Two Men Are Dead. The Cameras Were Off.
Plus: Texas puts the womb trade on the record, and a congressman’s West Bank detour splits the right in two.
Hey friends!
It’s Wednesday, and you are warned I get a little in the weeds on this one. It happens sometimes.
The biggest challenge with a fast-moving news cycle is remembering what happened just two weeks ago, let alone months or years ago, especially when it is highly relevant to today’s news stories. That is just one of the reasons for The Read, especially My Read of each story. I go digging not only for the cross-check but also the details that are omitted or forgotten, and we have plenty of that in today’s edition.
Let’s get into the news.
In today’s Read:
ICE killed two men who weren’t the target, no body cameras on either agent. The left wants “abolish ICE.” The real scandal: they had the funding for the cameras and the cameras were off.
Ro Khanna says settlers and soldiers detained him in the West Bank, then fundraised off it within hours. The buried story: Tucker Carlson wants the GOP ambassador fired for siding against a Democrat.
Texas put commercial surrogacy on the record. The right called it exploitation, the press made it a birthright-citizenship squabble, and everyone skipped the women.
Quick Rundown: the Navy re-blockades Iran, Graham’s sister takes his seat, the Russia sanctions bill gets his name, the DOJ loses its 13th straight voter-roll case, a Cox heir is arrested in Spain, and two justices go to Congress for security money.
Two Men Are Dead, and Neither ICE Agent Had a Camera Rolling
The Story.
On Monday morning, July 13, an ICE officer shot and killed Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. Agents were running surveillance on someone with a final removal order. Guerrero wasn't that someone. According to DHS, he left the residence in a vehicle, tried to flee when officers moved to stop him, and an officer opened fire while "fearing for public safety." His wife and 3-year-old daughter were with him, the girl still in her pajamas, and the witness accounts split: one heard Guerrero say "I tried to stop," another heard an agent say the driver tried to run him over. DHS confirmed Guerrero had a work permit issued in May 2025, a Social Security number, and a pending asylum claim, while noting he entered illegally in 2023 and that a work permit "does not confer legal status." Days earlier, agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. He wasn't the target either. In both shootings, the agents weren't wearing body cameras. That brings the count to roughly seven people killed during immigration enforcement since January 2025. On Tuesday, DHS paused most vehicle stops nationwide except for the most serious criminal targets, and said it's moving to expand body cameras. By Wednesday, Trump reversed the pause, telling ICE agents to go back to work and keep making traffic stops.
The Left’s read. Reign of terror. The Intercept ran “How ICE Arrests Went Quiet, and Got Even More Deadly,” the Boston Globe called them “gangster tactics,” and every Democrat in the Maine Senate scramble is now calling for ICE to leave the state or be dismantled. The frame is an agency so reckless it’s killing bystanders and hiding it.
The Right’s read. Nothing to see here. Border czar Tom Homan went on Fox and called the vehicle-stop halt “not a policy change, it’s a temporary pause,” predicting agents would be “back up and running” in a couple of weeks. The drivers fled, the agents feared for their safety, the pause is caution.
What both sides are skipping. The cameras, and the money. Congress appropriated $20 million for ICE body cameras in fiscal 2026. DHS pledged rapid rollout back in February. Five months later, the officers who killed two men still didn’t have them, and DHS’s explanation is that “back-to-back Democrat shutdowns” interrupted the purchase. The money was allocated. Cameras have reached half the field offices, with the rest promised in 60 days, and the two that ended in dead civilians weren’t among them. The left wants the whole agency abolished and skips right past a fix this concrete. The right wants to call it a two-week timeout and skips that there’s no footage of either killing because the equipment Congress paid for wasn’t on.
A man is dead who wasn’t the man they came for. Start there, because it’s true and it’s terrible, and no amount of policy argument makes Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero less dead. His family is planning a funeral this week. That’s the first fact, and anyone who races past it to score a point has already lost the thread.
