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This week Tigran Gambaryan the head of financial crime compliance for Binance, the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange found himself in the last place hed ever expected to be: in a Nigerian courtroom pleading for bail.

A former investigator with the IRS, hed spent more than a decade following illicit cryptocurrency transactions back to the people who made them. Rolling up, among others, the alleged founder of AlphaBay, Alexandre Cazes, and Silk Roads Dread Pirate Roberts, Ross Ulbricht.

But now, after a spectacularly bad turn of events, Gambaryan has found himself at the center of a battle between his company and regulators of the Nigerian government. A Nigerian court has charged him personally for a roster of alleged crimes that Binance is accused of committing, and it is unclear how a middle manager, a former cop, has ended up shouldering the blame. Gambaryan has pleaded not guilty. He says hes done nothing wrong.

Even so, Nigerian authorities have held Gambaryan under guard since late February. Click Here spoke to more than a dozen current and former IRS and FBI agents who either knew Gambaryan well or had worked with him, and they all voiced the same concern: Why isnt the government doing more for one of its own?

Youre leaving a fellow law enforcement officer, even though hes out of the game, kind of hanging, said Matt Price, a former IRS agent who worked with Tigran on cases and at Binance. We cant believe theyre not doing anything. And while his plight appears to have been elevated inside the Biden administration in recent days, agents are asking what took them so long?

I have done nothing wrong, Gambaryan said in a cell phone video he filmed back in March. Ive been a cop my whole life. Im asking the United States government to assist me I need your help guys. I dont know if Ill get out of this without your help. Please help.

Gambaryans cell phone video summed in 40 seconds what is otherwise a very complicated series of events. Hello my name is Tigran Gambaryan and Im the head of financial crime compliance at Binance, it began. I have been detained by the Nigerian government for a month and I dont know what is going to happen to me after today.

While Gambaryan recorded the message, it was clear he was worried guards would stop him or grab his phone because just a few hours earlier he had awoken from a nap to learn that the Binance colleague who had been detained with him had somehow escaped. I had nothing to do with it, I was not involved in any of it, he said in the video.

Nadeem Anjarwalla was Binances regional manager in charge of Africa. He and Gambaryan were detained by the authorities at the same time. But the afternoon of that video, according to three people familiar with what happened, Gambaryan found a Post-it note from Anjarwalla that essentially said he was sorry, but he was making a break for it. Anjarwalla had put pillows under the covers of his bed so guards would think he was still there.

While it is unclear exactly how he got out of the government compound, it appears he asked guards if he could go to a nearby mosque to say prayers for Ramadan, and while he was in the mosque, he gave them the slip. It was left to Gamabaryan to break it to his captors that Anjarwalla was gone. The Nigerian government now claims that it is in negotiations with Kenya to have Anjarwalla extradited.

Their anger and embarrassment at having lost Binances country manager seems to have fallen mostly on Gambaryan. Within days of the escape, the Nigerian authorities charged him, Anjarwalla and Binance itself with tax evasion and money laundering.

The fact that Gambaryan found himself on the receiving end of all of this is particularly ironic because his job at Binance was to act as a liaison between law enforcement and the company and he came to Nigeria in the first place to teach local investigators how to track shady transactions back to the criminals behind them.

The timing of the Nigerian governments decision to detain Gambaryan and Anjarwalla in February came just months after the Justice Department reached a plea agreement with Binances founder and former CEO, Changpeng Zhao. Zhao had agreed to plead guilty to a roster of charges including tax evasion and money laundering related to lax oversight at the exchange.

Zhao, known as CZ, agreed to step down as CEO, surrender his passport and pay a multibillion-dollar fine. The announcement, rumored for months, rocked the crypto world and, some observers say, may have planted an idea into the minds of some Nigerian officials.

CZ was sort of a cult figure within the industry, said Jacob Silverman, who wrote a book with Ben McKenzie on the crypto industry entitled Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.

He said that people had looked up to CZ because he had managed to build the biggest crypto exchange in the world at breakneck speed, though he had had a reputation for, you know, to use the old [Mark] Zuckerberg phase, move fast and break things.

Silverman said there was always a whiff of something being not-quite-on-the-up-and-up about Zhao. Among other things, he would never travel to the U.S. He lived in the United Arab Emirates, but he was from Canada.

People kept wondering, whats this guy up to in Dubai? Silverman said, adding that kind of mystery was rife in the early days of the industry. There was a sense that the existing rules, especially the existing rules around banking and how money moves shouldnt really apply. And thats certainly what animated a lot of the overseas growth of crypto, especially in East Asia and in Africa. There was this notion that we should be able to move money wherever we want to without really much heed for how were doing it or how much were sending or to whom.

