ICE fatally shoot two men in Maine and Texas

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1:01Colombian father who had legal rights to live and work in America. A Mexican as well had been working for three decades in the US as a builder. Neither had criminal records. Both have been shot. So big protests in Maine and in Houston, Texas, where those two shootings happened. Both men, it seems, not the intended targets. A third killing in Florida, possibly. Details still coming in. But amid all of these claims and counterclaims and calls for investigations, What is happening with ICE? How much of a priority is it for ICE ahead of the midterms to be sorted out? Does it matter politically? Welcome to AmeriCast.

1:43AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money. We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. This is a big cover up and this administration is engaged in it. This guy has Trump Arrangement Syndrome. I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.

2:09Hello, it's Sarah in the BBC's Bureau in Washington. And it's Justin in the World Wide Headquarters in London, England. And it's Anthony with Sarah live and in person in the BBC Bureau in Washington. And just before we get to what actually happened in these two shootings, it's worth saying right at the start, just as we're beginning this conversation, There is some measure of chaos inside the Trump administration because you've got the administration telling people, unnamed officials in the administration telling people that these traffic stops where both of these shootings seems to have happened, these traffic stops are going to be halted or suspended at least.

2:44and Donald Trump just now going on Truth Social to say, no, the traffic stops are really important. They've got to go on. So there's no question that what is happening, quite apart from the awful toll that it's taking of individuals in some circumstances, is also it's really playing into the politics of the midterms and the wider questions about ICE that there are all around. So we'll get to all of that in a second. Let's kick off, though, with what has actually happened insofar as we could know it in these two cases. Sarah. Yeah, so the first one happened in Maine. And in these circumstances, a 26-year-old man, Juan Sebastian Guerrero, was shot in the city of Biddeford in Maine.

3:32We don't have as much detail about that as we did about the cases that you'll remember from Minneapolis, because not as many cell phone footage and pictures to show us. But we have seen surveillance footage of what happened immediately after the shooting. And we see Mr Guerrero being pulled out of his car by ICE officers. And it looks as though they immediately drag him down to the ground and handcuff him, saying that they were fearing for public safety rather than seeing whether he was all right. Because the other thing that we've actually got images of are bullet holes through his window. So he's obviously been shot several times by the agent who then drags him out of the car down onto the ground.

4:15And he later died from his wounds. We know a little bit about the man himself. Guerrero was Colombian. He was actually authorized to work in the United States. He'd been given a social security number. And so, you know, he was not actually the target that the ICE agents were looking for. It was a mistaken identity that has resulted in his death. And unsurprisingly, there have been some vigils and protests in Maine where he lived. This is outside an ICE building in Scarborough, where you can hear one of the protest organizers. We knew that was going to happen, but it doesn't change the fact that it breaks our hearts.

4:49That we are here today in solidarity with the Guerrero family to say you are not alone. But we're also here to say it must be the last person in Maine that ICE kills. There is no excuse from any elected official, from the attorney general to the district attorneys to the state police to local law enforcement. These people are killers and they must leave our state now. And it's spread beyond Maine. In D.C., the representative Adriano Espaiat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, denounced the killing at this press conference. So here we are again, a brown man, a Latino, killed. And I must say that I don't see the outrage.

5:37I really don't see the outrage that I've seen in other cases. so whether you're an immigrant whether you have an immigrant status that's irregular documented, undocumented and life isn't life justice should be decided in our courtrooms not in the asphalt in the pavement of any city across this country this is a failure of leadership to allow ICE to continue to go on a rampage, a killing spree, is a failure of leadership. And that shows you some of the controversy that has been stirred up by this. But, I mean, he's not wrong when he says there hasn't been the same level of outrage that there was when two white American citizens were killed in Minneapolis earlier this year.

6:35So there have been some protests around the country, but it hasn't reached the scale of what we saw earlier in the year That may be because of the nationality and the ethnicity of the people involved. It may be because there just isn't as much footage of what happened. And so it's less clear exactly what went on. I think that may be a big part of it. There also was no footage of the shooting in Houston. The victim there, the target was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. He was a 52-year-old Mexican national. He was working as a builder and he was stopped while driving to work with three other people in a white van and killed by ICE agents shortly afterwards.

