Political News

Political handicappers and pundits alike disagree on the accuracy of internal campaign polls, with data showing they are often biased in favor of the candidate they’re affiliated with. However, history has shown that while the topline numbers in the surveys may not predict the exact outcome of a race, the amount of internal campaign polls released can be predictive of how that party will do…

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ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a traffic stop in Texas on Tuesday morning. The agents stated that Salgado Araujo ignored verbal instructions and tried to ram their vehicle. Newly obtained footage puts a massive asterisk over those claims of self-defense.

Surveillance video footage obtained by local outlet KHOU 11 shows the agents using their unmarked black SUV in an attempt to box in Salgado Araujo—initiating the conflict. Salgado Araujo makes a U-turn and heads in the other direction, and the agents then turn around to follow him.

While the video did not capture the final moments of the shooting, separate footage showed no damage to the ICE vehicle, again weakening federal agents’ claim that Salgado Araujo tried to ram them.

Video shows the moments before ICE shot a worker who lived for 35 years in the United States. It appears to show it was ICE attempting to initiate contact with his vehicle, not the worker attempting to "ram" ICE agents pic.twitter.com/Rv8KsHPf8J

— David J. Bier (@David_J_Bier) July 9, 2026

This discrepancy between the agents’ statements and the video footage has led to widespread calls for an independent investigation into Salgado Araujo’s death. Complicating that is the fact that the Department of Homeland Security detained the three other immigrant men in the car with Salgado Araujo—one of whom is Salgado Araujo’s brother—and is pressuring them to self-deport, preventing them from serving as witnesses.

“What we have heard … is that they’re being told to sign voluntary departures. They’re being told to cooperate with the version [of events] that ICE has released,” Immigrant Families and Students in the Fight head Cesar Espinosa told Democracy Now! on Thursday. “Threatening them that they’re going to file charges if they don’t, or that they’re going to be deported expeditiously. And what we fear is that this is another effort from ICE to cover up something that they did very, very wrong.”

ICE also arrested and detained witnesses after the killing of Alex Pretti in January. And this isn’t the first time it’s offered this version of events, either. When Marimar Martinez was shot five times in her car last year, ICE initially claimed that when the officers exited their vehicle, Martinez tried to run them over, “forcing the officers to fire defensively.” Bodycam footage showed no such thing, and her charges were dismissed.

“They are being approached by unmarked vehicles. These vehicles, many times, often, start ramming vehicles, trying to get them to stop. And when people jump out, they’re not wearing insignia saying ‘federal agents’ or ‘ICE’ or a badge. They’re wearing, a lot of the times, plain clothing with vests that just say ‘police,’” Espinosa continued. “So, I cannot imagine the fear that a lot of people feel when they are being persecuted by somebody that’s unknown. And I ask people, you know, put yourself in these folks’ shoes and ask yourself: How would you react?”

Salgado Araujo, a father of three U.S. citizens, had been in the United States for almost 35 years.

Mexico is taking legal action over ICE agents killing an immigrant in North Houston on Tuesday.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Thursday that her government planned to file criminal complaints in the United States over all Mexican citizens who have been killed while being targeted by ICE. Fourteen Mexican nationals have died in ICE custody, while three have been killed in immigration enforcement operations, including Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, on Tuesday.

“We cannot turn a blind eye to ​the Mexicans who have died,” Sheinbaum said during a press conference. She said the purpose of the complaints was to bring accountability to anyone accused of a homicide or of committing human rights violations.

The Mexican government provides help to all of its citizens who ask for it, but “especially to Mexicans whose only crime is working honestly ​in the United States,” Sheinbaum added.

The Department of Homeland Security claims Salgado Araujo, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who had lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, was killed after he didn’t comply with orders from ICE agents, and then “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” It’s a similar excuse to the ones DHS used for the shooting of Marimar Martinez in Chicago last year and the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis in January.

In both of those cases, video footage showed that neither Martinez nor Good tried to use their cars against ICE agents. The DHS has not provided any evidence to back up its claim in Salgado Araujo’s case, and has even pressured witnesses to “self-deport,” The New Republic found.

Salgado Araujo’s U.S. citizen son Ronaldo discovered his father’s death through social media, and not from the government or medical professionals.

