Category: Nation & World

Videos that capture the minutes leading up to and immediately after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot an undocumented Mexican immigrant in Houston early Tuesday morning show agents aggressively following a white work van and then approaching the vehicle on foot.

Security camera footage from nearby businesses and residences, obtained and analyzed by the Washington Post, provides a nearly continuous, six-minute-long view of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s van as he is pursued by federal agents. But the agents were not wearing body cameras, and the videos do not clearly capture the moment an ICE agent fires his gun shortly before 7 a.m. local time — a finding that may complicate any investigation into whether ICE personnel were justified in using deadly force against Salgado Araujo.

The Department of Homeland Security released a statement hours after the deadly shooting saying that Salgado Araujo, 52, had rammed an ICE vehicle and “weaponized” his white work van “in an attempt to run over” a federal immigration officer. DHS did not identify the officer or say how many times he fired but said he did so in “self-defense.”

The videos show federal officers in two unmarked SUVs following him closely, at one point cutting off his van and driving on the wrong side of the street toward it. The videos do not appear to show Salgado Araujo ramming a vehicle, but at times, the van and the SUVs are partially obscured from camera view by buildings and trees.

A DHS spokesperson said the department’s Office of the Inspector General is investigating the agent-involved shooting, and the FBI is investigating “the potential assault on a federal law enforcement officer.” The agency did not comment on the Post’s attempt to confirm the timeline of events.

Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said the county was collecting surveillance footage and witness testimony to determine what happened.

The videos could provide key evidence to corroborate what transpired. The officers involved in the incident had not been issued body cameras and were not wearing them, according to a DHS spokesperson. Surveillance footage and witness recordings have become key in several shootings over the past year involving federal immigration officers, and in some instances have directly contradicted statements by DHS.

Unlike the shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens killed by immigration officers in January, no video recorded by witnesses has emerged so far of Salgado Araujo’s killing.

In a statement Friday, the agency said the officers who followed Salgado Araujo‘s van had seen two similar vehicles weeks earlier on the property of a person suspected of being in the United States illegally. DHS said officers were on their way to that person’s residence when they saw Salgado Araujo’s van. Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D., Texas), who represents the district where the shooting took place, said in a TV interview Thursday that an ICE official told her that Salgado Araujo was not the person sought by agents.

Around 5:50 a.m., surveillance video from outside Salgado Araujo’s home shows him getting into his white van and beginning the drive to work. At some point, he picks up the other three men.

An hour later, the van is captured by a camera as it heads south on Highway 90, driving about 50 mph, according to the Post’s calculations. Two black, unmarked SUVs appear to be in pursuit.

His white van makes an abrupt turn onto another street, followed by one of the two SUVs.

The SUV sticks close to the van, pulling up alongside it. Seconds later, the SUV cuts off the van, and Salgado Araujo veers to the left.

Meanwhile, a second unmarked SUV enters Canal Street and drives onto the wrong side of the road toward the van, which backs up as the SUV approaches. It is not clear in the video whether the van makes contact with either SUV at this point.

The van then drives forward, going back the way it came.

As the van drives slowly away from the SUVs, at least three officers are seen pursuing on foot. It is not clear how close the van came to the officers as it turned, but the Post’s analysis indicates at least one officer was close to the passenger side of the van.

The van rolls less than 200 feet before pulling off to the side. Within seconds, several officers converge on the van. Officers pull out at least one person from the passenger side and put handcuffs on them.

Aftermath video of the scene shows Salgado Araujo on the ground by the driver’s side. Two officers are next to him, one kneeling. They appear to be checking on Salgado Araujo, who is visibly distressed.

According to his family, he had been shot in the abdomen. He later died of his injuries.

The three men who were in the van with Salgado Araujo said a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle and that at no point did Salgado Araujo veer in his direction. All three men were arrested and are in immigration detention.

DHS characterized Salgado Araujo as an “illegal alien” from Mexico, but his son told the Post that his father was doing what he could to legalize his status in the U.S.

Salgado Araujo’s death marks the first fatal shooting involving ICE agents since Good and Pretti were killed in separate incidents in Minneapolis in January during an enforcement surge in that city.

A year before Greenwater Services got a $1.7 million contract to clean the algae-infected Reflecting Pool, it had received another no-bid government contract to deploy at the trash-plagued Tijuana River.

Greenwater, which is owned by a Trump donor, was hired to treat sewage in the Tijuana River with its “nanobubble technology,” a system that injects ozone into water. But the monthlong water purification pilot to evaluate the technology was cut short last October when a storm flooded the river’s banks. The remnants of machinery were washed into the border river, with diesel leaking along the way, frustrating scientists and environmentalists at federal agencies who had questioned internally whether the company’s project would work in a flood-prone area.

