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“ICE has repeatedly lied about killing people in cold blood,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

The post New York Hasn’t Raised Housing Allowances for Needy Residents in Decades. That’s Unconstitutional, a Lawsuit Says. appeared first on ProPublica.

The Houston killing comes amid a sharp surge in ICE operations across the United States. A reported 10,000 people have been arrested by ICE in just 5 days. Devin Martinez , July 9, 2026

An SDNY judge’s ruling against Kalshi gives powerful ammunition to the 16 other states that have filed similar claims against prediction markets.

The Trump administration’s attempt to prosecute alleged “vandalism” at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool hit a snag Thursday.U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro attempted to bar former U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn from the pool after he pleaded not guilty to damaging it, only to be rebuffed by D.C. Superior Court Judge Carmen McLean.“The government’s evidence is weak,” one of Hearn’s attorneys, Mary Dohrmann, argued in court.Another of Hearn’s attorneys, Norm Eisen, said, “Every American should be alarmed about this prosecution. It is not a crime to touch the Reflecting Pool.”The government is accusing Hearn of destruction of property, which could send him to prison for 10 years if he’s found guilty. Pirro claims that Hearn “forcefully and violently” ripped two square feet of the pool’s newly added blue paint, while Hearn maintains that he only touched a piece of paint that was already peeling.“The condition of the Reflecting Pool was the same after I stepped away from the water as it was before I got there,” Hearn said.President Trump has spent more than $14 million on the Reflecting Pool, adding a blue coat of paint to the bottom and later dumping hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill algae, which had the side effect of causing the new paint to peel. Unwilling to accept the consequences of his actions, Trump has blamed vandalism for the poor state of the pool, and Pirro has charged at least four people over it, including Hearn.Many of Hearn’s supporters came to the courthouse on Thursday to cheer for him, including the former chair of the U.S. Olympic national governing body for canoe and kayak sports, Adam Van Grack, who said that Hearn has spent years voluntarily helping maintain National Park Service property near the Potomac River that canoeists use to train.“This is a person who has devoted his life to representing the United States on an international stage, caring for the community, and protecting and caring for National Park Service property,” Van Grack told the Associated Press. “So the idea that he is a malicious destroyer of federal property shocks the conscience and makes no sense to anybody who’s ever known Davey Hearn.”Trump now insists that the pool is fine, even as he is draining it once again.

