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A warden faced discipline over abuse at a prison. Now he runs a prison training site
A warden who oversaw a culture of abuse at two different federal prisons has a new job — running a national training academy for the Bureau of Prisons.
Andrew Ciolli was in charge of the penitentiary at Thomson in Illinois for one year before he moved to lead an even larger and more high-profile prison complex in Florence, Colo. An internal investigation by the Bureau of Prisons conducted last spring found that some staff at Florence used excessive force in violation of policy, and Ciolli, as warden, should have stopped it — but didn’t. Investigators referred him for disciplinary action. But he’s now landed a role as the director of the bureau’s Management and Specialty Training Center, which provides leadership training and specialized instruction across the agency.
“Historically, when a warden is disciplined for misconduct, they aren’t reassigned as a director of anything, let alone a training center,” said Thomas Bergami, who succeeded Ciolli as warden at Thomson before retiring last year.
Reporters reached out to Ciolli at a bureau email address for his new position. An unsigned response to that email declined to comment and referred reporters to the bureau’s Office of Public Affairs.
In a statement, Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Carl Bailey confirmed that Ciolli oversees the day-to-day operations at the training center, but said he “does not provide or oversee training.” Responsibility for the training “rests exclusively with subject matter experts, who operate independently of Mr. Ciolli’s oversight,” Bailey wrote.
He added that “allegations of employee misconduct are taken seriously,” and that the bureau “fully cooperates” with watchdog agencies “to bring to justice those who abuse the public trust.”
After a two-decade career rising through the ranks at the Bureau of Prisons, Ciolli became warden at Thomson in February 2021. An investigation by NPR and The Marshall Project exposed how during his tenure, three people were killed and dozens more alleged in lawsuits and interviews that they suffered serious mistreatment. Many incarcerated people described being shackled for hours or days at a time without access to food or a bathroom. The restraints were so tight, they often left scars on people’s wrists, stomachs and ankles that prisoners nicknamed the “Thomson tattoo.”
According to Bureau of Prisons policy, restraints should only be used on someone who is in immediate danger of hurting themselves or others or causing serious property damage. While staff can temporarily apply restraints, a warden must approve their continued use.
When Bergami took over the facility from Ciolli in 2022, he discovered an “enormous problem with inmate abuse,” he said in an interview last year. The Bureau of Prisons shut down a high-security unit at Thomson in 2023, citing “significant concerns with respect to institutional culture and compliance with BOP policies.”
In 2023, bureau Director Colette Peters testified before Congress that multiple Thomson staffers had been referred for administrative and criminal investigation for their roles in abusing prisoners. She did not name the employees. The bureau declined to comment on the status of those investigations.
After Ciolli left Thomson in 2022, Bureau of Prisons officials reassigned him to run the even bigger complex in Florence, with a $20,000 raise, according to the bureau. The job included overseeing a medium-security prison, a high-security penitentiary and the Supermax — which houses some of the country’s most notorious prisoners in single-cell solitary confinement.
A staffer at Florence becomes a whistleblower
But the recent federal investigation revealed that similar patterns of mistreatment found at Thomson, such as the excessive use of restraints, followed Ciolli to Florence. Last spring, a staffer at Florence who was tasked with investigating employee misconduct reported that officers were routinely using restraints on prisoners who did not meet the criteria for such treatment, according to a letter he wrote to federal officials. “All inmates were behind a secure door, no immediate threat to staff existed, and no actual disruptive behavior was observed from any inmate that would have placed a staff member in danger,” the whistleblower wrote to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency that handles such complaints.
The names of Ciolli and other Florence officials are redacted in investigative records obtained by NPR and The Marshall Project. But their job titles and descriptions are included, and two people with knowledge of the investigation confirmed their identities.
Investigators with the Bureau of Prisons’ Office of Internal Affairs reviewed video footage collected over nearly nine months at Florence penitentiary and found multiple instances of employees using force against prisoners who were “compliant, under control, and not a threat to staff or others,” according to a letter from the Office of Special Counsel to President Joe Biden.
Michael Antonio Thompson said he was restrained three times during the roughly 18 months he spent at Florence penitentiary, much of it while Ciolli was warden. Thompson was once left in cuffs for over 10 hours, he said. Officers “used to pepper spray me for nothing, hold me in chains for a whole bunch of hours,” he said in a phone interview. “Some people will put you in chains and put the handcuffs real tight until your hands turn blue and they swell up like baseball gloves.” He was released from prison in 2023.
