Had a brief flashback last night to 2017, when I woke up to the news of the Vegas massacre, then hopped on a plane to go there and find the unsung hero. At the time, that event seemed unthinkable. What happened the other night in D.C…. well, I don’t know about you but I sort of knew before I knew, if that makes sense. Here are some thoughts on that as well as an excerpt from my forthcoming book that deals with the Vegas massacre.

The book — If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened — just received a starred review at Publishers Weekly, which I’m told is a big deal. You can pre-order it here. Use the discount code “08TERRIBLE,” (that’s a ZERO at the front) to get 30 percent off. If you choose to become a founding member of American Doom, I’ll send a free signed copy of the book.

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We have some exclusive reporting coming on a few fronts, including more on ICE deaths and efforts to interfere in the midterms. So, as always, I ask for your paid support or contributions to our Coffee Fund to help pay for our journalism here.

Driving through the salt marshes lit by the moon we laughed and talked about the gig. The band had played well and the crowd was good. People enjoyed it and tipped us accordingly: each of us made $75 from the tip jar. A successful night. She told me about some of the people who had talked to her about the music, including the bartender at another place on the island I’ve always wanted to play who said he wanted to book us there. Then, she asked, “Do you want to hear the other development?”

Sure, I said, knowing what it was before she even said it: someone had tried to kill him again. Maybe that’s my finely-tuned intuition after having spent the better part of the last two decades reporting on the violence and upheaval of this country. Or, it’s just a reflection of our collective understanding and acceptance of the violence and upheaval of the Trump era.

The first thing I read about the attempted assassination was someone’s post saying they believed it was real, that it was not staged — another grim hallmark of times in which a faked presidential assassination attempt seems even remotely plausible. A quick scan told me everything else I needed to know. They caught the guy, he was nuts, and he had some guns.

The circumstances of this attempt are a bit different than the last two — or three, depending on how willing you are to trust the U.S. intelligence apparatus under Trump — but some of the results will be relatively the same: some in the legacy media put out a story about a changed, reflective and humbled Trump. He’ll surely blow a hole in that narrative in the coming hours and days as he blames half of the country for the actions of a single person before using the attempt on his life to enact further crackdowns on immigrants, or civil liberties, or decides to expand the surveillance state.

Meanwhile, men and women caught up in the ever-growing network of immigration detention centers continue to die at a record pace; alleged drug traffickers and at least some innocent fishermen continue to die in extrajudicial drone killings carried out by our military in international waters; the war in Iran drags on with no clear end or objective as we send more assets to the region, making us vulnerable to attacks elsewhere as our stockpile of munitions is depleted by the endless bombing.

And to add a bit of Trumpian absurdity to the growing catastrophe, Republicans in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life have taken up talking points about the construction of a White House ballroom that is now apparently a matter of national security.

Combined with several other major renovations and construction projects at the White House, Americans would be justified in wondering why the president is spending so much time, money (ours) and effort revamping a building that he is required by law to vacate in less than three years. Many Republicans have already been coalescing around the idea that he is not required to leave office at the end of his second term, or that they should change the rules to allow him to remain in power.

Simmering underneath all of this are efforts to upend what is currently the only threat to Trump’s power — the November midterm elections. Across the country, Republican state legislators have introduced more than 1,000 bills, according to an American Doom review of legislation in several states, that seek to enact some of the anti-democratic measures for voting and elections that Trump and the election denial movement insist must take place. Some of these bills include state-level changes to who is allowed to call themselves a U.S. citizen for the purposes of voting.

Urged on by developments like the latest attempt on Trump’s life, Republicans nationwide continue to operate under the belief that they are both victims targeted by an ascendant and violent left, but are also always the victors. This seemingly contradictory narrative is fleshed out a bit by Jeff Sharlet and a colleague, who described it succinctly as “Victory over victimhood.”

They will ride this narrative into November, when they will try — through legal, quasi-legal, and probably other means — to hold on to the power that allows them to brutalize the people they blame for not being more rich and powerful than they already are.

***

DALLAS, LAS VEGAS — I finished up work one day and punched in a single word into Google Maps: “bar.” Five minutes away was a place — no reviews, no website, no photos, just a neon “OPEN” sign shining and a hand painted ship on the side of the building: Tradewinds - The Original Social Club. I opened the door and took off my sunglasses to adjust from the blinding Texas afternoon sun to the utter darkness inside, where the only light came from the glow of TVs and Christmas lights. “I called earlier. Cool to bring in my dog?” Sure, the bartender said, and in ran Hendrix, a wildhearted Wheaten Terrier mutt who never met a person he didn’t like or a set of woods he didn’t want to disappear into. Before I could introduce myself, Henny was behind the bar, jumping up on the bartender’s leg and getting pets on the head.

Thus began my three-year residency at Tradewinds, the last real neighborhood bar in an area of Dallas that was either becoming trendy or being ignored by developers because it was too Mexican. Tradewinds was right in the middle of those two worlds. Henny and I took our barstools — back then, Henny was still spry enough to jump up on one — and I introduced myself. “I’m Justin, too,” said the bartender, “and that’s Justin down there.” Just three Justins sitting in a dark bar drinking Lone Stars on a warm spring Texas afternoon. I texted Sarah the address and told her to meet me there after work. I was elated. After leaving Chicago and moving to Texas, I figured my days of neighborhood bars were gone. Finding Tradewinds was like finding a piece of home right down the street from our house. She was, shall we say, less than pleased to walk in and find Hendrix and I sitting on a barstool at five o’clock in the afternoon after a few hours of drinking. But she made the best of it, and put up with my affection for Tradewinds and its cast of rough-and-tumble regulars as I acclimated to Texas. She put up with a lot of things I wish she wouldn’t have.

We rented a small home in Oak Cliff, which we filled with art and records and tchotchkes from our lives of travel. Things began to slow down. I bought a lawn mower and a grill and began reporting on immigration. At night I sat outside on our patio and listened to the neighbors blaring Tejano music as I slowly got drunk on Tecates. One bright morning I awoke with my usual sudsy hangover and saw Sarah looking at her phone. Fuck, she said, 50 dead? I opened my own phone to an email from the Washington Post asking if I was available to chase down some addresses in Dallas tied to the shooter who opened fire in Las Vegas overnight. Then came the rush — shower, clothes, laptop, notepad, phone charger, car, highway. By 11 am I had found a few of the homes and talked to some neighbors. Nothing doing. No one really remembered the guy. He was just another nobody. By noon I was on the phone with my editor in New York at the Beast. A call to Sarah — “Gotta go, love you” — then back to our house in Oak Cliff, and then the rush again — suitcase, car, highway, airport, security, airport bar, seat, Bloody Mary. By 10 pm., Sin City for the first time in my life.

My experience with hotels up to that point was that my car was usually sitting just on the other side of a dirty door in a parking lot no more than 15 feet from my bed, so dropping my bags in a room 20 stories off the Vegas strip was nice. It was 11 o’clock local, a little more than 24 hours after a madman had picked off 55 people with a machine gun from his turret in a highrise hotel room at Mandalay Bay. The time meant there probably wouldn’t be much for me to do, not that I thought there was much to do on this story regardless of the time of day or night. From the moment I woke up the day before in Dallas and hit the ground running to try to unravel the mystery of the shooter, Stephen Paddock, I knew it was a fool’s errand. I couldn’t say why; I just knew. The answer would come to me in bits and pieces over the days, months and years that followed.

I took the elevator down to the lobby and emerged to eternal daylight. New York is a city that occasionally sleeps —Vegas never does. I walked outside onto the sidewalk and into the freakshow diaspora that is the strip on any given night. People watched the worst of the other drugged out or drunk people laugh, cry or argue under the false sense of security that they weren’t like that, that they would keep it together. In Las Vegas, no one keeps it together for long. Your time crying in the pit is always just a few more hours away. The sidewalk was filled with these freaks, people from all over the country and the world unchained from their daily selves, laughing or crying and puking their way toward midnight. I walked through them and toward the Mandalay Bay. A TV news van was parked on a street corner just on the public side of yellow crime scene tape. A woman stood in front of it, posing for a photo her boyfriend took. There was no sense in something like the worst mass murder in US history ruining their vacation.

