ICE, Iran & cyclosporiasis

On Monday, ICE agents shot and killed 25-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine. His family said he had legal status, although undocumented immigrants also have a right against unreasonable searches and seizures, which courts have ruled includes a right against excessive force by law enforcement.

According to a senator from Maine, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullen claimed that Guerrero weaponized his vehicle. There is no evidence to support this, because DHS has failed to fulfill its promise of deploying body cameras. (Whether body cameras actually stop state terror is up for debate, though.) DHS has made similar baseless claims about others they have killed, and many of those claims were demonstrable lies.

Days earlier, ICE also shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Again, DHS said Salgado Araujo rammed his vehicle into officers, which witnesses dispute. And to reiterate, DHS has lied about this exact thing before.

Following widespread protests of these killings, and following another death of a 28-year-old man in Florida during an encounter with immigration agents, the Trump administration ordered ICE to suspend most vehicle stops. Then some "prominent MAGA voices complained," which made the president "furious," so he reversed the temporary pause. It’s unclear what ICE will follow through on. They didn’t follow through on more body cameras, after all. (In my opinion, the administration that ran on rounding up immigrants telling the people tasked with doing that to be a little nicer is probably not a winning strategy.)

Meanwhile, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus announced it will hold a hearing to hear eyewitness accounts of ICE’s killing of Salgado Araujo. And calls to abolish ICE — including from the governor of Maine — are getting louder.

The US has continued to strike Iran nearly a month after signing a deal meant to mark the beginning of the end of the war. Death toll estimates from the US and Israel’s war on Iran have reached as high as 18,300, with civilians accounting for up to 3,758 of those deaths. Iran has also accused the US of a strike near a children’s cancer hospital.

If thousands of civilian deaths aren’t alarming enough, the war is also making it harder to afford to get by here in the US. Oil prices jumped following recent strikes. Both the US and Iran said the Strait of Hormuz was under their control. But two different parties can’t just each claim control of it and bicker — this is a critical transit route for oil, not my bathroom sink as my boyfriend and I are fighting to get ready in the morning.

In reality, the UN holds that no country can claim international waters, a vague clause in the US and Iran’s memorandum of understanding doesn’t actually guarantee the strait is fully open, and Iran is taking it to mean that it maintains control.

So, how did we get into a situation where this US-Israeli war has killed nearly 4,000 civilians, the public is facing financial fallout, and Iran is still maintaining control over a piece of water that the US really, really wants? To recap, after Trump ordered the kidnapping of Venezuela’s head of state because he wanted that country’s oil, he then killed Iran’s head of state. That was also about wanting Iran’s oil, but it was additionally about baseless claims that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon. (US intelligence shows that they are not.) Iran, notably, did not like that the US killed their controversial head of state. So, they hit the US where it hurts: our oil supply, which relies on the Strait of Hormuz that Iran claims control over and shut down. And that timeline brings us to this week’s tip from our friends at MediaWise!

Cyclosporiasis! Literally all my friends are talking about this. I first learned about it when they decided not to eat at Taco Bell while we were walking home from the bars. There’s an outbreak caused by a parasite that contaminates fresh produce. Cyclosporiasis gives you tummy troubles. Like, really bad tummy troubles that can land you in the hospital. Is a Crunchwrap worth the cost of what my Marketplace plan surely won’t cover? Maybe.

This is not me libeling Taco Bell. I love that place, and I write that out of both personal conviction and legal caution. But some Taco Bell locations have put up signs saying they’re unable to sell some ingredients with produce due to a nationwide recall. The restaurant chain said in a statement that it’s only removed some ingredients at select restaurants, which makes it sound to me like those restaurants won a sweepstake rather than potentially started an outbreak. Taco Bell is also under investigation by the federal government and several states that are trying to find out whether they played a role in this outbreak.

The CDC has reported a bit over 1,600 confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis in the US, and knows of 5,100 more cases that need to be looked into further. You can prevent catching this by washing your hands thoroughly and washing your produce, especially lettuce. You can also do what I’m doing: reject summer salads, embrace decadence.

A CDC program that was tasked with keeping tabs on pathogens like cyclosporiasis was scaled back last year because of funding cuts to food safety over several years, even before the RFK Jr. and DOGE of it all. But since that program doesn’t involve real-time response to outbreaks, a former agency official who did quit because of the RFK Jr. of it all told our former Washington Post colleague Lena H. Sun that the Trump administration’s cuts wouldn’t really have impacted the current situation. Still, another former FDA official told The New York Times that cuts to federal surveillance programs certainly don’t help.

Trump wants to build an arch in DC. And he wants it to be 250-foot tall. But buildings in DC legally have to be under a certain height — 130 feet on broad avenues, and 90 feet on smaller streets.

Is that a good law? Critics say it limits development in a city facing a steep affordability crisis that building more homes would help solve. Proponents — including height restriction advocates as far back as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — say it helps tourists look at pretty monuments. (As someone who paid $2,100 a month for a one-bedroom basement when I lived in DC, I’m inclined to side with critics here.)

But it is a law nonetheless, and the president is trying to get around it. The Trump administration is arguing the law doesn’t apply to their arch project, and a panel full of Trump allies preliminarily agreed.

Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence and novice to anything national intelligence-related, refused to answer Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff when he asked who won the 2020 election. Historically, when people who don’t accept election results hold political power, it emboldens far-right insurrectionists.

Ossoff also asked Clayton whether he knew that Tulsi Gabbard, who previously had the job Clayton’s now up for, took part in a raid of a Georgia election office earlier this year. In that raid, FBI agents seized ballots years after Trump pressured Fulton County election officials to overturn his loss in Georgia.

Clayton said he only learned about the raid the day before the hearing. That raises questions given how much coverage there was of that raid before then, and given that the job Clayton’s up for oversees agencies that Trump has repeatedly tried to use for election interference.