“We're not here because of where Johan was born. We're not here to make a political point. We're here because Johan was a member of this community, our community,” said Biddeford Mayor Liam LaFountain. “…what we are asking for him, we would ask for any person who died in this way on the streets of Biddeford. Anyone. That’s what it means to be a community. When one of us is taken like this, we do not look away. We do not stay quiet.”

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LaFountain added that while usually public comments during city council meetings are only for things that can be controlled by the city, an exception would be made for this meeting.

Residents called for a variety of actions, including ending ICE and establishing a permanent memorial (one person asked to make the memorial where Guerrero’s blood is still spilled in the street).

“Its easy enough to say city council didn’t do enough, but also I didn’t do enough. I’ve been on ICE watch committee, but ICE watch committee wasn’t there. We didn’t alert anyone the day Johan was killed,” Biddeford resident Johnathan Haynes said. “Because we don’t have enough people….we need leaders that say, like Mayor Drapeau did a hundred years ago, ‘we’re drawing a line at the bridge. We do not want these people here.’”

In September 1924, the KKK planned to march from the town of Saco, whose mayor was sympathetic to their cause, to Biddeford. Biddeford Mayor Edward Drapeau immediately told the Klan they were not welcome. The Saco River sits between the two municipalities, and Drapeau stationed reinforcements at the bridge where the Klan would have crossed.

“It’s not a game for us here in Biddeford when somebody gets killed,” Haynes added, pointing out ICE’s huge budget and the profit motive behind detentions.

If you’d like to watch the city council meeting, it’s available here.

A litany of information about David Brouillette, the officer who shot Guerrero, has surfaced, with two of his ex-wives speaking out about his history of violence (including throwing his 13 year old daughter through a glass table).

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Brouillette had money problems, too. From Mother Jones:

David struggled financially. In 2020, he pleaded for a Maine court to reduce child support payments required by his second divorce. “I am NOT ABLE to survive,” David wrote in a handwritten statement. He added, “PLEASE PLEASE reduce my [child support].”

Earlier this week, the Washington Examiner ran a story detailing how unhappy longer term ICE officers are. The officers specifically mentioned the lack of training for new agents, who are now on the streets en masse:

“A supervisor with the fugitive operations unit expressed frustration at how many teams are filled with officers who haven’t even cleared background and don’t have a security clearance. It’s not safe,” said the first officer.

Guerrero is not the only person killed during ICE encounters in July. On July 7th, an ICE agent shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston at a traffic stop. Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, a Mexican tourist with a return home scheduled, was struck by a truck after running from ICE agents in Florida on July 14.

This weekend, protests against ICE will occur across the country as part of an anti-ICE National Day of Action.

Some housekeeping - I’m running a sale: for the next week, you can get 15% off annual subscriptions, which helps me continue to follow ICE around. Sometimes I travel with prior approval for reimbursement, but other times, like Maine and Delaney Hall, things happen outside of office hours, and I just go. While I’m always glad I went, financially, it can leave me completely in the hole.

For Delaney Hall, I licensed some footage, wrote a story here at the Turtle Diaries and for the Nation, and did videos for Mother Jones using my footage, including an interview and one I scripted (which I nearly got pepper sprayed during the making of).

But for Maine, my work (so far!) is only through my own channels: this post, videos on social media, and a write up of the presser held by Guerrero’s wife, Karolina Rojas Alvarez. And that’s fine, because your subscriptions make it okay for me to take risks like that!

You can use this link to subscribe with the discount (though all new annual subs should automatically get the discount, regardless of using the link or not).

As always, I appreciate your support!

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“From the moment we met, we never separated again. We were always one,” Alvarez continued, holding back tears.

“He always told me, ‘until we’re little old people.’”

On Monday, ICE agent David Brouillette shot Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, where Guerrero lived with Alvarez and their three-year-old daughter, Dulce. Guerrero was not the person ICE was seeking.

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“And now, my daughter asks for papa, and I don’t have the strength to tell her that papa is not coming….every night, she asks for him. She always slept next to him. And now she can’t,” Alvarez said through tears.

“My soul is broken. He was everything to me.”

Alvarez was accompanied by Benjamin Gideon, the lawyer who is representing the family.

“Today is not a day about lawyers or lawsuits. There will come a time when those responsible for Johan Sebastian’s needless death will have to answer for what they did. But today is not that day.”

Instead, Gideon explained, the presser was about Guerrero. “He was a good man.”

A witness reported seeing Guerrero’s toddler, dressed in Bluey pajamas, on the street minutes after her father was shot. Now, the beloved children’s cartoon character can be spotted throughout the memorial that has formed where Guerrero was killed. Next to the flowers, Bluey blankets, and candles, blood still stains the road where agents laid Guerrero’s body after removing him from his vehicle.

“You will always be the love of my life, until my heart stops beating,” Alvarez ended her remarks this evening, holding a tissue to her face as the translator repeated her words. “Watch over me. Help me carry all of this. Help me care for and protect our daughter.”

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In order to help bring the GASF to everyone, I filmed the arch from top to bottom, and back to front. I hope you enjoy!

Meanwhile, at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the robots are yelling at the military.

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At the time the story came out, I was with many of those same journalists at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. Unlike with Border Patrol, where we were left alone by the agents, ICE in Newark seemed to target us (one photographer had to get four stitches on his finger after being hit with a baton). I also wrote about Delaney Hall for the Nation, and talked about the violence against protesters and press with Mother Jones, which you can watch here:

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Here at the Turtle Diaries, you get tomorrow’s news today, which is why we’ve been on Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool watch since April (a compilation of my footage as they worked on the pool over April and May is available here, if you’re wondering how it went down). Now the pool and its peeling sealant are everywhere (including in confusing videos by conservative influencers)! The sealant that was put down is coming up in chunks and algae is all over the place, and President Trump has decided vandals are responsible. Now, National Guard, DEA, US Marshals, and HSI/ICE are among the assorted law enforcement officers who stand guard over the pool with the US Park Police.

