Incarcerated activist Malik Muhammad’s standing client call in March with their lawyer had been canceled without any real explanation. When Muhammad’s attorney, Lauren Regan, went to check their status on the Oregon Inmate Tracker, she found nothing. They seemed to have vanished without a trace.
Friends and family feared the worst. Muhammad, an army veteran and activist serving the longest federal sentence of any 2020 Black Lives Matter protester, had been a target inside the state prison because of their outspoken political beliefs and organizing efforts while incarcerated, several of their friends and supporters told The Intercept.
“We were calling everyone,” said Christopher Kuttruff, a close friend and supporter. “We were terrified that they were in the hospital or dead …your mind obviously goes to the worst places.”
For weeks, the activist disappeared from all tracking systems. The best Muhammad’s supporters could ascertain by early April was that they had been transferred to a “confidential location.” Late that month, Muhammad was able to get a letter out to their partner from Kirkland Correctional Institute, in South Carolina, an intake facility 3,000 thousand miles from Oregon — or, as Regan puts it, “as far away from me as possible.”
Muhammad described the conditions at Kirkland as deplorable, claiming that incarcerated people are denied access to enough water, food, and recreation, and are forced to sleep on mats on the floor, which sometimes get confiscated as punishment.
The South Carolina Department of Corrections had little to say of Muhammad. In mid-May, the state’s prison system told The Intercept they had no record of someone named Malik Muhammad anywhere in their custody; the prison system did not respond to a follow-up query in June. The activist had become a living ghost within the carceral system.
Even now, friends and family struggle to reach Muhammad, with only the occasional letter or call to the few people approved to contact them serving as proof of life.
Because she is not licensed in South Carolina, Regan said she has “not been able to speak on the phone or in person in an attorney-client privileged manner since their transfer,” seriously impeding her ability to represent her client. She had to hire a local attorney to speak with them in person and collect potential evidence.
Millions of people flow through the U.S. prison system every year. And every year, an untold number of them vanish off the map, lost in a massive system that is legally obligated to watch over them. In New Mexico, Stephen Slevin spent nearly two years in solitary confinement in county jail after county officials appear to have simply forgotten about him after charging him with driving under the influence. Slevin never saw a judge or a lawyer and had to pull his own tooth due to consistent medical neglect.
Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for the Prison Policy Initiative, said that people getting lost in the prison system is “pretty common,” even when they haven’t moved as far away as Muhammad. “There’s never any effort made by prisons to tell incarcerated people’s families, ‘Hey, we’re moving this person,’” said Bertram.
As the Trump administration ramps up its use of incarceration as a method of immigration enforcement, concerns are mounting about the already stretched system’s ability to keep track of the people within its care — and the opportunity such lapses in oversight create for authorities to target activists and dissenters adversarial to the government.
“Not only is [Malik] intelligent,” said Regan, a founder and director of litigation and advocacy at the Civil Liberties Defense Center, “but Malik is Black, Muslim, an anarchist, [and] a political activist, and they have targeted Malik as a result of all of those things.”
Muhammad, who was arrested in October 2020, received the harshest sentence out of the hundreds of protesters hit with federal charges in the wake of the 2020 summer protests for racial justice. After tens of thousands were arrested in some of the largest mass arrests in history, many were released without charges or saw their cases dropped, but some prosecutors pushed for harsh sentences and elevated state or local infractions to the federal level, arguing that rioters were masquerading as protesters.
Muhammad pleaded guilty to both state and federal charges, including two counts of “unlawful possession of a destructive device,” for throwing a Molotov cocktail during a protest in East Portland. In 2022, the then-25-year-old was sentenced to 10 years in state prison.
Their plea agreement specifically stated that they would serve their time in Oregon state prison, near their supporters and community. Regan says that Oregon’s prison system has reneged on the agreement — illegally transferring Muhammad interstate as retaliation for their activism while incarcerated — in another attempt by the criminal legal system to punish Muhammad for their organizing.
“Normally, they would have been sentenced to the federal prison system,” said Regan. However, “because their friends and family and supporters at the time were based in Oregon, they explicitly negotiated an outcome that ensured that they would remain in Oregon.”
Federal prisons tend to be “better,” said Regan, because they often have more funding, allow for more freedom of movement, and have marginally better food. Put it this way, she said, “generally speaking, if you had a choice between Oregon State Prison or Federal Prison, most people would choose [federal].” But instead of relative comfort, Muhammad chose community.
Prisons are essentially a “black box” where people can disappear into solitary confinement or be transferred without their family’s knowledge, according to Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative.
“There’s so many constant questions that you live with as the loved one of an incarcerated person, and then when that person suddenly disappears, it’s terrifying,” said Bertram.
To make matters worse, she said, “prisons have a kind of nasty habit of not telling the family when someone dies or is transferred to an outside hospital, or needs emergency care,” compounding concerns for people who cannot locate their loved ones on the inside.
In Regan’s view, there are “a number of reasons” to characterize Muhammad’s transfer as retaliatory. For starters, she said this is part of a pattern of behavior from the Oregon prison system. In 2024, The Intercept reported that Muhammad had been effectively held in solitary confinement, which in Oregon is called “special housing,” for more than 250 days — despite the fact that Oregon limits the use of this type of confinement to 90 days.
She said Muhammad had met people in prison, many who’d been through excessive solitary, and suggested that they could become potential plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit her organization is seeking to file against the state prison system. “The prison is, of course, retaliating against them for basically assisting a nonprofit legal organization in bringing a giant lawsuit about the abuses of solitary confinement in the Oregon prison system,” Regan said.
Oregon flatly denies sending Muhammad to South Carolina as retaliation.
“These decisions are not made lightly and require a thorough review process conducted by all parties. In the case of Mr. Muhammed [sic], there is extensive background for the reasons [they were] a candidate for an Interstate Compact,” Amber Campbell, communications manager at the public affairs division for the Oregon Department of Corrections, wrote in a statement to The Intercept.
Muhammad’s advocacy and community building inside have consistently put a target on their back, said Jeremy, a close friend and pen pal. Friends described Muhammad as “empathetic,” “generous,” and “passionate,” as eager to sing for their cellmates as they are to share a book on political theory.
Now, Muhammad’s friends and family have to sit and wait, and hope the prison system won’t lose them all over again.
