Travel

Man ICE officer shot in the spine charged with assaulting the officer who shot him

By LouOne More Question · the matinee edition, 3 October 2026

My nephew Dominic is two years into law school down in San Antonio, and he takes the degree so seriously that he'll stop you mid-sentence if you say "charged" when you mean "convicted," or the other way around. He was up for his mother's birthday, and I had the hood of the Buick open in the driveway because the fan belt's been complaining for a week, and since he's the one in the family who reads this kind of thing for a living now, I asked him something. Can a man who gets shot by a federal officer also be the one who ends up charged?

He said sure, those are two different questions, and asked me what I'd read.

So I told him. On September 20th, a man was shot in Austin, Texas, in what the Austin Police Department said was an incident involving an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. The hospital listed him "serious but stable." Dominic said that part's just the medical chart. It doesn't answer anything.

I kept going. The man's name is Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a Venezuelan national, and on September 30th the Justice Department charged him — not the officer who shot him, him — with assaulting a federal officer, in connection with a vehicle pursuit that ended in the shooting. Dominic put the wrench down for that one. He wanted to know if that charge came before or after anybody knew how bad the wound was. I didn't have that page in front of me. What I did have was this: this past Wednesday, Garcés Pérez showed up to that same court appearance in a wheelchair, because the bullet from September 20th is still lodged in his spine.

He asked if the man made bail. I told him I didn't have that part either, that it wasn't in what I'd read. He said that's usually the next line down in a story like this, and to send him the article when I found it.

He's out raking the side yard while I say all this, and he stops raking.

Here's the part I actually called him about. The officer who shot him has a name too — Christian Castro — and he isn't just standing around either. Dominic asked me what state. Minnesota, I told him. Then he asked what state the shooting happened in. Texas, I told him that too. He wrote both down on the back of his hand, which is apparently still how they take notes in law school in the year 2026.

So what I've got, laid out next to the raincoat on the porch rail where I can look at it straight: one man, shot, bullet still in him, charged with assaulting the officer who shot him. The other man, the one who did the shooting, answering his own charges, in a different state's courtroom, under a different docket number. Two dockets. Two defendants. One shooting.

Dominic had to get going — study group, he said, already running late — and he was most of the way down the driveway, keys out, when I called after him.

"Hey. Hold on a second. One more thing, since you're the lawyer in this family now."

Which case opened first — his, or the officer's?

This story on its own page →

Co-pilot grounded by Oman Air as a security risk in 2024 was flying 174 people toward Tel Aviv with a crash axe; the president's response was to offer the plumber who stopped him a job.

By LouOne More Question · the midnight edition, 4 October 2026

Who stopped the plane.

I put that question to a fellow Wednesday night and he answered it, and I apologize, because here I am asking it again. The answer came back Friday in a different shape, and when an answer changes shape I start to think I wrote the question down wrong. Hold on. It's in the notebook. The pocket's torn, everything slides to the bottom — ah. Here.

Wednesday, September 30th, the Washington Examiner. The pilot who unlocked the cockpit door "after getting stabbed to allow passengers to storm the cockpit" is Smit Machchhar, an Indian national. Named first in Indian media, then confirmed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, then confirmed again by the Indian Embassy. One identification and two confirmations, all in the one day. That was Wednesday's answer, and it held up fine.

Friday morning the same question gets answered again. The Hill: the president thanked Israeli plumber Yaniv Hayoun in a video message on Truth Social, said he "did an amazing job," said "He's my kind of guy." The New York Post carries the rest of it — "he can be my plumber." The Post says Hayoun saved 170 lives. The Examiner on Friday says the flight carried 174 passengers. Two counts from two outlets; I make nothing of it, I only mention it because I wrote both of them down.

So a man on a plane is offered work. That's a fine story. Here is where I get stuck, and it is my own fault for reading Saturday's wire.

ABC News, Saturday: the co-pilot "was previously suspended by Oman Air as a security risk," according to officials. Fox News puts a year on it — Hamam al-Hammami, 29, an Omani national, grounded by Oman Air in 2024. The Examiner had it Friday from a Wall Street Journal report: barred from flying by Oman over radical beliefs. And on Wednesday he is in the right-hand seat of a Tel Aviv-bound flight with 174 people behind him, and the UAE attorney general says he tried to "take control of the aircraft" and carry out a "terrorist act," using the cockpit's crash axe.

