whom, by then elders, also made pilgrimages to the Oceti Sakowin camp at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers. There were also similarities in how the police responded to Water Protectors as they did to the Red Power Movement. Notably, the swift and violent crackdown against Water Protectors created a new generation of Indigenous political prisoners, awakening many across the world to the reality that the Indian wars and American Indian people were not mere relics of a lamentable past. Those struggles were, and remain, very much central to our present realities. Leonard Peltier’s case and ongoing persecution exemplify that truth.

After I left the Standing Rock camps for the last time in late November, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to petition Congress for Leonard Peltier’s release. Appealing to the humanity of those who have dehumanized us and our movements is not an easy ask for me. But I felt compelled by a sense of duty. The Obama administration had made many promises to Indian Country. I thought we had a chance.

On the morning of December 9, I woke up to the heartbreaking news that Peltier’s son, Wahacanka Paul Shields, had died in the hotel room next to mine. He passed away fighting for the freedom of a father he only got to know while in prison. His death, however, didn’t elicit any sympathy from those with the power to free his father. The reactions to our lobbying efforts were cold. Fear gripped our so-called elected congressional allies as Donald Trump’s presidency loomed large. How cruel, I thought. Native faces made for great photo ops, but we get sidelined amidst the settler political infighting as an inconvenience. The lesson I learned was that crying on the colonizer’s shoulder can get you killed. You will die waiting for them to recognize your humanity. The lobbying efforts in front of congressional staffers who’d rather be elsewhere were humiliating. We were not a priority.

Unlike the high points of the movement to free Peltier, when hundreds, and sometimes thousands, demonstrated on his behalf, in December 2016, there were only a few of us: several of Peltier’s children—Chauncey and Kathy; longtime advocates like Peter Clark, Eda Gordon, and Suzie Baer; his AIM spiritual advisor, Lenny Foster; and two survivors of the Oglala shootout, Norman Patrick Brown and Jean Roach, who were teenagers at the time but are now elders in their own right. It wasn’t a low point, despite not achieving what we aimed for. For me, the conversations were enlightening. Everyone else had decades more experience than I did. Beyond the shared knowledge, it was very clear that Leonard Peltier was as much a political prisoner as he was a spiritual one. The Indian Wars, both old and new, were as much about achieving the political conquest of Indigenous peoples as they were about spiritual warfare—attempting to extinguish the fires of resistance even if they had been reduced to embers.

I now realize that movements aren’t only defined by their high points or the eye-catching spectacles of public demonstrations. Mobilizations are important, but they aren’t what sustains a movement over many years. Movements are shaped by periods of backlash and reaction, especially when victory feels distant or unattainable. For American Indian people, this reality confronts us nearly every day in a settler society that seeks to erase us and forget our existence. Erasing what came before and continues to exist, despite acts of genocide and elimination, makes it easier to claim land and resources that rightfully belong to others.

Leonard Peltier’s campaign appeared impossible, a fool’s errand to outsiders. Plenty of detractors said he would never get out. Sympathetic people were sometimes surprised that he was still alive or that he was still in prison. They had forgotten about him—maybe about us, too, and the movements fighting for our continued existence. Or perhaps they just tuned in at the wrong times. It’s easy to forget. It’s harder to remember. It’s even harder to reverse the course of a history that seems to naturalize our erasure. Peltier’s struggle behind walls cut off from the world was spiritual, keeping the faith in the people and movement of history. Ours on the outside had to match that level of commitment.

What are we willing to do for liberation? That is a profoundly political and spiritual question. It has humbled me to see in others their commitment, watching comrades endure devastating sanctions or genocidal wars but still maintain a revolutionary duty to stay, fight, and build power. Leonard Peltier survived five decades in a prison cell. His fight was spiritual.

***

On January 20, I kept hitting refresh on the White House press briefing website. The Trump inauguration ceremonies had already begun, and time was running out for Biden to grant clemency to Peltier. There were no updates.