“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.”

Hopefully, the Salgado Araujo family will get justice, and hopefully so will the families of Martinez, Good, and Alex Pretti.

Senator Mitch McConnell was inexplicably admitted to the hospital nearly a month ago, a stretch of time that has even the far-right media machine growing suspicious of the Kentucky Republican’s true medical condition.

McConnell was hospitalized after he was found unconscious in his Washington residence on June 14. But as the weeks have dragged on without a clear explanation from his team as to his mysterious absence, speculation about McConnell’s health has become increasingly grave. Earlier this week, far-right influencer Laura Loomer claimed on X that an unnamed “high level source close to the White House” told her that McConnell was suffering from severe organ failure and “is officially brain dead.”

By Thursday, hosts of the far-right news network Newsmax had joined the expanding choir.

“Republicans are doing the same bullshit with McConnell that Dems did with [Joe] Biden. No one has actually spoke to him, they are just trying to carry this on to keep @RepThomasMassie from running for his seat,” Carl Higbie posted to X on Thursday morning, referring to the highly dependent dynamic the previous president was rumored to rely on in the waning days of his term.

Newsmax anchor Rob Finnerty took his concerns to his show, questioning on air: “Where is Mitch McConnell? What is going on?

“When you factor this in under Kentucky state law, if McConnell resigned or died, a special election would have to happen within 90 days, meaning before the November elections, meaning someone like Congressman Thomas Massie could run in that race and potentially win, which is not something Republicans want,” Finnerty said.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear got involved in the matter Wednesday, penning a letter to McConnell’s office demanding a formal update on the senator’s health.

The 84-year-old Republican has represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate since 1985, and remained on Capitol Hill through several recent health scares, particularly since 2023. In March of that year, McConnell fell at a dinner event at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, fracturing his rib and suffering a concussion in the process.

He fell again that July. He also publicly froze mid-sentence twice that year, dissociating for 20 to 30 seconds each time, sparking concerns that the aging lawmaker had suffered a stroke.

In December 2024, McConnell fell for a third time in a public setting, and again in October 2025 while on his way to vote in the Capitol. He has since been transported via wheelchair by his aides as a health precaution.

In February, McConnell’s staffers shared that the lawmaker had spent roughly eight days in the hospital with “flu-like symptoms.”

Ladies and gentlemen: Introducing President Donald J. Trump International Airport. What was once Palm Beach International Airport has officially been added to the growing list of institutions adorned with the president’s name. “This morning, Palm Beach International Airport became President Donald J. Trump International Airport — a new name for a Florida landmark, and a lasting tribute…

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On Tuesday morning in Houston, an ICE agent shot and killed a man on his way to work. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years. With him that morning were his brother and two men who worked on Araujo’s construction crew. At the time of his death, Araujo was waiting on a work permit; according to his son, “he was close to obtaining his legal status.” When ICE detained the men, the agents were reportedly driving an unmarked vehicle, as has been their practice in raids across the U.S. since early 2025. His son said that Araujo likely feared for his life—as countless others have when ICE agents have followed them, approached their cars, smashed their windows, and dragged them out into the street. “This is not an isolated event across the nation,” said Roman Palomares, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “We have seen a pattern of ICE involvement in shootings and excessive use of force. Each time, a family is left without answers and a community is left in fear.” The group has called for a “full, independent, and transparent investigation” into Araujo’s killing.

For ICE’s mission of mass deportations, controlling the narrative is as critical as filling detention centers at record rates. The hospital where Araujo was taken would not tell his son Ronaldo what happened to his father, nor would law enforcement, he said at a press conference Wednesday. Instead, he learned that his father had died from a video he saw on social media, he said. He recognized his father by his voice. Predictably, the Department of Homeland Security told reporters that the killing was an act of “self-defense” by ICE agents who had feared for their safety. This is a story they have told many times before. Since Trump returned to office, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is the tenth person federal immigration agents have shot and killed.

