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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.
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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 th