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2026-03-08 06:08:23

Body camera footage newly obtained by CBS News shows the moments leading up to and after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot US citizen Ruben Ray Martinez in March 2025 and contradicts the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the killing. 

Martinez was 23 when an agent killed him in his car last spring in South Padre Island, Texas. Local news outlets reported on his death at the time, but described it only as an “officer-involved” shooting. Last month, ICE finally confirmed that one of its agents killed Martinez. 

But DHS, ICE’s parent agency, was quick to deflect blame. DHS claimed that Martinez “intentionally ran over” an agent “resulting in him being on the hood of the vehicle,” adding that a separate agent “fired defensive shots to protect himself, his fellow agents, and the general public.” 

The footage released by CBS on Friday tells a different story. 

As that outlet reports, Martinez’s car “was stationary or going at a very low rate of speed when he was fatally shot.” When shots are fired, “the brake lights of Martinez’ vehicle appear to be on.” Contrary to DHS’s account, the video shows no evidence that Martinez was attempting to run over an agent.

The newly released body camera footage is the latest chance for viewers to fact-check DHS’s claims about its reasoning for killing a US citizen. Following the shootings of citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis in January, videos from bystanders contradicted DHS’s assurances that the killings were a response to physical threats or violence by Good and Pretti.

After ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Good, then-DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that the 37 year old was a “violent rioter” who had “weaponized her vehicle” in an “act of domestic terrorism.” Video footage from several angles sooncirculated and directly opposed that official statement from the Trump administration. The videos indicated that Good reversed her car before appearing to turn away from Ross and drive away, after telling the agent “I’m not mad at you.”

Later that month, Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez shot at Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street, killing him. Again, the administration was quick to blame him for his death: The Border Patrol Union claimed that Pretti, who held a firearms permit, “brandishes” a weapon before being shot. But video footage released in the hours and days following the killing shows him holding a phone, not a gun, in his hand to record the agents. Video analysis from the New York Times also found that federal agents appear to pull a firearm from near Pretti’s right hip and carry it away prior to shooting him. 

In the footage of Martinez released this week, he can be seen driving slowly through an area being controlled by police and immigration agents after a car accident. Martinez’s friend, who was also in the car at the time, had previously told interrogators that Martinez may have been nervous at the scene since the pair had hung out with friends and had food and drinks that evening.

Next in the video, law enforcement begin shouting about the car going through the scene. Quickly, there are gunshots. Next, an agent pulls Martinez from the car and throws him on the ground. An agent then handcuffs Martinez before he’s given medical attention.

Rachel Reyes, Martinez’s mom, told CBS News recently in her first televised interview that she is “not a mother in denial. I’m just a mother in doubt, because I know my son and I know he’s not a threat.”

Reyes, who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024, said, “I don’t blame President Trump for the death of my son, ’cause he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.” “But,” she added, “I do think that something needs to be changed in that department as far as the pattern of violence or abuse and impunity.”

2026-03-08 05:12:27

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the US Secret Service want to build a tool for tracking US travelers’ flights and other personal information according to previously unreported documents reviewed by Mother Jones.

These agencies have asked for feedback from the private sector on whether this tool can be made, or if something like it already exists. Their request was posted on the government’s database for contractors. In it, the Secret Service, an arm of DHS, outlines the specifics they envision: a program that would provide real-time or near-real time access to a range of personal travel data, including passenger names, origins and destinations, flight numbers, ticket numbers, and forms of payment. The data would be gleaned from third-party ticketing sites, such as Orbitz or Expedia, and must cover major US and international airlines.

The proposed tool appears to be an attempt to rebuild a surveillance pipeline that was recently shuttered amid public backlash. Last year, The Lever and 404 Media revealed that the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC)—a data broker owned by the major US airlines—had discreetly sold flight data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which are both also arms of DHS. ARC ceased its so-called Travel Intelligence Program in November, citing pressure from lawmakers. DHS’s new Request for Information (RFI) seems to reference the now-defunct ARC program, saying the requested platform would “replace an existing commercial database used by the United States Secret Service for law enforcement travel data queries.” DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment, including a question about whether the agency is exploring a replacement for ARC.