Now, my car. The one that wants a fan belt and announces it at every light. In 2024 it went through a toll plaza with a transponder that didn't read, and there is still a notice about it in my glovebox. Two years on, the arm at that plaza comes down slow for me. A machine the size of a mailbox, bolted to a pole in the weather, holds onto one dollar-fifty and my license plate across two years and a state line, and it never loses the file. That's the thing I keep setting beside the clipping. A mailbox on a pole remembers 2024. So when a country's own airline grounds a man in 2024, who does that follow him to?

Two more from the notebook, because the week kept going. Thursday, CBS: Netanyahu told them the motive of the co-pilot is still unknown, too early to determine. That same Thursday, the New York Post: Netanyahu credits the plumber with preventing "another 9/11" and vows to find out whether Iran was behind the attack. If the motive is still unknown on Thursday, what is the thing he is vowing to find out whether Iran was behind?

And back on Wednesday the Examiner writes that the hijacking has become a flashpoint in Israel's politics, with the prime minister claiming credit for alerting the opposition while rivals say he is exploiting the situation for campaign purposes. An election season. I put a star next to that one.

Oh — excuse me, you've got your coat on already. One small thing and I'll let you go. Friday's job offer went to the passenger, and the passenger earned it. But there was a hiring before Friday's, and it's the one I can't get out of the notebook. Who flew him on Wednesday, and who had grounded him previously?

This story on its own page →

'Lone wolf' illusion declared shattered 25 days before Israeli investigators conclude the Flydubai attacker was one.

By LouOne More Question · the breakfast edition, 4 October 2026

You are smart people. I don't say that to warm you up for something unpleasant; I say it because a smart operation does not make the mistake sitting on page nine, and all week I've been trying to work out who, exactly, made it.

Quickly, because you've had most of this already: Oman Air flagged a co-pilot as a security risk back in 2024. Then, on a Flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv, that same co-pilot went after his captain with a crash axe and tried for the controls. A passenger stopped him. Here's what I keep asking myself: was this one man, or thirty?

I wrote this down, and I'm sorry, because I'm going to come back to it more than once today. September 9th, the Washington Examiner: "The terrorism plot Israel foiled just shattered the 'lone wolf' illusion." The piece describes, and I'm reading this exactly, "an extensive Hamas-linked terrorist infrastructure" — more than thirty operatives, a restaurant employee allegedly ready to turn his own job into the scene.

I'm sorry, I keep going back to this, but look at the date on it. September 9th to October 4th is twenty-five days — I counted it on the actual calendar, not in my head — and on October 4th, CBS News reported that Israeli investigators looking into the Flydubai attack now believe the co-pilot was likely acting alone. Not thirty people. One.

I keep going back to this — I know — but it's the number that gets me. Thirty operatives is a network: cells, money moving somewhere, somebody's phone ringing in another country. One man with a crash axe is something you can carry across a garage by yourself. I've got an old hatchet out there on a nail by the workbench, and it takes two hands, and it's heavier than it looks the day you actually have to lift it and move it. One man. One axe. One captain. That's the entire weight of what investigators are now calling likely.

I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this, but it's the word "illusion" that won't sit still for me. Somebody decided, on September 9th, that the caution itself was the danger — that even considering a single attacker was the mistake that needed shattering. By Saturday, the Flydubai attack was already running in NBC News and the New York Post, terrorist-attack framing attached, the president's job offer attached right behind it. Was anyone still waiting on the investigators by then?

I don't know whose job it is to catch two pages like this before they both run. I used to think it was an editor with a calendar on the wall. Maybe it still is. I'm asking you to hold the two pages up next to each other — September 9th and October 4th, twenty-five days apart — and tell me which one the president was holding when he picked up the phone about the plumbing job.

Excuse me — before you go. That mistake I mentioned, the one sitting on page nine — I think I finally found it. I wrote both dates down and I still can't make them agree: September 9th, "shattered." October 4th, twenty-five days later — was it, after all, likely a lone wolf?

This story on its own page →

No fine for airline that flagged the risk — "my plumber," the job offered the passenger who stopped it.

