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On June 26, 1975, a little before noon, FBI agents Ronald Arthur Williams and Jack Ross Coler were shot to death on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The man accused of killing them, Leonard Peltier, was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment in 1975. His sentence was commuted to indefinite house arrest by Joe Biden shortly before the former president left office.
There are volumes of material on the Peltier case: the man at the centre is seen by some as an international hero, and by others as a hardened criminal who deserved to rot in prison. A 1983 book by Peter Mathiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse made the case, convincing to many, that Peltier’s conviction was unjustified but, more damningly for the FBI, provided historical context for everything that happened on that day and charged coverups and more on the part of the agency. Libel suits against the publisher, Viking, kept the book out of print for a decade until it was republished in 1993.
I read Mathiessen’s book around the time it was republished, for a long-ago research project, and while I can’t recall all the details, my long-standing impression has always been that the entire incident, while tragic because of the lives lost, was also a giant mess. Mathiessen’s book correctly makes the case that the imprisoning of Leonard Peltier was in part a coverup of institutional ineptitude and that releasing him would force the FBI to acknowledge a series of mistakes. The Pine Ridge shooting is less about guilt versus innocence and more about the tangled and complicated history of Native American reservations’ relationship to the United States government.
Peltier was, at the time, a member of the American Indian Movement, a status that made him a symbol of many issues at once, including the need for prison abolition and the centuries-long degradation and violent incarceration of Native Americans in the United States. He is seen by many as a political prisoner.
Mahmoud Khalil was kidnapped from outside his home on March 8, 2025 and, in a powerful statement dictated over the phone, pointed out that he is a political prisoner. The ICE agents who showed up to apprehend him without a warrant claimed they were there to revoke his student visa when he was in fact a lawful permanent resident married to a citizen. (He was taken away for exercising his right to free speech.) Just today, June 11, “A federal judge granted Mahmoud Khalil’s habeas corpus petition and barred the Trump administration from continuing to seek his detention,” according to CNN. About a month later, Mohsen Mahdawi, also a green card holder, was kidnapped by ICE when he showed up for an interview that was to be the last step before he attained U.S citizenship. He has since been released and was able to walk at his Columbian University graduation ceremony in May. In various interviews, he has made it clear that he, much like Khalil, will not be silent about what he sees as the “interconnectedness between injustices.”
In March, Trump ordered that some 200 people should be placed on a plane towards El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). Only one, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, has been returned to the U.S, after political and popular pressure brought to bear upon the U.S government which is still pursuing claims that he was involved in the domestic transport of “thousands of noncitizens from Mexico and Central America, including some children, in exchange for thousands of dollars, according to the indictment,” as ABC reports. Garcia’s lawyers have consistently said that the charges are, well, ah, trumped up.
It is critical to spotlight these cases to make it possible for more people to gain their freedom, and yet it is also possible that the incarceration of, possibly, tens of thousands of people will escape our notice and slip into the background noise of the carceral state.
Clearly, both Khalil and Mahdawi are able to connect their situations to vast, global networks of oppression and terror. (To be clear: no one should be denied the ability to make their cases in public, through any means necessary.) Garcia is one of the lucky few with political representatives, a union, and a legal team to support him. He has not made public statements about his situation, and that may be for any number of reasons, but his silence should not distract us from the fact that he is also a political prisoner, as are all of the 200 men put on that plane in the dead of night towards one of the world’s worst prisons: they may not be there for explicit forms of dissent, but they have been picked up because it suits the political machinations of a state to define them as insurgents and undesirables.
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The three men are only among the most well-known examples of ICE kidnapping and detaining countless numbers of people, as it escalates its attempt to fulfil the government’s mandate of 3,000 arrests per day. In scenes resembling those from a dystopian movie, ICE agents have taken to raiding fields and chasing down farmworkers. In Los Angeles, Donald Trump is making a big show of sending in military reinforcements. This has had the effect of galvanising thousands of people in cities large and small, who have been showing up to protest the administration’s terror tactics. Many of those abducted are people going about their day as they have for hundreds of days prior, picking lettuce or shopping or dropping children off at school or attending graduations. Some may well have committed what the state defines as criminal acts, but they deserve more than the dehumanisation and indignity of being hunted down like vermin. I suspect most are terrified and want to run, and few would identify as political prisoners or even as particularly political in any way. And they, all of them, have a right to respond however they see fit.
As we watch the horrors inflicted upon thousands, we have to ensure that people do not disappear. Their bodies are being shoveled into the dark interiors of the prison industrial complex and left to rot there because the government cannot and will not admit that most are innocent of whatever they are charged, that even the “guilty” received no due process, and that the kidnappings are signs of a giant mess that ICE and DHS will never want to admit to. Releasing more people than Mahdawi, Garcia, and Khalil is not what the administration wants, and it will be a long, slow process to get everyone out. We cannot forget what will soon be many thousands of people and leave them to die in makeshift Guantanomo-style prisons or even the dreaded prison itself, which may soon be refashioned to take in detainees.
Leonard Peltier was in prison for as long as he was because it became too inconvenient to let him out. My fear about those rounded up and imprisoned is that they will become the Leonard Peltiers of our time: symbols of massive infractions and mistakes kept permanently behind bars for decades. Some may be able to find outside support, but others may simply die where they are. We cannot and should not deny anyone the ability to get the hell out by whatever means they can find, but we have to create and sustain a robust system that fights for the rights of everyone regardless of whether or not we know and like them.
Fight to keep them all out, and fight to bring them all back.
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See also:
“First They Came for the Criminals.”
“Why Are We Obsessed with Private Prisons?”
Image: Félix Vallotton, Low tide in Villerville, 1922
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