Sanders Says US Must End Support for UAE—’One of Trump’s Closest Allies’—as It Fuels Genocide in Sudan

“Trump’s good friend and staunch US ally, the United Arab Emirates dictatorship, run by one of the wealthiest families in the world—has financed and enabled this genocide for years.”


US President Donald Trump greets United Arab Emirates (UAE) President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan during a work lunch as part of the G7 summit, in Evian, eastern France, on June 16, 2026.
(Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Jul 14, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As the world fears another massacre by the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, Sen. Bernie Sanders emphasized that the rebel group’s string of atrocities is being funded by a nation with deep financial ties to President Donald Trump—the United Arab Emirates—and urged an end to US military support.

“In the midst of the wars in Gaza and Iran, we cannot forget the atrocities in Sudan,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said Monday in a post to social media. “As many as 150,000 killed since 2023, 14 million driven from their homes, 30 million need humanitarian aid.”

“All of this is fueled by the UAE—one of Trump’s closest allies,” the senator continued. “We cannot be complicit in genocide.”



The warning came as RSF encircles El Obeid, a city of half a million people, including hundreds of thousands who have been displaced.

For weeks, the RSF has launched drone attacks that have killed dozens of civilians and damaged critical infrastructure including water facilities, markets, and hospitals. Food, water, and fuel supplies have been disrupted. Some civilians have begun to flee as many entry points to the city have been cut off.

The United Nations Security Council warned last month that there was an “imminent risk of mass atrocities” and demanded that the RSF halt its assault.

Human Rights Chief Volker Türk stressed that the siege tactics followed a familiar “playbook” to the RSF’s October attack on El-Fasher in which at least 6,000 people were killed in just three days as part of a campaign that UN human rights experts said bore the “hallmarks of genocide,” including ethnically targeted killings and sexual violence.

While the US State Department and other governments have similarly warned that the RSF could be on the verge of committing atrocities, Nicholas Kristof argued in a New York Times column this weekend that “officials won’t say openly... that the power behind the RSF is the United Arab Emirates.”

Despite denials from Abu Dhabi, the UAE has been extensively documented as supporting the RSF through weapons shipments routed via Chad, financing the militia, and recruiting, training, and transporting mercenaries to fight alongside the group.

Kristof pointed out that the UAE “has particularly close financial ties to the Trump family,” most notably the $2 billion investment by an Emirati firm last year that benefited his family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial (WLF), which has been a major source for the unprecedented growth of the president’s wealth during his second term.



Recent financial disclosures reported this month by the Wall Street Journal show that Trump received $263 million from selling half his stake in WLF to a fund backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, one of the UAE’s most powerful royals and the brother of its president.

During his second term, Trump has rewarded the UAE with more than a billion dollars in weapons sales that were fast-tracked to get around holds imposed by Congress, and made an agreement giving the Emirates unprecedented access to hundreds of thousands of advanced computer chips per year.“Trump’s good friend and staunch US ally, the United Arab Emirates dictatorship, run by one of the wealthiest families in the world—has financed and enabled this genocide for years,” Sanders said in a statement last week. "And why is this happening? Billions of dollars of looted gold from Sudan is flowing straight into the pockets of Emirati oligarchs—making a multibillionaire family even richer."

He added that “Congress must demand that the UAE cease its military support for the RSF and work with the international community and the Sudanese people to bring an end to this horrific conflict and provide the humanitarian aid that is desperately needed there.”

As warnings about a brutal new RSF offensive have piled up, there has been a push in Congress led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) for restrictions on the United States’ ability to provide weapons to the UAE.

Last month, with help from some Democrats, the GOP-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee blocked two amendments aimed at halting US weapons shipments to the UAE unless it stops supporting the RSF.

The committee has passed a weaker bill that allows the president to impose optional sanctions on individuals who supply weapons to Sudan’s armed factions, which now awaits a full Senate vote. But the committee rejected Van Hollen’s amendment prohibiting arms sales to the UAE.

Mahmoud Khalil Sues Trump Officials for Conspiracy Against Pro-Palestinian Organizers

“This case will expose the scheme that sought to criminalize the Palestine solidarity movement in the US.”

