ICE Shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo Through Open Passenger Window in Houston, Witnesses Say - The New York Times

Witnesses Say ICE Fired Fatal Shot Into Open Passenger Window in Houston

"A congresswoman and a lawyer relayed witness accounts that diverge from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s version of the fatal encounter.

July 13, 2026

U.S. Immigration Crackdown

Family members embracing next to a makeshift memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo at the location where he was shot by an ICE agent in Houston.Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

The shot that killed a man during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation last week in Houston was fired into the front passenger side window, according to a local congresswoman and a lawyer who spoke with witnesses who were in the vehicle.

The precise moment of the shooting of the man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, remains unclear in video evidence obtained by The New York Times. But witnesses gave firsthand accounts to Representative Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat who represents part of the Houston area, and Ruby Powers, a lawyer representing the victim’s younger brother, who was the front-seat passenger.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was driving to work at a construction site with his brother, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, and two other passengers when ICE agents began tailing them.

Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo and Daniel Tirado Pantoja, a fellow construction worker, spoke at length this weekend to Ms. Garcia at a detention center about Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s last moments, on Canal Street in Houston. Ms. Powers spoke with her client, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo.

The ICE agents did not identify themselves as they approached the van shortly before 7 a.m. on Tuesday after it slowed on Canal Street, Ms. Garcia said.

It is unclear from available video whether ICE agents identified themselves.

The Times obtained footage from earlier in the pursuit — roughly 2.5 miles north of Canal — where the ICE vehicles had flashing emergency lights on. But footage from Canal Street shows no emergency lights were activated during this portion of the events.

The Times obtained video from earlier in the pursuit from a used car dealer 2.5 miles north of the van’s final stop on Canal Street. In the video, which The Times has slowed down to 15 percent of its original speed, flashing lights can be seen on the ICE vehicles.

Ms. Garcia said, according to her conversations with both men, that after the van came to its final stop, an agent fired a single shot through the lowered front passenger window, striking Mr. Salgado Araujo.

Mr. Salgado Araujo then got out of the van before agents pulled him to the ground, Ms. Garcia added. He died shortly after.

Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo gave his account of this moment to Ms. Powers, his lawyer. He told her that he heard a man on foot yell “Stop!” as he approached the front passenger door of the van on Canal Street. Then the man fired a single shot through the front passenger window, Ms. Powers said.

After Mr. Salgado Araujo was struck, his brother described seeing him in pain and clutching his back, Ms. Powers said.

The brother emphasized, Ms. Powers said, that the men inside the van did not know that law enforcement officials were chasing them.

Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo told Ms. Powers that the van contained only tools and work items. “A cooler, and water and Gatorade,” she said.

All three passengers are undocumented Mexican nationals who had been living in the United States for decades, according to Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, a lawyer for two of them.

The agents had been searching for two other people, including a Guatemalan man they believed was inside the van, when they began trailing Mr. Salgado Araujo, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation who were not permitted to speak about the case. Neither target was in the van. ICE has said that the agents and vehicles involved were not equipped with cameras.

The shooting is one of a growing number of encounters in which immigration agents have fired at civilians during enforcement operations. More than 20 people have been shot at since September, nearly all while inside vehicles, and several have been killed. On Monday, an ICE agent shot a man dead in Biddeford, Maine.

In the Houston encounter, it is difficult to say whether the available video footage from Canal Street, which is low resolution and shows only a partial, obstructed view of the interactions, captured when the fatal shot was fired.

A video filmed by a camera at a nearby gas station shows the moment the van comes to a final and complete stop. One of the side doors opens, and movement is visible on the passenger side of the van. It’s unclear if the source of movement is an agent, someone in the vehicle or both.

Seconds later, the footage shows one agent next to the front passenger side door moving his right arm toward his hip.

The agent then steps toward the van, pointing an object in his right hand in the direction of the vehicle. It is unclear what this object is, or whether it is a weapon. There is also no visible indication of any firing or discharge, but the view is obscured by a telephone pole and passing vehicles.