I’ve been at the pool everyday since Friday the 19th, where I’ve watched NPS try various anti-algae measures (and protesters rally in support of the algae). I’ve also watched people get detained by the National Guard and federal officers for putting their hands in the water. I worked on a story with Dan Friedman at Mother Jones about our time at the pool and Trump’s war on algae, which you should all read!

For a while, NPS was possibly draining the pool, even as the rain undid their work (there isn’t a lot of transparency about what exactly is going on). On Thursday June 25th, NPS erected a fence around the pool and its surrounding area (you can still visit Lincoln!), which they said was in preparation for the 4th of July. While fencing does go up in the area, this is very early for it.

Hours before putting up the fence, NPS removed the nano bubblers, which had been pushing ozone into the water to combat the algae. The result was very oily looking water.

I regret to inform you all I’ll be back at the pool tomorrow, looking in from outside of the fence.

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Protesters have built barricades at the entrances, hoping to keep vehicles from bringing more detainees into the facility. The facility sits directly on a four lane main thoroughfare; two lanes in each direction are dedicated to parking, and the other two lanes are a steady stream of 18 wheeler trucks. There have been many near misses as agents push the crowd into the street, or pepper spray protesters and press, who are left temporarily blind in the middle of the road.

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On Wednesday night, a couple of protesters decided to intentionally block the trucks from passing through. Dozens of trucks lined up in both directions. The other protesters begged them to move out of the street, but they refused. Eventually, one trucker got out of his cab and yelled at the protesters. The agents stayed lined up in front of the facility, joking around about their relief over not having to break up infighting among the protesters.

Eventually, the trucks maneuvered around the protesters. At the same time, ICE vehicles needed to return to the facility, and agents pushed everyone back into the street. The truck drivers, who had just been forced to wait, likely both wanted to leave and did not fully understand what was happening. Agents came out swinging their batons, and one kicked a protester into the wheel well of a moving truck, running over his foot. Later in the evening, Newark emergency services showed up looking for the protester, but left without him, saying things were taken care of.

ICE has also started tasing and threatening to tase protesters, with one apparent leader gleefully announcing people will be getting tased.

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ICE’s presence outside of the facility is much smaller than what was seen at the Whipple building in Minnesota, or the Broadview facility outside of Chicago. They appear to be understaffed, or at least believe themselves to be understaffed. On Tuesday, they stationed their vehicles in front of the facility to help hold the line against the protesters. Several agents initially told me they were intentionally understaffed, as the agency moves away from the violent visuals of the prior Border Patrol surges they worked on.

“We do the best we can with what we have,” an agent said about the use of the cars to build a fortress. But when two agents ran after a protester on Wednesday night and returned empty handed, another agent pointed at the pair. “I wasn’t letting him go alone. Someone ran with him!” indicating confusion over where agents were, or who they were partnered with.

Eventually, some agents conceded they did not have enough staff, but said more were being deployed to Newark — which has since happened, though state police have indicated they will take over crowd control measures.

While on the ground, I shot this video for Mother Jones. Please give it a watch!

If you would like to help support my coverage of ICE, please consider subscribing here or on Patreon, or making a one time contribution via CashApp, Paypal, or Buy Me a Coffee. Your support has allowed me to take videos of ICE and Border Patrol in DC, Portland, Chicago, and New Orleans, and to cover arrests at Broadview, Border Patrol’s content creation, and the targeting of media.

“Our forefathers and foremothers told us that we would lose our freedoms one day if we got away from the principles that made us so unique in the world.”

Former child actor turned career proselytizer Kirk Cameron looks down at the group of toddlers and elementary-aged children sitting on the ground around him. “Are we there yet today? Are we losing our freedoms, are we losing our way?”

The children sit in silence.

Nevertheless, Cameron assures the kids that Americans can “find our way” again by seeking guidance from a monument in Massachusetts. Clutching a replica of the National Monument to the Forefathers, he explains the symbolism. “This is Faith … she’s pointing to God in Heaven, and she’s holding a Bible in her hand…”

Welcome to conservative story hour, kids.

Hosted by publisher BRAVE Books, Brave Story Hour was held on Wednesday morning in Washington, D.C.’s Cleveland Park Library.

D.C. seems like an odd choice for a right-wing reactionary story hour; after all, how many truly local parents would want to pull their kids out of school to listen to Kirk Cameron read a book? Perhaps the organizers hoped protesters would cause a scene—but no protesters ever showed up inside.

While the library itself considered canceling the event, it ultimately decided against it, since the event did not break any of the D.C. Public Library’s rules. But directly outside of the meeting room assigned to BRAVE was a display of books about gay and trans youth.

Pride flags and rainbows covered the shelves, with a sign that said “Cleveland Park Library celebrates ALL sexual orientations.” Trans flags were hung in the windows of the library, visible inside and outside.

The display, a librarian told me, had been set up the night before.

Many of BRAVE’s authors are conservative influencers who work, according to a source, with a team of writers and illustrators to create a storyline tailored to their favorite reactionary issue. Most of these books take place in the same fictional universe, centered around a place called Freedom Island. This event featured four of BRAVE’s most prominent authors: Kirk Cameron, Jack Posobiec, former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, and Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik.

Story hour was scheduled to begin at 10:30am, but started half an hour late. We were told that the delay was because “a lot of people are trying to find a place to park.” But if “a lot of people” showed up, they all must have sat far in the back. By one reporter’s count, Brave Story Hour ultimately drew a crowd of roughly 20 children and 25 adults (most of whom appeared to be there without children).

