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A Secretive Program Has Let Cops Spend Hundreds of Millions on Weapons of War, Report Shows
“Our tax dollars are being weaponized against us,” said the head of the Center for International Policy.
Oct 31, 2025
State and local governments have spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars helping cops wage “war” against their own residents under a secretive and opaque program that allows the police to purchase discounted military-style equipment from the federal government.
Over the past three decades, the obscure 1122 Program has let states and cities equip local cops with everything from armored vehicles to military grade rifles to video surveillance tech, according to a report published Thursday by Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, part of the Center for International Policy.
Using open records requests, which were necessary due to the lack of any standardized auditing or record-keeping system for the program, the group obtained over $126 million worth of purchasing data across 13 states, four cities, and two counties since the program's creation in 1994. Based on these figures, they projected the total spending across all 50 states was likely in the "upper hundreds of millions of dollars."
“The 1122 Program diverts public money from essential community needs and public goods into military-style equipment for local police,” said Rosie Khan, the co-founder of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency. “The $126.87 million spent on militarized police equipment and surveillance technology could have instead provided housing support for 10,000+ people for a year, supplied 43 million school meals, or repaired roads and bridges in dozens of communities.”
Congress created the 1122 Program at the height of the War on Drugs, authorizing it under the 1994 National Defense Authorization Act to provide police departments with equipment to carry out counter-drug operations. It was not the first program of its kind, but followed in the footsteps of the more widely known 1033 Program, which has funneled over $7 billion of excess military equipment to police departments.
But there are a few critical differences: 1033 is subject to rigorous federal record-keeping, while 1122 has no such requirement. And unlike 1033, which transfers equipment that was already purchased but not needed, 1122 allows states and cities to spend money to purchase new equipment.
The program's scope ballooned dramatically in 2009 after another NDAA added "homeland security" and "emergency response" missions to its purview. As the report explains, "no regulatory mechanisms are ensuring that equipment is used for counter-drug, homeland security, or emergency response purposes. In fact, the scope of these missions was never defined."
Increasingly, it has been used to provide police with equipment that has often been deployed against protesters, including $6.2 million for weapons, weapons training, and riot gear. Among the equipment purchased in this category was pepper spray, batons, gas masks, and riot shields.
By far, the largest expenditures under the program have been the more than $85 million spent on various armored trucks, vans, and sedans.
Police departments have spent an additional $6 million to purchase at least 16 Lenco BearCats, which cost around $300,000 apiece. These were among the military vehicles used by police to suppress the racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.
As recently as October 3, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were documented aboard a Bearcat in full military garb and menacing protesters with sniper rifles outside the notorious immigrant detention facility in Broadview, Illinois.
In July, Los Angeles ICE agents were filmed using a vehicle to run over multiple protesters who attempted to block their path.
Another $9.6 million was spent on surveillance equipment, including license plate readers, video and audio recording devices, and subscriptions to spying software that uses sophisticated facial recognition and social media monitoring technology to track people's movements and associations.
The report highlights the increasing use of this technology by college police departments, like Northern Virginia Community College, which spent over $2.7 million on surveillance tech through 1122. College police departments have used this sort of technology to go after student protesters and activists, especially amid last year's nationwide explosion of pro-Palestine demonstrations across campuses.
At Yale, which has made "surveillance cameras, drones, and social media tracking... standard tools in the police department's arsenal," one student was apprehended last year and charged with a felony for removing an American flag from its pole using the school's surveillance system.
The report's authors call for Congress to sunset the 1122 Program and direct its funding toward "a version of public safety that prioritizes care, accountability, and community well-being rather than militarized force."
“Lawmakers, including federal and state legislators and city council representatives," it says, "must act with the urgency that this moment requires to prevent a catastrophically violent takeover of civil society by police, federal agents, and corporations profiting from exponentially increasing surveillance, criminalization, and brute force.”
They note the increasing urgency to end the program under President Donald Trump, who—on the first day of his second term—reversed an executive order from former President Joe Biden that restricted the sale of some of the most aggressive weaponry to local police forces.
“Local police have been given more avenues to arm themselves with military-style equipment during an era of heightened arrests, forced removals, and crackdowns on free speech. These disturbing political shifts have undermined the crucial work of coalitions for police accountability," the report says.
Nancy Okail, president and CEO of the Center for International Policy said: "Our tax dollars are being weaponized against us under the guise of ‘domestic terrorism.'”
"As talk of a ‘war from within’ grows louder," she says, the new report "exposes how this rhetoric fuels real assaults on democracy and civil rights.”
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You Have Your America, I Have My America
We should all remember that we’ve been through other dark periods in our history. Each time, we rose to meet these challenges.
