MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 2026
Human error prevails: One day before the (latest) fatal shooting, Jesse Watters was at it again. He was sitting on the set of The Five, this nation's most-watched "cable news" program.
Parodically, the program assembles a five-member panel each day. Four of the panelists are overtly pro-MAGA. On days when Jessica Tarlov fills the fifth chair, one on the panelists isn't.
On such days, the program gains its high frisson from the way the four interrupt and assail the one. On Friday, January 23, the panel's two camps looked like this:
The Five: January 23, 2026
Paul Mauro: Fox News contributor
Jesse Watters: co-host, The Five
Martha MacCallum: anchor, The Story (Fox News)
Tyrus: former professional "wrestler"
Jessica Tarlov: twice-weekly co-host, The Five
Mercifully, Greg Gutfeld wasn't there.
The latest fatal shooting hadn't happened yet. Still, this imitation news program devoted its opening segment to a familiar task--to the task of debunking the types of "horrific smears" being directed at ICE.
When it came her time to attempt to speak, Tarlov began quoting statements in which established law enforcement officials have criticized behaviors by ICE. At one point in her presentation, Watters apparently decided that he, and the program's millions of viewers, had finally heard enough.
He interrupted Tarlov, describing one of the matters she had cited as the latest example of "fake news." He went on to make a set of improbable claims--claims which were subjected to something like ridicule in this report by Mediaite:
Jesse Watters Claims ICE Jails Are ‘Amazing’ and That Detainees Are ‘Lucky’ to Have ‘Healthcare Services’
Fox host Jesse Watters said that immigration detention centers were “amazing” on Friday, claiming detainees were “lucky” to receive healthcare services in ICE jails.
Watters spoke to co-hosts on The Five about allegations of abuse by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, including the recent case of a Cuban immigrant who died in a Texas immigration facility after witnesses claimed he was choked by guards.
“It’s already been debunked weeks ago,” Watters said to co-host Jessica Tarlov when she mentioned the incident. “The guy was trying to commit suicide, and the people were trying to save his life.”
Tarlov's claim about the Cuban immigrant was "fake news," Watters said. He went on to conduct this silly exchange with Tarlov, as transcribed by Mediaite:
WATTERS: These detention centers are amazing! You get dental care.
TARLOV: Jesse–
WATTERS: You get free healthcare. Have you ever seen the kind of concierge healthcare services they have at these detention facilities?
TARLOV: I saw Alligator Alcatraz.
WATTERS: Where did this guy come from?
TARLOV: Jesse, then you go. Go live in there!
WATTERS: This guy came from Ecuador [sic[ without running water. He’s lucky to have these types of services.
In effect, exchanges like that function as a parody of serious news discussion. Mediaite was apparently struck by Watters' praise for the kind of "concierge healthcare services" provided at these detention facilities.
At this site, we decided to go one step further. We decided to fact-check Watters' initial claim--his claim about Tarlov's "fake news."
According to Watters, the immigrant to whom Tarlov referred had actually committed suicide, in spite of efforts by ICE personnel to save his life. As is typical on The Five, the facts of this matter never emerged from this pseudo-discussion.
That said, Tarlov had been referring to Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban who did in fact die on January 3 at the Texas facility in question. Late on January 23, Watters was hotly insisting that Campos' death had actually been a suicide.
But two days earlier, the El Paso medical examiner had issued the autopsy report. His findings were described in this AP report reprinted by PBS:
Cuban immigrant in ICE custody died of homicide due to asphyxia, autopsy finds
A Cuban migrant held in solitary confinement at an immigration detention facility in Texas died after guards held him down and he stopped breathing, according to an autopsy report released Wednesday that ruled the death a homicide.
Geraldo Lunas Campos died Jan. 3 following an altercation with guards. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the 55-year-old father of four was attempting suicide and the staff tried to save him.
But a witness told The Associated Press last week that Lunas Campos was handcuffed as at least five guards held him down and one put an arm around his neck and squeezed until he was unconscious.
