Seventeen Mexican Immigrants Have Died. Mexico Has to Ask for an Investigation.

ICE is killing Mexican immigrants in custody and calling it self-defense.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fifty-two years old. He had lived in this country thirty-five years. He had no criminal record. On 9 July 2026 he was driving his construction crew to a job site in Houston. An ICE agent shot him. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said Salgado Araujo had rammed an ICE vehicle, and that the federal agent fired in self-defense. The Mexican government has asked the United States to investigate. Seventeen Mexican immigrants have died during immigration enforcement since the start of the president’s second term — fourteen in ICE custody, three in agency operations. Mexico had already ordered criminal complaints of its own. Mexico has now had to formally request that United States state attorneys general criminally investigate what should never have required a foreign government to request at all. The Mexican foreign ministry said the same request will also be sent to the United States Department of Justice.

You know what an “ICE vehicle” looks like when it pulls up on a Houston job site at dawn. You know what “self-defense” means when the man doing the ramming is a fifty-two-year-old construction worker with no criminal record, driving a crew he has driven for years. The agent is alive. The crew is without their foreman. The man’s family in Houston is without their father, their brother, their uncle, the man who had been here since before some of them were born. The man is dead.

I do not say this lightly. I say it because the lie that this is self-defense is the lie that has made the killing possible. Every account of a man shot in the street, dead at the scene, has to be framed as something other than what it is, or the regime collapses. The man rammed the vehicle. The agent feared for his life. The force used was proportional. These are the sentences that turn a killing into a procedure. They are the sentences that make a regime of killing-by-procedure tolerable to the people who carry it out and to the country that lets it happen.

Fourteen people have died in ICE custody. Four of them died in one facility in Adelanto, California. The Mexican government has started sending letters to detention centers demanding they “immediately cease the actions or omissions that resulted in these deaths, such as preventing access to prompt and expedited medical care, as well as the application of policies incompatible with medical and penitentiary standards.” The first letter went to Adelanto. Mexico’s foreign minister, Roberto Velasco Álvarez, has also written to Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The country of origin of the people dying in American detention centers has had to ask the United Nations to look into what their own government is doing to them.

You have to hear what the bishops of your own Church, and the bishops of the Church next door, said about this in 2003. Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope — the joint pastoral letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Conference of the Mexican Episcopate — names what is happening in these detention centers by name. The document says, in language that has not been retracted in the years since: “We the bishops of Mexico and the United States seek to awaken our peoples to the mysterious presence of the crucified and risen Lord in the person of the migrant.” The man in the Adelanto cell who did not get medical care is Christ on the cross. The man in the Houston driver’s seat who was shot and called a threat is the Lord in the person of the migrant. This is not a metaphor the bishops reached for; this is what the bishops said. The bishops’ letter names what a humane immigration policy would require: the right to find opportunity in one’s homeland, the right to migrate when that fails, the protection of asylum seekers, the respect for the human dignity of the undocumented. None of this is contested by the U.S. Catholic Church. None of this is the policy of the administration that runs ICE.

The Torah, which the Catholic Church holds as the word of God alongside the Gospels, says the same thing in plainer language. “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” The word appears in the Torah more often than any other commandment. The people who wrote the books knew what it was to be the stranger. The people who enforce this regime of detention and deportation know the same thing. The commandment stands.

At Lampedusa in 2013, Pope Francis, speaking to a crowd of Sicilians and Eritreans and Tunisians and others whose loved ones had died in the Mediterranean, said: “In this globalized world we have fallen into a globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t concern me, it doesn’t interest me, it’s none of my business.” Francis named the condition by name. The detention centers where fourteen Mexican immigrants have died are a chapter in that book. Fratelli Tutti, published seven years later, names it again: migrants, the Pope wrote, “are not seen as entitled like others to participate in the life of society, and it is forgotten that they possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person.” The current administration has built more wall. The current administration has turned more migrants away. The current administration calls this the work of national security. Francis calls it what it is.

And Christ, in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, names the standard by which the regime will be judged. “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The goats — and the passage uses the word, in the same breath as the words about the hungry and the naked and the sick and the imprisoned — are the ones who did not see. They are not the ones who are mean. They are the ones who did not see. The regime of detention that does not see the migrant in the cell, that does not see the man driving the crew in Houston, that does not see the family at the funeral — that is the regime the passage names.

I will not stand here as a man without skin in the game. The Catholic parishes along the border have classrooms full of the children of families who are, in the language of the policy, “in the country illegally.” Some of those children are dead. Some of them died in custody. Some of them died in operations like the one that killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. The Catholic parishes did not do enough to stop what was being done in our name. The Catholic schools and Catholic Charities agencies in this country have not done enough to stop it now. The bishops’ 2003 letter is correct. The letter is twenty-three years old. The murders it described have continued under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The Mexican government has had to ask the United Nations to look into the deaths in our custody. The Church that produced the letter has not produced the resistance. We are part of the climate the regime is exploiting. We have to say so.

Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was murdered thirty-nine days after he preached the homily that made him a marked man. “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression.” He was not calling the soldiers bad men. He was telling them that the orders they had received were orders no man is obligated to obey. The agent who fired the weapon in Houston had a name. The agent had a family. You, the agent, are a person. You are a person who fired a weapon and ended a man’s life. You are a person, and the door of return is open. You can still refuse the next order. The crew Lorenzo Salgado Araujo drove to work this morning drove without their foreman. The crew drove. The work continues. The work is not finished.