ICE Ramps Back Up, With Deadly Results

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From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. Two fatal shootings by federal immigration agents in Texas and in Maine have once again put a spotlight on the Trump administration's deportation tactics. Today, my colleague Ahmed Aliezis explains how these killing signals return to a more aggressive form of immigration enforcement. One that can easily turn a routine moment like a traffic stop

into a deadly confrontation. It's Thursday, July 16th. I met in the six months since two Americans were killed by federal agents in Minnesota. The government's deportation crackdown has felt a little bit quieter. Federal agents, of course, withdrew from cities, the protests that we saw after Minnesota really

died down. We stopped seeing these gruesome confrontations between law enforcement and civilians

“that people have been capturing on video. And so all of this put together, I think, made these two”

recent shootings in Houston and then in Maine feel, at least to some people, like they almost came out of nowhere. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a fair assessment as far as the public's view, because in the months after Minneapolis, arrest numbers dropped pretty dramatically across the country. But that kind of came to an end in the late June when suddenly, at least at Ice, there was this sense that the White House wanted more arrests that the enforcement

needed to go up dramatically. Okay, we're going to talk about what has led to all of that,

but I just want to talk about the two shootings first. We are still learning the details of what

happened, both in Maine and in Houston, but can you just tell us, how mad, what do we know so far about both of those incidents? Yes, the first shooting was on July 7th in Houston. And in that

“incident, ice was looking for two individuals that they wanted to come and arrest. And as they're”

doing that surveillance, as they're looking for those two individuals, they come across a van to them that seemed suspicious. And in fact, inside this van, they believe individual in the car resembled one of the targets that they were looking for. And so they start to look up the license by the information of this van. And they find that it's registered to somebody who is undocumented.

And so they decide to go after the car. They're basically thinking, oh, even if it's not the

people, we're looking for maybe we could pick up another person who's here legally. Yeah, essentially, I mean, this is the year at a point now that you have created this level of reasonable suspicion that ice officers need to pursue individuals. And that's at this point really during this attempt to stop this van, where the narratives really start to diverge, where the passengers and the witnesses in this van say that the van was not doing anything dangerous. And

where ice says the van was actually putting their officers in danger, that it was being weaponized, that the officers essentially feared for their safety and needed to use that lethal force. So that's at this point where we know, but we don't have a clear video of this incident. But we do know, of course, that they shot into the vehicle killing this person in Houston. So what do we know about the victim at this point? Yeah Lorenzo Salgado Aroo. He lived in the

country for more than 30 years. He's undocumented. And he actually had a his own construction crew. His brother was part of it. His brother was in the van. And this story took off for many reasons. But one of them was, I want to tell you about my dad, really this impassioned speech from his son, Ronaldo. He wanted nothing else in life, but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people, who just released book glowingly about his father. I saw a video posted

on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognized him immediately. Not from his appearance, but from his

saddened he was about what had happened to him and something that they never expected.

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 Arooo, a husband, a father, and a job creator

“for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream. So the story, I think, really resonated”

for people because when this administration talks about immigration enforcement, they often talk about and they highlight individuals who have horrific criminal convictions and the type of criminal histories that they really want to put on display. But in this case, this was a man going to work.

As we mentioned, there were two incidents. The second one was in Maine. Tell us about the details

in that case. What do we know there? So on Monday in Bitterford, Maine, this police sleepy small town ice agents were targeting an individual who had a deportation order and they decided to target somebody going into a vehicle and they decided to try to stop that vehicle. But according to ice, the vehicle tried to flee the scene and it was during this time, they felt there was a fear. Actually, the way they put it was they were fearing for public safety and the ice

officer decided to shoot into the vehicle. This man, Joe on Sebastian Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian

immigrant, was killed. And just to be clear, do we know for certain whether he was or was not

somebody that ice was looking for? They don't clearly say that in the statement. Senator Angus King said that he spoke with DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullin, who told him that Mr Guerrero was not the target of the ice officers. So if that is the case, it is very similar in some ways to what

“happened in Houston. Can you tell us what do we know about him Guerrero, the victim at this point?”

Mr Guerrero, he lived in Bitterford. He worked as a food delivery driver. He was also a cleaner at a veterinary clinic. He has a three-year-old child and his wife, shared a photo of their family, on social media and she wrote that I will love you all the days of my life. His father actually gave an interview with the Colombian years outlets in a T said that his son had work authorization and was in the United States legally. The Trump administration, though, said that Mr Guerrero had

illegally entered the country in 2023 and was released into the United States by the Biden administration. So we don't necessarily have clarity at on his status. It sounds like we do not have any clarity on that, yeah. What has the public reaction been to these two cases that we've just

“talked about? Yeah, I think there is a lot of anger.”