With legs spread apart, the agent appears to lower his right hand back to his hip as he pulls open the front passenger side door with his left hand. He appears to struggle for several seconds to return the object to his hip.

Footage shows after Mr. Salgado Araujo’s van came to a final stop on Canal Street, an agent standing near the front passenger door pointed an object toward the vehicle.

ICE said in a statement on Monday that agents had tried to pull over Mr. Salgado Araujo’s vehicle as part of a “targeted enforcement operation” and that an agent fired in “self-defense” after Mr. Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle.”

Last week, the agency said that Mr. Salgado Araujo had rammed an ICE vehicle, had not followed orders and had tried to run over an officer, but it has presented no evidence to back up its claims.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that it was investigating the shooting, and that the F.B.I.’s Houston office is “leading an investigation into the potential assault on a federal law enforcement officer.”

Ms. Garcia said the accounts of ICE and the two detained witnesses with whom she spoke are “almost like a different event.”

“They both said — and I visited with them independently — that none of them in any way touched, struck or contemplated even approaching the officers because they were inside the car,” she added.

The third witness in the van, José Trinidad Rojas, declined to speak to the congresswoman, but Mr. Balderas-Ibarra, the lawyer representing him and Mr. Pantoja, said that what Ms. Garcia had heard was consistent with what his clients had told him.

Mimi Dwyer contributed reporting. Dmitriy Khavin contributed video production."

ICE Shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo Through Open Passenger Window in Houston, Witnesses Say - The New York Times

Maine ICE Shooting: What We Know About the Death of Joan Sebastian Guerrero - The New York Times

Maine ICE Shooting: What We Know About the Death of Joan Sebastian Guerrero

Updated July 14, 2026, 9:16 a.m. ETU.S. Immigration Crackdown

• Killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
• Fatal ICE Shooting in Maine
• Surge of ICE Arrests
• Unsanitary Detention Center
• Immigration Rulings

What We Know About the ICE Shooting in Maine

A federal immigration agent shot and killed a man in a car on Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine. It was the second fatal encounter in a week involving an agent and a person in a vehicle.

Listen · 7:11 min

Witnesses in Biddeford, Maine, heard gunfire early Monday morning.Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

By Madaleine Rubin

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a man in a vehicle on Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine. It was the second fatal episode in a week, as the Trump administration continues its immigration crackdown, and the latest in a string of encounters between agents and people in cars.

The man was identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, according to Matthew Felling, a spokesman for Senator Angus King of Maine.

Joan Sebastian Guerrerovia Facebook

The Homeland Security Department said in a statement on Monday that ICE agents had been monitoring what they believed to be the residence of someone who was in the country illegally and for whom they had a removal order.

Advertisement

It was unclear from the department’s statement whether Mr. Guerrero was the person agents had been seeking.

Video recorded early on Monday and posted to social media showed agents surrounding a body next to a car with bullet holes in the windshield. 

“I heard agony,” said Mary Hayes, a local resident, who said she saw a screaming woman on her knees, next to a young girl. “I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same.”

Here’s what we know:

Witnesses heard gunfire early Monday morning.

On Monday morning, agents tried to stop a vehicle that had departed from the residence they were monitoring, D.H.S. said in its statement, which came nearly 12 hours after the shooting.

“The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon,” the statement continued. The driver was struck and died from his injuries.

In a separate communication received by some members of Congress, the department used more pointed language, saying the driver had “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement.”

As of Monday evening, no video evidence confirming the government’s version of events had emerged.

People who live nearby reported hearing gunfire at an intersection at around 7:15 a.m. Several reported seeing a body on the ground next to a car.

Biddeford’s congresswoman, Chellie Pingree, a Democrat, said in a phone interview on Monday that “we have gotten reports that ICE officers shot through a car window, and the individual in the car was killed.”

Immigration officials have said little about the victim.

Though Mr. King’s office named Mr. Guerrero as the victim, the D.H.S. statement did not.

