Ten charged with attempted murder after allegedly ambushing Texas Ice agents
Federal prosecutors said attackers drew the agents out of an Ice detention center in Alvarado, Texas, with fireworks and by vandalizing vehicles. They allegedly shot a police officer in the neck and unloaded between 20 and 30 rounds on immigration agents, and were later apprehended by local law enforcement near the scene.
'It was a planned ambush with the intent to kill Ice correction officers,' said Nancy Larson, US attorney for the northern district of Texas, at a press conference on Monday. 'Make no mistake, this was not a so-called peaceful protest – it was indeed an ambush.'
Larson said the assailants began shooting fireworks outside the Prairieland Ice Detection Center, about an hour south of Dallas in Alvarado, Texas, at approximately 10.37pm. The fireworks drew agents outside and found the group spray painting vehicles with 'Ice pig', 'traitor' and 'other profanity', according to Larson.
A gunman, who was positioned in the woods away from the group, then fired a shot at a local police officer who was also on the scene and hit him in the 'neck area', Larson said. She added that a second gunman unloaded between 20 and 30 rounds on Ice corrections officers, who she said were unarmed.
'This was an egregious attack on federal and local law enforcement officers and it is part of an increasing trend of violence against them,' Larson said, adding that a jammed AR-style rifle was later found abandoned in the woods.
Ten people, most of them from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, were charged with three counts of attempted murder. An 11th 'co-conspirator' faces obstruction of justice charges.
Larson said local sheriff's deputies caught the alleged assailants in two separate vehicles near the facility, both with tactical-style vests and weapons. One group of seven alleged assailants was also covered in mud.
'We found masks, goggles, tactical gloves' in a residence, said Larson, along with 'additional body armor … spray paint, fireworks and again insurrectionist materials'.
The attack comes after police said a man with an assault rifle shot at officers leaving a Texas border patrol facility on Monday, before being killed by law enforcement. Hours before the attack his father told police he was looking for his son, who he said had psychological issues and was carrying weapons.
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The Independent
21 minutes ago
- The Independent
Trump's team wanted Kilmar Abrego Garcia to face ‘American justice.' He could be deported again before trial
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Daily Mail
21 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
The REAL reason the Epstein 'client list' is never getting released
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It has never been established that Epstein had ties to Mossad. 'Jeffry Epstein, in my view, is a textbook case of an access agent. I've said this before, but I think it's important and it bears repeating,' he told Bet-David. 'If you are a foreign intelligence service and you want information from Bill Clinton, or Bill Gates, or Alan Dershowitz, or important people, you want secret information from them—you're not going to recruit them. 'They don't need anything from you. They don't have any financial vulnerabilities. So you do the next best thing: you recruit someone who has access to them, and you finance this person... he has a private island.' He went on to mention Virginia Giuffre, who led the fight to bring Epstein to justice and claimed she was trafficked to have sex with Prince Andrew. Giuffre died by suicide at the age of 41 in April. 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The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Nearly 300 pages of Atlanta's ‘Cop City' records released after first-of-its-kind ruling
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The foundations have been used to pay for surveillance technologies in cities like Baltimore and Los Angeles without being subject to public scrutiny, according to the report. Vargas said the ruling, and the records provided, 'sets a precedent'. But he added that the results are a 'mixed bag', since Barwick did not offer an opinion about whether all the APF's records should be available to the public, or whether police foundations in general should be considered public agencies. 'The ruling doesn't come down hard on the bigger issue,' Vargas noted. This means police foundations could continue to assert they have a right to withhold records and invite further litigation. The 287-page document the APF sent to plaintiffs on 1 July offers insight into how the foundation actively lobbied Atlanta city council members to squash activist efforts to put Cop City's construction to a citywide vote in a referendum, among other issues. In a 17 September 2023 email, Rob Baskin, an APF spokesperson, said the foundation would speak to 'the mayor's key folks' and members of the city council about how allowing a referendum on Cop City to go before Atlanta voters 'would, at best, delay and could derail the project's financing', according to a document he attached. Letting the city's residents decide on the project would 'almost certainly [result] in the loss of credibility of City Council and its members', the document warns. Activists behind the referendum 'seek to override their elected representatives who conceived, debated and twice overwhelmingly approved the project in fully transparent public forums', the document says. The foundation omits that the city council meetings he refers to, in which the training center's funding was approved, included record-breaking numbers of Atlanta residents attending and dozens of hours of public testimony against the project. When the city council approved the training center funding anyway, the referendum effort was born. Cop City Vote organizers then spent months gathering 116,000 signatures in late 2023 in order to reach a required threshold of about half that number of verified, registered voters. A coalition of voting rights and pro-democracy law firms across the US drew up an ordinance to codify how the city could verify and count voter signatures on petitions to place questions on ballots in general, and offered it to Atlanta city council. This was needed because the Cop City referendum was the first such local democracy effort in the capital of Georgia's 176-year history – and no such process existed. But in the end, the city council scuttled the ordinance behind closed doors, as the Guardian reported at the time; the referendum never took place, mired in legal disputes. 'If we had known, and gotten these documents when we asked, there was a potential for immediate impact on public opinion,' Scott said, referring to the foundation's role in squashing the referendum. Also revealed in the document: the foundation posted 40 officers and installed eight cameras at the training center's 171-acre (70-hectare) footprint in a forest south-east of Atlanta in late 2023, to protect it from any vandalism by activists. Opposition to the $109-million center has come from a wide range of local and national organizations and protesters, and is centered on concerns such as unchecked police militarization and clearing forests in an era of climate crisis. Atlanta police, and the foundation, say the center is needed for 'world-class' training and to attract new officers. The last eight pages of the document include redacted emails, which appears to violate the judge's order to leave all records un-redacted. Plaintiffs plan to file a motion to obtain those records. After receiving the document several weeks ago, ACPC has not waited to test the ruling, and filed an open records request last week for minutes from the foundation's board meetings going back to 2005, Scott said. He has yet to receive a reply. 'We're going to keep going for transparency,' he said.