I went to a casino and sat at a bar and drank Jack and Cokes, smoking cigarettes and taking in the scene around me. The incessant chiming of slot machines provided a comforting white noise as an hour or so wore on. I talked to no one and went to bed. The next day I woke up to the sun streaming bright orange desert light across the carpet and got to work. I had heard that Paddock had tried to shoot up another music festival a week before and headed to the hotel that was across the street from where that event was held, where I found a manager and asked whether they’d seen Paddock when he stayed at the hotel and whether anything seemed amiss. The manager didn’t want to talk, and it was hard to tell, as it always is, whether that was because he had been trained not to talk or knew something he’d been told not to tell a reporter. Across town, the police were holding a press conference and argued my way inside. I didn’t have press credentials. For some reason I almost never had them over the years. Maybe I always thought I was faking it. I convinced a cop that I was actually a reporter and snuck in just in front of a group of reporters in line who weren’t allowed in because the room was at capacity, and wound up jammed underneath the TV cameras streaming the press conference out to the world. The reporters in the front row asked dumb questions like, Why did the shooter do this? As if the cops would know then or ever. I thought they should have been asking more obvious questions like, Didn’t anyone see this guy checking into a hotel room with a giant bag full of machine guns? Or, Why the fuck did it take you guys so long to find this guy and take him down? One of the officers leading the press conference talked about law enforcement’s response to the shooting and offhandedly mentioned that it was a security guard at Mandalay Bay who first found Paddock as he carried out his rampage. I wondered who that person was and why he wasn’t getting the attention he deserved for being the hero that finally drew the violent carnage to a close. I went back to my hotel and called the Mandalay Bay and asked to speak to the head of security. Someone there said I would have to speak to the union for security officers. A man told me a guard had been called to the 32nd floor, where Paddock’s room was located, for a hallway door that had been left ajar. When he walked past the room, Paddock saw him through cameras he had set up outside the door to his room and shot him in the leg. The guard alerted police who took a few excruciating minutes to reach the hallway. Meanwhile, Paddock shot out a window and began firing on the crowd below. The security guard was a hero but no one knew it. That was about to change. I told the union official that the security guard deserved credit for his heroic actions and after an hour of cajoling convinced him to let me tell the world his name: Jesus Campos. I wrote up my story in an adrenaline fueled rush so powerful that my hands shook as I typed.

I had my big story and watched it blow up online and on cable news as word spread of Campos’ heroism. Then I got drunk because that’s what I did when a big story went out, because the combination of adrenaline and alcohol was the best feeling in the world to me. I knew when I went to Vegas that I wasn’t going to leave there with the why of Paddock’s massacre, but it felt good to have figured out a little bit of the what the hell actually happened here? Now that the what was out of the way with, there wasn’t much left to do than some victim cleanup. That is, tell a few stories of victims’ families so the world would know what it felt like to lose a loved one in what people like to call senseless violence. I had done this hundreds of times over the years but wasn’t much in the mood for it in Vegas. It depressed me and I didn’t like feeling depressed. I was in this line of work for the adventure and the chase, not the sadness.

Over the years, I had ignored the traditional requirement of objectivity in journalism to advocate for people and causes I thought had gotten a raw deal. I used the concept of objectivity to justify my purposeful lack of emotions for those who had experienced the worst things imaginable. Drinking just made that easier. I drank away that which frightened or disturbed me and dismissed those feelings with forced callousness under the guise of journalistic objectivity or good, old fashioned gallows humor. If a murder victim’s mother broke down in front of me I carefully described the scene in order to not feel the emotions it brought. I relayed the facts of grim realities like the psychological breakdown of a grieving mother to an editor as if I was collecting meaningless bits of construction material to build a house I would soon abandon. In Gary I described the physical dismantling of the murdered women in excruciating detail in order to make them less human to me and more mechanical, soulless structures that were taken apart. In Piketon I wrote about the minor crimes of two young men who had been brutally murdered in some obsessive and heartless quest for a complicated and meaningless truth. As far back as Peoria and throughout my travels I often othered the Black community by reporting on it like it was a foreign warzone instead of a neighborhood across town where my fellow Americans lived. I deluded myself with the internal narrative that I was a righteous truth-seeker. I wasn’t like the politicians on the evening news and the Stephen Paddocks of the world who degraded and destroyed human life through their quest for power and control. I convinced myself that even if I fed on whatever soul had just passed, at least I did so in pursuit of the truth. The reality was, sometimes I was just a parasite.

By that evening I was back on my patio in Texas listening to the neighbors play Tejano music and sipping a beer. I was tired, so I did something I hadn’t done for a very long time: I turned my phone off and just listened. I heard the birds chirping, then a mother screaming over her dead son in Peoria. I heard the Tejano music, then gunshots in Chicago. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the orange film that the sunlight created through my eyelids, then I saw the man bleeding from a gunshot wound to his stomach in the back of a car in Ferguson. I opened my eyes and looked up into the trees, then saw tear-gas canisters with smoke spiraling from them flying through the air in Baltimore. Things began to feel bright, sharp and loud. I knew that it was the beginning of a panic attack. But I couldn’t understand why. How can I have anxiety because of the things I have seen? I didn’t lose my son to murder in Peoria. I wasn’t shot in Ferguson. I wasn’t at a country music festival in Las Vegas where a madman fired on innocent people with a weapon of war. I didn’t experience any of these things myself. I had just learned about all of these events and written about them in intimate and excruciating detail before moving on to the next one. I simply compiled terror and pain for a collection of stories that comprised the body of work that was my career. I was just a normal guy, I thought, whose line of work caused him to have random thoughts like wondering whether the chef’s knife I used to chop cilantro was the size of the blade Tino Bagola used to murder his two cousins on that remote Indian reservation in North Dakota. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the orange film and the Tejano music, then I saw Bagola’s eyes, staring back at me through a haze of dilated pupils and psychotropic drugs from a jail cell in Fargo, where I met him just before he was shipped off to prison for the rest of his life.

Three weeks after returning from Las Vegas, a young man shot up a church in Sutherland Spring, Texas. That day, I had had my phone off for hours. Things were slowing down in my life — a bit. Sarah and I were settling into our new home and I’d was enjoying spending time discovering Texas with her. I turned my phone on and learned of the shooting, then waited for the emails and calls to come in with the assignments. They didn’t. I had to sit this one out. And for the first time in a while, I wanted to.

***

This article is the result of months of digging into ICE deaths. The previous article in this series is viewable here. This reporting has taken much time and resources — and hundreds of dollars in fees to obtain autopsy reports. To support this work, please choose a paid subscription to American Doom or contribute to our Coffee Fund.

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Two coroners in Missouri who have publicly expressed anti-immigrant sentiment have overseen the autopsy of an ICE detainee who died in a local jail, American Doom has found. Now, under a questionable interpretation of Missouri law, the two coroners are refusing to release the autopsy report for Brayan Garzon-Rayo, a 27-year-old Colombian man who allegedly took his own life while being held on an ICE detainer in the Phelps County Jail just a little more than a year ago, on April 8.

The refusal of the two coroners — Darren Dake and Ernie Coverdell — to release Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report highlights transparency issues regarding the record number of deaths in U.S. immigration custody under the Trump administration.

At least 44 people have died in the custody of ICE, other immigration agencies, or in local jails as a result of the Trump administration’s historic crackdown on undocumented immigrants. That’s the highest number of deaths in a 14-month period since the government began publishing detainee death data in 2018 — and possibly since the Department of Homeland Security and ICE were formed in the wake of 9/11.

With about 70,000 immigrants in immigration custody each day, and plans to convert warehouses across the country into detention centers to hold even more, immigrant advocates worry that the number of deaths will continue to rise. As more immigrants are held in facilities that are already at or over capacity, conditions within the facilities will worsen, advocates have warned, leading to delayed responses to medical emergencies and routine ailments.

“These recent tragedies underscore what we’ve known to be true for many years, which is that nobody is safe for any period of time inside ICE detention,” said Laura Hernández, executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, a nonprofit organization devoted to ending immigration detention. “The detention system is infamous for its long-standing record of brutal medical abuse, violence, and premature deaths.”

While poor conditions inside ICE facilities have been well-documented, less known are the exact circumstances that have led to the record number of immigrant deaths during the Trump administration. But records collected by American Doom show that delayed or insufficient staff responses to medical issues played a role in some of those deaths.

In September, a Chinese man experiencing seizures and heart issues was left unattended by medical staff at a facility in California, according to an autopsy report provided to American Doom by authorities. Huabing Xie later died of a heart attack after being left alone for 36 minutes during a crucial window of time, the autopsy showed.

Another autopsy report showed that a Mexican man held at another California facility complained of severe rectal pain for weeks and was given only Tylenol. By the time the man was finally taken to the hospital, staff there recommended emergency surgery. The man, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, died of a heart attack before the surgery could take place. At the time of his death, Ayala-Uribe rated his pain at a level of 10 out of 10.

In Missouri, two men have allegedly taken their own lives while being held in local jails on ICE detainers. They are among at least seven people who have died of what ICE and local authorities have said are suicide. In the case of Garzon-Rayo, he denied having a history of depression or suicidal thoughts, according to a detainee death report released by ICE. Several days later, after testing positive for COVID and tuberculosis, Garzon-Rayo allegedly committed suicide.

