Guardian columnist calls for ICE prosecutions after fatal shootings

Two more immigrants killed in Houston and Maine, columnist says

Guardian US columnist Moira Donegan on Sunday called for criminal prosecution of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and the abolition of the agency, arguing that the recent fatal shootings in Texas and Maine demonstrate a pattern of violence during the Trump administration’s intensified deportation campaign.

The column, published in The Guardian, cited the deaths of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero as the latest in a series of ICE-involved killings that included the deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Donegan wrote that Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years, was shot dead in his car by an ICE agent last Tuesday while on his way to work in Houston. She said he had built a life as a business owner and father of three after immigrating from Mexico at age 17. His three co-workers who were in the car survived the shooting and were taken into ICE custody, she wrote. Donegan reported that authorities said ICE agents had been looking for someone else at the time of the shooting.

Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant, was killed by ICE in Biddeford, Maine, the following day, according to Donegan. She wrote that he held a work permit, a condition typical of asylum claimants, and worked two jobs — food delivery driver and custodian at a veterinary office — to support his wife and three-year-old daughter. According to witnesses cited by Donegan, his daughter saw ICE agents ram into her father’s car, approach his driver’s side window, and shoot him. Sen. Angus King of Maine was told by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullen that ICE was looking for someone else when agents killed Durán Guerrero, Donegan reported.

Other recent killings referenced by Donegan include the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year. Donegan wrote that video quickly disproved ICE’s account of the Good killing, and that the agency had stated that Salgado Araujo had been trying to run agents down with his car, a claim witnesses contested.

“ICE, a group of reckless, trigger-happy bigots tasked with carrying out the president’s mass deportation and ethnic cleansing regime, is terrorizing communities,” Donegan wrote. She quoted Maria Cervantes, a Mexican immigrant living in the Houston neighborhood where Salgado Araujo was killed, who said: “ICE hunts us like animals. I can’t help but think, who’s next? Am I going to get a bullet to the head for being brown?”

Donegan argued that when the current administration leaves power, those responsible for ICE operations must face consequences.

“Their immunity from criminal prosecution and civil suits must be eradicated, and their liability must be made retroactive,” she wrote. “They must be investigated, tried, fined, punished and ostracized. Needless to say, ICE must be abolished — attempts to merely reform it must be resisted as betrayals of democratic values. But it is not enough to abolish ICE. Those who are responsible for ICE must be driven from public life.”

The column envisions a post-Trump political environment in which calls to “move on” would pressure the public to forgo accountability for the administration’s immigration enforcement actions — a dynamic she compared to arguments made after Watergate and the Civil War. She rejected that posture, writing that “moving on requires forgetting about Salgado, and Durán, and about Good and Pretti, and about everyone else that ICE has killed and will kill.”