Columbia University students, professors, and supporters gather to rally in support of Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, and the numerous other community members who have been unlawfully detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York City on March 9, 2026.
(Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Jul 14, 2026 

A lawsuit filed by former Columbia University student organizer Mahmoud Khalil wasn’t his first legal challenge stemming from his arrest last year for his Palestinian rights advocacy, but he emphasized that his decision to take members of the Trump administration and private pro-Israel organizations to court was “about far more than what was done to” him when he was detained for 104 days.

“This case will expose the scheme that sought to criminalize the Palestine solidarity movement in the US,” said Khalil in a statement. “It is about a coordinated, ongoing plot to punish, silence, and intimidate everyone who dares to dissent and speak out for Palestinian liberation. We will hold them accountable.”


‘Major Escalation’: Trump Prosecutor Invokes NSPM-7 While Unveiling Charges Against 15 ICE Protesters

Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the law firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman, Khalil sued the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, Betar, Trump administration adviser Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, his predecessor Kristi Noem, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and John Armstrong, an official at the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.

The lawsuit was filed under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which was passed to stop efforts by vigilante groups like the KKK to coordinate with the government to strip individuals of their constitutional rights.

“Mahmoud is now using this statute to affirmatively challenge the illegal, anti-Palestinian, and anti-democratic public-private conspiracy to harass, intimidate, and punish Palestinians and their allies,” said CCR.



As the Trump administration continues its efforts to deport Khalil, the lawsuit traces the alleged public-private conspiracy against pro-Palestinian organizers to October 2023, when Miller “vowed to punish Palestinians and their supporters through arrest and deportation.”

A year later, the Heritage Foundation published Project Esther, which conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism, claimed all pro-Palestinian organizers were Hamas supporters, and pledged to execute a plan to deport foreign protesters “when a willing administration occupies the White House.”

The Heritage Foundation said a “public-private partnership” would be required to carry out Project Esther. The lawsuit alleges that Canary Mission, an anonymously run Israeli surveillance and doxing organization, and Betar, a self-described vigilante group with a history of surveilling and harassing supporters of Palestinian rights, provided that partnership.

“Between March and May 2025, Miller, Rubio, Noem, and Armstrong used ICE to arrest or to try to arrest at least nine students or scholars pre-selected by the private groups,” said CCR. “The federal defendants continue to seek Mr. Khalil’s deportation and pursue the conspiracy through sham, corrupted immigration proceedings under their control. Working together, the government and private co-conspirators sought to deny Palestinians and their supporters their constitutional rights: to equal protection, to freedom of speech and travel, to freedom from punitive detention, and, ultimately, to exist in this country.”

As The New York Times reported, former Heritage Foundation national security director Robert Greenway said two months after Khalil was arrested that it was “no coincidence that we called for a series of actions to take place privately and publicly, and they are now happening.”

CCR pointed to a “range of harms” Khalil has suffered as the result of being targeted by the Trump administration, starting when he was arrested in March 2025. During three months in detention, he was sent to Jena, Louisiana—nearly 1,300 miles away from his family and lawyers—and was forced to miss the birth of his first child. He also faces “an ongoing threat to his lawful immigration status in the United States,” with his attorneys preparing to appeal his deportation case to the US Supreme Court.

Baher Azmy, legal director for CCR, said that “the brazenness of this conspiratorial plan is matched only by the exquisitely detailed and shamelessly public record the conspirators produced of a collaborative plan to silence the growing student movement protesting US support for Israel’s genocidal campaign,” referring to the country’s assault on Gaza that began in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack.

“The conspirators acted through forms of state repression and arbitrary detention that numerous courts have found are blatantly unconstitutional,” said Azmy. “They targeted Mr. Khalil, smeared him, and subjected him to the torment of detention for nothing other than being Palestinian and supporting Palestinian rights in order to send a message of terror across the student movement for Palestine.”

“The KKK Act was designed to prevent conspiracies to stifle advocacy for political freedom,” he added, “and together we are demanding accountability for this outrageous injustice.”

