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A Detroit Fire Department official named Derek Marshall McMenemy is now facing federal charges for allegedly seeking and possessing CSAM. The whole thing came together after a search warrant in South Carolina in April 2024 turned up devices with explicit chat logs on them. One of those chats ran through Kik under the username jimmalow1, and the FBI eventually traced that account back to…

Twenty years later, after I started posting about Craigslist creeps, and they still haven’t figured out how to take a hint. Police in Boynton Beach, Florida, arrested 51-year-old Maximiliano Buitrago of Boca Raton this week after he responded to a craigslist ad offering summer babysitting services. Thankfully, the ad wasn’t real. It was posted by undercover detectives from the department’s Human…

The New York Times dropped a report last week that, if it holds up, tells you everything you need to know about where this administration’s priorities sit. According to the Times, FBI managers received written notice last week that the bureau will no longer investigate assault claims against ICE agents. Some field-level ICE agents were reportedly told the same thing directly by their FBI…

Content Warning: Self-Harm and Domestic Violence Yesterday I wrote about the Portland Press Herald’s report on David Brouillette, the ICE agent who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, and what we knew then was already bad. Brouillette is said to have a spotty work history, a string of jobs he couldn’t hold onto, and an ex-wife accusing him of trying to get her to lie for him…

I know. I can hear you asking, “Hey Trench. What’s with all the ICE stories lately?” Well, schools are closed, so there can’t be any shootings there, and ICE has decided to pick up the slack. But I digress. But this time it’s not agents pulling triggers; it’s the Trump administration going after police departments themselves. The DOJ is threatening to yank federal grant money from any city that…

A quick correction before we get started. I’ve been calling the man ICE killed in Biddeford “Joan Sebastian Guerrero,” because that’s the name that showed up in the earliest reporting. However, his actual name is Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, and that’s what I’ll be using from here on out. He deserves to be remembered correctly. Anyway, in my previous post, I wrote about how DHS was still in…

As I’m sure you all know, on Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE agent shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero while he was behind the wheel of his car. Guerrero was 25, Colombian, authorized to work in this country, and living in Biddeford with his partner and young daughter. He wasn’t even the guy ICE was looking for. Agents were supposedly doing “targeted surveillance” on a removal target’s last…

Trump either has or has not reversed the new ICE policy about traffic stops. It’s Schrödinger’s reversal. Nobody can quite open the box and tell you whether the cat, or in this case the traffic stop, is alive or dead until you actually watch what agents do on the street next week. But he is being very loud about it on his bargain basement version of Twitter. Loud enough that three different news…

I’ve been following Campus Guardian Angel for about a year now, and at this point I feel like I should get a punch card. The Texas company sells drones that are supposed to swoop in during a school shooting, blast pepper gel, flash strobe lights, and physically slam into an attacker before real damage is done. Justin Marston and his cofounder, a former Navy SEAL, say the whole concept came to…

ICE announced today that it’s temporarily suspending vehicle stops nationwide. According to an email obtained by The Atlantic, ICE official Liana Castano told top supervisors across the country that, “effective immediately,” vehicle stops were “suspended until further notice.” The directive came down late Monday night, hours after ICE agents fatally shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, in…

Six months after ICE agent Jonathan Ross put a bullet in Renee Good as she tried to steer her car away from federal agents, the government has decided transparency is worth trying after all. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Monday that federal authorities finally turned over evidence in three separate shootings by ICE and Border Patrol agents during this winter’s “Operation Metro…

Can we go one fucking week without ICE killing someone in the streets of America? Apparently not since early this morning, just after 7 a.m., a federal immigration agent shot and killed a 26-year-old man in Biddeford, Maine. Neighbors heard what sounded like fireworks. What they got instead was a man bleeding out on the pavement in front of their homes, less than a week after ICE did the exact…

Pop quiz. Do you remember the shooting at a high school graduation in Fairfield, California? If the answer is no, or a vague “maybe,” or you had to scroll back through your memory to place it, that’s not a failure on your part. That’s just how this country processes gun violence now. A teenager is killed at an event meant to celebrate him; it leads the local news for a few days, and then the…

Content Warning: Self-Harm Alexis Aldair Chavez got 40 years this week. A federal judge in San Antonio handed the 19-year-old that sentence, plus lifetime supervised release and a $10,000 restitution order, for racketeering and child sexual exploitation charges connected to the “764” network. If you read Friday’s post about Ryan Catello, you already have the broad shape of what these groups do.…

Earlier this week I wrote about ICE gunning down Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston’s East End. Salgado Araujo was a 52-year-old construction business owner who’d been in this country for nearly 35 years, whom the agency accused of “weaponizing” his work van and trying to run over an officer. He died at a local hospital with a bullet in his abdomen while his own son watched. That’s the short…

The last time we checked in on this case, the big news was a change of venue. Colt Gray’s trial was getting shipped two hours southeast to Columbia County because the judge figured you couldn’t find twelve unbiased jurors left in Barrow County after two years of wall-to-wall coverage. Jury selection was supposed to start October 13th, and I said his defense team could look at how well the “let’s…

The FBI’s Albany, New York, field office put out a call this week asking anyone who might have been targeted by Ryan Catello to come forward. If you haven’t heard the name yet, get comfortable, because it’s an ugly one. Catello is a 24-year-old from Ravena, New York, charged back in April with receiving CSAM, and the feds now think there could be more victims out there than the two minors named…