But authorities have yet to release key records that could shed light on the exact circumstances of Garzon-Rayo’s death, which his family has questioned. Those records include Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report, which Dake and Coverdell have refused to release. The two coroners have claimed an exemption in Missouri state law that prevents them from publicly releasing the report, but civil rights attorneys and public records experts who spoke to American Doom say the law is not prohibitive, and that it’s up to individual coroners in Missouri to release autopsy reports.

This fact is backed up by the cooperation of another coroner in Missouri, who has agreed to release the autopsy report for Luis Cruz-Silva, who allegedly took his own life while in custody at the Ste. Genevieve County Jail.

Dake and Coverdell have offered various explanations for their refusal to release Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report. Initially, Coverdell told American Doom he couldn’t release the report because “it’s an ICE report,” without providing further information. Later, he joined Dake in citing state law regarding autopsy reports that the two men say prevent them from releasing the document publicly. But that’s simply not the case.

The Missouri Attorney General as well as local prosecutors did not respond to requests for clarification on whether Dake and Coverdell were allowed by law to release Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report, but the public records experts who spoke to American Doom confirmed that the law is not prohibitive — both men could release the report if they wished. Additionally, the Missouri State Highway Patrol, which investigated the deaths of Garzon-Rayo and Cruz-Silva, have not yet provided records related to the two men’s deaths as requested under the state’s public records law by American Doom.

The lack of transparency over Garzon-Rayo’s death is a reflection of the byzantine network of immigration detention facilities, multiple federal agencies, local law enforcement, and medical examiners and coroners across the country that must be navigated in order to understand exactly how the 44 people who have died in ICE custody under Trump met their deaths.

In many cases, local authorities like medical examiners and coroners have helpfully released key records like autopsy reports. In others, local authorities and ICE have put up roadblocks to obtaining information about deaths in custody, or have provided incomplete and sometimes misleading information about those cases.

For Garzon-Rayo, the situation is clear: Dake and Coverdell could release his autopsy report, but have refused to do so. Coverdell has said he has viewed video from inside the Phelps County Jail that confirmed Garzon-Rayo took his own life, but declined to answer questions about exactly what that footage showed. The Missouri State Highway Patrol investigated the deaths of Garzon-Rayo and Cruz-Silva, but would only say that no charges are forthcoming.

***

After Garzon-Rayo died, Coverdell took custody of his body. Unable to conduct the autopsy himself — Coverdell is an elected coroner but not a licensed medical pathologist — Coverdell paid Dake, the coroner in nearby Crawford County, $2,600 to conduct the autopsy, he told American Doom.

Coverdell and Dake have a history of making public comments in support of Trump’s immigration policies, among other disparaging remarks about Democrats, liberals and Americans who don’t support Donald Trump, according to an American Doom review of their Facebook posts going back to 2018.

“CLOSE THE BORDER,” read a post shared in 2023 by Coverdell.

In 2018, Coverdell shared a photo of a migrant caravan with a caption that read, in part, “wake up before we are truly overun (sic) you liberal fools.” Coverdell has shared posts that said “toilet dwelling” Democrats propagate a “culture of hate.”

Among his many posts on his personal Facebook page, which has no privacy restrictions, Coverdell has also shared an AI-generated photo that showed an encampment of tents in a trash-strewn field under the banner, “Kamala’s America;” another AI-generated photo that showed the Statue of Liberty constructing a wall at the U.S. southern border; and a Dec. 23, 2023 post that encouraged his Facebook audience: “Everyone post: CLOSE THE BORDER!”

Dake has shared posts that support Trump’s “remain in Mexico” asylum policy and decried “leftists” who “hate border walls and gun rights,” among other pro-Trump posts.

Dake said he found nothing wrong with his posts, adding that he was “looking forward to the publicity.”

“Every time you left-leaning ‘journalists’ write a spin piece about me my support and popularity increases,” Dake told American Doom.

Dake did not answer specific questions about Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy, pointing to Coverdell in Phelps County. Coverdell told American Doom that he had seen video from inside Garzon-Rayo’s cell, but did not elaborate.

“It doesn’t matter what race, religion, ethnic background,” someone is, Coverdell told the American Doom, “if it’s a person that feels it’s better to die than face life for one reason or another.”

Coverdell said he did not intend to “disparage immigrants,” and said that he “in no way believes it is good when someone dies, especially by suicide.”

In August, Phelps County Sheriff Michael Kirn, whose agency oversees the jail, addressed members of the county commission about the county’s agreement with ICE to hold detainees like Garzon-Rayo.

Kirn told commissioners that “having the ICE inmates has incurred costs in food, medical, staffing and transport” that the county was having difficulty affording, according to meeting minutes reviewed by American Doom, adding that there was “not enough revenue coming in to offset” those costs. Under an agreement with ICE, the county had been receiving funding from the agency to hold detainees like Garzon-Rayo. Kirn did not respond to questions from American Doom.

At the August commission meeting, Phelps County’s elected officials agreed that the agreement with ICE was no longer worth the county’s resources. Phelps County stopped housing ICE detainees on September 1.

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Today’s edition of American Doom has information about the fight over 2020 ballots in Georgia that you won’t find anywhere else. Please choose a paid subscription or contribute to our Coffee Fund to help fuel more of the fact-based, adversarial journalism you see below.

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As Fulton County and the Justice Department continue to argue in court filings over the thousands of 2020 ballots and other material seized during an FBI raid in January, witnesses who Trump’s DOJ has relied upon for its supposed evidence of fraud in that year’s election have officially — and strangely — attempted to distance themselves from the case.

Of the 11 witnesses named in the FBI affidavit that led to the raid, all but four have agreed with American Doom’s motion to have their identities un-redacted. This means they’ve agreed to have their identities officially made public. Of the four who have asked that the court continue to withhold their identities, three are public officials. Two are current members of the Georgia State Election Board.

“Wit. 2 is the Republican-appointed member of the Georgia State Election Board,” the affidavit states, abbreviating “witness.” Any ambiguity about which “Republican-appointed member” this witness is — there are four Republican-appointed members on the SEB — is obliterated by the next sentence. “Wit. 2 was an obstetrician prior to serving on the State Election Board.”

For anyone with a passing knowledge of Georgia election matters, this is quite obviously SEB member Dr. Janice Johnston, who frequently discusses her time in private practice as an OBGYN, including at SEB meetings.

“Wit. 3, the current House-appointed State Election Board member, confirmed there were missing ballot images,” the affidavit goes on, referencing an oft-referenced claim about missing ballot images in Fulton County in 2020 that reflects the election denial movement’s misunderstanding of the rules and mechanisms for storing such records.

This is Janelle King, who is the only Republican member of the SEB who has been appointed by the Georgia House of Representatives. The remaining Republican SEB members — John Fervier and Salleigh Grubbs — were appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, respectively.

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“Current Fulton County Commissioner, Wit. 11, was a poll worker during the 2020 election,” the affidavit says of Bridget Thorne, who is one of only two Republicans on the commission, and the only Republican who has been outspoken in her belief about election fraud.

The SEB’s Johnston and King are fighting American Doom’s motion to have the court make their identities public. Joining them is Thorne, a Fulton County commissioner who has spread lies and conspiracies about election fraud. American Doom is not naming the fourth individual who has asked that their identity remain redacted in court documents because they’re a target of what is broadly considered to be a politically-motivated prosecution by Trump’s Justice Department that is primarily based on “evidence” presented by biased, pro-Trump election skeptics like Johnston, King and Thorne.

The evidence cited in the affidavit — which led to a magistrate judge issuing a search warrant that the FBI executed during its Jan. 28 raid of the Fulton County elections warehouse — is mostly recycled claims of technical errors and mistakes like double-counted ballots. That evidence is widely viewed to be not a predicate for criminal charges, which is what DOJ lawyers have argued is the basis for the raid, but for the Trump administration’s efforts to sow doubt in November’s election results.

Combined with similar seizures of 2020-related election materials in Arizona, California and Michigan, the Fulton County raid appears to be part of a coordinated effort to resurface fraud claims ahead of an election that Republicans across the country are slated to lose — and lose big — as the president carries out an unpopular war in Iran, gas prices spike, and inflation continues to make life less affordable for most Americans.

The Fulton County case is going nowhere but deep into the obscure lore of MAGA election denial conspiracy. Any criminal charges that result from the affidavit that Johnston, King and Thorne are now weakly distancing themselves from will likely be tossed by reputable judges. Perhaps this is the reason for their quiet recusal from being officially named as a result of American Doom’s motion.

***

Johnston, King and Thorne’s attempts to keep their identities weakly sealed in the affidavit are at odds with much of their public behavior. As we reported in November, King and others have openly bragged about their coordination with the DOJ on election fraud claims in Georgia for months.

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If there were any remaining questions about the MAGA-dominated SEB’s role in the Fulton County raid, Johnston herself put them to rest at the last meeting of the board.

“A request was made to the DOJ” by the SEB, Johnston said at the board’s Feb. 19 meeting, “and took notice (sic) to the Fulton County election irregularities that have been alleged, but had never been investigated.”

