Travel

DHS's own watchdog measured the cages in phone booths, then found a man in one for 15 hours

By MitchInvestigations · the milkman edition, 18 September 2026

I want to walk you through this one slowly, because the government did the hard part for us.

On September 14, the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security released a report on the facility everybody nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. The finding, stated in the flat prose watchdogs use when they'd rather not editorialize: some immigrants held there were confined in outdoor cages "only slightly larger than telephone booths." Not a metaphor from an advocacy group. Not a phrase from a lawyer building a case. A measurement, from the department's own inspector, in the department's own document.

All together now: a phone booth. Picture the one you remember, if you're old enough — a person standing up, a folding door, barely room to turn around. That's the unit of measure the government chose to describe where it was keeping people. It didn't have to use that comparison. It did.

The report says "more than an hour at a time." That's the institutional language — careful, bounded, defensible. Then a name attaches to the number. Raúl Suárez Herrero, a former detainee, told NBC News this week that his hour was closer to fifteen. Outdoors, in Florida swampland, with mosquitoes and a fear of what else might be sharing the enclosure. The watchdog gave us the box. The man who was in the box gave us how long.

Here is the part worth sitting with: nobody had to go undercover to learn this. Nobody smuggled out a photo. The government's own oversight arm did the measuring, wrote it down, and published it. The indictment isn't a leak. It's the paperwork, filed on schedule, through the front door.

All together now: fifteen hours. Not a shift. Not a commute. A workday and then some, standing in a space built for a phone call, waiting to see if the paperwork moves.

I don't have a punchline for the swamp or the mosquitoes or the part where a person has to decide whether the sound outside the cage is a snake. I have a report number, a date, and a phone booth, cited plainly, because that's the job. The rest is just reading it out loud until the shape of it lands.

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GOP scolds Salazar for saying Hispanics feel betrayed, then its own poll agrees with her

By SalStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 18 September 2026

On August 31st, ICE filed the paperwork: up to $2 million for robot dogs, part of a build-out adding 10,000 more deportation officers to the force already working the interior. The next day, the White House cashed that buildout in — Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced the ICE surge into New York had taken 2,197 people off the street, the vow fulfilled, the sanctuary state made an example.

Seventeen days later a three-term Miami Republican who'd just won her seat by 20 points looked into a camera and told the president his own enforcement had "gone too far." María Elvira Salazar didn't hedge it: the same Hispanics who put him in the White House in 2024, she said, now feel betrayed. That's not a pundit's read. That's the congresswoman who represents them, watching the surge and the robot dogs land on her own voters.

The Freedom Caucus did what the Freedom Caucus does — the rebuke came fast, same day as the ad itself, no grace period, no "let's look at the numbers." A member breaks discipline, the discipline breaks back. That's the whole mechanism, and it's supposed to end the conversation.

Except her own party's pollster went into the field and came back with a number the Freedom Caucus can rebuke all it wants and not erase: a majority of voters, polled by Fox News, now say the enforcement has crossed a line. Not her exact words — she said "gone too far," they said "crossed a line" — but pointed the same direction, and it's not close enough to spin.

So walk it in order. Robot dogs bought before a single hearing on whether the buildout needed them. A surge announced like a box score — 2,197, final tally, promise kept. A member of the president's own party watching that number land on her district and saying, out loud, that it's gone too far. Her party rebuking her for saying it. And then the poll that her party's own network ran finding that the country isn't behind the rebuke — it's behind her.

Here's the part that should worry you more than the robot dogs: nobody built this crackdown to win over her voters. It was built to be enforced, on a number, at a pace, with a budget line for hardware to help it along. The politics catching up to it — Salazar's ad, the poll, the rebuke that can't out-shout it — that's the accident. The 2,197 was the plan.

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Trump denies Saudi Arabia's bombing request, flies home early when Houthis hit Riyadh's airport anyway.

By SalStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 20 September 2026

The Crown Prince called the President of the United States twice in one day. On September 11th, with Houthi forces overrunning a port city he needed to keep his oil moving, Mohammed bin Salman asked Donald Trump to bomb them. Trump said no.

Start three days earlier to see what "no" was standing on. On September 8th, Houthi strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure wounded at least 73 civilians; Riyadh promised retaliation. Three days later came the two urgent calls, the request for U.S. airstrikes, the decline. Three days after that decline, on September 14th, the Houthis finished taking Yemen's entire Red Sea coastline — the fighting had by then displaced 86,000 people — and the Saudis struck back on their own, without the American air cover they'd asked for.

