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2026-08-07 06:34:25

Today, the consumer protection watchdog group Public Citizen released a report detailing the Trump administration’s secretive web of critical minerals deals around the world. The report, exclusively shared with Mother Jones, shows that the number of deals the administration has publicly claimed to have does not match up with the number of countries known to have signed these agreements. The researchers also detail the many ways these deals can exploit countries experiencing violent conflict—and the ways they might enrich the President’s backers. 

“This is now a huge web of deals that are being negotiated behind closed doors without any public scrutiny or oversight,” said Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch research group. “Even the things they are announcing, the numbers don’t add up.” 

It’s clear that Donald Trump and his administration are fixated on critical minerals— things like cobalt, lithium, and graphite, used for purposes as wide-ranging as building batteries or building missiles. “It’s really striking just how much President Trump is personally involved in this,” St. Louis said. Trump has released 12 executive orders related to critical minerals since the start of his second term, and the country has signed on to a bevy of trade agreements related to critical minerals. But, according to Public Citizen’s research, there’s no publicly available database of what exactly all those agreements are, which countries are involved, or who might be profiting. And many of these moves, based on executive orders, don’t require congressional approval. 

“The most complete information available is from a February 2026 State Department fact sheet that stated that at least 38 international critical minerals agreements have been completed or were pending at that time,” today’s report says. But that fact sheet only names eleven of the countries involved, meaning 27 are unaccounted for. Public Citizen’s review of available documents was only able to confirm the existence of some of those agreements. “Less than half of the memoranda of understanding announced have been made fully public, only two of which were released by the US government,” they wrote. The rest are only public because the other country involved publicized them. 

The Biden administration prioritized trade deals for critical minerals—like one signed with Japan—with the justification that securing resources for the green transition was a priority. “Now of course under the Trump administration, even the pretext of a clean energy transition is not even part of this. It’s really to seize these minerals for AI, military dominance, et cetera,” St. Louis said. In particular, the president is interested in military dominance over China. 

“Trump and his acolytes all use this very apocalyptic language, that it’s about our security, that it’s about the future of Western Civilization,” Nghia Nguyen, a lead author on the report, said. “I think that says a lot about why the government is throwing so much into it.” Report after report says that military contractors are being pressured to limit their reliance on trade with China for weapons components, and the US government is now seeking out those same minerals wherever they can find them.

Sometimes, Trump’s own family members might profit. A group of American investors including two of the president’s sons got access to a massive untapped reserve of Kazakhstan’s tungsten (a mineral widely used in missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips) through a government-brokered deal. And agreements with other countries are even more exploitative. The Trump administration’s “minerals for security” deals with Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo sign over portions of those countries’ mining sectors to US actors as they experience active conflict. 

The US deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo may have even been a pretext to make the country amend its constitution. “In practice, the deal gives sweeping financial and regulatory incentives to U.S. mining companies and grants the U.S. government unprecedented control over Congolese mineral resources,” the Public Citizen report says. “These are binding agreements devoid of meaningful labor, human rights, or environmental safeguards.” And in Zambia, as the New York TImes reported, the State Department has considered making medical aid contingent on a $2 billion critical minerals deal. 

“In seeking to encourage mining, the Trump administration is prioritizing speed over corporate accountability and ethical safeguards,” the researchers wrote. 

2026-08-07 00:25:09

“Max, Can REDACTED please have her bunny back? She’s had it since birth, sleeps with it every night, carries it with her around the house…Please don’t punish REDACTED if you’re upset with me,” Emily Moreno once wrote in an email to her ex-husband, Republican Rep. Max Miller. 

Miller, the Ohio lawmaker who has recently been fighting for his political life over allegations that he physically assaulted Moreno and other women, posted screenshots on X last night that he said prove he didn’t withhold their toddler’s stuffed animal during an August custody exchange. Earlier this week, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), Emily’s father, described the alleged incident to congressional reporters.

“Max would not hand over the little blue bunny,” the senator said when reporters in the Capitol asked about his ex-son-in-law. “Literally held it hostage for 48 hours. This girl is crying at night because she can’t sleep without her little blue bunny. And his answer is, ‘I’m just not going to give it to you.’ So finally, yesterday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, yesterday, he lets the little blue bunny go. This is the level of total and complete depravity.” Miller, in turn, told Bernie Moreno to “please stop the lies.”

