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No Amount of ICE Killings Will Make America Great
In light of all this death, we must seriously ask ourselves: Are we, as a nation, greater because a 3-year-old girl will never know her father? Are federal agents murdering people working hard to provide for their families making any of our lives better? Are we safer because of ICE?
Jul 17, 2026
On July 13, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Biddeford, Maine murdered Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national authorized to work in the US. One of his neighbors described him as “an excellent person, a good father, good husband.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleged that Guerrero “attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”
Yet, footage obtained by The New York Times shows Guerrero slowly driving in a circle as he is confronted by multiple agents—there is no evidence that he endangered anyone. One of their vehicles is clearly shown ramming into his. Afterwards, three agents surround the car with one pointing his gun at the driver’s side window. While not shown in the video, five gunshots can be heard. After the incident, there were four visible bullet holes on the front windshield.
Such excessive and unnecessary violence is the new norm. Last October, Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, was shot five times in her car. In December, Isaias Sanchez Barboza, a Mexican national, was shot at least three times. In January, Renee Nicole Good, a US citizen, was also shot three times, including one to her head. The same month, Alex Pretti, another US citizen, was shot at least 10 times in the span of five seconds.
So long as ICE exists, it will continue to kill.
This latest shooting comes less than a week after ICE agents in Houston murdered Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had lived in the US for 35 years. Here too, DHS blamed the victim. A DHS spokesperson alleged that Araujo “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.” DHS used the same story to justify the murder of Good and shooting Martinez. As in those cases, video evidence and eyewitness accounts dispute the Trump administration’s narrative.
A week after Araujo’s death, the FBI filed a warrant application claiming that the agency has reason to believe that there were illegal drugs in the vehicle he was driving. FBI Special Agent David McNeilly alleged that he observed small plastic bags “with a white crystal-like substance” in the cargo van. The application cites probable cause for “distribution, manufacturing, or possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance and simple possession of a controlled substance.”
Domingo Garcia, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Adelante PAC, accused federal investigators of trying to “change the public discourse and prejudice a jury in Harris County.” He further remarked, “It just smells of a smear campaign and a cover up.”
Garcia is right to be suspicious. There are many documented cases of law enforcement planting drugs on victims. The Trump administration has also demonstrated time and time again that it is incapable of holding itself accountable. After shooting Martinez five times, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum was congratulated by then-Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino. Good and Pretti were immediately smeared as “domestic terrorists” by several members of the Trump administration, including by then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
Moreover, this administration has actively sought to manipulate federal investigations into past ICE killings—this includes launching an investigation into Renee Good’s wife, Becca Good, while actively stopping probes into her murderer, Jonathan Ross. They have also intentionally delayed turning over key evidence to state prosecutors.
It is worth further emphasizing that, by DHS’ own admission, Araujo was not the target of ICE’s operation. Even if there were drugs in the van (and there is no evidence that there were), those agents did not know that. They did not kill him because of drugs; they did not kill him to protect public safety; they did not kill him in self-defense. ICE agents killed him and Guererro because they knew they could.
Guerrero and Araujo were not the only people to die in ICE-related incidents this month. On July 14, a 28-year-old man in Florida died while fleeing ICE agents.
A day prior, Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva, a Venezuelan national, died while being transferred between detention centers in Georgia. In a press release, his sister and immigrants’ rights groups reported that, despite their repeated pleas, ICE deprived him of medication he desperately needed. Including Arenas-Silva, at least 22 people have reportedly died in ICE custody this year.
Importantly, this figure does not include the deaths of people like Nurul Amin Shah Alam and Daphy Michel. Shah Alam, a nearly blind refugee who did not speak English, was abandoned by immigration enforcement agents alone on a cold winter night in New York state. He was found dead a few days later. A state medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.
Similarly, Michel, a Haitian asylum-seeker “suffering from untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language barrier,” was arrested by ICE in late February. Agents put an ankle monitor on her, drove her 25 miles away to Pittsburg where she was then abandoned. She died of hypothermia days later. Her death was also ruled a homicide.
On June 4, ICE announced it would no longer investigate or report the deaths of those recently released from detention centers—people like Shah Alam and Michel. This rescinds a policy instituted in 2021 by the Biden administration to hold the agency accountable for releasing severely ill detainees.
This is the reality of what ICE is: an agency that kills people; an agency that intentionally lets people die; an agency without remorse or accountability. Banning traffic stops or mandating bodycams will not change this. So long as ICE exists, it will continue to kill.
In light of all this death, we must seriously ask ourselves: Are we, as a nation, greater because a 3-year-old girl will never know her father? Are federal agents murdering people working hard to provide for their families making any of our lives better? Are we safer because of ICE?
The tens of billions of our taxpayer money spent on ICE could be going to fund childcare, instead of killing parents. It could be used to fund healthcare instead of an agency that deprives medication. It could be used to meaningfully improve the lives of millions instead of agents that kill and injure innocent people.
For all our sakes, enough must finally be enough. We must abolish ICE. Punish the ICE agents who have committed these shootings. Hold every member of the Trump administration who covered their crimes and every politician who voted to fund ICE responsible for the chaos they have unleashed across our country.
Unless there is real change, it is not a matter of if, but when ICE will kill again.
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Sen. Graham's Legacy: He Helped Israel Get Away With Genocide
Lindsey Graham is part of the answer to the question of how a genocide could be pursued in plain sight with impunity.
Jul 15, 2026
The sudden death of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, 71, has been greeted with the full spectrum of reactions. Many of them were personal in character. I never met or testified before Sen. Graham, and I’m not under the illusion that the persona politicians project on television gives much insight into them as persons. This maxim is especially true for a politician, who typically tacks with the wind, as Graham often did. Nor is my interest here personal. People depict him as a nice guy to colleagues who was capable of praising rivals such as Joe Biden. That sort of senatorial bonhomie is irrelevant to the issue I want to address.
Genocides in the past 50 years have not always been easy to recognize in real time. The Khmer Rouge polished off a fifth of Cambodia’s population, but isolated journalistic reports of what was going on were dismissed in Washington. Likewise, the Clinton administration was slow to understand the mass killings in Rwanda.
It was not until April 23, 2005, that the first video was successfully posted to the World Wide Web. It was that breakthrough that made the Gaza genocide that began in October 2023 the first televised such mass atrocity. The Israeli policy of systematic killing of innocent noncombatants was live-streamed on smartphones on a daily basis throughout the world. There was no doubt about what we were seeing.
And yet, the Israeli leadership has suffered almost no repercussions for having disregarded the value of civilian life, adopting a monstrous Rules of Engagement allowing for as many as a hundred women, children, and noncombatant men to be killed for each militant targeted. NATO has ceased joint military exercises with Israel because its army violated its RoE so egregiously.
We have to revise the old saying. If you have neither the law nor the facts on your side, pound racist superiority and inherent lack of accountability.
Lindsey Graham is part of the answer to the question of how a genocide could be pursued in plain sight with impunity.
When the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, prepared in April 2024 to apply for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, former Prime Minister David Cameron shouted angrily at him that Britain would withdraw from and defund the ICC if the indictment went forward. Cameron was not in office at that time, and may have been used by the Tory government to express its displeasure without intervening officially. Labour promised to do better when it came back to power. It didn’t.
There is an old adage among lawyers: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table.”
Israel’s lawyers, like Cameron and the Conservative Party in general, had neither the facts nor the law on their side, so they pounded the table. In fact, they threatened to dismantle the judge’s bench, strip his clothing off, and shoot him in the head.