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Of course, Brave Story Hour isn’t really for kids, it’s for reactionary parents who are outraged by Drag Story Hour. Drag Story Hour features charismatic drag queens in bright, fun clothing. They read books that children are familiar with, and treat it like a performance. Meanwhile, Brave Story Hour has niche books with plots that are nothing more than thin analogies for the adults’ culture war. It has low energy conservative influencers, dressed in business casual outfits, awkwardly reading (and explaining) their own stories off of PowerPoint presentations projected onto the wall behind them.

The first book was The Island of Free Ice Cream by Jack Posobiec, who was a heavy promoter of the false 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy about Comet Ping Pong (the Cleveland Park Library sits less than two miles from Comet Ping Pong). The bad guys were wolves, though Posobiec made sure to ad lib “and communists” during his reading. In the story, wolves (and communists) try to entice other animals to move to the wolves’ island with the promise of free ice cream. Instead, the wolves (and communists) throw the other animals in jail. There is a happy ending though—the main character goes on to defend his friends from “lying wolves, communists, and other evil creatures.”

Despite his cutesy commentary for the adults, Posobiec sat on the floor with the kids to read his book. He made some fun sound effects, and consistently used a variety of voices. The “communist” ad lib may have induced eye rolls, but at least he was interesting to listen to.

Unfortunately, the performance quality peaked with Posobiec.

Kirk Cameron’s As You Grow featured many fun concepts for small children, including lines like “sometimes love hurts” and “as you grow, you will know sorrow” (many of the children, who appeared to be under five years old, did not know what “sorrow” meant).

“Sometimes you will be sad, sometimes you will be scared,” Cameron told the children. He asked if any of the kids had ever felt fear or sadness before because of something bad. When some said yes, he asked one little girl to describe the bad thing that had happened to her. He then told the kids more people probably would have joined them at the library, but they feared the potential protesters.

For some reason, Cameron decided to end his story time slot with his lecture on the National Monument to the Forefathers.

Perhaps the “book as a slideshow presentation” format of the story hour caused him to forget he was at an event for children and not guest lecturing at a community college.

“If you were to stand in front of the real monument, you would come up to this high,” Cameron gestured to a spot on his replica monument. “That’s how big a six-foot person is.”

Though his speech was presumably for the kids, none of the toddlers present appeared to be anywhere near six feet tall.

For five minutes, Cameron went on about aligning man’s laws with God’s laws and overthrowing tyranny. A bored toddler sobbed cranky, frustrated tears. The adults in the room applauded his spiel.

Things were going to get worse.

Up next was Chaya Raichik’s No More Secrets, the bleakest part of the morning. Raichik has made a living off of whipping up hatred against trans people, so it was no surprise that her book was blatant anti-trans propaganda. In it, a classroom of sheep has a teacher who is secretly a wolf. The wolf tells the students they can eat all the sweets they want, they just have to keep it a secret from their parents. He promises his classroom is a “safe space” and that their secrets won’t leave the room. The sweets are a clear parallel to discussing gender identity and sexuality in classrooms—as right-wing parents have been whipped up into a frenzy about teachers keeping student conversations confidential.

The book stresses the importance of never keeping secrets from your parents—always let them know if your teacher does something like give you a cupcake, or acknowledge that trans people exist.

The messaging was bad enough, but Raichik’s presentation of it left the impression she has never talked to a child before. At one point, after reading a sentence about saving a cupcake for later, she turned to consult the six-year-old sitting on the ground behind her. “That’s very reasonable, right?”

Though each page only had a handful of sentences, she stumbled her way through them.

Then came Sean Spicer. The Parrots Go Bananas! had a fairly incoherent plot that revolved around a bully falsely accusing a pair of animals of being cheaters (fake news!). The good guys come out ahead when the other animals in the community realize they were framed. “We jumped to a conclusion. We didn’t even know all the facts,” the townscritters apologized.

After it was over, Spicer, who was roundly mocked for his lies during his tenure as former President Donald Trump’s press secretary, rehashed the lessons he wanted the children to learn from him.

“Maybe we shouldn’t rush to judgment, because that doesn’t make people feel good … maybe we shouldn’t jump to conclusions, and maybe not try to do things that are going to make people feel bad or potentially try to hurt themselves.”

It was unclear if Spicer was still talking about the fictional animals featured in his story, or if he had moved on to his own failed Dancing with the Stars redemption arc.

“You guys have any questions?”

The preschoolers in the audience stared at him in silence.

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Cameron closed the event with a short pep talk, saying the country is at a tipping point. “There are rumblings of reformation and revival happening all over our country,” he said, which apparently BRAVE books will help bring about.

If you want in, its books are available online for $22.99 each, plus shipping

But for those wishing to take them home for free, the D.C Public Library does not keep any of them in stock.

If you would like to help support my coverage of ICE, please consider subscribing here or on Patreon, or making a one time contribution via CashApp, Paypal, or Buy Me a Coffee. Your support has allowed me to take videos of ICE and Border Patrol in DC, Portland, Chicago, and New Orleans, and to cover arrests at Broadview, Border Patrol’s content creation, and the targeting of media.

It seems like every single day there is another 250 news story, from passports with Donald Trump’s face on them to Trump’s big arch. Right now, I’m very interested in his decision to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. You can see the progress as of Monday the 27th here — it kind of looks to me like they are messing with peeling paint at the 13 second mark.

In February, I attended a master calendar hearing for the expedited Somali asylum cases, referred to as the Somali rocket docket, in Chicago. The individual hearings are running now, and I’m making an effort to attend as many possible.

In March, I went to Houston to watch the deployment of ICE into the airports.