These agents have no business drawing their guns. They aren't judged during an executioner. He wasn't even the guy that they were looking for and so now an innocent man is dead. People are asking for investigations. They're asking for accountability. As I was making my way through a bit of food on Monday, there was a pretty large protest outside of the office of Senator Susan Collins, the local residents, pet signs,

anti-I signs surrounding that office just hours after that shooting. And I think a lot of this stems from public distrust of DHS, of this administration and their narrative as to what happened. What we've seen incidents before in which there is a explanation of what happened and video comes out and ends up contradicting the facts presented by the government. I mean, we can look to January when Alex Prady was shot by board of

patrol agents and the DHS secretary at the time, Christina came out that same day and said the Mr. Prady was planning to harm the agents that he was brandishing as weapon and Americans actually saw that video and they saw that none of the things that she was saying were reflected in that video.

I think that probably a few things about these incidents that remind people of what happened

“back in Minneapolis, back in January. And as you described though, since then, the administration's”

tactics have at the very least become less visible. And so I wonder whether the events of the last week represents some kind of return to that earlier, more aggressive phase of enforcement or whether the federal government has had more of a presence in American cities this entire time than people perhaps realized. Yeah, I mean, if you go back to January, the in Minneapolis really comes in a time when Steven Miller is pushing for more or less, more deportations. He's put out this

goal of 3,000 arrests a day, a figure that I was never able to reach. And they really went on a string

of targeting major American cities and states. And Minneapolis became a major target after a series of stories about the symbolic community there. That's right. So thousands of DHS agents are there. They are trying to rest as many people as possible. There are videos of people with legal status being pulled over. It seems like this is chaotic. Two American citizens are shot dead in the streets. And at the end of all this, President Trump decides to quiet down the situation in Minneapolis.

And he puts his borders are a time home and in charge. And ultimately, the DHS agents leave the

state. Then the DHS secretary, Christy Nome, is ultimately fired and incomes Mark Wayne Mullen,

this senator from Oklahoma, who in his confirmation hearing actually sets out this goal that he wants to keep his agency out of the headlines. He wants them to be quieter than they have been. And enforcement after the time he takes over really starts to drop. You start seeing around a thousand arrests a day. Right. Which is probably why this felt a little bit less present to a lot of people. Exactly. I mean, it kind of in many ways was a situation in which I really try to stay

out of the public's view. But even though it seems like things have quieted down, Stephen Miller

has continued to push for more numbers. He has always wanted more rest, more deportation.

He never wanted to quiet things down. Exactly. In by June Miller in this administration, he's in a position to where they can get what they've always wanted. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Ivan Penn. I'm an energy reporter for the New York Times.

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And that's the beauty of the New York Times. We're all working together to help you better understand and make sense of the world today. So if that sounds like something that connects with you and you're not a subscriber yet, you can go to nytime.com/subscrib. I'm at what happened in June that, as you said, allowed Stephen Miller to once again pursue his deportation strategy as aggressively as he's been wanting to.

You know, what we know that this administration has really been making this push to dramatically grow ice for the last year. But June is really when we saw those efforts come to fruition.

“You'll remember that DHS was funded with an extra $170 billion by the big beautiful bill.”

And a lot of that going toward ice, allowing them to hire these thousands of new officers. But the process of getting them out on the street, that takes time. There's training, there's all kinds of different administrative tests that are necessary. So by the time June ruled around, it was almost a year since that hiring push. And they're in a position now where they're able to on their own make this push from more enforcement, make it a reality.

and ramp their numbers up. And in fact, in the late June, there was this idea within ice,

“this perception within ice that 2000 arrests a day that that is the new goal.”

That is the new actually not even goal expectation. So there's a new quote you're saying. And while it's lower than the original quote that Stephen Miller said out earlier on,

it sounds like this 2000 number is maybe a firmer expectation. Like ice never really met that

3000 a day quote, but the expectation now is that 2000 should be at achievable number. Exactly. And in late June, in a period of five days they arrested more than 10,000 people averaging more than 2000 rest a day. And one day it was official told me that that was the highest five-day stretch of arrests by ice during a Trump administration. I mean, this is really unprecedented. A territory were in 10,000 people picked up by this agency in just a five-day swing.

“I think there was a sense at the time, you know, is it just a minor blip? Is it just kind of a”

momentary enforcement blitz, but we've seen on several occasions after that five-day stretch ice

again hitting that 2000 number? You know, I think I'm at for people listening to this and hearing how ice has really grown its ranks. A natural question is, well, how well trained could these people be and did a training or a lack of training contribute to the end results that we saw this past week? So what do we know about that? Yeah, you know, as the administration as ice was trying to push out these thousands of new officers, they really cut down on the days for these ice

officers to go through their training. In fact, there was a whistleblower in a visual who was a

former ice lawyer who came out and said that they had cut, you know, more than 200 hours

of classes involving firearms training, use of force, lawful arrests, the limit of their authority, and so that raised a lot of questions about exactly what these officers were being trained on and whether or not they were really capable of handling these really high stress situations. Sure.

