Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. If you’re watching this on Substack take a second to tap the ❤️ and restack this video. That’s the single best way to get these stories in front of the most people.
An undercover ICE agent posing as a construction worker shot a man in the neck with a rifle while the man’s five-year-old son was in his car, prompting mass protests. A local baker in Kansas is accusing Republican Senator Roger Marshall’s campaign of stiffing her on nearly $700 worth of cookies, which is pretty astounding for a former doctor who had patients arrested over unpaid bills. A new report finds Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown may end up costing the average senior more than $2,000 a year in reduced Social Security benefits. And newly released documents suggest taxpayers were billed for Trump’s Freedom 250 celebrations, despite Trump’s group raising tens of millions of dollars in corporate donations that were supposedly meant to fund them.
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The first story comes out of New York City’s Marble Hill neighborhood, where at least one U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fired seven rounds at a 28-year-old man named Oscar Belgal on Thursday night, with one striking him in the neck.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said NYPD surveillance footage showed a plainclothes federal officer with his gun drawn walking up to the driver’s side window of Belgal’s gray Honda CR-V, while a second plainclothes officer approached from the front. The SUV then drove out of the frame. Police recovered at least seven casings from the scene, and Belgal’s SUV had bullet damage to both its windshield and its rear window.
A five-year-old boy believed to be Belgal’s son was inside the car while agents fired on it. Thankfully, the child is reportedly safe in the custody of a relative. A neighbor named Orlando Perez told reporters he witnessed people in vests shoot at the car as it tried to leave the scene and then later pull a small child out of the vehicle. Perez said he dove to the ground because the agents were firing in his direction.
When NYPD officers arrived at the scene of the shooting, they saw several men wearing construction-style flourescent safety vests and masks, with at least one of them armed with a rifle. Belgal was in handcuffs and sitting on the ground. NYPD officers put him in a police car, administered first aid and drove him to the hospital. ICE reportedly whisked him out of the hospital and put him in custody while he was still receiving medical treatment.
The Department of Homeland Security says Belgal is from the Dominican Republic and accused him of being a gang member. Tisch said he pleaded guilty to fourth-degree grand larceny three years ago and has a pending drug-related charge from last year. But DHS still has yet to explain why federal agents decided to fire their weapons at a vehicle with a small child inside.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the shooting was an unconscionable act. He said he spent two hours on the phone with Donald Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin in an unsuccessful effort to have Belgal released from custody.
Mamdani, who has frequently spoke of his own immigrant background, said New York City “will not stand by while ICE agents shoot New Yorkers,” and he doubled down on his call for Congress to abolish the agency. New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she also spoke with both Trump and Mullin, urging them to stop ICE operations in the Empire State and release any body camera footage of last night’s shooting.
Federal agencies have now taken over the investigation, which sounds a lot like letting the defendant oversee his own trial. Murad Awawdeh, who runs the New York Immigration Coalition, said last night that agents with Homeland Security Investigations were knocking doors in the vicinity, and insisted they had no business looking into a shooting their own agents carried out.
By 9 PM last night, a crowd of hundreds of protesters filled the streets. Just three days earlier, eight local elected officials, including Democratic Congressman Adriano Espaillat, had sent an official request to the management of a nearby Target store asking them to stop letting ICE agents use their parking lot as a staging area. New York City Council Member Pierina Sanchez, who represents the Marble Hill neighborhood, accused ICE agents of “terrorizing our communities.”
The Supreme Court initially settled this all the way back in 1985 in the Tennessee v. Garner case, when it ruled that law enforcement officers can’t simply shoot a person just for trying to escape unless they’re poses a legitimate threat to someone’s life. A badge concealed behind a safety vest doesn’t suspend the Constitution, and any country that lets masked men shoot into a car with a five year-old boy inside while overseeing the investigation themselves is quickly abandoning the rule of law.
In Kansas, Republican Senator Roger Marshall is in an unexpectedly close fight for a second six-year term. Hutchinson, Kansas baker Holly Thomas, the owner of Holly’s Sweet Treats, posted on her Facebook page Thursday that Marshall’s campaign never paid for a $678.75 order of cookies and other treats for his 2020 primary election watch party. She even posted screenshots of the unpaid invoice.
Thomas explained that at the time, she was a brand-new small business owner trying to get off the ground in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, when every single dollar mattered immensely. She said she spent the better part of a year calling and emailing Marshall’s campaign staff and never had them answer or call back. Six years later, she said that experience is exactly why she’ll never vote for Marshall.
What makes this particularly egregious is Marshall’s own approach to unpaid bills. Back when he was a practicing physician, Marshall was accused of using hard-handed collection tactics on patients who owed negligible amounts of medical debt. This included filing lawsuits and even having some patients arrested. For a man who reportedly had working-class patients taken to court and hauled off to jail over a few bucks in missed payments, it’s striking that he apparently refused to pay a small bakery for a few hundred dollars worth of cookies.
