Renewed ICE killings are inevitable result of mass deportations rooted in incendiary claims of immigrant invasion
Democrats must pair opposition to ICE lawlessness with unsparing attacks on the GOP's dehumanizing anti-immigrant hatred and propaganda
Federal agents’ rapid-fire killing of two unarmed immigrants this month — both slain in the space of a week, and neither the intended target of the precipitating ICE operations — has created unfathomable tragedies for the victims and their families. The shooting deaths of Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston have inflicted sorrow and trauma on their friends and loved ones; Guerrero had a wife and young daughter, while Araujo leaves behind a wife and three adult sons. The sheer human pain and suffering of these unnecessary deaths must remain part of the larger public discussion of what happened and how to stop it from happening again.
Affirming the sanctity of all human life, and empathizing with the victims, is particularly important in these cases, and the numerous other federal killings of immigrants. This is because such deaths are ultimately rooted in the Trump administration’s effort to dehumanize the millions of undocumented immigrants who currently make their lives within the United States. They have done so by calling them rapists and murderers; by claiming they eat the pets of good citizens; by the use of reductionist, authoritarian language (“vermin”); by saying that they are vectors of disease and chaos within the U.S.
So these individual tragedies are at the same time fragments of a titanic political and social conflict whose stakes for the United States are measured in blood spilled, freedoms abrogated, and social cohesion frayed to the breaking point. The stakes are nothing less than the question of who belongs in this country, and who should ultimately count as a real American. For years now, Trump and his MAGA allies have not only driven hard to dehumanize immigrants, but to cast them as outright enemies of America. Characterizing them as an invading army that seeks to replace white Americans with brown-skinned interlopers, they have all but guaranteed that the poorly-trained and MAGA-sympathetic agents of our immigration agencies view them with maximum hostility.
Indeed, since the start of Trump’s current term in office, immigration agents have shot 23 people; six were killed, including three U.S. citizens. Adding fuel to the fire, Trump and his advisors have signaled to immigration agents they are “above the law”, while also “recruiting people through nativist, often racist messaging,” as Radley Balko notes. So even as it’s appropriate that these killings shift the public spotlight anew towards the lawlessness and lack of qualifications of ICE and CBP agents, it’s equally important to understand the politicians, pundits, and underlying ideology that create the incentives for state murder.
Moreover, these were not simply crimes against the individual immigrants who paid with their lives, but also moral crimes against the United States and the American people: against the great majority’s belief in the rule of law, and the ability of those who go about their business peaceably to be free from arbitrary state violence. They are also moral crimes because they are manifestations of the Trump regime mobilizing the U.S. government, including agencies like ICE, into instruments of racial purification and state terror.
The message from the Trump administration is clear, whether or not Americans choose to hear it: the federal government considers all brown-skinned immigrants to be an existential threat to the country, with agents of the state authorized to kill them based on the mere perception of threat. They are not primarily enforcing the law, but rather a twisted vision of national purification based on racism, slander, and hatred. Such motivations render descriptions like “immigrant enforcement” or “mass deportations” only marginally sufficient as descriptors. This is ethnic cleansing on behalf of a radical white supremacist minority, obsessed with delusions of its own divinely-ordained status and soul-sick to the point of believing that anyone who doesn’t look like them must not be fully human.
This supposed threat, of course, has been amplified most consequentially by the president himself into a matter of existential conflict. And so it is no surprise that within a day of an apparent order by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to at least temporarily halt vehicle stops like the ones had preceded both recent killings, Donald Trump made personally clear that such stops would resume, posting on social media that, “The men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job” and that “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”
It’s not just that the president received pressure from MAGA personalities that he maintain the pace of deportations, and sensed political danger. The motivation is deeper, and deadlier, even as it’s difficult for decent Americans to stomach. Acts of violence are not just inevitable byproducts of a mass deportation regime carried out by poorly-trained ICE and CBP agents. Violence serves the underlying contention that immigrants collectively constitute an invading army, and individually can be considered as soldiers or terrorists within this army. To restrain the killings would be to undermine the inciting lie, and this the president and other MAGA enforcers cannot do, for it would risk the premise of their own claims to power: that they are protecting Americans from the unspeakable, subhuman horror of mass immigration. To treat immigrants as fully human, even if it did not instantly pop the bubble, might still open cracks and provoke questions as to who the real criminals are. By treating them as less than human, agents of the MAGA state hope to make it so.