Now watch what the left does with it. The language went straight to “reign of terror” and “gangster tactics” and “abolish ICE” inside a news cycle, and the details doing the heaviest lifting are the ones built to gut you: the 3-year-old in the back seat, the Bluey pajamas, the pink backpack. I won’t pretend that little girl is a prop. She’s real; she saw something no child should, and her being in that car is a fact the investigation actually has to weigh, because a father driving his daughter to daycare is not a man who typically floors it at a federal agent. But it also raises the questions the pajamas are deployed to bury. Did the agents even know she was in the back seat, which they almost certainly didn’t? And why is the image running laps around the internet while the investigation hasn’t returned a single finding? Look at where the left landed anyway. Not "fix the stops," not "turn the cameras on," but "abolish," which is the same open-border finish line it wanted long before. The demands showed up before the investigation had even started.
There are still many unanswered questions. Was he fleeing? Did he turn the vehicle toward the officer? What was in the officer’s head in the half-second before he fired? That’s what an investigation is for, and it’s barely started. And it matters who runs it. Every agency has an inspector general for exactly this, the same way police departments have internal affairs, and here that’s the DHS Inspector General plus the FBI. That structure isn’t new and it isn’t a scandal. What’s new is who suddenly distrusts it. The same left that called Trump firing 21 inspectors general “a purge of independent watchdogs” and swore the IG was the one independent check we couldn’t afford to lose has decided, this week, that a DHS IG investigation is a coverup. Pick one.
I'll grant the honest half, and it cuts both ways. Trump did spend 2025 gutting the IG corps and stacking replacements with his own people, so the "independent" label is thinner than it used to be. The distrust didn't start this year, though. It traces to term one, when watchdogs like Michael Atkinson, the intelligence IG who forwarded the whistleblower complaint that got Trump impeached, looked to him like opponents with badges, and he fired five of them in six weeks in 2020. The left screamed "purge" then too, and swore Atkinson only did his job. Both sides have been sanding down the watchdog's independence for years, from opposite ends. But you don't get to canonize the inspector general in January and torch him in July because the target changed. And the outside check is sitting right there anyway.
Maine’s attorney general opened a separate state investigation, with the state police evidence team and the medical examiner on scene, and a Democratic-run state has no reason to cover for ICE. Maine’s delegation, Susan Collins included, is already pressing DHS on how much it’ll cooperate. Distrust the federal watchdog if you want. The state is watching too. And whether ICE had the right guy or the wrong guy, this part doesn’t change: when an armed officer tells you to stop, you stop. You do not run, you do not point two tons of car at him, and you fight it out later in court, where you can actually win. That’s not me carrying water for the agency. That’s how you stay alive to make your case.
So where’s the real problem? The cameras.
Congress put $20 million toward ICE body cameras this fiscal year, and the agency promised a fast rollout in February. Two men are dead in July and the officers who shot them didn’t have cameras on. DHS blames the back-to-back government shutdowns for stalling the purchase, and that tracks. The Democrats’ shutdown fights froze a pile of federal spending, and buying and issuing cameras across a department this size isn’t a weekend job. It’s also not a permanent pass. Half the field offices have them now, the rest are promised inside 60 days, and after this week that clock has to hold. Because the footage is the only thing that settles a story like this for anyone, the officer included. A clean shoot is the agent’s best defense. No camera just leaves everybody guessing, which is the last thing you want when a civilian is dead.
I’ll give the administration real credit here, because it earned some. This response looks nothing like the Noem and Bovino era, when the answer to every ugly encounter was to circle the wagons and dare you to complain. Pausing the vehicle stops, pushing the cameras out faster, retraining the agents on how these stops go, that’s the right instinct. A reevaluation and more training is always good. You don’t fix a bad stop by pretending it went fine.
Then, less than a day after DHS announced the pause, the President stepped on it, posting that ICE “CANNOT give up” the traffic stop. DHS shared it out.
Here’s where I actually land, because it cuts both ways. Trump isn’t wrong that the traffic stop is a real enforcement tool, not a courtesy ICE can just retire, and a blanket “never pull anyone over” rule would hand the criminals he’s talking about a free pass. But defending the tool and yanking the pause are two different things. He reversed the one move that looked like a correction before it corrected anything: the cameras still weren’t out and the retrain hadn’t happened. Keep the traffic stop. Just don’t torch the timeout before the fix it was buying has a chance to land.