So, why are Johnston and King asking the court to allow their names to continue to be redacted? That’s a good question, and one that I put to Johnston, King and Thorne. As of this writing, none have responded.

One would think that, after years of claiming that the 2020 election was beset with widespread fraud by Democrats and poll workers in Fulton County, this trio of hardcore election skeptics would want to shout from the mountaintops that their “evidence” is the backbone of what Trump’s lawyers at the DOJ are now claiming is a criminal investigation. (No one has been charged yet.) Instead, Johnston, King and Thorne are quietly arguing behind-the-scenes to have their identities remain redacted in the affidavit — a laughable objection, considering how obvious the affidavit makes their identities to be.

If nothing else, having their identities so obviously obtainable in the affidavit itself begs the question of why Johnston, King and Thorne are now fighting their official release. Maybe they’re fighting just because they feel like it, who knows, or to stick it to the “fake news,” as they like to say. It doesn’t really matter because everyone knows who they are.

What does matter is that Fulton County is pressing the DOJ hard on the “evidence” that Johnston, King and Thorne presented to the FBI that led to the raid. That evidence is questionable at best. At worst, it’s the result of “research” from the same small but vocal network of election deniers who have tried to have their way with Georgia elections since 2020. This network has used their influence to pressure state lawmakers to institute changes to election administration and voting — like the ban on QR codes that are used to count votes in a more reliable way than the hand counts that election deniers would like to impose — on millions of Georgia voters.

The election denial movement’s success in Georgia has caused a fracturing within the state Republican party. That divide is at the heart of the races for governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general, all of which will be up for grabs in November.

If the MAGA, election denial wing of the Georgia GOP wins out, you can expect to see the state implement even more anti-democratic measures aimed at cracking down on voting rights and fair elections. Because none of this is actually about election fraud; it’s always been about ensuring that Republicans win, no matter what.

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Watching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth give another bombastic press conference that seemed like an act of absurdist theater this morning as the chyron reminded us of the ridiculous name of our war in Iran — Operation Epic Fury — I had one of those moments where I’m reminded just how staggeringly dumb much of modern American life is. It inspired me to start something new here at American Doom, where much of my work lately has been focused on the hard news of holding the Trump administration and its threats to democracy to account — a new section called Dispatches.

Here, you’ll get writing that’s more along the lines of historically correct than the often chaste and detached news voice that’s required by my journalism. Considering my recent investigation into the deaths of detainees in immigration custody, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit some past reporting on immigration and the border.

Below, you’ll find an excerpt from my forthcoming book, If I am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened. It’s being published by the University of Georgia Press and comes out in early June. I’ve provided some links below to past excerpts as well as this PDF which contains a QR code for a 30 percent discount. Feel free to share this PDF with anyone who you think might be interested in the book. You can also go to UGA Press’ web page for the book and enter the code 08TERRIBLE to get the same discount.

You can also read other excerpts from the book, which focus on my hometown, Peoria, Ill. ,and the unrest in Baltimore following the killing of Freddie Gray.

As always, if you support my journalism and writing, please choose a paid subscription to American Doom or drop a few dollars into our Coffee Fund. Those of you who choose a founding membership to American Doom will get a signed copy of Something Terrible.

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EL PASO AND JUAREZ — After hundreds of miles of desert floor, a wind farm emerged. It was gone in a minute, passing by 34,000 feet below my comfortable seat on a packed plane heading over West Texas. It looked like the same wind farm I passed when I drove here a few months before, I thought. There can’t be more than a few of them. There’s not really more than a few of anything along the nine-hour stretch of Interstate 10 from Dallas to El Paso. Nothing but desert wastelands as far as the eye can see. I stopped at a gas station in Odessa, a town of oil workers with their jeans tucked into their boots and bad gas station hot dogs. You have to get gas in Odessa, because that’s the last place there is until El Paso, but that was another trip. That was when I decided to drive from Dallas to El Paso to get a sense of how far it actually is. You can’t really tell that in a plane. The only way to know how far El Paso is from everything is to drive there. Flying is much easier. Plus, you can see the pink and orange tops of the mesas as they rise up from the desert floor just before the sprawling grids of El Paso and Juárez come into focus through the broiling, dusty haze of any given afternoon.

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El Paso is its own world. It gets roped into an amorphous political concept that has no real basis in geography generally known as “the border,” but El Paso is more than just a town with fences on an invisible line guarded by men with guns on one side and children with guns on the other. Juárez is an even more misunderstood place, which is to say a living, breathing thing, because cities are really their own thumping creature manifested by the people who occupy them. Growing up in the Midwest, they would have seemed like they were on the moon. I was in love from the moment I walked on the scalding asphalt of their streets.

I’d come to the border for a new beat of American horror I was working: immigration. The first two years of the Trump administration were filled with shameful stories of desperate migrants caught up in concrete border cells and disgusting and dangerous privately run gulags at the behest of America’s would-be Latin American-style dictator. Asylum seekers were routinely and illegally turned back by border officials following Trump’s new dictates. The administration separated some 3,000 families, locking up parents hundreds and thousands of miles away from their children. Then the White House lied about it, saying they “did not create a policy of family separation.” Border guards dressed up in riot gear and closed the bridges in El Paso so Trump could have a show of force for a migrant caravan that was 1,500 miles away. A seven-year-old girl died after drinking contaminated water that guards at a detention center in New Mexico refused to touch. And that was just a six-month stretch of 2018.

Looking back, it makes sense: Trump’s entire campaign was run on the high octane hate fuel of the threat of immigrants, so it was only natural that the first two years of his administration were focused on the punishment and degradation of those same people. Also, signing executive orders and locking up immigrants en masse was really one of the only things the corrupt and feckless Trump White House could ever hope to accomplish. Filled with amoral climbers and reactionary thugs who were just as dimwitted and reckless as their boss, the White House of the 45th president was not built to tackle complex economic policy or global diplomacy. It was built to lock up perceived enemies and convince Americans who were mentally handicapped by ignorance-driven hate that Trump was a tough guy fighting for them. All you need to know about Trump’s ability to understand the complicated issues for which he was elected to navigate is that he thought building a wall across thousands of miles of desert would stop people from moving from one place to another for the first time in human history. Part of that wall was supposedly being built in El Paso.

Most people have never been to the border, so they don’t really understand how much of not really a thing the border is. I will never understand why people are so afraid and angry about people coming across it. I care as much about people crossing the border from Mexico into the United States as I care about the dozens of cars full of people who will cross from Florida into Georgia over the next five minutes and every next five minutes for the rest of my life — not at all. I’m secure in the belief that nowhere in those cars driving south from Brunswick or north from Jacksonville are people who are going to come to my house and hurt me or take my job or ruin my way of life. I think the same of anyone who crosses the invisible line between Juárez and El Paso, but many people don’t, so that border has become big political business. I needed someone in Juárez who could explain to the world that the border was simply a mental construct, and began asking friends both in the news business and outside of it if they knew anyone who could complete this task. I learned there was a man there who could distill the complexities into something anyone could understand. So I set out to meet him.

I paid a $1 toll to a woman in a booth and walked up a steep sidewalk on a bridge between the two cities and back down onto the street in Juárez. Standing there leaning against a Toyota pickup truck was Julián Cardona. He had spent almost his entire life in Juárez. First, he had worked in the maquiladoras, the cheap labor factories that built cars and appliances mostly for Americans. Then he had learned the art of photography and began documenting the city in all its grim and vibrant complexity for the daily newspaper there, El Diario. Now, in his early 60s, he still worked as a photographer but got most of his income by acting as a fixer for people like me, people who came across the border looking for help in telling stories. Julián and I shook hands and got into his truck. I needed to speak to migrants, I said. We drove farther into Juárez, through the industrial areas that held the maquiladoras and to Casa de Migrantes, the city’s small but busy migrant shelter.

One day in February 2019, Julián and I were driving around Juárez when we learned that the federales had rounded up migrants and were keeping them in a gymnasium. We drove to the gym and walked inside to find hundreds of men, women and children sprawled out on cots and blankets on the floor. In a back room we found a young man in his mid-20s laying on a makeshift bed made of a door resting on two piles of gymnastic floor mats, his legs in styrofoam braces, and his wheelchair resting next to him. His name was Jose and had made his way from his home in Honduras to Juárez and had wound up on the Paso del Norte bridge, trying to get into the United States. There, border guards put him in a cell and provided him the type of humane treatment that could only come from representatives of the greatest country in the world: they told him he was worthless, because he was in a wheelchair he had nothing to contribute to society, much less the United States of America. He told them that he was just asking for help and it was up to them to decide whether they were willing to give it to him. Pedir es fuerza y dar es voluntad, he told them. Asking is strength and giving is will, Julián translated for me. Jose made it, and he ended up in Dallas for a while where Sarah and I visited, bringing supplies from a GoFundMe I’d embedded into a story I’d written about his plight. He made us friendship bracelets from his bed, where he would lay and pet Hendrix. But the GoFundMe eventually ran dry, and his family ran out of money to take care of him. He returned to \Honduras.