Three advocacy groups released information about the victim in the shooting but did not name Mr. Guerrero. In a joint statement, the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine, identified him as a 26-year-old Colombian man. A third group said he had a partner and a young child. The source of the advocates’ information was unclear, and could not be immediately confirmed with the authorities.

The embassy of Colombia said in a statement on Monday that it was assisting the family of a Colombian national who had died in Biddeford. The embassy said it was also requesting information from D.H.S. “regarding the circumstances surrounding this lamentable death.”

Mr. King, an independent, said on Monday that he had spoken with Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary. Mr. King said that Mr. Mullin had told him that the man had been the target of an arrest warrant “based upon his immigration status.”

But Mr. Felling, the senator’s spokesman, said later that Mr. Mullin called the senator again and told him the driver had not been the target of any warrant. “He said they were looking for someone, essentially, and the person they shot was not the person they were looking for,” Mr. Felling said.

Officials are demanding a full investigation.

Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, said in a statement that the State Police and other agencies were consulting with federal officials to “determine the facts of what occurred this morning.”

Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, called for a “full and impartial investigation.”

“We will get answers, but we do not have them yet,” said Liam LaFountain, the mayor of Biddeford, who also pushed for an investigation.

This is the second death in a week involving an ICE agent firing into a vehicle.

Amid a national surge in immigration enforcement, a federal agent last week shot and killed another individual in a vehicle: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican man who died after a traffic stop in Houston.

Mr. Salgado Araujo, a construction worker and father of three who had lived in the country for more than 30 years without legal status, was not the initial target of the officers who pursued his vehicle, according to immigration officials.

The Houston and Maine killings add to a growing list of encounters between immigration agents and people in vehicles.

About 20 people have been shot at in their cars, some of them fatally. Federal officials have in several cases claimed that the agents’ actions were justified because their lives had been endangered by “weaponized” vehicles. Witnesses of the Houston shooting said that Mr. Salgado Araujo had not used his vehicle as a weapon.

As in the shooting of Mr. Salgado Araujo, it appeared that federal agents were not wearing body cameras on Monday, Mr. King said. So “we have no video evidence of what occurred in this case,” he added.

Shootings involving federal immigration officers

The list includes people who were fired upon during immigration enforcement activities in President Trump’s second term. U.S. citizens are noted with an asterisk.

Note: Data includes all shootings involving on-duty federal immigration agents that have occurred in the interior of the United States since January 2025.

Immigration arrests are on the rise nationwide.

Daily arrests of immigrants in the United States doubled in the last week of June and have continued to increase, signaling a reinvigoration of the president’s crackdown after a spring slowdown.

Immigrants make up about 5 percent of Maine’s population and have helped prop up the state’s economy, hampered by its aging population. Over the years, Maine has welcomed waves of refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East and several African countries.

In January, ICE detained hundreds of immigrants in the state during an enforcement surge the agency called “Operation Catch of the Day” — a reference to Maine’s commercial seafood industry.

Now, locals say agents have returned, making frequent appearances in Biddeford in recent months. Biddeford, a working-class city of roughly 22,000, contains a growing community of Latin American immigrants.

Talla Fall, who is originally from Senegal, lives near where the shooting took place on Monday. ICE agents have been in the neighborhood “every day, every week,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Jacey Fortin, Heather Beasley Doyle, Miriam Jordan, Hamed Aleaziz, Christina Morales, Aric Toler, Allison McCann, Soumya Karlamanglaand Murray Carpenter."

Maine ICE Shooting: What We Know About the Death of Joan Sebastian Guerrero - The New York Times

(2672) UK MP Wants Reparations FROM Former Colonies — Mottley CLAPS Back - YouTube

 

UK MP Wants Reparations FROM Former Colonies — Mottley CLAPS Back

 

Trump’s Posts on Singing Somali Schoolchildren Stir Anger in Minnesota

​

“President Trump reposted a video of Somali American kindergarteners in hijabs, sparking outrage in Minnesota’s Muslim and Somali communities. This act, part of Trump’s ongoing attacks on the Somali community, was condemned as targeting children and normalizing anti-Muslim hate. Critics highlighted the hypocrisy of Trump’s stance on religious discrimination, noting his selective concern for certain groups.

