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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.

Platner took a divisive tone in a video announcing his decision, blaming establishment Democrats for his exit.

The post “No tenía por qué morir”: cómo un centro de detención falló una y otra vez ante una crisis de salud mental appeared first on ProPublica.

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.

ICE is making people’s worst fears a reality. The family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican man who was shot and killed Tuesday by immigration enforcement agents in Texas, is calling for a full investigation into his death.Speaking at a press conference Wednesday, Ronaldo Salgado, the deceased’s son, gave an emotional account of how he learned of his father’s death. “I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognized him immediately,” Ronaldo said, his voice breaking. “Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street, bleeding out.”Salgado set off for the area where his father was working construction in North Houston, and remained on the site for hours looking for answers. League of United Latin American Citizens Representative Conchita Reyes connected him to Texas Representative Sylvia Garcia to locate his father at Ben Taub Hospital. “With all the hope in the world I drove to Ben Taub Hospital, the hospital that I was born in, my brother Lorenzo Jr. was born in, and my youngest was born in. I went to Ben Taub Hospital, demanded answers, but no one could give them to me,” Salgado said.“I learned of my father’s passing from a news report on social media, not the hospital, not law enforcement,” he continued.Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was undocumented, but his three children are U.S. citizens. His son said his father had completed the paperwork for a legal work permit, submitted good character affidavits and fingerprints 18 months ago, and was awaiting a response.In the hours after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed the officer had fired in self-defense after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo refused to comply with orders and “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” But that’s a familiar refrain used by ICE agents to skirt legal issues, as the agency’s use-of-force policy bars agents from firing at a vehicle unless there is an imminent threat to their safety. DHS made similar claims about the shooting of Marimar Martinez and the fatal shooting of Renee Good. The claims about Martinez quickly fell apart when her lawyer showed footage of immigration agents steering their vehicle into Martinez’s truck. While the investigation into Good’s death has gone nowhere, DHS’s claims are highly disputed.His family believes that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who had no criminal record, would have complied with orders if he’d known that the officers pursuing him in unmarked vehicles were federal immigration authorities. The family even had a plan in place in the event that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was picked up by ICE. “He did not deserve to die. He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican Man Shot and Killed by ICE.’ He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, a father, and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream,” his son said.Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death marks the tenth fatal shooting by federal immigration enforcement during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Graham Platner continued to deny his sexual assault allegations, lambasted “larger forces” against him, and demanded that the Maine Democratic Party allow him a say in his replacement upon announcing his withdrawal from the Senate race. The angry video went against everything his closest aides advised. “Accusations are supposed to be the beginning of things, not the end,” Platner said in his 11-minute video, posted Wednesday evening on X. “This was the last week to try to get me off of the ballot. That’s why this is occurring.... [The allegations] are being used by the political establishment to put structural pressure on us.... It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish. That if they begin to succeed, they can be crushed.” “They are going to take everything away from us. Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things we need to run a campaign,” Platner continued in his vertically shot video. “They would rather see Susan Collins win than have me be the next senator from Maine.”  My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine. pic.twitter.com/RKVyLU76tm— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 9, 2026His indignant rhetoric was also mirrored in his claims that national Democrats were trying to choose his successor behind “closed doors” and his insistence that they choose a fellow progressive. In reality, Maine’s Democratic Party is planning to hold a nominating convention with about 600 delegates later this month.According to Politico, several of Graham’s closest advisers begged him not to take this approach with his resignation video, urging him to center “gratitude” and to to strike a “conciliatory” tone instead. But he refused to take their advice.Platner was accused of sexual assault by Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine resident who dated him on and off for two years, in a Politico article published on Monday. She alleged that the former Marine drunkenly entered her home uninvited five years ago and forced himself on her even as she asked him to stop. Platner continued to profusely deny these allegations in his resignation video. Blaming the larger political establishment for your rape allegation with an 11-minute long video does not seem particularly gracious. Now Maine’s Democratic Party has until July 27 to pick a candidate—and to try and clean up Platner’s long mess of a campaign.

Workplace retaliation now accounts for over 55% of EEOC complaints. Learn how subtle employer reprisals work and how to protect your. The post Retaliation Is Becoming the Quietest Labor Story in America appeared first on DCReport.org.