Julián and I left the gymnasium and headed toward the bridge back to El Paso. There is a strip of bars there, including the Kentucky Club, where legend has it the margarita was invented. I was obsessed with another drink called chucho, cheap tequila in which roots from a native plant called the chuchupaste soak and give the tequila a harsh, earthy flavor. I drank Tecates and shots of chucho while Julián drank Jack and Cokes and told me how Juárez had changed from his youth. Gone were the days of pimple-faced and boot camp-weary soldiers coming across the border from Fort Bliss in El Paso for a rowdy night on the town. The cartel violence that began its climb toward a zenith of about 1,000 killings each year by the early 2000s. I sat with Julián in bars like Club Quinze, looking at old Playboy centerfolds plastered on the walls and ceiling, thinking about how this was one of those far-flung places on the edge of the world in which I’d always imagined myself having an adventure. But for Julián, this wasn’t a remote foreign outpost. This was home. It was his Peoria, and I was just another curious interloper who was adding “JUAREZ —” to his coveted list of exotic datelines.

Julián taught me a lot of things, but one of the most important was that the concept of remoteness is entirely subjective. Peoria is remote if you’re from Juárez. What Americans tend to think of as normal can be anything but for people who aren’t from here. Juárez wasn’t necessarily a place to be scared of, I learned. Migrants are no different than us, I knew. Julián was no different from me, a curious guy who liked asking questions and telling stories. Those stories inevitably end up being the same in one way or another. Someone always has power or money and is using it to get more, while the few struggle to get their cut.

While I spent most of my time at the border speaking with migrants from Mexico and Central America, Juárez was awash with people from all over the world trying to make it to America, including the Middle East. That was constantly used as a fear-mongering tactic in the first years of the Trump administration — ISIS is coming in the latest migrant caravan! In Dallas one day, I received a message from an Iraqi woman whose husband was in a privately run immigration prison in Laredo, Texas.

Zinah Al Shakarchi grew up in Iraq, but fled after she was shot for doing her job as a food inspector when she turned away a sugar shipment tainted with gasoline. Not long after, she met Safaa and the two quickly fell in love and married. They moved to the United Arab Emirates, but as Shiite Muslims they were hounded out of the majority-Sunni country. Together with their two children, they fled, arriving first in Mexico City, filled out the wrong visa paperwork, and ended up crossing into the U.S. near Hidalgo, Texas out of pure desperation. There, U.S. immigration officials took Zinah and her children away from Safaa, who became distraught and near-suicidal. He stopped eating inside the prison. Zinah and the kids fled to Canada, where she kept in touch with me over text and phone calls. Immigration and the border had become my latest obsession, a new set of traumas to consume in secondary fashion. Zinah and Safaa were just two of many people who had been caught up in the inhumane system I tried to penetrate. As always in America, there were tens of thousands more who were being abused by the systems we were supposed to trust.

Throughout all of this border chaos and terror inflicted on innocent migrants, plus the daily onslaught of controversies and unhinged madness coming from the White House and Trump’s Twitter account, I kept wondering about Las Vegas. I wondered why it seemed to have faded so quickly from memory. It seemed like a pretty big problem that such a bloody massacre could take place and the only thing that came from it was conspiracies about how it was all fake and an attempt by the government to take people’s guns. The dead bodies meant nothing to the people online theorizing about how and why unseen forces had manipulated Paddock to do their globalist bidding. Confronted with an obvious problem — Paddock had what can only be described as a fuckton of firearms and ammunition — the American right and online zoo of gun fetishists and government conspiracy nuts ignored the issue at hand and instead focused their energy on twisting it anyway they needed to avoid the problem at hand. I knew something about that myself, although I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time — the Thing was my big problem I chose to ignore in favor of diving down some rabbit hole of investigative fury. Taking in all this conspiratorial madness as the world continued to turn, quickly leaving Vegas behind, I went back.

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***

LAS VEGAS — The desk was covered in takeout containers, empty packs of cigarettes, and beer bottles. I had been in the room for four days, leaving only to go to the convenience store inside the lobby of Circus Circus to get more beer and cigarettes. It had been a year since the massacre, and I had returned to try to make sense of the senseless. Mostly, I stayed in my room and got drunk at a bar in the casino. I was binging episodes of The Office to try to get my mind off whatever it was that was making me feel like the world was falling all around me, the Thing kicking my ass. I knocked myself out each night with Miller Lites and shots of Jameson at a bar inside the casino before retreating to my room to finally and mercifully try to sleep away the the Thing inside me that wouldn’t let me go. The room gave me anxiety, I gave myself anxiety, the casino floor gave me anxiety, the whole city did. All around me, all I could see was future dead people. Smiling faces turned to blank stares of death on the blood-soaked ground. I kept seeing Stephen Paddock’s dumb, drunk, soulless eyes in the only picture that had ever been found of him, a picture I’d seen a thousand times online. Through the incessant chimes of the slot machines, I heard far-off screams.

After a few drinks at the bar that fifth night I had my fuck it moment. I went back to my room and packed a small bag with a notepad, called a cab, and told the driver to take me to Mandalay Bay. I got out and walked past the bellhops and security guards and into the lobby. Everything there was black and gold. But there was a dimness to it all, like looking at street lights at night with your sunglasses on. There was a dark film over everything, a shadow I couldn’t make sense of. I walked past a bar where a lounge lizard sang Frank Sinatra tunes to mostly empty chairs. Walking past a set of gleaming, golden elevators, I briefly thought about hopping in one and heading up to the floor where Paddock stayed that horrific night a year before. A security guard nearby, either through my own paranoia or because they were actually eyeing me for carrying a messenger bag into a casino late at night, scared me away from that plan. Instead, I walked out onto the massive casino floor and wound up where I always do in casinos, the sports book. I was drawn even more quickly than usual to the sports book at Mandalay Bay. You couldn’t miss it. The TVs climbed what seemed like three stories high off the casino floor. It was an electronic wonder that brought the solace that only a meaningless, early season hockey game or watching a few trips around Santa Anita racetrack can provide. Comforted by the movement of players in countless games across the country and around the world, the sports book in any casino is simply an extension of every family living room I grew up sitting in, where the green glow of some field came through the television. Childhood memories of going with my dad to the off-track betting parlor in Peoria, where cigarette butts and ticket stubs littered the hardwood floor, are never far off as long as there are horses racing endlessly around an oval, beamed to me in whatever casino I’m in from tracks back east where my nana played the ponies in the Poconos.

As I steadied myself under this comforting glow, I looked for a bar. Settling down on a bar stool I ordered a Jack and Coke. I sat there sipping my drink and staring blankly around me, wondering why I had come here. In four days, I had spoken to no one, done no reporting, and come to zero conclusions about why the massacre seemed already forgotten. They should tear this whole place down, I thought. Implode the Mandalay Bay into a pile of rubble. They did it all the time all over Las Vegas for plenty of other reasons. The hotels and casinos that made this town famous the world over are mostly gone, having been replaced by newer and shinier models in an eternal cycle of capitalistic renewal. Why was Mandalay Bay still here? And how could all these people be sitting here, happily drinking and gambling, knowing what happened thirty floors above them? I began to feel sick to my stomach and quickly finished my drink. Like the Motel 6 in Hammond, Indiana where Afrikka Hardy was killed, I had come too close to the epicenter/wellspring of violence for my own good. I felt that I had to see it with my own eyes, even if it made me ill. I had to know what it looked and felt and smelled like, even if it hurt me. I need to know what has happened and how and why so I can understand its role in creating the world in which we all live. I had to go to the heart of everything to try to make sense of all the madness of life. Here I was again, sitting in a crime scene that wasn’t a crime scene anymore. The terror had passed and, just like Tall Bob’s in the South End of Peoria, business had once again resumed.

I limped back to Circus Circus, deciding to walk off this terrible feeling. When I arrived I was ready for a drink. I sat down at the bar and received a text from Zinah: Safaa had been freed. No reason was given. ICE simply let him go from the detention center in Laredo and he was on his way to Canada to rejoin his family. Zinah said it was my reporting that helped to make this happen, and she thanked me. I cried to myself at the bar. Sarah was asleep, two time zones away in Dallas. My editor was down for the night too in New York. Journalism might have helped Safaa but it couldn’t save us from ourselves if we couldn’t even remember let alone do something about an event like the massacre just a year later, I thought to myself. In that moment, that’s all I had. Just me and my thoughts at a bar in a Las Vegas casino writing about some historic event and feeling that none of it mattered.

