Protesters outside an ICE facility in Scarborough, Maine. Photo (cc) 2026) by Eesha Pendharkar / Maine Morning Star.
Monday’s fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero at the hands of an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine, is a national story, with The New York Times, NPR, CNN and others all offering plenty of coverage. And as I wrote on Tuesday, the Maine-based media are following this closely as well, especially the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News.
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Today I want to focus on The Boston Globe, which occupies sort of a middle ground — not national, not regional in terms of covering Maine, but nevertheless close enough that Biddeford could be considered an exurb of Boston.
Protesters on Monday in Biddeford, Maine. Photo (cc) 2026 by Emma Davis / Maine Morning Star.
For the second time in a week, an ICE agent has shot and killed a man, this time in Biddeford, Maine, southeast of Portland.
The circumstances are murky. The Trump regime claims that the victim of Monday’s shooting, a Colombian named Joan Sebastian Guerrero, was endangering public safety as he attempted to drive away. There’s no evidence for that, and given the official lies that were told about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year, we have every reason to be skeptical. It’s notable, too, that Guerrero was reportedly not even the person ICE was looking for.
Plymouth County Correctional Facility. Photo via the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Office.
The Massachusetts public records law is already unacceptably weak. Now comes a new wrinkle: the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Office is refusing to release health-care records regarding the 507 detainees it is holding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), claiming that its agreement with the notoriously abusive federal agency prohibits the disclosure of such information.
Read about the 2026 New England Muzzle Awards, recognizing outrages against freedom of speech and expression from July 4, 2025, to July 4, 2026.
The ACLU of Massachusetts sued for the release of those records in February. On Tuesday, the issue came to a head, as the ACLU and the sheriff’s office squared off in Suffolk County Superior Court. Judge James Boudreau has not yet issued a ruling, but we have: Sheriff Joseph McDonald is receiving a New England Muzzle Award for failing to comply with state law.
Granted, there are some nuances. The sheriff’s agreement with ICE includes language banning the public disclosure of information about any detainees. Here’s how Kevin G. Andrade, reporting for The New Bedford Light, summarized what’s at stake:
The sheriff’s denial relied on arguments about state privacy laws and questions around federal preemption of state law.
“We have, I think, a pretty interesting issue here,” said Judge James Boudreau, who presided over the proceedings, at the hearing’s start. “The first question is whether or not the supremacy clause [of the U.S. Constitution] prohibits the production of the documents.”
Dan McFadden, managing attorney at the Massachusetts ACLU, argued that it does not.
“Plymouth has no authority to contract its way out of public records law,” McFadden told the judge in his arguments. “These are records we have good reason to believe they have because the contract with ICE says they produce them.”
As Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham points out (sub. req.), “the ACLU specifically asked that all records be anonymized,” which you would think is sufficient for protecting the detainees’ privacy rights. One way of reading the ICE regulation in question, though, is that it doesn’t matter — McDonald can’t release the names “or other information relating to” detainees. Yet given the wave of terror ICE has unleashed under Donald Trump, McDonald should have assured the public by releasing records about the detainees’ well-being without identifying anyone by name.
Moreover, there are reasons to believe that all is not well in Plymouth. Abraham writes:
The Plymouth County jail might not be “Alligator Alcatraz,” but advocates have good reason to worry about detainees there. Advocates have decried McDonald’s failure to provide detainees with timely access to lawyers and interpreters. For several years, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey have been calling on ICE to improve conditions in Plymouth, citing a DHS investigation in 2022 that reported rotten food, limited access to clean water, and delays in medical attention. In interviews, detainees have described a lack of timely access to health care and medications. And it’s getting worse, said Leah Hastings, staff attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts.
The real failure by McDonald, a Republican, was to go into business with ICE in the first place; as it stands, he is the only sheriff in the state to hold detainees on behalf of ICE. In May, an investigation by The Washington Post revealed hellish conditions for ICE detainees across the country. The Post reported that on at least 780 occasions, staff members at ICE facilities “used physical force or chemical agents to control immigrant detainees during the first year of the Trump administration.”
As the Globe’s Abraham notes, McDonald has denied allegations of abuse at the jail he oversees, saying, “I am proud of the humane care and custody we provide in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility. We are … routinely audited by federal and state agencies, and routinely exceed all applicable standards.”
That may be true, but we shouldn’t have to take his word for it.
Federal agents looking for David Streever at his home in Rochester, N.Y. Photo via Syracuse.com.
Here we go again. Last week Michelle Breidenbach of Syracuse.com reported that a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, had been handed a threatening letter by two federal agents.
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The letter, which claimed she had endangered ICE personnel, was almost certainly the result of her having written an Instagram post calling on Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Minneapolis protester Renee Good, to be indicted. Ross had already been publicly identified in the press. (The Syracuse incident was the subject of my newsletter last week for paid supporters, which I’m now offering for free.)
