A US immigration<\/a> officer shot and killed a man identified by rights groups as a 26-year-old Colombian on Monday, the second such killing by federal agents in less than a week.<\/p>\n The shooting happened in Biddeford, a town of 22,000 people in the northern state of Maine and is likely to fuel criticism of president Donald Trump\u2019s deportation drive and its handling by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).<\/p>\n US media identified the victim as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, who reportedly worked as a delivery driver and lived in Biddeford with his wife and three-year-old daughter.<\/p>\n An ICE spokesperson said officers had tried to stop a vehicle at around 7.20am local time after conducting surveillance of the last known address of a person with a deportation order, AFP reported.<\/p>\n A vehicle \u201cattempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon. The driver of the vehicle was struck, and emergency services were immediately contacted. He passed away from his injuries,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n Senator Angus King said he spoke with homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin following the fatal shooting. King urged state and local officials to remain involved in the FBI-led investigation and also raised concerns that ICE agents were not wearing body cameras.<\/p>\n Dozens of demonstrators were seen in Biddeford hours after the incident chanting \u201cget ICE out\u201d and called out Republican senator Susan Collins for her complicit votes supporting the DHS agency.<\/p>\n Monday\u2019s ICE-involved killing in Maine, and the one last \u200cTuesday in Texas, brought to at least seven the number of \u200cpeople shot dead during immigration enforcement operations since January 2025, when Trump returned to office and launched a campaign of mass deportations.<\/p>\n In other developments:<\/p>\n Lindsey Graham\u2019s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, has been named as her late brother\u2019s temporary replacement in the US Senate after his unexpected death over the weekend. Nordone would serve the remaining months on Graham\u2019s current term. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The US has launched its third consecutive night of strikes on Iran hours after Donald Trump said Washington would reinstate a maritime blockade on the country and, in an apparently policy reversal, charge ships for safe passage. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The US defense secretary, \u2060Pete Hegseth, \u200bannounced that the Pentagon and the US Department of Justice have created a \u201cjoint taskforce \u200bto identify and \u200bprosecute\u201d what he called the \u201cunauthorized disclosure \u200bof sensitive\u201d information to the press, marking the latest escalation in the Trump administration\u2019s effort to crackdown on leaks. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, launched a campaign to dismantle the international criminal court (ICC), claiming the global tribunal was interfering with US military and law enforcement operations at the risk of American sovereignty. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Share<\/a><\/p>\n Key events<\/p>\n Donald Trump is in Washington today. We can expect to hear from him at 11am ET when he welcomes the prime minister of Iraq, Ali al-Zaidi, to the White House.<\/p>\n We\u2019ll bring you the latest lines from their bilateral meeting, particularly if Trump has any more information on the latest strikes on Iran and the ensuing backlash from Democratic lawmakers in Congress.<\/p>\n Share<\/a>US refunds $81bn in Trump tariffs after supreme court ruled them illegal The US government has already paid back tens of billions of dollars in tariffs it collected before the supreme court ruled them illegal, according to budget figures released on Monday.<\/p>\n Tariffs<\/a> \u2013 taxes on imported goods \u2013 have been a key part of Donald Trump\u2019s economic plan since he took office again last year.<\/p>\n In February the supreme court shut down<\/a> a big chunk of the extra tariffs Trump had ordered, forcing the government to return money to the companies that had paid them.<\/p>\n According to the budget data, the US has paid out $81bn (\u00a361bn) in tariff refunds so far this fiscal year, which started in October 2025, compared with $5bn during the same period last year.<\/p>\n A Treasury department official said the spike was almost entirely because of the supreme court decision, with most of the refunds happening in May and June.<\/p>\n Trump had pitched the tariffs as a catch-all fix for the economy, bringing factories back to the US, getting better trade deals and closing the deficit in the federal budget.<\/p>\n But the deficit, which had become a little smaller last year thanks to the tariff income, is now growing again. It hit $1.367tn in the first nine months of the fiscal year, up 2%.<\/p>\n Share<\/a><\/p>\n Ramon Antonio Vargas<\/p>\n Hunter Biden<\/a> says he is \u201cgrateful that the rule of law prevailed\u201d in a defamation lawsuit that recently netted him a judgment of $1.7m in punitive damages from former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.<\/p>\n Biden made that comment in a social media post that served as his first comments about the judgment, which a federal judge in California handed down<\/a> on Friday.<\/p>\n The post by Joe Biden\u2019s son cited a portion of the ruling which said Byrne \u201cis not credible, fabricates awesome and farfetched narratives to garner attention in the media, and fabricated the defamatory story at issue in this case to damage the plaintiff\u2019s reputation\u201d.<\/p>\n US district judge Stephen Wilson\u2019s \u201corder \u2026 speaks for itself,\u201d Biden wrote, along with a hyperlink to the decision.<\/p>\n Biden sued Byrne in 2023, maintaining that Byrne lied in an interview that Biden had solicited a bribe from Iran\u2019s government in 2021.<\/p>\n Biden\u2019s father was the US president at the time. Byrne for his part is a Donald Trump ally who funded efforts to overturn the president\u2019s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Hunter Biden\u2019s lawsuit recounted how Byrne in an interview lied that Hunter Biden<\/a> \u2013 in exchange for an $800m bribe \u2013 had offered Iran to go to his father, have him \u201cunfreeze\u201d $8bn in frozen Iranian assets and ensure that the US would \u201cgo easy\u201d on Iran during \u201cnuclear talks\u201d between the two countries.<\/p>\n Share<\/a><\/p>\n Michael Sainato<\/p>\n Federal officials fired by the Trump administration<\/a> are calling the recent supreme court decision a \u201cdagger in the heart\u201d of the civil service that will open independent federal government agencies to corruption and manipulation at the whim of the president.