It did matter. It’s just that voice inside telling me it did not wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop questioning and wondering and asking what it all meant, whether it was worth it, what I was doing, where I was going, what I was going to do, who I would do it with, why I was doing it. God, that why… If there’s ever a word in this world that I’d like to never hear in my head again, it’s why. That why was the stowaway’s favorite word, the one it asked the most and at the worst times.

It was asking it as I sat at the bar and thought of Safaa and what would happen next, as I tried to shut up the voice by making small talk with the bartender. He wanted nothing to do with me. I was too drunk to make sense to anyone but me and the Thing.

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The last time we reported on deaths of detainees in immigration custody, I found that ICE had failed to provide detailed reporting on deaths within 90 days — a requirement of funding rules passed by Congress. Since then, ICE has begun updating its detainee death database in compliance with the rules. I hope that our reporting played a role in ICE’s mandate that it inform the public about deaths in which the agency has played a role.

This is the first of an ongoing series that explores the deaths of 38 men and women who have died in immigration custody since the start of the second Trump administration.

I also have a lot coming up on election interference ahead of the midterms. For now, you can listen to my recent appearance on Scott Harris’ Between the Lines show.

In March, Brayan Garzon-Rayo told a nurse at a jail in rural Missouri that he was not depressed and had no history of suicidal thoughts. The 27-year-old from Colombia then tested positive for tuberculosis and COVID before allegedly taking his own life.

In early January, Victor Diaz, 34, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a Minneapolis suburb for being in the U.S. illegally. Eight days later, he was dead inside a medical clinic on an army base 1,300 miles away after allegedly taking his own life. Diaz is the first death at the detention center since a local medical medical examiner determined another death there was a homicide, directly contradicting federal officials. Now, the U.S Army has since stepped in to perform Diaz’s autopsy — over the objection of local authorities.

On the same day of Diaz’s death, Jan. 14, 34-year-old Heber Sanchaz Dominguez took his own life inside a detention center in Georgia. Sanchaz Dominguez had no criminal history, but was involved in a car wreck on Jan. 7. He was arrested for driving without a license and insurance, law enforcement told American Doom. His family has said they’ve received “no answers” about Sanchaz Dominguez’s death.

In another case, a Chinese man named Chaofeng Ge who ICE has said took his own life at a detention facility in Pennsylvania was later found to have had his hands and feet tied behind his back at the time of death.

The deaths of the four men are among six suicides that have occurred in U.S. immigration custody since President Donald Trump took office a little more than a year ago. That’s the highest number of suicides in a 13-month span since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began publishing detainee death data in 2018.

The circumstances of many of those deaths have been questioned by families of the detainees, immigrant advocacy groups, and Democratic elected officials.

The deaths of these men are a troubling symptom of the United States’ growing detention landscape. Across the country, the Department of Homeland Security is enacting plans to convert industrial warehouses into detention centers. If current conditions inside immigration facilities are any indication, access to good medical care, healthy food and sufficient mental health resources are likely to be lacking in the new facilities DHS is constructing.

Supporters of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda may scoff at this — who cares if illegal immigrant criminals are holed up in a facility that isn’t so great? The issue is that we are no longer simply arresting and deporting “the worst of the worst,” as Trump and his hardline immigration allies like to say.

Sanchaz Dominguez and Diaz are clear examples of this. Neither man had a criminal history, let alone a violent one. Diaz may have been on his way to work at a Korean restaurant when he was picked up by immigration agents who were in the Minneapolis area as part of a surge there that has roiled the region over the last several months, infamously resulting in the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. The exact circumstances of Diaz’s arrest have not been made clear by ICE.

Sanchaz Dominguez took his own life shortly after arriving at the Robert Deyton detention center in Lovejoy, Georgia, which I confirmed by obtaining an autopsy report that provides detailed information about the circumstances of his death.

This, however, should not absolve U.S. immigration authorities or the Trump administration for its role in suicides of immigrants. The fact that men and women are choosing to take their own lives out of fear, stress, or desperation is an indictment of the cruelty of the systems and facilities in which they’ve been ensnared. Sanchaz Dominguez leaves behind two children, one of whom has Downs Syndrome. Diaz leaves behind two sons in his native Nicaragua.

While my reporting has provided some clarity on the deaths of Sanchaz Dominguez and others, many questions remain about the deaths of other men and women in the custody of U.S. immigration authorities. That’s because the deaths involve a labyrinth of local law enforcement agencies, medical examiners and coroners, and of course the Department of Homeland Security that takes significant effort to pierce. DHS and ICE answered none of my questions about some of these deaths. In some cases, local law enforcement and coroners were not helpful in providing information about their roles and investigations in deaths of immigrants.

In some cases, local officials outright refused to provide information or documents that could shed light on the circumstances of some of the deaths. This is part of a much larger problem with local law enforcement and medical examiners and coroners believing that they are simply not beholden to answering questions from reporters — an issue I’ve been dealing with for many years now. In other cases, local medical examiners and coroners have resisted transparency by demanding large fees for autopsy reports. Bottom line is, it takes a lot of work and patience to obtain these records, and it’s work that is crucial to understanding how so many detainees are dying under the Trump administration. I’ll have more on these deaths here at American Doom and elsewhere.

For now, here are some of deaths that I’ve identified as being highly questionable.

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Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, of Nicaragua died on January 14, 2026 at Camp East Montana in El Paso. ICE has reported his death as a suicide, which the Diaz family has questioned. He is the first immigrant to die at Camp East Montana since the El Paso County Medical Examiner contradicted ICE over the death of Campos. American Doom has learned that the Army is conducting Diaz’s autopsy. This is an unexplained departure from past practice, and the Army has not answered questions about why it is handling Diaz’s autopsy instead of the El Paso County Medical Examiner. Diaz had no criminal history, and leaves behind two sons, ages 10 and 15.

Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, of Cuba died on January 3, 2026 at 10:16 p.m. after allegedly attempting to take his own life at Camp East Montana detention center at Fort Bliss in El Paso. An autopsy later conducted by the El Paso County Medical Examiner later found that Campos died from “asphyxia of the neck and torso” and ruled the death a homicide. Campos was a convicted sex offender who was arrested on July 14, 2025, and slated for deportation.

Ismael Ayala-Uribe, 29, of Mexico died on September 22, 2025 after he complained of severe rectal pain for a week while in custody at the Florence detention center in Arizona, according to an autopsy report obtained by American Doom. During that time, he was given only Tylenol, the autopsy report states. He was eventually taken to a hospital, where staff found a hemorrhage, kidney injury and a possible hematoma. A surgery was being considered, but Ayala-Uribe died of a heart attack before the surgery could take place.

Lorenzo Antonio Batrez-Vargas, 32, of Mexico, died on August 31, 2025 at the Florence detention center in Arizona. An autopsy report obtained by American Doom showed he died of complications from influenza B, diabetes and COVID. Batrez-Vargas had previously been arrested for non-violent drug and alcohol-related offenses.

Brayan Garzon-Rayo, 27, of Colombia, died on April 8, 2025 at the Phelps County Jail in Rolla, Missouri. A coroner who spoke to American Doom said he had viewed video from inside the facility that confirmed the cause of death as suicide. The coroner, Ernie Coverdell, did not say whether the video showed Garzon-Rayo’s death. The Missouri State Patrol, which conducted an investigation into Garzon-Rayo’s death, did not answer questions about the video, and has not responded to a public records request for investigative materials. Coverdell and another coroner, Darren Dake, oversaw Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy. Both men have made disparaging comments about immigrants on their publicly-viewable Facebook pages. Garzon-Rayo had a non-violent criminal history that included fraud.

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Good morning from Savannah, where spring is about to pop if the hint of salt smell coming off the marsh this morning is any indication.

Meanwhile in Atlanta, lawmakers are no closer after two months in session to agreeing on a replacement ballot and tabulation system as a July 1 deadline approaches. That deadline requires that the ballots Georgians will vote on in November cannot have QR codes that are scanned in order to tabulate votes. Why? Because the election denial movement believes — with no proof — that QR codes can be used to manipulate, even change, votes.

The QR code ban shouldn’t have happened in the first place — there is no evidence that a single vote has ever been flipped simply because election equipment in Georgia utilize QR codes to tabulate votes. But the cat’s already out of the bag thanks to the passage of a 2024 bill, SB 189, that sets the July 1 deadline and accompanying prohibition on QR codes.

So, it’s up to the Georgia legislature to come up with a replacement system for how the state will count votes in the November midterms. So far this legislative session, which ends in early April, lawmakers have failed to introduce bills that solely address how those votes will be counted. Instead, the Republican-dominated legislature has introduced far more sweeping legislation that would require various forms of hand counts and hand-marked paper ballots for millions of Georgians to vote.

If Republicans get their way and Georgians will have to vote on hand-marked paper ballots, instead of the touchscreens the state has used for years, and those votes will then have to be counted by hand, we can expect chaos and turmoil.