It is worth noting that both of the recent ICE victims were working within the U.S. immigration framework to remain in the country. According to his father, Joan Guerrero was in the country legally, and worked as both a Door Dash driver and as a cleaner. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo lived in the U.S. for 35 years, raised three sons and built a business in the construction industry, and was seeking a way to remain in the country legally. This information is important for understanding the wider atrocity playing out across the United States, for trying to play by the rules could not save these two men from deadly injustice. And the fact that Araujo has three American-born sons also reminds us that the war on immigrants can’t be separated from a war on American citizens. Millions of people in the U.S. live in families that are a mix of documented immigrants, undocumented immigrants, and citizens.
As Los Angeles Times columnist Jackie Calmes reminds us, these shootings took place half a year after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota — shootings for which no federal agents have been brought to justice. In that time, the U.S. government has blatantly blocked and slow-walked efforts at investigation. The lack of accountability, and what amounts to obstruction of justice, aren’t simply a sign of a rogue agency or a sclerotic bureaucracy; rather, the cover-up of public executions reflects the corrupt desires of a lawless president. This Trump-approved lack of accountability has always been indistinguishable from a green light for immigration agents to resume their killings of immigrants and those who seek to protect them. His reaction to the two most recent shootings — to absolve ICE of any possible wrong and to insist agents continue with tactics that led to two killings in the space of a week — means that he is fully responsible for any future killings.
It feels grim to say so, but Democrats and others who oppose this regime should not make this assertion simply in the hope that they will change the policies that lead to such anti-immigrant violence — although with enough damage to his allies and to his own political standing, there is always some possibility the president might finally meaningfully restrain immigration enforcement. Rather, they should also do so in service of a larger project of exposing the irreducibly racist goals of the larger MAGA movement, with the aim of discrediting the politicians who serve its cause and, ultimately, their white supremacist ideology itself. Rather than haplessly suggest that with enough pressure, the president and his allies will change course, the emphasis should be to emphasize that the fundamental beliefs of Trump and his allies make state-level violence against immigrants inevitable, and that only the ejection of MAGA politicians from political office will bring peace and safety back to American streets.
With such a high-level effort setting the overall terms of the conflict with MAGA, a tandem attack on the lawlessness of ICE will be far more effective, both politically and practically. We will end with two recent examples: First, multiple news sources have reported that the apparent killer of Guerrero, an ICE officer named David Brouillette, has a history of violent behavior and mental health issues, including attacking women and physically abusing his teenage daughter. Brouillette needs to be held accountable for his shooting of Guerrero, but is also a vivid example of the bottom-of-the-barrel recruiting in which federal immigration agencies are engaging. And this is also where the hateful anti-immigrant ideology of the Trump administration becomes manifest in the world: openly hostile to the lives of immigrants, they recklessly recruit people who shouldn’t be allowed to own a firearm, much less work in anything remotely related to law enforcement. Many have already noted that Brouillette is likely just one of hundreds or thousands of similarly unqualified monsters filling out ICE’s and CBP’s ranks.
A second example: in the last few days, we have learned that FBI agents have received instructions that they “would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents.” As the New York Times goes on to observe, this “would sharply limit law enforcement scrutiny of immigration agents, as the Trump administration draws mounting criticism over killings at the hands of federal officers.” There is little other way to read this move than as Trump regime encouragement of ICE impunity in the name of mass deportations. As much as any other recent event, such a move highlights the contempt with which this administration holds the lives of immigrants. Indeed, we can see here how the war on immigrants is leading not just to violence and cover-up, but to an assault on the rule of law itself, as the White House continues to do what it can to abet and cover up ICE offenses. With the White House determined to further accelerate its immigrant purge, even in the face of blatant abuses, Democrats must be sure to communicate to the American people that the mayhem will not stop until enough of us rise up against MAGA’s dark vision for America.