Now we learn that two federal agents showed up at a home in Rochester, New York, last Tuesday to deliver a warning about an email that David Streever had sent to Todd Lyons last February. At that time Lyons was the interim director of ICE; he’s since left that post. Breidenbach reports that Streever was on vacation in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter, so the letter was left with his wife, Hilary Brandt Streever, an Episcopal priest.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Zuri Berry, the executive editor of The Banner in Montgomery County, Maryland. He’s also a Boston Globe colleague of Ellen’s from days of yore. The Banner is a nearly 4-year-old nonprofit digital startup founded in Baltimore that has been expanding into the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., even as The Washington Post has been cutting back on local coverage.
Zuri is one of those journalists who’s done a little bit of everything. We’re talking reporter, columnist, video producer, digital editor, radio host, audio editor over more than two decades in this business. And he’s got an MBA from the McColl School of Business at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, which is a combination you don’t always see in a newsroom leader.
Berry was deputy managing editor at the Boston Herald and managing editor of two NPR member stations. The accolades speak for themselves — he was part of the Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team for breaking news coverage of the 2013 Marathon bombings. At The Banner, he supported last year’s Pulitzer-winning series on Baltimore’s overdose crisis.
I’ve got a Quick Take about a journalist who’s run afoul of ICE and who faces deportation to Colombia. Estefany Rodríguez, a reporter for a Spanish-language newspaper called Nashville Noticias in Tennessee, was arrested by ICE even though her lawyers say she entered the U.S. legally. It may be a case of retaliation, as Rodríguez has reported on ICE activities in the Nashville area. After we recorded this podcast, Rodríguez was released on $10,000 bond, but she is still fighting to remain in the U.S.
Ellen has a Quick Take is about a small newspaper in Wyoming that ditched its police blotter — and almost nobody misses it. The Wyoming Tribune Eagle made the change after taking a course at the Poynter Institute on deepening crime coverage. Dropping the blotter gave the staff more time to do actual reporting.
Bystander video shared with The New York Times shows Jeffrey Pretti holding his phone as he’s taken down by federal agents.
The New York Times has produced another visual analysis (gift link) of a fatal shooting in Minneapolis by federal agents.
As with Renee Good on Jan. 7, the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti appears to be entirely unjustified. Preliminary statements from government officials that Pretti was approaching agents with a gun were false. If they didn’t know what they were saying was untrue at the time, they knew shortly thereafter.
Based on what we’ve learned, Pretti, a registered nurse, was video-recording agents while walking toward them as they went about their business of terrorizing the populace. An agent pepper-sprayed a woman, and Pretti got between her and the agent in an attempt to shield her. He was holding up his phone with one hand; his other hand was empty.
Agents then pepper-sprayed him and took him to the pavement. At that point, an agent took Pretti’s handgun and walked away. In Minnesota it is legal to carry a gun in public, and Pretti had a valid license. Again, he had not touched his gun; rather, an agent saw it and removed it from him.
Then, with Pretti’s gun removed and down on the pavement, agents began shooting him, firing 10 shots. It has all the appearances of the deliberate execution of an unarmed man — an act of state-sponsored terrorism. By the time Stephen Miller took to Twitter/X on Saturday afternoon and posted, “An assassin tried to murder federal agents,” he knew he was lying.
If you’re looking to catch up, Heather Cox Richardson has pulled together all the various strands, including efforts by Minnesota state investigators to preserve the crime scene and a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz that can only be described as attempted extortion.
Minneapolis is under siege. And if you’re thinking, well, that’s just one city, I’ll close by paraphrasing a quote that is often attributed to the science-fiction writer William Gibson: Fascism has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
Update: A little after 2:30 p.m., I changed the headline from “suggests that Alex Pretti was executed” to “shows that Alex Pretti was executed.” As the hours go by, the truth of what happened is becoming clearer. The Times itself is now asserting, “Videos directly contradict descriptions of the encounter by administration officials.”
Correction: Updated to correct Alex Pretti’s name.
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If you scan the top headlines, it might seem like the only stories in the news right now are ICE’s war against Minnesota and Donald Trump’s meltdown over Greenland. Venezuela is disappearing in the rearview mirror, but look out: here comes Snowmaggedon 2026.
But my media ethics students — yes, the same students who brought you their thoughts and suggestions earlier this week about practicing journalism in the AI era — have some different ideas. As I have in previous semesters, I asked them to identify stories that have been undercovered.
These stories have received some media attention or we wouldn’t know about them. But for one reason or another they haven’t broken through to the mainstream. Here is what they chose.
► Electoral unrest in Uganda, Reuters, Jan. 16. Amid accusations of election fraud, Ugandan opposition leader Bobi Wine was removed by the army from his house and taken to an unknown location, with President Yoweri Museveni claiming victory. The electoral campaign was marred by deadly violence, with the official count showing that Yoweri had been re-elected with nearly 74% of the vote, and Wine far behind at 23%.
► Data tallies ICE arrests in Boston, GBH News, Jan. 14. Reporter Sarah Betancourt found that at least 54 immigration-related arrests took place at Boston courthouses in 2025, with one so far in 2026. “We’re seeing ICE in the courthouses on an incredibly regular basis,” Jennifer Klein, director of the state’s Immigration Impact Unit told GBH News.