In its case against Zhao, the Justice Department said the former CEO prioritized Binances growth, market share and profits over U.S. law. He admitted to facilitating billions of dollars in cryptocurrency transactions without adhering to some of the most fundamental rules of banking. Binance didnt implement anti-money laundering protocols or adhere to know your customer procedures, which require that a bank or financial institution should know basic information about their customers.

For several years after Binance first opened in 2017, you could register a Binance account with just an email address and a password, said Silverman. And CZ knew that they were flagrantly in violation of Know Your Customer and anti-money laundering laws and regulations. The Justice Department said as much when it charged Zhao, using internal texts and emails as proof that the attitude was do it now, and ask for forgiveness later.

In early January, just weeks after the Zhao plea agreement was made public, Gambaryan was part of a group of Binance employees who traveled to Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to meet with regulators from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

It was more of a training event with the EFCC, this is something that Tigran did quite a bit, said Price. He did these trips a lot and I had done it quite a bit. You come in and talk to law enforcement people, it's usually a soft approach and you're trying to build relationships and trying to train them how to do crypto investigations.

So in other words, Gambaryan was there to teach the Nigerian regulators how to track cryptocurrency transactions back to the bad guys. But the January trip, the first of two Gambaryan would make in the first part of 2024, took a bad turn. Nigerian officials said they were concerned that Binance was evading taxes and violating anti-money laundering rules.

A Nigerian official allegedly took someone from the Binance team aside during the early January trip. The official said that regulatory authorities were planning an investigation of the company and that the cost of settling the companys legal problems would come to some $150 million. The authorities floated the idea of detaining some of the people in the delegation.

Obviously Tigran said, shit, I got to get out of here, said Price, adding that Gambaryan canceled his remaining appointments and hopped a plane back to the States.

Yuki Gambaryan, Tigrans wife, said she heard about it all in almost real time. He texted me, saying that, Hey, this is just a heads up, but things are not going well right now and we might get detained. So I was aware of it.

Then, just weeks later, Gambaryan got an invitation from the Nigerian government to meet with regulators again. Gambaryan told his friends that he felt he had an obligation to go. I asked his wife whether she was worried when he left for that second trip at the end of February.

I was. One hundred percent. Everybody was, she said.

Soon after officials detained Gambaryan and Anjarwalla, they asked Binance to turn over all the Nigerian transaction data they had. Local newspaper reports then said the government had limited the request to the top 100 users. Central bank officials then began accusing Binance of manipulating the exchange rate of the local currency, the naira, and said the company couldnt account for tens of billions of dollars in transactions.

All of which Binance has disputed.

The Justice Departments indictment against the former CEO of Binance showed Zhao and his lieutenants had a penchant for rule-breaking. You had, for example, employees of Binance joking about the price of an AK-47 and as if they knew about it in the context of a conversation of terrorist groups using Binance, said Silverman, the author of that book on cryptocurrencies. I think the company, at least at the top levels, definitely had a sense that some pretty bad people were using the platform.

Binance has been left to convince skeptics that they have changed. Richard Teng, the companys new CEO, is a former Singaporean regulator. He hired people like Gambaryan to help redeem the brand. Nigerian regulators are either unconvinced, or opportunistic. It is hard not to see echoes of the charges the Justice Department brought against Zhao in what Gambaryan is battling in Nigerian courts now.

Nigeria has the second largest cryptocurrency adoption rate in the world, after India. Its crypto transactions topped $56.7 billion last year, according to Chainalysis, a blockchain data platform.

We spoke to half a dozen people close to Tigrans case in both the U.S. and Nigeria and they say there may have been something else about the Zhao plea agreement that caught the eye of Nigerian officials. CZ agreed to pay a record $4.3 billion in fines and restitution to the U.S. government one of the biggest fines in corporate history.

Silverman said it sends another message. I think that indicates the gravity of the situation and maybe the amount of money sloshing around, he said.

It doesnt seem like a coincidence that days after Nigerian officials detained the two Binance executives in a government compound, they mused in the local press about potential billion-dollar fines.

Nigerias case against Gambaryan is about more than just trying to hold Binance and the cryptocurrency industry to account. There is a larger context: Nigeria is in the midst of a full-blown economic crisis.

The numbers tell the story. Inflation in Nigeria is now well over 30 percent. Food prices are up even more than that and the local currency, the naira, has declined in value against the U.S. dollar by some 40 percent since the beginning of the year. Just to keep up with inflation, Nigerians have started flocking to cryptocurrencies and trading stablecoins, which are pegged to the U.S. dollar amongst themselves, peer-to-peer.

Binance just facilitates those trades, it doesnt control them. But it has angered Nigerias central bank nevertheless. According to Feyi Fawehimni, a Nigerian scholar who has been writing about the nations economic and political affairs for more than a decade, it was easy to blame Binance for economic problems.

People who wanted simple answers simply turned on them and said, Oh, OK, this economy is struggling. Nobody has dollars, whos fault is this? he said. The dollar rate has jumped so significantly and the central bank had no control, so Binance became a kind of scapegoat.