Sen. Graham then joined a conference call with Khan in April, 2024, in which he lambasted the prosecutor, saying that ICC indictments are for “Africa and thugs like Putin,” not for the United States and its allies such as Israel.
If Khan’s report of this conversation is correct, it casts the late senator in an extremely poor light. It is hard to see the reference to Africa as anything but racism.
South Carolina had for centuries had one law for white people and another one for African Americans, who were kidnapped in Africa and brought to the lowcountry. Until 1863 they were held as chattel, property rather than persons. After a brief period of emancipation, they were gradually denied the right to vote or hold office, until the mid-1960s Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. The point of the Trump administration, of which Graham became a pillar, is to repeal those laws and to again disenfranchise African Americans, with outrageous racial gerrymanders and measures such as limiting the number of polling stations in heavily African American districts.
While it is controversial whether Graham was personally a racist, what he said about the ICC being for Africans was certainly a racist comment, and it unfortunately replicated the long history of white sentiment in South Carolina that some laws do not pertain to white people, which is a way of saying that whites have impunity. He clearly coded Israelis as “white.” Such categorizations are worthless and arbitrary, however. Whiteness has no stable meaning. Most Israelis couldn’t have gotten served at a diner in South Carolina in the 1950s, though. What is important is that Graham so categorized them, and the significance he attached to that categorization.
That he threw Putin (and who could be more pasty?) into the mix might tell against this analysis. Yet obviously even under slavery and Jim Crow there were white criminals who harmed propertied white gentry and who did not share in impunity as a result. An example was Ian Gale, the cat burglar who robbed a hundred homes of valuables totaling as much as half a million dollars. Putin became a “thug” by attacking other white people in Ukraine, and so deserves to be dealt with as though he were an African.
It is still a racist comment.
Graham’s angry attack on Khan showed the Nixonian logic of genocide denial. It isn’t a crime if the United States or Israel does it.
Ironically, Graham was a law school graduate and served in the US Air Force Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps for more than 30 years while in the Air National Guard and Reserves. He rose to hold the rank of colonel.
The JAG Corps of the Air Force admitted in 2020, “The statistics show that black male Airmen under the age of 25 and with less than 5 years of service receive NJP [nonjudicial punishment] and courts-martial actions at a higher rate than similarly situated white male Airmen.”
You give the white guy a break but throw the book at the Black guy. That was how Graham’s second institution often behaved during the decades he served in it. While for some JAG officers, this outcome may have resulted from an unconscious prejudice, Sen. Graham made his invidious view explicit in the conference call with Khan.
He also once said that it would be “terrible” if he took a DNA test and it showed he had Iranian ancestry. In retrospect I think he may have meant that such a bloodline might have made him partially brown and so would have denied him the benefits of being above the law enjoyed by white people. (Persian is an Indo-European language and Iran comes from the same root as “Aryan,” and a lot of Iranian Americans identify as white, but Graham was too incurious to have known all that.)
We have to revise the old saying. If you have neither the law nor the facts on your side, pound racist superiority and inherent lack of accountability.
And that is how Graham, in his guise as master prestidigitator, made the elephant of genocide disappear.
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Pick a Side. Fight Like Hell. Repeat.
The system is ignoring your demands, because it knows accountability is dead. It believes what you deserve doesn't matter. Simply naming your enemy won't fix this. One election won't fix this. But organizing and fighting back will.
Jul 13, 2026
People want to elect fighters. They want affordability. They want security. Accountability. Voters want to fight corruption. Voters are starving for somebody who’ll stand up to power on their behalf. Yet, almost every time, that sentiment gets pointed at one target, Donald Trump. Fighting Trump, fighting his administration’s grab at our rights, fighting the handful of people at the top who’ve piled up about as much wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent of the country combined. I’m for the fight. But a fight needs an opponent, and you have to be clear-eyed and correct about who the opponent is, or you can’t defeat them. Right now, too many politicians and too many voters have decided their opponent is one man.
Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, and his administration is a threat to people the world over. But you don’t solve that threat by standing up to him, or legislating around him, or writing some new law that says he can’t do the thing he’s already doing. Because we’ve watched a Supreme Court bless this behavior. We’ve watched laws get ignored. Judgments ignored. Courts ignored. So it isn’t a question of who sits in the chair. It’s a question of power, and a question of accountability, and almost nobody with any standing is asking for accountability.
Our enemy isn’t the man. Our enemy is the system in which he’s operating, and that system runs on one thing, a lack of accountability.
Let’s start with what should be the clearest. We have been funding and arming a genocide of the Palestinian people, carried out by a rogue regime in Israel, in plain sight, and none of us can do a thing to stop it. You might think that has nothing to do with your life in Des Moines or Knoxville or wherever you’re reading this. It has everything to do with it. Because a system that lets war crimes happen in broad daylight with no consequence is the same system you live under, and if genocide can’t be stopped then what can? The powerlessness we feel isn’t just a side effect, it’s the point. An inspiration to quit.
Unlike money powerlessness does trickle down. It’s the Epstein operation, where the names are known, and not one person who mattered has answered for any of it. It’s Ken Paxton in Texas, whose office took over the case of a man who admitted to years-long sexual abuse of a young boy, a first-degree felony that carried up to life in prison, and after a mistrial cut him a deal down to two misdemeanors, thirty days in jail, and no spot on the sex-offender registry, and that same Ken Paxton is now his party’s nominee for the United States Senate. It’s an economy that minted its first trillionaire off the backs of American workers, American innovation, and resources we all paid to build. Different stories, same disease. Nobody pays.
The centrists have a ready answer for all of this. They’ll say, “That’s your problem, you’d rather go after the Democratic Party than fight Trump.” The “centrists” are wrong. Working to transform and restore the Democratic Party is one of the few solutions that might work.
There’s not really a center for them to occupy. There’s no neutral ground when the government is actively working to dismantle democracy and we have an economy failing the overwhelming majority of the people inside it. There is no center on genocide. To stand in the middle is to work with the people who currently hold the power, and the people who hold the power are Trump, and Palantir, and private equity, and the billionaires, the ones doing the extracting and the oppressing, here and across the planet.
So when a Democrat says I’m not willing to take on the system itself, the economic system, the justice system, the whole machine, what that Democrat is saying is that the machine gets to stay. And the machine is what empowers Trump. Going after Trump the man instead of the system isn’t a step toward fixing anything. It’s the false option, the move that lets you feel like a fighter while you don’t solve anything. You cannot be a centrist in this moment, because in this moment the center is just a way of siding with Trump.
I don’t see how a centrist can honestly think of themselves as “a fighter.” You can’t both fight for people and not fight to take power away from the institutions and companies that hold it and use it to harm people. You can’t fight against Trump by attacking socialists.
There’s a poem most of us know, written about what Germany allowed to happen. I won’t paraphrase it. It does its work whole.
First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And by then there was no one left to speak out for me
We are doing it again, right now, in the open. Both Trump and centrist Democrats are coming for the socialists, by which they mean anybody standing to the left of a tax cut. They are coming for the immigrants. They are coming for the unhoused and the disabled and the people with the least power to stop them. And, just like in Weimar Germany, the people who should be blocking authoritarianism are instead siding with it to attack the left. Josh Gottheimer. James Carville. The whole Promise to America crowd, the centrists on every channel, lining up with an administration they swear they want to fight, against an ideology whose only crime is refusing to say that things are fine the way they are.
