In April 2023 a federal grand jury indicted Yeshitela and party organizers Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel — the "Uhuru 3" — for conspiring to act as unregistered agents of Russia. At the September 2024 trial in Tampa the defense answered that the party's positions predated any Russian contact by half a century and that no payment or direction had changed a word of its politics; the jury convicted on the conspiracy count while acquitting on the substantive foreign-agent charge.
In 2025 the court rejected the government's demand for prison, sentencing the three to probation with home detention — no prison time for the 83-year-old chairman. The movement claimed vindication: the first "foreign agent" prosecution of a Black liberation organization had ended, supporters said, the way the sedition trials of earlier generations had — with the state unable to imprison the politics it targeted.