But timestamps on the email from Miller’s former wife show the conflict over the bunny began earlier, back in March 2025. 

It’s one of several screenshots regarding the blue bunny that Mother Jones has obtained from a source familiar with the ongoing custody battle. Together, the screenshots of emails and text messages between Emily Moreno, Bernie Moreno, Miller, a parent custody coordinator, and lawyers for the involved parties suggest that the alleged withholding of the stuffed animal was part of a pattern of behavior and not a single incident. Miller’s lawyers did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment.

Here’s what we know.

In March 2025, Emily Moreno asked Miller to return the blue bunny to their then-1-year-old daughter via email.

The next day, Emily Moreno emailed Miller again about the same subject.

More than a year later, in May 2026, Bernie Moreno texted Miller asking about the blue bunny, which he was apparently supposed to receive during a custody exchange. “Evidently I was supposed to get REDACTED’S blue bunny at pickup. She’s asking for it. Do you have it by any chance?” Bernie Moreno said. 

To which, Miller replied: “You can go through the parent coordinator.”

Regarding what appears to be a third dispute over the stuffed animal in August, Miller posted screenshots of messages that he says prove he was not purposely hindering the child from getting her blue bunny back.

“So Sorry to bother you about this/I guess REDACTED left her blue bunny at your house and Emily is saying REDACTED wants it back-apparently her dad is offering to come pick It up From You- please Just let me know your response,” wrote the parenting coordinator in a text to Miller.

Miller replied, “Sure.”

According to the messages Miller posted on X and the screenshots obtained by Mother Jones, the Morenos tried to send a friend of the family to pick up the bunny. “Sending Jared over to my home as a conduit was a bad idea,” Miller wrote on August 3, according to his own screenshot.

Around the time Miller refused to coordinate with the family friend, Emily Moreno’s lawyer, Andrew Zashin, sent Miller’s lawyers a note. “This is totally ridiculous,” Zashin wrote in an August 3 email. “Please have Max return the bunny forthwith.”

Throughout the fraught impasse, messages obtained by Mother Jones suggest that Emily Moreno and Miller’s parenting coordinator played the referee. 

“I advised him to Let your dad get the bunny from Preferably from The mailbox but he adamantly refuses,” the coordinator wrote, according to a screenshot of the erratically composed text reviewed by Mother Jones.

Miller continues to defy calls for him to drop out of his campaign for reelection. August 10 is the deadline for him to withdraw and offer Republicans an opportunity to replace him with a less embattled candidate. Thus far, he shows no signs of doing so.

2026-08-06 23:22:41

On Tuesday afternoon, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights convened in Washington, DC, to hear complaints about excessive use of force and suppression of freedom of expression during protests against immigration enforcement in American cities. One of those who attended and testified at the public hearing was Antonio Romanucci, a Chicago-based civil rights litigation lawyer representing the family of Renée Good, who was fatally shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis in January.

He began by thanking the commission for hosting a forum to examine “human rights atrocities” in the United States. “What we saw with Renée,” Romanucci said, “was a federal agent clearly using deadly force without any legal justification, in an extreme manner, shocking the conscience of our country.” Romanucci, who previously secured a settlement in a wrongful death civil rights case on behalf of George Floyd’s family, said “zero federal investigation” resulted in no accountability in Minneapolis, or elsewhere. “I have not seen these atrocities in my 41 years of practice,” he added.

The IACHR, an autonomous body of the Organization of American States, monitors human rights conditions in the hemisphere and hears complaints from civil society about alleged violations. Romanucci, along with Thomas Becker of the University Network for Human Rights, appealed to the commission, requesting a hearing on the US government’s actions against protesters, journalists, and bystanders at demonstrations opposing the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“As Donald Trump attacks the courts, weaponizes the Department of Justice, and targets attorneys who challenge his administration,” Romanucci and Becker explained in an opinion piece published in the Guardian previewing the hearing, “we have been forced to seek justice beyond our borders.” They added: “Never before had the commission granted such a hearing, but the extraordinary nature of the Trump administration’s actions…warrants international scrutiny.”