<\/p>\n Since Donald Trump took office again in January 2025, he has fired more than 50 officials<\/a> from federal agencies as the Trump administration openly sought to have the supreme court overturn a landmark 1935 ruling that limited the president\u2019s power over independent agencies, known as Humphrey\u2019s Executor.<\/p>\n The ruling in the decision, Trump v Slaughter<\/a>, which effectively gives the president free rein to fire members of independent agencies, was based on the firing of Rebecca Slaughter, appointed<\/a> to serve as a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by Trump in 2018.<\/p>\n Slaughter said she received the email notifying her that she was fired by Trump in March 2025 as she was helping with rehearsal for her child\u2019s elementary school play, a performance of Beauty and the Beast.<\/p>\n \u201cMy stomach just dropped,\u201d she said, noting she wasn\u2019t surprised given similar firings were occurring at other agencies with statutory protections. \u201cI was really hoping that it would avoid us, both because I love my job, but really more because I love the agency. I just knew this was going to be a big fight and pretty unpleasant and pretty destructive to this institution that I really valued.\u201d<\/p>\n She called Alvaro Bedoya, the other Democratic commissioner at the agency, who was at his daughter\u2019s gymnastics practice. He had been fired as well.<\/p>\n They both filed<\/a> a lawsuit challenging their terminations a few days later, though Bedoya resigned from the FTC as he was not being compensated and he could not afford to be without income, while Slaughter\u2019s husband\u2019s income made it possible for her to continue pursuing the litigation.<\/p>\n Share<\/a>\u2018Misuse\u2019 of crowd control weapons on ICE protesters led to blindings and traumatic brain injuries, report finds<\/p>\n Jos\u00e9 Olivares<\/p>\n It\u2019s been a brutal tactic deployed by local and federal law enforcement officials time and again over the past year: using teargas, rubber bullets and pepper spray to control protests outside ICE detention centers or during enforcement operations.<\/p>\n Now, a new report lays bare the scale of the use of these crowd control weapons during anti-immigration demonstrations across the US, including hundreds of incidents that resulted in lasting and traumatic injuries.<\/p>\n The report and an interactive map<\/a> was created by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley (HRC) and released this week. Doctors and human rights experts with PHR and HRC documented 412 verified incidents of the \u201cmisuse\u201d of these crowd control weapons, also known as \u201cless-lethal weapons\u201d, from June 2025 through May 2026.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a concerning story,\u201d said Dr Rohini Haar, the lead author of the report and a PHR medical expert, in an interview with the Guardian.<\/p>\n The report documented 203 injuries stemming from the alleged misuse of the crowd control weapons. Some of the injuries included blindings<\/a>, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions.<\/p>\n The researchers struggled to confirm the full scale of the injuries, because \u201cvisual investigative techniques cannot adequately assess invisible injuries, such as chemical injury or chronic pain or hearing loss\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe true number of injuries is likely far greater,\u201d the report adds.<\/p>\n Share<\/a>ICE agent fatally shoots driver in Maine, six days after similar death in Texas<\/p>\n Hello and welcome to the US politics<\/a> live blog.<\/p>\n A US immigration<\/a> officer shot and killed a man identified by rights groups as a 26-year-old Colombian on Monday, the second such killing by federal agents in less than a week.<\/p>\n The shooting happened in Biddeford, a town of 22,000 people in the northern state of Maine and is likely to fuel criticism of president Donald Trump\u2019s deportation drive and its handling by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).<\/p>\n US media identified the victim as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, who reportedly worked as a delivery driver and lived in Biddeford with his wife and three-year-old daughter.<\/p>\n An ICE spokesperson said officers had tried to stop a vehicle at around 7.20am local time after conducting surveillance of the last known address of a person with a deportation order, AFP reported.<\/p>\n A vehicle \u201cattempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon. The driver of the vehicle was struck, and emergency services were immediately contacted. He passed away from his injuries,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n Senator Angus King said he spoke with homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin following the fatal shooting. King urged state and local officials to remain involved in the FBI-led investigation and also raised concerns that ICE agents were not wearing body cameras.<\/p>\n Dozens of demonstrators were seen in Biddeford hours after the incident chanting \u201cget ICE out\u201d and called out Republican senator Susan Collins for her complicit votes supporting the DHS agency.<\/p>\n Monday\u2019s ICE-involved killing in Maine, and the one last \u200cTuesday in Texas, brought to at least seven the number of \u200cpeople shot dead during immigration enforcement operations since January 2025, when Trump returned to office and launched a campaign of mass deportations.<\/p>\n In other developments:<\/p>\n Lindsey Graham\u2019s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, has been named as her late brother\u2019s temporary replacement in the US Senate after his unexpected death over the weekend. Nordone would serve the remaining months on Graham\u2019s current term. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The US has launched its third consecutive night of strikes on Iran hours after Donald Trump said Washington would reinstate a maritime blockade on the country and, in an apparently policy reversal, charge ships for safe passage. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The US defense secretary, \u2060Pete Hegseth, \u200bannounced that the Pentagon and the US Department of Justice have created a \u201cjoint taskforce \u200bto identify and \u200bprosecute\u201d what he called the \u201cunauthorized disclosure \u200bof sensitive\u201d information to the press, marking the latest escalation in the Trump administration\u2019s effort to crackdown on leaks. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, launched a campaign to dismantle the international criminal court (ICC), claiming the global tribunal was interfering with US military and law enforcement operations at the risk of American sovereignty. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Lauren](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Lauren_Almeida.png\")
Lauren Almeida<\/p>\n