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After ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, last week, they quickly arrested three witnesses: the other men that the 52-year-old father of three was driving to work. The three men, including Salgado Araujo’s younger brother Victor, are now being detained by ICE and threatened with deportation. “There is a Trump militia roaming our streets, our towns, our cities, killing people regardless of immigration status with absolutely no accountability. … They are either not getting training or getting training to shoot directly at people, to murder people, in the streets,” says Congressmember Pramila Jayapal, explaining that the three incarcerated witnesses must be protected from deportation for at least as long as they can provide information for the investigations on Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killing. Victor Salgado Araujo “wants to be accessible as a witness, and it’s really hard for him to do that when he’s [being detained] 45 minutes away from Houston,” says his attorney Ruby Powers. “Being able to be in the United States freely, to be able to give that testimony is what we’re asking for.”

Confirmation hearings are underway for President Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, his personal attorney Todd Blanche. Blanche is mired in a number of controversies, most notably his mishandling of the administration’s release of the Epstein files while serving as deputy attorney general under Pam Bondi. Washington state Representative Pramila Jayapal, who is co-sponsoring a bill to allow Epstein survivors whose identifying information was improperly publicized by the Department of Justice to sue the federal government for damages, says “Todd Blanche was responsible” for the breach. “He really wanted to discourage anyone else from coming forward with more information. … It’s [a] big reason why he shouldn’t be the attorney general.” Jayapal also discusses the Department of Justice’s surveillance of herself and other legislators who viewed Epstein-related documents and Blanche’s longstanding personal and professional connections with Trump.

U.S. Strikes Iran for Fifth Consecutive Day Targeting Tehran, Israeli Forces Kill Four People in Gaza, Including 6-Year-Old Girl, Israel’s Security Cabinet Approves Nearly Half a Billion Dollars for New Settlements in Occupied West Bank, Half of All Democrats on Capitol Hill Support Measure Slashing Military Funding to Israel, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche Grilled During Senate Confirmation Hearing, Trump’s Nominee for Director of National Intelligence Refuses to Say Whether Biden Won 2020 Election, New York Times Files Motion to Quash Subpoenas of Its Journalists, Hegseth Announces Plans to Screen Testosterone Levels of Service Members Over the Age of 30, 45-Year-Old Venezuelan Immigrant Dies in ICE Custody in Georgia, 100 Million People in North America Face Air Quality Alerts, Pro-Palestinian Activists Demand Release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from Israeli Custody

Washington has pressured Mexico’s president to extradite officials with alleged ties to organized crime gangs, straining relations between the neighbors.

Two years into Donald Trump’s campaign of mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups so often result in violence that if you look away from social media or the news for a few hours, you may miss another death.On Monday, ICE agents killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old man from Colombia, after stopping his car in Biddeford, Maine. Durán Guerrero was the second person shot and killed by immigration enforcement agents in one week: Last Tuesday, in Houston, also in the course of an apparent traffic stop, an agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father from Mexico who had lived in the United States for decades.Department of Homeland Security officials offered only a slight variation in their excuses for taking these lives. Initially, they claimed that both Durán Guerrero and Salgado Araujo had “weaponized” their vehicles against agents. This type of rationalization has become painfully routine in immigration enforcement. The only new thing about these excuses was how quickly they were doubted and discounted by the media and the public alike. Three men who had been with Salgado Araujo refuted the administration story within days, even as they were held in immigration detention, facing deportation themselves. After ICE killed Durán Guerrero, the official story landed amid months of lies; within hours, on the pavement where his life was ended and the evidence was still visible, someone chalked the words, “This is blood.”As if sensing it was not going to be able to victim-blame the agency out of responsibility, DHS issued a directive later on Tuesday, suspending “all ERO initiated enforcement vehicle stops until further notice.” (ERO stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations, a part of ICE.) That same day, in St. Augustine, Florida, another man was dead after an ICE “encounter.” In this case, four people fled their car when they spotted ICE. A truck hit and killed one of them, a 28-year-old man from Mexico, while he was running away. His name has not yet been released. Early Wednesday morning, the president showered praise on ICE, telling agents in a Truth Social post that they were doing “a GREAT job, one that has to be done” and that “we CANNOT give up” the agents’ key tactic, the “TRAFFIC STOP!” He threatened, “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.” He instructed, “Go back and do your very important job.” He soothed, “Remember, you are loved and respected in America.” The directive was dead; ICE business was barely altered.There is no shortage of policies or practices Trump has attempted to overturn by posting to his vanity social media site—which, if you have understandably forgotten in all that has happened over the past six years, exists because he fomented a riot at the Capitol, in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and was banned from the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. The “love” and “respect” with which Trump is rewarding ICE, however, after what may be the most lethal week of the agency’s 23-year existence, communicates the standards to which ICE is held just as surely as rolling back a directive.With this response to a rare policy change in the wake of multiple ICE killings, Trump again has indicated that ICE agents are his people. The message is of a piece with his regard for the Proud Boys (“Stand back and stand by … because somebody has got to do something about antifa and the left,” he said in a presidential debate). It is of a piece with his regard for “the Second Amendment people” (during his first campaign, he pondered aloud what they might be able to do to his opponent). The president thrills not only to what he wants but to how far his supporters will go to get it for him. “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump,” Trump told Breitbart in 2019. “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”The Trump administration has tried before to appease public opposition after immigration agents killed people, such as after the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year. The administration’s mass deportations figurehead, Greg Bovino, commander-at-large for Immigration Operations, was sent packing from the Twin Cities, taking his Reich-styled greatcoat (even German media agreed that was his look) with him. Tom Homan, the White House’s “border czar,” was sent in to unconvincingly act like the kinder face of mass deportations. But all this was window dressing: ICE continued arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants, and Minneapolis remained under siege.Bovino, meanwhile, relieved of official duties, has been able to say what remained largely unspoken during his tenure. Now purportedly considering a run for the presidency in the 2028 race, he was a featured speaker at a recent “remigration” conference in Portugal, and he has repeatedly called for about one-third of the United States population to be deported—100 million people. With the euphemism remigration, they mean ethnic cleansing, remaking the country by removing people deemed to have no value. This attraction to what had once been a fringe white nationalist concept did not emerge when Bovino became a free agent. During the 2024 campaign, Trump pledged to institute remigration in the United States, and in his second term, he launched an Office of Remigration. Bovino may be gone, but the people who elevated him and who worked for him remain, issuing orders from the White House and holding guns on the streets.Such rhetoric may be shocking, even considering that anti-immigrant policing and detention has been violent in the United States for nearly as long as we have had anti-immigrant laws. Americans have been primed to accept that violence, because at all levels of law enforcement in this country, officers enjoy impunity both for racial profiling and for killing people. What has changed, what has escalated, is that the White House is now openly telling us that this not a broken system but a system it permits and prefers. Our everyday lives are now occupied by a secretive law enforcement agency that is empowered to round up people profiled as immigrants based on their race or ethnicity, a form of racial profiling given license by the Supreme Court. These are federal agents who kill and face no consequences, and are led by people pushing an ethnic cleansing campaign. These killings are simply part of that job.

