In the span of about a week, federal agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, while the Tennessee National Guard killed Tyrin Johnson in Memphis as part of deployments that have come to characterize the second Trump term. These shootings came months after public outrage at the killings of Renee Good and Alexander Pretti in Minneapolis had highlighted reckless ICE action and seemed to have led to at least a slight retrenchment of the agency’s most aggressive tactics. Now, it has doubled down.
I find this all rather frustrating, particularly given the amount of my writing I’ve devoted in recent months to showing how states and localities can combat the federal government’s encroaching authoritarianism. The crux of much of this writing has been that shootings like these are completely foreseeable, and in fact have already been observed by some local elected officials who have, like the rest of us, watched them happen in other jurisdictions and sometimes in their own backyards.
I don’t mean to insinuate that nothing has been done. As I noted here a few months ago, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Albany lawmakers were indeed moving toward concrete policies to rein in the agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) both in state law and through executive practice, and almost all of those steps were included in some form or another in the executive budget. One of those measures was the creation of a state-law pathway for individuals to sue federal agents for constitutional violations. Just days before Durán was killed in Maine, I had published an article in part about how Maine’s version of that same law was used to bring a lawsuit against ICE agents in a crucial test of the concept. Perhaps that can serve as an avenue for some accountability.
Still, it’s just not enough. Federal agents and National Guard troops have now shot five people, four of them fatally, in Memphis alone as part of the so-called Memphis Safe Task Force ordered into the city by Trump. It is often unclear who fired the shots or under what circumstances. The federal government has often put out vague press releases blaming the victims, statements that have often been quickly exposed as, at the very least, heavily misleading, if not outright fabrications. The federal government has also often blocked state and local authorities from gathering evidence for an independent investigation of the incidents. In Durán’s case, the Department of Homeland Security didn’t even try to assert that he had posed any danger to officers, instead saying in a statement that “fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”
After Salgado’s killing, witnesses quickly disputed ICE’s assertion that he tried to ram agents with his car. These witnesses were then reportedly pressured to agree to deportation before they could fully speak out about what they’d seen. Point is, these are the tactics long endemic to many of the nation’s worst and most corrupt police departments, yet here they’re being imposed top-down by a centralized federal agency that features none of the local control checks that police departments do while having the full support of an authoritarian federal government. ICE almost seems to relish its lack of accountability.
After it came to light that Durán was not the intended target of ICE’s operation that day, I saw a lot of indignation generally premised on the idea that this was a marker of the agents’ ineptitude — they had not only killed the man, but killed the “wrong” man. I don’t think that’s the correct reading, if only because the reality is worse. ICE and the many, many other federal agents detailed to it have made it a policy to pursue so-called collateral arrests, which is a dry way of saying that picking up random people they come across as they’re conducting operations is now explicitly part of its mission, especially now that the Supreme Court has given the agency leeway to use racial profiling in deciding who to stop. Put another way, agents stopping someone like Durán practically at random for being Latino is more or less what the immigration enforcement efforts are doing now, all over the country.We heard about this encounter only because they shot him dead.
I hate to use clichés, but these are not normal times, whatever we take that to mean. Normalcy bias – the tendency to play down extreme risks because they’re so far from what we’ve experienced as normal – is a powerful drug. But we’re dancing around a democratic precipice that would be very, very hard to climb back up from if we fall. If what tempered the first Trump administration a little was inexperience and the fact that there were still large segments of the GOP and the conservative elite unwilling to go along with his agenda, that’s mostly melted away by now. The limiting factor now seems to be an administration that is so corrupt and full of nihilistic narcissists that it can barely function as a single unit as they vie to make the generally disinterested would-be king care about their own ideological and commercial interests.
Yet incompetence unfortunately is only marginally less damaging than calculated malice. The explosive-diarrhea-causing cyclospora outbreak is an inevitable consequence of the decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to kill that specific monitoring program (among others) at the CDC. Does that mean that the anti-vax crusader specifically wanted to engineer this outbreak? Probably not; these people aren’t masterminds, they’re arsonists. So now we have ICE, an agency awash in more cash than it can spend, openly using white nationalist language in aggressive recruiting campaigns while sending masked and heavily armed agents to practically occupy cities – whether or not it’s being efficiently managed is kind of beside the point. The leaders of ICE understand their mission well enough and feel like they have Trump’s blessing to carry it out as they see fit.
Meanwhile, I just don’t really see many state and local leaders laying out aggressive plans to defend their constituents and constrain the federal government. And look, I get it — no one wants to be the first governor to direct a state police force to arrest federal agents who are, for example, violating people’s First and Fourth Amendment rights. How such a move would go is very up in the air, starting from the basic question of whether local and state police even would obey a command to engage with fellow law enforcement personnel in that way. If states really went head-to-head with the feds, I’m not sure the former would meaningfully win, at least not without some very destructive and destabilizing times in the interim.
But what is the alternative? Public outrage is real. While I initially worried that these recent killings would fade into the background as we face torrents of scandal, malfeasance and corruption every day, protests coalesced almost immediately in Maine, while the nationwide scrutiny was so acute that ICE apparently suspended vehicle stops, at least temporarily. The public has decided that something must be done; why are our political leaders still hoping this all just goes away on its own? Is the idea really that Democrats will have such a midterms blowout that it will save us? That seems desperately naïve. So I’ll ask once more, as I have been asking governors and other state and local leaders for a year: What is the plan here? What are we going to do about the roving agents violating our constitutional rights, not to mention state law, left and right? I recommend that you start asking your elected officials the same questions.