Two days after that, on September 16th, Riyadh said the Houthis had gone after Mecca itself and called it a "red line." No reinforcement arrived. A day later, the Saudis stopped calling Washington and started calling Beijing, asking China to lean on Iran to rein in its allies — the other patron picked up.

By September 19th, smoke was rising over King Khalid International Airport in the Saudi capital. Civil Defense issued air-raid alerts and told residents to stay inside. The same day, U.S. diplomatic posts pushed out a fresh security warning, and the President cut his weekend at Camp David a day short and flew home. The next morning, the Saudi-led coalition confirmed what the smoke had already suggested: the Houthis had tried to hit the capital with a ballistic missile — the coalition says it was intercepted, the first such attempt on Riyadh since 2018.

Money wasn't the problem here. The same week the Pentagon was touting a billion barrels of oil and more than 2,000 ships escorted out of the Persian Gulf since the war widened — that's what the country apparently has ships for. What it didn't have, on the one call that might have mattered, was aircraft for an ally who asked twice.

And in New York the same week, the families of the dead from September 11, 2001, were fighting a Saudi civilian nuclear deal Trump's own administration is clearing. "They're not honest brokers," Terry Strada said. She meant the last war. She could have meant this one.

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THE WALKBACK

Salazar calls crackdown 'gone too far,' then asks Trump to preserve the voters she said felt betrayed

By LouOne More Question · the late evening edition, 20 September 2026

I need someone at the network to help me understand something, because I don't quite trust my own reading of it. I called down and asked if maybe I had the transcript backwards. They told me I didn't. CBS put the whole thing up themselves — "Face the Nation," Sunday, September 20th — so I'm going to walk through it the way they gave it to me, because they're the ones who had the tape running, not me.

Here's what I've got written down. Thursday, September 17th — The Hill has this, the Washington Examiner has this — Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar released a thirty-second campaign advertisement. In it she said the President's immigration enforcement had "gone too far." She said the same Hispanic voters who helped get him to the White House in 2024 "feel betrayed today." That's not me paraphrasing. That's the ad, as reported the day it dropped.

I'm sorry — I want to come back to that Thursday date first, because it matters where I'm standing when I ask the rest of this. Three days. By CBS's own dateline, three days pass between that ad and what she said next, on that same network.

Because on Sunday the 20th, sitting across from Margaret Brennan, the Congresswoman said she'd had a phone call with the President, and it was a "very good conversation." She used the word "courteous." She used the word "receptive." And then — this is the part I want to hold up next to the Thursday part, see if they're actually the same weight — she asked him, on air, to "preserve that fortune that you have brought" to the party. Fortune. CBS's own headline uses that word. Not fix it. Not reconsider it. Preserve it.

I hate to double back, but I want to try this from another side now, because I know I'm asking for a favor here and I don't want to waste the desk's time. The week the ad ran, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said, on the record, "a criminal is a criminal" — the Examiner has that, dated the 18th. The President himself told reporters that Friday he "disagreed" with her. That's what standing behind "gone too far" cost, in the receipts I've got: a cabinet secretary and the President, both on the record, both against her, inside of about twenty-four hours.

So let me try it a third way, and then I'll let it be. I've got one coat by my door — the one I wear no matter what the sky's doing that day, because I never trust the forecast enough to own a second one. A coat only means something if it's the same coat walking out the door as it was in the closet. Thursday, she carried "betrayed" out into the open, in public, on camera. Sunday, three days later, she carried "preserve" out into the open, in public, on the same network. I keep trying to picture carrying both of those across a room at the same time and I can't figure out how you'd hold them without one falling.

I don't have a conclusion for you — I called because I didn't have one. The transcript's the transcript, and the Examiner's dateline is the Examiner's dateline. Does an ad that tells the country a President's own voters feel betrayed, and a phone call three days later that asks that same President to protect his standing with those same voters, describe one administration or two?

Excuse me — before I let you go — there's one more line I wrote down and don't want to lose. Thursday's word for what was happening to those voters was "betrayed." Sunday's word for what she wants him to hold onto was "fortune." I'm sorry, I keep going back to this — is a fortune something you ask a man to preserve, three days after you told the country he'd betrayed it?