Central bankers didnt want to blame the people trading naira, so they blamed the Binance platform instead. These are unpopular people, right? he said. Nobody likes Binance. The US government doesn't like them. The U.K. government doesn't like them. Everyone is suspicious of them as a crypto platform across the world so someone in the government made the calculation that if we go after these people, nobody's going to really fight for them.

And the calculation was right. Gambaryan has given critics of Binance a human shape, a shorthand not just for crypto and all the problems it has caused in Nigeria. They didnt have a former CEO to blame so they settled for a compliance officer.

Nearly all the current and former IRS agents we spoke to for this story said Nigeria wasnt alone in being unable to see the difference between Gambaryan and the company he worked for: the U.S. government seemed to be doing that too.

It wasnt until mid-March that the U.S. State Department seemed to focus on the case. Tigran's wife said he had six visits from embassy personnel in Abuja while he was being held in the government compound. And theyve visited him once since hed been moved to Kuje prison. They seem kind of out of touch to me, she said. They don't seem to understand our sense of urgency.

We spoke to four people at the State Department familiar with the case. They declined to be identified by name because they are not authorized to speak. But they claimed that the State Department didnt like to interfere with legal proceedings in other countries and quickly added that Binance wasnt just any company, before mentioning the Zhao plea agreement and the parade of cases against the industry more generally.

At the end of March, after Gambaryan had been in Nigerian detention for over a month, his case was flagged at the Justice Departments Office of International Affairs. Its part of the Criminal Division and is supposed to help the department sort through international criminal matters. It is unclear what the response to that query was.

But the rank-and-file agents we spoke to all agreed that the Gambaryan case was moving slowly. The thought is that if he was an ExxonMobil or Apple executive detained overseas, would the response have been quicker?

The only official email that we discovered that went out about Gambaryan among the rank and file came from a special agent in the Cyber Crimes Unit in D.C. It was sent to a small group of agents, nearly all of whom either knew Tigran well or had worked with him. Two people who had seen the email described its contents as mentioning that Tigran had been detained and that he would always be part of the law enforcement family. There was no mention of elevating this up the chain of command, but the email did suggest that everyone keep Yuki and Tigran in their thoughts and prayers.

I guess the best word for me would be, I think, it is sad, said John Baker, who was at the IRS with Tigran and retired from the government a couple of years ago, so was at liberty to say on the record what other agents told us privately. Originally I was thinking he's well known, so well regarded that somehow the United States would get involved to kind of figure out what's going on. He has friends in various agencies, including the FBI or the U.S. Attorney's Office. But it sounds like most people don't even know whats happened to him or haven't heard.

Go after the companies and the people making the decisions, he said. But when we're dealing with people who are, you know, middle management, employees, people who have no way to make a decision other than to receive a paycheck, that's crazy to me.

The CEO of Binance, Richard Teng, said on Bloomberg television last week that the company is talking to the Nigerian government to get Gambaryan back. Our key priority is to get Tigran home safely, right? he said on the sidelines of a cryptocurrency conference in Dubai. Tigran is a person of the highest integrity, people that know him know that he has devoted his entire lifetime previously with U.S. agencies. We are giving him and his family all the support needed and our key priority, our prayers, is to bring Tigran home safely as soon as possible.

So given all of this one could be forgiven for wondering why Gambaryan returned to Nigeria at the end of February after that earlier close call. Hindsight is always 20-20. But his friends say that when the Nigerian government invited him back for that fateful February meeting, Gambaryan thought he saw an opening to make things right.

Former IRS agent Price said that was just the way Gambaryan was. He believed he could solve it, he said. Knowing Tigrans personality, I certainly could see him believing he would be the only one that could fix it.

On Friday, Gambaryans tax trial was postponed until May 17. A bail hearing is supposed to resume April 23. Chengpeng Zhao, the former Binance CEO, is supposed to be sentenced on April 30th. He is facing up to 18 months in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, but prosecutors have said they may be asking for a stiffer sentence.

Excerpt from:

US glacial response to Nigeria's detention of former IRS crypto investigator rankles federal agents - The Record from Recorded Future News

My good friend in Kiev (former Soviet Union), Slava Pilman, was a promising and struggling visual artist. In the early 1970s, he admired Western art of the mid-19thand early 20thcenturies, but he had no passion and tolerance for the Socialist Realism style.

From about the early 1930s to the mid-late 1980s, Socialist Realism was the official cultural doctrine of the Soviet Union. This style mandated an idealized representation of Soviet life and cultural traditions under socialism in literature and the visual arts. The doctrine was first proclaimed by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, which approved the standardized methods for the Soviet cultural production in all media.

Soon after the October Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Vladimir Lenin laid down his principles on what purpose visual art must serve for the working masses. He believed that it was important that visual art was no longer a domain of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie.

