ICE kills another American
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was an image of the best that America can be. He should be alive today.
We’re so far into the ICE crisis created by the Trump Administration that it feels hard to get exercised about it anymore. It is a slow rolling avalanche of injustice and authoritarianism, with more and more and more every damn day. Stephen Miller, the leader of the fascist anti-immigrant wing of the Administration, clearly took to heart the lessons of past authoritarian terror regimes with his commitment to overwhelming the ability of decent people to respond to the daily firehose of events.
But then something like the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo at the hands of ICE agents on the streets of Houston happens, and it reignites the fires of rage and protest.
The death of Araujo this week was a stark reminder of the stakes of what has been quietly going on for the last six months, since the Administration ramped the public intensity down in the wake of the Renee Good and Alex Pretti deaths. The drive to round up and disappear thousands of people deemed less than American by Stephen Miller has not ended; it has just gone dark, with the public buffoonery of figures like Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino removed from the scene and replaced with apparatchiks who will do the job without social media buzz. Seizing people and disappearing them into camps - where so many have died already, where there are reports of malnourishment and a lack of access to clean water and basic health care, where children are separated from parents, where paperwork is so lacking that families have no idea where their loved ones are, or if they are even still in the country - has been going on in our cities and towns for 18 months now. This is happening to citizens and noncitizens alike, to you neighbors and friends and the people you would see in the grocery store. It is happening to real human beings trying to make a better life, people like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
Araujo was, by all accounts, an upstanding husband, father, and small business owner who had lived in Houston for 35 years:
It’s often immigrants who remind us about family. Araujo’s son said yesterday that his late father was “a family man” and that yesterday was “the first day without him for all of us, and it is heartbreaking to know that my mom did not make lunch for my dad before going to work—the first time in their 30+ year marriage.” Araujo worked hard throughout his three decades in the United States so that he could support his family and raise their three sons. “He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” Ronaldo said.1
Although he did enter the country illegally in the 1990s, he was in the process of gaining legal residency, submitting the required paperwork and going through the procedures laid out by our government. Despite his initial illegal entry into this country, he was not a criminal. He was not someone getting free stuff from “real Americans.” He was not a “drain on society” as MAGA conservatives and immigration hardliners would have you believe. He was not making America less great. He was not “scum” or “an animal”, as Donald Trump and Stephen Miller have described immigrants in America. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a human being, like you and me, who deserved to live his life in his home of Houston. His death is a terrible injustice, and it was unnecessary and completely avoidable. His death was the direct policy choice of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the millions of voters who would rather punish immigrants than find a way to welcome them.
Defenders of the Administration would argue that the policies behind this moment are rational policies any nation would take to get serious about immigration. But, this is not true. It’s not just simple deportation and removal of people, like many Trump-adjacent voters want to blissfully believe. These policies, demanded by voters, are leading to terror for families and deaths for too many innocent people. Being in this country is a civil offense. It is not a crime with a punishment of indefinite detention, torture, and potentially death. But that is the effect the Administration’s immigration policies are having on real human beings. This is business as usual:
“Ronaldo Salgado is right. His father did not deserve to be killed by ICE agents. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal did not deserve to die in ICE custody. These deaths—and many others like them—are a direct effect of Trump’s mass deportation policy. That policy, more than any other, is the embodiment of the cruelty of the Trump administration. There had been, up to this point, twenty-one documented deaths of people in ICE custody in 2026 alone, as documented by Austin Kocher of the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.”
This is not the only way to do immigration enforcement. The cruelty of this Administration’s immigration policies is a deliberate choice, meant to strike terror into the heart of immigrants here, and people abroad who might consider coming to America, legally or illegally. It is not a technocratic policy aimed at enforcing our laws; it is bigoted agenda of reducing the number of people who folks like Stephen Miller consider unworthy of being in America, people who are disproportionally black and brown. It is racism and xenophobia as policy, with the authoritarian terror as the means to the ends of making America more in the image of a white, Christian nation.
People like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, like Alex Pretti, like Renee Good, are the necessary casualties of such a movement. There deaths are not bugs in the system, but a feature, a measure of state-sponsored violence to the ultimate degree meant to strike fear into the minds of millions.
But it is also a policy choice born not out of love for country, but out of fear and hatred of the unknown, of a kind of self-loathing that manifests as violence directed towards others. Araujo was an infinitely better person than a Stephen Miller, because someone like Araujo, no matter flaws, didn’t live life in a way that reflected a need to hurt others to make himself feel good:
His son also remarked, “My father was always a strong man and never wanted us to know if he was in pain. He never complained.” Our current government, by contrast, is led by weak men who constantly complain, and who benefit from exploiting other Americans’ weaknesses and anxieties. Our current leaders talk endlessly about American exceptionalism, while turning us into an unexceptional country presided over by thuggish apparatchiks.
I dare say Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a better American than they are.”
Who is the real American: Araujo or Stephen Miller? Is the American Dream more like Araujo’s - working hard, keeping your head down, making life a little better for his family and his friends - or like Trump’s - bluster, hate, unearned riches, a refusal to admit wrong ever, an eagerness to tear down others?
“We should be grateful that Ronaldo Salgado Araujo came to live here in the United States, to build houses for Americans, and to raise three American sons. Araujo was not yet an American citizen, though he had in the last eighteen months filled out paperwork and provided documentation, references, and fingerprints in an effort to regularize his immigration status. But he had lived as an American, de facto if not de jure, for the last thirty-five years. As his son said, he had sought to live the American Dream and to help others to do so.”
Original reporting in The Bulwark quote comes from The New York Times.