A press release said this marked the first time the IACHR, which doesn’t have enforcement authority, held such a thematic hearing on freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly in the United States. “For years, the Commission has heard testimony about the attacks on protesters carried out by some of the region’s most repressive dictatorships,” James Cavallaro, former president of the IACHR, said in a statement. “Now, it is the United States that will be called to answer for these abuses.”

Rev. David Black, a pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was one of the speakers. He recounted how in September 2025, he was wearing his clerical collar when he joined a protest outside the ICE detention facility in Broadview to say a prayer and stand in solidarity with the immigrant detainees. “My words were confrontational,” Rev. Black told the commission. “They were also peaceful.”

He said federal agents fired pepper-balls at him at least seven times, hitting his head, face, torso, arms, and legs. Other protesters tried to cover him, he said, but agents in full armor forced him down and sprayed the pastor with a chemical irritant. Rev. Black, who was part of a federal lawsuit against the US government last year decrying a “pattern of extreme brutality” by federal agents, recalled struggling to breathe. “What happened to me was not an isolated incident,” he said, stating that clergy have been “repeatedly assaulted” outside detention centers and prevented from ministering inside.

The delegation also condemned the Trump administration’s efforts to label protesters as domestic terrorists. Boston University law professor Susan Akram called the policies “blatantly illegal and draconian” and part of a “campaign to criminalize dissent, free expression, and ideologies that this administration dislikes.” Akram said the measures violated international law and “are frankly reviving McCarthyism in the United States.”

Andrea Pochak, one of the IACHR commissioners, said priests, journalists, human rights lawyers, and immigrants are not terrorists. She also inquired about cases in which federal agents engaged in excessive use of force had been disciplined or criminally charged. “The system of accountability is broken,” said Locke Bowman, an attorney representing Rev. Black and two other Chicago residents who have filed claims against the Department of Homeland Security.

The US government provided little in the way of response. Acting Deputy Chief of Mission to the OAS Julianna Aynes-Neville declined to answer questions, citing ongoing litigation. “I am circumscribed in what I am able to say today,” she said. “The United States must once again register dissatisfaction with the decision to convene this hearing on these matters.” She urged the commission to redirect its attention to backlogged cases and countries with “weak or nonexistent protections” for freedom of expression.

Cavallaro, the former president of IACHR, urged the commission to visit the United States to observe the human rights situation in the country. “If there’s nothing to hide, if the system is working, if cases are investigated, if abuses are addressed,” he said, addressing the US representatives, “please show that to the commission.”

“Without any transparent investigation there will never be any discipline,” Romanucci, the lawyer for Renée Good’s family, said, “there will never be any accountability.” After the hearing, Romanucci told Mother Jones the government’s evasiveness at the hearing mirrored its handling of Good’s killing. “Not only do we hear common design in justifying the narrative when there is deadly force or excessive force used,” he said, “this also, to me, is a common design of not answering questions or releasing information in order to make this process more transparent.”

Asked about the investigation into the fatal shooting of Good, Romanucci said, “the status today is the same as it was in January.” He added: “There has been no exchange of information with regard to the evidence of the case and we just hope to be able to get some answers very soon.” As for the IACHR’s hearing, Romanucci called for concrete action. “This was a good start,” he said, “but all that was exchanged today were words. We need to see much more.”

2026-08-06 23:18:05

As an ordinary internet user, I am skeptical about AI. My colleagues and I have reported on several harmful aspects of the technology in the US: threats to democracy, its impact on the environment, mental health, the workforce, military intervention—the list goes on. 

While researching the gaps in conversations around enforceable government regulation of AI startups, both big and small, eager to innovate and launch new products, I came across AI researchers, policy experts, and even “ordinary internet users” like me trying to reimagine how the industry could work. If AI is unstoppable, can we build it in a way where the public has more of a say in how the technology is made, used, and who it benefits? 

To answer these questions, I spoke with B Cavello, the director of emerging technologies at the Aspen Institute. Cavello wants to make sure that ordinary users like you and me have some say in how this powerful technology is developed and regulated. I talked to Cavello about the gap between the recent proposals among tech executives and lawmakers to give Americans financial ownership stakes in major AI companies and what actually ensuring public safety could look like.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

I’ve heard a lot of coverage on proposals of public ownership of AI from folks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Are there other prominent proposals being discussed?

