The Daily Blast: Texas ICE Killing Takes Damning Turn as Even MAGA Judges Abandon Trump

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

“A 52-year-old man named Lorenzo Salgado Arajo was shot dead by an ice officer this week.”

Ice claimed it was in self-defense, but this account deserves serious skepticism. And indeed, this story has now gotten even darker. A representative for the victim's family now says the three other men in the van with Arajo are not just in detention. They're also under pressure to self-deport. All this comes as even some magic judges are starting to reject Trump's deportation policies and surprising numbers.

So it's time to take stock.

Trump and Stephen Miller are escalating deportations in a big way, but trying to do so very quietly. We're at a real crossroads moment here that will determine how far they can get with their lawless ethnic cleansing campaign. We're talking about all this with new Republic staff writer, Melissa Jura Graham, who has a great peace lying out why people need to care a lot about this shooting. Melissa, good to have you on. Hey, thank you, Greg. You know, the piece is called Ice is hoping you won't notice the man agents killed in Texas.

And Ice really is hoping that. Let's start with this shooting. It was around six in the morning. Lorenzo was driving to a construction job with three other guys. He stopped as part of a targeted operation. Ice now claims that he attempted to evade arrest refused to follow verbal commands and then weaponized this vehicle against an officer who then fired and self defense.

It hit Arajo in the stomach and he died at the hospital.

“Melissa, can you explain why this account is worthy of skepticism?”

So we've been hearing a lot from Ice and from DHS that people are using their cars as deadly weapons or to potentially injure an officer. And that was certainly the case they made for example with Renee Good. They lied and said she was driving into them. Well, we know that's not the case. So at the time, Arajo has brother and two other men who the three of them were part of a construction crew. You know, Arajo has been working in construction for like 35 years in Houston and then the suburbs around there. He was on the way to work when Ice approached him as I understand it.

They were in their vehicle. And we know from other ice stops and other cities they tend to drive vehicles that are unmarked. They tend to use their car to box someone in. And at times they approach people very threateningly without clearly identifying themselves as look on enforcement.

“And I think we have every reason to believe that that is part of what happened in this case.”

It would be their pattern if they didn't do that. It would be a break with their pattern. Let's talk about who Arajo is. He's 52 years old. He's been in this country for 35 years. He started his own business. He put several children through college. They're all now grown up.

And Arajo's son, Ronaldo, Salgado says that the family had actually been preparing for the possibility that he might be picked up. And they had a whole plan in place where he would just cooperate. And then the family would try to get him freed. So it's a little hard to think. It's a little hard to see this guy as someone who would try to commit the vehicular men's slaughter against law enforcement.

Isn't it? Yeah, it doesn't make any sense that he would do anything to endanger himself when he had family support in a plan that ran counter to that as if we're to understand that. It is very clear from listening to the press conferences and reading some of what his son Ronaldo has posted on social media that this is somebody who had a lot of support. And I don't think would make a rash decision in the moment. It really doesn't seem like it. Now let's talk about these three other guys who are in the van. As you mentioned, one was Arajo's brother, the other two were workers at Arajo's business.

As we reported at newrepublic.com on Thursday, a representative for all these families, one prognos, the CEO of the League of United Latin American citizens, now says those three guys are in detention. And that their under pressure to sign self deportation orders. As Prognos says, these could be the only witnesses that could contest the government's account of the shooting. There doesn't appear to be any video of the shooting itself. There's been video of the aftermath, but not the shooting itself.

And yet these guys who saw this happen presumably, we don't know that they did, but it seems highly plausible that they might have.

It's possible that they are the only witnesses. And it's possible that that is like factoring into how DHS is is looking at this.

“And again, you said we don't know what they witnessed, but I have to believe that like they have more context.”

And that context is probably not favorable to the ISNDHS story. Absolutely. It does seem like that. By the way, I want to quickly note that in response to my questions about this, I put out a statement that entirely dodged the matter. It's just boilerplate repeating what it had said before. And then adding that this is a developing situation. They won't say any more. They just refer to all further questions to the FBI. So as of this recording, I says not denying that they are pressuring several witnesses to this thing that just happened to self-deport,

remove themselves from the country. And by the way, one other thing, we should note that Juan Peronio, who represents the families did say on a conference call today, that he does think the three men are illegal.

So they may actually be deported, or at least subject deportation, and it's possible ISIS trying to deport them to prevent them from sharing their account of what happened, which is just amazing.