Then, socialist realism was seen as the means of educating people; so, any deviance was often punishable by the Soviet Secret Police with varying harsh outcomes.

Art belongs to the people, he stated. It must leave its deepest roots in the very thick of the working masses. (Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin, January 1924).

Writers and artists were required to follow the party line on style and substance, especially under Joseph Stalinspolitical rule (19221953). Moscow University and Moscow Metro are clear symbols of Stalinists architecture style. Then, socialist realism was seen as the means of educating people; so, any deviance was often punishable by the Soviet Secret Police with varying harsh outcomes.

During the Nikita Khrushchev political era (19571964), literature and visual art were still stagnant. Khrushchev declared:As long as I am President of the Council of Ministers, we are going to support genuine art. We arent going to give a kopeck [cent] for pictures painted by jackasses. History can be our judge. For the time being history has put us at the head of this state, and we have to answer for everything that goes on in it. Therefore, we are going to maintain a strict policy in art. (Source:Encounter (London), April 1963).

Leonid Brezhnevs stagnant political era (19641982) in the Soviet Union continued to be sanctioned by only one artistic style Socialist Realism. Paintings and sculptures emphasized idealized figures heroically enduring hardships on a relentless crusade for progress and prosperity toward delusional communism.

So, Slava Pilman, as well as many other intellectuals in the Soviet Union, was trapped in the illusive socialist reality. I kept advising Slava to compromise and adjust his artistic style to the existing socialist environment, Slava, paint cows, peasants and workers, otherwise you will starve to death. Slavas usual response was, I am a free artist, and I will paint what I see and think, not what they want me to see and think. Slava, you are free from a job, I reminded him, and you are going to die in the Gulag as a free man.

editors of the major newspapers in the former Soviet Union, for the most part, were political appointees, with the connection to the State Secret Police. Their job was to suppress freedom of speech and advocate socialist doctrines.

I left the Soviet Union on March 16th, 1977, under the status of a political refugee; and I lost track of my friend Slava Pilman. One day, however, Slavas predicament re-appeared in my memories when in 1987 the Soviet delegation visited Juneau. Then, I was teaching archaeology, history and Russian Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast; I was frequently called to translate/assist for various delegations from the Soviet Union, visiting Alaska.

That delegation consisted of six high-ranking Soviet officials; it was sponsored by Rotary International. My close friend, the late Bill Ruddy and his wife Kathy Kolhorst hosted this group. Vladimir Nadein, a long-time letters editor of theIzvestiya(News) newspaper, was one of the delegates in this group. Then,Izvestiyawas the second largest newspaper afterPravda(Truth) in the Soviet Union, with a circulation of several million copies and all content tightly controlled by the Communist Party watch dogs.

One day, Nadein asked me, Sasha (Alexander), is there any way we can visit the State Archives? I am curious if we can locate any existing first-hand documents related to the Alaska-Siberia Lend-Lease Program during WWII. Per his request, I took him to the State Library and in about ten-fifteen minutes the librarian brought us several original documents of the ALSIB program. Remarkable, Nadein proclaimed. It would take months just to get permission to request the information in our State archives. He examined the documents attentively and took some notes.

In fact, the editors of the major newspapers in the former Soviet Union, for the most part, were political appointees, with the connection to the State Secret Police. Their job was to suppress freedom of speech and advocate socialist doctrines.

I have never expected that todays progressive American media, including those in Alaska, would resemble far-left Soviet style practices poorly edited publications, unchecked primary sources and, periodically, publication of poorly written and misleading articles. No surprise that newspapers in Alaska and around the nation are losing their readership.

As my good friends noted in our private correspondence: Every day, I wonder and despair about the condition of the media. Ive always said, why isnt lying against the law? It is so common, not only in the media, but in our government, which has failed us miserably.

Indeed, our American media is dominated by far-left ideology. Once known for their pursuit of the factual truth with an open mind, they are now indoctrinated by progressive dogma in our illiberal journalism schools and universities.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

Click here to support the Alaska Watchman.

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OPINION: Soviet-style control of art and media is not so foreign as you might think - Alaska Watchman

After intense backlash to his guitar smashing at Coachella, AP Dhillon has withdrawn from the festival's second weekend, citing scheduling conflicts.

On April 14, Dhillon smashed his metallic gold ESP LTD Kirk Hammett V on stage, an act that received considerable backlash online. Since the controversial performance, however, Dhillon has clarified why he smashed his guitar.

In photos shared by Dhillon on social media, a backdrop is clearly visible, stating Justice for Sidhu Moosewala. He wrote: The media is controlled and I'm out of control. Dhillon also shared a video of Kurt Cobain smashing his guitar.

Sidhu Moosewala was an Indian rapper and singer known for his contributions to Punjabi music and cinema. Some of the themes he covered in his music are considered controversial in India.