Ownership is complicated. I’m a big proponent of the movement for public AI. Public AI is open source, centering public access, accountability, and sustainable public goods. That means making sure that not only do people have free access to things, but also access to build models in their own local context. 

When we say accountability, we don’t just mean regulation on harms we’re trying to prevent. We also mean the capabilities that we want to get built in the world. When we talk about AI leading to a new age of human flourishing, we often aren’t talking about the basics, and that’s an important place to start when we think about public accountability and then sustainable public goods. 

When we build products within this framing, we want them to be essentially treated like public infrastructure. A lot of work in the public AI community has been on open source because that’s one of the spaces where people are able to continue to build on top of each other. CurrentAI [a public-private partnership of governments, companies, and organizations to fund public interest tech] announced in the last couple of weeks their AIPotluck initiative, which is bringing together different open-source AI builders to build a full open stack [meaning making the entire AI development process accessible to the public].

It’s less about trying to take the market share or revenues of big AI [companies, similar to Altman’s and Sanders’ proposals], but more that we’re going to distribute these capabilities, such that now they aren’t the only players in town—and we’re distributing [electrical] power that way. 

Who are the types of people and communities that are participating in public AI discussions?

There’s a big movement around AI sovereignty across the African continent and Europe about trying to disentangle from American AI providers. To that end, ownership is about local representation and empowering a local tech community. There’s a conversation in the US, especially around a potential AI bubble, whether or not it might burst, and how we might have public ownership or public uptake of these technologies. 

As you alluded to, there are folks like Sen. Sanders who are responding to the concerns around AI safety and power concentration, who are trying to look for interesting and creative avenues for trying to have some sort of power over these companies through partial ownership of them, but I think is like ultimately not where I would focus, especially per some of the conversations around the uncertainty of the [economic] future of these systems. It is sort of accepting defeat on other forms of regulation to say we’re just going to be passengers on this ride. I think Sanders’ team and a lot of people working in Congress don’t want that to be the only strategy going forward.

Windfall Trust, [a network of independent AI researchers and strategists], has been working on how to encourage people before a crisis happens [like mass unemployment] while the pressure is low, and get some pre-commitments on trigger conditions for different [ameliorating] policies. 

Considering all the discussions around reimagining AI, how would these ideas become policy?

The thing I parallel it to is the renewable energy transition, where on one hand, we needed the tech to be there. We needed solar panels to get super good and cheap. But we also needed rebates on the policy side that enable us to leverage those technologies. 

Congress and, broadly, governments tend to be reactive institutions. 

The public is also becoming more aware and engaged on issues around AI. So some of these things will be showcased at a more local level before they make it into larger policy.

As a regular internet user, what are things that I should be thinking or concerned about?

How do we establish public accountability in how data centers are operated? For the last 20 years, there have been people demanding transparency in technology companies and basically being told we can’t do that because of the First Amendment. We have adopted this mentality that tech companies can be secretive—we can’t ask them anything, and they don’t divulge anything. We can absolutely require reporting about some of the ways data centers are operating.

I would love to see people pushing on public access to data centers. Let’s demand that we have set-asides that 20 percent of a data center is allocated toward publicly accessible, accountable, and sustainable public goods. 

We already have the tools. We’ve seen a vast hollowing out of the apparatus that is meant to hold these entities accountable. Federal agencies are meant to do this work—the IRS. If somebody in the public cares about holding big AI companies to account, part of [the public effort] means championing the people who can do that work and encouraging the election of people who are interested in that. 

I would encourage people in their own use of AI technologies to think about how to use open systems and run things locally. There are some folks who are engaging with public libraries across the country, where people can access these tools for trying things out. OpenAI and Anthropic don’t monopolize what is possible [with AI].

Is there something analogous to conversations that happened previously on how to think about what AI could be? 

I would like our AI future to look more like electricity: a reliable, publicly accountable utility that has universal service requirements to make sure that everyone can be connected. And at the same time, we have batteries and home generators [as individuals]. 

It’s not to say that there can’t be interesting innovations on top of existing infrastructure. In many ways, I think of AI as the cool thing we can do with electricity. Here we are having a Zoom call—what an innovation in electricity! We should have public utilities, and we should have a thriving market of all different kinds of community solar and private companies that’ll build innovative batteries, but recognizing that we all deserve access, we all deserve accountability. We deserve, if we want, to have an innovation ecosystem. We need a sustainable infrastructure layer that people can count on and build on top of, and not be worried that [Anthropic] Mythos-style, suddenly everything is revoked. 