And I don’t mean any of that as a figure of speech. I mean, there’s already a system built and running. ICE has opened more than 150 new detention facilities since this administration came in, the daily detention population has passed a record seventy thousand people, and the plan on paper is to spend thirty-eight billion dollars building toward a hundred thousand beds, in mega-camps run by the same for-profit prison companies that make money off everybody they hold.
In the Florida Everglades, they built a camp they nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz, where the conditions are so bad detainees went on hunger strike and Amnesty International called what was happening there torture. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year, the most in two decades, and this year is worse.
Think you’re safe? It isn’t only immigrants. ICE and Border Patrol agents have shot multiple U.S. citizens and killed several of them, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both gunned down in Minneapolis this January. Good’s death was ruled a homicide, and the Justice Department declined to investigate the agent who shot her and opened an investigation into her widow instead. That’s what no accountability looks like.
And the same machine runs at home. In March of last year, they stood up a federal task force to flood Washington with police, sweep the unhoused out of public space, and run immigration enforcement through the middle of the city. In July came an executive order to make it easier to round up homeless people and commit them to institutions against their will, on the claim that most of them are addicts or mentally ill. In August, they declared a crime emergency and pulled DC’s own police force under federal command, and over the past year, we’ve watched National Guard troops and even Marines pushed into American cities against protesters.
And this June, the Justice Department put out a legal memo arguing that disabled Americans have no right to live in their own communities at all, tearing up twenty-five years of settled law and quietly reopening the door to warehousing disabled people in institutions, right as the Medicaid cuts pull the funding from the services that keep them out. That isn’t a slope we might slide down someday. It’s a machine, already built, made to remove the people the state has decided are a problem.
And the billionaires aren’t standing off to the side, they’re cheering it on. Two weeks ago, the richest man alive, Elon Musk, used his platform to give away for free a film that German censors had refused to certify because, by the director’s own account, they found it incited violence against migrants. Then Musk posted that the sequel will be even better. That’s where we are. The man with more money than most nations is out promoting vigilante violence against immigrants and calling it a movie.
And all of it sits on top of a surveillance system we’ve been building since 9/11, more and more of it run by private companies and now being supercharged with AI, the cameras and the license plate readers and the face scans, pointed at us. People will tell you the lesson is that we let the government get too big. That’s not the lesson. The problem was never the size of the government. The problem is that we let unchecked power pool in the hands of a few, the few who own the system, run the camps, write the memos, and answer to no one.
So no, I’m not interested in fighting Donald Trump. I’m interested in fighting the thing that made him and will outlast him, the system that lets a genocide run, lets the Epstein names stay buried, lets a child’s abuser walk and then promotes the man who walked him, mints fortunes off our work, and rounds up the weakest people we’ve got while calling it order. That’s the enemy. Not a man. A system.
And the first thing we can do is quit pretending there’s a safe place to stand while it runs. There isn’t. Knowing the enemy doesn’t fix anything by itself, it just tells you where to put your shoulder, and the work after that is bigger and longer than anything a single election can fix. But it starts with saying the plain thing the center exists to avoid. You cannot be a centrist in this moment. Pick a side.
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'Justice Has Failed Us Here in Guatemala': A Family Fights for Accountability
More than 44 years have now passed since Guatemalan state forces abducted Luz Leticia; every day since, her sisters have fought to preserve the truth and dignity of her life while demanding answers.
Jul 12, 2026
Under the beating sun on the morning of June 21, Mirtala del Rosario Hernández Agustín joins families of the disappeared and members of organizations including the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Guatemala, or FAMDEGUA, and Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence, or HIJOS, in Guatemala City’s Plaza de la Constitución to commemorate the National Day Against Enforced Disappearances.
“We dream of a different Guatemala, and we fight for it. We cannot sit back and cross our arms. We have a person detained and disappeared.” Mirtala’s voice carries across the plaza. Behind her sit more than 400 empty chairs, each bearing the portrait of someone forcibly disappeared during Guatemala’s 36-year internal armed conflict. “I am the sister of Luz Leticia Hernández Agustín,” she continues. “To have peace in my heart, to be able to say we’ve been heard, we need my sister's remains returned.”
More than 44 years have now passed since Guatemalan state forces abducted Luz Leticia on November 22, 1982. It was her 25th birthday. And it was the last time she was seen.
Yet her sisters, Marta and Mirtala, refused to let her vanish completely. Every day since, they have fought to preserve the truth and dignity of Luz Leticia’s life while demanding answers not only for her, but for the tens of thousands who were disappeared, tortured, and killed during Guatemala’s US-backed campaign of state terror and genocide.
No amount of political power can permanently shield perpetrators from the demands for truth and justice made by the people they sought, and ultimately failed, to erase.
Now, their case is finally being heard in court. Three days a week, the Hernández Agustín sisters climb the stairs to the fifth floor of Guatemala City’s Palace of Justice. They sit through hours of testimony and legal argument, filling notebooks with observations and listening for the answers that have eluded their family for decades. Some days sting with the reopening of old wounds. Others dissolve into procedural delays, technical difficulties, and bureaucratic legal wrangling. They often leave frustrated and exhausted.
Still, they return. They do so because this case is about more than one family’s pursuit of justice. At a time when the United States is escalating violence at home and abroad, and governments like Guatemala’s continue to subordinate themselves to the imperatives of that long-standing imperial project, this trial carries particular significance. Most recently, this has included expanded military cooperation with Washington targeting alleged drug cartels in the country, a justification the US has invoked to extrajudicially kill more than 210 people over the past nine months.
The trial has therefore become a testament to all those who refused the silence imposed upon them. It is proof that those marked for erasure can reclaim their place in history. Above all, it is a reminder that no amount of political power can permanently shield perpetrators from the demands for truth and justice made by the people they sought, and ultimately failed, to erase.
The Long Shadow of Empire in Guatemala
The Guatemala into which the Hernández Agustín sisters were born bore the unmistakable imprint of empire. It was a country of staggering inequality, where generations inherited the desiccated remains of a nation picked clean by the vultures of foreign capital. The promise of reform had long since been extinguished. Gone was the Democratic Spring, the brief decade from 1944 to 1954 when popularly elected governments sought to expand democracy and direct the country’s wealth toward its people rather than multinational corporations and the landed oligarchy.
That dream was crushed with the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz. The coup sought not simply to remove a government but to restore the deeply unequal social order whose foundations had been laid under the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. A pliant strongman who willingly auctioned off his country’s future to the highest bidder, Ubico granted sweeping concessions to US corporations while enriching himself. Under his rule, the Boston-based United Fruit Company became Guatemala’s largest landholder, acquiring more than 40% of its arable land and near-monopolistic control over not only its lucrative banana exports but also critical infrastructure, including the country's railroads and electrical network.
The threat posed by the Democratic Spring was not simply that it had challenged landowners and foreign corporations. It had shown workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities that collective action could transform society.
Ubico’s regime collapsed in 1944 with a popular uprising. Under elected Presidents Juan José Arévalo and then Árbenz, Guatemala embarked on an ambitious reform program. Building on Arévalo’s efforts, Árbenz expanded labor protections, social security, and universal suffrage while pursuing economic modernization that sought to transform Guatemala from what he referred to as “a semi-colonial dependency into an independent nation” and “a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.”
