The mourning and outpouring of support for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo continued through the weekend with neighbors and communities coming together to rally in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and across Texas. Then ICE took another life on Monday, this time in Biddeford, Maine.
While developments continue, what is known is that mass deportation agents fatally shot a 25-year-old father who “was authorized to work in the United States and had been issued a Social Security number,” Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! said in a joint statement. Like Salgado Araujo, Johan Sebastián had just started his day and was driving to work when – again, like Salgado Araujo – he was killed during a so-called “targeted” action that was not even targeting him in the first place. Another example of a Kavanaugh stop that turned deadly.
Witness Daniel Boucher described a horrific scene where Johan Sebastián was “bleeding profusely from the head,” the Portland Press Herald reported. “He was talking. He said, ‘I tried to stop.’” Boucher said he “watched in disbelief as the man’s legs stopped moving as he lay on the ground. He believes he watched him die.” His body would remain there uncovered, he said.
A second neighbor said he witnessed Johan Sebastián’s widow “crying at the scene, holding her daughter’s hand,” the Portland Press Herald continued. The child, just three-years-old, was still wearing her Bluey pajamas.
WITH ALL ITS MONEY, ICE DIDN’T BOTHER TO BUY BODY CAMERAS
Despite the fact that ICE is the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in the nation under the Trump administration, two members of Maine’s Congressional delegation, Sen. Angus King and Rep. Chellie Pingree, said that they “both believe agents were not equipped with body cameras.” In Houston, Rep. Sylvia Garcia said that agents who took the life of Salgado Araujo were also not wearing body cameras.
“Even after we’ve given ICE specifically $20 million for body cameras and Kristi Noem promised in February of this year that she was going to purchase them and get them in the field, that here we were in Houston that the agents didn’t have them,” she said.
Outraged Biddeford neighbors descended almost immediately on the local office of Sen. Susan Collins, who just weeks ago joined nearly all Congressional Republicans to give ICE and CBP another $70 billion in taxpayer funds – and with zero oversight or accountability measures despite mass deportation agents executing two U.S. citizens in broad daylight at the beginning of the year. “Around noon, about two dozen protesters marched into Collins’ office, but were shooed out minutes later as police arrived,” the Portland Press Herald reported. “‘This is your fault Susan!’ one man shouted.”
The Maine father’s death came just six days after mass deportation agents shot down Salgado Araujo, a Houston resident of more than three decades and father of three U.S. citizens. In South Austin, hundreds packed a church to mourn – and wondered if they might be next to fall on the radar of the administration’s violent and unsparing mass deportation agenda.
“Kayla Estevez said she fled her home country seeking safety for herself and her children,” reported KUT News. “She said her daughter is buried in the U.S. and wondered whether immigration enforcement could keep her from visiting the grave. ‘Will I still be able to take flowers to her?’ Estevez asked through an interpreter. ‘Will I still be able to go to work and come back and hug my kids?’”
THE ICE MACHINE SPREADS TERROR IN MINNESOTA, TEXAS AND NOW MAINE
Community support also came from Minnesota, where mass deportation agents brutally shot and killed two Americans in January. The administration falsely claimed that both Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were the actual aggressors, a script that it dusted off to use against Salgado Araujo despite no video evidence implicating the dad. In fact, the more that federal officials have tried to explain away this completely avoidable death, the more their case has fallen apart.
While ICE initially claimed that Salgado Araujo was stopped during a supposed “targeted enforcement operation,” the agency later admitted that he was in fact not the intended target at all. Since then, a representative for the three witnesses who were with Salgado Araujo when he died said that officials have been pressuring them to self-deport. The three detained men – including Salgado Araujo’s brother, Victor – “said a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle and that at no point did the driver veer in his direction,” The Washington Post reported.
“You don’t pressure witnesses to a shooting to self-deport if your goal is to get to the bottom of what happened,” Radley Balko, a criminal justice reform expert, told The New Republic. “You pressure them to self-deport when you want to make sure that nobody learns what actually happened.”
In one significantly worrying deviation from its Minnesota and Houston scripts, DHS said that the ICE officer didn’t fire at Johan Sebastián because he feared for his life, but rather because he “feared for public safety,” CNN reports. “So he killed him just because he did not want him in America, not because of any specific threat to agents?” asked immigration policy expert David Bier. But as Balko noted, Johan Sebastián was not even the target of the warrant. “Which means they had no reason to think he was dangerous.”
“Fleeing an immigration stop does not make you a threat to public safety,” Balko continued.
KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE IS BELOW THE CIVILITY OF A HUMANE NATION
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: the administration’s mass deportation obsessions represent a threat to all of our neighbors, no matter their legal status. Armed with $240 billion from Congress and Stephen Miller’s goal of a million deportations a year, ICE has pushed agents to chase arrest quotas at any cost. Agents pursuing those quotas have been treating our neighborhoods and communities as hunting grounds, with no accountability.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián, two men who came to this country for their chance to reach for the American Dream, are now the 10th and 11th individuals to be shot dead by mass deportation agents since the start of the administration. These agents have faced zero accountability and continue to stalk our streets and communities, endangering us all. In fact, Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! said that “members of our community were still reporting ICE activity” even as Johan Sebastián lay dying on the ground and his young daughter wept nearby.
“No child—whether a toddler, teenager, or adult—should lose a parent to the indiscriminate, lawless violence of our federal immigration agencies,” said the Children Thrive Action Network.
“In the wake of these two deaths, ICE has reportedly ordered agents to pause initiating most vehicle stops nationwide while it retrains officers,” America’s Voice noted Tuesday. “A partial, temporary pause on one tactic does not fix the underlying problem: a hastily hired, undertrained force of armed agents operating under exorbitant, politically driven arrest quotas. ICE cannot be trusted to police itself.”
“The utter disregard for human life is breathtaking,” said Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas. “In just six days, ICE agents in two different states shot and killed two fathers, husbands, and providers. Their immigration status is irrelevant. In America, we don’t kill people in the streets because of the way they look. This pattern of unaccountable killings is unconscionable and unconstitutional and must end, period.”
“Congress and DHS owe this country an independent investigation into Lorenzo’s and Johan’s deaths,” Cárdenas continued, “and they owe us answers about a chaotic and out-of-control deportation quota system that’s terrorizing communities and killing our family members, neighbors, and friends.”
Trump and his ICE Gestapo must stop murdering its citizens