WHEN AN ICE AGENT is involved in a deadly, high-profile shooting, you should now assume that the government’s initial story is packed with lies—and that the truth will only come out over time as the spotlight fades.

That’s been the case, yet again, in the two most recent episodes of immigration enforcement violence.

Take the killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 26, in Maine on July 13. Guerrero was shot dead in his car, leaving his 3-year-old daughter traumatized and his young wife widowed (yet somehow strong enough to give press conferences of profound dignity and heartbreak). The initial story we were told was that he was evading arrest. Only later did we learn that ICE had given a gun to an unprepared and dangerously unsuited man and put him in a position to kill.

That man, David Brouillette, 37, had well-documented anger issues, once threatening to blow his then-wife’s brains out with a gun, according to NPR. Ashley Brouillette provided a voicemail in which the ICE agent said she and her female relatives should have their throats cut. She says she thinks her ex-husband’s racist beliefs played a role in the killing of Guerrero, and that a proper background check would have unearthed his history of violence.

Brouillette’s tendencies were clear and on record, such as when police and child protective services “were both called to his home after he threw his then-13-year-old daughter through a glass coffee table” in 2022. And if there was any lingering ambiguity, it was dispelled when his second wife, Lucinda, confirmed his violent tendencies, releasing a statement that read: “Throughout our marriage and in the years that followed, I have feared for a long time that his anger, aggression and escalating behavior would eventually result in severe, life-threatening violence, and I often believe[d] that I would [be] the one on the receiving end of it.”

The paper trail for Brouillette’s legal issues is staggering: six hundred pages, including eleven temporary orders “for protection from abuse or harassment” running from 2018 to today. Judges twice restricted his access to guns. These disturbing revelations underscore some jarring realities of our current immigration-enforcement regime: The vetting isn’t happening before the hiring. And the disclosures aren’t coming in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, but after days go by. We are getting full pictures only sporadically, when those outside of the administration help fill in the gaps.

In the case of Brouillette, a deeply troubled, violent person who had no business in any form of law enforcement was not just hired by DHS but defended by the government following his violent act. Because of ICE’s callous indifference, a young father is dead and a family destroyed. And only thanks to the courage of his ex-wives was the public made aware of the full extent of the calamity.

Tom Homan, the White House border czar, had no answers on CNN, and offered no assurances this won’t happen again.

“If those are facts, I don’t think he should have ever cleared vetting,” Homan admitted of Brouillette. “Did the vetting process fail? Was that information not available? Did they not know? So there’s the separate administrative investigation on what happened here. . . . If that was factual, he would have an almost impossible time to pass vetting.”

Remember that when ICE claimed its new vetting standards would be sufficient as it hired 10,000 new agents en masse, we observed that the agency would almost certainly end up putting unqualified candidates in dangerous positions.

Background checks can take between six and nine months. As I wrote a year ago, “In a rush to fill the ranks, those background checks, including a dive into what they’ve posted on social media, could be rushed or skipped altogether.” The headline was “The Worst ICE Agents Are Coming.” Now they are here. In this case, it sucks to have been proved right.

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ICE ALSO LIED in the case of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the Houston father shot to death in his van on July 7. I recently told you about the efforts to assassinate his character. A search warrant filed by the FBI implied that a white crystalline substance found in Araujo’s van was meth. But, as I wrote when the tests came back, the powdery stuff wasn’t drugs—it was homemade electrolytes, the better to do backbreaking work in the Texas sun.

Here’s the thing: You’ve heard the expression ‘shout the lie, whisper the correction’? The Trump administration and its media hangers-on prefer to hype up the fabrication and then not even bother with the corrective whisper.

Take the meth claim about Araujo. Fox News @ Night’s anchor Trace Gallagher laundered the narrative to his audience, saying:

They were painting this illegal immigrant who was shot and killed—and we still do not have the outcome of that investigation, it’s still underway. But it was, ‘Oh, he’s a dad. Oh, he’s a good citizen doing his thing.’ And then . . . we now know that they found—put these pictures on the screen. They found three bags of methamphetamine in this car. There probably is a reason that they were trying to get away from ICE agents.

Claims about meth on the scene were not confirmed by the FBI and were disputed at the time, and those disputes have proven to be correct. But Gallagher told his audience what they wanted to hear—and what the administration wanted them to hear too.