Marshall is running against Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton, a minister who’s trying to become the first Democratic U.S. senator from Kansas since 1932. That streak has lasted all the way since Herbert Hoover’s final year in the White House. Stories like this are exactly how an almost-century long streak could finally come to an end.
Congress got rid of federal debtors’ prisons almost 200 years ago because Americans decided that simply owing someone money shouldn’t mean you lose your freedom. That principle is meant to work for both working moms with hospital bills along with Republican senators with an invoice from a bakery. That contrast clearly shows we’ve got one set of rules for the powerful and well-connected, and another set for everyone else.
Every American getting close to retirement age needs to hear this one. According to a new report shared with the Guardian, Trump’s anti-immigration campaign could end up costing the average Social Security beneficiary as much as $2,152 a year in benefits by 2034. That’s represents a cut of approximately 8.6%, and it would repeat every subsequent year. And that’s all thanks to Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
The report was commissioned by immigration reform group America’s Voice and conducted out by the firm Economic Insights and Research Consulting. Its core finding is that after roughly 1.2 million foreign-born workers left the American labor force over the past two years, the economy is reeling across multiple sectors.
Groceries are one main example. Foods that depend primarily on labor from immigrant workers have seen prices soar faster since Trump’s second inauguration. Fresh whole milk is up by roughly 5.7 percent, canned vegetables cost 6.3 percent more and apples have gone up by 7.2 percent over that time period. Robert Lynch, who co-authored the report, pointed out that in the period before Trump was reelected, the prices of those same foods rose more slowly compared to other groceries, and that Trump’s immigration policy was the primary factor that changed everything.
Housing is also impacted by the president’s immigration crackdown. Construction permits for new single-family homes have gone down by 10.6 percent across the country since January of 2025. This is exacerbated in states that rely more on immigrant labor, where the cost of building new homes went up by almost 11 percent on average. When the government rounds up and deports immigrant roofers and framers, American electricians and plumbers who worked on those same homes also lose those jobs.
By September of 2025, American-born workers already lost anywhere from 51,000 to 297,000 jobs due to of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, according to this report. Job growth has also slowed to roughly a third of what it was prior to Trump’s second term.
Even though undocumented immigrants don’t get Social Security benefits, they still pay around $26 billion a year in payroll taxes. After Trump drove them out, that money also went away. Even the president’s own Social Security trustees, like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have ackowledged that fewer immigrant workers will threaten the program’s finances in the long term.
Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security in 1935 based on the simple promise that the people who work today will pay for the people who have already put in their time. Every worker we remove from the economy is one less pair of hands that pay into your parents’ Social Security check. This also means the GOP lawmakers cheering on ICE raids are effectively picking the pockets of America’s future retirees.
Our last story today is about Trump’s big birthday party for America, and who’s really paying for it.
Initially, the president made a note of boasting about all the corporate donations flowing into his Freedom 250 group, which is the public-private partnership he set up to commemorate the nation’s semiquincentennial celebration. But documents released this week by watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) show that taxpayers likely footed most of the bill.
According to a budget estimate from the National Park Foundation — the official charity of the National Park Service — that PEER obtained, public events like the Great American State Fair, the so-called Patriot Games and the Fourth of July fireworks show on the National Mall were projected to cost roughly $128 million. That cost was meant to be covered by around $100 million appropriated by Congress along with another $14 million in federal grants for the Freedom Trucks mobile museum. That left a gap in the neighborhood of $14 million.
According to an August report from the Wall Street Journal, Freedom 250 raised more than $50 million in private donations. Various corporations like Chevron, United Airlines and defense contractor RTX each donated several million dollars. Donors were even invited to a wine reception at the White House. But that $50 million isn’t accounted for anywhere in the event budget. And so far, the Trump administration still has yet to explain who gave what or how the money was actually spent.
In July, the Department of the Interior initially requested another $10 million from Congress to recoup costs from the celebrations, though lawmakers didn’t approve it. America250, the separate bipartisan organization Congress actually created in 2016 to plan 250th anniversary celebrations, says it only got $25 million of the $100 million it was expecting.
The documents PEER obtained also show the National Park Foundation asked to bypass the typical competitive bidding process for federal contracts, and the National Park Service signed off. In that request, one foundation executive wrote that the White House asked for “specific qualified contractors.” Now, Democratic senators are asking if Freedom 250 doubled as a pay-to-play slush fund. So far the White House has remained silent.
The Framers wrote into Article I of the Constitution so no public money would be spent without the approval of Congress and a clear-cut paper trail for every dollar, because they had just fought a war against a king who treated the public purse as his own. A president who throws a party on our dime while corporations purchase access is the exact thing they sought to prevent.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. If you haven’t yet, take a second to click the ❤️ and hit restack so we can get these stories in front of the most people.