Riley B. | Red Phoenix correspondent | California–

The American Party of Labor calls for justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, two people that ICE agents have publicly shot and killed in recent weeks.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo celebrating his last birthday. (Courtesy of Ronaldo Araujo)

Early on the morning of Tuesday July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was driving himself and three co-workers to a Houston-area job site. Based on his co-worker’s written statement, Araujo had tried to drive away after an unmarked vehicle went from following them, to driving on the shoulder, to cutting them off.

The agents only turned on their police lights after Araujo had U-turned to steer clear of the erratic driver. The witnesses believe he’d braked to under five miles-per-hour before the rabid ICE agents rammed his vehicle, shot him through its passenger side, then threw him to the ground to bleed out.

Staying true to the fascist tendency to lie, the agents claimed that Araujo had weaponized his vehicle and that they were acting in self-defense. Since Trump’s second term, five deaths from 20 cases of DHS agents shooting into vehicles have been reported. DHS has cried about “weaponization of vehicles” repeatedly, but we are yet to see any evidence to corroborate their claims, and what evidence has been publicized has, in fact, negated those claims. Their pattern is to withhold evidence for as long as they can, because the videos keep destroying their narratives. In Araujo’s case, they claim that the agents didn’t even have body cameras.

The government was further embarrassed when we learned that Araujo and his crew were not the targets of this “targeted operation” and that the “crystal-like substances” in his car were almost certainly an electrolyte mix.

Araujo had a valid fear of being robbed, because his van and tools had been stolen in the past. He had carefully studied what to do if ICE pulled him over, because he was close to obtaining his work permit in a notoriously complicated and drawn-out bureaucratic process that immigrant workers are subjected to.

His son says: “We dotted every I, crossed every T, filled every document, attended every appointment. He was close to obtaining his legal status… Had my father seen an emblem of ICE or an emblem that says anything about a law enforcement agency, my father would have complied.”

This unconscionable murder was unnecessary and completely inexcusable.

Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. (via Guerrero’s Facebook profile)

ICE perpetrated a striking similar killing the next Monday, July 13. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was shot to death while driving to his morning job in Biddeford, Maine.

The government claims its agents fired five shots into his car “for public safety.” A video shows Durán Guerrero’s car circling in the street, at a crawling pace. His body was limp when he was pulled out of the vehicle and handcuffed. His last words were “I tried to stop.”

Durán Guerrero was not the person who ICE was targeting that morning. He had work authorization and a social security number. He was a husband and a father to a young daughter. Now, he’s the 11th person to be fatally shot by ICE agents in Trump’s new term, while more than 50 have died in ICE custody.

Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero should still be alive with his family.

David Brouillette, after killing Joan Durán Guerrero. (Portland Press Herald)

How did the agents’ alleged “confusion” turn into their shooting up a residential area and killing someone? The shooter’s relatives offer valuable insight.

The shooter is named David Brouillette. He called three relatives after the shooting, including an ex-wife and daughter, to try to justify the shooting and ask them to speak positively of him. Instead, they went public to blast him as mentally ill, violent, and racist.

Brouillette had major mental health struggles and diagnoses as a child. Even though he’d had multiple suicide attempts and hospitalizations, he was encouraged by military recruiters to stop taking his medications, so he could join the Maine National Guard and, later, the U.S. Army. This led him to Afghanistan, which relatives say, “destroyed him – trained him to be a killing monster, a machine.” Rather than seeking the medical care that all people deserve, he was convinced to eschew treatment in favor of serving as an agent of imperialist violence.

After the Army, he struggled to build a stable career. He spent time as both a police officer and corrections officer, among other things. He sustained a head injury while training to be a firefighter, which was significant enough for him to leave the program and file a lawsuit.

He’s been through multiple divorces, which involved him physically abusing the women and children in his home, making death threats, and having restraining orders against him. More graphic details are available in a July 19 article from LiveMint.com.

These struggles DO NOT excuse anything he did as a soldier, police officer, corrections officer, ICE agent, or domestic abuser. The question to ask is why we accept rule by imperialists, who seek to turn troubled teenagers into fascist shock troopers. Children should be able to choose from many possible paths to a stable income, even if they have mental health disadvantages. Instead, they are flooded with propaganda and told that the surest way to become a “man” is to join the military or the police.

There’s no need to talk about the hiring standards of ICE, because there are none. A journalist claims she got an employment offer by accident, after doing an application and a six-minute interview for research. If you’re willing to participate in crimes against humanity, you can join ICE!

As the administration defends every single act of terror committed by ICE agents, many of whom are fascist paramilitary thugs seeking state-sanctioned authority to commit violence against people of oppressed minorities, it’s made it abundantly clear that ICE exists to terrorize people. The bourgeoisie know that there will be extreme social unrest as the general crisis of capitalism continues to throw people out of work. Migrants are the scapegoats of the hour, the excuse for both bourgeois parties to pour money into ICE. With the context of past fascist movements and MAGA’s increasing efforts to demonize its political opponents as “terrorists,” it’s clear that Trump plans to turn ICE into his private army. They are MAGA’s Brownshirts. Where the Nazis hired traumatized World War I veterans, MAGA uses the veterans of George W. Bush’s imperialist wars.

Every class-conscious worker must take these threats seriously. While people put off organizing a focused, militant class struggle, the fascist MAGA clique members are ruining and ending the lives of countless migrant workers and their families. They continue raising more money for their terror forces. They are building more concentration camps and surveillance infrastructure. They are trying to develop automated killing machines to commit crimes against humanity. MAGA, which controls more wealth and technology than Hitler could ever have dreamed of, is an existential threat to peace-loving workers of the world. Honest workers outnumber the fascist bourgeoisie overwhelmingly, but the urgency of our situation can not be overstated.

Present society is ripe, is rotten-ripe for the social revolution. Delay does not mean pacific waiting on the issue. The dialectic of reality knows no standing still. Delay means ever-extending destruction, decay, barbarism. The words of Lenin on the eve of October apply with gathering force to the present world situation: ‘Delay means death.’

R. P. Dutt, “Fascism and Social Revolution,” 1934.

R. P. Dutt, “Fascism and Social Revolution,” 1934.

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