However, he was widely considered a key figure in mainstreaming Punjabi music at a global level. In May 2022, Moosewala was shot and killed in broad daylight by unidentified attackers at the age of 28. The murder, later attributed to a well-known gang, was committed shortly after the government temporarily withdrew his security cover.

Despite the controversial act, AP Dhillon continues the long lineage of artists smashing their guitars in protest, anger, or as a public statement.

One of the first guitar-smashing acts was actually a performance art piece by DIAS, intended "to focus attention on the element of destruction in Happenings and other art forms, and to relate this destruction in society".

All the latest guitar news, interviews, lessons, reviews, deals and more, direct to your inbox!

In 1962, experimental artist Robin Page threw his guitar and kicked it out of the London Institute of Contemporary Arts' front door. This allegedly inspired Pete Townshend to incorporate guitar smashing into his performances.

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The media is controlled and I'm out of control: Artist who smashed guitar at Coachella pulls out after backlash - Guitar World

Bulletin writer Annmarie Timmins will be reporting from Eagle Pass, Texas, this week, in collaboration with New Hampshire Public Radio, while shadowing the 15 National Guard soldiers sent by Gov. Chris Sununu to assist with border patrol. You can find her reporting at New Hampshire Bulletin and NHPR, both on air and online.

Gov. Chris Sununu has put nearly $2.3 million into tackling what he calls an illegal immigration crisis on two fronts: $1.4 million for a law enforcement task force along the states 58-mile border with Canada, and $850,000 toward this months deployment of 15 National Guard troops to Eagle Pass, Texas.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers and candidates are making illegal immigration a top issue in the State House and along the campaign trail, often making their case with misinformation and untested anecdotal evidence.

Every towns a border town, they say.

Its resonating with Granite State voters. Last month, nearly 43 percent of respondents told the UNH Survey Center they are very or somewhat concerned about undocumented migrants consuming state resources, costing taxpayers money, and committing crimes.

But are those concerns backed up by data and facts? Often no, and in some cases data contradicts illegal immigration claims.

The southern border is well over 2,000 miles from New Hampshire. Heres why the states Republicans are making illegal immigration a top campaign issue here:

Last month, 43 percent of Granite Staters polled by the UNH Survey Center said illegal immigration is a very serious or somewhat serious problem in New Hampshire. That jumped to 83 percent when asked about illegal immigration in the United States.

They cited the taking of resources from Americans, costs to taxpayers, and crime as their top concerns about people living in the country illegally.

Voters hoping to fact-check candidates claims are in for a challenge because theres endless data, and its complicated to decipher.

For example, Republican gubernatorial candidate Chuck Morse of Salem claimed in a campaign email last week that 10 million people have crossed the southern border illegally since President Joe Biden took office. The data contradicts that.

First, U.S. Customs and Border Protection tracks encounters, not people, and does not account for people encountered more than once.

Next, between the start of Bidens term and March, that agency reported 9.64 million encounters nationwide, with 8 million at the southern border. And, those numbers include people who may go on to be granted asylum.

Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a media briefing last week that 70 to 80 percent of asylum seekers clear the first hurdle, which is persuading a border patrol agent they have a credible fear of death, torture, or persecution due to their race, religion, or beliefs. About 40 percent of those people are ultimately granted asylum by a court, he said.

Heres what we know about undocumented immigrants in New Hampshire.

The CATO Institute, a public policy research organization, reported in 2020 that data collected by the Texas Department of Public Safety showed that the criminal conviction rate of undocumented people in that state was 45 percent below that of those born in the U.S. In February, the institute published another study that found undocumented immigrants in Texas commit homicide at slightly lower rates than native-born Americans, 2.4 percent compared to 2.8 percent.

Sununu cited human trafficking and terrorism as reasons to beef up security at the southern border. Fentanly overdoses prompted him to send New Hampshire Guard soldiers to Texas, he said. In 2022, fentanyl caused 224 of the states 463 drug overdose deaths and contributed to many more.

You can see exactly what is coming from the southern border and trace right up into virtually every city and town, he told lawmakers in February, when he asked for $850,000 to deploy the troops to Eagle Pass. Its very real. Its impactful, and its affecting families today.

Drug smuggling has also driven the debate in the State House when lawmakers take up bills aimed at tightening immigration enforcement.

What is almost never said is that its mostly Americans, not undocumented migrants, smuggling fentanyl into the country.

In 2022, U.S. Sentencing Commission data showed that Americans accounted for nearly 90 percent of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers.

That same year, 96 percent of fentanyl seizures occurred at official ports of entry, not along migration routes between checkpoints, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports analyzed by the Washington Post. And nearly all those seizures almost 90 percent occurred in California and Texas.

The contradiction between facts and talking points has led Democrats to see Sununus deployment to Texas and Republican claims about undocumented migrants as political stunts.