After Trump ordered mass deportations and officers with ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and other federal agencies descended on and occupied neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, among other cities, their showy, high-profile operations and violent arrests drew fierce public opposition. Residents put themselves in the way of ICE, defended their immigrant neighbors, and organized to shut down detention camps. In January, when immigration officers killed two Minneapolis residents in the street, surrounded by witnesses, officials claimed they were dangerous terrorists. Their lies did not succeed; the public grief and anger did not abate. Apparently to signal that things had changed, the man who had been mass deportation’s most brutal face, Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino, disappeared from the front lines. In March, Trump replaced DHS head Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullen. With these personnel shifts, the administration was perhaps trying to indicate a new approach. But it was doing so without any acknowledgment that it had done anything wrong.

If the withdrawal marked a shift in public relations, it did not, importantly, mark a shift in enforcement. Indeed, the violence resulting from those operations may be escalating: ICE shootings and killings in 2026 are already outpacing those in 2025. And mass deportation operations have expanded: In five days this June, federal immigration agents reportedly arrested 10,000 people—doubling their usual daily rate of arrests. They are still terrorizing neighborhoods: A recent raid in Virginia Beach involved agents chasing people through backyards, “searching everywhere,” from boats to trash bins, one resident said. They just aren’t marketing it as they once were.

Mass arrests lead to more killings, not only in the streets but also in detention camps. During this Trump administration, more than 50 people have died while in ICE custody, research by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights has found. “The mortality rate of deaths in ICE custody is at its highest level in over a decade and has more than doubled since Trump’s second term began,” their report stated. At the same time, these may be undercounts: DHS has lagged behind on reporting detention data and no longer reports deaths of those recently released. The lack of transparency is systemic, leaving the work of investigating anti-immigration operations, from detention centers to deportation flights, to nongovernmental organizations and neighbors.

So far, since the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston this week, federal law enforcement has shut out the Harris County District Attorney’s Office from the federal investigation, with “access to key evidence” under “federal control,” according to the district attorney’s spokesperson. Past investigations, meanwhile, have proved somewhat meaningless; before getting the results of 16 federal investigations into fatal and nonfatal shooting by DHS officers, the Trump administration declared the shootings were justified. These include incidents where video evidence is ample and public, such as in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year. When it comes to Araujo, whose killing was already on social media before members of his family had been officially informed of his death, the narrative set by DHS in the immediate aftermath will likely be what the administration hews to, even when thoroughly challenged by the evidence.

As of Thursday, the three surviving witnesses to the shooting, Araujo’s co-workers, were still in immigration detention, under pressure from officials, as my colleague Greg Sargent reported. “These men hold the key to what actually happened,” said Juan Proaño, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Now, Proaño said, they’ve learned from the men’s families that officials are trying to get them to leave the country, through what the administration euphemizes as “self-deportation,” apparently before they could say anything that might challenge the DHS narrative.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s story, however, is available to us. “That’s how I want the world to know my father, not as someone who got shot and killed,” his son Ronaldo told reporters. “He worked for thirty years building homes in the Houston suburbs.” After working on hundreds of homes for others, he dreamed of building one for his own family—“one he could call our home, and he did.” In the evenings, after work, “that’s where you could find him,” Ronaldo said, “resting on his porch, listening to music, petting his dog.” Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, he said, “did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.”

Joining the local calls for a full investigation were Representatives Sylvia Garcia and Christian Menefee. “What other profession has the power to take somebody’s life in the middle of a street,” Menefee said, “and meanwhile, our administration is in court fighting to make sure people like Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr. can’t be citizens in this country?” This is the Trump administration’s ethos in a nutshell: The lives of people who aren’t worthy of citizenship have no value. When ICE kills someone, when the administration rewrites the truth to exonerate the killers, that drive to dehumanize cannot be covered up.

New Mexico officials are accusing President Trump’s Department of Justice of obstructing the state’s investigation into billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch. 

The state’s Attorney General, Raúl Torrez, sent a letter to the DOJ last week accusing the department of withholding redacted records related to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch property, south of Santa Fe, The New York Times reports.  

“The U.S. D.O.J.’s continued withholding of unredacted records is causing real and escalating harm,” Torrez wrote to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in the letter, made public Thursday. “Every day that the U.S. D.O.J. withholds these records, the foundation upon which a New Mexico prosecution could be built erodes.”