7:11Now, the Department of Homeland Security has said that they stopped that white van because they saw someone who looked like an individual they were targeting, operating the van. He said that the firing, the officer shot in self-defense, and that Arafo was not actually the man that ICE was looking for. We don't have footage of that, not even the footage that we had in Maine. But the three men in the car with him did say that they were not endangering ICE agents. Their lawyer said that he was not using a vehicle as a weapon or trying to run over the immigration officers and that no one was in front of the vehicle.

7:48If you remember that shooting in Minneapolis, the officer was somewhat in front of the vehicle. But we don't know. This is he said, she said, he said, he said. this multiple accounts because we don't have that same kind of video evidence to be able to get anything out of it here. This is his son, Rinaldo, talking about how he learned of his father's killing. I learned of my father's passing from a news report on social media, not the hospital, not law enforcement. Through a collective effort from local organizations and elected officials, we got answers. My father's death was confirmed. I am calling for a full investigation into the events that transpired yesterday, July 7th.

8:29He did not deserve to die. He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of Mexican man shot and killed by ICE. He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, a father, and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream. What happened though, my father was being followed by two unmarked cars had my father seen an emblem of ice or an emblem that says anything about law enforcement agency my father would have complied he would have stopped he would have not ran away because he feared for his life he drove fast because he feared that someone would take his tools one of his worst fears is that someone took away his work tools because that's the tools of his the van as well because that is how he made his livelihood that's how he raised us That's how he fed us for the last 35, 40 years of his life.

9:24So had my father seen any emblems on those cars, he would have complied. He would have stopped. He would have not reacted the way he did. Unfortunately, that was not the case. ICE did not present himself to him in an orderly manner, in a professional manner that any law enforcement agency should have. That's the standard, to identify yourself. So that was Ronaldo Salgado calling for an investigation. The family has said that they haven't heard anything from ICE or the Department of Homeland Security regarding this case. And of course, he is relaying what are the accounts from the men who were with Al-Raho in the van prior to him being shot.

10:07Yeah, and the call for an independent investigation is interesting because this has happened in each one of these cases, isn't it? The Department of Homeland Security investigates themselves, essentially, and in each state where this has happened, the local authorities have very little confidence of how that investigation is going to proceed. And normally, when a federal agent is involved in a fatal shooting like this, there will be a parallel investigation from the local authorities. But ICE have been denying the state access to that in every single one of these cases. So it doesn't appear that there is any kind of effective independent investigation going on and little confidence in some quarters that ICE can investigate themselves fairly.

10:46And it's worth underlining, isn't it? Neither of these people had a criminal record. They weren't the intended targets, as we were saying. And also, I mean, the really crucial thing, there isn't body camera footage, is there? So there's no clear footage from the ICE agents themselves, which which I mean, again, just you'd think by now and particularly after the killings that there have been. And there have been other shootings as well, not just the ones that we mentioned, the ones in in Minnesota. But but there have been others as well where ICE agents have been involved in shootings, not all of them fatal.

11:21You'd think by now that are sorted out the body cameras at the very least. Right. One of the other things that's different here is that the two protesters and they were protesters in Minneapolis, Alex Priti and Renee Nicole Good. They were not the targets of ICE. They were not being swept up in these immigration enforcement actions. They were there protesting that they were there trying to provide eyewitness accounts and try to warn some of the people who were targeted. Whereas in Maine and in Houston and in some of those other cases that Justin mentioned where ICE agents discharged their weapons and at times shooting people who were who were in the vicinity of these investigations.

12:01This that this is a different sort of thing. And the response has been different, although I will add that in Houston, there have been mass protests already calling for further investigation. And we're starting to see some of that now in Maine as well. And of course, those investigations are not going to be helped by the fact that the officers weren't wearing body cameras. And there has been a lot of pressure to try and make sure that agents always do ever since what happened in Minnesota. But Tom Holman, the border czar, was up in Capitol Hill yesterday. He was asked by a reporter specifically why the agents weren't wearing body cameras, given that a huge amount of money had already been given to the department to pay for new body cameras.