“And I think what's happening now is that as this agency and as the officers are being pushed”

to do more, they're being pushed to get that number of 2000 rest a day. In fact, ice has ordered their field offices to send out more officers every single day to ramp up operations. What that means is you're going to see more of these confrontations, more of these situations where ice is in a, they have a sense of urgency to get as many arrests as possible. And what they're being met with in many cases is immigrant communities who are incredibly fearful of what's

going to happen to them, you know, they have seen the videos, they have seen the news of people being deported to Africa to detention in El Salvador and so that tension is very high. And so these officers are in some cases are running in the situations where the immigrants themselves, they want to flee the situation, they do not want to be arrested, they are terrified and in many ways it's a recipe for disaster. And on Tuesday morning I reported on a case of a 28-year-old man

who came across ice at a gas station in St. Augustine, Florida and he ran away from them and he ran into the street and was struck and killed by a truck. These are the types of situations where we've seen this before in California, people fleeing in panic to immigration enforcement and they're being lethal consequences. And so this is the kind of recipe for disaster that can make a routine interaction like a traffic stop, a really combustible situation like what we saw happen, Houston and

Maine. The public outcry over those shootings has been mounting and Hamid, I wonder what the reaction from the administration has been so far to the reaction that we've seen from the public. Yeah, it's been really interesting to see the way they've made their argument. We saw the administration pause vehicle pursuits, vehicle stops, except for certain situations. And that seemed to be kind of this moment where the administration was taking a beat to evaluate what they

were doing and then move forward. But President Trump on truth social and Wednesday morning,

That there was no pause. So you have a situation in which perhaps the agencies are looking at it one way in the president is decided for them that they should continue with their aggressive approach. Right, I mean, just to read a couple lines from the president's true social post, he said, quote,

we cannot give up on 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 went on to say in the same post,

“keep those crime stat records coming. So I think it seems pretty clear that the president is walking”

back any kind of attempt to maybe moderate the tactics that we saw over the past week being deployed in Houston and in Maine. What 100%. Both of these incidents right now, both of these shootings are currently under investigation. But in the past, when civilians have been shot by federal law enforcement agents conducting these kinds of immigration crackdowns, we did not see indications from the administration that they were very eager to pursue thorough investigations.

And I sort of wonder what we know about these investigations, whether they are being run any

differently. And if you have any indication at this point, I'm at when and what we may ultimately learn.

Yeah, I mean, these types of investigations typically, any type of officer involved shooting, even at a local level, it takes a long period of time. A lot of resources going to figuring out what happened with the shooting, whether or not the officer was in the right. And case and point, we can look at the shootings of Alex Pretty and Renee Goodman Minneapolis. You know, we are six months out from those shootings. We don't have any indication

“when those investigations will be concluded. So I think what we can expect is, in this instance,”

like past instances, the DHS inspector general taking a long period of time to come up with their analysis and to finally decide what they concluded on these shootings. The FBI is also involved with the investigation, but is primarily just involved with the threat to the officer. So DHS IG is the one that is really directing this entire investigation. I'm at, if it is true that more violent interactions are basically all but inevitable,

do you think it's fair to assume that the president has basically decided that whatever the cost is of these stops of reaching this quota, that that cost is ultimately worth it to execute the agenda that they have wanted to execute when it comes to deportations? Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is an interview that J. D. VanS gave recently in which he said that law enforcement and the work of law enforcement, it's not a very pretty process.

And I think for this administration, the thing that I look at is actions. I think actions matter. And this administration, since these shootings, they have not relent and they're pushed for more arrests. They have gotten days in which they've arrested more than 2,000 people a day. They cause car stops for seems like a matter of hours before President Trump stepped in and said they needed to continue. So I think it's fair to say at this point that this administration believes

that the mass deportation campaign, it hovers above everything else, above the protests, above the calls for accountability, the calls to defund the agency, the push to stop ice from doing what it's doing. The goal is mass deportation and nothing is going to stand in that way. Hamed Aliazis, thank you so much. Thank you for your time. The FBI is investigating whether there were drugs in the van driven by Lorenzo Silgado,

REUHO, at the time that immigration agents killed him in Houston. That's according to a search warrant application reviewed by the New York Times. There's been no indication that agents pursuing the van that day suspected that drugs were present. We'll be right back.

“Here's what else you need to know today. To clarify Mr. Blanche,”

do you believe it is the president's right and duty to order the investigation or prosecution of his perceived enemies? Yes or no? I can't answer that. Yes to know that. The confirmation of President Trump's choice for Attorney General Todd Blanche remained uncertain on Wednesday.

After his testimony before key Senate committee failed to win over crucial Republicans,

has not agreed in writing to delete the weaponization fund and there's no--

and what was widely seen as a revealing slip-up blanche Trump's former personal lawyer suggested

“that he still sees himself in that capacity. Are you in President Trump for him?”

I'm his lawyer, was his lawyer, and now I'm the deputy attorney general, so I bet.

And in a vote on Wednesday, almost half of House Democrats supported a measure to eliminate

“USAID to Israel. The measure ultimately failed, but the vote reflected a rapid and dramatic shift”

within the Democratic Party away from decades of unequivocals support the Jewish state.

Today's episode was produced by Adrian Hurst, Ricky Novetsky, and Chris Benderiff. It was edited by Michael Bemois and Rob Zipcoe, and contains music by Marian Lazzano and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderley. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Zolan Cano Youngs and Caitlin Roofman. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.

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