It's something that stuck out as I was working on sort of the background to ISIS killings for my story, that we have 16 examples in the second Trump administration of the administration story, coming to the conclusion that the shooting was justified before an investigation had even concluded. And so that's sort of, that's the context in which, you know, I understand the statement that ISIS made in response to your reporting, you know, they're going to pollute to their being an investigation. The other thing about any kind of investigation, local law enforcement, including the Harris County District Attorney's Office, they have tried to join the investigation offer assistance.

They have been denied that, and that includes being denied access to key pieces of evidence. So we're being asked to, you know, again, very similarly with Renegade and Alex Pretty. We're being asked to, um, fall for what I don't think you could ever call an independent investigation at this point, and they're rejecting any outside law enforcement participation. I would not be surprised if, you know, the White House comes out and just like says this is justified moving on and tries to let that be the end of the story.

And as I understand it, like this community will not let that be the end of the story.

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Save up to 52% off with code podcast at groans.co. That's code [email protected]. Well, it sure looks like there's a major ground swell for a raho right now. You had this very good piece about this shooting as well. I want to highlight one thing you wrote, how the government's cavalier response to this killing really shows the Trump and Steven Miller and Maga just don't regard people like a raho as fundamentally human. You wrote, quote, "the lives of people who aren't worthy of citizenship have no value."

And they really tried to create a second-class cast out of undocumented immigrants by pushing the end to birthright citizenship.

They failed there, but they are going to do everything they possibly can to try and treat undocumented immigrants and plenty of legal immigrants as well as an inferior cast.

“That's what's happening now. Melissa, can you expand on that?”

Sure. I thought that comment, you know, is trying to capture the Trump administration's ethos that is certainly not my belief that the lives of people who aren't worthy of citizenship have no value. That is what this administration's been telling us. I mean, since 2015, right, since Trump came down the escalator, this is like where they've started. And, you know, this idea of dehumanizing any immigrant in the course of this campaign, like I feel like they've shown us multiple ways that they're doing that,

whether that's in the legal arena, whether that is, you know, the news that they make, whether that is sort of the panic that they've been kicking up over this. Like they're fighting this in multiple arenas. And there are two representatives from Congress who have also called for a full investigation. There may be others by now, but as of now, one of them is Christian. And if you, I think it was just very recently come to Congress. I think like he only showed up in February.

The press conference, the family held earlier this week, he said what other profession has the power to take somebody's life in the street. And meanwhile, our administration's in court fighting to make sure people like Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr., which is another one of his sons. Can't be citizens in this country, right? Like Ronaldo, Lorenzo Jr. and a third of they are here because they, their father came here and they were born here. There's a big tool that the administration has been using to try to maximize the deportations and maximize the ethnic cleansing.

ISIS trying to detain people without bond, even if they've been in the country for many years, they'd ordinarily be afforded bond. Politico's Kyle Cheney, who's done great reporting on this, has just done a big count. He put out a piece saying that this has now been rejected by judges 15,000 times. Melissa, can you walk us through what this thing is about what this policy is about what they're trying to do and why it's not working?

“Sure. So, you know, we've had decades of immigration laws that were in warrant enforced in various ways, like I think that's like a good place to start. Like every administration kind of comes in and is like what are going to be our priorities.”

And even though this law has been sitting on the books for 30 years, it has never been used in this way.

And the law that the Trump administration is weaponizing here concerns when someone can be detained and for how long they can be detained when they're coming to the country and standard practice had been for decades in this country. And before this law, the people weren't detained for crossing the border like that is like a very insignificant crime. There is a whole process for that person to get, you know, get status in the country like it is optional for the government to detain someone for crossing the border. That is on them.

And now we've swung all the way to actually every single person and actually not every single person across is the border, but every single person who doesn't have legal status or people who we have profiled as not having legal status is fair game to be detained. And even older legal principle of papias corpus literally show us the body, produce the body. Using this tool attorneys and families have been able to get people who are now being swept up by the thousands into immigration detention. We were detaining more people in immigration detention than we ever have.

“I think it was 60,000 to the most recent number that I saw and am I already be out of date.”

You know, it's like, it's really fascinating. It's a kind of like super simple, super basic principle. But like you can't actually just hold somebody for as long as you want without giving them due process. And, you know, immigration court is not the same thing as our criminal or civil court. It's its own process. People don't have the same rights to counsel for example.

