The photo of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in front of his 52nd birthday cake provokes not only sadness for a life viciously cut short and a family marked by his shooting death by an ICE agent on July 7. It also produces anger and frustration to know that, as in other cases, conflicting versions are beginning, and it is likely that the lack of transparency and accountability will prevail again.

Six days later, on July 13, in another very similar incident, an ICE agent killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant, father of a 3-year-old girl who witnessed her death, husband, and holder of a work permit.

These days, an ICE detention can be a death sentence, especially if you are or look Latino.

The Trump administration ordered the temporary suspension of most vehicle stop operations to “retrain” its agents as if that would change the culture of violence that prevails when quotas of 2,000 daily arrests are imposed on poorly trained agents, but experts in the use of racial profiling, and without respect for due process of law.

Salgado Araujo was shot by an ICE agent in Houston, Texas, while driving his construction business' van to pick up three of his employees. It is now known that he was not wanted by ICE for detention, like Johan, although in principle it was indicated that they were, as if being the target of an arrest means that they should shoot you dead.

Those agents in unidentified vehicles allege that by not following instructions and trying to flee, Salgado Araujo “used his vehicle as a weapon” to try to run over an agent who fatally shot him “in self-defense.”

The three employees who witnessed everything and who are now in ICE custody, assure that Salgado Araujo did not try to run over the agent whose life was never in danger. The officers were not wearing body cameras that would have shed light on what happened.

In Johan's case, they were not wearing body cameras either, but ICE and DHS claim that the agent shot for “public safety.”

We already know that tired script. The cases of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens shot dead in separate events by immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, show the same similarities. Agents acting violently and shooting at random even though their lives are not in danger. They then blame the victim, and he is accused of using his vehicle as a “deadly weapon,” although in Pretti's case, he was shot in the back, on the ground, when he was neutralized.

These immigration agents are supposed to be applying civil laws, but for them, applying law and order means having a license to kill.

This culture of violence is promoted by the presidency itself, so we should not be surprised that agents think that their behavior is endorsed and justified by their superiors, because it is.

There was even a partial shutdown of DHS because Democrats wanted reforms to the way immigration agents operate and for accountability. But Republicans chose to approve an additional $70 billion on top of the $170 billion for ICE and CBP for the remainder of Trump's presidency through reconciliation, by a simple majority and without Democratic support. The reforms were left in the pipeline.

The reality is that both ICE and CBP use deadly force and no one is held accountable for their actions, whether it is a shooting in the middle of the street, or a suspicious death in a detention center. In both instances the death toll has increased.

The American Immigration Council describes it this way: "Under the second Trump administration, immigration agents routinely resort to violence in immigration enforcement operations and arrests. They often break car windows to remove their occupants. Several people have received gunshot wounds during immigration enforcement operations, and five of them have died." The report is from February and does not include the most recent deaths. Since Trump took office for his second term, 11 people have died in shootings at the hands of immigration agents.

The analysis adds that “in many of these cases, government officials have lied about the circumstances under which force was used to exaggerate the threat to the officers.”

“But even when the evidence confirms that the agent's use of force was not justified by the threat, the “pertinent administrative and criminal sanctions” are not applied.

An absolute reign of impunity.

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