“Travel records reveal an enormous amount of information about people’s private lives—where someone travels, how often they travel, and who they travel with—and expose deeply personal information, including medical care, family relationships, political activity, or religious practice,” said Tom Bowman, policy counsel with the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security & Surveillance Project. “It’s not hard to imagine that DHS would want access to these travel records to be able to track all sorts of people, whether it’s people who they’re targeting for immigration related proceedings, or whether it’s targeting people who have been involved in public dissent against federal immigration enforcement.”

RFIs are an information-gathering tool; they do not mean that the proposed program exists or that the government is seeking bids on a specific contract. Still, they offer a meaningful window into the government’s surveillance wishlist—and could encourage the private market to step up and meet that demand.

“DHS is essentially inviting the creation of more surveillance-as-a-service business models to come into existence,” Bowman said.

The government’s request for increased access to flight data arrives amid an extraordinary expansion of DHS spying capabilities, fueled by the commercial data broker industry and the rise of biometric surveillance tools. ICE has come under fire for its “dystopian” use of the facial recognition app Mobile Fortify, which agents have used to scan the faces of anti-ICE protesters and gather “contactless” fingerprints. Last month, Wired reported that DHS is moving to create a search engine that would allow the government to consolidate biometric data across agencies.

In January, DHS posted an RFI requesting feedback on the use of “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech” in ICE investigations. DHS has also already purchased at least two programs that provide access to Americans’ cellphone location data, scraped from social media and sold by commercial brokers. The DHS inspector general previously found in a 2023 report that ICE’s use of real-time cellular location data had violated privacy laws, causing the agency to walk back the practice. On March 4, over 70 Congressional Democrats, led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), called for a new investigation into the latest cellphone data buy-up by DHS.

This rapid expansion of DHS’s domestic surveillance dragnet is a result of President Trump’s priorities for his second term, including the mandate that immigration authorities deport 1 million people per year. The government claims its use of these tools abides by federal privacy laws and is necessary for enforcing the law. But critics say that warrantless mass surveillance violates constitutional protections against unreasonable government searches.

“Purchasing all of this information from a commercial intermediary like a data broker really undermines and weakens the Fourth Amendment protections in practice,” said Bowman. “Frankly, the rule should be simple: If the government would need a warrant to compel the data, it should not be able to buy it instead. But that’s exactly what the government is seeking to do.”

2026-03-08 04:17:07

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In a new report that outlines a dozen high-risk pollutants given new life thanks to weakened, delayed or rescinded regulations, the Environmental Protection Network (EPN), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group of hundreds of former Environmental Protection Agency staff, warns that the EPA under President Donald Trump has abandoned the agency’s core mission of protecting people and the environment from preventable toxic exposures.

Americans may not realize the scope and scale of their exposure risk from diverse industrial and agricultural sources or understand how much those risks are rising as political appointees destroy the safety net the EPA has always provided, said Marc Boom, EPN’s senior director for public affairs, at a press briefing Thursday. 

“While we may hear about one chemical or one EPA rule being changed,” Boom said, “so much is happening at once that it’s very difficult to see the full picture and connect it to our everyday lives.”

That’s why EPN developed a report, Terrible Toxics, to connect the dots, said Boom, who was joined by several EPN volunteers and medical experts on Thursday. 

The report details how recent EPA decisions have relaxed restrictions on harmful chemicals in food, consumer products, water and air, increasing Americans’ exposure to 12 of the most dangerous and ubiquitous pollutants. 

The list includes brain-damaging mercury and pesticides in food; hormone-bending phthalates in consumer products and cancer-causing PFAS “forever chemicals,” lead, arsenic, and trichloroethylene in drinking water. Also on the list are the carcinogens benzene, formaldehyde, and vinyl chloride in the air, along with heart- and lung-damaging soot and smog. All of these pollutants cause multiple health harms.