12:40And he basically said that the government shutdown from a couple of months ago had held all of that up, that although the money is there to buy the body cameras, they've been ordered now. And essentially blaming Democrats for the hold up in supplying them, which, well, we shall see how that holds up. Right. And you also explained that pause that was ordered, according to reports in the traffic stops. You've got to remember traffic stops. These seem to be a lot of the flashpoints for these type of incidents because you're pulling someone over. you have them behind the wheel of a vehicle, which in law enforcement views can be a deadly weapon and has led to injuries of law enforcement officers when they get hit by these cars.

13:19So it instantly makes it a more tense situation. They were going to pause this to review it. I mean, this is Holman talking about that pause and explaining the purpose behind it. You know, I think what they're doing is taking a pause and make sure that number one, the ICE officers have everything they need to stay safe because vehicle attacks are up 3 ,400%. And they're going to make sure, is the training sufficient? Did anything go wrong? I'm confident they're going to get back to their policy of vehicle stops, but they're doing what they believe is a necessary short-term pause just to look at it and make sure everything's good.

13:53But there's going to be situations where they need to do vehicle stops, especially if it's a criminal alien. and before you enter a city, downtown city, you want to take them down in a desolate area where the public is safer. There are so many different extenuating circumstances that these officers have to consider. Do I stop it or do I wait till he stops or should I approach him before he gets into the car? I mean, that's a two-ton weapon. The average weight of a vehicle is two tons. So the question then, Anthony, is whether that stands now because just as we were beginning, you monitor truth social very carefully, don't you?

14:31And you alerted us all to the fact that Donald Trump has essentially said, no, that's rubbish. Yeah, he did. This is the truth social post. He said the men and women of ICE are doing a great job, one that has to be done. Crime is way down in America, in many cases, the numbers that haven't been seen in decades. He goes on to talk about the ICE stop, saying that we cannot give up one of ICE's most important and effective crime fighting tools. The traffic stop. Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal's hands. He says Democrats don't want this to be done, but it won't happen. On my watch, ICE, be judicious, fair and smart and go back and do your very important job.

15:08Keep those Kramstat records coming. Remember, you are loved and respected in America, although he didn't call it nice. I thought he was changing the name of it from ICE to nice. I guess not. So that's a whole different public body in the United Kingdom. But I think there's a couple of really interesting things in what Tom Holman said there, because he actually posed a couple of questions which are material to this. He said, is the training sufficient of ICE officers? Now, he may have been talking specifically about the manner in which they pull over vehicles. But I mean, that's got to be at the nub of this, hasn't it?

15:37That you have officers who essentially don't know how to conduct these stops properly, who are maybe approaching people without having identified themselves. That's certainly what the victim who was killed in Texas, his son, seemed to be suggesting, creating unsafe environments and then feeling as though they are under threat themselves when possibly more training might have taught them to handle it in a different, non-fatal way. Right. And you have to remember that the immigration enforcement activities that the Trump administration has been conducting have been rapidly, significantly increased in the past couple of weeks.

16:11They've been conducting about 2 ,000 enforcement actions a day, nearly doubling the number of people it takes into custody compared to the spring. So most of those are happening with these kind of stops, whether they're traffic stops or resident stops or on the street kind of stops. So the potential, the number of stops is so much more that the potential, even if you talk about a small fraction of it, suddenly these turning violent has increased proportionately. And the other thing Tom Holman was saying there was, look, we need to do this when it's a criminal alien. And the administration's always saying this, aren't they, that we're going to be deporting the worst of the worst, that these are criminals who've got no place in the country, that they're making America safe again, they're reducing crime rates by getting these people out of the country.