​

The state’s large Muslim and Somali communities expressed indignation after the president reposted a video of a kindergarten promotion ceremony, including comments noting the girls were in hijabs.

July 11, 2026

President Trump at the White House on Monday, the day he posted about the children in Minnesota. Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times

The posts nearly slid by in President Trump’s chaotic social media feed this week, lost in a jumble of boasts about the economy and pictures of Washington landmarks dressed in their Fourth of July best.

But there they were, a video of Somali American kindergartners in blue caps and gowns during their promotion ceremony at their St. Paul, Minn., school, and again the same video punctuated by a comment from an anonymous right-wing account called “End Wokeness”: “Every girl is in a hijab… in kindergarten.” In the 14-second video, the children are singing an upbeat Somali educational song.

If Mr. Trump’s sharing of the video posts did not cause much national furor, they sent shudders through Minnesota’s large Muslim and Somali communities, whose members expressed indignation that the president was again vilifying them, and disbelief that he was doing so by targeting children.

“This was a red line,” said Khalid Omar, a community organizer with the interfaith group Isaiah and Faith, based in St. Paul. “Children who are just celebrating, and wanting to look like their mothers — forget about the hijab — who are just children enjoying themselves, seeing their families, singing. For him to go after those children, it’s awful, it’s dangerous, it’s inhumane, it’s wrong.”

For more than a year, Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked Minnesota’s Somali community in a series of xenophobic tirades. He has disparaged Somali immigrants as “garbage” who should “go back to where they came from.” He has portrayed their children as a burden on schools. And he has demonizedRepresentative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali-born Democrat, including by mocking her hijab as a “little turban.”

Seizing on a welfare fraud scandal that was concentrated among Minnesota’s Somali community, his administration launched an  immigration crackdown, threatened to cut federal child care funding and started investigations that a judge found were intended to “harass and retaliate against” Democratic officials in the state.

Even after all of that, Mr. Trump’s posts to his nearly 13 million followers on Monday still struck a particular nerve.

“He is a bigoted bully,” said James J. Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute. “He picks on vulnerable people — women, immigrants — but picking on 5-year-olds, it’s so low, even for him.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, declined repeated requests for comment on the president’s posts. Instead, she defended his previous statements about Somali schoolchildren burdening Minnesota’s public schools.

“President Trump is right,” Ms. Jackson said. “Aliens who come to our country, complain about how much they hate America, fail to contribute to our economy, rip off Americans and refuse to assimilate into our society should not be here. And nothing about that is racist.”

National civil rights organizations and state leaders added to local activists’ condemnation of the posts over the course of the week.

“I am no longer surprised when Donald Trump uses his platform to provoke attacks on Black, brown, or immigrant communities — but I am always disgusted,” said Keith Ellison, the state’s attorney general.

But on the other side, messages supporting Mr. Trump’s postings — in overwhelmingly racist, Islamophobic and anti-Muslim terms — also grew.

In response to the posts, Mr. Trump’s followers called the students “future terrorists” and said the children wearing hijabs were a “disgrace.” They called on him to “deport all Muslims” and to ban Islam. One account with more than a million followers declared that Mr. Trump had exposed a “terrifying reality” and that America was being “conquered.”

This is not the first time Mr. Trump has targeted Somali children.

In April of last year, Mr. Trump said: “You have states like Minnesota, where the school systems are collapsing under the weight of the refugee children, especially from Somalia.”

In November, he bemoaned “a vibrant beautiful community in Minneapolis, gone.”

“It’s not recognizable,” he said. “You have children that are going to school that don’t speak a word of English, they don’t speak a word of anything, and the teachers, they cry themselves to sleep.”