It was this challenge to entrenched economic power that placed Árbenz in the crosshairs of both Washington and Wall Street. The flash point was Decree 900, his sweeping agrarian reform. The measure authorized the expropriation of uncultivated large estates, including United Fruit’s vast holdings, for redistribution to hundreds of thousands of peasants. Remuneration would be based on the value the company itself had declared, a figure it had deliberately undervalued to reduce its tax burden. While the reform was rooted in economic nationalism and guaranteed compensation for the land, officials in Washington cast it as evidence of communist subversion.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, both closely tied to United Fruit, orchestrated Árbenz’s overthrow. The coup ended Guatemala’s democratic experiment and ushered in decades of military rule, repression, and civil war.
A State Built on Terror
The dictatorship that emerged in the wake of the coup gave rise to a popular insurgency determined to reclaim the democratic aspirations that had been violently swept aside. It also ushered in a new era of repression. For Guatemala’s military rulers, the objective was to preserve their power. For their patrons in Washington, Guatemala became a Cold War proving ground, meant to demonstrate the consequences of challenging US political and economic power.
The threat posed by the Democratic Spring was not simply that it had challenged landowners and foreign corporations. It had shown workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities that collective action could transform society. That lesson had to be unlearned. In its place, they sought to teach another: that any attempt to remake Guatemala would be met with overwhelming violence. Terror became the principal pedagogy of the state.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s internal armed conflict claimed roughly 200,000 lives and left another 45,000 disappeared.
Repression failed to extinguish resistance. In 1960, dissident military officers launched an uprising against the regime. After it was crushed, many of its survivors retreated to the countryside, where they helped form the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), the first of several guerrilla organizations. The state responded with a brutal, US-backed counterinsurgency waged through roving death squads, systematic torture, forced disappearances, and indiscriminate targeting of suspected dissidents.
Rather than destroying the insurgency, the violence pushed it deeper into rural Guatemala, where Indigenous Maya communities and peasant organizers assumed an increasingly central role in new guerrilla organizations. By the late 1970s, the military had embraced a genocidal scorched-earth campaign, particularly against the Ixil Maya. Entire communities were treated as inherently subversive. The objective was no longer simply to defeat guerrillas but to destroy the social fabric that sustained Indigenous life.
Villages were razed. Thousands were massacred. Survivors were displaced or forced into tightly controlled “model villages” under a policy known as Palestinianization, where military authorities sought to erase Indigenous languages, traditions, religious practices, and communal life in the name of anti-communist pacification and national modernization.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s internal armed conflict claimed roughly 200,000 lives and left another 45,000 disappeared. The bloodiest paroxysm of violence came between 1981 and 1983, when security forces killed an estimated 100,000 people, overwhelmingly Indigenous Maya, in a genocidal campaign that journalist Vincent Bevins has referred to as “the largest bloodbath unleashed by the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere.” The atrocities unfolded with US training and the material and diplomatic backing of the Reagan administration, which viewed Guatemala as a critical front in its campaign against leftist movements across Latin America, alongside its support for the Contras in Nicaragua and allied security forces in El Salvador and Honduras.
The Disappearance of Luz Leticia
Luz Leticia Hernández Agustín, or Leti, as her sisters call her, was one of the many lives cut short by the Guatemalan state during this period of extreme violence. As the eldest sibling, she occupied an outsized place in her family’s life. Marta and Mirtala remember her as hardworking, intelligent, and deeply compassionate. In a household, and community, marked by intense economic precarity and hardship, she assumed responsibilities well beyond her years, helping care for her younger siblings and easing whatever burdens she could.
This experience shaped Leti’s politics. She came to understand that centuries of colonial conquest had produced enduring systems of racism, dispossession, and exploitation that were still being felt. “Leti could see all of that,” Marta explains. “All the deep-seated wrongs that have persisted for so long.” She imagined a different Guatemala, one where those structures no longer defined people's lives and where everyone, regardless of ethnicity or social standing, could live with dignity.
Leti’s sisters have never abandoned their search for truth and justice, nor their determination to affirm their sister’s existence.
Her commitment extended beyond her immediate family. As Mirtala recalled, Leti was motivated certainly “by her own experiences, and the way our parents lived,” but equally “by the suffering she witnessed among our people.” Despite all the evidence seemingly to the contrary, she never surrendered her belief that Guatemala could become a more just society. That conviction would draw her into the resistance. She joined Nuestro Movimiento (“Our Movement”), an underground organization affiliated with the Organization of People in Arms (ORPA).
In late 1982, Leti became involved in an effort to secure the release of a comrade, Ileana del Rosario Solares Castillo, who was illegally detained by the regime. On October 14, members of Nuestro Movimiento abducted Jorge Mario Ríos Muñoz, the nephew of General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s de facto president who presided over the bloodiest phase of the genocide, for which he was convicted in 2013. The operation sought to force a prisoner exchange. Jorge Mario remained captive until November 21, when an intelligence unit, working alongside Israeli advisors, rescued him. In the process, Luz Leticia, Ana María López Rodríguez, María Cruz López Rodríguez, and Leandro Gabriel Calate Temu were all captured.
In that moment, Leti entered the opaque machinery of forced disappearance. She was taken into a clandestine detention system notorious for torture, sexual violence, and the systematic degradation of prisoners. Her family never saw or heard from her again.
The Struggle for Justice
Leti’s sisters have never abandoned their search for truth and justice, nor their determination to affirm their sister’s existence. In 2001, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) concluded that the Guatemalan state had violated the rights to life, liberty, humane treatment, judicial protection, and a fair trial of Ileana, Luz Leticia, and Ana María. It recommended that Guatemala locate the women’s remains, compensate their families, and identify and prosecute those responsible.
Five years later, the Guatemalan government offered the Hernández Agustín family an “amicable settlement agreement,” consisting of financial compensation without accountability and without the return of Luz Leticia's remains. They refused on principle.
In 2023, prosecutors indicted Juan Francisco Cifuentes Cano, the former commander of the National Police’s Fifth Corps Special Operations Reaction Battalion (BROE), on charges of crimes against humanity and enforced disappearance. After years of defense appeals aimed at delaying or derailing the proceedings, the long-awaited trial finally began on May 5.
Will we accept a world in which some have the right to kill and others the right to die, or insist on one governed by justice and accountability?
Justice, for them, means a broader reckoning with the collective trauma inflicted by enforced disappearance. The crime was designed to leave families trapped in cycles of hope and grief, producing what Marta described as the “strange sensation” that “[Leti] had died, yet was somehow still alive,” condemning them to “so much uncertainty, anxiety, and immense, constant stress.”
For Mirtala, that torment was central to the crime itself. “Enforced disappearance,” she explained, “is an act committed by the state against its own citizens, often in collusion with the very groups meant to guarantee the population's safety.” It extends far beyond the individual. “They don't just make the person disappear,” she said. “They do so in a way that instills terror and fear, and that is precisely what they have sought to do: to plunge us and our entire family into that terror.”
“It is a crime, an undeniable crime, but one committed in a sophisticated manner against our humanity,” she continued. The violence is directed not only at the disappeared but those left behind, condemning families to live with uncertainty while knowing their loved one is in the hands of the state. “It's agonizing to know that she's with these people.” “It’s powerlessness,” Mirtala said, “unable to do anything to pull [the disappeared] out of that cycle of violence and cruelty.”
Yet they have found meaning in the struggle. Their search for Leti has become inseparable from a broader fight over historical memory and for accountability. As Mirtala put it, it is a “story that reflects everything fractured in our country, all the underlying tensions and societal pain, and the struggles being waged on various fronts everywhere.”