His death was one of at least three reported in little more than a month at Camp East Montana, a sprawling tent facility in the desert on the grounds of Fort Bliss, an Army base.
The autopsy report by the El Paso County Medical Examiner's Office found Lunas Campos' body showed signs of a struggle, including abrasions on his chest and knees. He also had hemorrhages on his neck. The deputy medical examiner, Dr. Adam Gonzalez. determined the cause of death was asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.
The report said witnesses saw Lunas Campos "become unresponsive while being physically restrained by law enforcement." It did not elaborate on what happened during the struggle but cited evidence of injuries to his neck, head and torso associated with physical restraint. The report also noted the presence of petechial hemorrhages—tiny blood spots from burst capillaries that can be associated with intense strain or injury—in the eyelids and skin of the neck.
In this case, it almost sounds like those "concierge" services failed.
That official finding was two days old when Watters interrupted Tarlov to describe her report as "fake news." Aside from the Associated Press, the finding had been widely reported by an array of other major news orgs.
In fairness, everybody makes mistakes. That even seems to include the aforementioned Jesse Watters.
Watters is a regular co-host on The Five, the nation's most-watched "cable news" show. His own nightly show, Jesse Watters Primetime, is the second most-watched such program.
Everyone makes mistakes, but Watters' error on this day fits a familiar pattern--as did the apparent group assault reported in the case of the Cuban immigrant. Indeed, a somewhat similar type of group assault may imaginably seem to have taken place in Minneapolis the very next day.
Human error is a constant in human affairs. We refer to human intellectual error, but also to issues of moral judgment.
Human error is one thing, but undisguised lunacy leaped into view in the immediate wake of the latest fatal shooting. In group behavior straight out of Alice in Wonderland, Trump officials enacted this time-honored policy:
Verdict first! Investigation later!
Alex Pretti was fatally shot on Saturday January 24. The next morning, we were struck by what we saw and heard on the Fox & Friends Weekend program.
We've begun the week with what Watters said because it deserves recording. All in all, human error has been so widespread in the past two days that it's hard to know where to begin.
Tomorrow: Verdict first, they said
BalasPadamRight, Bob. Sure, sure.
I'll tell you what: if American detention facilities are not up to the high standard of the illegal aliens, there's a good, easy way to deal with it. It's called self-deportation! Capeesh?
Case solved! Next!
The guards killed the detainee. That isn't a complaint about the facilities (not enough blankets, coffee was not hot) but about the guards, who deliberately murdered a man they were restraining.
PadamThere's a better way to accomplish this too. Why not take the guy outside, hand him a whistle, tell him to blow, then shoot him in the back?
10:19 is only typing what his dark lord commands him to.
Padam
PadamLike I said, Soros-monkey: you don't like the guards, self-deport, mister.
You don't have the right to be here in the first place, much less whining and complaining about the facilities and the guards.
Good point Trumpbot! If these people didn't want to be strangled to death by guards in these ICE detention centers they should have self-deported before they were incarcerated. Case solved again by you!! You certainly for sure run circles around these idiotically retarded Soros-bots!!!??
PadamHe is saying that 5 year olds deserve to be treated however ICE agents want because they had the nerve to let their parents bring them to the USA. And what about all those citizens mistakenly detained and held for days or weeks before being let go. Are they responsible for what ICE did? If they had self-deported to Ireland, then it clearly wouldn't have happened, but that is true of a lot of things besides the "mistakes" being made when citizens are picked up (like that elderly man hauled into the snow in his underwear in front of his 5-year old grandson).
PadamWhen are these mistakes too much or too many for Somerby to tolerate. He didn't say.
"Former President Bill Clinton has broken his silence to decry the “unacceptable” shooting death of Alex Pretti over the weekend as unrest grips Minnesota.
BalasPadamClinton’s social media post on Sunday evening came a day after Pretti, a VA nurse, was shot dead during a struggle with multiple Border Patrol officers during a protest against ICE’s presence in Minneapolis.