Mr. Trump has long used his social media account to amplify racist imagery and vilify immigrant groups. When he posted a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apesthis year, the backlash was so swift and bipartisan that Mr. Trump removed the post. (He refused to apologize and blamed it on an aide).

This week, Mr. Trump also posted a doctored image of the Obamas waving from Air Force One, which had graffiti that included the acronym “BLM” and Arabic writing. When he speaks about the former president, it is often using his middle name, Hussein.

Some critics of the posts noted that Mr. Trump has made combating anti-religious bias, particularly against Christians and Jews, a cornerstone of his second term. His recent posts, they said, make it clear that concern seems to apply only to certain groups.

State Senator Zaynab Mohamed, a Democrat who is the youngest woman ever elected to the Minnesota Senate and its first female Muslim member, said she did not believe that Mr. Trump would have posted the video if it showed any other religious group.

“Imagine if these kids were children who were wearing yarmulkes,” she said. “Imagine the reaction people would have. We would all be angry because we should be, because they are just as American as anyone else. And these kids who are wearing a hijab are just as American as the child who goes to a Catholic school that wears a particular uniform.”

National advocacy groups that have tracked the rise of Islamophobia said Mr. Trump’s posts were part of a trend of normalizing anti-Muslim hate and demeaning rhetoric that has led to violence and could lead to more.

A poll conducted last year by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that 63 percent of Muslims reported experiencing religious discrimination. And 47 percent of Muslims with children in grades K-12 reported that their children had been bullied for their religious identity in the past year, about twice the rate of the general population. Nearly half of the Muslim families whose children had been bullied said it was by an adult.

“This is the context within which Muslims have been living in the United States for a long time,” said Dr. Saher Selod, the director of research at the institute. “The bar has just been lowered so much in terms of what people can and cannot say about Muslims. We’re waiting for everyone to recognize how dehumanizing this is.”

Imam Yussuf Abdulle, the director of the Islamic Association of North America, which oversees more than three dozen Islamic centers and groups across the country, said that after the “garbage” comment, his young children asked him of Mr. Trump: “Baba, are we OK? What did we do to him? Does he hate us?”

He now knows the answer.

“Our president is not sparing the most vulnerable of our community,” he said. “There’s no mercy for us in his heart.”

“What could make you happy, if not a kindergarten graduation?” he added. “If that makes you angry, there is no happiness left.”

But on that day, he said, the students captured the hope that the community still clings to in the United States.

The song, “I Am a Student,” speaks to cultural pride, educational success and collective responsibility.

I am a student, I am a student

I am the flower (hope) of this nation

I strive, I strive, I go to schools

So that I may repay the debt I owe my father and mother

With all the effort I bring, O Allah, help me, amen, amen

O Allah, support me, amen, amen

I am a student, I am a student, I am the light of the dawn

I run, I run, I go to take exams

So that I may gain knowledge, and benefit my country

With all the effort I bring, O Allah, help me, amen, amen

O Allah, support me, amen, amen.

Ernesto Londoño contributed reporting from Minneapolis.

Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

Dylan Freedman is the A.I. projects editor for The Times, investigating a range of topics. He has experience as both a reporter and a machine-learning engineer.“

 

Let’s Name the Country That’s Financing Mass Murder

​

“The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is backing the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia in Sudan, which is responsible for atrocities against Black African ethnic groups. Despite the UAE’s influence, world leaders are hesitant to pressure it due to its financial ties to the Trump family. Public pressure and legislation limiting weapons sales to the UAE could help end the conflict and prevent further atrocities.

​

July 11, 2026

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Last year, human rights experts warned for many months that a brutal militia was about to overrun a major Sudanese city, El Fasher, and massacre inhabitants.

President Trump and other world leaders mostly shrugged. The militia went ahead and overran El Fasher, slaughtering some 60,000 people in a few weeks.

Now the same militia is besieging another major Sudanese city, El Obeid, which has half a million or more people, and is also threatening populations to the north in the Darfur region. Some inside El Obeid are starving, yet, again, Trump and many other world leaders seem largely indifferent.