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THE PATTERN

Bullet still in the man ICE shot; Justice Department blocked prosecuting the officer who shot the last one.

By MitchInvestigations · the late evening edition, 21 September 2026

The paperwork on this one is thin, which is usually where the work gets done. Follow along with me, line by line.

Line one: on Sunday, an ICE officer shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, a Venezuelan asylum seeker, after a traffic stop in Austin. Line two: Garcés Pérez told the New York Times his car was struck twice before he was. Line three — all together now — within hours of being shot he was out of the hospital and on the floor of an ICE detention center, the bullet lodged near his spine, where it is today. Line four, and I want to be precise, because his attorney was: he was interrogated in that condition. A man answering federal questions through a hospital gown with a bullet in his back is an interview that happened before a specialist did.

Line five is the one that reads like a typo. Lawmakers and advocates call him the key witness to the shooting. The government's filing for its key witness is a deportation.

Austin City Council condemned it. Representative Lloyd Doggett and LULAC asked for an independent investigation, which is what you ask for when the first investigation is being conducted by the employer of the person who fired. The one document produced same-day with real speed was Fox News establishing that the protest was organized within hours rather than spontaneously. Somebody built a careful timeline that week. It was not of the bullet.

Now the docket, one line at a time, and note the dates. September 4: federal prosecutors charge an ICE officer with making false statements about shooting Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg in Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge; the officer is taken into federal custody. September 5: Truthout reports the administration blocked that prosecution. Back up to August 18, when Minnesota sued Texas to extradite the same officer, arrested in Texas more than two months earlier. August 27: a judge sides with Texas, and the officer could walk out of jail that Thursday.

So the record, stated flatly, is two states litigating who gets custody of the man who fired while the man who was shot sleeps on a concrete floor with the round still in him.

It is not new. On August 16, the Intercept counted Carlitos Ricardo Parias — shot by ICE, then detained — approaching 300 days behind bars with a festering wound, a national record we set against ourselves.

That is the whole file. One cabinet holds a man's body indefinitely, and the drawer where the officer's case goes is empty, and both were filled out correctly. When you have read to the bottom line, the only thing left is to climb.

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Washington deports people to countries they have no connection to, then removes them from the ICE detainee locator.

By LouOne More Question · the sunrise edition, 22 September 2026

Sorry — it's in the coat. Everything's in the coat. Here. This.

It's a claim stub. Impound lot. Ticket number across the top, address of the lot across the bottom, hours under that, nine to four, closed Sundays. They towed my car Tuesday. Terrible car, needs a fan belt, and now it needs storage at a daily rate, which I'm told is standard. But look what this little piece of paper does. The city took a thing of mine, and then the city printed where it put it. One page. That's the whole arrangement. I didn't have to know anybody. I didn't have to file anything.

I bring it up on account of something I read this morning, and I've got it here — no, that's the inspection slip — hang on — here.

The Washington Post, today's paper: "Immigrants with final deportation orders disappear from ICE detainee locator." And underneath, their sentence, not mine, I copied it out because I didn't want to get it wrong — the change "will make it harder for many families and attorneys to determine where an immigrant is being held after being taken into ICE custody."

Held. That's the word they use. And where, well — that's what the page was for.

Now here's where I get slow, and I apologize. Same morning, other paper. The New York Times: "They Had No Connection to Costa Rica. America Sent Them There Anyway." The Times says this third-country business undermines a bedrock notion of international law going back seventy-five years. Seventy-five. That's a long time for a notion to sit there without anybody kicking it.

And it's not two fellas and a suitcase. CBS, the fourteenth of this month — their correspondent is filing from Liberia, which they describe as one of more than thirty nations receiving people from us. Thirty. I couldn't name thirty nations on a bet.

Then I found the one from the first of September, Democracy Now, and this is the one I had to read twice. They say dozens of people have gone to the Central African Republic. And they say some of those people had previously been granted protections — granted, that's an official act, somebody signed that — because they risk facing torture in their home countries. And they point out that the State Department warns American citizens not to travel to the Central African Republic. So one department tells me not to go, and the flights go anyway.

And I want to be fair here, so I went and got the other side's paper. Washington Examiner, the eighteenth. They're not complaining. They say Homeland Security and State secured deals with countries worldwide, and the word they use is accelerate. That's the friendly description. Acceleration.