► How Florida is helping the feds, Tallahassee Democrat, Jan. 5. Using quickly thrown-together detention centers with names like Deportation Depot and Alligator Alcatraz, the state has detained about 20,000 people and turned them over to federal officials as part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ policy of assisting the Trump administration in its immigration crackdown.
► ACLU sues on behalf of federal arrestees, ACLU, Jan. 15. The class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of three community members who are challenging “the administration’s policy of racially profiling, unlawfully seizing, and unlawfully arresting,people without a warrant and without probable cause.”
► Climate change’s non-virtuous circle, Environmental Defense Fund, Jan. 20. Global warming caused by humans is speeding the release of greenhouse gas emissions from natural ecosystems. “These greenhouse gasses are a result of manmade climate change — they are indirect human emissions,” said Brian Buma, senior climate scientist at EDF.
► ICE List Wiki. This interactive database “documents incidents, agencies, individuals, facilities, vehicles, and legal authorities involved in enforcement operations.” According to The Daily Beast, the list — created by Crust News — is based on a leak of information about some 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees, provided by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower following the shooting death of Renee Good in Minneapolis at the hands of ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
Now, I listed these stories in the order that I did deliberately. You’ll note that the first three come from mainstream news sources. The next two are press releases issued by respected advocacy organizations, the ACLU and the Environmental Defense Fund. The last isn’t a news story at all; rather, it’s a project put together by activists aimed at exposing the identities of federal agents involved in Trump’s crackdown on immigration.
Critics call this “doxxing,” but the ICE List doesn’t appear to contain any personal information beyond what you could look up about your local police department — whose officers, unlike ICE agents, do their jobs unmasked, with their badge numbers clearly displayed.
Essentially the first three are examples of traditional journalism while the last three are hybrids that combine advocacy with acts of journalism. I trust groups like the ACLU and the Environmental Defense Fund to offer accurate, truthful information, but it’s fair to wonder what relevant information they might have omitted.
As for Crust News and the ICE List Wiki, it’s an interesting idea, but it seems aimed more at news organizations that might make use of the data than it is at the general public. The site says that it “is designed for public use. Journalists, researchers, and advocacy groups use the data to track enforcement patterns, identify repeat agencies or jurisdictions, and contextualise individual incidents. Pages may be cited with attribution.”
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Click on image to review the Times’ video analysis.
I already posted this on social media, but I just want to make sure that Media Nation readers are able to take advantage of the gift link.
The New York Times has undertaken another video analysis of the killing of Renee Good at the hands of ICE agent Jonathan Ross. As you’ll see, it’s absolutely clear — as it was in earlier videos — that Good’s vehicle did not run over Ross (I mean, really?) and did not strike him. The most likely explanation was that she was trying, very slowly, to drive away, cutting her wheels away from Good and another agent.
It’s possible that Good’s vehicle brushed up against him, but that remains unclear. It appears that Ross slipped on the ice and braced himself by placing his hand on the roof of her vehicle. Oh, and there’s this: After the shooting, an ICE agent is heard describing Good as a “fucking bitch” as she, mortally wounded, careens down the street. The Times has determined that it was Ross himself who used those words to describe his victim.
Claims that Ross suffered internal bleeding are obviously a lie. You can see him casually strolling down the street after shooting Good four times. Federal authorities aren’t going to do anything, and they’re impeding an investigation by state and local officials.
ICE agents in South Minneapolis on Monday. Photo (cc) 2026 by Nicole Neri / Minnesota Reformer.
I posted this on Facebook earlier today, and it’s gotten a lot of interaction, with nearly 100 comments so far. Feel free to comment here, but if you’d like to join the conversation on Facebook, here’s the link.
I’ve seen a few people of good will argue that we should withhold judgment on ICE agent Jonathan Ross’ killing of Renee Good until the investigation is complete. I’m sorry, no. We know exactly what happened, from multiple angles. Every new video only makes Ross’ actions look more outrageous. And, of course, the feds are already impeding any legitimate investigation.
Public anger diminishes with every day that passes, and then we’re on to the next thing. (Invasion of Greenland, anyone?) There are no ambiguities. We know what happened. Ross should be arrested and charged with murder. Then there really will be an investigation, and we can let a jury of his peers decide his fate.
Larry Bushart under arrest. Photo by the Lexington, Tenn., police department via The Intercept.
Larry Bushart is free, but he didn’t win. It was the forces of oppression that won after Bushart spent a month in jail, held on $2 million bail, for publishing a provocative Facebook post about the late Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump that Tennessee authorities decided to conflate into the felony of recklessly threatening mass violence at a school.
Bushart was released from jail Wednesday after public pressure began to build, reports Rick Rojas in The New York Times. A retired law-enforcement officer who obsessively posts liberal memes, Bushart’s offense was to publish a photo of Trump following Kirk’s murder accompanied by the words “We have to get over it,” which was a statement Trump made in 2024 after a fatal school shooting in Iowa. A line under the photo read “Donald Trump, on the Perry High School mass shooting, one day after,” along with “This seems relevant today …”
The ACLU of Massachusetts 