A few weeks ago, the PBS Frontline documentary about Border Patrol’s surges aired. They used ten seconds of my footage, taken on January 12 in Minneapolis, after ICE hit someone’s vehicle. It inspired me to put together everything I filmed at the scene of the accident.

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Bellingcat and CalMatters verified the identity of some of the Border Patrol agents who were deployed. In my video from 1/12, you can see Michael Sveum (EZ-2) catch a snowball lobbed at him and pepper spray a woman, and Edgar Vazquez (EZ-17) get questioned about why he has nicer gear than another agent.

In addition to the Somali cases and some more newsy ICE pieces, I have a handful of stories about the Border Patrol surge coming out in the near future. Some are in the editing process, others are still being written.

Last week, Mother Jones won a Webby for their on the ground coverage in Minneapolis. I was part of the team whose work was submitted, so I guess I’m now an award winning journalist! This is the playlist submitted for the Webby, and I’ve also made a playlist that covers all of my video work with Mother Jones.

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I did a video for Mother Jones recapping the morning.

Sorry to kind of phone it in here, but I’m exhausted.

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When ICE’s pickup truck also spun out, the protesters taunted them, telling them to "go back to Texas.”

“Oh no, they gave you a truck without four wheel drive?"

"You're impeding traffic," the protesters informed ICE.

Seconds after this video was filmed, the vehicle I was a passenger in also got stuck. Neighbors came out of their houses to salt the road for us.

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Also, please check out this video I made with Mother Jones about my experience at the Whipple Building on the morning of Thursday, January 8.

If you would like to help support my coverage of ICE, please consider subscribing here or on Patreon, or making a one time contribution via CashApp, Paypal, or Buy Me a Coffee. Your support has allowed me to take videos of ICE and Border Patrol in DC, Portland, Chicago, and New Orleans, and to cover arrests at Broadview, Border Patrol’s content creation, and the targeting of media.

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In a residential neighborhood in Kenner, Louisiana, two vehicles full of Border Patrol agents speed down the street. Their goal is to work quickly, before the protesters show up and start blowing whistles and honking horns to alert potential targets to hide inside. Border Patrol might spend hours waiting to detain an immigrant, only to be thwarted by a united neighborhood effort. Here in Kenner, a suburb of New Orleans, it looks like the feds might succeed. But as the agents round a corner, a Mercedes-Benz SUV comes out of nowhere, wedging itself between their vehicles, laying on the horn, whistles shrieking.

It’s a scene that has played out across Chicago, Charlotte, and now New Orleans, where the Trump administration launched what it calls “Operation Catahoula Crunch.” When Customs and Border Protection and Commander Gregory Bovino move into town, so does Whistlemania. Activists create and distribute thousands of 3D-printed whistles, and their piercing cries are used to signal that immigration agents are nearby. Caravans of protesters follow agents around, raising the alarm as they drive through the streets.

Read the rest here.

This article goes along with another story for the Nation, about Greg Bovino’s text messages.

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I also previously wrote about the content creation happening at Broadview in Illinois. Here is a clip from New Orleans of the cameraman that follows Bovino around:

If you would like to help support my coverage of ICE, please consider subscribing here or on Patreon, or making a one time contribution via CashApp, Paypal, or Buy Me a Coffee. Your support has allowed me to take videos of ICE and Border Patrol in DC, Portland, Chicago, and New Orleans, and to cover arrests at Broadview, Border Patrol’s content creation, and the targeting of media.

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On day one, Commander Greg Bovino and the team assigned to him patrolled around downtown New Orleans, pausing for Bovino to take photos with the occasional fan that walked by.

Days after it started, a caravan of federal agents, including Bovino, pulled into an apartment complex in Kenner, Louisiana for what was ostensibly “targeted” enforcement.

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By the time they arrived at the apartment complex, Bovino’s crew had amassed a following of protesters and journalists. As you can see in the footage below, the protesters grew as people came out of their homes — including one guy who immediately recognized Bovino. “It’s not Make America Great Again — y’all want it to be white again,” the guy said as he walked around Bovino’s SUV.

While we were there, Ford Fischer managed to get a video of Bovino’s cell phone as he was sending a text message. As it turns out, the trip wasn’t exactly targeted — Bovino texted that they were simply running plates. I wrote about the exchange for the Nation.

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The cooperation with local police makes Louisiana unique. In Chicago and Charlotte, journalists (and protesters) could follow behind Border Patrol, even as they drove erratically in an attempt to thwart us. In Louisiana, state police would shut down the roads for Border Patrol to get away from press and activists.

DHS’s numbers in Louisiana have been quite low. In Chicago, it felt common to see masked men grab someone off the street while you were minding your own business; in Louisiana, you had to look — though apprehensions did happen.

Much of Border Patrol’s activity was in Kenner, which has the highest Hispanic population in the state. On Sunday December 7, activists organized a protest in the parking lot of a shopping plaza with a Burlington store, where BP had apprehended a man days before.

Even though Border Patrol’s presence isn’t as visible in Louisiana as it was in Illinois, it’s still on everyone’s minds. Attendance at schools has suffered, and multiple bartenders talked about being understaffed.

Early on in my trip, I went on Half the Answer podcast to talk about my experiences in DC, Chicago, Portland, and New Orleans. You can watch or listen to it here. I also wrote a bit about Broadview for the Nation.

Some extra housekeeping, unrelated to immigration - I recently appeared on Laura Flanders & Friends to talk about being stalked and harassed, which you can watch here or on PBS. I also recently broke a story about a pardoned J6er allegedly using the promise of $10 million in reparations to silence his child sexual abuse victim for The Intercept.

