The Dictatorship
Why the car app used in the New Orleans attack should have police worried
Officials say that the Ford 150 Lightning pickup truck used in the New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans and the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas were separately rented by the men responsible for those crimes through the vehicle-sharing app Turo. The man who drove that truck into the New Orleans French Quarter killed 14 people before officials say police shot him dead. The person inside the Cybertruck was discovered dead inside the vehicle with a self-inflicted gun wound.
The owners who rented out those vehicles via the app must have been gobsmacked to start the new year by learning they were tangled up in federal investigations into the deadly attacks.
When police usually run the license plates of vehicles used in illegal activities, the information connects them to the owners. The owners who rented out those vehicles via the app must have been gobsmacked to start the new year by learning they were tangled up in federal investigations into the deadly attacks.
Officials have not found any link between the attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas. Aside from the coincidence that both the New Orleans attacker and the man who drove the Cybertruck served in the Army, the only known similarity is that the men rented the vehicles in question through Turo.
For many people, the crimes in New Orleans and Las Vegas may be the first they’ve heard of the peer-to-peer method of renting vehicles. But law enforcement officials have been paying attention.
These vehicle-sharing applications have, for the past few years, been garnering the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kinds of renters. Some vehicles offered on these apps, such as Getaround, and now defunct Karshare, have been stolen, used in homicidesdrug dealing or human trafficking.
Reports suggest peer-to-peer rentals are more likely to attract criminals and be used by criminals than those from vehicle rental companies and that, if they are used in a crime, can take investigators more time to distinguish those who own the vehicles from those who committed the crimes.
For example, according to a May 2024 report in the Houston Chronicle, federal prosecutors there said a man in that area paid people to rent cars through Turo that he then sold in Mexico. Turo cooperated with that investigation. “Turo has a message to those with criminal intent: We will stop at nothing to see you brought to justice,” the company said in a statement.”
According to a statement the company released Wednesday, “It is with a heavy heart that we confirm that this morning’s horrific attack in New Orleans and this afternoon’s Tesla Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas both involved vehicles rented on Turo.” The company added: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.”
It’s too bad that companies trying to make renting a vehicle cheaper for the renter, and safe and lucrative for the owner, have to contend with people using their service to commit crimes.
Turo is one of several companies that seek to provide consumers with an alternative to the brick-and-mortar rental vehicle behemoths we most often see at airports. It’s too bad that companies trying to make renting a vehicle cheaper for the renter, and safe and lucrative for the owner, have to contend with people using their service to commit crimes. The companies put systems in place that are meant to prevent that. A vehicle owner looking to make some extra income applies for approval to post it on the app; the company screens the owner, learns about the vehicle and, if all goes well, permits the owner to post it. Would-be renters are similarly screened and subjected to a criminal background check.
In these cases, Turo said in its Wednesday statement that the two renters had valid driver’s licenses, clean background checks and both had been honorably discharged from the military.
So, why would this attract criminals?
First, the owner and renter mutually decide either to schedule an in-person exchange of the keys or to have the owner leave the vehicle at a prearranged location. Vehicles posted for rent are often left at locations with keys inside, for easy, contactless pickup by a renter. Someone browsing one of the apps could determine its location, break into it and steal it without ever renting it. Similarly, people could, and have, rented it for the express purpose of stealing it — perhaps because it’s a highly sought after vehicle.
When a law enforcement agency, such as Border Patrolfocuses on a vehicle because of suspected crimes, such as human or drug smuggling, they run its license plate, which comes back to the owner. The driver may or may not have any identification on them. In contrast to how easy it would be to trace a car rented from a traditional company, when it’s a peer-to-peer app, the police can’t always quickly determine that the car was rented or, if it was rented, who rented it.
With a traditional rental company, the police can typically make one phone call to the company to get the information they need.
A Tucson, Arizona, news station sought comment from Turo in 2023 after a man who’d offered his vehicles on the app said Border Patrol had impounded an SUV he owned after determining it had been used in human smuggling. The company responded, “We are aware of incidents where guests violated our policy by giving their vehicles to unauthorized individuals. We acted promptly by restricting their access to our platform and collaborating with the host and law enforcement to recover the vehicle while covering the host’s associated expenses.”
More than a few owners have been told their car has been impounded in connection with a crime they had nothing to do with. The whole process is a giant speed bump for police who may be rushing to get to the bottom of a crime. Time is especially of the essence during investigations of apparent terrorism.
Peer-to-peer car-sharing apps can be a convenient low-cost method to rent a vehicle and even try out an exotic, expensive one. But easy to rent can mean easy to steal, and easier to elude investigators who have to burn precious hours trying to learn where a vehicle came from and who is the person they’re really pursuing.
