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Evening Brief: Border Patrol Shooting, Trump Administration Sued by Caribbean Family, Top Chinese General Ousted

BY Guy D. McCardle

From a Border Patrol shooting on a dirt road in Arivaca, to a missile strike on a Caribbean fishing boat now headed to U.S. court, to Xi Jinping gutting the very top of the PLA, the common thread is power under stress, weapons in motion, and the human cost that follows when force gets ahead of accountability.

A Border Patrol truck sits alone on West Arivaca Road as a medevac helicopter lifts out of the desert, the kind of quiet stretch where things go sideways fast and answers always arrive later. Image Credit: Border Report

Border Patrol Shooting Puts Arivaca Back in the National Crosshairs

One person remains in critical condition after an early-morning shooting involving U.S. Border Patrol near the tiny desert town of Arivaca, Arizona, not far from the U.S.–Mexico line. The incident unfolded along a lonely stretch of West Arivaca Road, a corridor better known to local ranchers, smugglers, and migrants than to tourists checking GPS.

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Border Patrol officials are already trying to shape the narrative. “Our agents encountered an individual under circumstances that are still being reviewed, and a firearm was discharged,” a CBP spokesperson said, stressing that the person shot is now in federal custody and receiving medical care at a regional trauma center. “Any time force is used, it’s serious. We’ve requested independent assistance to make sure this is looked at from every angle.” Local law enforcement says the feds are not running this in-house. Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos confirmed his deputies are on scene and working alongside the FBI’s Tucson office, which is routine when federal agents are involved in a shooting. “We’re going to follow the evidence and the evidence only,” Nanos said. “Politics stays outside the tape.”

 

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On the ground, the first people to see the aftermath weren’t politicians or spokespeople; they were neighbors. One rancher, who asked not to be named, said he came up on a swarm of emergency vehicles just after sunrise. “You get used to helicopters out here, but this was different,” he said. “They were working on somebody right beside the road, real fast, and then the bird lifted off like it was Iraq, not Arizona.” Fire and EMS crews from the Santa Rita Fire District and American Medical Response stabilized the victim before handing them over to a medical helicopter for the flight to a Tucson-area trauma center, where they remain in critical condition.

Another local, a store owner in Arivaca who’s watched border traffic spike and ebb for years, summed up the mood. “Everybody’s tense,” she said. “Agents are on edge, migrants are desperate, and we’re caught in the middle, hoping nobody we know is the one under that sheet next time.” For now, the hard facts are few: one person shot, one agent’s decision under a microscope, and another patch of desert turned into an active crime scene that will be argued about long after the chalk marks fade.

Trump’s “Drug Boat” War Just Met Its First Wrongful Death Lawsuit

Two families from Trinidad and Tobago have now put the Trump White House where it never wanted to be: in the dock, answering for a missile strike on a small, nameless fishing boat off Venezuela’s coast.

The story starts on 14 October 2025, in that gray no-man’s-land of the Caribbean where the map says “high seas” and Washington calls it a battlespace.  A U.S. aircraft or drone — the intel on this is cagey  — put a precision-guided munition into a wooden boat carrying six men headed toward Las Cuevas, Trinidad, killing everyone aboard. Two of the dead, Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, were exactly the sort of people government officials like to call “collateral damage” when they belong to someone else. They family states they were merely fishermen and farm workers hustling work in Venezuela and hitching a ride home.

On Truth Social, the same day as the strike, Donald Trump posted footage of a boat being blown apart, bragging that, “under my Standing Authorities,” his Secretary of War had ordered a lethal strike on a vessel allegedly tied to a “Designated Terrorist Organization” running drugs in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. That little victory lap may end up as Exhibit A.

 

Civil-rights lawyers from outfits like the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU took the case into federal court in Boston, framing it as the first wrongful death action to come out of a three‑dozen‑strike campaign against drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. They’re reaching for every legal lever available: the Death on the High Seas Act, to argue classic maritime wrongful death; the Alien Tort Statute, to claim extrajudicial killing in violation of international law; and the basic laws of armed conflict, which require an actual armed conflict before you start killing people from a distance by remote control.

The suit’s theory is blunt: there is no congressionally authorized war with drug cartels, drug smugglers are not an “organized armed group” under the laws of war, and civilians who don’t pose a concrete, specific, imminent threat don’t become fair game just because someone in D.C. slaps the word “terrorist” on their ride. In plain English, the complaint says these weren’t lawful kills — they were murders, ordered at the top and executed down the chain, dressed up after the fact as counter-narcotics.

Yes, we’ve all heard this before, and for some time now.

If the court buys even part of the family’s argument, this quiet little case out of Trinidad’s fishing community may become something much bigger: the moment a drug war that went to sea finally ran aground on the rule of law.

China’s Top General Falls Under Xi’s Relentless Purge

China’s most powerful uniformed officer, General Zhang Youxia, has just gone from Xi Jinping’s trusted enforcer to the latest high‑profile casualty of Beijing’s never‑ending anti‑corruption crusade. Zhang, the vice‑chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and effectively China’s top general, is now under investigation for “suspected serious violations of discipline and law”, the stock phrase Beijing uses when a senior figure is about to be taken down.

For readers tracking PLA leadership, Zhang wasn’t some faceless apparatchik. He was one of the few remaining Chinese generals with real combat experience, a veteran of the 1979 Sino‑Vietnamese war, and the son of a famed founding general. That revolutionary bloodline, combined with decades of service, made him a natural ally for Xi as the Chinese leader tightened his grip over the military. Xi trusted him enough to keep him on past the usual retirement age, a rare exception in a system obsessed with seniority and age limits.

That all came crashing down when the Ministry of National Defense quietly announced the probe. Zhang isn’t falling alone. General Liu Zhenli, chief of the Joint Staff Department, is also under investigation. Together, they sit at the apex of the PLA’s command structure. Their simultaneous targeting sends a clear message through the ranks: nobody is untouchable, not even those closest to Xi.

This is just the latest aftershock in a rolling purge that’s gutted the upper tiers of China’s armed forces. Defense ministers have disappeared, Rocket Force commanders have been dragged out, and an entire cohort of senior generals has been cashiered over the last two years. Officially, it’s about corruption, procurement scams, kickbacks, weapons programs that look better on paper than on a battlefield. Unofficially, it’s also about loyalty. Xi wants a modern, combat‑ready PLA that answers to him personally, with no competing centers of power.

The irony is hard to miss. Zhang was one of the main guarantors of Xi’s control over the military, the guy you’d expect to be cleaning house, not being swept out with the trash. His fall suggests either that rot is deeper than Xi believed, or that the definition of “disloyalty” is getting ever tighter inside Zhongnanhai.

For defense professionals, the takeaway is simple: the PLA is undergoing a violent internal shake‑up at the exact moment Beijing is trying to project strength from Taiwan to the South China Sea. On paper, purges are about discipline and readiness. In practice, they also create hesitation, fear, and second‑guessing in the command chain; exactly the kind of friction you don’t want when you’re planning for high‑end war.

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