The list does not cover pollutants like greenhouse gases, which also exacerbate health harms, but is meant to illustrate the escalating health costs of Trump administration policy decisions.

“Political leadership is steering the agency away from its responsibility to protect human health and the environment,” the report warns. “Making Americans safer is a choice and EPA’s current leadership has chosen to make Americans sicker.”

The vast majority of Americans want their government to do more to protect them from dangerous chemicals, a new survey from the Pew Charitable Trusts found. More than 80 percent want the government and business to increase transparency around the use of chemicals.

Yet getting information from the current EPA is “like pulling teeth,” Boom said. “It’s probably the least transparent EPA we’ve ever had.”

The EPA has abandoned its oversight duty and failed to let Americans know what chemicals are doing to their health, said Betsy Southerland, former director of EPA’s Office of Science and Technology in the Office of Water. 

As one example, said Sutherland, who is an expert on the health effects of notoriously indestructible forever chemicals, “we’re seeing fewer guardrails to prevent PFAS exposure and much less transparency about the risk.”

PFAS contaminate nearly half of all drinking water across the country, scientists with the US Geological Survey reported in a 2023 study. Nearly all Americans, including babies, have PFAS in their blood.

Companies who handle PFAS have been given more leeway while the EPA is delaying safeguards and withholding science data, Sutherland said. 

EPA officials have delayed deadlines that prohibit companies from discharging PFAS into waterways and require drinking water systems to take the hormone-disrupting chemicals out of tap water, she said. They have proposed exempting importers from PFAS reporting requirements, leaving consumers in the dark about what’s in the products they buy, and they’ve buried reports on PFAS health risks, she added.

“That means Americans’ toxic exposure is going up,” Southerland said, “and so are our health risks.”

Inside Climate News asked the EPA to comment on the EPN report and explain how delaying water standards for PFAS and granting waivers to coal-fired plants, which emit mercury, lead and other pollutants, makes Americans healthier. 

“Referring to EPN as nonpartisan is laughable; its staff and board is loaded with Democratic operatives,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. “While, unsurprisingly, EPN is engaging in dishonest fearmongering to drum up media attention and donations, the Trump EPA is taking real steps to protect human health and the environment.”

Although the EPA is rolling back regulations on PFAS and allowing higher lead levels in soil, the spokesperson called the Trump EPA “unmatched” in fighting these contaminants. “The Trump EPA is committed to transparency and gold-standard science like never before to deliver on our core statutory responsibilities of protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback.”

Hundreds of the 80,000 chemicals registered for use under the US Toxic Substances Control Act are known to be dangerous, though just a fraction have undergone safety testing. The multiple harms associated with the chemicals listed in the EPN report are well-documented.

America’s nurses are on the front lines of addressing the health impacts of toxic chemical exposures, said Sarah Bucic, a registered nurse and policy analyst with the nonpartisan Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments. 

At the briefing, Bucic ran through the ills she expects the EPA’s deregulatory agenda will cause. More soot in the air will mean more children treated for asthma and lung diseases. More lead will result in more children with developmental, behavioral and attention-deficit problems. More benzene will lead to higher rates of blood cancers while more trichloroethylene will contribute to kidney and liver cancers, Parkinson’s disease and fetal heart defects.

“There’s nothing more heartbreaking than treating a patient, especially a child, who is sick because of something we could have prevented,” Bucic said.

Afif El-Hasan, an Orange County pediatrician and board director of the American Lung Association, is most concerned about loosened rules that increase exposure to soot, or PM2.5. 

These tiny particles easily bypass the defenses of the lungs and enter the bloodstream, posing outsize risks to children’s still-developing lungs and immune system.

The EPA strengthened the national PM2.5 standard in 2024 based on hundreds of scientific studies, El-Hasan said, a move that was projected to prevent thousands of premature deaths and millions of asthma attacks over time. “Now, unfortunately, the EPA is failing to enforce these standards and is even trying to roll them back.”

And the EPA recently repealed measures to make coal and oil-fired power plants cleaner, El-Hasan said. 