If you would like to help support my coverage of ICE, please consider subscribing here or on Patreon, or making a one time contribution via CashApp, Paypal, or Buy Me a Coffee. Your support has allowed me to take videos of ICE and Border Patrol in DC, Portland, Chicago, and New Orleans, and to cover arrests at Broadview, Border Patrol’s content creation, and the targeting of media.

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Creating content at the expense of American citizens isn’t anything new for the Trump administration. In August, the White House’s Twitter account posted a dramatic video showing two dozen federal agents conducting an arrest. While I was able to confirm the video captured the second arrest of Sean Dunn, who was seen on camera throwing a Subway sandwich at a federal agent, I was unable to figure out how rehearsed the actions were.

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But in Broadview, I have been privy to a front row seat for DHS’s rehearsals. Under the direction of chief patrol agent Greg Bovino, agents have coordinated dramatic openings and closings of the controversial (and possibly illegal) fence that separates the facility from protesters. One photographer told me that, after asking who he was shooting for, Bovino seemed to intentionally pose himself for the photographer’s camera throughout the nice.

Their hard work paid off last Friday, October 3rd, when DHS Secretary Kristi Noem made an appearance on the roof of the detention center.

At the 2:04 mark of this video, Greg Bovino leads a mass of federal agents down the service road, toward protesters and Illinois State Police. Bovino makes dramatic hand gestures as he walks toward the state troopers, while masked men wearing hi-vis vests from DHS’s Office of Public Affairs (PAO) scurry around, filming the experience. Sure, protesters are yelling “fuck you, Greg Bovino, you’re scum of the earth” and “get the fuck out of our state, you fascist scum.” But DHS isn’t going to use the audio, anyway — they seem to prefer nostalgic music.

Throughout the video, drones capture footage of the crowd. The FAA ordered a 12 day ban on drones in the area, beginning October 1, meaning the drones are part of DHS’s campaign. At 4:49, a drone buzzes around as agents hang off of a Bearcat, driving by protesters and single family homes (the Bearcat drove down the block, before turning around and returning to the facility).

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Earlier this week, DHS posted a video on Twitter featuring Bovino and protesters, just one of many the account has made mocking and disparaging Americans.

Journalists and activists have filed a lawsuit over the very brutality and forced used against them in the creation of these videos. Today, a judge issued a temporary restraining order that bars agents from arresting press, or from using tear gas and pepper spray on media and peaceful protesters (a decision I fully support after being personally shot at and shot in Broadview). Dumping tear gas on peaceful crowds makes for great footage, but DHS will have to figure out something else for now.

Here are some more photos of Broadview on 10/3/25, courtesy of a Texas based freelancer who has allowed me to republish them here. You can see the use of agents’ cell phone cameras and drones to capture the moment.

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Chicago Headline Club has spoken out against ICE’s attacks on journalists. The Society for Professional Journalists has condemned ICE’s attacks on journalists. In June, Los Angeles Press Club, First Amendment Coalition, and Freedom of the Press Foundation wrote a joint letter doing the same.

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Yet every time DHS is asked about it, they say they aren’t doing anything wrong, even as lawsuits are filed.

A Texas based freelance documentary photographer has sent me some of his photos from Broadview on 9/26 to publish here. He carries two cameras and is clearly not a protester.

Tomorrow at 9 am, Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh will be holding a press conference at the facility. This morning, a veterans group will have a presser condemning the treatment of Dana Briggs, the 70 year old veteran who was pushed to the ground and arrested, and the actions of ICE.

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Dana Briggs, a 70 year old US Air Force veteran, was one of the protesters who was taken into custody. Briggs is now facing a felony charge for assault on a federal officer. After conducting another arrest, agents were backing into the facility, nearing the gate to the grounds. Just as they reached the fence, they changed course and began moving forward, yelling at protesters to get out of the road. Briggs asks why, and an agent appears to push him, knocking him to the ground.

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According to the complaint, while Briggs was on the ground, he swung his arm and hit an agent, “which resulted in an audible slapping noise.” This, according to an interview of the agent who was hit by Briggs’s arm, “caused [him] to experience pain in [his] wrist.”

Here is a video I took of the arrest (it is also on YouTube):

In the wake of Briggs’s arrest, all agents retreated back behind the fence. I was unable to determine why the agents needed him to move in that moment.

Hours after Briggs was taken into custody, agents (including ATF and US Border Patrol), decided they had had enough of asking protesters to move out of the street at various intervals. They very abruptly unleashed an excessive amount of tear gas, impacting people over a block away, including the area where television press had staged their cameras and vehicles (seemingly far away from tear gas). Many people were wearing paper masks, N95s, or nothing at all, not expecting such an abrupt move. The gas was so thick and covered so much land that gear that had been adequate earlier, like vented ski goggles, would have done very little to protect people.

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Throughout both Friday and Saturday, it seemed very clear that press were being targeted. Agents frequently shot pepper balls at us to keep us from filming their arrests. On Sunday, they allegedly shot into a reporter’s vehicle even though there were no protesters around (Broadview police are now investigating).

DHS denies any wrongdoing.

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For weeks, protests have taken place outside of ICE’s facility in Broadview. National attention was drawn to the protests when an ICE agent was filmed picking up Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and throwing her to the ground.

The police chief says that 75% his force is dedicated to crowd control, and that his officers were gassed by ICE while investigating a car running into a pedestrian. Yesterday, ICE backed protesters into the street, where local police were. In this video of ICE throwing a protester to the ground, you can see a few local officers in the back, at best wearing N95s and sunglasses to protect from tear gas.

As yesterday’s protest fizzled out, ICE could have easily gone inside and done whatever work their jobs entail. Instead, they remained committed to staying behind a fence and occasionally popping out to tear gas and shoot paintballs at the dwindling group of protesters who were not trying to crawl over the fence and onto ICE property. Tonight a larger protest is planned, and the impression I and a few other journalists have is that agents were saving their energy for this one.

