The depressing sameness of ICE murders
They're killing people with impunity and lying to our faces about it.
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The nation is suffering through another spasm of shootings by ICE agents. It feels like we’re right back where we were in January, when federal agents went on a lawless, deadly tear in Minnesota.
This time, however, the violence is more diffuse, spread out across multiple states. But the aftermath of all of it remains the same: a sick, lurching knowledge that you are under assault from your own government.
And just as we saw in Minneapolis and Chicago, the government’s so-called justification for murderous ICE violence falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, and “weaponized vehicles” is still being used by DHS as an all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card.
On July 7, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had been here for decades. His children were born and raised here, and they flourished, with one becoming a teacher, another an engineer. A third is still in college. He built a thriving small business constructing houses in the Houston suburbs.
That sounds a lot like the American dream, doesn’t it? People come here looking for a better life, a place to raise a family in safety, a place to succeed financially, a place to weave oneself into the fabric of a community and of the nation.
Instead, Salgado Araujo and his family became trapped in the dystopic, deadly nightmare that is America for immigrants these days.
Salgado Araujo was, by no metric, the supposed “worst of the worst” that ICE claims to be protecting us from. Even if he had been, however, that wouldn’t have justified his summary execution in the early morning hours on a Houston street as he drove his crew to a construction site.
From there, the story unfolded in the same fashion as earlier ICE shootings. The Department of Homeland Security nearly immediately claimed Salgado Araujo “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer, resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”
That story didn’t hold up for very long, though. Three other migrants in the van with Salgado Araujo gave statements that the ICE officer fired at the van right after getting out of his vehicle, and said Salgado Araujo never drove his van at the officers.
It sounds an awful lot like the initial explanation of the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, where the government claimed Good had literally run over Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who murdered her. Video, of course, did not bear that out, and ICE’s claims soon collapsed.
In Salgado Araujo’s case, videos do not at all show him “weaponizing” his vehicle in an attempt to murder ICE agents, but rather ICE vehicles attempting to box in his van. Indeed, only two days after the shooting, DHS began an oblique walkback of that claim, saying that Salgado Araujo was not a target, but instead they were on the way to the house of their target, spotted Salgado Araujo’s van, and decided to just go for it and “initiated a vehicle stop.”
Also as with Renee Good, the government is continuing to smear its victim and torment the survivors by opening an investigation into Salgado Araujo’s alleged assault of a federal law enforcement officer. It isn’t enough to literally kill Salgado Araujo, to remove him from the face of the earth, for no reason save for an unbridled enthusiasm for violence against immigrants and their supporters. The government also has to attack the memory of Salgado Araujo.
What other explanation could there be for the latest development in Salgado Araujo’s case, where, as the whole ramming the vehicle story started to collapse, the government’s story shifted radically? Now, it’s that the FBI has to “investigate” whether Salgado Araujo was a drug dealer, complete with a warrant application showing random photos of tiny bags inside Salgado Araujo’s work van. Somehow, this will help the government determine “what may have caused the occupants of the vehicle to flee.”
Let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment and pretend that yes, somehow this father of three and upstanding citizen wasn’t transporting his work crew to a building site, just as he’d done for years, but was instead a secret drug kingpin ferrying narcotics around Houston. It’s unclear how that would support ICE shooting Salgado Araujo as he attempted to avoid their unmarked SUVs cutting him off. Just as the government has no right to summarily execute someone for being an immigrant or for observing ICE’s murderous violence, there’s no right to summarily execute someone because they have drugs in their car.
Except come on. We know full well this is a post hoc attempt to rewrite history, to turn the ICE thugs into heroes, protectors of the community.
But that never, ever works. Because ICE thugs are just that: goons terrorizing every community in which they’re deployed.
The aftermath of Salgado Araujo’s murder has echoed that of Good and Alex Pretti in another way: the administration’s refusal to allow state and local law enforcement to investigate the murder, though somehow Texas Gov. Greg Abbott thinks that the Texas Rangers will have a meaningful role. Meanwhile, the administration is refusing to name the ICE shooters, an all-too common tactic.
And yet even as we reeled from the murder of Salgado Araujo, ICE was already pivoting to another murder, just six days later, this time in Maine.
Trump’s death squads
Tell us, DHS, was 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero the “worst of the worst”?
A Colombian national who was authorized to work in the United States. Guerrero was a father who, like Salgado Araujo, moved here for a better life, only to be murdered at the hands of the state.
As with Salgado Araujo, Guerrero wasn’t ICE’s target — he was simply collateral damage in the administration’s war on immigrants. And as with Salgado Araujo and Renee Good before him, DHS initially claimed, when talking to Maine Sen. Angus King, that Guerroro had “weaponized” his vehicle.
But video didn’t bear that out. Indeed, it showed Guerrero trying to leave, a perfectly normal reaction when unidentified armed men start attacking you. (ICE claims the agents were attempting “to conduct a vehicle stop” when they blocked Guerrero in and then shot him.)
