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human rights watch
Bodycam Footage Casts Further Doubt on ICE Narrative of Fatal Shooting Outside Chicago
"An ICE agent shot Silverio dead," said Chicago's Rep. Delia Ramirez. "DHS lied about what happened."
Sep 23, 2025
Local police body camera footage released Monday has further called into question the government's justification for an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent's fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a 38-year-old father of two, in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park on September 12 during a traffic stop.
In a statement justifying the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Villegas-Gonzalez “refused to follow law enforcement’s commands and drove his car at law enforcement officers. One of the ICE officers was hit by the car and dragged a significant distance. Fearing for his own life, the officer fired his weapon.”
Video footage of the incident recorded by local businesses had already raised doubts about the government's version of events, showing that Villegas-Gonzalez had not initially driven his car forward toward the agents, but that one of them had instead grabbed ahold of his window frame as he attempted to reverse.
Federal law enforcement's refusal to provide information on the shooting has raised further suspicion, leading Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) and groups like Human Rights Watch to call for independent investigations.
The ICE agents who conducted the arrest were not wearing body cameras at the scene after the Trump administration scrapped a policy requiring them.
According to Belkis Wille, the associate director of the Human Rights Watch’s crisis, conflict, and arms division, who wrote about the shooting last week, “law enforcement officers can only use lethal force when an individual poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or another person.”
But the body camera footage from a Franklin Park police officer who responded to the scene, obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, has cast doubt on DHS's claims that one of the agents involved in the shooting had been severely injured.
(Video: Chicago Sun-Times)
In the video, the injured agent is shown with a large hole in his blue jeans, revealing a scraped knee. Over the radio, the other agent is heard explaining to police that his partner had suffered "a left knee injury and some lacerations to his hands.”
The injured agent said it was "Nothing major,” and his partner reiterated: “Nothing major."
Later, after his partner was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, the other agent was heard explaining: "I think we’re good, man. Just shooken up a little."
This video footage directly contradicts the description of events presented by DHS, that the agent “sustained multiple injuries” and was “seriously injured” by Villegas-Gonzalez's car.
Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez, a Chicago native, reacted to the video on social media: "An ICE agent shot Silverio dead. DHS lied about what happened."
"There needs to be a full, thorough investigation into what happened that morning," she added. "All camera footage must be released. And [Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi] Noem must come to the committee and account for ICE's unlawfulness and lies."
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Israel’s Strike on Yemen Newspaper Offices Was ‘Deadliest Global Attack’ on Journalists in 16 Years: Press Freedom Group
The Committee to Protect Journalists said Israel's attack on a media complex in Sana'a last week killed 31 journalists.
Sep 19, 2025
Israel's airstrikes on a media complex in Yemen last week resulted in the largest single attack on journalists the world has seen in 16 years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In a report released Friday, the group said that 31 journalists from two government-run newspapers based in Sana'a were killed in the strikes on September 10, along with four others, including one child.
Nasser Al-Khadri, editor-in-chief of the newspaper 26 September, called the attack on his newsroom an "unprecedented massacre of journalists."
"It is a brutal and unjustified attack that targeted innocent people whose only crime was working in the media field, armed with nothing but their pens and words,” Al-Khadri told the CPJ.
According to CPJ, it was the second-largest attack on the press they've ever recorded, and the worst since 2009, when 32 journalists were massacred as part of a political ambush in the Philippines.
The Israeli government has often defended its attacks on civilian infrastructure by claiming that it houses militants. But in these strikes, the IDF's media desk acknowledged that it was targeting what it referred to as the "Public Relations Department" for the Houthis, also known as Ansar-Allah.
Shortly after Israel's genocidal war in Gaza began in 2023, the militant group, which controls large parts of Yemen, began to launch drone and missile strikes against shipping vessels in the Red Sea and directly against Israel in what they have described as an effort to support Palestinians under fire. They have said they will stop these attacks when Israel reaches an agreement with Hamas to end the war in Gaza.
Israel has repeatedly bombed Yemen in recent weeks, including launching a strike on its main airport and large amounts of civilian infrastructure. On the same day it bombed the media complex, it also hit residential areas in Sana'a as well as a medical facility.
In a post on X, the official account for the Israel Defense Forces justified striking the newspapers by saying that they are "responsible for distributing and disseminating propaganda messages in the media, including speeches by Houthi leader Abdul-Malik and statements from spokesman Yahya Saree." For this reason, Israel described the journalists as "military targets."
But the CPJ says that "as civilians, journalists are protected under international law, including those working for state-run or armed group-affiliated outlets, unless they take direct part in hostilities."
Niku Jafarnia, a Bahrain and Yemen researcher for Human Rights Watch, explained in more detail on Monday:
Radio and television facilities are civilian objects and cannot be targeted. They are legitimate targets only if they are used in a way that makes an “effective contribution to military action.” However, civilian broadcasting facilities are not rendered legitimate military targets simply because they are pro-Houthi or anti-Israel, or report on the laws of war violations by one side or the other, as this does not directly contribute to military operations.
Al-Khadri said that Israel's strikes hit his newsroom around 4:45 pm, right when staff were finishing up the publication of the weekly paper.
Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemen analyst, noted that “Since it is a weekly publication, not a daily one, staff were gathered at the publishing house to prepare for distribution, significantly increasing the number of people present in the compound."
