Fatal Encounters

Fatal Encounters

Good morning. President Trump returned to the combative posture toward Iran that he displayed at the war’s start, threatening yesterday to attack civilian infrastructure and refusing to rule out a ground invasion.

And the House voted overwhelmingly to make daylight saving time permanent. (The Senate may feel differently.)

There’s more news below. But I’m going to start today with the deadly business of federal immigration enforcement.

Federal agents have killed two immigrants to the United States in the last eight days, both of them in their cars. The first man to be killed, in Houston on July 7, was in the country illegally. Details in the other case, of a man killed in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday, have remained unclear.

The shootings weren’t exactly uncommon. Since President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, agents involved in the immigration crackdown have shot at least 22 people. Six have been killed. Three were U.S. citizens. Nearly all of the shootings involved officers firing at people in vehicles.

We’re still piecing together the particulars of the two most recent shootings. In Maine, officials said the man was trying to flee. In Texas, they said the victim had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon. None of the agents in either incident was wearing a body camera. But The Times has been talking to witnesses and examining video footage. Here’s what we’ve learned.

What happened in Biddeford

It was early Monday morning in the small, working-class city on the banks of the Saco River, 20 miles south of Portland. Federal agents attempted a traffic stop on a white sedan driven by Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 25, a Colombian national who lived in Biddeford with his wife and 3-year-old daughter. According to Guerrero’s father, he was in the United States legally, though Homeland Security described him, without naming him, as an “illegal alien.”

It’s not clear whether ICE was targeting Guerrero — a spokesman for Senator Angus King said the homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, had told the senator the agents were looking for someone else. But they pursued Guerrero, and the stop went awry. The Times obtained several videos of their encounter. In one, there is audio of shouting and five gunshots. Another, from after the shots were fired, shows Guerrero’s car circling slowly around an intersection. After three loops, agents manage to stop the car, open the door and pull out Guerrero. His body falls to the ground. It’s unclear if he’s alive.

“I heard agony,” Mary Hayes, a local resident, told The Times. She was describing Guerrero’s wife, kneeling and wailing in the street as his daughter looked on. “I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same.”

What happened in Houston

The shooting in Houston also happened early in the morning, in the historically Hispanic neighborhood of Magnolia Park, near the Houston Ship Channel. Immigration agents in two unmarked vehicles there began trailing a white work van. Minutes later, the van’s driver, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, had been fatally shot in the abdomen.

Our colleagues on the visual investigations team took a close look at videos of the pursuit. The footage shows the ICE agents driving after the van aggressively, seemingly without flashing emergency lights. At one point one of the pursuit vehicles appears to veer toward the van, possibly making contact, though it’s unclear if it was a ramming or an accident. If there is video of the shooting, it has not emerged yet.

But a few moments later, footage from a passing motorist shows two agents bent over Salgado Araujo. He was lying on the street, his hands behind his back, his shirt soaked in blood.

These shootings didn’t happen in a vacuum. My colleagues have reported a recent surge in immigration enforcement activity. It has happened both in large cities like Chicago and Las Vegas and in small suburbs outside Milwaukee and San Antonio. Daily immigration-related arrests doubled in the last week in June, they found, and continue to rise at a pace of about 2,000 arrests a day.

The recent enforcement operations “may be more targeted, but they escalate quickly, and it is leading to violence just like before,” a Hispanic community leader in Pennsylvania told The Times. “That is the part that is scary.”

Yesterday, The Times reported, the Trump administration ordered ICE officers to halt most vehicle stops while carrying out their operations. (ICE said in a statement that the agency would not discuss law enforcement tactics.)

Still, death stalks their work. This also happened yesterday: A 28-year-old man ran from what the authorities called “an encounter” with federal immigration officers at a gas station in St. Augustine, Fla. He was hit by a tractor-trailer and killed.

  • Sotheby’s sold a towering T. rex fossil, nicknamed Gus, for $50.1 million, reanointing the carnivore as the most valuable dinosaur on the commercial fossil market. (Two years ago, it had been unseated — by a herbivore, no less — when a stegosaurus sold for $44.6 million.)

  • In a small Brazilian city deep in the rain forest, you follow either the blue bull mascot or the red one. It’s nothing to do with sports or politics. It’s all about class.

  • The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was about menopause myths.

  • Scientists say they have solved what may be the most famous lawn-care-related problem in physics: What happens if you run a sprinkler in reverse, underwater? (One of the scientists who helped with the research was the aptly named Brennan Sprinkle.)

— That is how many miles Dale Sanders, 91, plans to hike each day on his quest to reclaim his record as the oldest person ever to hike the whole Appalachian Trail. At 80, he became the oldest person to paddle the full length of the Mississippi.

Erling Haaland led Norway to its best-ever World Cup finish. Now he’s big in China. Fans there call him “Baby Ha.”

The tomatoes at my market are starting to get good, and it’s time to return to one of my favorite summer meals: Ali Slagle’s tomato Cheddar toasts. You don’t really need a recipe to make them (it’s just tomato and Cheddar on toast slathered with mayonnaise), but you sure can benefit from the advice she picked up from the chef Chris Kronner about how. That is, to grate your cheese into the mayonnaise before swiping it onto the hot toast (wall to wall, please). It melts into a queso-like almost-cream that complements the sliced tomatoes beautifully. 🍅

Tired: Michelangelo’s David. Wired: Michelangelo’s small wooden sculpture of Christ at the Santo Spirito church in Florence. Here’s the argument.

Strap yourself into one of five new — and frankly terrifying — American roller coasters. One will take you up 309 feet, pause, then drop you at a 95-degree angle at a top speed of 87 miles per hour.

Invest in a soundbar for that giant television you found on sale at the big box store. Even the budget pick recommended by the audiophilic cineastes at Wirecutter can help bring Hollywood into your home.

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