Still, they approach that work with humility, believing that lasting change is built through small acts of collective resistance. “We are like an ant carrying a single grain of salt,” Mirtala explained. Yet she sees power even in the smallest acts. “This is how dust turns into sand, then into a gust of wind, and finally into a storm. We believe it will change many people’s perceptions.”
But this is not merely a struggle over memory. It is also a struggle over the present, over the ways impunity continues to shape Guatemala. In the decades since Leti’s disappearance, Guatemala has remained marked by stark inequality, corruption, violence, and rights abuses. The state continues to repress dissent, fueling recurring political crises rooted in its failure to meet the needs of its people. Mirtala sees in today’s situation the echoes of the violence that took her sister. “All these things,” she said, “they weigh on you, drop by drop, little by little.”
That is why pursuing Leti’s case has become about far more than one family’s search for justice. It is an act of resistance, a “vindication,” against a state that, as Mirtala put it, “has turned against its own people. Those who take power rob and take money from the people to enrich themselves" while the people “lack education, healthcare, food, and the chance for decent housing.” “To me,” she said, “it is a slap in the face, a punch to the gut of the state.”
The struggle has not been without risks. As documentary filmmaker Nancy Peckenham observed, “In Guatemala, to remember is dangerous.” Yet Mirtala and her sister remain resolute. “Sometimes I think about the risks,” Mirtala reflected, “but then I remember this isn’t just about asserting my sister’s rights. It is about the rights of thousands of people, both within Guatemala and abroad, because this is something suffered by all of us who lack power.”
Ultimately, she said, “that is what this has meant for us. It is a collective struggle.”
The case will continue through July. Its verdict will test not only Guatemala, but also whether we are doomed to live in a world, as the Trump administration architect of the United States’ ongoing nativist assault Stephen Miller put it, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Will we accept a world in which some have the right to kill and others the right to die, or insist on one governed by justice and accountability? The trial is one link in this broader struggle over whether a better world is possible: one free from the violence of impunity and imperialism, sustained by the conviction that those who commit atrocities will one day be held to account, from Guatemala to Venezuela, Palestine to Iran, and here in the United States.
All quotes from Marta and Mirtala Hernández Agustín are from a June 2026 speech and interview conducted by the authors and translated from Spanish.
Correction: The name of General Efraín Ríos Montt's nephew was Jorge Mario Ríos Muñoz, not Mario Ríos Montt. The piece has been updated to reflect this.
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ICE Kills, DHS Lies: The New Normal of Trump’s America
Federal agents flood our neighborhoods; a poorly trained, gun-happy immigration agent kills someone; the administration alleges, without evidence, that the victim was responsible; no proper investigation is conducted; no one is held accountable. Rinse and repeat.
Jul 09, 2026
On July 7, an Immigration Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national. According to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, Araujo “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.” As of the time of this writing, the agency has yet to provide any evidence.
This shooting comes days after a massive surge in ICE arrests. Between June 26 and June 30, 10,000 people were reportedly detained by immigration agents.
This is a tragic story—one that we have seen many times before.
Silverio Villegas González: On September 12, Villegas González, a Mexican national, was shot and killed by an ICE agent. This occurred during the agency’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in the Chicago area.
Araujo was not the first of ICE’s victims. So long as the agency exists, he will not be the last.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleged that the ICE agent “was hit by the car and dragged a significant distance. Fearing for his own life, the officer fired his weapon.” DHS further claimed that the agent “sustained multiple injuries.”
These were lies. Bodycam footage collected by Franklin Park police officers show the ICE agent saying he “got dragged a little bit” and describing his own injuries as “nothing major.” Surveillance video shows that Villegas González did not drive toward or hit either agent. Several eyewitnesses further refute DHS’ narrative.
Marimar Martinez: On October 4, Martinez, a US citizen, was shot five times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum. In a statement, DHS described this as “defensive fire.” They alleged, without evidence, that Martinez and her fellow “domestic terrorists” “ambushed” and “rammed federal agents with their vehicles.” On social media, FBI Director Kash Patel posted a video—from an unrelated incident—of a black SUV aggressively ramming an agent’s truck as "proof" of Martinez’s crime.
These, too, were lies. Bodycam footage shows the agents already had their weapons drawn as one of them turned the steering wheel toward Martinez’s car. One agent can be heard saying, “It’s time to get aggressive.”
Text messages reveal the “big time” support Exum received from then-Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks, and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in the aftermath of this incident. Hours after the shooting, Bovino even offered to extend Exum’s retirement with CBP “in light of [his] excellent service in Chicago.” He added, “you have much yet left to do!”
In a group chat, Exum bragged about how he “fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes.”
Renee Nicole Good: On January 7, Noem alleged that Good, a US citizen, “weaponize[d] her vehicle” and “attempted to run” over ICE agent Jonathan Ross. This act of so-called “domestic terrorism” justified Ross’s lethal action.
Once again, more lies. Footage captured on that day definitively showed—from multiple camera angles—that Good was turning away from Ross as he opened fire. He was never in danger.
Six months later, her murder has yet to be properly investigated. This was always the government’s plan. The day after her death, Vice President JD Vance insisted that the officer had “absolute immunity.” A few weeks afterwards, six federal prosecutors resigned over the Justice Department’s reluctance to investigate Ross. An FBI agent who had opened a civil rights investigation into Good’s death also resigned after she was ordered to reclassify it as an investigation into an assault on the ICE agent.
To these names, there are many we can add: Ruben Ray Martinez (shot and killed), Alex Pretti (shot and killed), Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis (shot), Jesus Javier Gomez Islas (shot, left permanently blind in his right eye), Keith Porter Jr. (shot and killed), Carlitos Ricardo Parias (shot).
Trump’s bigotry, Congress’ cowardice, and the Supreme Court’s blind obedience; a government devoid of checks and balances at war with its own people—this is America after 250 years.
This is the new normal of Donald Trump’s America—federal agents flood our neighborhoods. A poorly trained, gun-happy immigration agent kills someone. The administration alleges, without evidence, that the victim was responsible. No proper investigation is conducted. No one is held accountable. A family is torn apart. A community traumatized. Rinse and repeat.
We do not yet know all the details surrounding Araujo’s death. Perhaps we will never.
For now, there are two things we can take as certainties: First, any official narrative put forth by ICE, DHS, or the Trump administration cannot be trusted. They have repeatedly lied to the public, defended their killers, and blamed the victims. In their view, if you are killed by ICE, protest ICE, criticize ICE on social media, or even write a strongly worded email to ICE, then you are the criminal. You are the “domestic terrorist.”
Second, Araujo was not the first of ICE’s victims. So long as the agency exists, he will not be the last. The next victim could be anyone. Regardless of race or legal status, we are all vulnerable to Trump’s taxpayer-funded secret police.
This is the reality that we all find ourselves in—one that is nurtured and sustained by every aspect of the federal government: the Trump administration’s militarized immigration enforcement and crackdown on political dissent; a Congress that continues, despite the deaths, to provide billions to ICE and DHS; and a Supreme Court that gives ICE agents legal immunity to racially profile minorities and that paves the way for DHS to strip noncitizens of their protection status.
Trump’s bigotry, Congress’ cowardice, and the Supreme Court’s blind obedience; a government devoid of checks and balances at war with its own people—this is America after 250 years.
On Facebook, Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, wrote: “My father has been in this country for nearly 35 years, working in construction to provide for myself, my two brothers, and my mother. He was in the process of obtaining his work permit through the legal process. He was on his way to work, picking up his workers. My father did not deserve this.”