And here’s the line the “abolish ICE” crowd needs you to forget. You can be critical of how it was done and still think it needed doing. Being angry that two men who weren’t the target are dead does not mean signing up for the DSA program where enforcement itself disappears and the border becomes a suggestion. Those are two different arguments, and the left is betting you can’t hold both. You can. Fix the tactics, keep the mission, put the cameras on.
Watch whether the cameras actually reach every field office in the 60 days DHS promised, or whether that timeline quietly slips. Watch whether the Maine and Houston investigations get released in full or get buried in “ongoing.” And watch whether a single outlet running “reign of terror” this week reports the $20 million camera line, because that’s the fact that indicts the rollout without abolishing anything.
The scandal isn’t that ICE exists. It’s that we paid for the cameras and they were off.
ICYMI
Skill in Action: Why My Tuesday Salmon Failed (I Fixed It)
Here is the scenario. It’s 5:15 pm. You’ve had a busy day. The salmon was supposed to be defrosted by 5:30, but it was still vaguely glassy. Crank the burner, drop the fillets into a barely warm pan with a slick of olive oil. Doing everything I told you not to do.
Ro Khanna Got Stopped in the West Bank, Then Fundraised Off It. Watch the Right Eat Itself.
The Story.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who’s openly weighing a 2028 presidential run, spent part of the congressional recess on a three-day West Bank tour led by Breaking the Silence, an activist group that opposes the Israeli military’s presence in the territories. On July 8 he says masked armed settlers blocked his van outside Khirbet Zanuta, a demolished Bedouin village in an area soldiers believed was a closed military zone, and that IDF soldiers then joined and kept the road shut for over an hour, until he called the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. The IDF disputes the key detail: it says its soldiers didn’t block anyone, that troops were sent to disperse the Israeli civilians blocking the road and reopened it. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called the trip a “stunt,” said Khanna entered a restricted military zone without coordinating, that the armed men were a civilian patrol, and that Khanna didn’t identify himself as a congressman until late in the encounter. Khanna’s answer: “the IDF is lying,” and he’s more disturbed by Israel’s lies than the detention. Within hours of posting about it, he sent a fundraising email. Then Tucker Carlson called for Huckabee to be fired for failing to defend a fellow American. Khanna also co-sponsors a bipartisan push to strip $3.3 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel, a version of which hits the House floor this week.
The Left’s read. Exhibit A. Al Jazeera, Haaretz, and J Street run it as exactly the settler intimidation Palestinians live with daily, with the twist that when the army finally showed up it chased the visitors off instead of the men with guns. Khanna’s the American who got a taste of it on camera.
The Right’s read. Split down the middle, which is the point. The Israel-hawk lane (Huckabee, National Review, The Free Press) calls it a dishonest stunt staged by a presidential hopeful who wandered into a military zone with activist handlers. The Tucker lane calls it a national humiliation, an American congressman detained by armed men while the U.S. ambassador shrugged, and wants Huckabee gone.
What both sides are skipping. Two tells. First, the fundraising email. A member of Congress turned a roadblock into a donation ask before the dust settled, which is the best evidence going for the “stunt” read, and the left won’t touch it. Second, settler roadblocks in the West Bank are a real, documented pattern whether or not this particular hour was staged, which is the part the “it’s all theater” right skips. And the bigger thing sitting under both: the right’s Israel coalition is coming apart in public, and the press is covering Tucker-versus-Huckabee like a celebrity beef.
Let’s be honest about Ro Khanna first. The man is running for president in 2028 and he knows a good visual when he builds one. You don’t tour a demolished village with a camera crew and activist guides, get stopped, and have a fundraising email out the door the same day by accident. That’s not a congressman caught in a bad moment. That’s a candidate collecting footage. And he’s barely hiding it.
In his first interview on the ground he branded himself “probably the first American politician [who has] been detained by the IDF and Israeli settlers,” and said the trip left him “more resolved” to consider a 2028 run. The donation ask is the tell. His own mouth is the confirmation.