Weakening the guardrails that keep soot out of the air will mean more kids in the emergency room struggling to breathe, he said. “It means more missed school days. It means more missed work days for the parents that have to stay home and take care of the children.”

El-Hasan hopes that academic and public health institutions monitor and document the health consequences of all these rollbacks. “It’s very important that that is captured,” he said. “So that this mistake is never made again.”

Health experts with EPN hope the report helps people understand the complex web of toxic exposures they encounter in daily life, where they come from and how recent policy decisions are increasing those exposures.

For decades, Americans have relied on EPA scientists to answer basic questions about the harms posed by exposure to a toxic chemical in the air, water and soil, said Chris Frey, a former EPA science advisor and leader of the Office of Research and Development (ORD), the agency’s independent scientific arm. “Over the last 13 months, EPA’s scientific backbone has been substantially diminished in ways that will affect Americans’ health and safety.”

Frey pointed to formaldehyde as just one example of the consequences of the EPA’s decision to overturn safeguards against toxic chemicals. 

Nearly all Americans are exposed to some level of formaldehyde, which escapes from building materials like cabinets and flooring, and from personal care products like cosmetics. 

In 2024, the EPA concluded, after more than three decades of scientific review, that formaldehyde poses cancer risk at any exposure level. The agency was on track to require companies to lessen or eliminate formaldehyde-related health risks, Frey said. “But current EPA leadership is now moving to ignore its own scientific findings,” he said, “effectively letting companies put this dangerous chemical back into play.”

There are steps consumers can take to reduce their risks, like using certified filters to reduce PFAS in their tap water and avoiding solvents with formaldehyde. 

“But the burden should not fall on individuals and families to manage chemical risks on their own,” Frey said. “EPA needs to follow the science and ensure that polluting companies follow safeguards that put Americans’ health first.”

Even as the EPN team recounted numerous ways the EPA is stripping Americans of health protections, they remain hopeful that the rollbacks can be reversed.

Although ORD is now almost completely depopulated and is going to be shuttered formally, Frey said, a significant amount of its former workforce remain at the EPA. “They may not be in the roles that are best suited to their talents and experience and capabilities, but they’re still there,” he said, adding that the physical infrastructure of the research labs is still intact.

Both could be harnessed to restore the EPA’s mission, Frey said. “But you know, time is ticking. And the longer the destruction continues, the harder it will be to recover.”

There’s even a remedy for what Southerland sees as the biggest detrimental actions taken by this EPA: revocation of the endangerment finding, the basis for regulating greenhouse gases as a public health threat, and removing protections for wetlands and other ephemeral waterways under the Clean Water Act.

Congress can craft legislation to reinstate the endangerment finding and restore protections for the so-called “waters of the United States,” she said, though such laws would need a president who’s willing to sign them or a veto-proof majority in Congress. If the midterm elections give Democrats majorities in the House and Senate, she said, they could pass a budget that requires replacing all the staff this administration fired “as soon as possible.”

Ultimately, Boom said, exposure is not inevitable but the result of choices.

“We know how to filter PFAS from drinking water. We know how to replace lead-service lines, and we know how to reduce pesticide drift and develop safer alternatives,” Boom said. “Under the law, EPA’s mission is to protect human health and the environment. That mission was never meant to be optional.”

2026-03-08 02:14:01

This story contains discussion of suicide. If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

Staff at the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility have placed bets on which detainee will be the next to die by suicide, according to new reporting from the Associated Press based on 911 calls and detainee accounts. 

Owen Ramsingh, a legal permanent resident who spent several weeks at the Camp East Montana detention facility in Texas, told AP that he overheard a security guard talking about a betting pool for which detainee would next die by suicide. The guard said he had paid $500 into the pot, which would all go to the winner with the most accurate predictions on detainees harming themselves. 

Without providing details, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told AP that Ramsingh, who was brought to the US at age 5 from the Netherlands, was lying about the suicide bets. 

