On Monday, Durán Guerrero, a 26 year old Columbian man was shot to death by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Maine. This follows the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican man, by ICE last Tuesday.

Neither man was the target of the respective ICE operations that led to their deaths.

Both incidents occurred in the course of traffic stops. In the wake of these two killings, according to CNN, ICE is "direct[ing] officers to largely suspend vehicle stops until further notice, according to a source familiar with the guidance."

President Donald Trump, of course, had other things to say.

According to CNN,

President Donald Trump was furious over the pause on most vehicle stops conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the blowback from his base, according to two sources familiar with the matter, as prominent MAGA voices suggested that the administration was weakening its immigration enforcement.

The pause on vehicle stops has since ended.

Is it reasonable to be furious that government actions that have been leading to violent deaths have been temporarily halted? I suppose so if your paramount priority is the deportation of suspected illegal immigrants and not the freedom, dignity or even lives of your fellow man.

As usual, the government seemed to justify the shootings with self-defense theories related to the threat posed by the suspects wielding vehicles as weapons.

In the case of Guerrero, CNN said,

An ICE officer fired his weapon “fearing for public safety” as Durán Guerrero, in a vehicle, “attempted to flee the scene,” the Department of Homeland Security said in its first official statement nearly 12 hours after the shooting.

Naturally, the ICE agents did not have body cameras, and there is no firsthand video of the incident. The Director of the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition said that Guerrero was working legally in the US. Guerrero's father backed it up. On Wednesday, the US government asserted Guerrero entered the country illegally while not directly contradicting the assertions that he was working legally.

On Wednesday morning, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Mr. Guerrero had “illegally entered the United States on Sept. 1, 2023, via the southern border and was released into the country under the Biden Administration.”
The statement went on to say, “To be clear, work authorization does not confer legal status in the United States.”
The agency did not provide specifics about Mr. Guerrero’s immigration case beyond the statement, and it was not clear how he would have been approved to work.

According to the New York Times, ICE may have mistaken Guerrero for someone else.

In the hours after he was killed on the block where he lived, details emerged to suggest that immigration agents may have mistaken him for another person. A spokesman for Senator Angus King of Maine said on Monday that Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, had told the senator that the agents had been looking for someone else.

In the case of Salgado Araujo, according to CNN,

The ICE vehicles attempted to block in the van, which struck at least one of the vehicles, the source added.
ICE said in a Tuesday statement Salgado Araujo rammed into a law enforcement vehicle and refused to follow several verbal commands before an ICE agent fired his weapon in self-defense.

It is unclear whether ICE officials identified themselves to Araujo.

What should we make of these killings? Unfortunately, we really only have the government's word on what happened -- the killings were justified because the men reacted in a way that endangered ICE officers' lives. That sounds plausible on its face; however, the government's credibility is nonexistent, particularly when it concerns violence committed by ICE.

When an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good, a US citizen confronted in her car by ICE in Minnesota back in January, the DHS Director claimed that Good ran over the ICE agent and that he shot her in fear for his life and to protect the public. This was despite there being video that led many, many people to conclude that this was not true and that any danger faced by the ICE agent was due to his carelessness is walking in front of her car.

In response, the government put more effort into investigating Good's activism and her widow instead of the actions of the ICE agents, leading many federal prosecutors to resign.

Then there was the ICE shooting of American Citizen Alex Pretti. Video clearly showed that Pretti was essentially executed by ICE agents while on foot at a protest. The video showed he was armed but had never grabbed or reached for his weapon. Eventually, after an ICE agent removed Pretti's weapon from its holster and Pretti was being held down by several armed ICE agents, an ICE agent suddenly drew his own weapon and shot Pretti to death.

Despite the clear video, Trump seemed to place blame on Pretti for legally carrying a firearm. The DHS Director baselessly asserted that Pretti was set on committing violence and was a "domestic terrorist."

If this is how top government officials behave when there is clear video of ICE holding down and killing an American citizen, how can we trust what they say when there is no video and the victim is foreign? If the government chooses to investigate people killed by ICE and their grieving families but not the actions of the ICE agents, how can we ever give the government the benefit of the doubt about any ICE incident?

We simply cannot. Top officials will always side with ICE agents over the people they killed, even when the incident merits patience and neutral investigation. The government has proven that it will immediately and blatantly lie and mischaracterize, even when there is clear evidence to the contrary. The government will fight tooth and nail to hide evidence, even from state government investigators.

This president and his administration have decided that deporting people who may be here illegally (or perhaps not) is their top official priority. It is more important than respecting the dignity of foreigners. It is more important than respecting the rights of American citizens.

How long are we as a people going to tolerate this? Can a nation survive when it tramples the rights of its people in the interest of dealing with foreign boogeymen, real or imagined? Unfortunately, there seem to be tens of millions of Americans who will endlessly support law enforcement while claiming they support freedom and the Constitution. Many will tolerate anything in the interest of deporting millions of what they perceive as violent, criminal foreigners and stopping the protestors who "impede" ICE.

While I would like to think most people will eventually come around as terrible incidents pile up, Americans have historically shown a nearly bottomless appetite for oppressing their neighbors to guard against scary foreigners.