Yes, settler harassment in the West Bank is real. Grant it and move on, because Khanna didn’t wander into this blind. He’s been to Israel three times. He’s met Israeli prime ministers and sat with President Abbas in Ramallah, so he knows how combustible that ground is, and he knows congressional trips get coordinated with the Israeli government and the IDF for exactly that reason, which is how other delegations meet Palestinians without ending up in a 90-minute standoff. Khanna skipped the coordination on purpose. A first-timer might not know better. He does.
But look at how this play got built. His guide was Breaking the Silence, an activist group whose entire purpose is opposing the Israeli military in the territories. The spot he picked was a patch the soldiers on the ground believed was a closed military zone, and the Free Press reports the closure had lapsed, though nobody there knew it. He gets briefly stopped, fires off a fundraising email the same day, and two days later he’s on Hasan Piker’s stream, the socialist streamer, cashing the whole thing in:
Ro Khanna, on Hasan Piker’s show: “Israel is acting in a rogue way, with an apartheid state in the West Bank, and is committing genocide in Gaza. We need to end all aid... We have a vote on the Massie Amendment coming up next week. Are they really gonna vote for aid after Israel’s foreign government just detained an American congressman and four American citizens?”
That vote is real, and it’s this week. The Massie Amendment to strip $3.3 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel is on the House floor, and Khanna is one of its sponsors. So walk the sequence back. Tour a flashpoint with an anti-IDF group as your guide, get stopped in what the soldiers think is a closed zone, fundraise off it by dinner, then go on a far-left show and turn “they detained a congressman” into the closing argument for the aid cut you were already pushing. That’s not a man who stumbled into a moment. He went shopping for one.
Now the detail that actually matters, and it’s where Israel gets its due. Khanna’s headline claim is that the Israeli military detained him. The IDF says its soldiers didn’t block the road, they came to clear the civilians who were. That’s not a small distinction. “Settlers stopped my van” and “the army detained a U.S. congressman” are two very different sentences, and Khanna keeps reaching for the bigger one. When the disputed fact cuts against the guy with the fundraising email already sent, I lean toward the account that isn’t selling merch off the moment. And then the footage turned up, from Khanna’s own side, and made it worse for him.
An activist traveling with him posted his body-cam video to prove the detention:
@weimanadav (on the ground with Khanna) The IDF is lying about the detention of Rep. Khanna. I was on the ground with him that day, and my body camera captured us being detained by both settlers and Israeli soldiers. The IDF did not disperse the violent settlers, as they claim. They explicitly sided with them.
Watch what people found in that same tape. Mark Zlochin went back through it and says nobody was detained at all, that they were stopped from entering a closed military zone Khanna had already been warned about:
Mark Zlochin @MarkZlochin The most remarkable thing about this footage is that it completely debunks the whole “detainment” narrative. His body camera shows that nobody was “detained” - they were simply prevented from entering a closed military area, which he had previously been warned he could not enter. But words - whether “detained,” “genocide,” or “apartheid” - have no meaning for these propagandists.
And here’s the tell inside the tell. The video’s English subtitles translate every part except the one line that sinks the story:
Mark Zlochin @MarkZlochin Something I missed when I first watched the video two days ago: they added English subtitles for everything except the very last part, where a member of the local security team says: “The police have already come across you here, right, buddy? And what did they tell you? That you’re not allowed to be here, right? It’s a closed military zone. Right?” Funny how that’s precisely the segment they chose not to translate into English.
A closed military zone he’d already been warned off, and a translation that drops the guard saying exactly that. That isn’t documentation. It’s staging.
Here’s the story the coverage is burying under the he-said, IDF-said. The right just fractured on Israel in public, and it wasn’t close. Tucker Carlson, the loudest voice in the post-Trump right, called for a Republican ambassador to be fired for not defending a progressive Democrat.
Watch whether Khanna releases the full footage or only the cut that sells the detention. Watch whether the IDF’s “our soldiers didn’t block the road” account holds or quietly shifts. And watch how many more MAGA voices line up behind Tucker against Huckabee this week, because the count is the story, not the stunt.
