At dawn on July 29, 2022, FBI agents with flash-bang grenades and armored vehicles raided the Uhuru House in St. Petersburg, the party's Uhuru Solidarity Center in St. Louis, and the home of the 80-year-old Chairman Yeshitela, handcuffing him and his wife in the street — executing search warrants in an investigation of Russian influence operations, on the theory that a Moscow-based operative, Aleksandr Ionov, had cultivated the party.
The raids on an organization of elderly Black socialists — over its consistent, publicly held positions on reparations and against U.S. foreign policy — drew condemnation across the left and from civil-liberties advocates, who heard in "foreign agent" the echo of every prior era's charge that Black demands for freedom must be foreign-inspired.