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Body camera footage newly obtained by CBS News shows the moments leading up to and after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot US citizen Ruben Ray Martinez in March 2025 and contradicts the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the killing.
Martinez was 23 when an agent killed him in his car last spring in South Padre Island, Texas. Local news outlets reported on his death at the time, but described it only as an “officer-involved” shooting. Last month, ICE finally confirmed that one of its agents killed Martinez.
But DHS, ICE’s parent agency, was quick to deflect blame. DHS claimed that Martinez “intentionally ran over” an agent “resulting in him being on the hood of the vehicle,” adding that a separate agent “fired defensive shots to protect himself, his fellow agents, and the general public.”
The footage released by CBS on Friday tells a different story.
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the US Secret Service want to build a tool for tracking US travelers’ flights and other personal information according to previously unreported documents reviewed by Mother Jones.
These agencies have asked for feedback from the private sector on whether this tool can be made, or if something like it already exists. Their request was posted on the government’s database for contractors. In it, the Secret Service, an arm of DHS, outlines the specifics they envision: a program that would provide real-time or near-real time access to a range of personal travel data, including passenger names, origins and destinations, flight numbers, ticket numbers, and forms of payment. The data would be gleaned from third-party ticketing sites, such as Orbitz or Expedia, and must cover major US and international airlines.
“It’s not hard to imagine that DHS would want access to these travel records to be able to track all sorts of people.”
The proposed tool appears to be an attempt to rebuild a surveillance pipeline that was recently shuttered amid public backlash. Last year, The Lever and 404 Media revealed that the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC)—a data broker owned by the major US airlines—had discreetly sold flight data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which are both also arms of DHS. ARC ceased its so-called Travel Intelligence Program in November, citing pressure from lawmakers. DHS’s new Request for Information (RFI) seems to reference the now-defunct ARC program, saying the requested platform would “replace an existing commercial database used by the United States Secret Service for law enforcement travel data queries.” DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment, including a question about whether the agency is exploring a replacement for ARC.
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This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In a new report that outlines a dozen high-risk pollutants given new life thanks to weakened, delayed or rescinded regulations, the Environmental Protection Network (EPN), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group of hundreds of former Environmental Protection Agency staff, warns that the EPA under President Donald Trump has abandoned the agency’s core mission of protecting people and the environment from preventable toxic exposures.
Americans may not realize the scope and scale of their exposure risk from diverse industrial and agricultural sources or understand how much those risks are rising as political appointees destroy the safety net the EPA has always provided, said Marc Boom, EPN’s senior director for public affairs, at a press briefing Thursday.
“While we may hear about one chemical or one EPA rule being changed,” Boom said, “so much is happening at once that it’s very difficult to see the full picture and connect it to our everyday lives.”
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