Khanna got the ad he came for. The right handed him a bigger one for free.
Texas Put the Womb Trade on the Record. The Press Made It About Passports.
The Story.
On Wednesday, July 8, the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, chaired by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, held an interim hearing on foreign nationals contracting with Texas surrogates to have children. It came out of an interim charge from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to examine "the unethical and foreign interests exploiting the surrogacy and fertility industries in Texas." Witnesses testified that there's no federal oversight of surrogacy and no background-check requirement for the people commissioning a baby, which leaves the door open to child abuse and foreign exploitation. Jennifer Lahl of the Center for Bioethics and Culture told lawmakers to "close all commercial international surrogacy arrangements." The testimony feeds legislation when Texas reconvenes in January 2027, and the state GOP platform already backs banning commercial surrogacy for foreign nationals.
The Left’s read. Immigration story. Where the mainstream showed up at all, it framed the hearing around birthright citizenship, Texas Tribune’s headline was “Texas to explore banning foreign surrogacy,” pinned to the fight over who gets a passport after the birthright ruling. The women renting out their bodies were a footnote, and there was no wall-to-wall national pickup.
The Right’s read. Exploitation, plainly. The Daily Signal, Texas Scorecard, and First Things centered the surrogate mothers, the “build-a-baby” arrangements, and a pipeline that lets foreign nationals order an American-born child with nobody checking who they are.
What both sides are skipping. The women, still. The mainstream frame is citizenship and the conservative frame is the marketplace, and the surrogates keep getting reduced to a step in somebody else’s argument. Take the woman who actually testified at this hearing. Christian Ross told the committee she contracted with a California agency, was misled about the foreign couple she was carrying for, and watched the baby end up in England’s foster system, while the pregnancy left her with preeclampsia, multiple blood transfusions, an emergency C-section, and no ability to have children of her own. “If I could go back and redo this all over again, I never would have done this,” she said. That’s the story hiding inside the abstraction, and almost nobody’s telling it as what it is.
Watch how fast a hearing about renting wombs turns into an argument about passports.
The bones of this are ugly and simple. You can commission a baby in Texas from a woman you will never meet, using an egg from a third woman and a clinic that runs it like a supply chain, and at no point does anyone run a background check on the person buying the child. Foreign or domestic, no vetting. If that arrangement existed for adoption, we’d call it what it is and shut it down by Friday. Slap the word “surrogacy” on it and suddenly it’s a fertility service with a nice website.
The birthright and immigration piece is real and important. Foreign nationals commissioning American babies to plant a citizenship anchor deserves a hearing and a law, and I’m not waving it off. But it’s the easier play. Who gets to be an American is a fight the political class already knows how to have, well-lit and clean for a headline. The harder thing, the one almost nobody is working, is women and children treated as a commodity: surrogates carrying babies for strangers with no background check on the buyer and no protection for themselves, newborns handed off under contract like inventory. That got skipped, and it got skipped precisely because birthright is the easier political win, at the expense of the very women and children the hearing was supposed to protect.
Related
Rent a Womb, Buy a Child: The Money of Surrogacy
In 2023, 11,000 American women were paid to carry babies for those who could buy a child and rent a womb. This is part two of my series The Surrogacy Racket. Part one was about the foreign billionaires purchasing American babies. In part two, I examine the money that funds this racket.
Look at the Arcadia case if you want the thing without the euphemism. California authorities pulled 21 children from a mansion owned by a former Chinese official and his partner, most of them born to American women recruited online through an agency the couple secretly owned, several of those women carrying embryos for the same buyers at the same time without knowing it, and a batch of the babies now sitting in foster care. That is the market working exactly as designed. The product is the baby. The woman is the machine. And the only reason any of this is finally getting a hearing is that somebody in Texas noticed the babies come with U.S. citizenship attached, which tells you it took a passport to make the exploitation worth anyone’s attention.