There are things that are not great about our public utilities. People are having fights about data centers in part because of the way our electrical grid is run [such as prioritizing data centers over local residents]. So I don’t think that it is a perfect one-to-one.

2026-08-06 20:58:27

When 27-year-old Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz took her three daughters and boarded a plane from St. Louis to Guatemala City on June 17, her friends begged her not to go. But Glendy had no other option: Her husband, Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz, who worked as a roofer and was the family’s breadwinner, had been deported a year earlier.

On July 22, just weeks after Glendy reunited with Nixon in rural Guatemala, neighbors found the couple bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field. Their 14-month-old daughter Giovanni was crying, dehydrated, next to their bodies. Two communities—one in Missouri, the other in the western Guatemalan region of Retalhuleu—are left to pick up the pieces. 

In Guatemala, that includes Nixon’s older brother, Rolando Pérez Paz, who was deported alongside Nixon in 2025. Now, Rolando and his wife are caring for his three nieces. He can’t help but wonder what could have been. 

“If my brother hadn’t been deported, he might—well, only God knows—but he might still be alive,” Rolando told me in Spanish from his home in Retalhuleu. “Both of them might still be alive.” 

News of the couple’s deaths slowly got back to St. Louis. Glendy’s friend Laura, who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear that she, too, might be targeted by ICE, got a call from another friend: “Glendy is gone.” An email circulated within the Fuerza organizing committee, a local immigrant workers rights group for which Glendy rarely missed a meeting. By the time St. Louis Public Radio picked up the story, Glendy and Nixon’s friends were already planning a vigil. 

Asked about Nixon and Rolando’s deportations, an ICE spokesperson wrote that Nixon had two convictions for driving while intoxicated. Mother Jones was able to corroborate only one of those charges, and there are no court records under Rolando’s name.

To Alicia Hernandez, an organizer with the legal aid group MICA Project, the story was familiar: a husband taken in a traffic stop and sent away and a wife forced to leave the United States to reunite with him. Their deaths are part of a broader story of revenue-seeking policing in a region that once withstood intense federal scrutiny and has now become part of the Trump administration’s deportation machine.

The St. Louis area is home to 54 separate police departments. Some have fewer than 10 officers and serve townships with a thousand or so residents. Those municipalities—sometimes no larger than one or two subdivisions—rely on their police departments as a major source of local government revenue, extracting money through traffic stops and municipal court fines. ICE’s deportation surge presents a new financial opportunity.

After the 2014 police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, the St. Louis area’s patchwork law enforcement apparatus came under national scrutiny. Some departments consolidated; others, under pressure from the federal government, enacted rules meant to limit racial profiling and profit-motivated traffic stops. But now, instead of pushing the region’s police toward reform, the federal government is offering financial incentives to target immigrants like Nixon and Rolando. ICE is paying six St. Louis–area police departments to deputize officers as federal immigration enforcers under what’s known as a 287(g) agreement.

“It’s quite a bit of money,” Scott Robinson, chief of police for Breckenridge Hills, a small municipality bordering Overland, told a local TV station earlier this year. ICE has promised some participating departments money for equipment, salary and benefits reimbursements, and $100,000 for new vehicles. For Breckenridge Hills, which employs just over a dozen officers, that’s a substantial sum. “They sign these 287(g) agreements to supplement their budgets,” Hernandez said.

About 60 percent of ICE arrests in St. Louis start as traffic stops. “We see situation after situation where someone is pulled over for rolling a red light, driving without a driver’s license, having a broken tail light,” Hernandez told me. “And then from there, they are put on an ICE hold.”

Locally, immigrants know where the “hot spots” are, Hernandez said. They issue warnings like “Don’t drive through Overland.” About a quarter of all ICE arrests in the St. Louis area during President Donald Trump’s second term so far have happened in Overland, a suburb of small midcentury brick homes. Glendy and Nixon settled there around 2020.