The CPJ classified the 31 journalists killed in the strike as having been "murdered" by Israel, meaning that they were deliberately targeted specifically for their work. Over the past decade, the group says, 1 in 6 of the world's murdered journalists have been killed by Israel.
While estimates from different groups vary, Israel's war in Gaza is considered by far the deadliest conflict in the world for journalists, with more killed than any other conflict in the world combined. In August, the CPJ reported that 192 journalists, nearly all Palestinians, have been killed since October 7, 2023, while other groups put the death toll even higher.
In attacks last month that drew similar worldwide condemnation, Israel conducted what was described as a "double tap" strike on Khan Younis' Nasser Hospital aimed at killing first responders who arrived after the first strike. Twenty people were killed in total, including rescue workers and at least five journalists.
Not long before, Israel carried out the targeted assassination of Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and five other journalists, claiming without evidence that they were part of "a Hamas terrorist cell.”
“Since October 7, 2023, Israel has emerged as a regional killer of journalists, with repeated incidents in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and now Yemen confirming Israel’s longstanding pattern of labeling journalists as terrorists or propagandists to justify their killings,” said CPJ regional program leaderSara Qudah.
“Israel’s September 10 strikes on two newspaper offices in Yemen marks an alarming escalation, extending Israel’s war on journalism far beyond the genocide in Gaza," Qudah said. "This latest killing spree is not only a grave violation of international law, but also a terrifying warning to journalists across the region: no place is safe.”
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Democrats File Resolution to Stop Trump's Strikes Against Boats in Caribbean
"President Trump has no legal authority to launch strikes or use military force in the Caribbean or elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere," said Sen. Tim Kaine.
Sep 19, 2025
With 14 people killed in the Caribbean in recent days by US forces at the direction of President Donald Trump, two Democratic senators on Friday moved to stop the Trump administration from continuing military strikes against boats that it claims are involved in drug trafficking.
Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) introduced a joint resolution calling for the US to stop engaging in military hostilities that have not been authorized by Congress, days after Trump announced that US forces had killed three people whom the president claimed were part of "extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels" based in Venezuela.
That strike followed the killing of 11 people aboard another boat in the Caribbean earlier this month, which US officials later acknowledged had turned back toward Venezuela before the US carried out the strike—further calling into question the claim that the vessel was headed toward the US and posed a threat.
"President Trump has no legal authority to launch strikes or use military force in the Caribbean or elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere," said Kaine in a statement, adding that the administration has refused to release basic information showing it was necessary to attack the vessels.
The strikes have been condemned by legal and human rights experts as "murder" and "extrajudicial executions" of civilians—people who, if they were in fact bringing drugs to the US as the White House has claimed, would typically be confronted by law enforcement agencies instead of struck by the military.
The US Coast Guard has in the past intercepted boats and searched them to confirm suspected drug smuggling, and arrested their crews.
As Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said last week, Trump's claim that boats are carrying fentanyl, which caused roughly 48,000 drug overdoses in the US last year, is likely inaccurate. Fentanyl is primarily trafficked from Mexico and Central America into the US, he noted, not from Venezuela.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this month that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's assessment that Venezuela is also not a major source of cocaine was of no importance to the administration.
"I don’t care what the UN says," Rubio told reporters after the first military strike in the Caribbean.
The White House has not released evidence showing that the boats were carrying drugs; after the first bombing, the president said the administration had "tapes of [the victims] speaking" that showed they were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which it has designated a terrorist organization that works directly with the South American country's government—despite US intelligence agencies' finding that the group does not work with President Nicolás Maduro.
Even if the president's suspicions were correct, said Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch, "US officials cannot summarily kill people they accuse of smuggling drugs."
“The problem of narcotics entering the United States is not an armed conflict, and US officials cannot circumvent their human rights obligations by pretending otherwise," Yager said Thursday.
While claiming the military is targeting drug traffickers, Vice President JD Vance suggested this week that the US could mistakenly kill civilians who are not involved in drug activity, joking, "I wouldn't go fishing right now in that area of the world."
The administration has not disclosed a legal analysis of why it believes the strikes, which it has said will continue, are lawful.
Congress has not authorized any military conflict with drug cartels, and at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday, a nominee for a position at the Pentagon was unable to answer Democratic lawmakers' questions about the legality of the administration's strikes.
On Friday, reporting by The New York Times suggested that Republican lawmakers and the White House are working to grant the administration the legal authority to continue the strikes.
A draft bill is circulating around the White House and Congress to grant the president the power to order military strikes to carry out "the drug trafficking war."
The authority would last for five years, and longer if renewed by Congress, and would cover groups that the administration has designated terrorist organizations as well as nations that harbor those groups.
Jack Goldsmith, a former George W. Bush administration official and a Harvard Law School professor, told the Times that the legislation is "insanely broad."
"This is an open-ended war authorization against an untold number of countries, organizations, and persons that the president could deem within its scope," said Goldsmith.
Introducing their resolution on Friday, Kaine and Schiff said they do not want to prevent the US from carrying out strikes in self-defense against an "armed attack."
But, they emphasized, “the trafficking of illegal drugs does not itself constitute such an armed attack or threat.”
Yager called on Congress to also "open a prompt and transparent investigation into the decision-making process behind these attacks, including the legal rationale and chain of command.”
“The US military should immediately halt any plans for future unlawful strikes," she said, "and ensure that all military operations comply with international human rights and humanitarian law."
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