Eight months later, the company brought its equipment to clean up a mess at the Reflecting Pool in Washington. In April, as part of his effort to remake the nation’s capital city ahead of America’s 250th birthday, President Donald Trump drained the pool at the base of the Lincoln Memorial to add a new coating to the bottom that would make the water shine “American flag blue.” But a week after the $14 million renovation was finished in June, an outbreak of algae floated along the water’s surface, hiding the new blue coating under a thick, mossy shade of green. Algae had long been a problem for the pool, but a Washington Post analysis of satellite data found that the post-renovation bloom was the worst outbreak dating back at least five years.

The Department of Interior gave Greenwater and its nanobubble technology an expedited, no-bid contract to clean up the muck, even though other companies had expressed interest in the work to the National Park Service. Administration officials cited an urgent need to solve the problem before the 250th celebrations, and said they didn’t have time to allow companies to compete for the bid, according to a federal contracting document.

Greenwater, founded in 2019 in Ohio, is owned by J.J. Cafaro Investment, according to the contracting documents it filed with the government. J.J. Cafaro is an heir to an Ohio-based mall development company and a Republican donor who has given about $350,000 to Trump-related political committees and owns a $16 million mansion down the road from Mar-a-Lago. He said he considers the president “a friend,” and Trump once described Cafaro as “a man who made a lot of money in Cleveland, does a good job and a fantastic man.” Cafaro has denied his relationship with Trump played a role in securing Greenwater’s contract for the Reflecting Pool.

Chas Antinone Jr., Greenwater’s president and chief operating officer, has said the company has been expanding on the use of its technology, mostly in small bodies of water under 100 acres — such as a free demo to Trump’s Bedminster resort in 2024, Antinone told the San Diego Union-Tribune. The manager of Trump National Golf Club Bedminster brought Greenwater into conversations with the Interior Department about cleaning the Reflecting Pool, the New York Times reported.

In total, the federal government has paid Greenwater $2.8 million between the Tijuana River and Reflecting Pool contracts.

Company spokesperson Erin Kramer said Cafaro is not involved in the company’s day-to-day operations, and she shared research showing the technology has cleaned algae in studies. (Cafaro did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Private demonstrations, self-funded projects, research partnerships, and public-agency work are ways new environmental technology moves from research to adoption,” Kramer said in response to questions about the Bedminster demo.

Asked about the Bedminster connections, the Interior Department press office emailed a statement saying the White House was not involved in the selection process for any contract.

Since the Times reported last month on his company’s no-bid contract, Cafaro has become a sort of bogeyman for liberals online. On Monday, the Democratic National Committee’s rapid response X account shared a photo of Cafaro along with news that the Interior Department planned to use the same contractor that installed the liner to repair the pool, even though Cafaro doesn’t own or operate that company.

That photo featured Cafaro posing with former Real Housewives of Orange County star Kelly Dodd. But Dodd later posted a video clarifying that she merely posed with him because “he looked a little peculiar, and I liked his whole [get up]” but she only met him once at an event in Palm Beach, where she also saw Trump.

“This has gone viral. I don’t know why I got lumped in with this guy,” she said. “I can safely tell you I don’t know this man.”

‘Hope it doesn’t rain’

Flowing along the U.S.-Mexico border and discharging into the Pacific Ocean, the Tijuana River has been plagued by untreated wastewater, sewage, and debris dating back decades.

The U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission gave a no-bid contract for Greenwater last year, initially offering more than $2 million for a pilot that would encompass 120 days of work. Officials said there was an “urgent need to assess the effectiveness of this technology in addressing the public health threat” and that “the technology is proprietary and not in use by any other company.”

Until permanent infrastructure to address the pollution problems is in place, officials must “think creatively and evaluate every credible tool that can bring relief to affected Americans now,” Frank Fisher, an IBWC spokesperson, said in a statement to the Post.

After Greenwater secured the project but before work got underway, career scientists exchanged emails asking about the initial $2 million cost and the feasibility of the project. Environmental Protection Agency staff who were consulting IBWC questioned their plans.

“Wow. $2.4m for 90 days?” Thomas Konner, an environmental engineer for the EPA, wrote to IBWC and EPA officials on July 1.

“Hope it doesn’t rain on their parade!” he followed up on Aug. 25.

