Truthout76%
ICE Keeps Killing Immigrants in Cars It Claims Were “Weaponized” Against Agents 71%
By Austin C. McCoy92%
7/14/2026, 8:08:09 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Indoctrination, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 40.6% saturation with 446 hits. Analysis detected 3,898 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,098 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 64.3% and a BS Rank of 71% (4,759 of 15,918 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 70.10% of the article peer group.
This week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot to death yet another immigrant in his car — a 26-year-old father living in Biddeford, Maine, who was originally from Colombia.
Neighbors reported that the victim, whom they identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, is the father of a young daughter and was authorized to work in the U.S.
While the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reportedly initially claimed that Guerrero had “weaponized his vehicle,” it has since shifted its narrative to claim that an ICE officer shot Guerrero as his “vehicle attempted to flee.”
Guerrero’s killing by ICE in broad daylight on July 13 is the second in a week.
In Texas, Houstonians are still reeling from Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death at the hands of ICE officers.
On July 7, Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican construction worker, became the 21st person whom ICE shot since Donald Trump took office last year.
Over the same period of time, Salgado Araujo was the fifth person whom ICE killed after agents shot into the victim’s vehicle.
ICE officers claimed that they shot Salgado Araujo after he tried to ram them with his work van.
The officers did not wear any body cameras to document the encounter, and Salgado Araujo’s colleagues dispute ICE’s account.
Jose Trinidad Rojas told The Washington Post, “there were no officers in front or behind the vehicle.
They were on the sides.”
In fact, Salgado Araujo had stopped the van before the officers fired their weapons into it.
One of the ICE officers shot Salgado Araujo from the passenger side of the van, hitting him in the abdomen.
They then pulled him out of his van onto the street.
Salgado Araujo, in a scene that is becoming entirely too familiar in the age of social media, can be heard in a video crying out for help.
Joan Sebastian Guerrero’s and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killings exemplify how the Trump administration’s deportation machine thrives on racism, dehumanization, violence, and cruelty.
While the president’s bigoted comments about Mexicans, Haitians, Somalis, and other groups of migrants often garner headlines, it’s important to recognize the role of the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Noem v.
Vasquez Perdomo in facilitating Guerrero’s and Salgado Arajuo’s deaths, as the ruling institutionalized racial profiling in immigration enforcement.
Soon after their encounter, numerous media sources reported Salgado Araujo was not the intended target of ICE’s operation.
Similarly, the Portland Press Herald reported that a top ICE official told Maine Sen.
Angus King that Guerrero also lost his life to a case of mistaken identity.
Guerrero and Salgado Araujo, who both just happened to “fit the description” of other migrants, might still be alive if it were not for ICE profiling them.
Guerrero’s and Salgado Araujo’s killings this July follow reports of ICE apprehending 10,000 people in the last five days of June.
This exorbitant number of arrests marks the DHS’s shift from engineering dramatic encounters with migrants to a quieter strategy of arresting, detaining, and disappearing as many undocumented folks as possible.
DHS and ICE would rather we not know about workers like Salgado Araujo and the others who have been disappeared into the U.S. prisons.
This was heartbreakingly evident in Salgado Araujo’s killing.
In a final act of dehumanization, the ICE officers then stripped him of any identifying information before he was transported to the hospital.
Salgado Araujo later succumbed to his injuries while at the hospital, not as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, but as “John Doe.”
Due to ICE’s actions, Ronaldo Salgado, Salgado Araujo’s eldest son, said he could not get confirmation of Salgado Araujo’s medical status until he heard from a news report that his father had died.
ICE’s killings of Guerrero and Salgado Araujo also share the cruelty used in the fatal shooting of Renée Good in Minneapolis.
ICE officers also claimed that Good tried to “weaponize” her car against them, justifying their use of lethal force.
“Weaponizing” one’s vehicle seems to be the government’s go-to excuse for lethal force.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reportedly used the same terminology to justify ICE fatally shooting Guerrero.
Yet, it’s the ICE officers who are turning people’s vehicles into caskets.
“Weaponizing” one’s vehicle seems to be the government’s go-to excuse for lethal force.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reportedly used the same terminology to justify ICE fatally shooting Guerrero.
Yet, it’s the ICE officers who are turning people’s vehicles into caskets.
The day after ICE officers killed Salgado Araujo, Ronaldo Salgado gave a statement that resembles many that have been made over the last decade and a half after police killings.
Anticipating an ICE cover-up, his son, consumed by grief, called for an independent investigation.
Ronaldo Salgado engaged in public testimony — a tactic that many families of those who perish from state violence practice to thwart the state’s (and media’s) narrative of “justified” force.
Salgado told his father’s story to humanize him.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo lived and worked in the U.S. for more than three decades.
And, according to his son, Salgado Araujo’s life revolved around his family and his work in construction.
Salgado Araujo had embarked on the process of trying to obtain a work permit.
He built his own house with the help of his colleagues.
By his son’s account, Salgado Araujo preferred to live an ordinary life.
“You could find him every evening after work, resting on his porch, listening to music, petting his dog,” Ronaldo Salgado said at a press conference.
Unfortunately, humanizing the victims of state violence and pointing out the flagrant racism of its officials will not stop the deportation machine’s attempts to whiten the U.S.
While Salgado’s testimony reinforces the illegitimacy of ICE, other state institutions like Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and other administration officials who lie to stir up nativism, we need a broad-based movement against state violence to halt this administration’s attempts to use ICE, CPB, and the military to serve white supremacist ends.
Houstonians have joined this fight.
Ronaldo Salgado and others held a vigil for Salgado Araujo at Houston’s Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) office.
Hundreds assembled at city hall to demand more information about his death and accountability for ICE.
While undocumented migrants are the primary targets of the state, the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and the calls from Trump’s allies to deploy ICE at polling stations during the midterms, illustrate how this anti-immigrant crusade ultimately threatens everyone.
The resistance to ICE and CBP in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Newark show us what must be done to halt the machine.
Analysis
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