In February, Torrez requested documents from the DOJ related to the ranch, but despite receiving assurances from department officials that they would send over the documents, nothing ever came. Torrez wrote that he even followed up five times over the next few months through different channels to no avail, impeding important leads in the probe. 

“Every avenue of investigation that begins with a redacted name, a blacked-out face or an obscured date is an avenue that ends before it begins,” Torrez wrote. He told the Times that he hasn’t received a response to his latest letter. 

Epstein’s ranch was never fully investigated by the federal government, and New Mexico authorities have said that federal prosecutors in New York asked them in 2019 to hold off, claiming that the DOJ was conducting its own probe. Nothing came of it, and the federal government never fully searched the property, which has new ownership.

Now that the state of New Mexico has decided to begin a new investigation, it’s not surprising that the Trump administration appears to be stonewalling once again. The ranch holds many secrets, including why a mansion on the property was built by military contractor Bradbury Stamm Construction, better known for building classified government facilities such as Los Alamos National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base. For now, those questions will remain unanswered as the Trump administration continues to try and wish Epstein away. 

Just one single person has enrolled in the GOP’s $3 million anti-woke program at West Virginia University’s Washington Center.

The taxpayer-funded Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship program has seen an abysmal level of interest ahead of the upcoming fall semester.

“I do think that it’s important for the legislature and for the governor to reflect on this.... There is a question about whether or not this is the best use of public funds,” WVU political science professor Erik Herron told West Virginia Watch. “I think the Washington Center, ironically, seems to be exactly what it complains that higher education has become. It was created in Charleston, and it was imposed on the university, so it’s a big government mandate.”

“I’m not happy about it,” said Democratic State Delegate John Williams, who voted against the center’s creation last year. “Now we’re in a position where we’ve allocated so much money towards this program, and only one person is taking advantage of it.”

Republicans have defended low enrollment by noting that the program does not count toward university credits for students yet—a fact that does not instill confidence.

The program, mandated in 2025 via a Republican bill, is intended to center the “great debates of western civilization,” “western history and culture,” and “the development of ideas across the political and ideological spectrum.” West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey put it more plainly, stating that the program existed to “push back on the woke ideology that has infected our schools and help return higher education to its true purpose.”

The fall curriculum includes classes titled “Woke,” “The New Right,” and “Nation and Migration.”

This is one of the more desperate cases of the right’s ongoing culture war in academia, the workplace, and beyond. Responding to what you perceive as ideological extremism in the classroom with your own ideological course—worth zero credits—is a decision steeped in delusion. We’ll see how many people are enrolled in the fall.

The Trump administration is attacking journalists for reporting on President Trump ditching his new Qatari jet for security reasons.

MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig reported Wednesday evening that the president abruptly swapped the new jet for his old Air Force One on his trip from the NATO summit in Turkey to the U.K. due to concerns about the aircraft’s defense systems. She noted the new Air Force One didn’t have the necessary communications and defensive capabilities for “safe travel amid Iran hostilities.”

Leonnig’s post was angrily singled out by White House communications director Steven Cheung, even though multiple other outlets reported the same information.

“Carol Leonnig is a liar and this article is complete Fake News. She has no idea what she is talking about. She says the White House declined to comment. Not true. We gave comment to The New York Times and many other outlets,” he wrote Thursday on X. “Carol is not a real journalist. A complete fraud.”

Cheung never actually disputed any of Leonnig’s reporting in the post—he just called it fake news without offering up any response. And if his issue is with Leonning not attributing his comment, all he said to The New York Times on a similar story was “the new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art aircraft that has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the president and his staff.”

He also mentioned that “there are many enemies of America who have their sights on [Trump], and we use every tool at our disposal—including distraction and misdirection—to address those threats.” But none of that language addressed the reason Trump switched planes.

Trump himself claimed rather unconvincingly that the Qatari jet was going to a U.S. military base in Europe “so the soldiers can see it.” In reality, the new jet simply doesn’t have the same command-and-control functions of the original Air Force One. And while experts have said that it would take years and billions of dollars to upgrade the Qatari jet’s defenses to the presidential level, the Trump administration did it in weeks—all before ditching it partway through its first official trip.