I don’t need the immigration angle resolved to see the plainer thing. We built an industry where a human being can be commissioned, gestated, and handed off under contract, and we dressed it in soft language so nobody has to look at it straight. Texas at least made someone look.
Watch whether Kolkhorst’s committee actually produces a bill for the January session or lets it die in the interim. Watch whether a single national outlet covers the American women in the Arcadia case as a labor-and-trafficking story instead of a true-crime curiosity. And watch which fertility-industry groups show up to lobby against background checks, because that’s the tell.
You can’t buy a puppy without a screening. You can order a baby without one.
The Navy went back to blockading Iran, and Trump floated a tollbooth. The U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports went into effect Tuesday, July 14, backed by a third straight night of strikes, and the White House told Congress the war is back on to start a fresh 60-day War Powers window, after filing a notice the same week that hostilities had ended. Trump also announced, then walked back within a day, the Washington Times reported, a 20% “reimbursement” fee on all cargo through the Strait of Hormuz, swapping it for promised Gulf-state investment. The criticism came from Republicans and Democrats both.
Graham’s sister took Graham’s seat, and got sworn in Tuesday. On Trump’s personal recommendation, Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Darline Graham Nordone, the late senator’s sister, who was sworn in Tuesday per the Washington Times, becoming South Carolina’s first female senator. The 62-year-old commissioner for the state Commission for the Blind has never held elected office. The seat’s on November’s ballot regardless, so it’s a four-month placeholder that keeps a fragile GOP majority intact.
CBS News@CBSNewsDarline Graham Nordone, Lindsey Graham's sister, is officially appointed to fill the late senator's seat. “Lindsay has always been there for me, and now I will be there for him,” Nordone said. “It is such a privilege to get to finish some of his important work.”8:24 PM · Jul 13, 2026 · 605K Views387 Replies · 284 Reposts · 1.8K LikesThe Russia sanctions bill now carries the name of the man who died pushing it. Bipartisan senators unveiled the Sanctioning Russia Act on Tuesday, one of Graham’s top priorities before his death, mandating sanctions on Putin, Russian oligarchs, and state firms, with a 100% tariff (cut from Graham’s original 500%) on the top buyers of Russian oil, China and India among them. Trump said the bill has “a good chance,” RFE/RL reported, and floated bolting Iran and Hezbollah onto it.
The DOJ’s voter-roll hunt is now 0 for 13. A federal judge in West Virginia, a George W. Bush appointee, dismissed the Justice Department’s suit for the state’s unredacted voter rolls, WV MetroNews reported, the 13th straight loss in the push to seize voter data. West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state cheered the ruling, and the judge openly wondered “what the real purpose was.” It’s the backdrop to Trump’s Thursday primetime speech on “free and fair elections.”
A Cox media heir was arrested in Spain for bankrolling militants. Fergie Chambers, who walked away from the Cox Enterprises fortune with a reported $250 million payout in 2023 and poured it into pro-Palestinian and radical-left groups, was arrested in Spain on a U.S. extradition request, Fox News reported. The federal indictment charges him with money laundering to provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations, and he faces up to 30 years. His allies call it political repression.
Stu Smith@thestustustudio🚨 Fergie Chambers, heir to the Cox media fortune and a major funder of militant pro-Palestine groups, was detained in Spain as the Trump administration seeks his extradition on federal charges carrying up to 30 years in prison.5:17 AM · Jul 13, 2026 · 482K Views151 Replies · 1.14K Reposts · 5.91K LikesTwo Supreme Court justices went to Capitol Hill for security money. Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett made a rare appearance before Congress as the Court seeks millions to harden judicial security, the AP reported. The U.S. Marshals logged 564 threats against federal judges last fiscal year; Barrett’s detail defused a fake 911 call at her home, and a would-be assassin was arrested near Justice Kavanaugh’s house.
CBS News@CBSNewsSupreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett detailed threats she and her family have faced, and described the moment her 12-year-old son found her with a bulletproof vest following the leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. "I didn't expect that performing this service4:21 PM · Jul 14, 2026 · 432K Views579 Replies · 113 Reposts · 556 Likes
That’s The Read. See you Friday.
If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.