Antifa Conspiracy Hogwash: A Convenient Platform for Fascism

Eve Ottenberg

 July 15, 2026

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Let’s start with reality: there is no Antifa organization. There exists no Antifa “funding” that FBI director Kash Patel claims he is hunting down – he’ll be doing that from now till Kingdom Come, because it quite simply doesn’t exist. There is no shadowy Antifa conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government and what Donald “Nail a Commie” Trump regards as its God-given mission to promote capitalism. It doesn’t exist. It’s a fascist chimera, a demagogic delusion, a convenient hallucination, a mad mirage, a demented nightmare for the boobocracy. It’s bullshit.

What there is, is people fed up with ICE. It is people, quite a few Americans in fact, who hate fascism. They are – surprise! – anti-fascist. Whoever the idiot was who cooked up the supposedly brilliant idea of making all anti-fascists targets for right-wing cuckoo-birds by tagging them with the trendy abbreviation “Antifa,” I wish he – or she – had stayed home and kept his mouth shut. Because now morons in Washington believe – or maybe some just cynically exploit – the notion that there’s a national octopus of “Antifa” revolutionaries, who, like the devious anarchists of yore, can be eliminated via domestic counter-terrorism.

So we have a problem. Government orgs like the FBI, with fascist roots reaching back over a century, are now, under Trump, laser focused on the very saleable “Antifa” conspiracy. Along the way lots of innocent anti-fascists have their lives turned upside down. Just witness the recent sentencing of the anti-ICE Prairieland protesters. According to the Intercept June 23, one so-called Antifa protestor, Daniel Sanchez Estrada was “convicted of obstructing the investigation by moving a box full of antifascist zines after the protest.” The lunatic judge threw the book at him and sentenced him to 30 years, one of eight absurdly, shockingly lengthy sentences “handed down by judges in two courtrooms in Forth Worth,” a case “widely regarded as the Trump administration’s first major victory in its crackdown on left-wing activism.” Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, got 70 years, because she allegedly asked her husband “to move the zines after her arrest.”

Patel delivered a colossally stupid statement after these harsh sentences – one of which was for 100 years – saying these punishments “show the FBI remains committed to identifying, locating and dismantling Antifa and its funding networks across the country.” Antifa has no funding networks, because it is not an organization. It is a label. And an unfortunate, troublesome, imbecilic one, at that.

So how did these eight protestors wind up with such wildly wrong sentences? They all wore black to the protest! So that’s one fashion statement you don’t want to make if you’re demonstrating against ICE. Prosecutors in this case told the jury that, per the Intercept March 12, “wearing all black at protests makes you guilty of terrorism.” What if you’re returning home from a funeral and wander into an anti-ICE-Gestapo demo? Welp, too bad for you. You’re guilty of terrorism. Also, the luckless defendants “used the Signal encrypted messaging app.” So do journalists I know of; they might want to ditch Signal tout de suite. Signal, in turn, might want to sue these prosecutors for defamation that harms its business.

In other words, the prosecution was reaching, straining to expand its weak, lousy case from “we don’t like their look and their tech” to “terrorism!” And the astounding fact is – they succeeded, not just with the jurors but with two half-wit judges. And beyond their wildest dreams; which raises the question, why? The answer, as I’ve been none too subtly suggesting, lies not just in the run-of-the-mill, bovine stupefaction of a complacently ignorant mass of Amuricans, but in the creation by the media, and the birdbrains who coined the term “Antifa,” of an “Antifa” bogeyman. The fact that using this bogeyman nets a bunch of anti-fascists is an added plus for our FBI maniacs, suspicious of Signal and those wearing black.  But my guess is anyone who calls themselves Antifa, even if no anti-fascist, would be acceptable quarry for Trump security state predators.

The Department of Justice is bursting with pride at what it has done. Its press release dated June 23 is headlined: “Leader of Antifa Cell Members in North Texas Sentenced to 100 Years in Prison for Terrorist Attack on ICE Facility.” The press release trumpets the defendants being “affiliated with Antifa.” These eight defendants all together got a combined sentence of 450 years in prison, following their 12-day trial that started February 23. One defendant “was granted a continuance and will be sentenced on July 1. Seven others…pleaded guilty prior to trial to one count of providing material support to terrorists and they will be sentenced on July 1.”

