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James warned me before we even got into it today that this one would be heavy, and he was right. We opened on two ICE killings that happened within days of each other, kept finding the same pattern of zero accountability everywhere we looked, and ended up in one of the most honest conversations James and I have had on this show, about the industry we both work in and why people deserve better, both from mainstream and independent media.
We led with the two ICE killings that happened within days of each other this month. 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero was killed in Maine. He had legal work permits and a three-year-old daughter. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed in Houston days earlier. He was 52 and had spent decades trying to get right with the immigration system. Both men were fathers. Neither man was even the target of the operation that killed him. We also got into the Memphis killings that got far less attention, two National Guard soldiers and a DEA agent involved in separate fatal shootings within days of each other this same month.
From there, we got into why this isn’t getting the same coverage in Britain that the Minneapolis killings got earlier this year, and why even here at home, coverage and public outrage shift depending on who the victim is. That led into the economics underneath all of it and the decades of manufactured immigrant scapegoating that Republicans use to avoid solving the actual problems facing working Americans. From there, we got into what it would actually take to fix and/or abolish an agency like ICE.
And then, as we do in most weeks, the conversation turned personal. James and I talked honestly about trying to navigate an industry built to reward outrage over understanding, why we’ve both been thinking about building something bigger than either of us has built before, and what it actually takes to do this work honestly instead of creating performative nonsense. It’s one of the most candid conversations we’ve had on this show, and it’s worth watching in full.
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Unaccountable: Two More ICE Killings
I opened with the details of this month’s ICE killings, and neither James nor I could find any version of events that makes what happened defensible.
Joan Sebastian Guerrero was 26, and he had done everything right. He had legal work permits and was here working to provide for his family. He had a three-year-old daughter. He was shot and killed by ICE in Maine this week, and I’ll admit it’s hard for me to cover this one without getting emotional, because there’s no veneer of legitimacy to any of it. They left blood on the streets and called it a day.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was 52, and he was killed in Houston just days before Guerrero. He had spent decades trying to achieve legal status and was working, not committing any crime, when ICE killed him. He was also not the target of the operation. Both men were fathers. Both were in their cars, on their way to work. Both were killed for no reason, as immigration enforcement quotas climb toward roughly 2,000 arrests a day.
This wasn’t only ICE, and it wasn’t only immigrants. Early this month, two National Guard soldiers fatally shot a 20-year-old in Memphis. Four days later, a DEA agent serving a drug warrant fatally shot a man in a Memphis hotel room. This is federal agents broadly, National Guard included, unleashing violence on American civilians.
The pattern of lies keeps repeating, and it keeps getting less careful. In Salgado Araujo’s case, DHS claimed he tried to use his vehicle as a weapon, a claim his own coworkers in the truck directly disputed. In Guerrero’s case, they didn’t even bother making that claim. They just called him a threat to public safety without saying why. That’s an agency essentially admitting there was no real justification and daring anyone to do something about it.
There is still zero accountability anywhere in this chain. Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s killers are still walking free, and the federal government is actively obstructing Minnesota’s investigation instead of cooperating with it. Trump has offered no words of remorse for any of these families. And this week, a brief pause on ICE traffic stops was announced, and then Trump overruled it in real time, just as we were going live. ICE will keep targeting Latino communities regardless of legal status, and most of the thousands arrested daily still don’t have criminal records.
The most coverage this story is getting right now, at least out of Britain, is Petro’s comparison to Nuremberg. James went looking and found that the dominant UK angle on this whole story is the Colombian president calling it a state-sponsored killing and invoking the Nazis. He was careful to note Petro isn’t a leader without his own authoritarian streak, but said flatly he couldn’t disagree with the substance of what Petro said. I agree. Regardless of Petro’s own legitimacy, I think what’s happening here is state-sanctioned and state-sponsored murder, full stop.
The Coverage Gap, In The US And Across The Pond
James went looking for UK coverage of these killings and came up almost empty. When we compared notes on the US coverage too, a clear pattern emerged about whose deaths get treated as a crisis and whose don’t.