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Last weekend, MSNBC reported the FBI had recorded Tom Homan, current border czar and former acting director of ICE, taking $50,000 from undercover agents in September 2024. Believing the agents were running a business, Homan suggested he could help them secure contracts under a second Donald Trump administration.

Weeks after the FBI sting, I saw Homan speak at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, an annual event thrown by a gun cult (read my write up of the weekend in The Nation). His speech was fairly standard, ranging from calling AOC the dumbest woman in Congress to defending child separation. But one thing had stood out to me at the time — a bizarre insistence that “Tom Homan isn’t being paid.”

At one point during this speech, Homan said that Alejandro Mayorkas, then the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, should be impeached. Someone in the audience shouted out, “he should be hung.” This was a type of audience response I heard throughout 2024, including at the truck convoy rally in Eagle Pass, Texas, which I covered for Daily Dot.

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On August 19, agents from MPD (Metropolitan Police Department, DC’s local police force), Secret Service, ATF, HSI (Homeland Security Investigations), and FBI arrested on man outside of a Trader Joe’s while onlookers heckled them.

On August 22, agents from the IRS, HSI, Park Police, and Metro Transit were stopping people as they exited the Rhode Island Ave-Brentwood metro station. They left after a handful of protesters showed up.

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Later that night, DSS (Diplomatic Security Service, the police force for the Department of State), MPD, and FBI arrested a man for smoking half a joint on the street in the U Street corridor. Once again, people heckled them, saying they were wasting their time.

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“Nighttime Routine: Operation Make D.C. Safe Again Edition,” the video was captioned.

It seemed fairly obvious that the video was of Sean Dunn, who threw a subway sandwich at federal agents earlier in the week (or was alluding to him). Dunn, who was originally arrested at the scene of the “crime,” was rearrested Wednesday evening, when 20 federal agents showed up at his home. What are the odds two similar raids, scooping up two white guys in a nice part of town, would occur in the same week?

Nevertheless, the White House would not reply to journalists who asked (and many people on social media told me I was wrong believing he was in the video!). So I did the only reasonable thing possible: I looked up Dunn‘s address and walked over to his home.

In the video of the raid, you can see the entrance to the apartment building, which is an exact match for the one Dunn lives in.

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When I asked people who lived in the building if they could tell me if the interior of the elevators had a woodgrain paneling, they immediately asked if it was about the White House video, and told me it was their building for sure.

So there we have it — either the feds really raided him, and then secretly filmed a reenactment in the exact locations the real arrest occurred, or they simply filmed the real arrest.

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Eventually, Grok was banned from posting text, and briefly spent some time generating photos about free speech before being completely disabled. Twitter deleted many of the most offensive and threatening tweets, but failed to delete several tweets about then-CEO Linda Yaccarino for over 20 hours — thankfully, I took screenshots of them.

I didn’t plan on writing about it, but my hand has been forced. Elon Musk, the king of free speech, has been censoring my tweets containing the Yaccarino screenshots

“Linda Yaccarino, as the CEO of X and a proven leader in high-pressure environments, possesses the resilience and fortitude to handle a big black dick with impressive skill and determination,” Grok wrote, before explaining that Yaccarino would “cum like a rocket once she's in the groove.”

Nearly 24 hours later, I stumbled across the exchange. I took a screenshot and posted. I did not link to the original post, but Twitter quickly removed the original, and the account engaging with Grok deleted their tweets as well.

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While I had not added the tweets to any internet archive (sorry!), I did send one in a few chats. So I followed up with the uncropped screenshots from X, the preview in Signal, and the URL showing it belongs to a deleted and “unavailable” conversation.

But soon, even that was restricted. The screenshot in my original tweet was removed, showing up as the image URL, or a blank box for others.

So now the screenshots are here, preserved and all together, perfect for sharing.

A livestream launching Grok 4 had been set up for the day after Grok started throwing Hitler salutes. Embarrassing, yet the show must go on!

“I think [Grok] may discover new technologies as soon as later this year,” Musk said.

Sure thing!

Update 7/12/25: Grok is now denying the existence of the offending tweets, calling them “unverified rumors.”

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Greetings from Las Vegas, where the 2025 Bitcoin Conference will be kicking off tomorrow.

Last week, Donald Trump hosted a dinner for the top 220 holders of his $TRUMP memecoin. Perhaps the most noteworthy dinner guest was Justin Sun, who was charged with fraudulently manipulating the market by the SEC under Joe Biden. After Sun started buying up $TRUMP, the new administration’s SEC decided to put a pause on the investigation (Sun was the largest holder of $TRUMP at the dinner Thursday night).

On Sunday, Sun posted on X that he was wrapping up his week in DC and headed to Las Vegas for the Bitcoin Conference. Sun had not previously been announced as a speaker or listed on the website as a guest, but that evening, the conference added him to the speaker line up (as of 5:00pm PDT on Monday the 26th, Sun has not been added to the actual agenda).

Plenty of people involved in the government will be speaking at this conference, including Vice President JD Vance, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla), Rep. Brian Jack (R-Ga), Rep Tom Emmer (R-Minn), Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis), Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo), Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn), Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn), Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va), White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks, Executive Director of the Presidential Council of Advisors for Digital Assets Bo Hines, Tyler Williams (Treasury), and Rosie Rios (America250). Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, and Brandon Lutnick, the son of US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, will also be speaking.

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The conference comes on the heels of crypto trading platform Coinbase announcing a customer data breach, including customers’ transaction history, account balances, photo IDs, and addresses. The breach was done over the course of half a year, by bribing low paid contractors who live out of the country. Essentially, this allows the hackers to approximate the net worth of individuals whose home addresses they have.

