Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump's foreign policy isn't going well, so thank goodness for domestic policy, right? Not so much, as it turns out. After the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, ICE pulled back a bit, and "border czar" Tom Homan was put in charge of operations. The basic idea was that border policy would still be vigorously (and even inhumanely) enforced, but that there would be no more shootings. The new approach held for a while, but the last week has seen two more killings at the hands of ICE officers.
The first victim was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who lost his life last Tuesday. He was a permanent resident of the United States who first arrived from Mexico as a teenager and had been living in the country for 35 years. He worked in construction, and with income from that job, was able to raise a family. His habit was to rise early, pick up his crew in his white van, and then get to the job site. On Tuesday, Salgado Araujo was confronted by ICE officers during the trip to work, shots were fired, and by the time the smoke cleared, he was mortally wounded.
After the Good and Pretti shootings, video footage appeared nearly instantly on social media platforms and other websites. By contrast, we're a week removed from the Salgado Araujo shooting, and no video of the actual incident has yet come to light (there is some video from a couple of minutes after the shots were fired). ICE claims that Salgado Araujo tried to ram officers with his van. Non-ICE witnesses say that is not true, that there was never an ICE agent in front of the van, and that the gunfire commenced very quickly and came from agents alongside the van.
If you have to judge which side to believe, based on current evidence, then the answer is clear: ICE is lying. To start with, part of the reason there is no video is that the shooting took place in a poor, heavily Latino neighborhood, where people are considerably less likely to have cell phones. Unfortunate, or deliberate? More importantly, the agents were not wearing body cams. This strikes us as the first piece of equipment that should be issued to any agent who is going to be armed, even before their actual gun. There were also no dashboard cams, which is also supposed to be standard-issue law enforcement equipment these days. Again, unfortunate, or deliberate? When asked why the ICE officers had no cameras, DHS officials blamed... the Democrats. That would be the same political party that controls zero-thirds of the trifecta in Washington.
Beyond that, as local authorities have tried to investigate, ICE has stonewalled and stonewalled and stonewalled some more. They have provided no evidence whatsoever, and have refused to answer questions or to identify the agent responsible for the shooting. ICE spokespeople won't even say if that agent has been placed on leave, or if he or she (although, let's be honest, it's gotta be a he) is still on duty. Also, Salgado Araujo was sent to the hospital with no ID, and so was admitted as "John Doe," making it much harder for reporters to track him. ICE also won't explain what put them on Salgado Araujo's scent, other than a "tip" from some law enforcement agency, an agency they refuse to identify.
In short, ICE is behaving like an agency that is guilty as sin and is engaging in a cover-up. In fact, they're behaving the same way they did after the Good and Pretti shootings. And, in those cases, we all saw the footage, and we could all see that the ICE version of events was a fantasy. Again, there is much unknown about the Salgado Araujo shooting. And it's possible that video will come to light, and will give some useful insight. But given the currently available information, the conclusion has to be that ICE is lying through its teeth.
The second shooting, meanwhile, took place yesterday, in Biddeford, ME. The victim, whose name was only made public late yesterday, was 26-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastian Guerrero. As with Salgado Araujo and Good, he was in his vehicle at the time he died, with the responsible ICE officer firing into the car. As with Good, Guerrero was killed as family members looked on; in this case, his 3-year-old daughter. As with Salgado Araujo, ICE claims Guerrero "weaponized" his vehicle, but no video has yet been made public, and the agents and their cars were apparently without cameras.
After Guerrero's death was made public, noted radical Sen. Angus King (I-ME) was furious, and called DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to demand answers. Mullin refused to give the victim's name, which only became known when neighbors identified the dead man to reporters. Further, the Secretary initially told the Senator that the then-unnamed victim was in the country illegally and was the target of an arrest warrant. King was apparently skeptical, and later Mullin "corrected" himself, and said that it was a case of mistaken identity, and that Guerrero was not the target of the ICE operation. It is still unknown what Guerrero's immigration status was.
Note that we do not believe that ICE is actively looking to kill people in cold blood. However, we do believe it's a badly run agency, and one that is relying on many poorly trained, inexperienced agents. That is how you end up with 20 shootings and 4 fatalities in less than a year. We also believe that the Good and Pretti shootings created enough political blowback that DHS is doing everything it can to avoid accountability. Our evidence for these conclusions is laid out in the previous paragraphs; readers can decide for themselves if they agree with us.
In terms of politics, ICE's misconduct had moved to the backburner in terms of the attention it was getting, primarily because there are two or three new outrages from this administration every week. Will the new killings move ICE back to the forefront of people's attention? Maybe, though we tend to guess that the effect of the killings will be most profound in the states where the shootings took place. As a reminder, Minnesota, Texas and Maine all have critical U.S. Senate races underway as we speak. (Z)