16:562 ,000 arrests a day are not all criminal aliens. Many, many of them, in fact, the vast majority of them have no criminal record at all. So it's always fascinating, I think, where they both want to parade very large numbers and they want to say these are dangerous criminals and both things cannot be true at once. Yeah. And it's really interesting, isn't it, that they are doing what they originally said they were going to do. They said there are going to be very large numbers deported. And then during the course of the election and just afterwards, as you say, Sarah, they start to say, well, it'll be the worst of the worst, etc.

17:31But actually, in a way, and in a politically damaging way for them, potentially, they seem to be living up to the first of those things rather than second, if you see what I mean. In other words, they are going for the whole hog to go for really large numbers and including people who haven't necessarily done anything criminally wrong or not done anything criminally wrong recently. and that is although it is what they initially promised to do or suggested they were going to do it it's still i guess quite a shock to people to actually see it happening and to see the the fallout from it as in these two cases and the other cases where people have been shot yeah sarah you remember at the republican national convention they had signs that the convention delegates were holding up saying mass deportations now that was as justin you say the promise although maybe they realized that was not politically acceptable to a larger swath of the American public, which is why they changed their messaging.

18:30But pretty clearly what they are doing and what they have the funding to do, the resource, the reason why ICE now has more prisons than the Bureau of Prisons in the federal government and more immigration enforcement officers than a lot of militaries in a lot of different countries is because this is a much, much bigger operation than just finding people who have criminal records and getting them off the streets. And the politics, of course, are crucial to this. There is public support for removing people who are undocumented in this country, even if they're not criminals. That remains a popular thing, which definitely the Trump administration and Republicans could be running on in the midterms and maintain support.

19:11What's much trickier is when people are killed, especially when they're people who are not the target of the operation in itself, and it looks as though the thing is both dangerous and badly organized. And that's when it gets much, much trickier. It gets much trickier for Trump to defend. But it's also complicated, isn't it, Anthony, for how the Democrats jump into this, because there are dangers politically for them as well. Right. Immigration has been, since Donald Trump first started running for president in 2015, his biggest issue and one of the issues that he has had the most public support on.

19:45Now, if you look at recent polling, it does show that there has been some erosion of his support, particularly after what happened in Minneapolis because of the killings there. And also, I think it's more than more, even more than that. I think it's a feeling like sometimes this is being done in a cruel sort of way. Families separated, people snatch off the streets. It's one thing to say, yes, we need to get 10 million undocumented immigrants out of this country. Another thing when it's your gardener or your housekeeper or your nanny or your neighbor or the person you're going to church with, that makes it a lot more personal.

20:18I think that has affected public opinion to some extent. But Democrats do have to be careful because this is an issue where Republicans typically have a stronger hand. And if they get over their skis on this, if they push back too much, it might play into Donald Trump's campaign messaging that Democrats want open borders and mass immigration. Yeah. And the phrase defund ICE, of course, Justin, is it becomes, you know, pretty toxic when you remember the arguments over defunding the police. Yeah. And then you go to so if you go to Maine, because it's interesting that both of these these places where these these shootings happen are states potentially the Democrats want to win in the election.

21:00Texas and Maine Senate seats are absolutely crucial for them retaking the Senate if they intend to retake the Senate, both of these places. places. So how do they play? It's interesting. I've just been looking at Troy Jackson, former Senate president in Maine, who now wants to take over the place of Graham Plattner, this guy who has imploded as their candidate for the Senate seat, and to get Susan Collins, the Republican senator, out. Troy Jackson now saying on social media that ICE is, I quote, this rogue agency that must be abolished. In other words, on the left of the Democratic Party, and I think it's fair to say Troy Jackson is on the left, they may well become the candidate in Maine.

21:47On the left of the party, there is a sort of all out push. Okay, abolish ICE. They're not quite saying abolish ICE and don't put anything in its place, are they? But it's still that initial abolish ICE thing that is potentially attractive to people on the progressive left, but not attractive to anyone else. That's the kind of tightrope, isn't it, that they're walking? Right. And Susan Collins is in a tricky situation because she is getting pressure from her constituents. She has been a critic of some of this ramped up enforcement in the past and had been one of the people calling for a pause and some sort of a consideration of these traffic stops.

