Another ICE Killing
And, no, The Trump Administration does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
We do not yet have the video, but we’ve seen this pattern before, haven’t we?
It has been three days since ICE officers shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Some details remain fuzzy, but questions keep multiplying. This morning’s Washington Post quotes some of the surviving migrants who say “a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle and that at no point did the driver veer in his direction.” This, of course contradicts the Department of Homeland Security (usual) claim that the officer acted in self-defense.
“From information we are receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense,” the agency said in a statement.
According to the witnesses, none of that is true.1
But we’ve heard this before. After the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Trump officials rushed out with claims that later proved false.
We don’t know all the facts yet because, unlike the ICE murders in Minneapolis, we haven’t seen any videos of the shooting. But we do know enough to recognize a few patterns. (See today’s NYT: “What We Know About the ICE Shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.”)
Before we dive in, let’s make a few points:
On Thursday, DHA admitted that Araujo was not the intended target of the operation.
“Araujo, 52, was a husband, father of three children and a business owner who had been in the country for more than three decades and was trying to obtain legal residency. His sons said their father, a Mexico native, was most likely months away from obtaining a work permit after submitting fingerprints to immigration officials.”
At least 21 people have been fired on by federal agents since last year. Via the NYT: “In many of these shootings, immigration agents have accused drivers of trying to assault a federal officer with their vehicles. Many people fighting those allegations in court have prevailed.”
Federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in January. In February, we learned that ICE agents had killed a third U.S. citizen, Ruben Ray Martinez, back in March 2025 during a traffic stop in Texas. In October, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant, was killed in Chicago by officers who fired at his vehicle as he drove away.
In each case the killings were followed by DHS cover stories and cover-ups.
In each case, the killings were followed by federal obstructions of local investigations.
Given its history, ICE no longer deserves the presumption that it is telling the truth.
BONUS: A reminder that the cruelty is the point: “Claims of Poor Conditions in ICE Facility Are Bolstered by Health Inspectors” - The New York Times (Gift link)
Happy Friday
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The Price Tag for Trump’s Ego Projects?
It’s time to tally the butcher’s bill of Trump’s hubris.
The Financial Times estimates that the total cost of Trump’s vanity projects is likely to exceed $1 billion. Earlier this week, we learned that the president is speeding up his White House heli-pad project — adding $875,000 to the tab. But that’s just one of his pricey baubles.
Let’s break it down:
East Wing Ballroom, $400 million
Ballroom bunker/security center, $400 million
Kennedy Center, $250,000,000
City Fountains, $58 million
National Garden of American Heroes, $40 million
Lafayette Park, $17 million
Reflecting Pool /Green Swamp, $16 million
Gilding statues, $5.1 million
Rose Garden, $2 million
BONUS: Renaming Florida airport after Donald Trump is expected to cost more than $5M | The Independent
More Platner Fall-Out
Former MS NOW anchor Alex Wagner: “F**k Graham Platner.”
Platner, as a candidate, is over. What incenses me today, this humid Thursday, is his behavior in, shall we call it, his post-candidacy—both self-serving and defeatist.
Because Platner quite obviously has a staggering amount of self-regard, he chose to post a 12-minute (!) bitchfest of a video announcing the suspension of his campaign (nobody needed any more minutes of Graham Platner, and certainly not a video stretching into the double digits)….
Platner, accused by multiple women of violent and aggressive behavior so extreme that one of his exes characterized it as rape, never mentioned any of them, never addressed their myriad allegations, but instead bundled their accounts into a fantastical deep state plot on the part of the political establishment to keep Platner from claiming his rightful seat in the Senate. You know, the ole Rape Victim Deep State card:
“A corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury, and executioner…. There is a reason that this is happening now. I only have until July 13th until I am officially the nominee. This was the last week to try to get me off of the ballot. That’s why this is occurring.”
It’s hard for me to believe that this is the posture of anyone other than a sociopath. Call me naive, but if most dudes were accused of rape, they would spend at least one minute out of twelve addressing those concerns—or at least the women who had expressed them.
**
Rachel Bade: “😡Dems are furious with Bernie”:
For years, establishment Democrats have quietly grumbled about BERNIE SANDERS trying to play kingmaker in primaries he has zero personal accountability for — parachuting in, cutting a video, headlining a rally, then moving on to the next fight while some hapless nominee is left holding the bag in November or the party is forced to pick up the pieces.
This week, the grumbling is reaching a fever pitch behind the scenes in Washington’s Democratic circles.
The trigger, obviously, is GRAHAM PLATNER — the Mainer whom Sanders transformed into a rising star, headlining his Labor Day rally in Portland and standing by him through a Nazi tattoo, ugly Reddit posts and multiple women’s accounts of his misbehavior — only to watch it all collapse this month over a rape allegation. Sanders turned the oyster farmer with zero political experience into the presumptive Democratic nominee in a state Democrats NEED to flip the Senate — a candidate some even whispered for a hot second could be a future presidential nominee. Now that bet is in ashes, and Maine Democrats are in chaos trying to replace him.
But Democrats are grumbling that Platner isn’t a one-off. Many who’ve spent the cycle biting their tongues are now running the tape on every other Sanders pick — and they don’t love what they’re finding.
**
Matt Yglesias on the Democrats who actually do well with working class voters:
There’s a big faction of Democrats who are absolutely convinced that if you pound the table hard enough with Bernie/Warren economics that you’ll win non-college voters. Then there’s an identity-obsessed sub-faction that acknowledges this doesn’t really work but thinks that if you cast the perfect gruff white man you can make it work and Platner was supposed to be their perfect gruff white man.
And the thing is, he really might have beaten Collins absent the scandal — not because of any special working-class appeal, but because Maine is a state Kamala Harris won pretty handily in a bad national year for Democrats.
The truth is we know the names of the Democrats who do well with working-class voters. They’re Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in the rural north. They’re Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez in South Texas. They’re Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer and Elissa Slotkin in the Rust Belt. They’re Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly and Katie Hobbs in Arizona.
People knock these candidates as too boring, but the truth is that a network of political operatives and sympathetic media figures were incredibly successful at generating enthusiasm for Platner because they felt enthusiastic about the idea of Graham Platner. Which is fine. But if they chose to get excited by — and spread excitement about — people who are actually good at beating Republicans, then Democrats would have a lot less trouble making those candidates seem exciting.
Friday dogs
On watch.
Via the Wapo:
“That is a lie,” wrote Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, in a handwritten statement. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over … there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”
Balderas-Ibarra spoke to Rojas, Daniel Tirado Pantoja, 43, and the shooting victim’s brother, Victor Salgado, 44, and said he heard the same story from each as he interviewed them separately. The men are not being housed together, the attorney said. All three are undocumented Mexican immigrants who are now facing removal proceedings.
“All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra said. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”
I wonder if these killings ever bother these guys in the wee small hours of the morning? I would think blowing away a guy running out of a bank with a sack of cash would even have some trauma with it. But blowing away a father rounding up a morning work crew to re-shingle a roof would eat at you later. Maybe not for the types they hire
Ice Killings. Seems that if Stephen Miller had his way those killings would just be tagged on to the end of the weather report. You know, cloudy with a chance of murder, oh, excuse me, cloudy with a chance of self-defense!
You can see it in his eyes, you can hear it in his rhetoric. The absolute hatred emenating from him is so obvious. He's taken the worst traits of some of the worst Nazis, Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich & swirled them around in his bile & created a monstrous movement in our supposed Department of Justice.
I wonder when it will end? 2 of those Nazis committed suicide the other died from his injuries when he was attacked by Czech underground.
Hate knows no boundary on either side of this argument does it?