Bailey, the bureau spokesperson, declined to comment on Thompson’s experience, for “privacy, safety and security reasons.”
The Bureau of Prisons’ internal investigation found the overuse of restraints at Florence was part of a broader program known as the High Visibility Watch Program, records from the whistleblower investigation show. The program targeted prisoners who were accused of masturbating in front of officers. Guards were instructed to fire pepper spray into their cells, force them into restraints and escort them to solitary confinement — whether or not they posed an immediate threat, investigators found. Those prisoners were then labeled with a yellow card around their neck.
These measures posed a “significant threat” to those in the program, the whistleblower wrote, “as inmates who engage in masturbation in a prison setting are prone to extortion, rape or assault from fellow inmates.” The Office of Internal Affairs found the program violated bureau policy, the office’s records show.
Several other employees moved from Thomson to Florence around the time of Ciolli’s departure in 2022, including Associate Warden David Altizer. According to the investigation by the bureau’s Office of Internal Affairs, staff members reported that Altizer and Ciolli called officers into a meeting after they arrived at Florence and instructed them to implement the watch program. The whistleblower told investigators that Altizer and Ciolli said “they had conducted a similar program at another location, and it was successful.”
When asked by investigators, Ciolli denied involvement and said he “could not remember” telling staff about the program, according to the bureau’s Office of Internal Affairs. Altizer was not interviewed in the inquiry, because he went on long-term medical leave shortly after the investigation began, according to documents from the investigation. Investigators concluded that at the very least, Ciolli was “responsible for providing managerial oversight and was accountable for determining policy” of the complex.
Altizer did not reply to requests for comment.
The whistleblower wrote in a separate letter to the Office of Special Counsel that a third official at the complex was involved in implementing the program. That person was cleared by the investigation and not referred for disciplinary action, and instead was promoted to warden of another prison complex.
This investigation was referred to several federal agencies, ultimately resulting in a report from the Office of Special Counsel to Biden explaining that most of the whistleblower’s allegations were true.
Both Altizer and Ciolli were referred for discipline, but neither was fired from the agency. Altizer retired in April. Ciolli began his new position with the training center in July, according to his LinkedIn profile and an internal bureau announcement. He lost his status as a senior executive in the agency and took a $3,350 pay cut, according to an email from the Bureau of Prisons.
After a string of scandals in the bureau, Congress has moved to increase oversight of the agency. This summer, Biden signed a law that would create a new ombudsman position in the Justice Department and require regular inspections of facilities with higher risk of mistreatment.
After the whistleblower report from Florence, the bureau also updated its use-of-force policy for the first time in a decade. It now explicitly states zero tolerance for excessive force, and that misconduct could result in criminal prosecution. It mandates de-escalation training and states that employees have an “affirmative duty to intervene” if they witness colleagues applying excessive force.
The policy now makes plain: Restraints may not be used for punishment, or “in any manner which restricts blood circulation” or “causes unnecessary physical pain or extreme discomfort.”
Christie Thompson and Beth Schwartzapfel report for The Marshall Project.
President Trump speaks during an event on health care affordability in the Oval Office at the White House on Thursday in Washington.
Mark Schiefelbein/AP
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Mark Schiefelbein/AP
WASHINGTON — An appeals court on Friday blocked President Trump’s executive order suspending asylum access at the southern border of the U.S., a key pillar of the Republican president’s plan to crack down on migration.
A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that immigration laws give people the right to apply for asylum at the border, and the president can’t circumvent that.
The court opinion stems from action taken by Trump on Inauguration Day 2025, when he declared that the situation at the southern border constituted an invasion of America and that he was “suspending the physical entry” of migrants and their ability to seek asylum until he decides it is over.
The panel concluded that the Immigration and Nationality Act doesn’t authorize the president to remove the plaintiffs under “procedures of his own making,” allow him to suspend plaintiffs’ right to apply for asylum or curtail procedures for adjudicating their anti-torture claims.
“The power by proclamation to temporarily suspend the entry of specified foreign individuals into the United States does not contain implicit authority to override the INA’s mandatory process to summarily remove foreign individuals,” wrote Judge J. Michelle Childs, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Joe Biden.