Preventing the slaughter would not require military action. It would not even require money. Put aside the arguments over whether humanitarian assistance is worthwhile. (But first, let me say that I believe the billions spent on the Iran war would have been better allocated to $2 bed nets to save children’s lives from malaria.) It may be that all we need to do to avert atrocities in Sudan is to speak up.

The backdrop: Sudan is probably the world’s worst humanitarian crisis right now. The country is caught in a civil war between the army and a largely Arab militia, the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., and while both sides have behaved viciously, the R.S.F. is particularly notorious for savagery, including for killing and raping members of several Black African ethnic groups. While reporting on the Chad-Sudan border in 2024, I interviewed survivors who described the R.S.F.’s systematically killing men and boys over the age of 10 and gang-raping many women and girls.

“We don’t want to see any Black people,” one woman quoted an R.S.F. leader telling villagers before the militia slaughtered the men and boys, among them her five brothers.

The R.S.F. is now massing forces around El Obeid and attacking it with drones. Food is scarce and people are weakening. The region is suffering an outbreak of cholera, which, if it spreads, could greatly increase the suffering.

“Another human rights catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan,” Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, warned a few days ago. He added that people in the region are being subjected to summary executions and sexual violence.

“Families have to queue for long hours to get water that is often unsafe for drinking,” the Norwegian Refugee Council reports. “Once they manage to bring water home, they must choose whether to use it to drink, cook or wash.”

It’s not entirely clear if the R.S.F. plans to overrun El Obeid or whether there would be a blood bath if it did. Compared to El Fasher, fewer people in El Obeid are members of the Black African ethnic groups that the R.S.F. targets. It’s even possible that the siege of El Obeid is a feint to distract from an attack elsewhere, such as on the Darfur city of Tawila.

Still, the risks are immense, and the United Nations Security Council issued a statement last month warning of the “imminent risk of mass atrocities.”

Leaders are willing to speak about the violence itself. Both the Biden and Trump administrations described the situation in Sudan as genocide. The State Department just last month warned of “alarming indications that mass atrocities could be imminent.”

But what American, European and United Nations officials won’t say openly is that the power behind the R.S.F. is the United Arab Emirates. Although the Emirates denies it, its backing of the R.S.F. is well established. Yet the Emirates is rich and influential, so it has become The Country That Must Not Be Named.

Tough public comments and other pressure from Washington and European capitals might shame the Emirates enough for it to tell its murderous friends in Sudan to back off; similar pressure led the Emirates to pull most of its forces out from a brutal war in Yemen in 2019. Instead, world leaders today tiptoe around the Emirates’ role.

The Emirates has particularly close financial ties to the Trump family. Indeed, Trump’s family income surged last year partly because an investment firmtied to the Emirates paid hefty sums for a stake in the family’s main crypto company.

Members of Congress, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative Sara Jacobs, have sponsored legislation that essentially would limit sales of weaponry to the Emirates as long as it arms the R.S.F. “This awful conflict could be ended if we had the political will to do so — instead of starting stupid wars with Iran,” Van Hollen said.

I share the belief that such a measure could end this catastrophe — but it is languishing from indifference. We should have the fortitude to speak up about human rights outrages whether the responsible party is Russia, China, Israel, America or the Emirates; if you care about human rights in only some places, you don’t actually care about human rights.

Sudan isn’t getting much attention, partly because the crisis areas are difficult to enter. I was organizing a trip to the conflict areas last month, but my route closed at the last minute and I had to put the trip off. Enough information is trickling out for diplomats and aid groups to be able to ring the alarms; it’s just that the world is ignoring them.

“The international community must stop reacting to atrocities and start preventing them,” noted Rabab Mohamed Ali Baldo, a Sudanese activist originally from El Obeid.

This is an excellent moment to apply public pressure, for the Emirates appears to be lobbying for one of its top Foreign Ministry officials, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, to be the next United Nations secretary general.