“The court should add this far-fetched claim to the growing list of meritless climate lawsuits the state and federal courts have already dismissed.” That’s how Chevron’s lawyer Theodore Boutrous responded last year when Misti Leon filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in Washington State against major oil and gas companies for the wrongful death of her mother, Julie Leon, who died during the record-breaking Pacific Northwest heat dome that killed over 1,400 people in 2021.Last week, a Washington state court published its response to Big Oil’s effort to throw out Leon’s “far-fetched” claim. Boutrous was no doubt disappointed, for the court rejected the defendants’ motion to dismiss—meaning Misti Leon’s case to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for her mother’s climate-induced death will now be proceeding toward discovery and trial.This is a big deal. First, it’s striking how clearly the court ruled that Leon’s pathbreaking new theory of climate accountability is “not about regulating emissions,” as the defendants had argued. Leon’s lawsuit alleges that Big Oil companies should be liable for her mother’s death based on two state law causes of action: their failure to warn the public about the climate catastrophes they knew their fossil fuel products would cause, and their deceptive advertising—both climate denial and greenwashing—that have misled the public about these dangers for decades.The defendants refused to accept those claims on their own terms. Big Oil’s primary arguments to dismiss Leon’s suit—the same arguments it is currently pushing at the Supreme Court against a more traditional climate case—are that her case is preempted by the Clean Air Act (and also, somehow, the Constitution) and that her claims would “usurp the power of the legislative and executive branches to set climate policy.” The court’s response to these claims was unequivocal: Failure to warn and deceptive advertising are state law causes of action. They are adjudicated by courts all the time. And they have nothing to do with—and are therefore not preempted by—the Clean Air Act. “This case is about a single individual and an allegation that a single weather event contributed to her untimely passing,” the court wrote. “It is seeking damages for her death and nothing else”—pointedly, damages that are “not an attempt to regulate future emissions.” Such claims are not preempted because the Clean Air Act “does not address product liability or deceptive marketing.” And they are not non-justiciable political questions because they are “simple torts” that do not “implicate separation-of-powers concerns.” This ruling is a major boon to Leon’s new legal theory. Naturally, surviving a motion to dismiss doesn’t mean a case will succeed—not by a long shot. But this ruling confirms that such a lawsuit is legally plausible. The court essentially asks if there would be a cognizable claim if it accepted the plaintiff’s factual allegations as true. If one has confidence in Leon’s allegations—regarding Big Oil’s climate deception, the role of this deception in furthering climate change, and the impact of climate change on heat waves like the Pacific Northwest heat dome—then there is every reason to believe that a judge’s gatekeeping regarding these legal questions is as big an obstacle to a suit like Leon’s as the willingness of a jury of regular people to respond to evidence of Big Oil’s deception by ruling in favor of a bereaved daughter like Misti Leon.As such, this ruling could encourage other victims of climate disasters to file their own wrongful death suits against Big Oil—and it could give other plaintiffs’ attorneys confidence to take on these cases. That should make the fossil fuel industry very nervous. Julie Leon is far from the only victim of Big Oil’s climate misconduct. Dozens of people in New Jersey and Philadelphia were just killed in the Fourth of July heat wave, which climate scientists have already determined would have been “virtually impossible” but for climate change. Maricopa County, Arizona, experienced 430 heat-related deaths in 2025, and its death count this year is outpacing that figure “at a troubling rate.” Figures like these could be on track to explode in the near future. Already, some regions are experiencing orders of magnitude more carnage—a recent analysis found that extreme heat from climate change may have caused over 20,000 deaths in Europe last month alone.The progression of Leon’s case could also help inspire a powerful and previously untapped category of legal actors to join the fight for climate accountability: prosecutors. Though criminal prosecution requires a higher burden of proof than civil litigation, the core legal argument being made by Misti Leon is similar to the one prosecutors would rely on to charge Big Oil companies with criminal offenses—like homicide, reckless endangerment, or risking catastrophe—in relation to the climate disasters that are, in some instances, killing more of their constituents than are being lost to traditional homicides.It seems the fossil fuel industry is becoming concerned about this possibility. The latest