Frank Figliuzzi is an BLN columnist and Senior National Security and Intelligence Analyst for NBC News and BLN. He was the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, where he served 25 years as a special agent and directed all espionage investigations across the government. He is the author of “The FBI Way: Inside the Bureau’s Code of Excellence.”
ByDavid J. Bier
Following two killings of motorists in two weeks in Maine and Texas, Immigration and Customs Enforcement briefly suspended most vehicle stops to retrain its agents. The suspension implicitly conceded the obvious — ICE could have prevented these deaths — but President Donald Trump quickly overruled the agency, ordering it to resume the stops.
The president posted on social media Wednesday that “we cannot give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” But he’s wrong. His own adviser, White House border czar Tom Homan, has admitted that vehicle stops are not an important enforcement tool, and that permanently ending them would better protect ICE agents, their targets and the public.
ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away.
It’s true that ICE officers receive less training on vehicle stops. That’s because, before this administration, most arrestees came straight from federal, state or local custody, and when ICE had to go to the streets, it carefully planned operations — surveilling suspects to learn their routines, sometimes for weeksand working as a team of agents and creating a pre-enforcement action plan.
To speed up arrests, however, ICE reportedly eliminated the pre-enforcement planning last year as it started targeting areas more than specific people. “It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot,’” one former ICE official told NBC News. Enforcement went from targeted and planned to indiscriminate and opportunistic, which led to more chaotic interactions.
Reflecting this lack of planning, both of the immigrants shot and killed in the past two weeks were not the individuals ICE agents were originally looking to arrest, according to lawmakers who spoke to officials. A similar situation played out in Minnesota earlier this year, when ICE agents mistook a DoorDash driver for their target before shooting him after he ran into his home. (That officer was charged after video evidence from a city traffic camera contradicted his account.)
Even when pre-arrest surveillance of a specific suspect is conducted, ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away. One Department of Homeland Security supervisor described the attitude to The New York Times as “we’re adrenaline junkies who want action, foot chases, car pursuits.”
In October 2025, for instance, agents waited outside the home of Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a TikTok influencer, whom ICE was particularly interested in arresting. But rather than leap immediately into action, they let him get into his car. This led to a vehicle stop at which an ICE agent shot Parias, and the bullet ricocheted into a U.S. marshal.
On Fox News Tuesday, Homan admitted that there’s no downside. “I hear a lot of noise right now, ‘this will affect ICE arrests.’ It’s not going to,” he said.
Another shooting in California in April 2026 followed the same pattern. ICE did the surveillance but let the suspect get into their car. This appears to have been intentional. In June, surveillance video captured what appears to be a targeted ICE arrest in Milwaukee, in which officers allowed the suspect several minutes to get a snack and re-enter his vehicle before the team moved in for the arrest.
When stops do happen, as a Wall Street Journal investigation found earlier this yearICE agents commonly use tactics that place themselves in unnecessary risk: failing to tell drivers to turn off their engines, grabbing cars when they start to move, placing their bodies — rather than vehicles — in the way, and then shooting at uncooperative drivers.
DHS’ use-of-force policy already gets most of these issues right. It prohibits officers from “intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.” It bars shooting drivers unless there is an imminent risk of serious bodily harm.
Outside of a terrorist attack where the car is the weapon, shooting the driver does not lessen the threat; it enhances it. After an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot Renee Good, the car didn’t stop. It accelerated until it crashed. In Maine, ICE officers had to try to grab the car on foot to stop it after the injured driver lost control, and the car circled blindly. Eventually, an ICE agent used his vehicle to stop it.
ICE’s suspension of most vehicle stops would force agents to spend time learning new tactics, but doing so would have gone a long way to protect agents, targets and bystanders. Rather than a temporary reprieve, in fact, ICE should have made it permanent.
On Fox News Tuesday, Homan admitted that there’s no downside. “I hear a lot of noise right now, ‘this will affect ICE arrests.’ It’s not going to,” he said. “Before he gets into the car, you can arrest him then. You can wait until the vehicle gets to its destination,” he said — unless the target is a violent criminal. He added, “If we can take that 2-ton ‘weapon’ away from them, that’s good.”
Homan is admitting what the record shows: ICE has been endangering its officers and others for no enforcement benefit. Ending vehicle stops won’t end all the problems, or even all the deaths. But continuing them means more danger for ICE personnel and the public.
David J. Bier
David J. Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.
Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been shy about the point of the prime-time speech he intends to deliver Thursday night. During an appearance on Newsmax this week, for example, the president peddled familiar, tiresome nonsense: “Our elections are crooked, and we’ve got to straighten them out.”
A day later at an unrelated White House event, he said he didn’t want to go into a lot of detail about what would be included in his address, though he did tell reporters“What we’re going to be talking about Thursday is, it doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”
The president neglected to mention that Americans already have a country, as well as free and fair elections.