“This won’t end until the Emirates are pressured to stop their advanced weapons superhighway to the R.S.F.,” said Nathaniel Raymond of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which closely follows the crisis in Sudan. “This war could end in two weeks if the R.S.F. entered an ammo drought because the Emirates decided it was no longer worth it.”

So this is in part on us. Will we find the courage to speak up?

1. 

   Nicholas Kristof

   Opinion columnist

   I may get pushback from readers who say that what happens in Sudan is none of our business. My response would be that if we describe something as a genocide, then it should be our business to speak out and do what we can. Is that persuasive? What other arguments can I marshal?“

 

Second Person in a Week Killed by Federal Task Force in Memphis

​

“Tennessee authorities are investigating the second fatal shooting in four days by a member of the federal task force in Memphis. The shootings have exacerbated tensions in the city, with some residents welcoming the task force’s efforts to combat crime while others accuse agents of aggressive tactics and causing fear and distrust. The task force, established by President Trump, has made over 2,000 arrests and confiscated hundreds of firearms since its arrival.

​

Tennessee authorities are investigating both shootings involving agents working with the task force in Memphis.

July 8, 2026

A federal agent with the Memphis Safe Task Force shot and killed a person at a hotel in Memphis on Wednesday, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.Natalie Van Gundy/Daily Memphian, via Associated Press

Tennessee authorities are investigating the second fatal shooting in four days by a member of the federal task force dedicated to confronting crime in Memphis.

The shootings are likely to further exacerbate tensions within the city, which has been torn over the presence of hundreds of federal agents since October and their aggressive approach to targeting crime.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said on Wednesday that the shooting involved a Drug Enforcement Administration agent with a team of agents trying to serve an arrest warrant at a Memphis hotel on Wednesday morning.

A spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service said agents forced their way into the hotel room after commands to open the door were ignored. A man inside pointed a handgun at the group, and the agent shot and killed the man, the spokesman said. The state bureau said it would investigate the shooting, but did not identify the man or the agent involved.

“The Memphis Safe Task Force will remain in Memphis since dangerous criminals are still on the street,” Brady McCarron, the marshals spokesman, said. “Attempted violence against law enforcement will never be tolerated.”

The task force, he added, “has made the city of Memphis safer by arresting criminals, driving down crime, and locating missing children.”

Steve Mulroy, the district attorney for Shelby County, which includes Memphis, also asked the state bureau to investigate a fatal shooting days earlier. In that episode, on Sunday, two National Guard members fired on Tyrin Johnson, 20, killing him, according to the bureau, among several shootings in nine states during the Fourth of July weekend.

At least two other people have been killed after altercations involving agents working with the Memphis task force.

While the Trump administration has pulled federal agents and National Guard troops back from other Democratic-led cities, personnel remain in both Memphis and Washington. The federal government has outsize power over the nation’s capital, while Republican leaders in Tennessee have embraced the groundswell of law enforcement after President Trump signed an executive order establishing the task force in September.

Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, has allowed Memphis police officers to work in tandem with federal agents and State Highway Patrol troopers, though he expressed some discomfort with the National Guard deployment. More than 2,000 arrests have been made and hundreds of firearms have been confiscated since the task force arrived last fall.

Some Memphis residents have welcomed the task force, expressing weariness and frustration with the high crime rates that have long plagued the city. Others, however, have accused the agents of using aggressive tactics and causing more fear and distrust in a majority-Black city with a painful history of discriminatory policing.

There is also an ongoing lawsuit against leaders of the task force, accusing agents of retaliating against efforts to document the task force’s arrests and detainment of both residents and undocumented immigrants.

“Every Memphian deserves to feel safe and public safety depends not only on reducing violence but also on maintaining trust between government and the communities it serves,” Raumesh Akbari and London Lamar, Democratic state senators, said in a statement after Mr. Johnson’s death early Sunday. “That trust is strengthened through transparency, accountability and an independent review of the facts.”

Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.“