Two men are dead in two weeks, killed by federal immigration agents in cases of mistaken identity. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old business owner and father of three, was shot in his car in Houston while heading to work. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25, was killed in Biddeford, Maine, in front of his three-year-old daughter. In both cases, the agents were hunting someone else.
Salgado had lived in Texas for 35 years after immigrating from Mexico at 17. He was giving coworkers a ride when ICE agents opened fire. Durán had a work permit and held two jobs to support his wife and young daughter. Witnesses say agents rammed his car, approached his driver's side window, and shot him dead while he was still in her Bluey pajamas.
After Salgado's death, ICE claimed he tried to run them down with his vehicle. Witnesses disputed that account. The agency told similar stories about Renee Good, a mother of three killed in Minneapolis early this year, until video footage contradicted the official narrative entirely. There is little reason to trust ICE's version of what happened in Salgado's case either.
These shootings fit a pattern. Good and Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs hospital nurse, were both killed by ICE in Minneapolis in recent months. Both were U.S. citizens. Their deaths sparked waves of protests across the country and briefly damaged the credibility of the agency's aggressive enforcement operations. A high-profile border patrol commander known for Nazi-like attire lost his job. The Homeland Security secretary at the time did not survive politically either.
But the respite was temporary. After a brief pullback, ICE has resumed its raids with what critics describe as ostentatious cruelty and reckless violence. Maria Cervantes, a Mexican immigrant living in the Houston neighborhood where Salgado was killed, spoke to the Guardian about the climate of fear. "ICE hunts us like animals," she said. "I can't help but think, who's next? Am I going to get a bullet to the head for being brown?"
The Political Reckoning Ahead
History suggests what comes next. When administrations change and power shifts, pressure will mount to move past accountability. Voices will emerge advocating for closure over justice, for looking forward rather than backward. These arguments were made after Watergate. They were made after the Civil War. They will be made again, delivered with piety and claims that prosecutions and investigations only divide the country.
But the case for holding ICE officials responsible is unshakeable. Every officer, bureaucrat, and leader involved in immigration enforcement operations bears responsibility: the uniformed agents making arrests, the private contractors operating detention facilities, the officials in Washington drafting legal justifications for the operations. Their immunity must be stripped away. Criminal prosecutions must proceed retroactively. Civil suits must be allowed. Beyond legal accountability, those responsible must be investigated, tried, fined, and permanently removed from public service.
More fundamentally, ICE itself must be abolished. Reform efforts will inevitably emerge as politically convenient compromises, but meaningful change requires dismantling the agency entirely rather than patching its worst abuses.
The stakes extend beyond individual cases. If the country is to rebuild itself as a genuine pluralistic democracy, it cannot allow citizens to live in fear of state violence based on their appearance or national origin. Salgado, Durán, Good, and Pretti deserve not just memorial but justice. The communities terrorized by these operations deserve assurance that this cycle will never recur.
When political conditions shift and the pressure to move on intensifies, that pressure must be refused. Moving on would require forgetting these deaths, leaving the injustice of them unanswered. The country cannot afford that moral failure.
Author James Rodriguez: "The moment of reckoning is coming, and America will face a choice between justice and convenient amnesia. The answer cannot be silence."
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