Oct 27, 2025
A century ago, Gibran Khalil Gibran wrote a love poem to Lebanon, "You have your Lebanon, I have my Lebanon." He spoke of his affection for the captivating qualities of generosity and hospitality of the Lebanese people and the sheer beauty of the country and contrasted this with Lebanon’s petty, bickering politicians who sought nothing more than their own aggrandizement. When I read this poem, I saw parallels between the understanding of the contradictions at play in Lebanon and those in my country, the United States of America.
Today, many Americans are living in fear and even despair as they watch their president, seemingly unchecked, tearing down some of the foundations of democracy and gutting social and economic programs that have for decades provided for the safety, security, and well-being of millions. They ask: “How could this be happening?” and “Can our country survive this onslaught?”
But, as has always been the case in America, while some have felt hopeless, others are driven to respond. And so it was that a week ago, seven million Americans took to the streets in 2,700 cities and towns to demonstrate their resolve to save America’s democracy and arrest the drift toward authoritarianism.
All of this should serve as a reminder that there have always been these two Americas: one pushing to restrict democratic freedoms and the other working to expand them. Both have defined our history.
America, after all, was born with the original sins of genocide against native peoples, the forced enslavement of Africans, and the annexation and subjugation of Spanish-speaking peoples of the Southwest. As the country grew and attracted immigrants, these newcomers, whether they were Irish, Italians, Central Europeans, Jews, or Arabs were often met with discrimination, repression, and even violence.
This, however, was always only one part of America’s story. On the other side, for every racist, segregationist, anti-immigrant bigot, there were abolitionists who fought slavery, and organized movements that championed immigrants, labor, and civil rights for Blacks, Latinos, and Native peoples. And in the last century, for every xenophobe like Fr. Coughlin or Pat Buchanan, or segregationist like Bull Connor or George Wallace, there was a Martin Luther King, Caesar Chavez, and Jesse Jackson. And despite persistent bigotry and waves of recurring anti-immigrant bigotry, what remains are the core of Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech and the spirit of the Statue of Liberty’s words welcoming the “tired and poor, yearning to be free.”
This is my family’s story. While my father’s mother and siblings were all able to immigrate to America after World War I, he was delayed and then unable to secure a visa because Congress determined that there were too many immigrants from the Mediterranean region. (One Senator famously said, “We don’t need any more Syrian trash in America.”) Eager to reunite with his family, he got a job on a ship sailing to Canada and then crossed into the US without documents in 1923. He received amnesty in the 1930s and became a citizen in 1943. Four decades later I was serving as a deputy campaign manager for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign and was given to opportunity to place his name in nomination at the 1984 Democratic Convention.
Reflecting on my personal history as a metaphor for the broader American story, I noted in my speech that “I am the son of an illegal immigrant who is nominating for president the great grandson of a slave. Nowhere else but America could this happen.”
It’s important to remember that these two Americas are always with us. And we must never forget either one. If we forget the threats and challenges to freedom, we let down our guard and become vulnerable to the assaults when they come. But if we forget the promise of America and fail to recall the heroes and movements who in every generation have fought and won, then we lose hope and fail to meet the challenges before us.
And so, to those who despair and say that what is happening today is” un-American” as they witness efforts to gut voting rights, curtail immigration, use of military force to violently expel migrants and threaten freedom of speech and assembly—we must respond that we've been here before and we’ve always risen up to confront these threats to liberty. And we’ve won.
The bottom line is that we should remember that we’ve been through other dark periods in our history. In my lifetime, we’ve witnessed: the hysteria and repression of the McCarthy era’s manufactured anti-Communism scare; the racism and violence that followed the civil rights movement; the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Dr. King; the deeply polarizing Vietnam war; the national trauma of 9/11 and the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes and government repression that followed; and the disastrous failed wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Each time, we rose to meet these challenges.
Given our history, I feel confident that in the face of today’s xenophobia, racism, repression, and hate, we will rise again. Like Gibran, we will assert: “You have your America, I have my America.”
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ICE Threatened to Shoot Ambulance Driver Picking Up Injured Portland Protester, Medics Say
The incident comes as immigrants' rights advocates warn ICE's tactics in US cities are growing increasingly violent.
Oct 14, 2025
Amid report after report of increasingly aggressive tactics used by federal immigration enforcement, a pair of Portland medical workers say that an agent threatened to shoot them as they tried to transport an injured protester last week.
According to publicly archived dispatch records reported by Willamette Week, an ambulance crew was attempting to transport a protester with a broken or dislocated collarbone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in southern Portland on October 5.
The facility has been a flashpoint in recent weeks as the site of several small but persistent protests, which the Trump administration has attempted to characterize as violent provocations by "antifa" in order to justify its deployment of military troops.