“Over the course of a lifetime, we face only a few moments where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come,” Clinton posted to X alongside a lengthy statement. “This is one of them.”
“All of this is unacceptable and should have been avoided,” Clinton said of the actions of federal agents in the face of protests, including the deaths of Pretti and Renee Good.
“It is up to all of us who believe in the promise of American democracy to stand up, speak out, and show that our nation still belongs to We the People.”
Obama has also released a statement:
Padam“The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.”
His tweet included a lengthier statement from himself and Mrs Obama.
@BarackObama
it's a little too fucking late. we don't have a democracy anymore
PadamState sponsored murder of black people is yucky, but we won't stand for you fuckers murdering white people. Come on now.
PadamYes, no one made a fuss when that black guy died at the hands of a cop, amirite.
PadamObama was on MSNOW.
Padam10:19 is the kind of inhuman mutant TDH seems to attract nowadays.
BalasPadam"Human error" is an unacceptable explanation for Pretti's shooting. It is a term so trivializing and minimizing of a deliberate shooting that took an innocent man's life, that it does not belong anywhere near any description of this ICE shooting.
BalasPadamCalling deliberate murder a "human error" is offensive on Somerby's part. These shootings of Good and Pretti were not "oopsies" but crimes that must be investigated. ICE must be held accountable for escalating violence against people exercising their rights as US citizens.
If Somerby searched his mind for the most offensive thing he could say about these ICE crimes, he couldn't have come up with anything more demeaning than these words today.
Somerby maintains an elaborate plausible deniability that he is just talking about Watters and "the wake" of the shooting, but he goes out of his way to apply the term "human error" to moral judgment, not just misreporting facts. The way he interweaves the shooting with the reporting of a death in TX, implies that human error was involved in Pretti's murder when that was not a simple mistake but a frenzy of beating and shooting that killed a man who had done nothing wrong. If anythiing, there must be an investigation to determine how and why this group murder happened and to explain why the government coverup has been so blatant, including Somerby's belated suggestion that this was all just a terrible mistake because humans make errors. That answer is not good enough.
Essay like this one reveal a great deal about Somerby as a person. That he would write something like this suggests there is something seriously wrong with him, in the same way as there is something wrong with Noem and Hegseth and the other blood-lusting incompetents in Trump's administration. These are not good people, they aren't even trying to be good, and Somerby sits there among them, trying to gaslight his readers into thinking we shouldn't be too hard on these shooters because to err is human. This killing was part of ICE policy, not a slip of the finger by a scared agent. Somerby has a job too -- to excuse the objectionable doings of Trump and his minions. This damage control, after the fact, makes Somerby complicit. The premeditated nature of this essay suggests this isn't an excess of compassion on Somerby's part, but a purposeful excuse of an inexcusable crime against the American people, whose rights are being rolled back by Trump's govt, as well as against a man who was breaking no laws, threatening no one, and had a right to be doing what he was shot for doing.
"Calling deliberate murder a "human error" is offensive on Somerby's part."
PadamThis is why you're so stupid. Somerby didn't call the murder a 'human error.' He used that phrase in reference to Watters' characterization of the murder.
Do you see the difference, stupid?
You want to limit "error" to just Watters but Somerby himself widens it when he says this:
Padam"Everyone makes mistakes, but Watters' error on this day fits a familiar pattern--as did the apparent group assault reported in the case of the Cuban immigrant. Indeed, a somewhat similar type of group assault may imaginably seem to have taken place in Minneapolis the very next day.
Human error is a constant in human affairs. We refer to human intellectual error, but also to issues of moral judgment."
He is saying Pretti's death fits a pattern of error like that in TX which Watters mischaracterized as suicide. The govt tried to say that Pretti had a death wish and was going to use his gun to kill as many ICE agents as possible (suicide by cop).