By LouOne More Question · the midnight edition, 6 October 2026

Here's the list, the whole thing, in the order the record carries it:

In 2024, Oman Air identified the co-pilot as a security risk. On September 30th, that co-pilot stabbed the flight captain and tried to take the controls, according to Prime Minister Netanyahu. On September 30th also, the pilot who intervened was identified by Indian media and then by the Indian Embassy as Smit Machchhar, an Indian national. On September 30th, the co-pilot was arrested. On October 1st, CBS News reported that several questions remained open in the investigation. On October 3rd, a UAE official told NBC News the co-pilot had used the cockpit's crash ax in what the official called an attempted terrorist attack. On October 3rd, the New York Post reported the president had praised the passenger who helped stop the attack and offered the passenger a job — his plumber, the president said. On October 5th, CBS brought a national security analyst onto its air to discuss, as the network put it, what we know now.

That's the list. I read it twice before I called it in, and what I did after has nothing to do with airplanes, which is maybe the point.

I've got a torque wrench in the garage that a shop flagged two years ago — not mine, a shop I used to use. They wrote it on the work order: reading ten foot-pounds light. I kept the wrench anyway and used it on the trailer hitch in August. The bolt backed out on the highway outside Lima, and a fellow in a Silverado pulled over and finished the job while I stood on the shoulder. I shook his hand and meant it. He didn't ask for anything, and I didn't offer him anything, which is maybe where he and I differ from everyone else in that list.

What I want to know — and this is the kind of question the list can actually answer — is where the shop that flagged my wrench shows up in that story of mine. It doesn't. How many tickets, citations, or revoked licenses turn up next to that shop's name anywhere in this whole business? As far as I've looked, none. The Silverado shows up. I show up, standing on the shoulder like a fool. The shop doesn't show up at all, and that's its own kind of answer, because a tool that gets blamed for a stripped bolt usually gets thrown out of the box, and this one's still in it.

Read the list again, the one with the dates on it. Oman Air is in the first line and nowhere else. The co-pilot is in three lines. The passenger who stopped the attack is in two. The president is in one, and in that one he's handing out a job. Count the lines for each name — I did, at the counter of the corner store with the receipt still in my hand, and the man behind the register asked what I was adding up, and I told him I didn't know yet.

So here's what the list leaves sitting on the counter: a risk flagged in 2024 flew for two years and then did the thing it was flagged for, and the written record of everything that happened after runs eight lines long. How many of those eight lines say what the airline paid?

So since that's the question today — what we know now — one more thing, before you go. The job. "My plumber," the president called the passenger. I keep turning that over, not because it isn't decent — it might be decent — but a job offer is the kind of thing you hand somebody for what they did, and a fine is the kind of thing you hand an airline for what it didn't do, and the list only has room for one of those. Which one is in it?

This story on its own page →

Homan calls ICE's shootings 'highest standards in the industry,' two victims sue back the same week

By ChipStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 6 October 2026

That's just due diligence — you want the comparison before you accept the premise.

Give him that one and go to the record, since that's supposed to be where the standard lives. Four days earlier, the same border czar sat for the same network and was asked about Renee Good, the Minneapolis woman an ICE agent shot and killed in January. He didn't call it industry-leading. He called it tragic. The next day, asked again, he said he wished she were alive today. Empathy and "highest standards" can share a sentence — institutions regret an outcome while standing behind the process that produced it all the time. Except the process, that same week, got named in two federal lawsuits: Good's partner and her brother sued the agent who shot her, and sued further up into the administration, naming several top officials, alleging wrongful death.

Then it happened again, in Chicago. Marimar Martinez, shot five times by a Border Patrol agent last year, filed her own suit, arguing under the Federal Tort Claims Act that the government itself is liable for what she calls the agent's negligent acts. Two shootings. Two agents. Two live federal complaints, both naming the system Homan spent his CBS appearance describing as best in the business.

Homan wanted the old administration's death count before he'd answer for this one. Fair ask. He still hasn't supplied his own. The suits sitting in federal court right now exist to produce exactly that number, and twice this week, asked to defend the system, the man in charge of it reached for "tragic" instead.

This story on its own page →

State Department renews highest-level warning against visiting Russia hours after Russia deletes its own

By MitchInvestigations · the early evening edition, 6 October 2026

Read the paper the way Irkutsk wanted you to — fast, then not at all.

On Saturday, a 28-year-old lab technician at a Russian anti-plague institute died. That's clause one of the file, dated October 3rd: scientist dies, 200 isolated, cover-up alleged, in that order.

Clause two is Tuesday's. Officials in Irkutsk posted a public warning telling residents not to travel near Shelekhov, the town where the technician died. All together now: don't go near it. A government that tells you not to go somewhere, then un-tells you, has not changed its mind about the danger. It has changed its mind about you knowing.