James searched everywhere and found almost nothing. He uses Ground News and checks multiple outlets regularly, and the only UK coverage he could find at the time was from The Independent, which, he pointed out, runs a lot of cross-Atlantic content. The BBC has covered it since, but there was nothing in the immediate aftermath. His own algorithm had gone quiet on ICE content since the peak right after Alex Pretti’s killing, and it’s only spiking again now.
A third death came up in the same conversation. James flagged that a man in Florida was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer while fleeing ICE and said he genuinely can’t fathom what it must feel like on the ground there right now, watching footage of agents in masks that he described as dystopian.
The domestic discrepancy comes down to race, and James said so directly. He pointed out that the outrage gap between how Renee Good's and Alex Pretti’s killings were covered versus these ones isn’t really about legal status, since Guerrero had perfectly legal work authorization. It comes down to Hispanic origin, and to Blackness, patterns Black American communities already know well. After he looked into the story, his own algorithm served him a run of pro-ICE content, including a video of a woman at an airport praying over and hugging ICE agents while referencing something called an ICE coin. He compared the whole vibe to The Handmaid’s Tale.
I connected it to a story from last week: Nolan Wells. Nolan, a Black man, went missing for about 24 hours after being with a group of white friends, and there was no coverage in the initial days until independent media, myself included, along with Danielle Moodie and Don Lemon, started covering it, and mainstream outlets caught up. It’s the same discrepancy playing out again.
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The Economic Scapegoating Of Migrants That Provides The Basis For These Abuses
Once we got past the coverage gap, the conversation moved to the deeper why: the decades of manufactured economic grievance that make killings like these politically viable in Trump’s base.
I laid out the throughline: this is the culmination of decades of villainizing immigrants. Trump’s first line coming down the escalator in 2015 was calling Mexicans rapists. That’s the same energy driving all of this now. You cannot claim you want to reward people for following the rules and then kill and deport the people who are literally following the rules. Guerrero had legal work permits. Salgado Araujo spent decades trying to get legal status. If you’re a Trump supporter and you still back this, I think you need to sit with why you’re able to dehumanize people doing exactly what your own ancestors did when they came here.
James drew the UK parallel to Farage and Rupert Lowe. He said they’re trying to sell the idea that asylum is some newfangled, woke invention that isn’t working anymore, when it’s actually one of the oldest principles in statecraft. His bigger complaint was that the right offers no actual solutions, just complaints.
A viewer raised the take-care-of-our-own-first argument, and I wanted to push back on it directly. Undocumented immigrants pay more than $100 billion in taxes annually without receiving matching benefits back, which is the reverse of what that argument assumes. I traced this zero-sum framing back to the Reagan era specifically and pointed out that white Americans are actually the largest plurality of people receiving welfare benefits in this country, which undercuts the entire premise that immigrants are the drain.
James added the false binary underneath this framing. He said the right specifically invokes veterans, not the wider category of struggling Americans, because it stokes nationalistic pride more effectively. His larger point was that a country either accepts the basic responsibilities of statecraft, including some form of asylum and immigration policy, or it isn’t really a country. He said plainly that people like Trump and Farage don’t actually care about society because division benefits them while they stay personally insulated from its costs.
Root Causes, From The K-Shaped Economy To The Impact Of Foreign Interventionism
The conversation kept going down a level, from the manufactured grievance itself to what’s actually driving it, and eventually to what should replace ICE as it currently exists.
I tied it back to Reagan-era trickle-down economics that never actually trickled down. Tax cuts fuel stock buybacks and CEO pay, not wages, and that’s the root of the K-shaped economy. Rather than fix income inequality or the tax code’s tilt toward the wealthy, the response has been to scapegoat immigrant communities instead, which is a distraction from the actual problem, not a solution to it.