“We conclude that the INA’s text, structure, and history make clear that in supplying power to suspend entry by Presidential proclamation, Congress did not intend to grant the Executive the expansive removal authority it asserts,” the opinion said.
White House says asylum ban was within Trump’s powers
The administration can ask the full appeals court to reconsider the ruling or go to the Supreme Court.
The order doesn’t formally take effect until after the court considers any request to reconsider.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking on Fox News, said she had not seen the ruling but called it “unsurprising,” blaming politically-motivated judges.
“They are not acting as true litigators of the law. They are looking at these cases from a political lens,” she said.
Leavitt said Trump was taking actions that are “completely within his powers as commander in chief.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the Department of Justice would seek further review of the decision. “We are sure we will be vindicated,” she wrote in an emailed statement.
The Department of Homeland Security said it strongly disagreed with the ruling.
“President Trump’s top priority remains the screening and vetting of all aliens seeking to come, live, or work in the United States,” DHS said in a statement.
Advocates welcome the ruling
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that previous legal action had already paused the asylum ban, and the ruling won’t change much on the ground.
The ruling, however, represents another legal defeat for a centerpiece policy of the president.
“This confirms that President Trump cannot on his own bar people from seeking asylum, that it is Congress that has mandated that asylum seekers have a right to apply for asylum and the President cannot simply invoke his authority to sustain,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
Advocates say the right to request asylum is enshrined in the country’s immigration law and say denying migrants that right puts people fleeing war or persecution in grave danger.
Lee Gelernt, attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who argued the case, said in a statement that the appellate ruling is “essential for those fleeing danger who have been denied even a hearing to present asylum claims under the Trump administration’s unlawful and inhumane executive order.”
Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, welcomed the court decision as a victory for their clients.
“Today’s DC Circuit ruling affirms that capricious actions by the President cannot supplant the rule of law in the United States,” said Nicolas Palazzo, director of advocacy and legal Services at Las Americas.
Judge Justin Walker, a Trump nominee, wrote a partial dissent. He said the law gives immigrants protections against removal to countries where they would be persecuted, but the administration can issue broad denials of asylum applications.
Walker, however, agreed with the majority that the president cannot deport migrants to countries where they will be persecuted or strip them of mandatory procedures that protect against their removal.
Judge Cornelia Pillard, who was nominated by Democratic President Obama, also heard the case.
In the executive order, Trump argued that the Immigration and Nationality Act gives presidents the authority to suspend entry of any group that they find “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
The executive order also suspended the ability of migrants to ask for asylum.
Trump’s order was another blow to asylum access in the U.S., which was severely curtailed under the Biden administration, although under Biden some pathways for protections for a limited number of asylum seekers at the southern border continued.
Migrant advocate in Mexico expresses cautious hope
For Josue Martinez, a psychologist who works at a small migrant shelter in southern Mexico, the ruling marked a potential “light at the end of the tunnel” for many migrants who once hoped to seek asylum in the U.S. but ended up stuck in vulnerable conditions in Mexico.
“I hope there’s something more concrete, because we’ve heard this kind of news before: A district judge files an appeal, there’s a temporary hold, but it’s only temporary and then it’s over,” he said.
Meanwhile, migrants from Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela and other countries have struggled to make ends meet as they try to seek refuge in Mexico’s asylum system that’s all but collapsed under the weight of new strains and slashed international funds.
This week hundreds of migrants, mostly stranded migrants from Haiti, left the southern Mexican city of Tapachula on foot to seek better living conditions elsewhere in Mexico.
When Stuart Sepulvida arrives at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Parish in Tucson, Ariz., for Mass, which he attends most mornings, he passes a display honoring local soldiers and encouraging parishioners to pray for their safety. Hundreds of small cards record their names: Robles, Arenas, Grajeda. A portrait of Pope Leo XIV hangs across the lobby.
Mr. Sepulvida, 81, is a Vietnam veteran whose patriotism and Catholicism are deeply intertwined. He voted for President Trump three times but has never felt more betrayed by an American president than when Mr. Trump denounced Pope Leo as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
“It was very disturbing to me to hear both of them clashing like they did,” Mr. Sepulvida said, standing outside the church one morning this week. Now, he is reconsidering whether he will vote Republican this year.
The Republican Party is struggling to hold onto the support from Hispanic voters who helped propel Mr. Trump back into the White House in 2024. Yet as many party leaders have acknowledged the urgent need to stop the backsliding among Latinos, the president has enraged many of even his strongest supporters by clashing with the pope.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo, the first U.S.-born pontiff, spoke of the need to “abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars.” Within days, Mr. Trump, who has led the United States into a war with Iran, said the pope was “catering to the radical left” and posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a Jesus figure. Mr. Trump later deleted the image, saying he thought it depicted him as a doctor.
“It just isn’t what a president should do,” Mr. Sepulvida said. “The pope speaks for his people. He is beyond politics.”
Mr. Trump won 55 percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, compared to 43 percent who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Pew Research Center. The most sizable gains came from Hispanic Catholics. While Joseph R. Biden Jr. won their votes by a 35-point margin in 2020, the Democratic advantage shrunk to 17 points in 2024. Now, just 18 percent of Hispanic Catholics said they support most or all of President Trump’s agenda, according to a poll from Pew released earlier this year.
If the president’s quarrel with the pope sours more Latinos on the Republican Party, it could affect midterm races across the country, including in South Florida and South Texas, where Republicans have notched important victories in predominantly Hispanic districts in recent years.
In Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from north of Tucson to the Mexican border, voters were still grappling with the fallout this week.
The district is roughly evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independent voters. Nearly a third of the district is Hispanic, and there is a significant population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as a large Catholic community with deep history in the region. It also has one of largest numbers of military veterans of all congressional districts in the country.
“The president is looking for a lot of attention from everything,” said Maria Ramos, 60, who regularly attends weekday Mass at St. Francis. A registered independent, she usually votes for Democrats but often declines to cast a ballot if she views a candidate as too liberal. “He believes he can put God in his place. He’s meddling in countries that he’s not in control of — he wants to control the world.”
“It is not just a very serious lack of respect — it is a mortal sin,” she said, shaking her head. One word comes to her mind again and again, she said: disgust.
Like so many others in southern Arizona, Ms. Ramos has several relatives who serve in the military — a path they saw to both serve the country and as an entry into the stable middle class. Many of them, she said, voted for Mr. Trump for president.
The Tucson district is now widely seen as one of the most competitive in the country. Republican Juan Ciscomani narrowly won the district in 2022, in part by emphasizing his biography as a Mexican immigrant and a devoted father of six children. He is also an evangelical Christian, a group that has driven much of the growth among Hispanic Republican voters in recent years.
Mr. Ciscomani declined a request for an interview, but when a local radio host asked Mr. Ciscomani what he thought of Mr. Trump’s comments “as a man of faith,” the congressman declined to criticize the president but said, “You can trust that you won’t see any meme like that coming out of my account.”
JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat challenging Mr. Ciscomani this fall, has made her 20-year career in the U.S. Navy and Marines a key aspect of her story on the campaign trail. While she rarely speaks about her religious background and no longer considers herself a practicing Catholic, she said she briefly considered becoming a nun as a teenager. She criticized Mr. Ciscomani for not condemning the president’s remarks.
“You can’t make faith a central part of your campaign and then allow this to stand,” she said in an interview.
Across Tucson, Latino Catholics, regardless of their past voting preferences, were similarly quick to condemn the president’s remarks.
When Cecilia Taisipic, 71, heard about it, she said, she winced with shame about her vote for him in 2024.
“I thought he would make the country better, but apparently it’s the opposite,” she said as she left Mass at St. Francis earlier this week. She is so fed up with politics, she said, that she is unlikely to vote at all this year. “When it comes to my faith, I don’t like anybody to challenge it. Now I don’t want to hear anything on the news. I just want to pray.”
Matilde Robinson Bours, 63, teaches a weekly Spanish Bible study class at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, and like nearly all of the women in her class, she immigrated from Mexico decades ago. She has voted for Republicans in nearly every election since she became a citizen. Though she has never liked President Trump, she said, his comments about the pope enraged her more than anything else he has said or done in the past.
“This surpassed everything, every social and political norm — this is personal to all Catholics,” she said. “The arrogance and ego is disgusting. To think that he is God? The pope has every right and responsibility to talk about peace.”
Still, Ms. Robinson Bours said, nothing will stop her from supporting Republicans again this year. She has been delighted that her adult children have stopped supporting Democrats in recent elections.
“Almost everyone I know thinks the way I do,” she said.