And again, as with Salgado Araujo, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and everyone else who has been murdered in the street by ICE, the administration is slandering Guerrero, even in death. You see, they simply had to shoot him even though they knew nothing about him, because the officer was “fearing for public safety.”
So now the government is essentially saying it can summarily execute anyone who they’ve singlehandedly determined is a threat to “public safety.” And given that the administration has also made clear that it believes all immigrants and all of those who oppose ICE are threats to public safety, you can see where this is going.
This isn’t an officer saying he feared for his own safety, a situation in which there is sometimes authorization for use of force. This is an officer determining that he gets to be judge, jury, and executioner as long as he can say he is protecting us.
There’s nothing at all to indicate that Guerrero was a threat and that letting him drive away instead of murdering him would have put anyone at risk. But post facto, the administration came up with the claim that he “illegally entered the United States on Sept. 1, 2023, via the southern border and was released into the country under the Biden Administration.”
Ah, got it. So someone who entered the country, was legally released into the country, and had authorization to work here had no right to be here, and therefore, presumably, had to be murdered. Indeed, they made sure to let everyone know in their official statement that “work authorization does not confer legal status in the United States.”
The administration hasn’t tried to pivot and insinuate that Guerrero was a drug runner or whatever, but give it time.
ICE has, of course, declined to give the name of this brave public safety-protecting agent, with a spokesperson declaring, “I will never share an officer’s name.”
Well, yeah. The secret police can’t really be secret police if we know their names and can see their faces.
The Minnesota model
Of course, ICE doesn’t always murder people. Sometimes, they only manage to grievously wound them after shooting them for no reason.
That was the case earlier this month for Clemente Lara-Hernandez in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. After being surrounded by ICE agents who broke his window, Lara-Hernandez tried to flee, so an agent shot him. Of course, the administration immediately let us all know that Lara-Hernandez actually had “weaponized” his vehicle and rammed it into the ICE sedan.
You will not be surprised to learn that of course, Lara-Hernandez did no such thing, and the whole event is on video. And, as Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas pointed out, “fleeing is not punishable by death.”
Except ICE clearly thinks it is.
In January, ICE agent Christian Castro shot Julio Sosa-Celis through the door of his home in North Minneapolis as Sosa-Celis attempted to get away from an armed-to-the-teeth thug chasing and assaulting his housemate, Alfredo Aljorna. Castro and ICE then spun a tale of how Castro was the real victim here, attacked by vicious immigrants and fearing for his life, but when video emerged, it showed something entirely different: Castro shot Sosa-Celis only 24 seconds after getting out of his car, recklessly firing into a house as Sosa-Celis committed the possibly capital crime of trying not to get shot.
It’s deeply distressing and wearying to see the violent excesses of ICE in Minnesota exported to other blue cities, but it was always inevitable. ICE suffered no consequences whatsoever for the murders of Good and Pretti. Hennepin County has criminally charged Castro for shooting Sosa-Celis. Still, it’s a long, hard, often unsuccessful road from state charges to actual justice when a federal law enforcement officer is involved.
ICE agents are violently raging, unchecked across the country, and the administration is making no secret of the fact that it is going to keep killing people unless they bow down and agree to let ICE kidnap and murder people with impunity.
But the residents of Minnesota, the residents of Maine, the residents of Houston, the residents of Los Angeles, the residents of Chicago, the residents of New York, the good people everywhere in the country, are not going to back down. We’re fueled by love of our neighbors and a belief in the promise and possibility of an American dream and of people coming here to build a life. ICE has infinite money and unbridled hate, but it’s no match for the rest of us whatsoever.
That’s it for today
Aaron is taking a vacation this weekend, so no new episode of PN Pod this afternoon, but he’ll be back with a special edition tomorrow.
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What is depressing is we are discovering these ICE agent killers are "the worst of the worst." The killer in Maine was a recently hired ICE agent who has a long history of terrorizing people in his life. He threw boiling water at an ex-wife while she was holding his infant daughter, and just months ago said another ex should have her throat slit (the ex shared the audio with a local paper). One ex had called the military repeatedly to tell them about his history of mental illness (diagnosed bipolar since high school) and that he had no business being near a gun. He was fired from a local volunteer fire department because he got into yelling matches with his supervisors. No one gets fired from volunteer work with rural Maine fire departments! The only reason we know so much about him is that his ex talked to local reporters. We know almost nothing about other ICE killers unless people like exes are willing to talk. ICE is literally hiring people who are unemployable, simply because they are desperate for warm bodies to fill positions. And then we let these deranged hotheads lose on the street with no cameras, no oversight. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to how wrong and awful this is. I live in Maine. We are normally a sleepy, quaint, rural state. If it is happening here, it is truly happening everywhere.
Wait till they start killing Democrats. Why else would Rubio want to dismantle the ICC? Genocide against Americans is my guess.