Four ICE shootings in a week. Seventy billion in new funding. One deciding vote. And a federal government that won’t investigate its own.
Joan Sebastian Guerrero was 26. He had a wife, a three-year-old daughter in Bluey pajamas, and a work authorization card issued by the same federal government that just shot him dead in a Kia sedan on a street in Biddeford, Maine. Also, he was on his way to a food delivery job at seven in the morning on July 13. He was not the person ICE was looking for. The agents who killed him weren’t wearing body cameras. His daughter saw his body.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was 52. Construction worker. Father of three. Married to his childhood sweetheart for forty years. Thirty years in this country. Killed July 7 in Houston by ICE agents who were looking for somebody else. Three men rode in the van with him. All three now sit in immigration detention. Their accounts contradict what ICE said happened. No body cameras.
Tyrin Johnson was 20. Killed on the Fourth of July weekend in downtown Memphis by Tennessee National Guard troops assigned to the federal task force his mayor never asked for. His grandfather wants to see the video. The family is still waiting. Four days later, a DEA agent on the same task force killed another man in a Memphis hotel room. That is the fourth task force death since September.
Renee Nicole Good was 37. A U.S. citizen. A mother of three. She was shot three times in her own Honda Pilot on January 7 in Minneapolis by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. Ross is still walking around free. The Justice Department declined to investigate. Twelve federal prosecutors resigned rather than sign off on the whitewash. The federal government seized her SUV, shrink-wrapped it in an FBI warehouse in Brooklyn Center, refused to let Minnesota touch it, and refused to open a federal case. Six months. Six months of the state of Minnesota begging for its own murder scene. The evidence finally moved two weeks ago. Ross still walks around free.
Say the names out loud. That’s where this starts.
I served 23 years in the United States Air Force. I have been in places where the rules of engagement mattered because human beings on the other end of a rifle were watching. Nobody I served with would have fired four rounds through a Kia windshield at seven in the morning at a father who wasn’t even the target. Nobody I served with would have hidden the vehicle. Nobody I served with would have refused to turn over evidence to a state investigator. Nobody I served with wore a mask on the job. What ICE is doing in American streets is not law enforcement. It is not immigration policy. It is a domestic paramilitary operation with a shoot-to-kill culture, no body cameras, no accountability, and a bipartisan check for seventy billion dollars written in June.
That check has a name on it. Susan Collins. Senator from Maine. In June, she cast a deciding vote to advance the $70 billion top-up for ICE and Border Patrol. Then, in a stunt her voters have seen too many times, she flipped to no on final passage so she could tell you she was against the thing she made possible. Two weeks later, ICE agents her vote funded put four bullets through a windshield in her own state. Two weeks later, protesters filled Mechanics Park in Biddeford and marched to her office. The chant was three words. Vote her out.
Say those three words out loud, too.
Virginia hasn’t been spared. On July 6, in Suffolk, ICE agents tackled Victor Perez Martin outside Sentara BelleHarbour Hospital and kneed him on the ground while a bystander filmed the whole thing. In Norfolk last October, Josue Castro Rivera was struck and killed by a pickup truck trying to escape an ICE traffic stop. He was 24. This week Richmond gathered at the base of the Maggie Lena Walker statue. Boston gathered. Portland. Chicago. Philadelphia. Austin. Birmingham. Charlotte. Phoenix. Oakland. Indivisible counted more than a thousand events nationwide in January when Renee Good died. The country has been in the streets over this since winter. The killings didn’t stop. The killings sped up.
The government reaction has been what the government reaction always is when a federal agent kills a citizen or a legal worker or an immigrant with paperwork. A statement. A “pause.” Border czar Tom Homan already told the country the pause is short. A couple of weeks, he said. Come August, the traffic stops resume. ICE announced Tuesday that arrest teams would have “an agent wearing a body camera.” One. Per team. The $20 million Congress set aside for body cameras is still sitting there because the government would rather blame a shutdown than put a body camera on a single ICE agent.
Ask yourself something. If a Memphis police officer had shot Renee Good, the Department of Justice would have opened a civil rights investigation by January 8. The FBI would have executed search warrants. The vehicle would be in state custody. There would be an indictment or a public decision not to indict, on the record, in the open. That is how the system worked when it worked. That is what happened in Minneapolis in 2020 when Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. That is not what is happening now. Now the killer is federal, the badge protects the shooter, the vehicle disappears into a warehouse, and the deciding vote was cast by a Republican senator from Maine who wants us to believe she cares.
How much killing is enough?
That is a question, not a rhetorical flourish. Answer it. At least 39 shootings by immigration agents since January 2025. At least eleven dead by federal immigration officers. Fifty-two dead in ICE custody in the first 500 days of the second Trump administration, per Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights. A Wall Street Journal count of thirteen separate incidents of federal officers firing into civilian vehicles between July 2025 and January 2026. Five of the people shot in that window were U.S. citizens. That is the record. That is what seventy billion dollars bought.
At what number does Susan Collins say enough? At what number does the White House stop calling every dead man a threat? At what number does the Department of Justice open a case? Because from Tampa, on a Tuesday morning with the news on mute so I don’t have to hear the White House deny it again, the answer looks like never. The answer looks like the killings will keep happening because the funding keeps flowing and the funders keep walking around telling us they voted against it after they voted for it.
Show up. Say the names. Vote them out.
Say them out loud
Joan Sebastian Guerrero
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
Tyrin Johnson
Alex Pretti
Renee Nicole Good
Silverio Villegas Gonzalez
Josue Castro Rivera
Ruben Ray Martinez
Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez
Jaime Alanis
That’s ten. Say them out loud. Then ask a senator what number is too many.
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