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This is a developing and fast-moving story that American Doom has been fighting in court over for weeks. Please check back later for updates. This tedious and time-consuming work is not possible without your support. Please choose a paid subscription or consider a one-time contribution to support American Doom’s aggressive, fact-based journalism. - jg

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A …

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American Doom has been at the forefront of reporting on elections in Georgia. We were the first to file a motion to unseal the DOJ affidavit that led to the raid in Fulton Co…

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In a filing this afternoon in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, I’m seeking the release of the affidavit that led to the FBI raid in Fulton County that netted the Trump administration hundreds of thousands of ballots and other material from the 2020 election.

While the search warrant for that raid has been made public, the Justice…

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I’ve got some exclusive information about the FBI raid carried out on Wednesday at a Fulton County elections warehouse. Read on below or catch my full report at Zeteo. Stay tuned for much more on this developing story, as well as lots of forthcoming reporting on Homeland Security, ICE and our rapidly-expanding immigration detention system. If subscribing isn’t your thing, you can do a one-time contribution here. Now, on to the news…

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The raid at a Fulton County warehouse containing records from the 2020 election appears to have been a haphazard and incomplete one. A source familiar with the operation tells me that the agents there did not confiscate all the materials inside — even though some of the boxes left behind could very well have contained records pertinent to the investigation.

Not that it matters all that much — Democrats, voting rights advocates, and election officials from both parties contend that the investigation being carried out by the Trump administration is both unnecessary and doomed to fail. That’s because there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Still, President Donald Trump has never given up on his hopes of proving widespread fraud in 2020. To that end, his Justice Department has been coordinating with election deniers for months, as I reported in November at Zeteo.

Wednesday’s raid is part of an investigation that exists simply to propagate a narrative, Democrats say. That narrative will be used in November to call into question the results of midterm elections that Republicans in many polls look to be fairing poorly in. The narrative of election fraud will be weaponized, according to Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), to directly interfere in November’s election.

“This is not idle speculation — earlier this week AG Pam Bondi offered to withdraw ICE agents from Minnesota if the state turned over its voter rolls,” Goldman told me in a statement. “Just two weeks ago, Trump admitted that he ‘regretted’ not seizing voting machines after the 2020 election, and now, six years later, his administration is doing just that by raiding Fulton County’s board of elections.”

Goldman is among a handful of congressional Democrats who are warning that Trump could use the military or federal law enforcement to interfere in the midterms.

“It is clear that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are using their militarized immigration agents as part of this scheme,” Goldman continued. “By sending masked, violent agents into our cities to inflame tension and incite violence, they are trying to create a sham pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act, seize more voting information, and even potentially cancel the election.”

But even if that doesn’t occur, Wednesday’s raid offers another path toward MAGA election interference, Democratic officials here tell me. It involves the MAGA-dominated State Election Board taking over election administration in Fulton County, home to Georgia’s largest and most important voting bloc — a largely Black, largely Democratic group of voters who will be crucial to determining the balance of power in Congress through Sen. Jon Ossoff’s re-election campaign.

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I’m out with a big exclusive today at Zeteo that’s the result of a week of digging into immigrant deaths at ICE facilities across the country. Your paid support funds my journalism, and keeps American Doom free for everyone else. To support my work, please choose a paid subscription or drop a few dollars in the Doom Coffee Fund. Also, pre-order my book so I can hopefully write another one some day. Now, on to the news… - jg

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The killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis is just the latest development in a year’s worth of outrage over the Trump administration’s aggressive push on immigration enforcement. The apparently unjustified killing of Pretti — and before him, Renee Nicole Good — might push Senate Democrats to refuse to pass a funding bill that would give ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the money they need to continue their operations across the country.

A vote on that bill is expected Tuesday. Pretti’s killing also comes as there are growing questions about deaths inside immigration facilities. Today at Zeteo, I have some troubling news on that front.

Since October, ICE has not released a single detainee death report for any of the dozen-plus immigrants who have died in immigration custody since that time. ICE is required by federal law to release this information — in the form of what are called “detainee death reports” — within 90 days of an immigrant’s death. But the most recent detainee death report listed on ICE’s website is from Sept. 22.

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You can watch my breakdown above about how Good was perceived as such a non-threat that she waived through ICE agents who drove past without incident just before she was killed. None of this adds up and it’s all very bad.

Speaking of bad things that have been happening for some time, I’ve written a book that details the last decade of chaos and carnage, as well as the early years of my career and my battle with — and recovery from — alcoholism. It’s called If I am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened - The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. I’m told the book even contains a bit of a love story.

So what, you say — you already knew about this stupid book? Well, now you can pre-order the book on Amazon before it’s published by the University of Georgia Press in June. I sure would appreciate that. It’s nice to be reminded every once in a while that there are folks who are actually on the other side of these words and that I’m not just pumping out sentences into the ether.

If you want a taste of what’s inside Something Terrible, you can read an excerpt I published here at Doom in September. You should read that, pre-order my book, and share it far and wide. That way I can continue doing what I love — as dark as this job often is.

Speaking of that, I also need you to pay for the journalism I produce here. Less than 300 of Doom’s 13,000 subscribers are paid supporters of my work. That doesn’t seem like a great ratio! I get it. I don’t want to pay for subscriptions either. And I damn sure don’t want to be reminded or guilted into paying for things like subscriptions to things I use. But I think my journalism is worth it — especially considering my exclusive reporting on threats to democracy as we head into the most important election of our lifetimes (for real this time, and again). Remember this from last year, which all the other reporters and publications in the country didn’t find, but I did all on my own?

Yeah, that’s pretty good stuff. And there’s more of it coming. So, if you aren’t already, please consider throwing a few dollars my way with a paid subscription to Doom. For the next few days, you can get a discount of 20 percent off those subscriptions.

OK, enough of the money-grubbing. Watch the clip above and check out the Public Notice piece, plus that excerpt. That should keep you pretty busy for a while. And remember, they can’t break all of us at once.

-jg

Ten years ago, in the summer of 2015, a police officer in Cincinnati stopped a man named Samuel DuBose. It was night on a narrow road among winding back streets of a hilly neighborhood. Words were exchanged, and DuBose tried to drive away.

Officer Ray Tensing claimed his arms were caught in the window and he was in danger of being dragged, so he shot DuBose point-blank in the head, killing him. I arrived the next day to see if protests would turn to flames. They did not. Tensing, who is white, was indicted for killing DuBose, who was Black. Eventually, Tensing was acquitted for DuBose’s killing.

At trial, the prosecution was not allowed to present evidence showing that Tensing was wearing a shirt with the confederate battle flag underneath his uniform.

The issue of police claiming that their lives were under threat by someone in a vehicle is not new. What’s new about the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis yesterday is that her death came at the hands of a federal immigration agent who should have never even been in the city.

The primary reason the agent — who has not been named — was even in Minneapolis is that a right-wing political influencer made highly questionable claims about fraud committed by Somali immigrants there, prompting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to surge her teams to the city.

Good was more or less an innocent bystander. Now she’s dead because Noem wanted to continue her campaign of looking tough on immigrants, egged on by a 23-year-old kid pretending to be a journalist by filming Somali immigrants who ran childcare centers, piggybacking off actual reporting by local press who had exposed some fraud tied to the businesses.

Good is dead for this reason. She is also dead because American fascism continues to grow and spread in very troubling ways. Take a scan of social media and you’ll see plenty of your fellow Americans justifying Good’s killing. I’ll get to why that’s intellectually dishonest on its face in a moment but for now, consider the ironic phenomenon of conservative Americans lining up in support of masked federal troops occupying American cities and killing U.S. citizens with impunity under the direction of the president himself.

This is nearly the exact scenario under which our nation was founded, with all those self-identified patriotic Americans you’ll see in the coming days and weeks praising the agent who killed Good identifying with the colonists and revolutionaries who battled tyrannical overreach and a foreign military on their own streets 250 years ago. Now, the people like Good are the revolutionaries, but the patriots aren’t on their side anymore.

***

Watch the video of Good’s killing and you’ll see a disorganized and unprofessional law enforcement operation. First, Good waves through an ICE vehicle that passes her by without incident.

After this, other agents approach Good’s SUV, appearing to offer contradictory commands, motioning for her to drive away before demanding she exit the vehicle and grabbing the door handle. The agent who killed Good appears to position himself in front of the vehicle — which any cop worth his or her salt will tell you is a bad idea. Good puts the SUV in reverse as an agent wrenches on her door handle. She then shifts into drive and the SUV lurches forward.

A video from another angle shows the agent who killed Good sliding from the hood to the front quarter panel of the car. As CNN’s chief law enforcement analyst, John Miller, noted on Wednesday night, it’s only after the agent is out of harm’s way from the front of the SUV that he begins firing. Prior to shooting Good, the agent had his phone out and appeared to be recording her.