Then the DOJ finally spikes the heart of the matter: “The defendants were members of a North Texas Antifa Cell, part of a larger militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups…[who call for] the overthrow of the United States Government.” The press release repeatedly invokes this insane notion of an Antifa cell and a larger coordinated Antifa organization. But just saying something doesn’t make it so. The Trump cult can scream about a unified Antifa conspiracy all it likes, no matter: Where’s the proof Antifa is anything other than an updated, hipper locution for something that, without a nickname, might be too complicated for your average reactionary nincompoop to grasp, namely anti-fascism? As far as anyone can tell, Antifa is little more than the occasional anti-fascist punching a goth Nazi in the nose in his local bar. But unfortunately, this happened enough absolutely to enrage the far right, so that it claims a concerted Antifa org is out to undermine Amurica.

“Evidence at trial revealed that most of the ANTIFA cell involved in the Prairieland attack looked to Benjamin Song as a leader,” the DOJ hyperventilates. And Song owned guns! Ordinarily for reactionaries, gun ownership is a sacred Amurican right, worth the bloody, regular ritual slaughter of schoolchildren by psychotics with semi-automatic weapons being excused by the far right as the price we pay for our freedoms. I suppose for them sometimes the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of toddlers. In short, it depends, I guess, who owns the guns. If the owner protests ICE abuses, then his gun ownership proves he belongs to a nefarious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. DOJ also breathlessly invokes “ideologically aligned groups,” namely those luckless women who “created and distributed insurrectionary materials called ‘zines.’” Short for magazines and pamphlets. Like Antifa is short for anti-fascist. How many multi-decade prison sentences will it take before leftist bubbleheads abandon this idiotically provocative lingo?

Calling things by their names is far more likely actually to stump boneheaded reactionaries. Attacking an anti-fascist means what? That you’re attacking someone opposed to fascism? Well, such an attack is prima facie, even for rightists, a bad thing. Fascists were once Amurica’s enemies. We even fought a war against them. But if you’re attacking Antifa? Ah, now that’s another kettle of insurrectionists. It’s an amorphous term, whose provenance is obscured, and which can be slapped onto just about anything a far-right nitwit doesn’t like. You’re even supposed to pronounce it with the stress on the second syllable, making its relation to “anti-fascist” even more opaque. Cool. That makes it almost impossible to link, orally, to antifascist. Antifa is a dream-come-true for dimwit reactionaries and their judges, who think pounding its so-called followers with 100-year sentences strikes a blow against a vast, coordinated underground network of revolutionaries. Who’s gonna tell these judicial chumps? None of this stuff exists. There are just anti-fascists, who recognize that what ICE does is, well, unvarnished fascism. For that – and for moving a box of magazines – they get 70 years behind bars.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is “Death Calls It a Day.” She can be reached at her website.

From the Haymarket 8 to the Michigan 8

How the state uses conspiracy charges to crush social movements.


FBI raid on the home of some of the Michigan Eight defendants in Ypsilanti, Michigan on June 10, 2026.

Adi Saleem
Jul 14, 2026

Common Dream

On the morning of June 10, 2026, the FBI, together with an ensemble of local and state police departments, including the University of Michigan Police Department, conducted a series of simultaneous raids and arrests in Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin in spectacular militarized fashion. The operation targeted eight individuals engaged in Palestine solidarity activism at the University of Michigan.

That afternoon, FBI director Kashyap Patel announced that the targeted individuals “engaged in a coordinated campaign of violent, criminal acts seeking to pressure University of Michigan leaders and other businesses in the Eastern District of Michigan to cut off all ties with Israel.” The alleged violent, criminal acts in question? Property damage. The coordinated campaign in question? Per their indictment, “using encrypted messages, social media, and overseas collaboration platforms […] [and] the internet and social media to broadcast their message.”

To be clear, the Michigan Eight are not being charged with property damage or vandalism. Instead, they are facing charges of conspiracy to transmit a threat, conspiracy to tamper with a witness, and destruction of property to prevent seizure. Less than a week after the raids against the Michigan Eight, 15 individuals were similarly indicted in Minnesota on various conspiracy charges for their participation in community activism and mutual aid in the context of Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) Operation Metro Surge that saw 2,000 ICE agents deployed in Minnesota, leading to over 3,000 arrests, two protesters shot by ICE agents, and one individual dead in ICE custody. The conspiracy charges faced by the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15 carry a maximum sentence of 5-20 years and, when there are multiple counts of it, defendants face potentially decades in prison. A week after the Minnesota 15 indictments, anti-ICE protesters were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years in prison after being convicted of various conspiracy charges related to protest activity at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas.