James asked me directly whether ICE can be reformed or whether it needs to be abolished. He referenced Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s abolition stance. My answer: the US ran an immigration system before ICE existed; it isn’t a foundational American institution, so yes, it could be abolished. My actual preference is dismantling it and rebuilding it under a new name, with real training and real accountability, focused on humane processing and citizenship pathways instead of terror and deportation quotas. I’d rather see that done legislatively than by executive order, even though Trump has already proven agencies can be dismantled unilaterally if a future administration wants to go that route.
James had a number that stopped the conversation for a second. ICE’s current funding exceeds Denmark’s entire military budget. He said that fact genuinely blew his mind, and it’s a clean illustration of my point that a budget is a statement of priorities, and right now this one reflects a lie about where the actual threat to this country is coming from.
I connected the funding fight to foreign policy, specifically the gutting of USAID. When the US pulls back on foreign aid and enables further regional destabilization, Israel’s actions in Lebanon being one example, it directly creates the refugee crises this same administration then punishes people for fleeing. People aren’t showing up at the border for a prolonged vacation. They’re fleeing violence. If you actually want to solve the asylum problem, restoring foreign aid and addressing root causes abroad does more than any amount of enforcement at home ever will.
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The Kind Of Thoughtful Media We Want To Contribute To The Information Landscape
The last stretch of the show turned inward, into a genuinely candid conversation about the industry James and I both work in, and why so much of it is built to make people angry instead of informed.
I’ve been developing a theory that curiosity can drive an algorithm as effectively as outrage can. I’ve seen it work in some of my own videos already, and coming out of this hiatus, I want to lean into it more directly. The goal is to give people the why behind hard stories, not just to tell them the sky is falling.
James told a story about an invitation that stuck with him. He’d been invited to a Meta-hosted creator summer barbecue next week, and one of the scheduled talks is on how to turn news trends into fast, engagement-driving content. His reaction, in his own words, was that it’s not entertainment; it’s the news. He described outrage content as functioning like a cortisol spike, adrenaline without nourishment, what we’ve both called fast food politics before, and said real processing requires talking through something rather than just pointing at it.
I reflected on my own younger self doing exactly what James was describing. At 22 or 23, early in Trump’s first term, I sometimes fell into that same outrage trap myself before I matured out of it. My sharper critique is aimed at some independent media figures who wear the journalist persona without the rigor to back it up. I think our own space needs more internal accountability instead of pointing every criticism outward at mainstream media.
James shared something more vulnerable: a specific moment that morning after leaving BBC Studios. He’d been up since 5:30 am, was out the door by 7, and sat in his car scrolling past a creator whose entire format is seven-second rage clips, lines like calling a politician’s death overdue with no substance behind them. She’d just crossed a million followers. He admitted feeling envy in that moment before catching himself. In recent months, he’s reshaped the book he’s currently writing, which now centers on the shift in politics from news and storytelling toward entertainment and rage.
I ended up sharing my own bigger picture reflection. I miss running an actual media organization the way I did with Rantt Media. With CNN likely heading toward the Ellisons and the same path CBS News is now on, I’ve been thinking about what it would take to eventually build a new, editorially independent network with both a digital and broadcast presence. James and I didn’t land on a plan, but we landed on the same belief: honest, unhurried conversation, exactly like the one we’d just had, is the actual antidote to a media ecosystem built to keep people angry instead of informed.
Bottom Line
Two more innocent people are dead, killed by federal agents who won’t be named, defended by a department that keeps changing its story, and covered unevenly depending on who died. None of that happens in a vacuum. It’s propped up by decades of manufactured economic grievance, amplified by a media system that rewards outrage over understanding, and normalized because there’s still no real accountability anywhere in the chain.
James and I didn’t come out of this conversation with easy answers. We came out of it more convinced than ever that the way through is the same as it’s always been: talk it through honestly instead of just pointing at it.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the ongoing right-wing takeover of mainstream media and the media we actually deserve. I wrote a Substack note with my thoughts in more detail if you’re interested in reading more:
