The wave of violence committed by ICE officers only continues to increase, while the agency implements new changes against transparency and accountability, and top officials blatantly threaten more bloodshed on American streets.
Here at The Free Thought Project, since January of 2025 we have been tracking the progression of abuses committed by agents of the Immigration and Custom Enforcement across the United States amid the agency’s weaponization by the Trump administration.
Part one of this series documented how Trump’s immigration crackdown served to empower the police state, using immigration enforcement as a false pretext advancing a campaign to target and intimidate ethnic communities, erode domestic civil liberties, constitutional protections, and erect a biometric surveillance panopticon under the guise of border security.
Our follow up piece in October, ICE: The Rogue Agency Terrorizing America’s Streets illlustrated several instances of brutality and rights violations committed by ICE officials, including raids on civilian apartment blocks utilizing Black Hawk helicopters, the brutalization of citizens, and the deployment of chemical agents on nonviolent civilian observers.
In ICE: The Rogue Agency’s Wave of Terror Continues, we subsequently exemplified a slew of even more abuses that took place in the months following the previous report, including the summary execution of an American citizen, Renee Nicole Good, as well as various other attacks against schoolchildren, teenagers, and the elderly as the agents would deliberately target vulnerable populations.
The escalations of brutality would only continue, and not long after Good’s murder another American citizen, 37-year-old Alex Pretti, would be executed in the streets of Minneapolis after attempting to protect a female peaceful protester being assaulted by ICE officers.
The deaths of Good, Pretti, and countless others constitute a new normal taking shape in Trump’s America, one where these hyperviolent agents of the state are given carte blanche to brutalize with impunity, and the Department of Homeland Security will retroactively rewrite the narrative to place blame on the deceased.
Meanwhile, more recent reporting from TFTP has also documented the scope of abuse and human rights violations taking place within ICE detention facilities across the country, most of which have a predominant inmate population with no criminal record. Specifically, investigations found high rates of inmate abuse, excessive force, cruel and inhumane treatment, and a skyrocketing suicide rate among detainees primarily driven by mistreatment and neglect.
On June 15th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a new set of guidelines rolling back standards for their detention facilities that empowers even further exploitation by the private prison industry behind the recent expansion of ICE camps.
Dishearteningly, the bloodshed has not stopped, and the agency only appears to be brazenly emboldened to continue their vicious rampage throughout American communities.
In recent weeks, two more individuals have been senselessly killed only days apart from one another.
On July 7th, ICE agents in Houston, Texas, fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52 year old father of three who had been living in the United States for 35 years with no criminal record, after conducting a traffic stop following an increased surge of street opperations prompted by the Trump administration’s demand for a higher quota of arrests.
The agents claim that upon the stop Salgado Araujo attempted to use his vehicle as a deadly weapon and ram into them. One of the officers fired through his passenger side window, hitting him in the torso. They would then drag the wounded man from his vehicle, placing him in handcuffs as he lay dying and bleeding out in the street.
Three other men who were passengers in the van at the time of the killing were also taken into custody and are now being held in a detention facility awaiting deportation proceedings.
According to the Texas Tribune, witness statements from two of the three passengers dispute DHS’s claim that Araujo attempted to ram the agents with his vehicle. In fact, all witness statements indicate that there were no agents in front or behind the van at the time of the killing, instead the officers fired into the passenger side window after it had been put in park. There was never any risk to the agent’s safety.
DHS has a documented history of lying and fabricating details following shootings by ICE agents.
Only days later on July 13th in Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents shot and killed 26 year old Joan Sebastian Guerrero. After initially claiming that Guerrero attempted to weaponize his vehicle against agents who then fired in self defense, DHS has since shifted the narrative, drastically changing the story to instead claim Guerrero was attempting to flee and agents fired into the vehicle “fearing for public safety”.
One may be forgiven for logically assuming that discharging a firearm on a public street at a moving vehicle in and of itself constitutes a threat to public safety.
Reports have confirmed that neither Lorenzo Salgado Araujo or Joan Sebastian Guerrero were the intended targets of ICE operations, making their murders at the hands of ICE officials that much more damning.
What’s more, an exclusive investigation by The Associated Press found that the agent identified as the gunman responsible for the death of Guerrero, David Brouillette, has a lifelong history of violent behavior that should have disqualified him from employment with the agency.
According to court documents and statements from relatives, Brouillette, a 37 year old Army veteran, has a history of psychiatric issues accompanied with multiple instances of physical violence and abuse, including against his two ex wives and teenage daughter. Another family member confirmed that Brouillette was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a child, describing him as “extremely mentally ill”.
Brouillette served in the United States Army deployed to Afghanistan from May 2012 to February 2013 as a Human Intelligence Collector, an MOS commonly associated with acts of torture and mistreatment of detainees.
Speaking to the AP, Brouillette’s relative stated:
“Afghanistan destroyed him — trained him to be a killing monster, a machine. They took someone who was extremely mentally ill and turned him into a killing machine.”
These recent incidents following a rapid surge of hirings at ICE raise legitimate concerns of just how many of these trigger happy lunatics have been recruited into the agency.
But rather than simply being an issue of poorly vetted gunmen on the streets, recent statements from agency officials demonstrate that ICE’s violent nature is systemic to the highest reaches of the institution.
Following increased criticisms, “Border Czar” Tom Homan would take it upon himself to make what some could characterize as terroristic threats against the American public, and marginalized communities specifically.
Speaking with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Homan would brazenly declare that unless critics of ICE’s tactics “shut their mouths” there would be more bloodshed.
While Holman’s comments can be seen as deflecting blame for the actions of his agents to the constitutionally protected speech of those who criticize their heavy handed tactics, the implied threat is clear: Either submit to these armed agents terrorizing your community, or even more will die.
It is not the place for enforcers of the state to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It is worth reminding that even in the event that an individual targeted by these agents is in the country illegally, being undocumented is a civil misdemeanor, not a capital crime worthy of a death sentence.
Homan’s threat and the continued escalations of violence by ICE on America’s streets is only further compounded by an increasing lack of transparency and accountability, as reports allege that a new guidance issued to Immigration and Customs Enforcement claims the FBI will no longer investigate confrontations involving ICE agents. While DHS and the DOJ released a joint statement claiming that the change would not take place, it begs the question why then the guidance was issued at all?
This comes amid a new report from the ACLU documenting over 1200 instances of actions by ICE that demonstrate a large scale of civil rights violations committed by ICE officers and the police forces it has deputized, ranging from racial profiling to school lockdowns.
Naureen Shah, one of the authors of the report, commented saying that these killings were part of a “much, much bigger pattern, where ICE agents and the agents who are working with them have threatened to use force and used force in a way we’ve never seen from these agencies, in their history.”
The report concluded that the use of violence and force has now become the new default tool for ICE officers.
When armed agents of the state act with reckless impunity, using violence as a tool of intimidation and repression against peaceful communities, there is only one word to describe such actions. Terrorism.
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