After a federal agent killed an undocumented Mexican man in his van during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday, the government rushed to follow a familiar template. Just as it has after other shootings, the Department of Homeland Security released a statement insisting that the man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, had “weaponized his vehicle” against the officer, who then justifiably opened fire. DHS offered no evidence of this.But it appears three other people were in the van with the now-deceased man, and they presumably could recount their version of what happened: the victim’s brother and two employees of the dead man’s construction business. They were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the encounter, and we haven’t heard from them publicly about what happened.Now, in another potentially dark turn in the saga, those three men 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, claimed in an interview with The New Republic.Proaño—who regularly confers with the family members of the victim and the three detainees and organized a press conference on their behalf earlier this week—said the family members were able to reach the three detainees, who then related this situation.“They’re being pressured to sign self-deportation orders,” Proaño told me. “They’re currently in detention. These men hold the key to what actually happened.” Under self-deportation, detained migrants agree to leave the country voluntarily within a prescribed time period.According to DHS, officers tried to stop Salgado Araujo’s vehicle as part of a targeted operation, after which the undocumented Salgado Araujo “attempted to evade arrest.” DHS claimed Salgado Araujo “refused to follow multiple verbal commands” before trying to “run over” an ICE officer, who then fired “in self-defense.” Salgado Araujo, struck in the abdomen, was transported to the hospital, where he died.Yet Salgado Araujo, 52, had been in the United States for 35 years, raised a family, and didn’t immediately seem prone to attempting vehicular manslaughter of federal law enforcement. A business owner himself, he and his passengers were driving to a job: The encounter occurred at the early hour of 6:50 a.m. ICE reportedly hasn’t presented evidence of its version of events and didn’t provide any video camera footage.But other video of the encounter, reported on by NBC News—which doesn’t include the shooting itself—shows several other men lying face down on the ground along with Salgado Araujo, who is lying wounded with two officers crouched over him and one radioing for help.The three men are Salgado Araujo’s brother, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, and two workers, Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego, Proaño told TNR. Family members who are in touch with them confirmed the pressure to sign self-deportation orders, Proaño says, adding that some of the men may be inclined to do so to avoid longer-term detention.“We want full public disclosure of the eyewitness accounts of what actually happened on the day that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed,” Proaño said. The pressure to self-deport, Proaño added, looks like “an effort by DHS to get rid of the only eyewitnesses to what happened.” Asked for comment, ICE emailed a statement that didn’t address the three men’s status and referred questions to the FBI.There are other reasons to doubt that Salgado Araujo would attempt to kill an officer. NBC reports that DHS hasn’t said that the man has a previous criminal record. And Salgado Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, says that the family had actually been preparing for the possibility that he might be picked up by law enforcement, given increased ICE activity in Texas. The family had a plan, according to The Washington Post: He would comply if arrested, refrain from signing anything, and wait for the family to try to get him released.A family man, Salgado Araujo also helped send his three U.S. citizen sons to college, as The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo reports. He was far along in the process of applying for legal protections, having even submitted fingerprints. And while Salgado, the victim’s son, is calling for a full investigation, the FBI’s local office is said to be focused mainly on establishing that an assault on a federal officer took place (the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is also probing the event).A big question now, says Radley Balko, a criminal justice reform expert who writes about ICE abuses on his Substack, is whether these men are advised by lawyers to speak out about what they saw. (Proaño told TNR he doesn’t believe they have legal representation yet.)“You don’t pressure witnesses to a shooting to self-deport if your goal is to get to the bottom of what happened,” Balko said. “You pressure them to self-deport when you want to make sure that nobody learns what actually happened.” Balko pointed out that with previous ICE shootings, the government has taken unabashedly heavy-handed steps either to suppress the truth of what happened or to rewrite it to cast the victims as instigators of violent confrontation. For instance, a number of federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned in protest over a Justice Department push to criminally investigate the actions of shooting victim Renee Good, and over DOJ’s refusal to include state officials in probing the shooting itself. And Balko notes that in a different ICE shooting in Minneapolis, a migrant eyewitness was flown to a detention center hundreds of miles away, potentially to prevent him fom testifying.“There is precedent for this,” Balko said of ICE’s apparent response to the Texas shooting. All this comes as ICE is embarked on a massive new escalation of deportations nationwide. Yet in this case, ICE is very eager to keep the removal operations out of the news. The last thing Republicans want with the midterms approaching is another big backlash akin to what met ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis.Yet as we’ve seen again and again, ramping up this level of paramilitary force—and unleashing it to violently extract longtime residents and business owners from deep within local communities—of necessity creates the tinderbox conditions that make deadly shootings a matter of when, not if. The authors of these conditions are Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. In Texas, this has now resulted in an unspeakable tragedy. What remains to be seen is whether we’ll ever learn the full, horrifying story.

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Multiple victims of billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are accusing his assistant of lying to Congress. Several Epstein survivors, including four who spoke publicly and two others who did so anonymously, told CNN that Lesley Groff’s assertions last month were outright false. Groff testified before the House Oversight Committee on June 9 and claimed that she never met any of the girls and young women who gave Epstein massages and did not know anything about their backgrounds. The victims said that was not the case, describing meeting Groff in person, telling her their ages, and being paid by Groff directly. Epstein survivor Marina Lacerda said she saw Groff regularly after first meeting Epstein in 2002, when she was not yet 14 years old. “She’s lying,” Lacerda said. “Just me and my friends, she’s met at least three or four of us.”Sharlene Rochard, who told CNN she was a young New York City model when she met the billionaire, said that she met Groff “multiple times in different locations.” Lara Blume McGee, who said she was abused from 2001 to 2003, described meeting Groff at Epstein’s New York townhouse at least twice. Several of these women told CNN that Groff was well aware of their ages. Lacerda said that Groff asked detailed questions about new girls and ordered her to tell her friends to bring school IDs to sessions with Epstein because of his preference for younger girls. “She would ask, ‘What does the girl look like? Where is she from? How old is she?’ over the phone,” Lacerda said. Rochard said that she and other girls would give Groff their passport information and identification to book flights, which plainly showed their ages. One anonymous victim said Groff helped her fill out her passport application at Epstein’s New York City office. “I sat with her and she took all my information in person. She obviously knew my age,” the woman said. But when Democratic Representative Suhas Subramanyam directly asked Groff in June if she handled or viewed any of the girls’ or women’s passports, Groff said no. “I may have seen a passport—a picture of a passport, but I never had anything to do with their passports,” Groff said. Multiple women, including Lacerda, said that Groff was also directly involved in cash payments, putting $100 bills in long white envelopes and handing them to them. Groff denied paying anyone on Epstein’s behalf, telling the committee that she sometimes arranged for money to be picked up or delivered. All of this suggests more lies out of Epstein’s inner circle, joining those from Epstein’s longtime fixer Ghislaine Maxwell. Despite new revelations from Congress and the Justice Department, though, no new charges have been filed in the U.S. against anyone involved in Epstein’s massive abuse operation.