What ICE didn’t say about its latest killing

Since Donald Trump returned to office, federal agents have shot at more than 20 people as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown, killing six of them. Almost all those shootings have had one thing in common: They aimed at someone inside their vehicle. That includes Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, the two men ICE agents killed in Texas last week and Maine on Monday. 

Soon after Durán’s death on Monday, ICE directed its officers to temporarily pause most stop vehicle stops. On Wednesday, Trump reversed that decision, posting on Truth Social that “we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” 

Durán, who was 25, came to the United States in 2023 and received work authorization last year, the Washington Post reported. Friends and family members told the paper that he made the journey to provide a better life for his then-infant daughter. In Maine, he spent the morning cleaning a veterinary office and delivered food later in the day.

Mary Hayes, a retiree who lived near Durán, told the Post that she saw his partner sobbing on her knees after the shooting. “If anybody with a heartbeat stood there and heard it, and it didn’t bring tears to your eyes, then I don’t know what kind of person you are,” Hayes said. “I’ve never seen pain like that before.” She added that the couple’s daughter, who recently celebrated her third birthday, was standing near her mom with a pink backpack on the ground.

The number of people immigration agents are shooting inside their vehicles is shocking. Police officers have been taught for decades to avoid shooting at moving vehicles. The reason is simple. As Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, explained, “For the most part, you do not shoot at vehicles because if you hit the driver, now you have an unguided missile.” Instead, cops are told to simply step away. “It takes more time to pull your gun and do that than it does to take three steps back,” Alpert said. 

Most police officers seem to have absorbed the training they receive about not shooting at drivers. A nationwide study of people shot by municipal police between 2015 and 2020 found that only 7 percent involved a person described as being “armed with a vehicle.” For the Trump administration’s immigration agents, that figure now stands above 90 percent. “From what we’ve seen, it doesn’t look like they’ve been trained very well, if they’ve been trained at all in this,” Alpert said about how immigration agents are handling vehicle stops. 

The agent who killed Durán was hired this year as part of ICE’s recruitment surge, according to The Atlantic. He previously worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs Police.

The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly tried to justify shootings by claiming that drivers threatened the lives of immigration agents by “weaponizing” their vehicles. In many cases, videos and other evidence have made clear that these justifications were false and bore little resemblance to what actually happened. The department’s response to the killing of Durán, the 25-year-old Colombian man killed by an immigration agent in Maine on Monday, is different. 

Instead of responding immediately, ICE took most of Monday to craft an ambiguous statement about why Durán was killed, claiming that agents were “conducting targeted surveillance on the last known address of an illegal alien with a final order of removal” then encountered an “illegal alien” leaving that residence. It neglects to say Durán was apparently not the person whom ICE agents were targeting. 

The statement explains the shooting on the basis that the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon.” In previous shootings, DHS alleged that the people it killed posed a specific threat to immigration agents. ICE did not respond to a request for comment asking whether the agent who killed Durán feared for his own life. 

Can a general fear for public safety ever justify shooting the driver of a moving vehicle? “Hell no,” Alpert replied. He added, “What does that mean? What do they know about this person? What do they know about them at the time the officer pulled the trigger? What was the immediate threat?”

Seth Stoughton, a former Tallahassee police officer and current professor of law and criminology at the University of South Carolina, said via email that the “generic statement that an officer ‘feared for public safety’ would not, in and of itself, establish that the fleeing subject’s actions presented a threat justifying the use of deadly force.” At a minimum,” Stoughton added, he would expect a clear account of why the person’s driving “created a serious threat.”

Six days before killing Durán, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in Houston for three decades. Like Durán, Salgado was not the person whom ICE agents in unmarked vehicles were pursuing. 

“I want to tell you about my dad,” Ronaldo Salgado said at a press conference last week. “He was a hardworking family man. He was also a man of routine.” He said that his dad got up before dawn to drive to work on a construction site—the same thing he had done for the past 35 years. Ronaldo Salgado said he found that his dad had died from a video posted on social media. As Mother Jones has reported, he said he recognized his father immediately “from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out.” 

DHS claimed that Salgado “weaponized his vehicle,” but has provided no evidence—and, as with Durán’s killing, agents were not wearing body cameras. A video analysis of security camera footage by the Washington Post shows agents  “aggressively following” Salgado but does “not appear to show Salgado Araujo ramming a vehicle” as DHS alleges. 

The fatal shootings of Durán and Salgado come after numerous accounts of shootings by DHS have been contradicted by video evidence and witness accounts. After Ruben Ray Martinez was fatally shot by immigration agents in Texas last year, the agency later claimed Martinez “intentionally ran over” a DHS agent.

Joshua Orta, who was in the car at the time, rejected that account. Orta said in a statement that Martinez was shot “without giving any warning, commands or opportunity to comply.” He added that Martinez “was unarmed, nonviolent, not fleeing and not resisting at the time he was shot.” (In February, Orta died in a car accident in Texas.)

In October, a Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martinez as part of DHS’ “Midway Blitz” operation in Chicago, led by disgraced Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino. In the aftermath of the shooting, DHS claimed that Martinez was one of two “domestic terrorists” who ambushed Border Patrol agents and “rammed” them with their vehicles before taking “defensive fire.” The Trump administration then tried to prosecute her.

Text messages and body camera footage unraveled the case. Body camera footage showed one of the Border Patrol agents saying “Do something, bitch,” and “It’s time to get aggressive,” shortly before Charles Exum, the agent who shot Martinez, jerked the steering wheel of his SUV as part of an apparent effort to ram Martinez’s vehicle. Exum then jumped out of the SUV. Within seconds, he shot Martinez five times. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” Exum later wrote in a text message about his actions.

Three months later, immigration agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. DHS initially said that Good attempted to “kill” federal agents after she “weaponized her vehicle” in “an act of domestic terrorism.” But Good’s death was captured on video from multiple angles that made clear that she was driving away from the ICE agent who killed her. 

DHS similarly alleged that Pretti, who was killed after an immigration agent removed his holstered and permitted handgun, appeared to be trying to “massacre law enforcement.” Video evidence showed that he was disarmed, surrounded, and defenseless when immigration agents killed him. 

The nationwide backlash to Good’s and Pretti’s deaths cost Bovino his authority and forced DHS to at least temporarily adopt a less publicly confrontational approach. In the five months after Pretti’s death, immigration agents shot one person during interior enforcement activities. But in the past month, as arrest numbers increased, they have shot at four people, including Durán and Salgado. And in the case of its latest killing, the agency is offering essentially nothing in the way of explanation.