It’s been six months since mass protests erupted following the murder of two unarmed U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. The mainstream news cycle moved on to other matters: the war in Iran, the World Cup, the record-breaking heat wave, the U.S. midterm elections. But citizen journalists and observers never stopped watching, reporting, and warning of escalating violence in communities amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
With three more unarmed people killed so far this month, the public has once again turned a sharp lens onto the administration’s immigration policies, and again it is often ordinary observers who are making the truth known.
The leopard tries to changes its spots
President Trump shuffled top personnel at the Department of Homeland Security shortly after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot dead by federal agents in January, an apparent attempt to allay public outrage over the agency’s violent tactics.
The strategy worked, but only to the extent that it helped get federal immigration agents out of the national headlines for a time. With media attention lapsing, the administration quietly began surging more officers into selected cities, culminating in 10,000 immigration arrests over a five-day period at the end of June.
The result of an unprecedented number of hastily hired immigration agents being unleashed onto city streets and told to arrest 2,000 people a day has predictably proven dangerous. Three unarmed men have been killed during interactions with federal immigration agents since last week.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo of Texas and Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero of Maine were shot dead by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during traffic stops while on the way to work. Araujo was a father of three from Mexico with no criminal history, who has lived and worked in the United States for over 35 years. Neighbors describe 26-year-old Guerrero, who also had no criminal record, as a loving dad to a 3-year-old girl, who witnessed her father’s lifeless body laying in the street of their own neighborhood. The agent who shot him had a history of violent behavior before being hired by ICE.
The third person, an as-yet unidentified man, was hit by a truck and killed while attempting to flee a traffic stop in Florida. In a fourth incident, an ICE agent was caught on film firing shots in a residential neighborhood during a traffic stop in Pennsylvania.
In each of these cases, the administration claimed the victims posed a threat to agents or the public that justified the use of deadly force, only for video shot by bystanders or private security footage to become available that contradicts the official version of events.
Citizen observers make state violence known
Frequent contradictions between witness testimony, video evidence, and official accounts underscores the powerful role of citizen journalists and observers in making the truth about violent ICE interactions known to the public.
While recording video on a cell phone may not sound like much, it can be the reason the truth gets out there. Guerrero’s death was reported by his neighbors on social media before it even reached the local press. “We need everybody to use these things,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said, holding a cell phone in his hand, at a press conference after Pretti was killed.
Organizers and concerned neighbors have done just that. The Immigrant Defense Network, a coalition of labor, faith and community organizations, trained nearly 30,000 people in Minneapolis as constitutional observers to document and record federal agents’ interactions with the public. The group has since expanded training to 30 other Midwest cities, and it’s not alone.
As violence in communities escalates, observer and rapid response groups are activating across the country to document immigration agents’ activities and inform their neighbors, from the Bay Area of California to Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York, among others.
People brave risk to share the truth
Considering the documented cases of agents turning violent against observers simply for filming them, and the administration’s targeting of observers for arrest, people put themselves in real jeopardy when they record immigration enforcement activities.
Immigrants in detention have also moved to break through the information shroud that surrounds the growing network of DHS facilities, at incalculable risk to themselves. Attorneys, family members and even congressional representatives have been denied access to detention centers, leaving the public largely in the dark about what’s going on inside.
In May, around 300 people detained at the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey, collectively declared a hunger strike over human rights and labor abuses, documenting their case in a series of letters.
They described being “forced to work, in most cases without pay, or for $1 an hour,” while living in squalid and unsanitary conditions with frequent disease outbreaks and lack of access to medical treatment and legal representation. “The company in charge [the for-profit prison firm GEO Group] fails to meet the basic conditions necessary to protect our health and our lives,” they wrote.
DHS coerced, deported, or dispersed some of the detainees to other facilities, but not before they successfully drew attention to conditions in Delaney Hall. Word quickly spread through the surrounding community, and protestors soon gathered. Several elected officials including U.S. Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) were swept up in violent clashes with ICE agents outside the facility, motivating another round of media attention on DHS as well as the private companies that have benefited from Trump’s immigration policy.
On Monday, 100 diverse faith leaders from around the country rallied at the facility, drawing attention to the killings in Texas and Maine alongside the death of Jean Wilson Brutus, who died at Delaney Hall in December after just one day of detention.
Although citizen pushback against DHS has achieved some success, the victories have been only partially successful. Citizen evidence has forced ICE to back down from some claims that people agents harmed had committed crimes, but the thrust of Trump’s immigration policy persists.
Pressure on airlines to stop deportation flights, for example, has met with limited success. The Trump administration has also been trying to clamp down on grassroots ICE trackers including The ICE List, ICE Activity Tracker and the Deportation Data Project. The administration pressured Apple to remove a tracker called ICEBlock from its app store last year, though it continues to host new information for people who previously downloaded it.
Additionally, though grassroots trackers and citizen activists successfully raised the alarm over a DHS plan to convert industrial warehouses into immigrant detention camps earlier this year, DHS has not entirely mothballed the plan. “Days after federal attorneys announced that ICE would be abandoning its plan to convert a Morris County warehouse into an ICE prison, a new legal filing suggests the plan may be back on,” the hyperlocal news organization Patch reported from New Jersey this week.
Citizen action continues
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordered a temporary pause on most ICE traffic stops in response to the recent violence, but Trump quickly attempted to reverse it via a post on social media. Despite the uphill battle and the personal danger faced by opponents of the administration’s immigration policies, the triple killings have galvanized a new wave of protest.
On Monday, protestors met in Biddleford, Maine, to honor the life of Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero and demand change to ICE operations in communities. On Tuesday, hundreds gathered at City Hall in Houston, Texas, to recognize Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and protest his killing. A wake was held for Araujo in the city today. “It can’t be, they killed him without mercy,” one of his neighbors told NBC News. “He raised his children and gave people jobs. What happened is a tragedy.”
Featured image: Geoff Livingston/Flickr
