Exclusive: Three men who were alongside Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was killed in an immigration operation, said a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle and that at no point did the driver veer in his direction.

A Harris County prosecutor on Thursday said his office is committed to investigating the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an ICE agent. And four Houston Democratic members of Congress demanded that feds release footage of the incident. Here’s what you need to know. 🧵

NEWS --> Three men who were in the van with the victim of the ICE shooting in Texas are potential witnesses, but they're now under pressure to self-deport, a rep for the families tells me. They remain in detention even as ICE's story falters. Details in this piece: newrepublic.com/article/2129...

TBH, it's not a very good likeness of me (or Karen)... (H/T: GULC alumna Maria Lowe.)

Grateful for local Houston station KHOU youtu.be/FzekKKyaGvA?...

NEW The Justice Department is threatening to prosecute election officials across the country for failing to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls, an escalation of the Trump administration's attempts to prosecute election fraud, according to letters I obtained with Andy Mannix @propublica.org 🧵

1/ I looked at 20 years of Supreme Court decisions and found that for the first time, all nine justices decided more cases by secret ballot — aka the “shadow docket” — than it did for cases argued in open court last term. 🧵:

🚨 We analyzed the Supreme Court’s decisions over the past 20 years and found that for the first time, the court issued more consequential rulings on its “shadow docket” (unsigned orders often decided without arguments) than the traditional merits docket. www.propublica.org/article/supr...

A Troubling Milestone: The Supreme Court now decides more cases using its shadow docket than it does on its merits docket, the first time ever that has been the case, a @propublica.org analysis found. @kbmorales.bsky.social

NEW: The Trump administration has shut down a controversial Homeland Security tool it had touted as a way to find noncitizens who’d illegally registered to vote, @propublica.org has learned. 🧵

So awful. This paper just won a Pulitzer and deserves another one for its coverage of ICE’s actions in Minnesota. A reminder that journalism layoffs have nothing to do with the quality of work. Minnesota Star Tribune eliminates 24 union jobs, primarily in newsroom www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Compare Alito's description of Trump's racist statements (on the left) to Justice Kagan's anthology of Trump's racist statements (on the right). These are passages from this morning's opinions in Mullin v. Doe.

They finally did it. A group of reformers who have been fighting for years to overthrow the Brooklyn Democratic Party leadership on Tuesday won the majority they need to take over the county party and oust its chair, Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn. hellgatenyc.com/morning-spew...

A trove of internal records from a secret society for powerful figures in US politics, finance, and tech was left exposed online, WIRED has confirmed, naming participants in its events and revealing sensitive personal details they were assured would stay private.

New: An Indian Billionaire was targeted by the Trump administration. Then he poured millions of dollars into a startup secretly backed by Donald Trump Jr. www.propublica.org/article/trum... w/ @josh-kaplan.bsky.social @amierjeski.bsky.social

One factor in the recent homicide decline was the Biden admin's clampdown on gun trafficking. Now, the Trump admin is pulling back on several fronts, raising odds that the flow of illegal guns will rise, with ill effects down the line. My latest @propublica.org: www.propublica.org/article/how-...

New: A top White House aide intervened to get a $620 million Pentagon loan for a company tied to Donald Trump Jr. “The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” said one person involved. www.propublica.org/article/dona...

5/ defense atty parente speaking to the judge

The government appears to be trying to privatize the federal prison system piecemeal. This month, they've put out several RFIs for vendors to take over things like food services (!), medical (!!) and commissary. For example, here's the food services one:

NEW: Prosecutors Had a Drugs-for-Votes Scheme “Locked Up.” Under Trump, They Were Told Not to Pursue Charges. By @raquelrutledge.bsky.social

I don't quite have words yet. I'm stunned, grateful, disoriented. My deepest, deepest thanks to the five families without whom this book would not exist. It has been the honor of my life to know and learn from you.

WATCH: The DOJ quietly closed 23,000+ criminal cases in the first six months of the second Trump administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases. Full story: propub.li/4tHp2Wd

It’s happening:

The feds are moving to deport the partner of a construction worker who died in the Key Bridge disaster. Eye-popping scoop by Daniel Zawodny in @thebaltimorebanner.com www.thebanner.com/politics-pow...

