Killings rekindle anti-ICE protests, but Trump doubles down
Public outrage led officials to temporarily ban ICE traffic stops. Trump overruled them.
Any hope that the Trump administration might voluntarily reform its brutal and sometimes murderous mass deportation campaign vanished this morning.
Public horror and protest over Trump’s immigration tactics reignited this past week after ICE agents recklessly fired into moving cars and killed two model citizens who happened to be immigrants, in Houston and Maine.
Yesterday, Department of Homeland Security officials responded to the outcry by temporarily banning most traffic stops — the practice that has preceded many of the most grievous attacks on immigrants and protesters.
This was seen by some as a sign that the Trump administration recognized that there was such a thing as “too far” to go to achieve Trump’s goals.
But today, we know better. There is no limit
In a post on Truth Social, Trump enthusiastically countermanded his DHS officials and gave an attaboy to the thugs terrorizing American cities and towns. He wrote that “The men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done.”
He falsely equated undocumented immigrants with criminals, and he wrote that in order to deport them, “we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”
So the murders will continue. And the protests will continue.
Those protests had dwindled over the last several months as DHS shifted its tactics away from assaulting entire cities at a time to surging agents across the country. But then came two shocking murders.
On July 7, an ICE agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, a Mexican national who had lived in the U.S. for decades, as he drove his home-construction crew to a Houston job site. ICE issued its standard cover story – that he had rammed into the agents with his van, leading one of them to shoot in self-defense – but videos from the scene indicated that was a lie.
And on Monday, ICE agents in Biddleford, Maine, shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, a Colombian immigrant who was driving with his partner and 3-year-old daughter. This time, ICE didn’t even try to claim self-defense. It said Guerrero was driving away and the agent fired because he was “fearing for public safety.”
Neither victim should have been pulled over in the first place; agents allegedly mistook them for their intended targets.
In Houston, family and local leaders immediately called for an investigation. The next day, a large crowd attended a vigil honoring Salgado Araujo and flooded the street where he had been killed.
Three days later, on Saturday, hundreds of protesters rallied outside Houston’s City Hall. And yesterday, residents packed City Hall demanding answers from city officials, while protesters again gathered outside.
The Houston Chronicle spotted protests in honor of Salgado Araujo in Los Angeles, Tampa, Detroit, Charlotte, Eugene, Ore., Broadview, Ill.
There have also been vigils and protest in an Austin church, in Dallas, in San Antonio, in Philadelphia, in Durham, N.C., in Santa Cruz, Calif., in Oklahoma City, and in Phoenix.
After Guerero’s killing in Maine, residents of Biddleford, population 22,000, came out of their homes in astonishing numbers. Hundreds mourned in a city park just hours after Guerrero’s death, many of them marching to the local office of Sen. Susan Collins and chanting “Vote her out.” Collins supported legislation to expand funding for ICE.
Protests have continued almost daily in Biddleford and nearby, including a protest yesterday outside an ICE facility in Scarborough, a few miles away.
There was a big protest yesterday in the state’s largest city, Portland, where hundreds demanded that ICE get out of Maine.
Also yesterday, protesters gathered in New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston.
The United Farm Workers posted on social media: “Another killing by ICE, this time in Maine. That’s twice in one week. How can America keep asking immigrant workers to work as usual if they are being shot dead on their way to work? Stop killing us.”
The two homicides brought attention to the nationwide deportation surge that’s been taking place in relative quiet for months — but is apprehending as many as 2,000 immigrants a day, a record number.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, explained the dynamics to Marcela García, a Boston Globe columnist.
“It really was a matter of time before this surge happened because they’re bringing on so many new officers,” Bier said. “They have so many new resources to spend. You’re talking about altogether over $100 billion of unspent money.”
Bier told Garcia the increase in arrests is also a product of the White House’s impatience. “Stephen Miller never backed off his agenda,” Bier said, referring to Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the main architect of his mass deportation campaign.
The Week in the Courts
An infuriated federal judge in Florida ruled that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s grant of immunity to Trump from IRS audits was illegal. “Acquiescing to any such demand is wholly incompatible with the duties of DOJ attorneys,” Judge Kathleen M. Williams wrote. , making it clear that the deal was in no way a legitimate “settlement” of the case she had been hearing, in which Trump sued his own I.R.S. over the leak of his tax information by an agency contractor. “This action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute,” she wrote. “The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”
Four more losses for DOJ in its baseless attempts to obtain unredacted copies of statewide voter registration lists! On Friday, a federal judge in New York dismissed DOJ’s lawsuit there, bringing the government’s record to 0-12 in these cases. On Monday, a federal judge in West Virginia also dismissed the lawsuit against his state, making it 0-13. On Tuesday, federal judges in Virginia and New Mexico did the same. Now DOJ is 0-15.
The chief federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., blocked the Trump administration’s visa limits for noncitizen social media researchers who work on such issues as misinformation, disinformation, and fact checking. “Much of American political debate consists of disagreement over whether a practice is liberty or regulation, safety or suppression, accountability or censorship,” Judge James E. Boasberg wrote. “The First Amendment does not permit officials to resolve that dispute by attaching legal burdens to the side they condemn.”
Must Click
In the New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer tells the moving stories of detainees held in Camp East Montana, the West Texas tent complex that is ICE’s largest detention center. He finds that deprivation and dire conditions are part of the design, in order to put maximum pressure on detainees to agree to their own deportations.
The Guardian writes up a new report and interactive map documenting 412 verified incidents of the misuse of crowd control weapons such as teargas, rubber bullets and pepper spray to control protests outside ICE detention centers or during enforcement operations. The report was created by Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
From the Orlando Sentinel: “Alligator Alcatraz is no more. Tents, cars, signs disappear from airport site.”
From the Redoubt: “ICE eyes 1,000-bed detention facilities in foreign countries.”
From News 12 in the Hudson Valley of New York: “Opposition is mounting in the Town of Newburgh over plans for a potential Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.”
From the Miami Herald: “As work permits for Haitians with TPS expire, South Florida rallies to protect them.” Rallies have also been held in Springfield, Ohio, and Bridgeport, Conn.
From the Center for American Progress: “The Trump Administration’s $1.7 Billion National Guard Deployments Fail To Reduce Urban Crime.”
And there are more than 500 “Good Trouble Lives On” events taking place July 17 to 19. The events — named in honor of the late civil rights icon and Rep. John Lewis — are intended to continue the fight for voting rights with nonviolent collective action. Find one near you.
Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators' work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable.
When even Markwayne thinks "maybe pull back" and 'trump' overrides him you know it is really Miller, AKA the Modern Rasputin.
And given "deprivation and dire conditions are part of the design, in order to put maximum pressure on detainees to agree to their own deportations."--it is no wonder that this administration is now trying to destroy the court at the Hague. Nothing like torturing people to bend them to your will creates a charge leading up to a LOT of indictments with no sovereign immunity as a shield.