After entering through the facility's front gate around 9:19, the two medics were able to load the patient into the ambulance without issue. But at 9:40, the driver reported to dispatch that "we are still not being allowed to leave by ICE officers."
Confidential incident reports filed by each of the two medics, and obtained by WW, describe in more detail what was happening at the scene.
Each of the drivers' separate reports says the agents had demanded to ride along in the ambulance en route to the hospital. The driver replied that without arrest paperwork, they were not permitted to ride along. Agents continued to insist that the vehicle would not be allowed to leave until an officer was permitted to accompany them.
"I repeated again," the driver said in their report, "that no officer is permitted to ride in the ambulance and that they can meet us at the hospital and that we needed to be let out of the facility. Officers then began walking away from me whenever I spoke. At that point, a group of 5-8 civilian-dressed men walked into the garage and just stared at me. No identification on any of them. I walked back to the ambulance and got into the driver's seat. I flipped the emergency lights on and put the car into drive. I inched forward slowly out of the garage."
A man described as being in civilian clothes and a neck-wrap then stepped in front of the vehicle and ordered the ambulance not to leave, according to the report. As more agents amassed about 15 feet in front of the vehicle, the driver assumed they were preparing to escort the ambulance off the property and continued to slowly inch the vehicle forward. But agents continued to obstruct the ambulance's path. As of 9:39, a dispatch report said there were "50-60 fed agents completely blocking the road."
At this point, the crew member in the passenger's seat exited the vehicle to attempt to reason with the officers. After putting the vehicle into park, the driver began to exit as well. They said that as they opened the side door, "I looked up and suddenly the entire group of officers… were crowded around the open car door, some of them leaning forward towards me, inches from my face."
The driver recalls that an agent "pointed his finger at me in a threatening manner and began viciously yelling in my face, stating, 'DON'T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN, I WILL SHOOT YOU, I WILL ARREST YOU RIGHT NOW." The vehicle had rolled forward slightly after the driver put it in park, apparently leading the agents to believe the medics were attempting to hit them.
"I was still in such shock," the driver later wrote, "that they were not only accusing me of such a thing, but crowding and cornering me in the seat, pointing and screaming at me, threatening to shoot and arrest me, and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene. This was no longer a safe scene, and in that moment, I realized that the scene had not actually been safe the entire time that they were blocking us from exiting, and that we were essentially trapped."
The ambulance was finally allowed to leave after being delayed for more than 20 minutes. An unmarked vehicle followed the ambulance to the hospital, where several men in civilian dress exited and walked in.
The incident reports provide the latest account of what Portland city officials described to WW as a pattern in which "federal agents have in several cases needlessly intensified situations that might have easily remained far more calm."
Over the same weekend, peaceful demonstrators and journalists were ambushed with pepper spray, flash-bang grenades, and rubber bullets without clear provocation. In one viral incident earlier that week, a demonstrator who danced at protests in an inflatable frog costume had pepper spray shot directly into his air intake vent by an officer as he attempted to help a fellow protester who was injured.
The reports come as experts say ICE has been intensifying its tactics around the country, which have been captured in several videos taken by bystanders.
One video in Hyattsville, Maryland, shows an officer who dropped his gun while pinning a man to the ground, before picking it up and pointing it towards onlookers.
In another video from Alamosa, Colorado, agents were filmed hopping out of a car and immediately pointing their weapons at a young couple whom they'd boxed in at an intersection. As the woman in the car shouted that the driver's 1-month-old baby was riding in the back seat, an officer in a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) hat used his baton to smash open the car's driver's side window, spilling glass into the vehicle.
Another video from the Chicago area, where President Donald Trump has surged ICE as part of "Operation Midway Blitz," shows agents firing pepper spray upon a pastor who was speaking outside a facility.
And a recent photo shows a masked agent in the passenger's seat of an unmarked van pointing a weapon at a woman who was attempting to film him from the neighboring car.
On October 4, CBP agents in Chicago shot a woman, 30-year-old Marimar Martinez, whom they similarly claimed had provoked them by ramming them with her car. Body camera footage would not only contradict this claim, but show that the agents had in fact plowed into Martinez's vehicle after one of them shouted "Do something, bitch."
Prosecutors said Martinez had a licensed gun in her car. But her attorneys say she did not brandish the weapon, and she was not charged with any weapons-related offense. She was the second person shot by immigration agents in the area in less than a month—the other was also unarmed.
In the meantime, the Trump administration has attempted to describe peaceful demonstrations against ICE's behavior as acts of "terrorism," with deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller calling those in Portland "an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers."
Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told NPR that the latest spate of attacks by federal agents "are just the tip of the iceberg."
"This administration," he said, "overall seems more interested in heightening the tensions instead of trying to ramp them down."
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