That is pretty directly saying that Pretti's death was a human error. Some of us don't agree that it should be described that way. You say it wasn't, but Somerby's own quoted words contradict you.
PadamTime to stop calling other people stupid now.
anon 11:07 is either a troll (a bizarre one at that) or a crackpot - probably both. Day after day, it seems her life work is to distort and twist TDH's posts (not that they often aren't above criticism). She seems to have devoted her life in her zany.
PadamGood news. Texas has deported ten times as many illegal immigrants as Minnesota without Minnesota's problems.
BalasPadamFlorida and many other states deported more than Minnesota without these problems. Cooperation with ICE keeps people alive.
Go take a flying fuck, Dickhead, you fucking fascist freak motherfucking racist cunt
Padam
Padam"Cooperation with ICE keeps people alive."
There's no need to keep explaining this, David. The fact that Soros&Co. produce all the ICE-related chaos and death on purpose is obvious and unenabled.
Could you perhaps comment on the notion that there is now supposedly a federal law enforcement agency that has, in the words of our Vice President, “absolute immunity”, and why the very thing that conservatives feared from a Democratic administration has now been realized by a supposedly “conservative” one, DiC? Would it be too much to expect right wingers to have actual principles?
PadamIt is hard to say how many TX has deported given that those detained are shuffled around the country from place to place before being actually deported outside the US. I suspect ICE does that to prevent lawyers and family (and aid organizations) for knowing where anyone is, but also to hide how many people are being handled at any point in time.
PadamThe numbers quoted by the govt are bogus, so we don't know how many people are held, deported or self-deporting, and we don't know how many are criminals, how many did nothing wrong, and how many are children, women, elderly, sick, as well as innocent.
David's gleeful repetition of bogus stats makes him sound foolish under the circumstances. I think a better source of info might be the groups trying to help those accused with their deportation, detainment and other legal claims.
Why can't these European troll farm commenters learn English before being sent to annoy others at blogs?
Padam"produce all the ICE-related chaos and death on purpose is obvious and unenabled"
unenabled? What the fuck does that mean? It looks like a bot screwed up, but why is the right sending bots to do a human's job?
Somerby would call that just another example of human error, like murder.
PadamTX has more than 10xs the number of folks in question you Nazi cunt.
PadamThe point is that people detained in MN are being sent to TX, and other parts of the country too, so of course they are counting more people there. Are they counting the same people twice? How would anyone know?
Padam"Cooperation with ICE keeps people alive."
PadamAn interesting phrasing. It almost sounds as if Alex Pretti died because he was uncooperative.
Is that why Alex Pretti died, DiC?
ICE was terribly, completely wrong to shoot this victim. But, the people who provoked this incident are also wrong. The people I'm talking about are Walz, Frey and other public official and radical organizations who, I believe, consciously and professionally create a situation where this sort of tragedy occurs.
Padam
PadamHector -- ICE deserves blame for shooting. But, the victim was worse than "uncooperative", according to what I heard. He was actively interfering with ICE in performing their duties. That's a felony. Again, his felony does not in any way excuse ICE or justify being shot.
DinC: You are discounting "Operation Metro Surge" and its seemingly punitive, illogical focus on Minneapolis.
PadamThe videos do not show him "actively interfering". They show him blowing a whistle and protesting. ICE approached him, not vice versa.
PadamPerhaps the resident right wingers here would like to opine about bovino, Patel, and so much of the right wing now claiming that you aren’t allowed to bring a gun to a protest.
BalasPadamRemember when the boy was going to be rewarded as a congressional page for his civic duty of mommy buying him a long rifle and driving him to the protest and killing him some darkies?
Padam" A Cuban migrant held in solitary confinement at an immigration detention facility in Texas died after guards held him down and he stopped breathing, according to an autopsy report released Wednesday that ruled the death a homicide."