These are just three out of several other recent cases involving social movements and conspiracy charges. What links them is not the recurrence of some crime called “conspiracy,” but the conversion of ordinary political association into proof of unlawful intent. Conspiracy charges are among the most common charges brought against social movements precisely because they represent an extremely broad, far-reaching, and powerful tool of the state. You do not need to have taken any action, nor do you need to know the other alleged co-conspirators to be found guilty. Federal prosecutors simply have to establish that at least one alleged conspirator has taken an overt (legal or illegal) act toward the alleged plan. Needless to say, virtually anything can be claimed to be an overt act.

The only conspiracy related to the Michigan Eight or the Minnesota 15 is the one that has been constructed by the federal government.

Aside from formal charges of conspiracy, there is also the more diffuse concept of conspiracy that the prosecution in these cases use more generally to paint activists as dangerous, terroristic individuals engaged in a plot against the state. For example, during the detention hearing on June 12, 2026, for four of the Michigan Eight, one of the federal prosecutors, Margaret M. Smith, assistant United States attorney at the Department of Justice, made several references to the defendants being part of a revolution and a “revolution organization.” This language, as we shall see, has a long association with conspiracy charges. It does more than just describe the alleged beliefs of defendants. It represents the bridge by which belief, affiliation, and collective organization can be made to stand in for actual evidence of particular criminal acts.

But what does the nebulous concept of conspiracy mean and why does the government keep using it and who is it meant to target? The late Michael Parenti once noted that “conspiracy means to collude together in secrecy for what are potentially illegal or immoral ends and [the ruling elites] do this all the time and they talk about the necessity of it and they even give it a name, they call it national security.” Indeed, the only conspiracy related to the Michigan Eight or the Minnesota 15 is the one that has been constructed by the federal government. In fact, across more than a century of American history, the recurring pattern that has shaped the state’s response to dissent and protest has been the tendency to treat collective organization itself as a crime. The First Amendment may protect the freedom of speech and assembly as the very conditions of democratic politics, but conspiracy charges have long made these supposed rights conditional.

The Long History of Conspiracy Charges

The state has a long history of using the concept and charge of conspiracy as a weapon against social movements that have sought to expand democratic freedoms. We must therefore place the particular case of the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15 in a longer history that involves the Haymarket Trial (1886-1887), the Espionage Act (1917), the Smith Act (1940), the Anti-Riot Act (1968), RICO (1970), and more contemporary post-9/11 developments such as the Patriot Act (2001). These historical moments represent the cumulative expansion in what the state can make conspiracy mean: from attributing responsibility for an unidentified act to an entire radical milieu, to treating speech as dangerous, group membership as suspicious, mundane logistical organization as evidence of criminal intent, and decentralized movements as racketeering enterprises. While, in case of the Michigan Eight, the targets are Palestine solidarity activists, and while in the case of the Minnesota 15, the targets are anti-ICE organizers, the tools that have been assembled and are still being expanded and perfected can and will be applied to other groups. What is at stake here is no less than ability to collectively organize to create a better and more just world and to resist oppression.

In 1941, the legal scholar Albert J. Harno wrote that, due to its “elasticity” and “vague boundaries,” the concept of conspiracy “presents serious potential dangers of abuse.” Only, there is nothing “potential” about its dangers. From some of its earliest applications right to the last two weeks, the charge of conspiracy has been the bane of organized labor and other broad social movements that the state has sought to repress. One facet of the seemingly endless elasticity of the concept of conspiracy relates to the category of unindicted conspirators. In the case of the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15, this term is constantly invoked in the indictments. Aside from the fact that unindicted conspirators cannot testify on behalf of the defense, prosecutors can introduce the out-of-court statements of unindicted conspirators in court as evidence against the defendants without these statements considered hearsay. Prosecutors can thus introduce texts, emails, phone calls, et cetera, involving unindicted conspirators as evidence against the defendants even if the defendants were not a direct party to these communications. Moreover, the shadow of not knowing whether one is or is not an unindicted conspirator introduces even more fear into social movements. This uncertainty is a feature of conspiracy law and one of its political effects, thus extending the coercive reach of an indictment beyond the courtroom.

