ICE agents are still killing people. In the space of six days, the agency has fatally shot two men.
First was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father and construction worker in Houston, Texas. ICE agents shot him on July 7 after stopping his vehicle because they believed he looked like another person they were trying to abduct. On July 13, a similar act of ICE terror occurred in Maine. Agents stopped the vehicle of a 26-year-old Joan Sebastion Guerrero and ended up shooting him in the head. Some reports have indicated that his young daughter was believed to be in the back seat.
ICE agents, of course, will come up with excuses for these killings. They’ll say they felt threatened. They’ll say that mistakes happen but that their main job is to go after “criminals.” In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has already claimed that Guerrero’s killer “feared for public safety.”
We know that they always have racist bullshit on hand to keep justifying what is nothing more than a racially motivated terror campaign against immigrant communities which is fueling racial profiling and violence against Latin American and other non-white communities across the country.
People are already protesting. In cities across the United States, immigrant rights activists are holding vigils to honor Salgado Araujo. In Maine, spontaneous protests broke out following the news of Guerrero’s death. Even New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, now one of the most influential politicians of the Left in the United States, used his social media to amplify the call to “abolish ICE.”
On July 14, less than 24 hours after news of the killing in Maine broke, news outlets reported that ICE is suspending most vehicle stops for immigration enforcement. They’re scared and they should be.
A Weakened Trump, and Democratic Party Complicity
Since the year began with the powerful uprising in Minneapolis, fueled by the ICE killings of immigrant rights activists Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the Trump administration has been in a precarious position. The administration was able to contain the expansion and radicalization of the movement, in no small part due to the role of Democrats like Tim Walz and Jacob Frey who de-escalated the outrage in Minneapolis. The movement was also pacified due to Democrat-aligned union and social movement bureaucracies that refused to play a direct role in organizing demonstrations, work stoppages, and spaces for debate on how to grow the movement. But this containment has not changed the fact that ICE is still terrorizing communities across the country, as these killings make abundantly clear.
Trump is weak. He was militarily defeated in a war he started, and is now resuming, with Iran. He can’t address the economic insecurity that is worsening for so many Americans, including sectors that voted for him. And his authoritarian overreach isn’t popular. Meanwhile, there remains a profound solidarity with immigrant communities which fueled the confrontation with the administration in Minneapolis, as well as previous confrontations in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. This poses the threat that class struggle against ICE can flare up at any moment, a fact which was shown in the recent confrontations outside the Delaney Hall ICE jail in Newark.
Trump has sought to prevent a resurgence of class struggle like we saw in Minneapolis by making ICE’s day-to-day terror less blatant, while also trying to repress the most advanced sectors of the immigrant rights movement, as shown in the recent sentencing of the Prairieland defendants and the charges against 15 activists in Minneapolis.
Let’s be clear. Trump would be unable to carry out his repression and prevent national outrage against ICE terror if not for the role of the Democrats who keep their base’s focus on the midterm elections instead of allowing that political energy to catch fire in the streets. In fact, Democrats largely support anti-immigrant policies. They routinely vote to fund ICE budgets and talk about needing to “secure” borders. Their role, along with the Far Right, has to be directly challenged, especially in this moment where outrage over the recent killings is widespread.
Fight to End ICE Terror
If the immigrant rights movement doesn’t seize this moment, it is only a matter of time before ICE kills again. We have to abolish ICE, and we can have no illusions that we can accomplish this by placing our faith in the Democrats. We already saw their feckless strategy in Congress fail to stop the passage of a $70 billion DHS budget.
The movement needs to organize independently of the two-party regime that is always finding new ways to divert our energy, and divide us from our immigrant class siblings. We need faith in our own collective power to fight until ICE is abolished, and then keep fighting for full rights for all immigrants. Because until every single person living in the United States is given citizenship and full political, economic, and social rights, the state will find new ways to terrorize our families, friends, coworkers, and neighbors based on arbitrary immigration status.
We cannot allow one more of these killings. Let’s fight to bring an end to ICE terror, free all those who have been abducted and are languishing in ICE jails, and get justice for all the victims of the war on immigrants.
The post ICE Killings in Houston and Maine Should Reignite a Combative Resistance to Trump’s War on Immigrants appeared first on Left Voice.
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