BalasPadamThis too was a deliberate killing. Somerby dismisses it as a mistake. He jokes that concierge services "almost" failed. Yuk yuk yuk. That is bizarre writing by Somerby, whose attitude is that "these things happen" because humans make mistakes. That wouldn't fly as a defense in any court trying someone for murder of a spouse or business associate, so why does Somerby think it is acceptable applied to the treatment of a man in handcuffs being assaulted by guards in a prison?
Mistakes imply a benign intent that failed in the process of doing a task. That isn't what happened to Good or Pretti. It also isn't what happened to Watters, whose job is to whitewash the presidency and build up the right wing. It wasn't an error when he called the report of a man's death "a parody of serious news discussion". Watters was repeating the right wing narrative, the line about what happened, just as everyone repeated a single story about how Pretti was a terrorist bent on doing maximum damage by shooting agents. There was no mistake involved -- it was their intent to confuse the public by making a false report that justified the shooting and asphyxiation. Watters did his job as demanded by Fox and Trump. Who does Somerby do his job for today?
But most offensive in Somerby's essay is his mocking tone applied to calling a whitewash "a parody" and a killing "a moral failure in judgment". This isn't funny. It is infuriating. That Somerby expresses none of the outrage exhibited by our past presidents and every other Democrat and many Republicans, suggests there is something wrong with Somerby. He is either right wing or he is a ghoul. He can take his pick. Fraudulent sarcasm or fake irony or whatever he wants to call his lame "jokes" about these deaths is not a human response. It is the way Somerby typically denies saying anything real, leaving himself room to back out of anything he says. But this cutsie use of human error and moral judgment to refer to politically motivated murder is despicable. Not only does Somerby lack empathy, but he lacks basic humanity. Like those he serves on the right.
"It wasn't an error when he called the report of a man's death "a parody of serious news discussion".
Padam"he" refers to Somerby, not Watters. Sorry for any confusion.
"This too was a deliberate killing. Somerby dismisses it as a mistake."
PadamHow stupid can one person be? Seriously, is there any upper bound to your stupidity?
Somerby didn't dismiss the killing as a mistake, and any reasonably intelligent 3rd grader could see that. He dismissed Watter's characterization of the killing as a mistake.
Did I mention how stupid you are?
Third graders are excessively literal. They don't learn about metaphors and allegory and figurative language and finding parallels in writing so that a rose is more than a rose until middle school. That is because their brains have not developed the capacity for abstract thought and it is still hard for them to hold multiple ideas in mind at the same time so that they can compare them.
PadamWatters show appeared before the Pretti killing, so he was not characterizing that killing as a mistake. Somerby tried to juxtapose the two killings (one in TX and one in MN) and call them errors of judgment, even moral judgment. Yes, Somerby also called Watters judgment a mistake too. But that isn't where he stopped.
A better writer (or one with different purposes) would have clarified his own reaction to the Pretti killing instead of weirdly discussing errors, saying that all humans make them, calling Watters in error, and so on, until we conclude that all wrongdoing can be reduced to human error.
Go back and re-read Somerby's words, from the perspective of an adult. Try to go beyond the face meanings and consider what is implied. If that is hard for you, a course in literary criticism in community college might help you. If you are a foreign troll, just learning more English might be the ticket.
Someone who calls another commenter "stupid" is an obvious troll because most regular people would be more hesitant to draw such a conclusion about IQ based on a disagreement.
PadamThe people being deported are mostly vastly superior human beings than our President and his evil cabinet members.
BalasPadamThat is pretty obvious. There is irony that the wrong people are locked up.
PadamIt isn't hard to be "vastly superior" to the murdering scum working for ICE. There is irony that Trump is supposedly deporting murderers while hiring his own murderers to deport innocent people (and kill them too).
PadamWho cares about Tarlov and Watters when innocent people are being shot by ICE? Somerby, obviously, but who else?
BalasPadamFox is one of the places where the right wing loons get their false narratives. They end up firmly believing their false view of the world is what it is, never mind those four videos detailing the truth, as that is being shown on fake news sites. It is a big fucking problem with these fucking idiots, and good on Somerbay for placing attention towards it.