Conspiracy and Labor Repression

Nineteenth-century labor cases show where this logic first acquired its legal form and political function. Labor Studies scholar Risa Lieberwitz notes that the charge of conspiracy has historically “provided a powerful weapon against groups advocating political and social change [and] the labor movement [in particular] was the target of many criminal conspiracy prosecutions during the 19th century, beginning with the Philadelphia Cordwainers’ Case of 1806, which was both the first criminal conspiracy trial in the United States, and the first recorded labor case.” If the Cordwainers’ Case demonstrated that workers coming together to demand higher wages could be a criminal conspiracy, the trial of the Haymarket Eight showed how conspiracy could make an entire political milieu culpable for an act that the state could not directly attribute to any one defendant.

On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown during a labor demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago. Till this day, no one can say for certain who threw that bomb. During the trial, prosecutors could not prove who threw it nor prove that the defendants had planned the bombing. They could not even, in some cases, prove that they had been present when the bomb was thrown. What they could prove was that the Haymarket Eight had given speeches, written articles, edited newspapers, belonged to radical organizations, and broadly advocated for a social revolution.

The concept of conspiracy was what allowed the prosecution to transform this into evidence of collective responsibility for the bombing. The prosecution did not need to identify the bomber; it only needed to argue that the Haymarket Eight had been part of a conspiracy to create the conditions in which such a bombing became likely. In other words, the defendants were guilty of belonging to and contributing to a radical workers’ milieu that the state had defined as dangerous. Haymarket helped established what would become a recurring pattern where membership in particular groups (whether well-defined or as vague as “antifa”) and speech (like posting messages on social media) and acts (like organizing a meeting or using the internet) can become evidence of a conspiracy.

Conspiracy, Speech, and Political Organizations

Haymarket thus supplied the basic argument that the state would repeatedly adapt: When direct proof of individual action was absent, prosecutors could substitute much fuzzier ideas. World War I expanded this basic framework under the sign of national security. The federal government used the Espionage Act of 1917 against socialists, labor organizers, anti-war activists, and others who opposed conscription or otherwise criticized the war. During this time, the Department of Justice conducted a series of mass raids and arrests, collectively known as the Palmer Raids (1919–1920), in more than 30 cities and towns, targeting thousands of individuals, particularly Italian-American and Jewish-American socialists, the so-called “hyphenated Americans” that President Woodrow Wilson railed against, warning that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”

In Schenck v. United States (1919), theSupreme Court unanimously held that the First Amendment did not protect Charles Schenck, who had distributed anti-draft and anti-war flyers to draft-age men, from prosecution under the Espionage Act precisely because, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. concluded, “The words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” In other words, the Supreme Court ruled that otherwise lawful speech could be punished if it was thought likely to obstruct or encourage resistance to government aims.

In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Supreme Court overturned Schenck v. United States and, on the surface, introduced a more expansive interpretation of the First Amendment, holding that advocacy of illegal action cannot be punished unless it is “directed towards inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Yet, the so-called Brandenburg test still reveals the subjective nature of, well, law in general, its interpretation, and its enforcement. In this case, the key subjective terms are “imminent” and “likely.” Whether an action is imminent and whether speech is likely to produce an action requires a level of guesswork that is wholly reminiscent of the trial of the Haymarket Eight.

Described as a “prison for ideas” by the National Committee to Win Amnesty for the Smith Act Victims in 1954, the Smith Act of 1940 would extend this logic within the context of the Cold War. Among other things, the Smith Act criminalized “knowingly or willingly advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing any government in the United States by force or violence.” In the late 1940s and 1950s, communists in particular were prosecuted under the law, not because they had launched an armed insurrection, or even taken material steps toward an armed insurrection, but because they belonged to organizations that taught Marxist theory and advocated for communist revolution.