None of ICE’s victims deserved this.
We cannot allow ICE to continue tearing families apart. We cannot continue to suffer politicians and institutions that prioritize war and violence over helping the people they are meant to serve.
Despite the dangers, we must continue to protest ICE. We must advocate for progressive candidates and policies. The situation is bleak, but things will only get worse if we do nothing. The White House will not save us. The Supreme Court will not save us. Congress, as it stands, will not save us. We must save ourselves.
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A Warning From the UK for Centrist US Democrats Who Refuse to Fight for the Working Class
When Labour won, they were supposed to be an alternative to right-wing crazy, but now are losing the whole country to their own MAGA because a real alternative takes work.
Jun 16, 2026
The consensus is that this is the year for the Democrats. They have the political winds at their backs. Even with the gerrymandering and the voter suppression and everything Republicans have thrown at the wall, smart money says Democrats take the House and maybe the Senate. And anything that limits the power of this president is good. I’ll grant all of it. Net positive.
But what happens after a good cycle or two, if the winners don’t understand what they won? If they don’t see the pain that powered their victories?
We don’t have to guess because it already happened in Britain.
A year and a half ago, Labour won in a landslide. Imagine our centrist Democrats, the Newsom and Buttigieg wing, sweeping into power with the biggest majority in a generation. The Tories were finished, the same way a lot of folks think Republicans are about to be finished. But Labour walked in and decided the mission was better management. Be the adults in the room. Trim the spending. Talk tough on the border. The ship was fine, just needed a steady hand.
If Democrats get to Washington, take the gavels, and decide the job is just to clean up after Donald Trump and keep the machine humming, we know how this ends. We just watched it play out in Britain.
Now look at them. Reform is Nigel Farage’s party, which is their MAGA more or less. Reform is leading the polls, and Labour’s a distant second. Their MAGA has led just about every poll since late last year. Keir Starmer, the head of Labour, is one of the least popular leaders in the Western world. A year and a half ago centrists won everything. Now they’re watching the British version of Trumpism walk toward power.
When a party wins on the promise of change and then delivers management, the people who abandon ship don’t all come back. The ones who move, move right. The angry ones, the ones who feel lied to, don’t drift off to some nicer party on the left. They turn to the man burning it all down, which is always how the right takes power. Afterward, centrists throws up their hands, convinced the country is turning right, when in reality they’re turning desperate. If you promise change and deliver the status quo, things don’t get better; for a lot of people, they get worse.
Britain at least has a buffer. They build coalitions, so no single party runs the whole thing alone usually. The damage is scattered and slower. But the US doesn’t have that. We’ve got winner-takes-all, with gerrymandering stacked on top. Here, a centrist party that wins big and then governs scared doesn’t lose gracefully. It delivers the whole country to MAGA. The House, the Senate, the gavels, all of it.
Our centrists, the Newsoms, the Buttigiegs, the Slotkins, are on the rise right now. They aren’t leaders. They aren’t fierce advocates for structural change. In fact this is exactly the kind of compromise-driven, go-along-to-get-along Democratic Party that abandoned the working class and helped usher in MAGA. Hell, California Gov. Gavin Newsom can’t even bring himself to tax billionaires. These are folks who don’t get the depth of pain across our the country. And they certainly don’t get the ferocity behind the criminal administration wrecking our democracy. The Democratic Party and its faux leaders don’t see what’s coming, or they see it and don’t care. In the end it won’t matter which.
The cost of living is so far out of reach for young people that you can’t fix it with a tweak. There’s no tax credit, no rebate, no clever little program that closes that gap. It will take transformation. It will take building things again. The same is true for jobs. AI and robotics are about to come for human labor in a way this country has never seen, and Democrats have no plan for it. None. They’re not ready for the losses. They’re not ready for what happens to a person, to a town, to a whole generation, when the work goes away.
And they’re sure as hell not ready for what’s happening at the very top. Last week, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. I wrote on Thursday about how we built him, how public money and public research and public contracts carried him up the hill while we kept no ownership. Our tax dollars built SpaceX and then we handed over the deed. The pretenders in the Democratic Party, the ones about to take the reins, have no answer for that. They have no intention of stopping the next massive giveaway. Why? Because they don’t want to upset the interests who fund their campaigns.
Lack of accountability for guys at the top is the clearest indicator that we need systemic change. Forget for a second the question of genocide in Gaza. Forget the West Bank. You don’t have to know the answer for those to agree we should honestly investigate war crimes. The International Criminal Court already issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister for using starvation as a weapon of war. Our government’s response? To go after the court. To sanction its officials, and defend the war criminals.
Here at home, we’ve got a Justice Department unit whose entire job is crimes against humanity. Did it ever investigate Joe Biden’s cabinet, the men who signed off on the bombs? It didn’t. It won’t. They go after small men in faraway places, and give a pass to the policy masterminds here. The impunity of the powerful doesn’t start with Jeffrey Epstein or end with him. It runs straight through the war machine, the financial machine, the whole arrangement. A justice system that can’t prosecute its most powerful people for their most serious crimes is broken. You don’t fix broken with better management. You rebuild it.
We’ve got from now until the end of primary season to pick the right people. The candidates who understand our fight is structural. The ones who are ready for what’s actually coming. The ones not owned, willing to take a real risk.
If Democrats get to Washington, take the gavels, and decide the job is just to clean up after Donald Trump and keep the machine humming, we know how this ends. We just watched it play out in Britain. The winners were supposed to be an alternative to right-wing crazy, but now are losing the whole country to their own MAGA because a real alternative takes work.
That’s the thing about the so-called adults in the room. The centrists, the moderates, the corporatists, they won’t do the hard work. In part because they’re bankrolled by entrenched interests who will use every weapon in the arsenal to maintain status quo. And in part because of fear. They’re terrified of blame, so they’d rather keep walking toward disaster than take a chance on something better. Real reform means changing the whole structure, the democracy, the social fabric, the economy itself, and that’s going to take fight.
People are desperate for a life that works, but it’s easier for Dems to keep their heads down, push gently for incremental change, and hope things will get better on their own.
They won’t.
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US Voters Are Hungry for a Country With Consequences for Corruption at the Top
A new poll finds that large majorities of voters believe corruption is a big problem across politics and government and back bold reform.
Jun 03, 2026
I’ve written that corruption is the sleeper issue of 2026. Well, it’s awake. And the issue may be bigger than I realized.
That’s the implication of a new national poll released Tuesday by the Brennan Center. The survey was conducted in late April and early May, just before the president’s attempt to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to funnel taxpayer money to his political allies.
The results are striking. More than 9 in 10 voters believe corruption is a big problem across politics and government. Large majorities view corruption as endemic and deeply embedded in government institutions, from the Supreme Court to Congress to the presidency. They are dejected about the fact that scandals continuously go without consequences and shocking revelations fail to produce reform.
Margins are overwhelming among Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
Vast majorities believe this corruption is part of why government doesn’t respond to major issues, including concerns like affordability and housing.
Most importantly, voters back bold reform. Eighty-three percent want a law that bars presidents from having conflicts of interest and holds them to stronger ethical standards. Eighty-one percent want a new federal ethics enforcer. Seventy-nine percent want a constitutional amendment that restores limits on money in elections, and other anti-corruption measures received similar levels of support.
It’s hard to find a set of proposals with a wider bipartisan appeal.