I think it is part of former President Trump telling Congress not to pass the bipartisan (immigration) bill because its an issue he wants to campaign on, said Sen. Cindy Rosenwald, a Nashua Democrat who voted against Sununus $850,000 request. The border just seems to get dragged in a lot even when you think the subject matter is not about that. So, I think its all part of feeding into former President Trumps desire to beat up President Biden about this.

Sending National Guard soldiers to the Texas border isnt the states only response to the surge in undocumented migrants entering the county.

House and Senate Republicans are backing a bill now that would prohibit New Hampshire communities from adopting so-called sanctuary city policies that prohibit their police from cooperating with federal immigration agencies.

If history is any indication, the bill, which passed the Senate along party lines in March, may have a tougher fight in the House, where Republicans hold only a seven-seat majority. Even in years when Republicans controlled both chambers, lawmakers have rejected nearly a dozen similar bills since 2006.

Senate Bill 563 would require local police to make their best effort to comply with the enforcement of federal immigration law. The bills opponents include not just the ACLU of New Hampshire and church leaders but several police chiefs who worry taking on immigration enforcement would undermine their relationships with immigrant communities.

Sen. Bill Gannon, a Sandown Republican and the bills sponsor, sees it differently. He told a House committee Wednesday that the bill is a necessary public safety tool to identify what he called bad hombres whove committed crimes and are in the country illegally. Its a phrase former President Donald Trump introduced during a 2016 debate.

Im sure most (undocumented immigrants) are looking for a better life, just like all our grandparents, and great grandparents were, he said. And theyre here to raise their families and live the American dream. Unfortunately, theyve not been vetted.

Gannon cited the arrest last year in Rye of a man who had fled Brazil, where hed been convicted of multiple murders.

He was working on a painting crew, eating lunch with everyone, going out to restaurants, and driving through my towns, Gannon said. If you have individual towns (adopting sanctuary city policies), youre putting the other towns at risk.

Gannon cited Keene and Lebanon as two cities that have adopted policies that say local police officers shall not cooperate with the federal authorities.

That is not wholly accurate.

Keene and Lebanon have adopted broad welcoming policies, not sanctuary city policies, said their city managers. Neither policy prohibits the police from cooperating with federal immigration officials in criminal cases.

Weve been accused of harboring terrorists, which is completely untrue, said Lebanon City Manager Shaun Mulholland, a former police chief in Allenstown. If people are wanted for terrorism, which is a crime, we are certainly going to detain them, and were going to turn them over to the federal authorities.

What neither city will do is cooperate with federal immigration officials to enforce civil immigration rules, including detaining someone based solely on their immigration status. It is a civil offense not a crime to be in the country without documentation unless the person is here after being deported.

Lebanons policy also prohibits its police officers from allowing federal immigration authorities to use the station to investigate civil immigration cases. Mulholland, like the police chiefs who penned a letter to senators, said local law enforcement has no legal authority to enforce federal immigration law.

Mulholland said he would have explained that had he heard from Gannon or any other senator who said the city is impeding the enforcement of federal immigration laws.

They never asked, What are you doing there? he said, which is very very frustrating when they make allegations of this nature.

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Republicans have made illegal immigration a top issue in NH sometimes with misinformation New Hampshire Bulletin - New Hampshire Bulletin

When I met Ira in January, her top priority was getting out of Texas before S.B. 4, a new state law that authorizes state forces to take over immigration enforcement, took effect.

Ira currently has a few months remaining on a one-year parolea legal status that offers temporary authorization to live in the United Statesand is working on her asylum application to defend her and her children against deportation. She told me she had escaped Mexico after she took a bullet in her abdomen protecting her daughter from a cartel shooting. Yet Ira, resolute and deeply competent, could not figure out how to leave Texas. She said her savings were drained by the medical bills from the shooting and the journey to the United States. (Slate is not identifying her by her full name because her asylum case is ongoing.)

If you dont have a job, you dont have a shot [leaving]; without a work permit, you dont have a shot at a decent job, she told me. It costs $410 to apply for a work permit in the United States.

Ira is afraid that if she and her six childrenthree of them her own, three her partnersdo not make it out of the state before S.B. 4 is fully implemented, she could be jailed or deported, even though she has a temporary status and a strong asylum claim. When youre Mexican, people think youre illegal, she told me. (Ive translated her interviews from Spanish.) They wont stop you, she paused, pointedlyIm a white naturalized citizenyou have the face of an American, the speech, everything. But imagine me! I follow the law, but they can stop me because I look illegal.

Priscilla Orta, director of Project Corazon, has been advising people to leave Texas if they can. New immigrants may be able to cross the border into Texas, she said, but they just wont leave. Its Hotel California up in here. (I worked with Orta at Project Corazon, which is run by Lawyers for Good Government, in an independent clinic as a law student this winter. I met Ira after she messaged Project Corazon on Facebook, and am currently working on her asylum case.)