Like their predecessors in 1886 who did not have to prove that the Haymarket Eight had thrown the bomb, prosecutors in these cases did not have to prove that communists had entered into an agreement to commit a crime (the most basic definition of conspiracy), but that the Communist Party itself was a criminal enterprise. The state did not need to demonstrate that any communists had agreed to carry out a specific unlawful act in the near future. Instead, their membership in the party and their ideological beliefs were sufficient proof of criminal liability. Charisse Burden-Stelly summarizes it well, writing that “membership in the CPUSA automatically meant conspiracy of insurrection.”

Conspiracy and Protest

In the context of popular protests and anti-war mobilization, the Anti-Riot Act of 1968 made it a federal offense to cross state lines or use interstate facilities with the intent to incite, organize, or encourage a riot. If the Smith Act treated membership as evidence of insurrectionary conspiracy, the Anti-Riot Act adapted the same logic to the mass movements of the 1960s by treating travel, communication, planning, and assembly as evidence of an intention to produce disorder. The Chicago Seven would be the first to be prosecuted under the Anti-Riot Act and charged with conspiracy to incite a riot and crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot. Again, we see the danger in the elasticity of the key terms of the act that allowed the federal government to frame lawful activities taken to organize a protest, in this case at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as evidence of unlawful intent, namely, to incite a riot.

On February 18, 1970, seven defendants were acquitted on conspiracy charges, two were acquitted on all charges, and the remaining five were convicted of travelling across state lines with intent to incite a riot and sentenced to five years in prison. Over two years later, those convictions would be overturned by an appeals court panel that found numerous errors made by the judge. Yet, the damage to the defendants’ lives and to the broader public had been done. Even when defendants are acquitted or have their convictions overturned, conspiracy charges succeed in the ideological work for which they are perhaps best designed, leaving behind a public narrative in which dissent and protest are not cornerstones of democracy, but dangerous, hidden plots conducted by shadowy figures.

Even unsuccessful prosecutions impose a real material and mental cost on defendants and, more generally, they impose a heavy cost on the public at large, forcing all of us to consider whether participation in collective protest or forms of dissent may expose us to repression.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act of 1970 would give an even more expansive tool for prosecutors to bind heterogeneous individuals and acts under the label of a single, criminal enterprise. RICO has increasingly been used by federal and state prosecutors to target labor unions and broad social movements. The statute’s breadth gives prosecutors considerable flexibility in defining a criminal enterprise and explaining how otherwise separate acts fit together.

In September 2023, Georgia prosecutors brought a sweeping state RICO indictment against dozens of activists associated with opposition to the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, commonly known as Cop City. The indictment alleged that a broad protest movement constituted a criminal enterprise and cited a wide range of activities, including alleged acts of property destruction, distribution of literature, mutual aid, reimbursements, fundraising, communications among activists, and protests and demonstrations.

Prosecutors used the flimsiest of evidence to rope even more people into this “conspiracy” as “co-conspirators.” Signing a petition was enough to get a visit by the police and having mud on one’s shoes in a forest was taken as evidence of participation in alleged acts of property damage at a construction site. The significance of the Stop Cop City case lies less in the specific allegations, but in the indictment’s construction of a broad social movement as a unified, organized criminal enterprise. Social movements are almost by definition heterogenous and decentralized. They always comprise individuals with different goals, tactics, and levels of commitment.

The dismissal of the RICO charges against the defendants in December 2025 does not make this case any less troubling (the state could refile charges or repeal the dismissal). On the contrary, the dismissal sharpens the stakes of indictments like this. While the dismissal shows how weak the charges were in the first place, the state successfully punished the defendants. Even unsuccessful prosecutions impose a real material and mental cost on defendants and, more generally, they impose a heavy cost on the public at large, forcing all of us to consider whether participation in collective protest or forms of dissent may expose us to repression. From this perspective, it does not matter much that a court may eventually reject prosecutorial overreach when the threat of prosecution may shape the way we behave.

Responding to Repression with Trust and Solidarity

One lesson that we can learn from the historical continuity between each of these episodes is that movements for economic and racial justice, movements against wars and imperialism, and anti-fascism as a concept (through the targeting of “antifa”) have all been described, in different moments, as threats to public order. In each case, the state and its prosecutors have been able to portray individuals participating in these movements as public enemies. The language of conspiracy is especially useful in this process because it turns ordinary features of collective life into suspicion. Each of these historical cases has contributed to the ever-expanding use of conspiracy charges in state repression of social movements. Across these cases, the object of prosecution moves further and further away from identifiable unlawful acts to the social relations that make collective action possible. This past should inform our understanding of the recent cases and remind us not to take at face value the charges against the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15.

