How ICE Arrests Went Quiet — and Got Even More Deadly
The Intercept · L · trust 40/100
ICE just killed two immigrants in one week. Democrats running for office need to commit to abolishing the deportation regime once and for all.
Share Copy link Share on Facebook Share on Bluesky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp Natasha Lennard July 14 2026, 1:05 p.m. ET Share Copy link Share on Facebook Share on Bluesky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp Anti-ICE protesters attend a vigil for Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old from Colombia who was shot and killed by an ICE agent, on July 13, 2026, in Biddeford, Maine. Photo: Ryan Murphy/Getty Images For the second time in a week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have shot a man dead. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old father from Colombia, was driving slowly in Biddeford, Maine, when an agent shot into his vehicle.
As is now par for the course, ICE representatives are already lying about the incident. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reportedly at first told Maine Sen. Angus King that the driver had attempted to use his car as a weapon — the same lie used to justify shooting 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo dead just one week ago in Houston and Renee Good months before that. ICE has made the same bogus claim in a number of recorded incidents involving agents shooting into moving cars.
In a contradictory but equally baseless statement, the Department of Homeland Security claimed on X that the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.” An eyewitness told reporters that before the victim died, his face covered in blood, he could be heard saying, “I tried to stop.”
Both shootings highlight the agency’s pattern of violent racial profiling and reckless indifference to human life.
Like Salgado Araujo in Texas last week, Durán Guerrero had not been the target of ICE operations. This is not to say that either death would be any more justified had ICE been seeking the men for arrest; no immigration violation should carry a death sentence . But both shootings highlight the agency’s pattern of violent racial profiling and reckless indifference to human life .
Thousands protested in Houston following Salgado Araujo’s killing. Immediately after news spread of the Maine shooting, protesters took to the streets and rushed to Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s Biddeford office . Collins cast a deciding vote in the Senate last month to deliver a staggering $70 billion in funding over three years to ICE and Border Patrol. “Vote her out,” the demonstrators chanted.
Every elected official who is complicit in this border regime should be ousted. It should be a minimum requirement for Democrats running for Congress that they commit to abolishing ICE . Wherever there is legislative, municipal, city, or local power to do so, political leaders must combat ICE with more than words or face organized pressure campaigns and removal.
Most Read Iran Claims to Kill 3 U.S. Service Members in Kuwait Nick Turse Trump’s Sanctions Against the ICC Are Unconstitutional, Rights Groups Say Noah Hurowitz Harlan Crow Maxed Out Campaign Donations to John Fetterman Akela Lacy
Following the high-profile ICE killings of Good and Alex Pretti , two Minnesotans, in January, people took to the streets nationwide. Minneapolis residents responded with work stoppages, blockades, and powerful community resistance . The need to escalate organized resistance to ICE nationwide is again all too clear. Community mutual aid networks , neighborhood defenses, mass strikes , and major disruptive protests are as necessary as ever. But all such actions face the challenge of sustainability when opposing President Donald Trump’s endlessly resourced deportation machine .
Durán Guerrero’s killing in Maine is the eighth fatal ICE shooting in Trump’s second term, according to The Trace . At least fifty-two people have died in ICE custody over that same period, which Human Rights Watch called a “soaring mortality rate.” Meanwhile, ICE is further scaling up its quotidian activities to serve Trump’s project of ethnic cleansing: In just five days at the end of June, ICE agents quietly made a reported 10,000 arrests.
The vile spectacle of city-based ICE surges, which were the agency’s calling card under former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, have given way to dispersed but constant round-ups. The terror for immigrant communities is no less acute; the difficulty when it comes to fighting back has only sharpened. It is high time that anti-ICE action receives more robust political and institutional support.
It is not sufficient , for example, for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to assert that the New York Police Department does not coordinate with ICE for deportation operations if the NYPD is dispatched to clear streets for ICE vehicles to travel through disruption-free. It is not enough to have a court order in place barring ICE from making arrests at New York City immigration courts if that order isn’t enforced . “ Sanctuary city ” has to be a label with meaning beyond Trump using it as a slur against blue cities. It’s a promise, one that must also entail taking action against the racist municipal policing under which immigrants suffer and antifascist organizing is targeted .
Houston Mayor John Whitmire vowed last week to “pursue an independent and transparent” local investigation into the ICE shooting in his city. He also said that the federal government has taken control of the evidence, making such an investigation extremely difficult. The idea that the federal government will hold its jackbooted thugs accountable is, of course, utterly laughable .
But so, too, is the idea that an investigation by Houston or Texas law enforcement will deliver justice to Salgado Araujo’s loved ones, let alone the millions of people whose lives are being destroyed by the American deportation machine. An independent investigation into ICE killings is not even the floor, it’s the basement.
As the…
Read the original at The Intercept →
Open in TruthVane →