According to a statement from ICE, Nixon and Rolando were picked up by federal agents on April 15, 2025. “They got us at 5 in the morning—we were maybe 50 meters or so from our house when they grabbed us,” Rolando said. First, they spoke with Nixon, who was in his 40s, then they questioned his older brother. They shackled their hands and their feet. “I asked if there was an arrest warrant for me, and [the officer] said no,” Rolando said. 

The two brothers were held in downtown St. Louis, Rolando said, then moved to Phelps County Jail, a small rural jail operated by a sheriff’s department that entered into a 287(g) agreement with ICE this year. (The Phelps County Sheriff’s Department refused to answer a Freedom of Information Act request, instead deferring to ICE.) 

As the month dragged on, Rolando said, the Pérez brothers were moved to yet another rural Missouri jail, then to Louisiana. By the middle of May, Nixon and Rolando were back in rural Guatemala. There, Rolando was reunited with his wife, but Nixon’s family was left thousands of miles away.

Glendy, then 26 and nine months pregnant with her third child, was left to fend for herself. “Her world completely collapsed,” her friend Yohana, who asked to use a pseudonym, told me in Spanish, “because she was left all alone.”

She tried for a year to make it work without her husband, all while worried that she would be deported herself. The Department of Homeland Security had its own solution: self-deportation. 

“Leave on your OWN terms,” ICE threatened in a September 2025 social media flyer. “Avoid the jail cell. Avoid the humiliation.” Last year, then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spent over $200 million on advertisements pushing that same message. US Customs and Border Protection has even launched a “self-deportation app,” CBP Home. 

But self-deportation, researcher Austin Kocher explained, is a marketing tactic meant to appeal to Trump’s base by declaring that if people would only follow the law and immigrate the “right” way, they could be safe. “It’s trying to develop legitimacy for a deportation program that is not always particularly popular if people understood the normalcy of the people who are wrapped up in it,” Kocher said.

Representatives with Fuerza, the immigrant rights group, said Glendy had an open asylum case with a hearing set for 2027. She came to the United States as a young mother fleeing violence and poverty in Guatemala six years ago. But that likely would not have stopped her from being criminalized and deported, as the vast majority of asylum claims in Missouri are rejected.

“This administration seems to believe that everybody requesting asylum must inherently be a bogus asylum seeker and not really an authentic humanitarian case,” Kocher said. According to UN data, 32,000 people have been deported to Guatemala in the first half of 2026 alone. “This is a consequence of having a whole system that is so bent towards deportation that it can’t even listen to the legitimate claims of legitimate asylum seekers.” 

Records from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show that there are 49,576 backlogged cases in the Kansas City Immigration Court, which oversees the state of Missouri. In the first half of 2026, over 95 percent of asylum applications processed by that court were denied. The same week Glendy and Nixon were killed, the Trump administration launched a new plan to expedite deportations of asylum seekers.

After her husband’s deportation, Glendy took on two jobs, working in a factory during the day and cleaning offices at night. Sometimes, Laura watched the kids while Glendy worked. Laura and Glendy’s daughters—girls so close they had their first communion together and saw each other nearly every day—had sleepovers that stretched from one night into the next. Laura and Glendy took turns driving them to school. Whenever Glendy made tamales, she shared some with Laura’s family. They helped each other out wherever they could. 

But Glendy couldn’t stop worrying. She gave Laura and another friend power of attorney to help her children in case she was taken. “I won’t let that happen,” Laura said. 

This past April, police officers working with ICE arrived at Glendy’s local middle school, asking questions about three students there. District Superintendent Chris Kilbride rushed to the scene and “got the officers away from the school as quickly as possible,” he told me. Although no students were detained, parents in Overland were terrified.

A few weeks after Glendy gave birth to her youngest daughter, Giovanni, she started bringing Laura to monthly meetings held by the local immigrant advocacy group Fuerza. “She was like, ‘Hey, let’s go! You can get informed about what’s going on in the community,’” Laura remembered. There, they commiserated, shared meals, and got reports of the latest ICE arrests. At every meeting, there was childcare. “We would take our daughters for them to know what’s going on as well.”

As members of Fuerza, the women went door-knocking, asking neighbors to join their cause. They met with local officials to ask them not to sign 287(g) agreements. Organizing for their rights helped them feel less alone, but Glendy still feared leaving the house to go to work.