Frustrated, I stepped into the twenty-below weather. It was so cold that the moisture in the air crystallized into ice, producing the effect of a light snowfall despite the clear sky. The sunlight refracted through the ice particles, creating a glittering rainbow effect. I made my way to the Mississippi River to an eagle’s nest. I said a prayer with a tobacco offering, hoping the Wanbli would take that message.

Within minutes of returning from the river, my phone blew up. “He’s coming home.”

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).

Leonard Peltier is Coming Home!

'I Am Finally Free': Leonard Peltier Released From Prison After Nearly 50 Years

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'I Am Finally Free': Leonard Peltier Released From Prison After Nearly 50 Years

"They may have imprisoned me but they never took my spirit!" said Peltier. "I am finally going home."


Leonard Peltier was released from a federal prison in Florida on Tuesday, February 18, 2025.
(Photo: Angel White Eyes / NDN Collective)

Julia Conley
Feb 18, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Indigenous rights and criminal justice reform advocates on Tuesday celebrated as Native American political activist Leonard Peltier, who has maintained his innocence for nearly 50 years since being sentenced to life in prison for the killing of two FBI agents, walked out of a high-security prison in Florida and headed home to North Dakota.

"Today I am finally free," said Peltier in a statement to the Native news outlet Indianz.com. "They may have imprisoned me but they never took my spirit! Thank you to all my supporters throughout the world who fought for my freedom. I am finally going home. I look forward to seeing my friends, my family, and my community. It's a good day today."

Advocates for Peltier, who is 80 years old, have long called for a presidential pardon and celebrated in January when former President Joe Biden announced he was commuting Peltier's sentence. He will serve out the rest of his sentence in home confinement.

Nick Tilsen, CEO of the advocacy group NDN Collective, noted that before his conviction Peltier was one of thousands of Indigenous children who were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools, where many suffered abuse.

"He hasn't really had a home since he was taken away to boarding school," Tilsen told The Associated Press. "So he is excited to be at home and paint and have grandkids running around."

"Leonard's step outside the prison walls today marks a step toward his long overdue freedom and a step toward reconciliation with Native Americans."

Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota, was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and given two consecutive life sentences after prosecutors accused him of shooting two FBI agents at point-blank range during a confrontation at the Oglala Sioux Indian Reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota in 1975.

Peltier has always maintained that he did fire a gun during the confrontation, but from a distance and in self-defense. A witness who claimed that she saw Peltier shoot the agents later said she had been coerced into testifying and recanted her testimony.

Lynn Crooks, the federal chief prosecutor in the case, later admitted that the government "knew we hadn't proved" that Peltier was guilty.


The American Indian Movement, which fought for Native American treaty rights and tribal self-determination and in which Peltier was active, was subject to FBI surveillance and harassment when the shooting took place.

Kevin Sharp, an attorney and former federal judge who has represented Peltier and filed numerous clemency petitions for him, said the violent confrontation in 1975 was "unquestionably" a tragedy that was "only further compounded by the nearly 50 years of wrongful incarceration for Leonard Peltier."

"Misconduct by the government in the investigation and prosecution of Mr. Peltier has been a stain on our system of justice," said Sharp. "Leonard's step outside the prison walls today marks a step toward his long overdue freedom and a step toward reconciliation with Native Americans."

The AP reported that Peltier left USP Coleman in Sumterville, Florida in an SUV on Tuesday morning and didn't stop to speak to members of the press who were gathered outside.

Amnesty International, which has long campaigned for Peltier and considers him a political prisoner, applauded his release.

"Leonard Peltier's release is the right thing to do given the serious and ongoing human rights concerns about the fairness of his trial, his nearly 50 years behind bars, his health, and his age," Paul O'Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement. "While we welcome his release from prison, he should not be restricted to home confinement."

Tilsen said that Peltier's "wrongful incarceration represented the oppression of Indigenous Peoples everywhere."


"Peltier's liberation is invaluable in and of itself," said Tilsen. "His release today is a symbol of our collective power and inherent freedom."