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Hundreds of community members gathered in Houston on Thursday evening for a public viewing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old Mexican man shot and killed by an ICE agent on July 7. His sons stood by their father's casket for hours greeting mourners who wore blue, Salgado Araujo's favorite color. A mariachi band played, and several altars adorned the chapel: One table held Salgado Araujo's construction tools and hard hats, while another displayed two of his Mexico soccer jerseys. Photos and videos of some of the family's most joyful moments were projected in the background.
Democracy Now!'s María Inés Taracena spoke to some of the attendees outside of the funeral home. "Looking back at history, it brought back memories of Emmett Till, when his mom also let the community grieve with them," said Cesar Espinosa, a local immigrant rights activist. "She wanted to show the world what they had done to her son, and I think today, this family also wanted to show the world what they had done to them."
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In a primetime address on Thursday, President Trump accused China of meddling in U.S. elections in his latest effort to spread doubt about the U.S. voting system ahead of the midterm elections in November. Trump announced he was declassifying documents that show what he called "shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure," but offered no evidence that China or any other country directly interfered with recent elections.
"If Trump was trying to build … a smoking gun case that the 2020 election was stolen, he failed miserably," says Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. "I am still very concerned that this speech is intended to lay the groundwork for the administration to interfere in the midterms."
Berman argues that U.S. elections are "secure" and that results are "audited extensively at the state level" and reviewed at the federal level. He says the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden, was "found to be the most secure in American history."
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Hollywood's blockbuster adaptation of the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey premieres around the world today amid growing calls for a boycott. Human rights campaigners are criticizing director Christopher Nolan over his decision to film part of the film in Western Sahara, a vast territory in northwestern Africa that Morocco has occupied for the past half-century.
"This occupying force is practicing cultural genocide against the Sahrawi people, ethnic cleansing," says María Carrión, the executive director of the Western Sahara International Film Festival. "By staying silent for one year and then using this footage, Nolan has basically become an accomplice to Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara."
Abidin Mohamed Hamudi, a Sahrawi filmmaker speaking to Democracy Now! from Algeria, says he cannot return to his home in Western Sahara, but Nolan "can just go there and film and be complicit in the occupation of my homeland." He calls it "a metaphor of how the Western world uses human rights, democracy narratives whenever they want, and then ignore it in other parts of the world."
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After ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, last week, they quickly arrested three witnesses: the other men that the 52-year-old father of three was driving to work. The three men, including Salgado Araujo's younger brother Victor, are now being detained by ICE and threatened with deportation.
"There is a Trump militia roaming our streets, our towns, our cities, killing people regardless of immigration status with absolutely no accountability. … They are either not getting training or getting training to shoot directly at people, to murder people, in the streets," says Congressmember Pramila Jayapal, explaining that the three incarcerated witnesses must be protected from deportation for at least as long as they can provide information for the investigations on Lorenzo Salgado Araujo's killing. Victor Salgado Araujo "wants to be accessible as a witness, and it's really hard for him to do that when he's [being detained] 45 minutes away from Houston," says his attorney Ruby Powers. "Being able to be in the United States freely, to be able to give that testimony is what we're asking for."
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