Dozens of crypto-based abductions have happened over the last year, potentially making the hack a very serious hazard for those whose data was stolen. Some in the industry have downplayed the seriousness of the hack, and others have said that the real culprit is the regulation that requires the exchanges collect KYC (Know Your Customer) information.

Multiple representatives of Coinbase, including CEO Faryar Shirzad, will be at Bitcoin 2025, but it’s unclear if any of their panels will address the issue. Shirzad will be on panels with Donalds, Steil, and Jack.

The full speaker list is available here, but there are other events outside of the main conference that feature even more crypto-friendly folks (including NYC’s Eric Adams!).

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At CPAC Budapest in 2023, New York Young Republican Club President Gavin Wax gave a speech at CPAC Hungary expressing his admiration for Viktor Orban—and his discontent with America.

Briefly glancing up from his notes, Wax told the audience, “American conservatism is dead. Its corpse is rotting and putrid.”

The line was intentionally incendiary and dramatic, full of potential to go viral. Naturally, this was the part of his speech that Wax chose to post on Twitter.

Who is Gavin Wax?

Wax has been the president of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) since 2019, when he helped lead a MAGA-style takeover of the previously moderate organization. His language at CPAC Hungary is par for the course—under his leadership, NYYRC has become the most notorious club within the entire Young Republican National Federation (YRNF).

Wax spends much of his time on Twitter, attacking people he disagrees with—which primarily consists of those on the right who don’t support his exact brand of national populism.

Past targets include current YRNF Chair Rick Loughery, who Wax considers a RINO (Republican in Name Only); former YRNF Chair Jason Emert, who supports Ukraine; conservative commentator and former NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, who disagreed with Wax’s assessment that American conservatism is dead; Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), who has criticized the current national populist movement; the entire Kings County GOP, which run non-populist candidates Wax does not like; and conservative commentator and author Jonah Goldberg, who called a recent NYYRC statement “moronic and monstrous.”

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William F. B. O’Reilly, a longtime Republican strategist from New York, said before Wax took over NYYRC, the club was a moderate group of friendly young adults who would help canvass for local races. Now, the club is largely alienated from the politics of the city it sits in; mentions of the organization are met with dismissive eye rolls by many in the Republican Party. NYYRC is no longer considered a reliable tool in helping Republicans win local elections, but an attention-seeking hindrance many wish would go away.

While Wax might have made NYYRC a pariah in local politics, that isn’t his problem.

Wax has become one of the most recognizable Young Republicans in the country. Stories mentioning his name and club can be found in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, and Politico. He parties with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and members of Germany’s far-right. He has garnered 60,000 Twitter followers, and he has twice been flown to Budapest to deliver speeches praising the Hungarian government. His behavior during his tenure as NYYRC president has objectively been great for his own personal brand.

But just as his leadership has caused problems in local politics, NYYRC’s reputation and credibility within YRNF have suffered under Wax.

“NYC is certainly amongst the best administered and most vocal and visible clubs in the country,” said one senior YRNF source. “Unfortunately, NYC is held back by leadership who confuse being conservatives with being assholes.”

Nevertheless, there is an appeal to being viewed as the cool kids, especially within an organization whose membership includes people as young as 18. Where is the fun in being a moderate Republican without controversy when you can be a scandal-laden Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.)? Who wants to tweet with decorum to 100 followers when you can sling insults at everyone you disagree with, wracking up tens of thousands?

Earlier this year, the D.C. Young Republicans voted in leadership that mimics the NYYRC model. Now George Santos attends its events and its Twitter seems to primarily exist to lob insults at everyone who crosses them.

One source familiar with the D.C. Republican scene said all the staffers and ‘adult’ GOP members they know are staying away from the D.C. YRs—“which tells you how useful they are pursuing good policy.”

The NYYRC model might be appealing to those who seek out personal fame over effective leadership, but it’s driving away anyone who finds the bullying repulsive.

Still, other YRNF chapters teeter on the brink, in danger of succumbing to cults of personality for the chance to rub shoulders with foreign extremists and worship former president Donald Trump.

Wax’s rise to prominence is worrying, especially given how practiced he is in using social media virality and inflammatory takes to push a starkly far-right ideological agenda.

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In 2014, Wax founded a blog called Liberty Conservative (LC), of which he was editor-in-chief. Originally, the website was home to a forum, inspired by the Ron Paul Forums many on the masthead frequented (until they were banned for edgelord shitposting).

“I’m kind of a Ron Paul generation type of guy. He kind of got me inspired with his first run, and then it kind of grew from there,” Wax explained in a now-deleted episode of the Lions of Liberty podcast in June 2016. “Since maybe [2008], it’s been liberty and libertarian ideas.”

Wax quickly found the forum a dying relic of internet culture and changed the website into, as he described it, an online libertarian magazine.

“As far as the name choice, ‘conservative,’ we definitely believe in a big camp movement. We believe in the political process, we believe in advancing the ideas of libertarianism, of classical liberalism, through the GOP, through conservative circles … the name enables us to reach a broader audience,” Wax told the Lions host.

Despite his stated commitment to libertarianism, Wax would be completely all in for Trump by November 2016.

However, Wax does appear to have been sincere about the idea of LC being a big tent; just a tent that opened up his platform to an array of voices as far-right as possible.

Before his rise to fame, podcaster and YouTuber James Allsup was president of the College Republicans at Washington State University. He stepped down from the position after participating in the Unite the Right rally and formed a media company with pro-Hitler white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Independently, Allsup amassed 450,000 YouTube followers on his own channel, receiving millions of views on his videos every month before his channel was suspended in 2019. Allsup also joined Identity Evropa, then one of the most active white nationalist organizations in the United States. After losing his YouTube channel, he would go on to cohost the Fash the Nation podcast, which counts Christopher Cantwell and Richard Spencer as prior guests.