draft legislation being put forward by the American Legislative Exchange Council to immunize oil and gas companies from liability for climate harms includes language creating a shield for all “criminal charges, indictments, or prosecutions based on or arising from” Big Oil’s climate-related misconduct.Corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP are desperately looking for get-out-of-jail-free cards like these because they know that claims like those of Misti Leon are not, in fact, “far-fetched” or “meritless,” as Boutrous bluffed. They know that people like Julie Leon should not be losing their lives. People like Misti should not be losing their mothers. These are not natural tragedies. They’re the result of the conduct of a small number of companies that knew their fossil fuels would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate harms that would create “more violent weather” and cause “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” Despite this knowledge, they spent years preventing the public from understanding the risks their products were creating, in order to protect their obscene profits.These companies have blood on their hands. The volume of that blood is growing every year. Following this latest court decision, they are one step closer to being held accountable for their lethal conduct. And it’s all thanks to the courage of Misti Leon, a regular person going up against some of the most powerful corporations on the planet to win justice for her mother. For now, at least, she’s winning.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday pressed attorney general nominee Todd Blanche, President Trump’s former lawyer, on a range of controversies and came away even more convinced that he’s not fit to lead the Justice Department. But will any of their Republican colleagues come to the same conclusion?Senator Richard Blumenthal, who sits on the committee, was alarmed by Blanche’s responses to questions about Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund and the president’s self-dealing with the IRS. “He hewed to the standard line and showed that he’s really Donald Trump’s henchman, his mob consigliere, and will enable and promote the lawbreaking that we’ve seen by Donald Trump,” Blumenthal told me. “There’s a chance” that Republicans will defect and vote against Blanche, he said, but he added, “I am certainly not optimistic because, looking at history, they have failed to stand up when it counted, even in the face of lawbreaking.”Assuming every Democrat on the committee opposes Blanche, who is currently the acting attorney general, he will need every Republican vote to advance to a confirmation vote in the full Senate. (His two-vote cushion was cut to one with Senator Lindsey Graham’s sudden death.)Another Democrat on the committee, Senator Cory Booker, cited Blanche’s response to questions about the government investigation into the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. “It was outrageous how many times he didn’t even tell the truth,” he said. “Even just about the fact that he said [he] can’t meet with the victims of Epstein.”During the hearing, ranking member Dick Durbin pressed Blanche to commit to meeting with Epstein’s victims. Ten of those victims were present at the hearing. Blanche said he would ensure that colleagues meet with Epstein’s victims, but didn’t commit to doing so himself. “You’re dancing on the head of a pin here,” Durbin said.“I’m not dancing on any pin,” Blanche responded.In another tense moment, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse questioned Blanche on FBI Director Kash Patel. “How long do you intend to put up with that Kash Patel character?” Whitehouse asked, listing some of Patel’s alleged misdeeds.“That’s an extraordinarily obnoxious question, senator,” Blanche responded.Perhaps most significant was GOP Senator John Cornyn’s line of questioning. Both Cornyn and Senator Thom Tillis, who is also Republican, are leaving the Senate in January. Tillis is retiring, while Cornyn lost his primary to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom Trump endorsed. In recent months, the two senators developed independent streaks, but it’s no guarantee that they will break with the party in this instance. (A Spectrum News reporter said that Tillis is leaning toward “yes.”)Cornyn questioned Blanche about the anti-weaponization fund and got the acting attorney general to confirm that it is “dead.” Still, Blanche noted, the underlying settlement agreement between Trump and the IRS, which included the creation of the fund, remains an “enforceable document.”“His claim that the weaponization fund is a dead doornail is not a characterization that I agree with,” Cornyn said, later in the day. But Cornyn remains undecided on whether he’ll vote for Blanche. “I’m not going to make that decision until I need to,” he said.Though Senate Democrats said they’re unsure where their Republican colleagues will fall on Blanche, they see cracks in the wall. “You didn’t see defections of any significance at the beginning of the Trump term, but you’re starting to see [them now],” Senator Tim Kaine said.