22:28And now Donald Trump is coming in and doubling down on this. So the protests that happened in Maine just the other day. They were protests that started in a public park and ended at Susan Collins's campaign headquarters or Senate headquarters in Portland, Maine. And so this is pulling her into an area where she probably doesn't want to be because she then becomes more and more associated with Donald Trump. She either has to defend the Trump administration's policies or criticize them. But if she criticizes them, people are going to have wonder whether this is just another example of her being concerned about something, but not taking any kind of concrete steps to stop it.

23:10I mean, they're in real trouble potentially, aren't they, as well, with Latino voters. And we ought to talk a bit just about that kind of segment of the vote as well, because Donald Trump did incredibly well with Latino voters in 2024. I mean, absolutely blew out, getting on for half of all Latinos who voted, voted for Trump. This time around well the polls already suggesting that that has reduced and reduced i think it's fair to say actually largely because of the economy rather than because any actions taken by ice and and by the administration because plenty of latinos probably don't want to see illegal immigration and if they think that it can be stopped and stopped in a just and fair way we're pretty convinced that the trump administration had got that right are they though still convinced I mean, that's the question, isn't it?

24:00The extent to which, particularly in Texas, where they're obviously a very important constituency, the extent to which they now think, as you know, you heard that the son of the Texas victim and his words about his father and his words about the family and his words about a man who's given employment to others and all those things. And you wonder whether for at least some Latino voters who will be crucial in the Senate vote, that they may be a kind of feeling of enough is enough. Yeah, and we've seen this play out in special elections already. There was one in the Dallas area where Hispanics swung dramatically back to the Democrat who ended up winning a seat in a district that Donald Trump had carried by double digits.

24:53We saw it in New Jersey and some of the gubernatorial districts around New York City that had very high Hispanic populations that, again, Democrat, the Democratic candidate did quite well with that. And I think there is a feeling among the Hispanic community where even by ICE's own account, DHS's own account in this Texas shooting, it was a case of mistaken identity that the person who was shot, pulled from the car, Araujo, was not the target of this. They saw him and he looked like someone they were looking for. So what's to stop ICE from finding other Hispanic people and having the same sort of mistaken identity if they're just basing it on how they look?

25:32there's a very real concern, I think, and a very real risk that this community feels threatened by this stepped up immigration enforcement action, in addition to, as you mentioned, Justin, economic issues and all of these things, I think, you create an environment where Donald Trump is not very popular. Yeah, and there's a story in Minnesota, where those incidents happened earlier this year, that ICE agents have been stopping a number of off-duty police officers who are legal US citizens. There's no reason why they were being stopped at all, but asked to prove the citizenship, which if you are a citizen, is very difficult because you're not carrying papers in your car and you're simply your driver's license isn't going to prove your citizenship.

26:16But every single off-duty police officer who was stopped by ICE was Latino. None of them were white. And when you see stories like that, the idea that there is some kind of racial profiling going on, which, of course, will upset everybody or many, many people in the United States. But obviously, Latino communities, exactly the kind of thing which this kind of policy was always going to lead to. And it's taken several months, but we're actually at the point now where it's becoming very obvious. And the Supreme Court said that was OK in a case last year, one of these shadow docket cases, not a formal one that was argued and and then issued a full opinion on.

26:50But it said that traffic stops that were kind of incidental, these sorts of things were OK, even if you have a reason to believe by looking at the person, their Hispanic background makes you think that they're they're the person that you're looking for. Yeah, but really ironic, wouldn't it, if the Trump administration sort of re-racializes the broader Hispanic Latino community? Because one of the criticisms and we heard it on the pod, didn't we? We've talked to people about this in the past. One of the criticisms of the Democrats' outreach to Latino voters in the past has been it's been kind of patronizing and suggested that they're separate and suggested that they need to be spoken to in Spanish and et cetera, et cetera, and that they were oppressed in some way.