Trump officials are on the hunt for the person who leaked details about a hostile meeting between the Pentagon and the Vatican earlier this year.

In January, the Pentagon reportedly threatened an ambassador from the Holy See, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address.

The U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Brian Burch, told The New York Times Thursday that the meeting had been “grossly mischaracterized.” The 51-year-old co-founder of CatholicVote presumed the story came from the Vatican’s side, and personally called Cardinal Pierre for an apology for what Burch described to the Times as “an attack on the United States.”

Burch told the national daily that he had also asked for the cardinal’s help in identifying “who was lying about the meeting.” The Times noted that Burch later posted a statement in which he claimed that Cardinal Pierre had “emphatically denied” reports of the confrontational exchange, and that the Vatican had confirmed the details of the meeting were exaggerated. The cardinal, however, did not respond to a request for comment from the Times. The Pentagon denied ever making such a threat.

Pope Leo XIV has continually upset the president and a number of Donald Trump’s underlings through his relentless advocacy for world peace, particularly as it relates to the president’s warmongering. The Chicago-born pontiff has thus far railed against the White House’s lethal and unproductive attacks on small watercraft in the Caribbean, the sudden infiltration of Venezuela, and the escalating conflict in Iran, the last of which he said in June was not a “just” war.

Trump, meanwhile, has not shied away from throwing his own fire at the religious leader. In May, Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he believed the pope was “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people” by advocating for global peace and prosperity. “But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Trump, however, has not done a very good job himself of stripping nuclear capabilities from Iran’s theocratic regime.

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran nuclear deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed later that year when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.

By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

On Wednesday, Trump indicated that he would no longer be willing to negotiate with Tehran’s leadership, suggesting that—despite having been president from 2017 to 2021—he had only just now started to understand Iran’s theocracy.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey. When asked what had changed since the memorandum of understanding was preemptively signed last month, Trump said: “I got to know ’em.”

The Trump administration is reportedly trying to rally the rest of the world to help it in its fight against “antifa” activists, but the world isn’t answering the dubious call. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has circulated an invitation for foreign ministers of more than 60 countries to meet with him to strategize against the purported “resurgence…

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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.

Graham Platner, the scandal-ridden populist Senate candidate from Maine, suspended his campaign Wednesday night. His announcement came two days after a rape allegation against him was made public in a Politico report, and prominent Democrats—many of whom had looked the other way at Platner’s Nazi tattoo and prior abuse allegations—one by one dropped their endorsements.

In an eleven-minute video posted to social media, Platner categorically denied the allegation and lashed out at “the corporate media system and the political establishment,” which he said acted as “judge, jury and executioner.” He insisted that his video was not an admission of guilt—but after nine minutes, he nonetheless said: “I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw.” 

If Platner does file that paperwork before 5:00 PM Eastern Time on Monday, he will be leaving the Maine Democratic Party with just nineteen days to nominate a replacement. The Maine Democratic Party has released a statement saying it will hold a nominating convention before the July 27 deadline.

Devon Murphy-Anderson, the Maine Democratic Party’s executive director, posted a video to social media on Tuesday promising an “open, inclusive, transparent and fair” convention—and accused Platner’s team of trying to “manipulate this process” and select his successor themselves.

The Maine Democratic Party has approved plans for a nominating convention that will involve roughly 600 delegates, most of whom will be local party officials from around the state. They will pick a candidate to replace Platner—who got over 150,000 votes, the most of any Democratic Senate candidate in Maine primary history. Then, that candidate will face off against incumbent Senator Susan Collins in November.

At least eight candidates’ names have been floated to replace Platner: brewery owner Dan Kleban, social worker Paige Loud, former Maine CDC director Nirav Shah, former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, and former political staffer Jordan Wood among them. But in Platner’s Wednesday night announcement, he said he believes his volunteers—not the Maine Democratic Party—should be the ones to choose his replacement. “These decisions need to be made in the open by the people of this state, the people who got us here,” Platner said. “My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine.”