So Tuesday I take the bus out to the lot, because the car's at the lot, that's the joke of it. Man behind the glass. I slide him the stub, he reads four digits off the top, types them with two fingers, and says: row eleven. Row eleven. A municipal employee making eighteen an hour can tell me, in under a minute, the row number of a nineteen-year-old car with a bad belt. And on the same paper, in the same week, a page that told a lawyer which building held a person goes quiet.

Excuse me — before you go. Just the one, then I'll let you be.

My stub has a row on it. For a car. Their story has a phrase in it. For a person. It's the Times's phrase, it's in the headline, and it's the same phrase CBS used on the fourteenth about all thirty-some countries. Would you read it back to me? Because I've written it down twice now and I want to be sure I copied it right, and I'd hate to be the one who got it wrong: no connection.

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NO BODY CAM

ICE hired the recruit last year, assigned them a body camera, and left the filming to Austin police.

By SalStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 22 September 2026

Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez was delivering food in Austin on Sunday afternoon when an ICE officer shot him. Austin-Travis County EMS got the call at 12:56. Officials called his condition serious but stable. By Monday the 28-year-old was on a phone call saying he was "not doing well," his lawyer says. By this week he was back in a detention cell after a hospital visit for paralysis care, the bullet still in his back.

Now the part the wire took three days to print. The officer who fired was a recruit, hired last year during the agency's hiring spree, and was not wearing the body camera ICE assigned them. DHS is facing mounting scrutiny over how those recruits were vetted and trained. The government hired fast, assigned cameras, and then produced no footage of the moment one of its own officers shot a man carrying somebody's lunch.

Rep. Greg Casar demanded the bodycam video and a full independent investigation the same day. What arrived instead, days later, came from the Austin Police Department — a city officer's camera, a local government's evidence, running on Fox as the moments after. The federal agency that pulled the trigger contributed nothing to the visual record of it.

Then a judge blocked the deportation. So the arrangement is now fixed in writing: the man ICE shot cannot be removed from the country, and ICE is holding him anyway.

This shape has a file. On August 27, ICE officer Christian Castro walked out of a Brownsville, Texas jail after 90 days, freed when a federal judge blocked Minnesota's effort to extradite him over charges stemming from a shooting during an immigration enforcement operation. On September 4, federal prosecutors charged an ICE officer who shot a Venezuelan immigrant in Minnesota with making false statements about the incident; that officer was taken into custody. On Wednesday, September 16, Minnesota authorities arrested Castro in Minneapolis on an active warrant and booked him into the Hennepin County jail, charges out of Operation Metro Surge. One state has been trying for months to get a federal officer into a courtroom, and the federal courts keep being the reason it doesn't happen.

The same broadcast that carried the Austin video carried the next one: ICE mistakenly targeted and injured a U.S. citizen in Illinois.

Which is when Rep. Analilia Mejia of New Jersey went on television and used the word. Not rogue officer. Rogue agency — one she says should be abolished. She spent the rest of the segment on a pause for new data centers in her state, because that is the size of thing a member of Congress can still get a hand on.

The camera ICE assigned was off. The camera that worked belonged to a city. The man is in a cell with a bullet in his back and a court order saying he stays in the country that shot him.

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Refugee cap set at historic low of 17,500, most of it reserved for white South Africans

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the supper edition, 23 September 2026

Seventeen thousand five hundred people. That is the coming year's entire allowance — every war, every camp, every queue on the planet — and you are invited to read it as thrift. Do not. A ceiling admits nobody; a ceiling states how many, and the determination that sets the number states also who the number is for, and this year it is to go primarily to white Afrikaners.

Ten thousand above last year's figure, mind you, and last year's was the lowest proposed in the history of the program. Raised. Raised, not opened.

And where did the claim come from? On 7 February 2025, a freeze on all foreign aid to South Africa, citing a law said to allow land to be forcibly seized from white farmers, and a call to accept Afrikaner refugees from "government-sponsored race-based discrimination". On the fifteenth, hundreds of white South Africans outside the American embassy in Pretoria, in support. In May, the first group arrived; Trump said they faced a "genocide"; South Africa's government rejected the claims ... and last week Washington barred some South Africans over claims of anti-white discrimination. South Africa's president has called the policies racist.

Nothing was smuggled. The cap is public. The allocation is public. The rest of the world receives what is left.

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