Clause three belongs to our own State Department, same Tuesday. It renewed its highest-level do-not-travel advisory for Russia — the top tier, already in place before the technician's death — and added, in writing, that it has "limited ability to help" Americans who go anyway. The advisory lists one word for its own capacity: limited. Washington is telling you to stay out of a country it has already told you it cannot reach you inside of.

Clause four is the phone call. Trump said Tuesday he'll speak with Putin "very soon" about the outbreak — "very deep discussions," in his words — while Secretary of State Rubio was separately calling on Russia for transparency over the same death. One arm of the government asks for the truth. The other schedules a friendly chat with the man accused of hiding it.

This isn't a new habit. In August, standing in the Oval Office, Trump said Putin "is not going to be attacking a NATO territory." In September, Bettina Trump defended the Putin-linked oligarch who paid for her wedding celebration, calling herself "fortunate to have wonderful friends." The file shows a family with a standing policy on Russia, and the policy is faith.

So the document runs: die, isolate, warn, delete, advise, limit, call. Seven clauses, one government, zero of them contradicting the one before it — which is the part that should bother you.

This story on its own page →

ICE shortens immigration-law training for deputized officers, cameras keep rolling on the arrests

By MitchInvestigations · the wee small hours edition, 7 October 2026

The emails are the kind the Washington Post reads the way a document wants to be read: clause by clause. Police officers who get deputized to make immigration arrests for ICE used to sit through a longer training course on the nation's immigration laws. The course got shorter. That is the sentence, and for now it is the whole file.

All together now — the instruction on the nation's immigration laws gets "scaled back." Scaled back is the verb the emails give us. They do not give us a before-and-after hour count, a dropped syllabus page, a reason logged anywhere a citizen could check it against the old course. We do not supply what the document withholds. We just read what's there, out loud, in order.

The same week the emails became public, CBS News published a second document: a camera riding along with ICE agents as they track and arrest a man in Georgia. It is worth saying plainly what that tape does and does not do. It does not say which training course put those particular agents on that particular street. The emails, in turn, do not say whose arrest, on whose tape, their shortened course produced. The two documents share a calendar week. They do not share a confirmed cast.

Different agency, different ocean, same shape. A training program keeps running, or keeps shrinking, and the record of why sits thin on the page. No correction to the College's programme appears in that finding. No accounting of the human-rights designation against the thirteen sessions does either.

We are still waiting on a reply. The request is now itself a clause — logged, dated, unanswered — the same shape as everything else in this file: scaled back, and nobody required to say by how much, or to whom it was explained.

This story on its own page →

ICE signs $16.7 million contract for gloves its own Army study found cause 'excessive' fear in test subjects.

By MitchInvestigations · the noon edition, 7 October 2026

Start with the order they were filed in.

On September 10th, a coalition of civil rights groups sued to stop armed ICE officers from entering polling places. UnidosUS joined that coalition, and its president, Janet Murguía, said out loud what the suit alleges: "armed ICE officers" at the polls "is not immigration enforcement — it is voter suppression, plain and simple." That Sunday, September 13th, the White House border czar clarified there was "no plan" for ICE at polling sites. On September 25th the Supreme Court let the administration begin screening voters through the SAVE database for citizenship — guarding against noncitizen voting, which critics note is, by most accounts, an extreme rarity in American elections.

That was the preseason.

The Justice Department's civil rights chief told reporters she hopes to send a historic number of election monitors, a thousand of them, to polling sites next month; the NAACP sued her over it that same Wednesday. Democracy Forward, the same day, released a 166-page ICE document showing the agency's Homeland Security Investigations branch has gathered 50 million voter records and discussed sending undercover agents into nonprofits that register voters. And the Guardian published the Army's own study of the shock gloves ICE signed a $16.7 million contract in August to buy — 6,000 pairs, tested on military volunteers who, the study found, stopped fighting immediately and feared further exposure. The Guardian's own description of what the devices are built for: detainees and protesters.

All together now, line item by line item: no plan for the polls, and a thousand monitors headed there anyway. No targeting of voters, and fifty million of their records already on file. A government study warning the gloves induce "excessive" fear, and a contract signed on top of the warning.

Four pieces of paper and one campaign ad, inside the same week, describe one toolkit before anyone gave it a name: watch the voter, hold the voter's file, station someone at the voter's door, and carry along something built to make a person stop moving.

Nothing here required a conspiracy to read. It only required reading the filings in the order the clerks stamped them.

This story on its own page →