Months before, another scientist questioned the approach and called it a “Sisyphean task” — and forecast the storm. “I really don’t think the ozone will do any good unless you are able to ozonate the entire flow, but that’s based on my gut feeling and nothing else,” Douglas Liden, then an environmental engineer with the EPA, wrote to colleagues. “I also think the first storm will wash out any equipment you install, just as it did in Nogales, AZ.”

Phillip Musegaas, executive director of the nonprofit San Diego Coastkeeper, which obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request, said local groups have long hoped for a solution to one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters, which has sickened residents, closed beaches, and contaminated the air and water. Greenwater was supposed to take the nanobubble technology to the noxious hot spot — Saturn Boulevard — where the pungent water foams, an IBWC official wrote in the emails planning the project. But the company’s pilot was cut short by the storm and it never went to Saturn.

Debris from the equipment washed into a barrier set up to collect trash along the river, according to photos shared with Voice of San Diego.

“We were skeptical about it, but we wanted to see if it would work properly,” Musegaas said. “The fact that the whole project ended early because they let the equipment get washed away was pretty frustrating.” The company later acknowledged that the nanobubble machines could not operate continuously as intended because trash floating in the river clogged the machines.

The company also said, in a report to the government about that pilot, that its machines hadn’t been affected by a previous rainstorm. The night of the next big storm, Greenwater said, it moved the machines to “a higher elevation” because of rising water levels, but “an unexpected flooding event occurred” that “carried large quantities of trash and debris that inundated and damaged” the machines. The company then said it shut the project down because of “safety concerns and site conditions.” The IBWC said in a December news release, citing the Greenwater report, that the project was “successfully completed” and the “technology has the capability to kill bacteria and eliminate odors associated with sewage.”

Heather Raymond, the water quality director for Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, has tested Greenwater Service’s technology for years. Raymond, who does not work for the company nor on the Reflecting Pool and the Tijuana River projects, said the technology showed promise in trials when her team tested it in large tanks in controlled settings where algae levels were reduced, and small lakes where they saw some improvements in the local advisories for toxin levels.

“There’s still a lot to learn in scaling this up in the water quality conditions and amount of treatment needed to be successful,” Raymond said.

In the case of the Reflecting Pool, workers from the National Park Service used hydrogen peroxide and vacuuming to clear the algae in addition to the temporary units. Greenwater also said it had temporary units running by June 7, but the units were taken offline on June 12. Within 24 hours, an algae bloom developed, and the units returned. The company has since installed a permanent system in the Reflecting Pool’s pipes and said the water has cleared even though green sediment remains at the bottom.

This week, the Reflecting Pool has been fenced off following the Fourth of July fireworks display, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the workers will drain the pool and repair the peeling coating.

The nanobubble technology has been turned off ahead of the draining, a person familiar with the plan said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. By the middle of the week, the pool appeared green and murky, its bottom invisible under the mossy shade.

A federal judge on Friday night granted the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the seditious-conspiracy case against four top members of the Proud Boys who led a violent mob into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But in his ruling, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly gave a stark warning about President Donald Trump’s efforts to lift penalties against those who instigated and carried out the storming of the Capitol. The attack — by the mob seeking to overturn Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election — left more than 140 police officers injured and caused an estimated $3 million in damage.

The judge indicated he was wiping out the Proud Boys’ charges — against Ethan Nordean; Joseph Biggs; Zachary Rehl, former leader of the Philadelphia Proud Boys; and Dominic Pezzola — under protest, saying legal precedents left him no choice but to accede to the request by the Trump administration’s prosecutors.

“As the Court has said many times, the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a perilous event,” wrote Kelly, who is a Trump appointee.

“It was an attack on people, including police officers, many of whom were injured. It was an attack on a coordinate branch of government — Congress — that the Founders saw fit to give a place of primacy in Article I of the Constitution. And it was an attack on the Constitution’s mechanism to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next.”

The Jan. 6 riot followed a rally where Trump repeated his false claims that he won the 2020 election. As rioters rampaged through the Capitol, lawmakers were forced to evacuate, delaying the certification of Biden’s victory for hours.

Friday’s ruling wipes out some of the most serious criminal charges from the riot, cementing Trump’s bid to unravel the largest Justice Department investigation in U.S. history.

Trump pardoned nearly all the rioters — more than 1,500 — who were charged by the Justice Department in the wake of Jan. 6. But that blanket pardon, issued on the president’s first day in office last year, did not extend to about a dozen leaders and prominent members of two extremist groups behind the violence, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Those defendants were convicted of carrying out a seditious conspiracy against the United States or related offenses. Trump initially commuted their prison terms, stopping short of a full pardon. But this year, while those cases were being appealed, Justice Department officials filed legal papers to vacate the convictions altogether.

