(SeaPRwire) –
By: Adrian Kingsley
Two immigrant fathers are dead at the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in just over a week. Both had full legal right to be in the United States. Both were killed during ordinary, unthreatening acts of daily life. The Department of Homeland Security put out a press release this week framing ICE operations as targeting the “worst of the worst” criminals. It lists convictions for murder, child sexual assault, aggravated assault, and drug trafficking as the basis for its arrests. That framing is not a harmless overstatement. It is a deliberate, policy-driven smokescreen designed to normalize extrajudicial violence against immigrant communities. The gap between official immigration enforcement rhetoric and on-the-ground reality has grown fatal, and it is only widening.
DHS’s official narrative rests on a simple premise. ICE exists to remove dangerous people who pose a threat to public safety. The facts of the two most recent ICE killings dismantle that premise entirely. On July 14, 2026, 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero was shot and killed by ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine, while driving to work. Guerrero grew up in Bucaramanga, Colombia, where he attended Nuestra Señora del Pilar. The school has hushed corridors and wind-swept balconies, where nuns usher students between classes and daily morning church services. In Maine, he worked cleaning a veterinary clinic and delivering food to support his three-year-old child and pregnant wife. In one social media photo, he poses in front of a mirror. His clear phone case holds two photos of his pregnant wife, one showing her bare belly, another of her hugging him from behind over his shoulder. He held legal status, a work permit, and a Social Security number, per a joint statement from the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine. A witness told the Portland Press Herald his last words were, “I tried to stop.” Video published by The Bangor Daily News shows agents pulling his unmoving body from the driver’s seat before handcuffing him, with no clear sign he was still alive. Just six days earlier, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by ICE agents in Houston, shot through the passenger window of a car. ICE agents were in an unmarked vehicle, and claimed they had activated their emergency lights during a pursuit. Video evidence proves those lights were never turned on. Salgado was dead within minutes. These are not isolated incidents of officer error. They are the predictable outcome of an enforcement culture that treats every brown or indigenous person as a suspect, regardless of their paperwork or behavior.
The official line also claims legal status offers full protection from immigration enforcement. That promise is hollow for millions of documented immigrants who live in constant fear of detention or deportation. Take the family profiled in the firsthand account, who fled Bogotá, Colombia, in 1998 after the father was kidnapped by FARC and the family received repeated threatening calls. They spent years working toward green cards, filing paperwork, paying fees, gathering stamped and translated certificates in the years before COVID. The father received his green card in June 2025, and was so proud he showed it to strangers at grocery stores and shoe shops in Mexico City. He moved to Minnesota to live with his daughter and grandchildren, but lost 20 pounds in his first months there. He watched ICE raid cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Portland, and Minneapolis. He knew his brown, indigenous appearance made him a target, even with valid paperwork. He still walked to the school bus stop every day to pick up his granddaughters, afraid but determined. His wife’s green card application was rejected for a trivial reason. The filing fee changed, and his daughter had paid the old amount. The government kept the money, and told the family they would have to start the entire process over. She remains in Mexico alone, the first time she has lived on her own in her life. When their daughter calls, both parents complain no one ever checks in on them. They miss each other deeply, and no other person can replace the comfort they find in each other’s company. Last December, when the father traveled back to Mexico City to take his wife to medical appointments, he feared ICE would detain him at the airport indefinitely. He asked his daughter, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, to send him her award citations. He printed them out and tucked them into a folder with all his legal documents, desperate to have proof of his humanity on hand if he was stopped. His daughter waited by her phone all day, sick with worry, until he texted to say he was safe. Their 41-year-old daughter now finds herself parenting her parents through both their loneliness and the cruelty of a broken immigration system. This is the daily reality for documented immigrants across the country. Tens of thousands of people are held in ICE detention at any given time, 70% of whom have no criminal convictions. Under the second Trump administration, these facilities have become more dangerous than ever. The fear is not paranoia. It is a rational response to a system that has abandoned due process in favor of racialized terror.
The structure of U.S. immigration enforcement guarantees more deaths and more separated families. DHS’s budget is tied directly to its ability to frame immigrants as existential threats, so it has every incentive to ramp up fear-mongering and aggressive enforcement. There is no meaningful oversight of ICE agent use of force, and no accountability for officers who lie about their actions during operations. Legal status will never be a reliable shield for brown and indigenous people as long as the system is designed to treat them as suspects first and people second.
Author bio: Adrian Kingsley is an internationally renowned public administration scholar who has studied immigration policy across the Americas for 25 years and advises global policy bodies.