Yet there are notes here that should jar complacency. Listen carefully to voters. They define corruption broadly. Vast majorities see the spectacle of politicians catering to the interests of billionaires and big corporations as corrupt, not surprisingly. But to most Americans, wasting taxpayer dollars and even failing to respond to constituent needs are also forms of corruption.
Vast majorities believe this corruption is part of why government doesn’t respond to major issues, including concerns like affordability and housing. How do we connect these arcane government rules to people’s economic well-being? Voters are already doing so.
There are warning signs aplenty for politicians from both parties. Other polls have shown that voters think neither Democratic nor Republican politicians are better than the other on the issue.
Policymakers should understand that the public’s conception of what has gone wrong goes far deeper than super PACs or White House ballrooms or even slush funds. To them, it is a system that is fundamentally misfiring. A government that is not performing. And there is a willingness to name names and assign blame.
In some ways, these results are ominous. We often note that the 2024 election was the first time since the 1800s where the incumbent party lost the White House three times in a row (2016, 2020, 2024). This survey shows a deeply disquieted electorate, scornful of the political system and furious at its flaws. That environment created the conditions for President Donald Trump’s populist nationalism to emerge in 2016. It hasn’t gone away.
Yet this is also the kindling that can fuel new approaches, sharper critiques, and stronger solutions. If polls are to be believed, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) has turned his political fortunes through a relentless and often stirring stump-speech focus on corruption.
The breadth of public unhappiness suggests a deeper moral critique. Even now, amid wrenching technological change and evaporating standards, people seem focused on an underlying core of personal responsibility.
My old boss, President Bill Clinton, often talked this way, especially when he was running for president in 1992. “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one,” he would say. “If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.”
More recently, that ethos was given voice in Hungary by its new president, Péter Magyar. Running against the authoritarian kleptocrat Viktor Orbán, Magyar vowed that Hungary would no longer be “a country without consequences.” He pledged to oversee not just new policies but a thorough effort to clean house and to hold accountable those who had stolen from the people.
The new Brennan Center research suggests that voters here, too, are ready for a country with consequences. That will help shape the next political era—if we are ready to make it happen.
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Bearing Witness in the Age of Generative AI
Pushing back against the assault on verifiable reality is a crucial undertaking in the pursuit of justice.
May 31, 2026
The advent of generative AI has made it even harder to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t, and also easy to claim what is real is fake. This threatens to undermine the very idea of "evidence," which traditionally has been used to enforce accountability, by fracturing shared, verifiable reality.
For example, in Iran authorities attempted to dismiss protest footage as edited or artificially manufactured after AI was used to enhance long-distance footage of someone confronting the military, effectively turning this doubt into a propaganda weapon. Doubt was also a feature in the aftermath of the recent bombing of a girls' school which killed 168 people—mostly children—in Minab, Iran. And in the midst of an already distorted information ecosystem, methods developed to detect AI fakes are now being weaponized to falsely discredit authentic evidence.
This affirms that the emergence of generative AI is not simply a technological issue, but is creating a visual evidence problem. The consequences are already being felt not only by those chronicling and exposing injustice.
Historically, visual media has been an important tool to document injustice. In South Africa, for instance, a generation of photographers used the camera to challenge the prevailing power structures of apartheid. By exposing the apartheid’s injustices and delegitimizing the system, as well as documenting resistance and everyday life, photographers had a huge impact on the liberation struggle in South Africa. So much so, that the camera would be “seen as an instrument of insurrection” by the apartheid regime, resulting in a ban on foreign journalists and documentary photography.
What would have happened if the apartheid regime had claimed that photographs like Nzima’s were faked or AI generated? Would this have created doubt for the audiences who saw it, impacting international support for South Africa’s liberation struggle?
Although they were not the sole targets of apartheid repression, those photographing or filming were often targeted by the regime. Security forces regularly exposed films, confiscated equipment, conducted raids, and banned publications, as well as people. For example, photographer Sam Nzima was harassed by police and placed under house arrest for months following the publication of his iconic photo of the dying 13-year-old Hector Pieterson who was shot by police during the youth uprising on June 16, 1976. The photo not only fueled the liberation movement within South Africa, but also galvanized stronger international condemnation of apartheid. Apartheid Minister Stoffel Botha even referred to those documenting what was unfolding in the country as "media terrorists."
While there have been attempts to deny or downplay apartheid, including from the now late last apartheid president F. W. de Klerk, systemic denial has not been possible owing to the evidence available. This underscores the role of documentation in defending truth, even if incomplete.
What would have happened if the apartheid regime had claimed that photographs like Nzima’s were faked or AI generated? Would this have created doubt for the audiences who saw it, impacting international support for South Africa’s liberation struggle? Today these questions are not rhetorical, owing to the emergence of generative AI.
To be sure for most of the world, the saying, “The camera never lies” has never been true. Visual media was vital to the Nazi regime's propaganda efforts. Before that, it played “a critical role in propagating colonialist myths about Africa,” with colonial states using photographic imagery to cement white supremacy. It would also become a tool for apartheid in South Africa, used to not only legitimize and validate itself, but to also attempt to shape global perceptions of what was happening in the country.
But the story did not end there. Visual media would also become a tool for liberation movements in South Africa and beyond, because documentation impacts how the world is perceived, meaning is made, and reality is verified.
For example, Human Rights Watch recently used geolocated images to verify the Israeli military’s unlawful use of white phosphorus, a highly reactive chemical which ignites when exposed to oxygen, in residential areas in Lebanon. This offers a pathway for accountability in the future. Similarly, the Syrian Archive, which tracks and preserves videos of war crimes in Syria, has used documentation to pursue accountability for the deadly use of chemical weapons in the country.
Documentation is critical in the pursuit of justice, as well as the need to preserve the past to confirm reality. Not only for these worthy ideals, but also so that those who are left to pick up the pieces know that their experiences of injustices are documented, even in the face of denial and propaganda aimed at persuading people otherwise.
Of course the risks and harms are heightened in conflict situations, which does not need to be inevitable. For example, Meta’s Oversight Board recently called for new rules on how deceptive AI content is managed by the platform to enable users to distinguish between what is real and fake. This follows Meta’s failure to appropriately designate an AI-generated video that purported to show significant damage caused by Iranian soldiers in Haifa, Israel. While the board’s recommendations are not binding, should Meta fail to urgently implement these, it will be yet another example of a platform knowing how to address harms but failing to do so. This must change.
To this end, pushing back against the assault on verifiable reality is a crucial undertaking. This includes protecting people's ability to safely document and preserve their documentation; accessible and effective detection tools, alongside transparency for AI-generated content; and democratic policies, laws, and regulations that center human rights considerations.
As history has repeatedly shown us, secrecy is a shield that protects injustice and emboldens bad actors. So, bearing witness, exposing truth, and insisting on justice remains as important now as it was for South Africa’s liberation movement and beyond— even in the age of generative AI.
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Big Oil is the New Big Tobacco; It’s Time They Paid for the Damage
Massachusetts must pass a Climate Superfund Act to hold big polluters accountable and keep our communities safe from climate harm.
May 29, 2026
Early in my career as a primary care physician, I found myself steering my car through driving rain around downed power lines and fallen tree branches for a shift in urgent care. I was already nervous about my new role. Having a hurricane didn’t help. I remember feeling overwhelmed and inadequate when I had to refer a patient to the already overburdened ER. The deep wound a roof shingle had carved in their scalp was too much for me. Hurricane Bob was a Category 3 hurricane and it took 18 people’s lives and caused today’s equivalent of ~$3.5 billion in damages. The fear, the injuries, and the losses all fell on the local community.
