Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
The photo of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo standing in front of his 52nd birthday cake evokes not only sadness over a life viciously cut short and a family scarred by his shooting death at the hands of an ICE agent on July 7, but also anger and frustration at the possibility that, as in other cases, conflicting accounts will begin to surface, and that a lack of transparency and accountability will likely prevail once again.
Just six days later, on July 13, another very similar incident unfolded in Maine, where an ICE agent killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero—a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant, father of a 3-year-old girl who witnessed his death, a husband, and a work permit holder.
These days, an ICE detention can be a death sentence, especially if you are or look Latino.
The Trump administration ordered a temporary suspension of most vehicle stop-and-search operations to “retrain” its agents, but then backtracked. In any case, that would not change the culture of violence that prevails when daily quotas of 2,000 detentions are imposed on poorly trained agents who are, however, experts in racial profiling and have no regard for due process.
Salgado Araujo was shot by an ICE agent in Houston, Texas, while driving the van belonging to his construction business to pick up three of his employees. It is now known that he was not wanted by ICE for arrest—just like Johan—although initial reports indicated otherwise, as if being the target of a detention meant you should be shot to death.
Those agents in unmarked vehicles claim that by failing to follow instructions and attempting to flee, Salgado Araujo “used his vehicle as a weapon” to try to run over an agent who fatally shot him “in self-defense.”
The three employees who witnessed the entire incident and are now in ICE custody assert that Salgado Araujo did not attempt to run over the agent, whose life was never in danger. The agents were not wearing body cameras that would have shed light on what happened.
In Johan’s case, the agents were not wearing body cameras either, but ICE and DHS claim that one of the agents fired in the interest of “public safety.”
We’ve heard that tired old script before. The cases of Renée Good and Alex Pretti—two U.S. citizens shot and killed in separate incidents by immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota—show the same patterns. Again, agents act violently and fire indiscriminately, even when their lives are not in danger. Then they blame the victim, accusing them of using their vehicle as a “deadly weapon”—even though, in Pretti’s case, he was shot in the back while lying on the ground, after he had been neutralized.
These immigration agents are supposed to be enforcing civil laws, but in practice, enforcing law and order has become a license to kill.
This culture of violence is promoted from the presidency itself, so it should come as no surprise that agents believe their conduct is endorsed and justified by their superiors—because it is.
There was even a partial DHS shutdown because Democrats wanted reforms to the way immigration agents operate and to ensure accountability. Instead, Republicans chose to approve an additional $70 billion on top of the $170 billion for ICE and CBP for the remainder of Trump’s presidency through the reconciliation process, by a simple majority and without Democratic support. The reforms were shelved.
The reality is that both ICE and CBP use lethal force, and no one is held accountable for their actions—whether in a shootout in the middle of the street or a suspicious death in a detention center. In both cases, the death toll has risen.
The American Immigration Council describes it this way: “Under the second Trump administration, immigration agents are routinely using violent force in immigration enforcement and arrests. Immigration agents often break the windows of vehicles to remove their occupants. Several people have been shot in the course of immigration enforcement operations, and five of them have been killed.” The report is from February and does not include the most recent deaths. Since Trump began his second term, 11 people have died in shootings at the hands of immigration agents.
The analysis adds that “in many of these cases, government officials have lied about the circumstances in which force was used to exaggerate the threat to officers.”
But “even when evidence confirms that the officer’s use of force was not justified by the threat, however, “applicable administrative and criminal penalties” are not being sought.”
A complete reign of impunity.
The original Spanish version is here.