They have seen as this like up swell of lawyers and community organizations using the habeas process to get people out and seeing that in numbers that we've never seen before.

So the fact that like, you know, more than 15,000 times judges have rejected this mass detention policy.

“The flip side of that is with that, that is 15,000 habeas petitions that succeeded that's 15,000 people potentially who were released.”

And it's so it's this like, it's been sort of a cat and mouse of like the more people you to take the more habeas petitions we're going to throw at you in the busier the courts who're going to get in the more incentivized judges are going to be to let people go. They can't simply keep up with these numbers. And that's the story I see behind that number, too. There's one other nugget of reporting from Kyle Cheney that I want to highlight here. He did this big count.

And he found that even a majority of Trump appointed judges who have considered this detention policy have ultimately rejected it.

That seems to me to be pretty remarkable. We're talking about maga judges, judges who were picked by Donald Trump who agree with more liberal judges that this major tool that they're using. Again, this is absolutely central to their entire mass deportation campaign. This major tool that they're using is too much for a majority of Trump appointed judges who have considered it. This novel legal argument, this like real stretch of the legal argument that has not been made before.

I mean, it could just be like a true like small sea conservatism on the part of this judge is like, no, you can't do this. You can't just make up a new interpretation. This is too far. I do suspect though that part of it is the sheer number of cases. None of these judges have been called upon to deal with this kind of volume. This many habeas cases, this many immigrants who have been detained, like in a way Trump and Steven Miller, who I'm assuming is like a significant architect of this policy interpretation. They have created the situation for their own failure. Like it just simply cannot circulate this many people through the system.

That's sort of a snowball effect at this point and it only stops if they, you know, actually stop detaining people. So that brings me to the concluding question here were sort of in this split screen moment. On one screen, Trump and Steven Miller have a mass really tremendous power to carry out this ethnic cleansing.

“They've gotten billions and billions, tens of billions of dollars that's basically not subject to any serious oversight, which they're using to build massive detention centers and higher.”

God knows how many hijens they've got this real army at this point, which is armed with paramilitary weaponry in a very serious way. So they've got that they've got all this power. Yet on the other flip side of this whole thing, we're seeing tremendous resistance to what Trump and Steven Miller are wanting to do. You saw this backlash in Minneapolis, public polls have shown that solid majorities are rejecting this.

Project the mass deportations as a policy, not just the tactics that we're seeing in the streets. You've got the courts really drawing a very hard line in many cases against this.

There's serious institutional resistance. You had the Supreme Court, not by enough, but still the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship.

“And you have Trump appointed judges in enormous numbers saying, no, you can't do this. So where are we? How far are they going to get? I tend to think that they're not actually going to get that far towards what they want. What's your reading of it?”

There's optics, and then there's what's happening in the courts, and then there's, you know, what's actually happening in people's neighborhoods. So one of the things I found pulling my piece together, you know, there was that big moment after the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretty of an alleged draw down in Minneapolis, there were some personnel changes, you know, Gregory Bavino, the guy in the Great Code with the kind of Nazi appealing haircut.

He's out, we're bringing Tom Homan, he's an old hand, he looks more legitimate, even though arguably he's in the same exact lane, ideologically as the rest of them.

“A few months later, we get rid of Christy Nome, we bring in Mark Wayne Mullin, like, I think there's something going on where they, at least want to change the optics. They at least want to make it look like grown ups are in charge.”

And that to me says, like, what was sort of building up to Minneapolis, like, they took that very seriously. They don't want to be in that position again. However, we are seeing this huge increase in arrests and detention. We have double the amount of detention daily happening in some cases, there were five days in June this year where 10,000 people were arrested by immigration agents. That's double what would be the normal rate on even under this administration. So it's important right now for people to, you know, maintain their focus, maintain the work that they've been doing to challenge these policies and press for more, you know, this is, I think exactly what the administration would like is for us to turn away and believe that things have changed and they certainly have not.

I really agree with that. I really hope people take that to heart. Folks, you saw what happened in Texas. That's a very good sign that Melissa's really onto something here. So stay in this people. Please stay on top of it. Melissa, Geragrant, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for all this.

So they just talk with you. Thanks.

Folks, a quick announcement that daily blast is taking a short break to recharge the pod will return in a week early in the morning on Monday, July 20th. See you all then. all then.