Before S.B. 4, people who crossed couldif they fled a credible threat and found legal assistance within one year of arrivingapply for asylum as a defense against deportation. Those who could prove that they had been persecuted had a shot at a permanent status; at the very least, while their cases were pending, they could live and work in the United States.

If S.B. 4 takes hold, these limited rights would be crushed.

S.B. 4 allows state forces to police immigration by creating three new Texas state crimesIllegal Entry, Illegal Reentry, and Refusal to Return to Foreign Nationwith penalties ranging from up to six months in jail for a first offense to up to 20 years in prison for repeat offenses. Those convicted are to be deported by the state of Texas to Mexico after serving their sentence. Unlike current federal immigration law, S.B. 4s state deportation process could apply to people in the middle of their immigration proceedingslike those applying for a family visa because they have a U.S.-citizen child, or soliciting protection from removal because of a high likelihood of post-deportation torture. Someone like Irawhose parole expires in just a couple of monthscould be deported while waiting for a hearing to prove that she will be killed upon return.

S.B. 4 will produce a second radical departure from the status quoone that worries Ira even more. While S.B. 4s author has claimed the law is targeted only at recent arrivals, as written it allows police to question the status of anyone suspected of being a nonU.S. citizen. Immigrants and immigrant rights advocates fear that this will lead to unfettered racial profiling across the state.

Theres something very strange in the S.B. 4 law, Ira told me over a WhatsApp voice message after a flurry of research on the bill. What is a police officer going to base stopping you and asking about your immigration statuswhat are they going to base it on? On my face, on how I look? Do I look like an illegal?

Over the past month, the law has wavered in and out of effect as its worked its way through the courts. S.B. 4 was signed in December of 2023 and blocked by a district judge in Austin. The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily allowed its enforcement in March 2024 despite ongoing challenges in lower courts; hours later, the 5th Circuit issued a stay, blocking the law again while litigation proceeded. S.B. 4 is currently dormant, and advocates expect an expedited ruling on its legality this summer.

But while the law was briefly in effect, it was already destructive to immigrant communities in Texasas Orta put it, the chaos is its own damage. Ira told me that the immigrant families she spoke to at the border are afraid to leave their homes. Theyre scared that police could stop them and arrest themespecially, she told me, people in mixed-status families, who could be deported while their children remain in Texas.

Its unsurprising that families at the border are wary of S.B. 4. Theyve been living through Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar campaign in which Gov. Greg Abbott, citing the failure of federal immigration enforcement, sent thousands of Texas troopers to the border in a sort of on-the-ground rough draft of S.B. 4. The Texas troopers who were mobilized under the operation arrested tens of thousands of brown and Black immigrants putatively for trespassing violations; in reality, the scheme allows Texas troopers to arrest immigrants for the act of crossing into Texas. This catch and jail system allowed for the mass incarceration of immigrants under the auspices of existing state trespassing laws.

Operation Lone Star paints a dark picture of the future that awaits immigrants detained under S.B. 4. Under Operation Lone Star, the state put thousands of immigrants in prison to wait indefinitely for slow, capricious criminal proceedings. Detainees languished in cells for months as they waited for an overwhelmed and ad hoc criminal system to even file charges against them; even if they received release orders or finished serving their trespassing sentence, they were often kept in jail long after.

As detailed in a 50-page complaint filed with the Department of Justice, under Operation Lone Star, detained immigrants often did not receive counsela mandate for indigent criminal detainees. They also faced unchecked racial harassment by state prison officials, and lived with what the Texas Jail Project concluded was an essentially nonexistent medical care system.

The judges in the small courts in charge of Operation Lone Star casescourts accustomed to serving small rural populations and suddenly flooded with thousands of trespassing casesdid not have the capacity to hear the cases. Despite massively constrained resources, three rural county judges were fired in retaliation for authorizing the release of some Operation Lone Star detainees.

Advocates believe that S.B. 4 will significantly increase arrests from Operation Lone Star, which already strained the system well past its breaking point. They also fear that the magistrate courtswhich, under S.B. 4, will replace the county judgesare even more rogue. The Texas magistrate system is the Wild West of adjudication, according to Orta, who has had clients with sudden magistration hearings that took place at 2:30 in the morning. In rural impoverished areas like the [Rio Grande] Valley, Orta explained, magistrates are usually not attorneys, and are not necessarily knowledgeable about immigration law.

In Texas, magistrate courts are tasked with making custody termination (setting a bond or bail) and determining whether there was probable cause for an arrest.What worries advocates the most is that at magistration, those subjected to S.B. 4 will be offered two options: voluntary return to Mexico, or prosecution and detentionand they wont have a lawyer to explain the legal implications of either choice, or consider the best course of action in their individual case.