“For those of us without children, it’s a bit easier to manage,” said Yohana, a Nicaraguan Fuerza member who works in construction. “But if you have children at home, you can’t just tell them ‘there’s no food today.’” Glendy had no reliable transportation and worked irregular hours; the bills kept piling up. “I picture the situation and ask myself, ‘My God, how did Glendy sleep?’ How could Glendy sleep peacefully, knowing she had to feed her daughters the next day?” 

Teachers from the Ritenour School District, which two of Glendy’s daughters attended, reached out to help; friends offered rides and childcare. But a year after Nixon’s deportation, it still wasn’t enough. By May 2026, Glendy was telling her friends she planned to return to Guatemala. 

“I didn’t want her to leave. And she told me she didn’t want to leave but she was obligated to,” Laura said. “It’s just getting hard,” Glendy told her, shortly before getting on the plane. The last time the two saw each other was the first time Laura saw Glendy cry. 

“They should never have gone back, but the laws of this country made them go,” Yohana said. In a photo taken June 17, the day Glendy returned to Guatemala, she grins alongside her daughters outside St. Louis Lambert International Airport. The two older girls carry large stuffed bears. Glendy’s youngest daughter is in a carrier strapped to her chest, smiling at the camera in pigtails. It’s a warm and sunny day in St. Louis, but they’re all wearing jackets in case it gets chilly on the plane.

Nixon and Glendy’s family buried the couple side by side after a procession through the Guatemalan countryside. The Guatemalan National Civil Police and Public Prosecutor’s Office are investigating the killing, but they have not publicly identified a suspect or motive. At an early August vigil for the couple outside Overland City Hall, the town’s mayor said Overland will not sign a 287(g) agreement—though two municipal police departments bordering Overland have already done so. 

Laura and Yohana are fundraising for Nixon and Glendy’s three daughters and talking to the press. But neither was willing to use their real names in this article, out of fear that they, too, would be targeted. In late July, Laura tried to tell her 10-year-old daughter what happened to her best friend’s family.  

“Why are people so mean?” Laura’s daughter asked. “She literally just left, and now she has no mom or dad, and I don’t get to see her anymore?” 

Correction, August 6: The age of Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz has been updated.

2026-08-06 19:30:00

Prisciliano Trejo Ricano spent his 29th birthday on July 10 in Georgia’s Stewart Detention Center. In the privately-run facility that can hold about 1,900 detainees at a time, Trejo Ricano felt “like a number or like a placeholder.” Two days later, in a Facebook post from July 12, Trejo Ricano, who was born in Mexico, described his worsening medical symptoms. “I’ve been dealing with a bad sore throat, coughing blood in the morning and night and really bad migraines,” he wrote. He said he hadn’t received treatment or medication and told relatives he had a bruise that refused to heal. Asking for prayers, he continued, “This is truly the worst feeling of my life.”

A few days after Trejo Ricano posted on Facebook, his family in Durham, North Carolina, got news that he had been admitted to a hospital’s intensive care unit. There he was diagnosed with acute leukemia, a type of blood cancer. By the time ICE released Trejo Ricano from custody to be with his family, the 29-year-old was in a coma. He later passed away at the hospital on Friday, July 24. A fundraising page set up by a relative to cover medical and funeral costs describes Trejo Ricano as “a confident, funny, and outgoing person” who “dominated a room with jokes and was silly with everyone he met.”

But in the ever-growing tally of ICE detainee deaths—the number is now more than 50—Trejo Ricano’s name doesn’t appear. Advocates say that’s because he had already been released from the agency’s responsibility. That obfuscation of the detention death toll isn’t the result of any oversight in record-keeping. This summer, the Trump administration rescinded a Biden-era policy requiring ICE to report and investigate deaths that occurred within 30 days of someone being released. “ICE is returning to the standard practice of reporting deaths that occur while an individual is in agency custody,” said a memo from acting ICE director David Venturella first reported by the Washington Post.

The Department of Homeland Security told Newsweek that Trejo Ricano had been arrested and charged with driving while impaired and a hit-and-run. Durham County court records show charges for a June 19 DWI, leaving the scene with property damage, no operator’s license, and driving the wrong way on a one-way street. A law enforcement officer’s affidavit states that Trejo Ricano appeared to be asleep at the wheel and “smelled of alcohol.” He was later transferred to ICE. (DHS said Trejo Ricano was a “criminal illegal alien.”)