PadamThe false narratives are coming from the govt itself. Somerby says this particular error by Watters occurred before the Pretti shooting. But for some odd reason, Somerby discusses the TX homicide ruling today, instead of talking about the coverup of Pretti's death. That could be called a distraction, not "placing attention towards it." (Most native speakers would say "directing attention to it".) Some of us mentioned the TX homicide yesterday in comments. Good on us for doing that, even if Somerby is a bit late to the subject.
PadamThe problem has metastasized far beyond Fox News.
PadamThe idea that Watters is just making mistakes when he engages in his vile televised rants is itself an egregious mistake. That is, if Somerby genuinely believes what he writes here.
BalasPadamAgreed. 'Mistake' is not an apt term in this context.
Padam"Indeed, a somewhat similar type of group assault may imaginably seem to have taken place in Minneapolis the very next day."
BalasPadamHere are Somerby's weasel words: somewhat, similar, type, imaginably, seem. That many indefinite words in a single sentence may imaginably seem to make the sentence itself possibly sort of not eactly true.
What is Somerby doubting, that he needs to qualify a straightforward sentence this way? Does he doubt that Pretti died? Does he doubt that there were a group of agents, not a single one? Does he doubt that an assault took place? Does he doubt it happened in Minneapolis? Does he doubt the similarity between the assault in TX and the one in Minneapolis?
If the facts in this particular sentence are true, why the need for so many words qualifying that meaning?
Somerby dislikes saying things directly. He could have said that the assault in TX is similar to what happened in Minneapolis, but he doesn't feel safe enough to say that directly, perhaps out of concern for how similar the two attacks were. Or maybe Somerby would have to have witnessed both attacks himself before he could call them similar. But the problem with assuming he is just a cautious type of guy, is that he negates the idea of similarity between these attacks when he includes so many words expressing uncertainty.
Somerby is not giving sworn testimony in his essays here. No one will care if new info emerges that makes these two murders less comparable. But what if Somerby's purpose here is not to express opinions (which he evades routinely) but to promote the idea that what we liberals believe about such assaults may have problems with it, may be less reliable than we think. In that case, Somerby is doing his job by undermining the liberal narrative on behalf of Trump and the defenders of the ICE murderers who shot Pretti. Because Somerby pretends to be liberal, without showing any of the usual liberal attitudes, he is dissembling, lying, faking, just as much as those deep fake videos of Biden sitting on air did.
Liberals, and many Republicans too, are not afraid to say that Pretti's murder was wrong and that ICE needs to be stopped. Not Somerby. He wants to diddle around calling heinous acts "errors" instead of crimes. And no, he is not just talking about Watters in today's essay.
How about the personal accountability of Pretti and Scott. Love how liberals just skip over that part. They both purposely engaged in confrontations with ICE. That’s not protesting. Pettit was stupidly brought a gun with him. Why?
PadamWho is Scott? Pretti was doing nothing illegal. You are allowed to bring guns with you in the US. Just ask innumerable right wingers who have done so, and used to defend the right of citizens to do so. Fighting the tyranny of the government, donchaknow.
PadamThere wouldn't have been any confrontation if ICE had left them alone. We all saw the video and it was ICE who approached Pretti, not vice versa.
PadamThere is a law in MN allowing upstanding citizens to concealed carry guns with proper paperwork. Pretti had that. It was his legal right to carry a gun. His reasons are no one else's business. He did not draw his weapon or threaten ICE with it. It was found in its holster after Pretti was on the ground, and Pretti was shot after his gun had already been confiscated, meaning he was no danger to ICE when he was shot.
Given that the gun did not justify shooting Pretti and it was his legal right to carry it, how did he bring on his own death? Given the video evidence, it seems likely they would have shot Pretti without a gun too. Good didn't have a gun and they shot her.
Pretti was there to kill cops. Typical that Democrats defend assassins.
Padam