Like the cases from the past, the present charges are an attack on political speech and, more broadly, all those who seek to collectively work toward a more just and freer future. Isaac Sant, one of the Minnesota 15, has noted that what they are facing is “not a normal criminal trial; this is a political case, this is political repression against organizers.” The long history of conspiracy charges and state repression suggests that political repression cannot be defeated alone in the courtroom. This is because conspiracy cases do not just target the named defendants; the broader targets are concepts like trust, collective organization, and solidarity, that is to say the very bases of social movements.

Like previous generations of workers faced with political repression, we must seize the current crises as an opportunity to revitalize the labor movement from the ground up. That revitalization is not going to come from union leadership, but from you and other rank-and-file worker-organizers. As the veteran labor organizer Daniel Gross recently noted, in Unions of Our Own (2026), “A truly just society with reliable economic security, where we can live freely on a healthy planet, simply cannot happen without organized workers and liberatory unions.”

This moment threatens our very ability to collectively organize for a better world at the same time as it represents an opportunity for workers everywhere to double down on collective organization, whether it is to keep our fellow workers safe from abductions; to organize toward divestment from companies profiting from war and genocide; or to fight the daily struggles of autonomy, respect, and dignity on the shop floor. In all cases, every victory, big or small, is not a concession, but a privilege that workers have wrested from state and capital. The stakes of not meeting this moment could not be heavier.


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Adi Saleem
Adi Saleem teaches at the University of Michigan.
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Brutality Against Anti-ICE Protests Caused Blindings and Traumatic Brain Injuries: Medical Experts

“The high number of head injuries... suggests a pattern of force directed towards the head. Whether intentionally or recklessly, this violates virtually all use-of-force guidelines.” 

A US Customs and Border Patrol agents pulls the pin out of a canister of tear gas before tossing it towards residents in a residential neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 12, 2026.
(Photo by Madison Thorn/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Jul 14, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

Federal, state, and local law enforcement agents’ brutal attacks on protesters across the US have caused blindings, traumatic brain injuries, permanent disabilities, and other maladies, according to a report released Monday by researchers at Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley.

In an examination of actions taken by authorities in response to demonstrations against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions over the span of a year, the report documents 412 instances of misuse of force against protesters, journalists, and bystanders.

Just over half of the misuses of force were directed at demonstrators, while 43% were directed at journalists, the report finds.

This misuse of force led to 203 documented injuries affecting 119 individuals, including 44 incidents of laceration, 19 traumatic brain injuries, 10 ocular injuries, seven permanent disabilities, and one instance each of amputation and hearing loss.

The report adds that the actual number of injuries inflicted upon anti-ICE demonstrators “is likely far greater” given researchers’ limitations in documenting “invisible injuries” such as chronic pain or hearing loss.

What is particularly troubling, the report emphasizes, is the number of injuries impacting people’s heads.

“The high number of head injuries (19 brain, 10 eye, 1 hearing loss) suggests a pattern of force directed towards the head,” the researchers write. “Whether intentionally or recklessly, this violates virtually all use-of-force guidelines and results in significant harm.”

The report documents 97 incidents of law enforcement officials shooting crowd control projectiles at people’s heads, making it the second-most frequent type of improper force used, following shots taken at close range.

Dr. Rohini Haar, the lead author of the report, said in an interview with The Guardian that she started tracking misuse of force in response to anti-ICE protests after a federal agent shot a pastor in the face at close range during a demonstration in Oakland last year.

“Those weapons can cause harm,” said Haar, who for years has been researching the health impacts of crowd control weapons. “It’s just when they’re used, how they’re used, and if they’re used.”

Tactics used by ICE and other law enforcement agencies have come back into focus over the last week after the fatal ICE shootings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine over the span of less than a week.

Salgado Araujo, 52, was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who had lived in the US for more than three decades and ran a small construction business. Sebastian Guerrero, 26, was a Colombian national who was authorized to work in the US and was shot and killed by ICE in front of his three-year-old daughter.