Are You Waiting for Opioid Settlement Money From Purdue, Mallinckrodt or Endo? Get in Touch. Our recent investigation details changes to a bankruptcy settlement that leaves out some of the hardest-hit victims of the opioid crisis. Here’s how you can share your story with ProPublica & @inquirer.com:

Our vision is coming true. Step 1: Make the data. Step 2: A thousand startups bloom. Step 3: Fairer access to the law. This article validates the work we and others have been doing for decades. This is why the legal space is blowing up. (It’s the data.) www.law.com/legaltechnew...

This site uses "AI clean rooms" to bypass copyright to "liberate" open source projects of the need to credit or support open source projects. It's satire, but it also works and is something that the open source community is already dealing with: www.404media.co/this-ai-tool...

1. Boy, Amazon is in a heap of trouble. Evidence made public yesterday by California AG @agrobbonta.oag.ca.gov shows blatant price fixing. And there are so many examples. Here's Amazon scheming with a pet food supplier to get Chewy to raise its prices.

Great find: Al-Fassel is literally hosting a hi-res CENTCOM logo for some reason

"Asked to articulate the difference between his group’s working with the Justice Department and the groups criticized in the report for working with the department during the Biden administration, Mize started to say, 'We’re not targeting pro-abor- ...' but then trailed off."

NEW: Justice Sotomayor statement: "At a recent appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law, I referred to a disagreement with one of my colleagues in a prior case, but I made remarks that were inappropriate. I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague."

FRONTLINE and ProPublica investigate the violence, protests and arrests stemming from the federal immigration sweeps across the country. "Caught in the Crackdown" premieres tonight on PBS and online.

BREAKING: Banner parent company to buy Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, staving off newspaper’s closure

NEW: “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to," Gregory Bovino told Border Patrol officers in 2025. But a review of hundreds of such arrests shows that charges brought against protesters and bystanders repeatedly fell apart under scrutiny. w/ @frontlinepbs.bsky.social

Yesterday, our members in New York, D.C., Chicago and across the country walked out to demand a fair contract. We deserve job security. We deserve to know AI won’t be used to replace us. We know that @propublica.org can and must do better.

The Trump administration has fired more than 100 immigration judges and hired more than 100 new judges to replace those them. I analyzed court data and found that while fired judges granted asylum 46 percent of the time under this administration, their replacements are granting asylum in 6 percent.

NEW: The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony in a trial told 404 Media.

It me! Ithacans, come see me live and in the flesh, talking about death. news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...

our look at gray money is leading the @nytimes.com on politics newsletter today. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/u...

We’re on strike today! Support our fight for a fair contract by NOT visiting the @propublica.org website or engaging with ProPublica stories today. Tell ProPublica’s management you won’t cross the picket line: actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

SCOOP A DOJ lawyer told a judge in Rhode Island that voter rolls data the agency has collected from states was being kept separate, and no analysis was being done to identify voting irregularities. That wasn't true.... www.wired.com/story/doj-mi...

Profound, incredible www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/o...

Breaking News: The President fires Pam Bondi and inserts Todd Blanche as acting Attorney General of the Justice Department. ICYMI, we chronicled some of Blanche’s business and ethical dealings here. www.propublica.org/article/todd...

Fun fact: If you ever find yourself thinking, "wow there sure are a lot of federal court rulings today," the odds are decent that the day is March 31 or September 30 www.uscourts.gov/data-news/re...

Shortly after AG Bondi’s confirmation, the DOJ declined to prosecute more criminal cases in a single month than any other going back to at least 2004.

NEW: The government tells Americans to use VPNs to protect their privacy. The government also automatically presumes communications of unknown origin are foreign. Foreign communications don't require a warrant to wiretap. Lawmakers who've done the math want answers. My latest @wired.com:

🚨 We've seen instances of people impersonating ProPublica reporters on Signal and over email. Reminder: Our reporters have their Signal handles listed on their bio pages. They will always have an active @propublica.org email address. ➡️ How to verify: https://www.propublica.org/staff#news-staff

NEW: Over the past year, we've been collecting thousands of financial disclosure documents from across the Trump administration. Now we're making them searchable. Look up names, assets, former employers across 1,500+ Trump appointees and 3,000+ ethics documents.

don't use viridis as your palette when you have just 2-3 categories challenge