“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” Maine Democratic Party leaders said in a statement. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”

On Wednesday night, Graham Platner finally ended his campaign for Senate in Maine, after rape allegations from a former girlfriend caused even his own allies to denounce his candidacy and call for him to drop out. The move has Democrats feeling relieved and GOP Sen. Susan Collins and her allies panicked, as they viewed Platner and his personal transgressions as a weak nominee who she could…

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A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | RFK Jr. seeks to peek at Americans’ medical records for clues on autism and vaccines…

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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 Proano, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, claimed in an interview with The New Republic.

Proano—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,” Proano 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 Araujo’s vehicle as part of a targeted operation, after which the undocumented Araujo “attempted to evade arrest.” DHS claimed Araujo “refused to follow multiple verbal commands” before trying to “run over” an ICE officer, who then fired “in self-defense.” Araujo, struck in the abdomen, was transported to the hospital, where he died.

Yet 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 Araujo, who is lying wounded with two officers crouched over him and one radioing for help.

The three men are Araujo’s brother, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, and two workers, Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego, Proano told TNR. Family members who are in touch with them confirmed the pressure to sign self-deportation orders, Proano 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,” Proano said. The pressure to self-deport, Proano added, looks like “an effort by DHS to get rid of the only eyewitnesses to what happened.” TNR emailed questions about this to DHS, which weren’t immediately answered.

There are other reasons to doubt that Araujo would attempt to kill an officer. NBC reports that DHS hasn’t said that the man has a previous criminal record. And 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, 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. (Proano 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.

The Trump administration is not looking to wind down the violence in the Iran war anytime soon.

The current escalation could last a day or a month, depending on whether Iran attacks more commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, according to unnamed U.S. officials who spoke with Axios Thursday. But the brutality and bloodshed aren’t expected to simmer down in the meantime.

“We’re going to slap them a bit so they understand we’re not fucking around,” one American official told Axios’s Barak Ravid.

The dissolution of the ceasefire reportedly stems from frustration inside Iran’s theocratic regime, with more radical components of Tehran’s leadership unconvinced that the previously arranged peace deal would benefit their nation.

U.S. officials told Axios that Iran saw its grip over the strait slipping as ships began to travel through the waterway’s southern route, closer to the Omani coast. The economic incentives of the memorandum had also lost their allure for Tehran as the country found it remarkably difficult to sell oil even after the U.S. lifted economic sanctions. Financial institutions and countries were reluctant to participate in trade that was based on temporary waivers.

Iranian officials were also reportedly vexed that the billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets held in international accounts had not yet been unfrozen, despite stipulations requiring that Iran first meet nuclear thresholds as required by the memorandum of understanding.

“Part of the Iranian leadership was not happy about all of those things,” a U.S. official told Axios. “They started shooting and we decided it’s time to slap them back hard. It’s a process. We have patience. If we don’t feel we’re getting the deal we want, we are not going to do it.”

It is not clear exactly how long the current flare-up will last, but Donald Trump signaled Wednesday that he would no longer be willing to negotiate with Tehran’s leadership, suggesting that—despite having been president from 2017 to 2021 and, during that period, dismantling the previous Iran nuclear deal—he had only just now started to understand Iran’s theocracy.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey. When asked what had changed since the MOU was preemptively signed last month, Trump said: “I got to know ’em.”

Also at the NATO summit, Trump openly pitched the idea of committing war crimes against Iran, claiming that the U.S. could “knock down every single bridge in Iran” in a single day.

“There’s not a thing they can do about it,” Trump said, seated feet away from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “If we have to, we’ll take them out. I don’t want to do that. They have desalinization plants, we’ll take them out if we have to.… Maybe we’ll take over Kharg island. We may take over Kharg Island, there’s not a thing they can do about it.”

President Donald Trump is using the fallout from Graham Platner’s failed Senate campaign in Maine to remind everyone that when it comes to sexual assault, he comes down on the side of assaulting women. Platner, a Democrat, announced on Wednesday night that he would end his campaign after he was publicly accused of rape earlier this week. He denies the allegation. When Trump was asked…

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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.

President Donald Trump got four Supreme Court justices to pretend that the Constitution doesn’t guarantee birthright citizenship, despite the 14th Amendment’s plain language: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.“ Their reasoning boiled down to two arguments: One of the amendment’s drafters supposedly…

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