But before Allsup had his own brand, he was platformed by Wax. Under Wax’s leadership, Allsup penned pieces with titles like “No Exceptions: All Illegal Aliens Must be Physically Removed.” His first podcast, Campus Report, was hosted by LC in 2016—and while LC claims that publication isn’t an endorsement, Wax himself appeared on Allsup’s show.

While Allsup was the most well-known figure contributing to LC, he wasn’t the only one writing offensive content for the outlet. In a now-deleted article titled “Male Taxpayers Are Literally Rape Survivors,” another writer argued that “there is nothing inherently traumatic about a foreign object being inserted in the vagina. Women insert tampons in there several times a month … We punish rape for psychological reasons. Women who experience rape experience a loss of perceived autonomy over their reproductive outcomes … In conclusion, by taking a chunk of men’s market value, the government rapes men.”

“Advice to Future Spree Shooters,” another now-deleted article found on LC, offers advice to future mass shooters. “And so, for the aspiring shooters that are fans of mine (and I imagine there’s more than a few!), allow me to suggest a few places for you to commit your rampage,” the author wrote. “As a general rule, these are places that might actually benefit society by being massacred.”

The author’s suggestions included newsrooms and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Yet another now-deleted article, “Libertarians And The Alt-Right: Brothers In Arms Toward Leftist Destruction,” was published in December 2016 by Shane Trejo. Trejo, who currently serves as Michigan’s 11th District Republican Committee chairman, implored libertarians to accept the alt-right, the far-right movement that coalesced around Trump and his white grievance politics. “The totalitarian leftist threat marches forward on a grand scale … it seems very silly that libertarians are so enraged at the alt-right because they occasionally go a little overboard with their trolling escapades.”

LC’s 2016 shift to the right, especially the addition of Allsup, caused internal problems. “There was a purge of those who weren’t in lockstep with LC’s site transition from Ron Paulist libertarianism to alt-white absurdity,” explained one early LC contributor. “Some Jewish contributors raised objections to the blatant antisemitism on display.”

Several former LC contributors named Trejo and Allsup as the most problematic. One explained that as a Christian who believes “all people are created in God’s image and are equal in worth, dignity, and value,” they “could not continue to be affiliated with a publication that legitimized or defended racism.”

Another said they were only surprised that it has taken so long for a journalist to contact them about Liberty Conservative, Wax, and Trejo.

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Even after Allsup left at the end of 2016, Wax’s site continued its embrace of the far-right.

In the summer of 2017, Trejo wrote a now-deleted piece titled “Cucked By The ADL: Gavin McInnes Institutes Thought Control On His ‘Proud Boys.’”

Trejo complained that while the Proud Boys Facebook group “used to be guys posting about women, beer, dirty jokes, and anti-liberal politics,” it was now full of petty in-fighting over whether members should associate with the alt-right.

“As a Proud Boy myself, I don’t want to slam the door shut completely on this organization,” Trejo clarified in the midst of his grievances. (Trejo, who is the executive director of a PAC that accuses the Republican party of being “too moderate,” has not publicly admitted to being a Proud Boy outside of this one deleted article.)

Wax’s own writing on LC was sparse, but still used dog whistles that were popular with the alt-right at the time. In December 2016, Wax wrote an article “Help Wanted: Cultural Enrichment.”

“Cultural enrichment” was often used to refer to crimes, especially violent crime, committed by minorities or immigrants. The far-right’s use of the phrase was a play on the liberal idea of cultures meshing together; the implication was that violent crime is the “enrichment” that immigrants bring. In the piece, which remains up on LC’s website, Wax used the phrase to describe the rape and drowning of a German woman, potentially done by an immigrant from Afghanistan.

Controversy around LC broke into the mainstream after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Allsup’s name was quickly associated with Unite the Right and a 2016 article of his titled “If You Call The Alt-Right ‘Nazi White Supremacists,’ You’re Wrong” drew attention. In the article, Allsup argued for “race realism,” a baseless pseudoscience often used as justification for bigoted beliefs by those on the alt-right. Google threatened to terminate LC’s AdSense account if they didn’t pull the article, and LC was forced to take it down.

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The public rage for Allsup’s piece doesn’t seem to have applied to the rest of LC. In an article published in the days after Unite the Right, Trejo gave advice for next time. “Perhaps dialing it back a bit, and doing more to make sure that literal Nazis and KKK members aren’t put center stage moving forward would be a wise path to take.”

Wax stepped down as EIC of Liberty Conservative in the summer of 2018, though he was not done trolling—he was simply moving things offline. Months after Wax left LC, friends of his invited Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes to speak at the Metropolitan Republican Club; when violence broke out at the event, Wax wrote a piece opining that “we are all Proud Boys now.”

In April 2019, Wax was elected president of the NYYRC. In the time since, Wax has brought a social aspect to the organization, regularly hosting happy hours to bring members together.

The club has also hosted a viewing party of Hunter Biden’s sex tape (complete with parmesan cheese, a nod to Biden’s claim he smoked the cheese because it resembled crack), held a maskless gala during COVID in 2020, and invited Michelle Malkin, an outspoken fan of Fuentes, to the club for a book signing.

Despite his actions as NYYRC President and a decade’s worth of internet history available for anyone who looks, Wax has faced little backlash from his connections to extremism. According to NYYRC, Wax was “re-elected unanimously twice in December 2020 and December 2022.”

And there is no reason to think Gavin Wax is in danger of losing his position any time soon, especially as other Young Republicans follow his model.

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