All of this — the lackadaisical yet contradictory commands and actions of multiple agents on scene, the firing agent’s stupid and pointless maneuvering in front of Good’s vehicle and his filming of her — do not add up to what Noem and president Donald Trump are now trying to sell: that the agent was so in fear for his life had no choice but to fire on Good.

If all that weren’t obvious enough, Trump of course had to double down. Hours after the shooting, he claimed that the agent was “viciously” run over by Good. Video shows he was not.

In fact, the agent was never even knocked to the ground. After shooting Good and after her car rammed harmlessly into a parked vehicle nearby as she lay dead or dying behind the wheel, the agent can be seen walking just fine under his own power.

***

Fatal police shootings are always fertile ground for culture war battles between the left and right. Over the last 11 years as I’ve covered them, both sides have gone to extremes. Many on the left think there’s never any reason for an officer to use fatal force. Many more on the right believe that law enforcement should be able to kill just about anyone, for just about any reason.

The reality of police uses of force and the events that precede them are much more complex than these two opposing viewpoints allow. But what used to not be up for as much of a debate was whether an officer had a legitimate fear for his life when killing someone. How anyone can watch the videos of Good’s killing and conclude that the agent was legitimately in fear for his life by a slow-rolling SUV that he was just filming with his phone defies common sense.

But we are far past that. The American right — taking their cues from Trump or vice versa; it’s hard to tell anymore — will suspend reason in order to be on what it perceives to be the correct side of this police killing-turned culture war flashpoint. They’ll either lie and say they actually believe the agent faced his own mortality and had to make an impossible choice, or they’ll convince themselves that’s the case. There’s a cost to the soul for that. Maybe it’s not one they’ll pay here but they’ll pay it eventually.

If Minneapolis burns tonight, or tomorrow, or in the coming weeks or months as Trump’s masked immigration agents focus their harassment campaign on it, there’ll be at least some level of justification. Trump and his people will feel equally justified in responding with their own violence. They’ll invoke the Insurrection Act or send in National Guard troops from Republican-led states. Hell, they’ve been wanting to do that since protests erupted in Minneapolis and across the country following the killing of George Floyd.

DuBose’s killing happened in the middle of a two-year stretch of high-profile police killings across the country. A mass protest movement spawned from that, leading to a backlash from white voters who clung to then-candidate Trump’s message of “law and order.”

That protest movement then mostly faded from view as the first Trump administration inflicted its daily chaos and corruption on the nation. It came roaring back with Floyd’s killing, further enraging the American right who watched from their small towns as big cities burned. That’s part of the reason why the attempted insurrection on January 6 was so easily dismissed by Trump and his supporters.

If Floyd protesters could burn American cities over his killing, why shouldn’t self-described patriots be able to try to overturn an election they (wrongly) believed was illegitimate?

Then, as now, we have a president who is unable or unwilling to calm tensions, instead choosing to inflame them as he sees every violent, unnecessary and tragic incident as an opportunity to score points in a nihilistic game that is hastening our national decline.

In 2020, the cooler heads in the first Trump administration stopped our would-be dictator from outright shooting Floyd protesters outside the White House. This time, protesters might not be so lucky. In fact, Trump’s troops are already killing Americans like Good.

At the time of DuBose’s killing, a question hung over the nation that was difficult to answer, and mostly persists today: Why does this keep happening? With cops all over the country interacting with Americans in innumerable tense and strange circumstances, fatal police shootings are probably always going to happen.

But when it comes to Good, the answer is obvious: This happened because of Donald Trump. He caused it. He supports it. He enjoys it. Trump and Republicans don’t see Americans who disagree with them as their fellow countrymen. They see them as the enemy. Or, as Noem described Good today, people who are engaged in “domestic terrorism.”

You tell me who you think is causing the terror: people like Good, or the people who killed her.

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A masked immigration agent killed a woman in Minneapolis today. Prior to the shooting, the agent appeared to be filming the woman — who was behind the wheel of her SUV — with his phone.

Other agents had approached the vehicle, prompting…

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Whatever happens during President Donald Trump’s address to the nation tonight, know that it will be partly an attempt to distort reality or distract from it — and that reality is that it has been a disastrous end to the first year of Trump’s second presidency.

Epstein, the economy, extrajudicial killings — how’s that for just some of the scandals that are roiling the Trump administration as it limps out of 2025 and into 2026. Hanging over all of it is the president’s health.

A few weeks back I began asking the White House why Trump wears bandages on the back of his right hand. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded last week — with an obvious lie.

“President Trump is a man of the people and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other President in history,” Leavitt said in a statement. “His commitment is unwavering and he proves that every single day.”

Why is this so obviously a lie? Well, there’s common sense, for one: have you ever known a single person to injure their hand from handshaking? I haven’t. There’s a few other reasons why this lie is so obvious and ridiculous, not the least of which is the fact that Trump has had fewer public events this year than any other year as president. Now, he plans to get back out on the road next year to whip up support for Republicans in the mid-term elections, which they’re of course trying to rig in their favor.

To prepare for the exhausting prospect of campaign-style Trump rallies, I’ll be taking as much time off as possible over the holidays. This year really has flown by. Like 2024, 2025 was incredibly newsy and we’ve grown quite a lot here at American Doom. Really, these two years have sort of melded together in my mind. There hasn’t been much of a break, so I’m looking forward to taking one.

The only reason I’m able to do that is thanks to the support of my paid subscribers. To join those ranks, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom. Believe it or not, next year is going to be even crazier, and American Doom is one of the only publications keeping a close eye on state and local threats to elections. That’s where the rubber meets the road for our democracy, and you’ll want to pay attention to stay in-the-know about how Republicans are working hard to rig the mid-term elections in their favor.

Before my last dispatch of the year later this week, take a look at some of the greatest hits from 2025.

On Friday night, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth took to X to address one of the growing scandals surrounding him — what increasingly looks like murder, war crimes, or both.

“The Department of War will never back down,” Hegseth wrote. “America First. Peace Through Strength. Common Sense. For the warriors, always.”

In addition to the gaping holes in Hegseth’s story about the killing of two survivors of a Sept. 2 airstrike on alleged drug smugglers — inconsistencies that will catch up to him at his inevitable congressional testimony — the entire months-long mission to take out supposed drug boats in international waters has required incredible suspensions of reason to square with reality.

Of course, Hegseth and many others are clearly lying about much involving the strikes, which have killed 87 people since September. The Trump administration hasn’t presented a single piece of evidence that the targets of the attacks are drug smugglers, that the drugs are even headed to the United States, or that the strikes are any more necessary than the non-lethal drug interdiction operations that have been in effect for decades.

Instead, we’ve gotten grainy videos shared bombastically on social media and questionable legal justification for a “war” on “narco-terrorists.”

At Public Notice today, I’ve got a breakdown of how these airstrikes are evidence of an erratic and largely leaderless administration running purely on the instinct of morally depraved strivers like Hegseth trying desperately to impress Trump by looking tough. But I wanted to take a moment here to address Hegseth’s (apparent) claim that the strikes necessitate a “never back down” stance by the U.S. military.

Let’s start with…

America First

The administration has claimed the strikes are necessary to take out drug dealers whose drugs are killing Americans. One problem: the boats are coming from South America and carrying mostly cocaine.

More than 70 percent of American drug deaths are from fentanyl, not cocaine. If the Trump administration wanted to save American lives, it would be better off doing something about the fentanyl flooding American streets, much of which comes from China.

Peace through strength

Nothing says strength like the most powerful military in history obliterating speed boats piloted by, in some cases, Venezuelan fishermen.

If the disproportionate use of force weren’t enough, we’re also now in the business of killing helpless non-combatants.

After a first strike killed nine men on Sept. 2 and separated their boat in half, two men clung to the craft’s wreckage.

Democrats who viewed video of the strike said that the two survivors may have been waving their arms in surrender or begging for mercy. Showing strength, our military fired on these helpless souls.

Common sense

Is it “common sense” to spend untold millions (or billions) of dollars on military strikes to take out low-level drug smugglers? Does that same common sense apply to Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted by U.S. courts for smuggling 500 tons of cocaine into the country?

For the warriors, always

Maybe there are some members of the military who are proud of their work raining hellfire upon speedboats in the Caribbean, I don’t know. What I do know is that this isn’t likely what they signed up for.

It therefore must take a significant amount of energy to convince oneself that these strikes are necessary to protect Americans. Are these strikes “for the warriors” then?

When Hegseth says, “for the warriors,” he means these strikes are for people like himself — men with little to no combat experience who have romanticized conflict well past its brutal realities. It’s a desperate attempt at self-actualization from a man with a mediocre-at-best resume — an unintentional admission of his own insecurities.

***

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It’s been a tiring year but I hope everyone is getting ready to have some rest over the holidays. If you want to support our work here at American Doom or spread the word about what we do, I’ve put some links to gift subscriptions below. Remember tha…

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