The federal immigration agents who shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican father of three in Texas, weren’t even looking for him.When ICE agents conducted a deadly traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday, they were looking for two people from Guatemala, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. Agents believed one of the people they were looking for drove a white van—instead, they found Salgado Araujo and three men he was driving to work. Before conducting the traffic stop, federal agents knew they had the wrong man. They reportedly looked up the owner of the van and learned it was Salgado Araujo, who was undocumented. The supposedly “targeted operation” ended in ICE’s tenth fatal shooting this year.In the hours after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed the officer had fired in self-defense after Salgado Araujo refused to comply with orders and “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” But the other three men in the car who were arrested by ICE told their lawyer that was a lie—there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. Surveillance footage from the traffic stop also doesn’t support DHS’s claim. One video showed that agents boxed in Salgado Araujo’s car, before he attempted to U-turn and drive the other way. Another video showed that there was no damage to the ICE agents’ vehicle. In another potentially dark turn in the saga, the three men who were with Salgado Araujo are under pressure from immigration officials to agree to self-deport, Juan Proaño, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in an interview with The New Republic.
Les Leopold “I think a democratic socialist can get elected anywhere across the country for any position.” — Zohran Mamdani, June 28, 2026 These are heady days for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Its leading lights, Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are on a winning streak—first winning office themselves and then helping propel successful congressional […]
This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act, the landmark government transparency law that has helped reveal and publicize critical information about everything from the Vietnam War to FBI surveillance to CIA torture. For decades, FOIA has played a crucial role in uncovering and rectifying government wrongdoing. Today, however, advocates say that the government’s resistance to fulfilling FOIA requests has grown, forcing applicants to file expensive lawsuits to obtain records, while records that are released often take years to receive and are filled with so many redactions as to render them essentially “a waste of time.”
“It’s gotten extremely bad in this last year and a half under Trump, but this has been going on for decades,” says Ian Head, who manages the Open Records Project at the Center for Constitutional Rights. These bureaucratic delay and deferral tactics are extremely concerning, he adds, threatening accountability, transparency and democratic processes. “We need to be able to file federal FOIA requests so we can see what this government is doing.”
Mercedez Some of the most peaceful moments of my life were spent standing on the deck of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier just before dawn. It feels like looking over the entire ocean, into endless blue water. An aircraft carrier is massive — like a floating city on the sea — and yet you can […]