When Kristi Noem was pushed out of her job as the secretary of homeland security and replaced with Oklahoma’s GOP senator — and wannabe MMA fighter — Markwayne Mullin, the public was assured he would make all those pesky problems with Immigration and Customs Enforcement go away.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., described the concentration camp-style immigrant detention centers and the killings of two American citizens during immigration raids as “a little hiccup” and promised a “course correction” under Mullin. The New York Times heralded Mullin’s “warmer and fuzzier tone” during his confirmation hearing as a “sign that the administration wants to project a more moderated approach.” Various Republican leaders praised Mullin as a “good guy” who “likes dogs.”
But savvy people weren’t fooled. This is still Donald Trump’s presidency, an administration that is at least partially being run by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a man so paranoid about foreigners he floated the idea of banning pregnant women from even visiting the U.S., lest they give birth here. (His wife, podcaster Katie Miller, followed up by suggesting mandatory pregnancy tests of anyone suspected of being female coming through customs.)
The public-facing faux-moderation that came with Mullin’s confirmation — along with the war in Iran — did push ICE out of the national headlines, even while maintaining Trump and Miller’s mass deportations.
On Tuesday, though, a fatal shooting in Houston served as a grave reminder that nothing has changed substantively at the Department of Homeland Security, much less at ICE. The biggest difference between Mullin and Noem is that he’s male and she’s female, though both are bizarrely committed to cartoonish performances of their gender, with him pretending he’s going to fight people on Capitol Hill and her apparent cosmetic transformations.
ICE remains what Noem always wanted it to be: a rogue organization staffed by people who are too sadistic or unqualified to meet already too-low standards for regular police work.
Mullin was never intended to be more than a surface change, meant to deflect attention from Trump and Miller’s attempt at ethnic cleansing through deporting and harassing immigrants. ICE remains what Noem always wanted it to be: a rogue organization staffed by people who are too sadistic or unqualified to meet already too-low standards for regular police work.
The details of the shooting are awful. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, was driving to work in Houston when ICE agents, reportedly chasing someone else entirely, allegedly boxed in his car and him through the stomach. The officers weren’t wearing body cameras. According to the New Republic’s Greg Sargent, witnesses to the killing have allegedly been pressured to self-deport before they can testify. The official DHS response is the same dubious claim, issued in standard boilerplate, the agency always relies on in these cases: accusing the victim of threatening to run over ICE agents with his car.
It’s unlikely anyone sincerely believes this anymore. It’s what DHS said when an officer killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good, even though multiple videos showed she was turning the car away from the man who shot her. It wasn’t true when Border Patrol agents shot Marimar Martinez in Chicago, which was later revealed with the release of body camera footage. Since Alex Pretti wasn’t in a car when he was shot by Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis, they tried to blame the gun on his hip, even though video footage shows he never touched it during the incident. As Melissa Gira Grant of the New Republic pointed out, not only does DHS put these excuses out before an investigation can determine what happened, they block any good faith effort by other law enforcement agencies to conduct a real investigation. It’s a series of preemptive cover-ups, which is not what they’d be doing if they had any confidence in these stories.
After the Minneapolis shootings, a spate of investigations showed that in their efforts to dramatically increase deportations, the Trump administration recruited heavily from the ranks of men who struggle to find useful employment elsewhere. Many had histories of criminal violence, which was blamed on poor vetting but also conveniently aligns with Trump and Miller’s fantasies of controlling a lawless secret police force. As Tina Fey joked on “Saturday Night Live,”, being an ICE agent is for men who “use zip ties because people in your life don’t trust you with keys.”
None of this is a surprise to political scientists. As the New York Times reported in May, new research shows that authoritarian regimes are run by people who can’t succeed at honest work. Being willing to do the dirty and often illegal work that more talented workers won’t do, reporter Amanda Taub explained, allows these people to achieve “promotions and career success they could never have managed otherwise.”
As POLITICO reported the day before Araujo’s shooting, Mullin has been successful at tamping down national media attention around the evils of ICE, mainly through cosmetic changes. Officers have been making fewer public arrests and cutting back on the social media videos of terrified immigrants in handcuffs that DHS once regularly fed to the MAGA base. He even deployed a favorite corporate deflection tactic of promising “more training,” creating the illusion that he’s dealing with the problem, without addressing the real issue: ICE’s fleet of dangerous, unqualified employees who cannot be fixed with any amount of training.
As the Intercept reported in May, ICE recruitment materials are so ugly that Colorado’s state law enforcement warned DHS that it could attract “violent extremists” because it mirrors “popular white supremacist rhetoric and imagery.” Mullin blew off the criticism in June, saying these were just words, not “facts.” But that is flat-out false. The Colorado memo clearly laid out the facts, tracing how slogans used in ICE recruitment materials originate with white nationalist groups, Nazi Germany and the KKK.
Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
This refusal to change anything substantive at ICE is playing out exactly as experts warned it would after Good and Pretti’s killings. A new report from the nonprofit news organization the Trace shows ICE shootings are on pace to outnumber last year’s. ICE has been involved in 10 shootings this year alone, two fatal.
It’s worth remembering the context for what’s happening: Being undocumented in the U.S. is not a crime, no matter what hyperbolic language Republicans may use. It’s a civil offense, not even as bad as a speeding ticket. Observing federal agents doing their jobs is perfectly legal and, frankly, a duty of concerned citizens. Even if people are in the process of committing serious crimes, law enforcement is constitutionally required to do whatever they can to avoid harming them. Punishment is supposed to be meted out after due process, not because some wannabe gangster with a badge is feeling frisky. But people targeted by ICE aren’t even committing crimes in most cases. Most have no criminal convictions. Araujo, reports suggest, wasn’t even the guy ICE was looking for that day. He was just in a bad place at a bad time.
Local activists in Houston are not letting this story go. Hopefully, it will help shatter the illusion of moderation that Mullin has been trying to construct around what is clearly the same old ICE, packed with unqualified hotheads who have been implicitly told — through lack of investigation into killings like Pretti and Good’s — that they can kill without repercussion.
The Trump administration relies heavily on the “believe what I say, not what I do” trick in countless cases. How many times have we heard the Iran war is “over,” only to wake up to headlines showing more battles in the Middle East? Mullin cannot be allowed to conceal the ugly realities of ICE through paper-thin P.R. tricks.
Read more
about Trump’s mass deportations project