But while the public waits to hear Trump’s latest conspiratorial pitch, it’s worth appreciating the fact that the format he has chosen has not exactly served him well.
In recent decades, prime-time presidential addresses are generally reserved for major announcements about pressing matters of great significance. Trump’s prime-time presidential addresses, however, tend to be duds.
Consider some of the more notable examples.
April 1, 2026: The president delivered remarks on the war in Iran, though once it was over, no one seemed to have any idea what the point of the speech was. He presented no plan. He offered no coherent vision. Trump meandered from dubious point to dubious point and peddled a contradictory message about a possible endpoint, leaving many viewers even more concerned about the war. The New York Times’ Helene Cooper summarized“Trump has concluded speaking after 19 minutes. … This was a rehash of his Truth Social posts over the past month.”
The speech had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
Dec. 17, 2025: Trump delivered a prime-time address, ostensibly to talk about how great the first year of his second term was. What he presented, however, was 18 minutes of combative presidential blame-shifting and excuse-makingpackaged in the unsubtle desperation of a man who didn’t seem to understand why so much of the public failed to appreciate his systemic failures and embarrassments.
The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
March 11, 2020: As the Covid-19 pandemic started to wreak havoc in the United States, Trump delivered a weird Oval Office address in which he flubbed his own policyprompting White House officials to spend the rest of the evening clarifying that the president didn’t exactly mean what he said.
The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
Jan. 8, 2019: In the middle of a government shutdown he was responsible for, Trump delivered an Oval Office address for no apparent reason. Over the course of nine minutes, he presented no plan, offered no material, endorsed no solution and had no factsas evidenced by the avalanche of falsehoods he peddled to the nation. Rachel Maddow asked as part of MS NOW’s live coverage, “Why did he just do this? … Why did this just happen?”
The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
Taken together, it’s hard not to wonder if this just isn’t Trump’s best format.
A member of the president’s team told Axios this week that he wants to do prime-time speeches because they “give a sense of importance to what he’s saying.”
I don’t doubt that this is the idea behind the addresses, but as Hearst columnist Philip Bump explainedTrump and his team apparently haven’t figured out “that he’s dragging the gravitas down rather than it lifting him up.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
This is the July 15, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter.Subscribe hereto get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
In his final speech as president, Ronald Reagan talked about the importance of immigrants to America’s heritage.
“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
Johan Sebastian Guerrero came to America from Colombia. The 25-year-old husband and father worked two jobs to support his wife and 3-year-old daughter.
On Monday in Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents shot him dead through his car window. His wife knelt weeping over him in the street as their daughter watched.
Johan wasn’t even the person they were looking for.
The young father’s killers were whisked away, like King George III would have protected British troops who gunned down colonists 250 years ago.
Now as then, no body cameras, no investigations, no justice.
Source: Gallup poll of 1,001 U.S. adults, conducted June 1-15, 2026, margin of error: ±4 percentage points
INFLATION DOWN, BUT NOT OUT
Wednesday’s June inflation report can be read two ways: Since May, prices fell — driven by the drop in oil and gas. But compared to a year ago, prices are still 3.5% higher, which is exactly how much wages have risen over the same period.
In other words, consumers have not achieved any “real” growth in purchasing power over the past year.
Watch Steve Rattner break down the numbers below.
WHAT THEY SAID
John Heilemann on GOP politics
“The last things Ken Paxton and Susan Collins want to talk about are mass deportation and ICE on one hand and election fraud on the other. Yet those are the two issues in the headlines in Texas, in Maine, and all across the country. Donald Trump is bringing Republicans a political nightmare heading into November.”
Sen. Chris Coons on Maine ICE shooting
“Hearing the account of Sebastián’s widow and 3-year-old wailing by the side of the car after he had been shot point-blank is just heartbreaking. All of us need to step up and do a better job of holding accountable those to whom we give the power of life and death. This is a fundamental challenge to civil liberties and to justice in our nation.”
Lisa Rubin on Todd Blanche
“I knew Todd Blanche briefly when I was in private practice, and I witnessed the adoration firsthand. He was liked for many reasons. He was a regular guy, the paradigmatic lawyer that jurors would want to have a beer with. The guy that I see on our screens growling from the podium at the Department of Justice is entirely inconsistent with the person that I briefly knew.”
CATCH UP ON MORNING JOE
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- Trump administration snubs Aspen Security Forum for second year
- Fake fire shelters raise safety concerns for wildfire crews
- Congress can finish the job on healthcare price transparency
- Bessent unveils $1 gold coin featuring Trump image
- GOP concerns grow after 2 ICE shootings in a week
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