In January, staff at Camp East Montana called 911 to request emergency help for Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old from Cuba. DHS described his death as an attempted suicide. A medical examiner later ruled it a homicide. That same month, staff at the detention facility called 911 to report that a 36-year-old Nicaraguan man died by suicide. The AP reports that “detainees attempted to harm themselves while expressing suicidal ideations on at least six other occasions that resulted in 911 calls.”

Once the site of an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, Camp East Montana is made up of six long tents at the Fort Bliss Army base outside of El Paso. On an average day, the facility holds around 3,000 detainees who are living in harsh conditions: They lack sufficient food and often go without proper medical care, according to AP’s review of 130 calls made to 911. Those calls took place in just about five months—from when the tents were quickly constructed in mid-August to January 20.

“Every day felt like a week. Every week felt like a month. Every month felt like a year,”Ramsingh said. He lived in Columbia, Missouri before being stopped at the airport by DHS and sent to Camp East Montana last year. Despite holding a green card and being married to a US citizen, he was deported to the Netherlands in February over a drug conviction from when he was a teenager (which he served prison time for). “Camp East Montana was 1,000% worse than a prison,” Ramsingh added. 

Ramsingh said that the alledged bets on who would die by suicide were especially difficult because he had contemplated suicide himself.

While ICE data shows that the average stay at the tents is around nine days, detainees can be stuck at the camp for months as the courts struggle to accommodate President Donald Trump’s mass detainment and deportation campaign. 

US House Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who represents part of El Paso and has toured Camp East Montana, told AP that the facility “should not be operational.”

“It feels like this contractor is reinventing the wheel,” she said, “ and people are losing their lives in their experiment.” 

2026-03-07 16:01:00

Two veteran journalists set out to document Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health care system: hospitals attacked, medical workers killed, doctors detained and held for long periods without criminal charges. The BBC had commissioned the film. 

But their Palestinian sources in Gaza and the West Bank were skeptical. 

“We really had to try and persuade them…to talk to us because they didn’t—and don’t—trust the BBC,” says reporter Ramita Navai. 

One source doubted the BBC would air the film. “And I was quite shocked he felt that way,” says reporter Ben de Pear. “But actually, he was 100 percent right.”

Over the last couple of years, big media organizations have been criticized—from the left and the right—about their coverage of the war in Gaza. But it’s rare to get the chance to peel back the curtain to see what exactly was happening inside one of those organizations to learn whether political pressure played a role in journalistic decision-making.

This week on Reveal, we’re partnering with the KCRW podcast Question Everything to tell the story of a film the BBC wouldn’t air and what it says about the future of journalism.

2026-03-07 04:55:10

On Friday, the Buffalo-based Investigative Post reported that New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Blind Rohingya refugee who died in the cold streets of Buffalo days after Border Patrol dumped him without coordinating with his family or lawyers.

In a letter to Rep. Tim Kennedy (D-N.Y.), James wrote that her “office is continuing to gather and review facts as to any state or local involvement in this tragedy” and is prepared to coordinate with federal authorities as necessary. James also said her office is coordinating with the Buffalo Police Department to “canvass for additional witnesses and surveillance footage” that may help her office understand what happened to Shah Alam.

“The loss of life under these circumstances demands a searching and independent assessment of what occurred,” James wrote. “I also agree that a close examination of release and transfer protocols of vulnerable individuals from law enforcement custody is warranted.”

Since his death was initially reported, more information has also come out about Buffalo police officers’ initial arrest of Shah Alam, who did not speak English. Shah Alam had wandered to a woman’s home and seemed confused about his location. Viewing body cam footage, the Washington Post reported that Shah Alam apologized while slowly approaching police officers, who responded by tasing him.

At a press conference last weekend, the family of Shah Alam spoke publicly for the first time. His wife, Fatimah Abdul Roshid, and the two of their five sons who also have refugee status in the US, had waited outside the Erie County Holding Center to pick him up on his release, but Erie County sheriff’s deputies instead turned him over to Border Patrol.

“We were ready with food, clothing, everything,” Abdul Roshid said. “We thought he would be able to break fast with us. He was so close, so close to my hand.”