The D.C. Circuit federal appeals court granted that request in May. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a Trump ally who serves as the top federal prosecutor in D.C., then filed motions to dismiss the underlying charges in U.S. district court.

Kelly said in his opinion on the Proud Boys case that judges are constrained to dismiss charges once prosecutors ask to drop them.

Under Supreme Court precedent, prosecutors have “exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case,” and they may drop charges “in the interests of justice” even after defendants have been convicted.

The moves by the Justice Department were unusual — prosecutors rarely ask to throw out guilty verdicts — and Pirro’s office initially did not give detailed reasons for scrapping the highest-profile cases related to the Jan. 6 attack.

In a brief court filing, a prosecutor in Pirro’s office wrote only that the government “has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice.”

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio separately had his conviction vacated and charges dismissed last year, also at the Justice Department’s request. Tarrio, who had been convicted of organizing members of his group, was not present at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Pezzola was acquitted at trial of the seditious conspiracy charge but convicted of assaulting a police officer and other offenses from the riot.

“We took the worst they threw at us the raids, the solitary, the lies and we stood tall,” Tarrio posted on X after the ruling was issued Friday night. “Trump dropped the pardons and now the rest is crumbling. Justice is SERVED!”

Before dismissing the set of charges against the Oath Keepers, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, an appointee of President Barack Obama, asked Pirro’s office to supply detailed reasons for its request. Mehta has not yet issued a ruling on the Oath Keepers’ charges.

A prosecutor, G.A. Massucco-LaTaif, said Trump’s blanket pardon proclamation also directed the Justice Department to drop all pending charges stemming from the Jan. 6 attack. Prosecutors can no longer put any Jan. 6 defendants on trial and judges cannot effectively impose any prison time, he wrote in a court filing, because the presidential proclamation would immediately kick in to prevent those outcomes.

“In any event, the public’s interest in a trial of these defendants has already fully vested,” Massucco-LaTaif wrote. “This Court presided over two public trials of the charges in this indictment. … Dismissal of these cases with prejudice will not erase this public record.”

The president and top officials in his administration have moved aggressively to recast and minimize the threat posed by the mob of Trump supporters on Jan. 6.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department acknowledged that it had deleted reams of news releases it had posted online, which detailed the prosecutions of those charged in the riot.

The Washington Post identified several webpages that led to error messages, including news releases about the arrest and conviction of Tarrio and other rioters whose convictions were undone by Pirro. The Justice Department said in a social media post that it was erasing what it considered “partisan propaganda.”

“We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration,” the department posted on its rapid-response account on X. “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

Copies of hundreds of those news releases, which had been hosted on the website of the U.S. attorney’s office for D.C., have been archived by an independent website, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

A spokesperson for Pirro did not say who ordered the deletions or how many releases were affected, referring questions to Justice Department headquarters. A searchable database of all charges and convictions stemming from the Jan. 6 investigation was taken offline by the Justice Department last year.

Pirro has denounced political violence in other cases, such as the incident this year in which a lone gunman allegedly tried to assassinate Trump during the White House correspondents’ dinner, but routinely declines to take questions about the Jan. 6 riot at her public appearances.

She has also pursued Trump’s perceived political foes with shaky allegations of misconduct, including then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell as well as six Democratic lawmakers who angered the president by posting a video on social media reminding U.S. service members that they could refuse illegal military commands. A grand jury refused to indict the six Democrats, and Pirro closed the investigation into Powell after failing to find evidence of a crime.

In addition to the pardons, commutations, and court filings seeking to dismiss cases, Trump appointees have fired many of the FBI officials and prosecutors who investigated the attack.

The Justice Department has also taken steps to vacate the conviction of Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump adviser who was convicted of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena related to Jan. 6. And the department has stopped defending a similar conviction for Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser to the president who is appealing his case.

The Trump administration had announced plans for a $1.776 billion fund to provide payments to people who claim they were unfairly targeted by law enforcement, and dozens of Jan. 6 rioters said they intended to apply for a cut of the money. The payments would have been funded by taxpayers, raising bipartisan concerns in Congress. A federal judge issued an injunction blocking the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” from being established, and Trump administration officials have said that effort is dead.

In dismissing the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy charges, Kelly invoked remarks from President Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address in 1981 describing the peaceful transfer of power as a miracle of self-governance.

“President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 — whether those views are based on fact or fiction — are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them through the Executive Order,” Kelly wrote in the opinion.

“Moving forward, if this Nation’s experiment in self-government is to last another 250 years, the American people — no matter their partisan preferences — will have to act together to preserve, protect and defend that miracle through our constitutional framework,” he wrote.