Patricia Martinez, 86, who has attended the same Bible study as Ms. Robinson Bours for years, shook her head in disagreement. She said she cannot imagine voting for a Republican who supports Mr. Trump.
“This is different — this shows he is out of his mind,” said Ms. Martinez. “We have to have basic respect and teach that to people in this country.”
Patrick Robles, a 24-year-old native of Tucson, spent years alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, but returned to his faith more recently. “The craziness of the world sort of caused me to seek some sort of answers,” he said. Now, he attends Mass at the St. Augustine Cathedral in downtown Tucson, a few blocks from the office where he works as an aide to Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.
Mr. Robles said he saw Mr. Trump’s battle with the pope as both a personal affront and a political opportunity.
“The president is basically trying to draw a line between Catholics and what we perceive to be patriotism,” he said. “I believe we can be both.”
Last week, he texted one of his uncles who has supported Mr. Trump in every election asking him what he thought.
“I’m afraid we need divine intervention,” the uncle replied.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., takes questions at a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
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Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., is forging ahead with his latest proposal to renew a key American spy power. His bill, revealed Thursday, is largely unchanged from a previous plan which failed in a series of overnight votes earlier this month.
The program at center of the debate, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), is set to expire on April 30.
FISA 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside of the United States. Some of the nearly 350,000 foreign targets whose communications are collected under the provision are in touch with Americans, whose calls, texts and emails could end up in the trove of information available to the federal government for review.
For almost two decades, privacy-minded lawmakers from both parties have sought to require specific court approval before federal law enforcement can conduct a targeted review of an American’s information gathered through the program. The lack of any such warrant requirement helped sink an effort last week to extend the program for 18 months, as well as a separate vote on a five-year renewal.
Trump officials, like those in past administrations, have argued that such a warrant requirement would overburden law enforcement and endanger national security. Johnson’s latest proposal would reauthorize the program for three years, but does not include a warrant requirement. Instead, the bill calls for the FBI to submit monthly explanations for reviews of Americans’ information to an oversight official as well as criminal penalties for willful abuse, among other tweaks.
“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social last week, advocating for the program to be extended without changes. “I have spoken with many in our Military who say FISA is necessary in order to protect our Troops overseas, as well as our people here at home, from the threat of Foreign Terror Attacks. It has already prevented MANY such Attacks, and it is very important that it remain in full force and effect.”
Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the Obama and first Trump administration, says Johnson’s reforms look like an attempt to find a middle ground.
“There’s not a lot of really substantive changes to the statute, but some gestures are made to people who are worried about privacy and civil liberties,” Gerstell said. “It seems like a pretty reasonable compromise that is going to be satisfactory to the national security agencies and yet at the same time represents some gesture to the privacy advocates.”
“This is not a reform bill and it’s not a compromise,” Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy advocate and senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, wrote on X. “It’s a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it’s NOT a straight reauthorization.”
A bipartisan reform deal is still out of reach
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told NPR on Wednesday, before the release of Johnson’s new proposal, that lawmakers were working on a bipartisan solution. He said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., was in touch with Johnson on the issue.
“There’s a lot of work being done here,” Himes said. “We’re sort of working out a process that will be inclusive rather than exclusive.” Himes said he was negotiating with Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional law scholar, on a reform proposal they hoped could preserve and reform the program — reauthorizing it with bipartisan support.
But Johnson’s new bill appears to fall short of the inclusive approach Himes hoped for.
NPR obtained a memo written by Raskin to his colleagues urging them to oppose the bill, which he said “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.”
“FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge,” Raskin wrote.
FBI agents must receive annual training on FISA and are generally barred from searching for information about people in the U.S. if the goal of the search is to investigate general criminal activity, rather than find foreign intelligence information, and those searches need approval from a supervisor or an attorney.
Republican hardliners — who sunk Johnson’s last reauthorization attempt — also don’t all appear to be on board for Johnson’s latest revision. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a past chair of the Freedom Caucus, said “we’re not there yet” in a video he shared to X on Thursday.
“I didn’t take an oath to defend FISA, I didn’t take an oath to defend the intelligence community,” Perry said. “We can’t have them spying on American citizens and, when they do, there has to be accountability and I haven’t seen any that I’m satisfied with yet.”
The House Rules committee meets Monday morning, the first step toward advancing the renewal bill toward a vote.
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