That was decades ago. Nowadays—from Texas floods, to Western wildfires, to deadly heatwaves across the Midwest and Northeast—communities across the country are paying the price. Severe storms are more frequent because of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. Extreme weather events are causing traumatic injuries, post-traumatic stress disorders, medication shortages, and death. Heatwaves are more frequent and more dangerous, causing heart attacks, asthma attacks, kidney failure, and death. Floods are ravaging our towns, roads, bridges, and farms, overwhelming local businesses and thinly stretched municipal budgets. Public health and infrastructure costs from these crises are mounting. And fossil fuel air pollution—accounting for ~95% of total air pollution in the state—currently kills over 2,700 residents each year in Massachusetts through heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, and chronic lung illness.
Meanwhile, the petrochemical corporations—who’ve knowingly fueled the climate crisis and spent tens of millions of dollars to sow disinformation—got off scot-free.
As a doctor, I can treat people for asthma from air pollution and dehydration from heatwaves, but if the root cause is not addressed, countless more will suffer. The enormity of this threat to public health led me to retire from primary care and join with those fighting for clean energy. We urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels, but we must also invest in resilience and adaptation projects, to safeguard Massachusetts communities against the climate harms they are already experiencing—from the flooding and erosion threatening residents and businesses in Boston and along the coast, to the droughts facing farmers in Western Mass, to the record-shattering heatwaves hitting the entire state this month.
In my medical practice, if I discovered a treatment I prescribed was harming my patients, I’d be ethically bound to speak out. It’s abundantly clear that the fossil fuel industry follows a different ethic.
Passing the state Climate Superfund Act is one step we must take, following in the footsteps of our Vermont and New York neighbors and coalition partners in the nationwide movement to hold big polluters accountable and keep our communities safe from climate harm. Passing a superfund in Massachusetts would allow us to build resiliency in our communities using funds from Big Oil’s checkbook. This act would require the biggest polluters to pay, based on their historical emissions, for projects across the Commonwealth—upgrading stormwater drains, protecting our coasts, installing energy-efficient cooling for seniors who swelter without AC, and offering preventive healthcare programs to treat those sickened by climate change. We desperately need these measures, and this gives us a fair way to pay for them. If you made a mess, you need to clean it up.
In my medical practice, if I discovered a treatment I prescribed was harming my patients, I’d be ethically bound to speak out. It’s abundantly clear that the fossil fuel industry follows a different ethic. Big Oil has known for more than 60 years about the harms their products were causing, but instead of putting people over profits, they have spent tens of millions to cover it up and lie to the public about the damage they were creating.
We can no longer afford to be complacent. It’s time for the Massachusetts legislature to stop “studying” this problem and start protecting its people with this legislation that the majority of its residents support. It’s financially and morally imperative that we pass the Climate Superfund Act. It’s time to make polluters pay for the health of our Commonwealth.
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Americans Are Fed Up With Reckless Federal Agents; Congress Must Act
A simple law could ensure that no federal agent is above the law.
May 16, 2026
The American public's patience with reckless federal agents has run out—but Congress has yet to act. While members of Congress debate funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, communities across the country remain at risk of further harm from lawless policing.
For months, polling has shown cratering support for ICE and the agency’s aggressive tactics, including a 30 point collapse in a single year. Recent YouGov and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) polling shows that Americans don’t think federal law enforcement should be above the law: 93% of voters—including 89% of Trump voters—believe that agents who violate people's rights must be held accountable. Former MAGA influencers have criticized ICE and compared the agency’s tactics to the Gestapo. Even current Department of Homeland Security agents have told reporters that they’re troubled by the agency’s tactics. And in cities across the country, the response has been unmistakable: massive demonstrations in response to violent raids and multiple fatal shootings by federal agents.
Americans have been demanding accountability because when agents can violently attack and kill community members without consequence, everyone is less safe.
Consider what happened to one ACLU client in Maine earlier this year.
When federal agents face no consequences, that impunity invites more wrongdoing, turns our freedoms into empty promises, and leaves us all unprotected.
On the morning of January 22, Juan Sebastián Carvajal-Muñoz was abducted in broad daylight by federal agents. A civil engineer, Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz was driving to his job when a dark SUV cut in front of his car, forcing it to stop. Three people approached his window and demanded to see his papers. He showed his driver’s license through the window, and the agents ordered him to get out of his car. When he reached for his phone to call for help and to record the interaction, agents violently smashed his car window, forced his car open, and dragged him out. Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz’s car was left running with the door open, and his phone was left lying on the street.
Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz was racially profiled and targeted as part of an immigration crackdown in Maine callously called “Operation Catch of the Day.” Mr. Carvajal-Munoz was caught, but for what? He was legally working in the United States on an H1-B visa, was not breaking a single law, and was simply driving as a Latino man. Mr. Carvajal-Munoz was able to sue for these constitutional violations under Maine’s Civil Rights Act, but people in most states cannot.
That’s because there’s an alarming accountability gap between federal and state officers. For example, after Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020, Mr. Floyd’s family sued the City of Minneapolis and police officers for violating his constitutional rights, ultimately securing a $27 million settlement. Federal law, however, does not allow the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good to file that type of lawsuit against the federal agents who shot and killed them just miles from where Mr. Floyd was murdered.
This illogical gap stems from a historical omission. After the Civil War, in response to pro-Confederate state and local officials’ widespread violations of the rights of Black people and Union sympathizers, the Reconstruction Congress passed a law allowing people to sue state and local officers for damages or other relief when their rights were violated. Unfortunately, that law, commonly known as Section 1983, did not cover federal officers.
In 1971, the Supreme Court filled that accountability gap, ruling in Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents that the logic of the Constitution demanded that federal officers could be sued for constitutional violations, too. For decades afterward, people sued federal agents over constitutional violations in what were known as Bivens actions. But in 2017, the Supreme Court severely limited when people can bring Bivens actions, and now it’s nearly impossible to sue federal officers for violating people’s rights. For example, in 2021, a federal court rejected Bivens claims against federal officers who were sued for attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a baton charge at Lafayette Square Park across the street from the White House. At the same time, the same court ruled that local officers could be sued for those same constitutional violations, which the court held “would have been clear to every reasonable officer.”
When federal agents face no consequences, that impunity invites more wrongdoing, turns our freedoms into empty promises, and leaves us all unprotected. US courts have long recognized the fundamental legal principle that where there is a right, there must be a remedy. In other words, a right that you can’t enforce is just a suggestion that government actors can ignore when it suits them. We are now seeing the very real results that follow when a right lacks remedies: Officers can terrorize and abuse people without repercussions.
Congress has the power to close this dangerous accountability gap and restore a basic promise: If a federal officer violates your rights, you can seek justice, just like you can when a state officer crosses the line. All Congress has to do is pass the Bivens Act, which would fix the historical omission by explicitly stating that, like state and local officials, federal officers can be sued when they violate our constitutional rights. As the Supreme Court pointed out in a 1980 case applying Bivens, “The ‘constitutional design’ would be stood on its head if federal officials did not face at least the same liability as state officials guilty of the same constitutional transgression.”
The weight of our constitutional rights is becoming clearer every day: None of us is safe when federal agents can harm people at will. Congress can and must pass the Bivens Act, a simple law that would restore accountability, compensate victims and their families, and deter the unchecked government violence that has become a hallmark of this administration.
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