Trejo Ricano’s father said his son had been healthy, employed by a welding company, and going to the gym twice a week. He wanted to be a trainer. But during the three weeks he spent in detention in Georgia, his family said his health became progressively worse from when he first complained about feeling unwell on July 6. Then he went several days without adequate care. When the family finally was able to see him at the hospital, he had been intubated and could no longer communicate.

In an email, a DHS spokesperson repeated a statement shared with other publications saying Trejo Ricano had been “released from ICE custody on July 16, 2026, with an order of recognizance,” and that claims that he didn’t receive medical care were false. “He received medical screening when he was admitted to Stewart Detention Center,” the spokesperson said. “He also received medical care after complaining of a cough and sore throat.” The email also stated that Trejo Ricano tested negative for strep and received QC Mucus Relief Sinus for his cough. In addition, he was treated with a saline IV, Amoxicillin, Ibuprofen, and Tylenol. DHS described medical treatment offered to ICE detainees as “the best healthcare that many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, 55 people have died in ICE detention, according to the agency’s own data. Twenty-two deaths happened in 2026 alone. The mortality rate of ICE detainees is at the highest level in more than a decade and four times that of the Biden presidency, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report documenting the increase in detention deaths.

The most recent recorded death on ICE’s website is that of Jesus Manuel Arenas-Silva, a 45-year-old Venezuelan man the agency said died on July 13 from a suspected cardiac arrest while being transferred from the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, to another facility. But on Monday, the agency issued a press release about another detainee death, reporting that Edwin Lopez-Cornejo from El Salvador “experienced a medical emergency” at New Jersey’s Delaney Hall before passing away.

Lopez-Cornejo had been in the United States for more than two decades and had a 12-year-old daughter. His mother, Maria Cornejo, told the New Jersey Monitor that he had diabetes and high blood pressure and hadn’t been receiving regular medication in detention. “I have a recording from the hospital that says when he arrived his heart had already stopped,” she told reporters during a press conference on Tuesday. The family is calling for an investigation.

Speaking on social media about Lopez-Cornejo’s death, Democratic Rep. Rob Menendez mentioned that another person held at Delaney Hall had recently passed away after being quickly released to the hospital. Once again, their death wasn’t reported as a result of ICE’s policy change. “This is meant to keep the number of deaths that are being reported in ICE custody to as low a number as possible,” he said. DHS didn’t respond to specific questions about the death of Lopez-Cornejo, instead referring Mother Jones to the ICE press release.

As Trejo Ricano and other cases show, official numbers of deaths in detention don’t tell the whole story. Earlier this year, a 31-year-old asylum seeker from Haiti died from hypothermia at a Pittsburgh bus stop only three days after being released from ICE custody. Daphy Michel, who suffered from severe mental illness, was found more than 20 miles away from her home in Charleroi, wearing summer clothes in freezing weather. In June, Michel’s death was ruled a homicide. An attorney for the family said they are planning to file a lawsuit. Michel’s death isn’t recorded on ICE’s website. “ICE had NOTHING to do with this woman’s death,” DHS declared on social media.

ICE reporting also doesn’t account for people who died shortly after being removed from the United States. Consider the case of Randall Gamboa Esquivel. Originally from Costa Rica, he was detained in south Texas for months and, in September 2025, deported to San José on an air ambulance in a vegetative state. The following month, Gamboa Esquivel passed away in the hospital.

“These avoidable tragedies underscore what we’ve known to be true for many years,” Laura Hernández, executive director of the abolitionist organization Freedom for Immigrants, said in a statement. “Nobody is safe for any amount of time in ICE custody because immigration detention has always been abusive and deadly by design.”

Amilcar Valencia, the executive director of El Refugio, which advocates for immigrants held at Stewart and their families, and who has been in touch with Trejo Ricano’s father, said it isn’t uncommon for detainees to be hospitalized only when they’re in critical condition. While it’s unclear if Trejo Ricano’s death could have been prevented, Valencia said the circumstances raise many questions for the family. “His dad asked why my son, who was in good health and did a lot of exercise, was very young and active, died all of a sudden,” Valencia said. “They want to know exactly what happened.”