S.B. 4 seems designed to enshrineand enlargethe reality of Operation Lone Star: people being detained for months or years without understanding the criminal charge that got them there; without talking to a lawyer or learning their rights and due process protections; without medical care, phone access, or protection from racial harassment.

Yet in one critical regard, its even worse. Advocates worry that without knowing their full rights and faced with a lengthy sentence, even people who could face serious harm if they return voluntarily will choose to do so. Even those who stick it out will, after their sentence is served, face state deportation anyway.

This is where things get really sticky. Texas is proposing that it will take over the federal business of deportationbut deportation is done at the federal level rather than the state level for a reason. Its is built on extensive negotiations with other countries, who have to agree to accept and process U.S. deportees. Texas has no such agreements in place; the Mexican government has stated that it would refuse to accept anyone deported by Texan authorities.

Right now, the U.S. government is the one that has agreements and procedures in place to execute deportations, Denisse Molina, an organizer and outreach coordinator at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told me. Its unclear how, exactly, Texas plans to pull off the complex binational deportation process. To this day, [Texas] will not give us exact procedures of how this law is supposed to be enforced, she said.

If Mexico holds firm, its border officials or police could turn back those ordered to cross the bridge. Those who are turned back could, under S.B. 4, face Texas state prosecution for reentry or refusal to comply with the deportation order, which carries a sentence of up to 20 years.

In other words, the act of crossing the border to seek asylum could end in decades of incarceration. Or, as Orta put it, Mexico says no; Texas says 20 years. Twenty years in prison because a country that you cant controlthat youre maybe not a citizen ofwont take you back.

Texas has said that it will prosecute refusal to comply with a deportation order only for those not forced to return by Mexico. Nothing in S.B. 4s text, however, ensures that those turned around by Mexico will not be prosecutedeven inadvertently.

According to Aron Thorn, a senior attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project working on the S.B. 4 litigation, its impossible to know what will happen without seeing the way that its actually enforced on the ground.Regardless of how Texas enforces their proposed reentry or refusal to return laws, Thorn explained, leaving the United States has a ton of immigration consequences.

Thorn is concerned not only about the potential carceral consequences of state deportations, but the federal law consequences for people Texas pressures into voluntarily departing (or actually deports) from the United Stateswho most likely do not know that they are incurring a lifelong ban on entering the United States. People have a lot to lose, and they dont always realize that, he said.

The threat of S.B. 4 has already transformed immigrant communities in Texas. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of it could change the realities of immigrant communities throughout the nation.

Gabriela Mata, an Austin-based migrant- and Indigenous-rights activist, warned that Abbott is already setting off a Rube Goldberg machinestyle chain reaction into the rest of the country. In fact, at least 7 Republican-controlled states are attempting to pass similar bills. Iowa has already passed a bill that would make it a crime to enter the state after having been deported or denied entrance into the United States.

Texas will not be the last to try to take over immigration policingnor is it the first. S.B. 4 has sparked some comparison with Arizonas S.B. 1070, and for good reason. Bothbills order state police to check the immigrationstatus of people suspected of being undocumented; both attempt to create a state crime targeting undocumented immigrants, and to give police the power to arrest people suspected of being in the United States undocumented.

In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down most of Arizonas S.B. 1070, allowing Arizona police to demand proof of status but prohibiting Arizona from arresting people or creating state crimes for failure to carry papers. In the resulting opinion, Arizona v. United States, the Supreme Court held states cannot take over the federal governments control of immigration, articulating the principle of federalism that has been at the center of lawsuits over S.B. 4.

This precedent is critical, but its not the whole story. As S.B. 4 teeters on the edge of taking effect, its important to recognize that this law, like S.B. 1070, is not just about federal versus state functions. Its about the final erosion of the limited rightsdue process, criminal defense, access to asylum proceedings for those who fear persecution or deaththat immigrants receive in the United States. That these protections are threadbare now does not undermine the massive impact that their removal will have on a community already at the margins, and the massive damage their newly exposed frailty has already caused.

The Supreme Court may well strike down S.B. 4after all, the law directly contradicts its holding in Arizona v. United States. Whatever the Supreme Court decides, however, the damage of S.B. 4 is ongoingand will continue as long as immigrants in Texas face a future in which their basic rights to be free of arbitrary detention and discrimination are not secure.

Most importantly, those currently in Texas without a permanent immigration status are in no position to wait for the vagaries of judicial intervention.

S.B. 4 is a very strong law because many families are going to be broken, and its supposed to be that here in the United States, one protects the unity of the family, Ira told me. What will happen to the children born here once their parents go?

A few weeks ago, Ira mobilized the resources to leave the Texas border and relocate to Houston with her partner and their six children. Its not enoughshe wants to make it to Massachusetts or Illinoisbut shes closer, and while S.B. 4 remains dormant, she has a little time.

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S.B. 4: This Texas immigration law is worse than you think. - Slate