For two weeks, Gallagher never bothered to correct the record. Two days ago, I reached out by email to his network for comment. Seven hours later, Gallagher declared on air:

An update on the deadly shooting of an illegal immigrant in Houston, Texas by an ICE agent who DHS says he was trying to run over. The Harris County D.A. says lab tests confirm a white crystal substance found in the suspect’s van was a kind of an electrolyte salt and not an illegal drug. In a court filing before those results came in, the FBI called those salts a “controlled substance” that was “consistent with methamphetamine,” but to clarify: No drugs were found.

Fox News responded to my email by flagging the clip for me.

Other outlets haven’t even gone that far. The conservative website National Review Online published an article on July 15 titled “Houston Man Killed by ICE, Hailed as Father Chasing ‘American Dream,’ Had Meth in His Car, FBI Says.” The article is still up, without a correction. The author of the article did not respond to my emailed request for comment on whether a correction is forthcoming.

Apparently, the chance to disparage a dead victim of ICE was so enticing that right-wing media figures couldn’t resist using their social media accounts to spread the meth lie.

AND HERE’S ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF ICE MENDACITY that recently came to light. Last summer, ICE claimed Gabriel Hurtado-Cariaco, a 31-year-old Venezuelan immigrant it arrested in Nebraska, was a “criminal illegal alien” and a “Tren de Aragua terrorist” who had slammed a female agent’s head into the ground and then choked her. As soon as bystander video emerged, it became clear the person who had actually been assaulted and choked in the altercation was Hurtado-Cariaco. How many ICE accusations are actually admissions here?

The shocking number of cases like this puts the onus on the press to not just scrutinize ICE’s claims but to assume by default that they are untruthful.

The pattern of ICE deceit has led more Democrats to become comfortable plainly calling ICE liars.

“You can’t trust ICE. They’ve eroded any confidence with the American people,” Rep. Rob Menendez, who attended the Congressional Hispanic Caucus field hearing last week in Houston to learn more details about Araujo’s killing, told me.

Menendez called out the Department of Homeland Security for “openly lying.”

“Generally most law enforcement says, ‘We have an ongoing investigation; we can’t comment at this time.’ No law enforcement puts out a press release that assigns blame to the deceased,” he added. “So long as that is their approach, you can’t trust them. I don’t see how they have done anything to gain the benefit of the doubt.”

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U.S. Citizenship for Me, But Not for Thee

While the Trump administration has hired ICE agents at scale and has set high daily arrest quotas, there are, thankfully, still limits to their ability to industrialize some parts of their mass-deportation program: specifically, the administration’s “unprecedented” effort to denaturalize U.S. citizens—that is, to take away citizenship status from individuals who went through the naturalization process, the legal process of becoming citizens.

Legal experts I’ve spoken with have stressed the rareness of cases of denaturalization, and how high a bar the government is required to clear to actually denaturalize someone. To put that in concrete terms, last month the administration announced it was seeking denaturalization for seventeen people, including people who they say committed violent crimes or sex offenses against children. The administration has always been good at that part, though: highlighting a few awful people to create space for taking rights away from others who are not criminals. Some legal experts think there are perhaps two hundred people in the country, total, who could be denaturalized in this way.

“They would be putting someone in front of an actual federal judge who is not going to have a lot of give for denaturalization,” said Matt Cameron, a Boston-based immigration lawyer. The “most common reason” for cases of denaturalization, he told me, “and why there would be so few of them, would be for a pretty serious material misrepresentation” in their paperwork.

Cameron said past cases have ranged from the relatively benign—such as people on probation who didn’t think they had a conviction for a crime and so accidentally misrepresented themselves when applying for citizenship—to the decidedly malign, like Nazi concentration camp guards.

But with the Trump administration flagrantly pursuing political enemies, just bringing a case against someone—requiring them to lawyer up, go to court, and fill out paperwork—would be stressful enough, which is probably the point of the whole endeavor. Indeed, we’ve seen this administration wield bureaucracy as a cudgel before.

What should a naturalized citizen do if they’re contacted by USCIS or the Department of Justice about their citizenship? Cameron acknowledged these are serious concerns, but wanted to dispel some unnecessary fears he sees about the issue in immigrant communities.

“First, get a lawyer immediately. Then you need to see if it’s civil or criminal denaturalization. It almost certainly is going to be civil, and going to be in federal district court, where you have all the rights that come with that, and it’s intentionally difficult [for the government] to do,” he said.

“I’ve seen a lot of irresponsible commentary that Trump is mass-denaturalizing people, and he can do whatever he wants, which is clearly not true,” said Cameron. Denaturalization is “hard to do. It’s supposed to be hard to do.”