“How many more dads have to die?”
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s son asked me that question shortly after his 52-year-old father was fatally shot last month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.
For decades, Lorenzo worked construction in Texas to provide for his family. Looking into the eyes of Lorenzo’s two grieving sons, I could see the human cost of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Earlier this year, I traveled to Minneapolis, where the community was grieving Renee Good, a U.S. citizen and mother killed by ICE. After I returned to Washington, I said there would be more deaths if the Trump administration continued its aggressive and unaccountable mass deportation policies.
Sadly, I was right.
Trump’s immigration trap reaches far beyond people seeking asylum or the “worst of the worst.”
At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since Trump’s crackdown began. Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and Department of Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse, was killed in Minneapolis in January by Border Patrol agents. In July, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old father of a 3-year-old daughter, was fatally shot during an ICE operation in Biddeford, Maine.
These deaths, hundreds of miles apart, are the foreseeable consequence of immigration enforcement policies that demand arbitrary arrest totals and disregard common sense, constitutional limits and the value of human life.
Worse, the administration is preparing to widen its campaign. Officials are preparing to revoke up to 200,000 business and tourism visas held by people who have sought or are seeking asylum, the Associated Press reported this week. This will be the largest mass revocation of visas in U.S. history.
But Trump’s immigration trap reaches far beyond people seeking asylum. It ensnares families trying to reunite legally, visa holders facing new uncertainties, longtime workers who have built lives and businesses here and U.S. citizens caught in reckless immigration operations.
First, the administration closes legal doors. In January, the State Department paused immigrant visa issuances to applicants from 75 countries. A federal court vacated that policy on Aug. 21. The visa revocation plan now under consideration would take the approach even further.
Federal law allows people seeking protection to apply for asylum regardless of their current immigration status. Claims that do not meet the law should be denied. But an asylum application is not wrong. It is a request for the fair, individualized process our nation’s law requires.
But after legal avenues are blocked, Trump’s mass deportation apparatus closes in.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, has publicly said the administration’s target is 3,000 immigration arrests a day. Local law enforcement agencies don’t operate on quotas for good reason. A quota does not consider who someone is or whether they pose a threat. It merely asks how many. By that standard, a father driving his construction crew to a job site counts the same as a violent criminal. So does a man on his way to work in Maine. So does a 5-year-old child. All help meet the arbitrary quota.
Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was caught in that trap. Photos went viral earlier this year when ICE detained Liam, an innocent in a blue bunny hat, with his father despite a pending asylum case and no order directing their removal at the time. Ordering their release, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery wrote that the case grew from an “ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”
The administration says it is targeting “the worst of the worst.” But the facts tell a different story. The overwhelming majority of individuals detained by ICE have committed no violent crime. In fact, the focus on quotas has caused ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies to relax their focus on public safety, reassigning investigators away from fentanyl and child sex trafficking work.
That’s not what Americans want. Half of Americans say this deportation campaign has gone too far, including nearly one-quarter of the people who voted for Trump in 2024, according to Politico polling conducted Aug. 8-12. Gallup polling in June found that 73% say immigration is a good thing for the country. They want secure borders, rules people can understand, timely decisions and enforcement focused on genuine threats to public safety.
As the only House Democrat serving on both the homeland security and oversight committees, I have watched accountability inside ICE collapse. In a closed-door briefing in July, ICE officials told members of Congress that the agency had received 56 excessive-force complaints since Trump returned to office. Thirty-two were cleared and the rest were still under investigation as of the briefing. One officer had been referred for possible discipline. No officer had actually been disciplined as of that briefing. Think about that: ICE has 22,000 officers, and not one has faced disciplinary action for violating use-of-force policies.
Last year, Republicans approved $170 billion to expand immigration enforcement. In June, they added an additional $70 billion in funding for ICE and Border Patrol through 2029.
ICE has 22,000 officers, and not one has faced disciplinary action for violating use-of-force policies.
Instead of making these agencies come back to Congress each year and answer for their actions and how they use the money, Republicans locked in funding for years. They did it without adding commonsense reforms such as requiring judicial warrants before agents enter homes, mandating body cameras, and seeking independent investigations when someone is hurt or killed.
That was a choice. The Republican majority chose the blank check, and it has refused to work with Democrats on the lifesaving reforms we are still seeking.
Congress can fund border security and still demand accountability from the agencies that carry it out. It should reopen legal doors, replace arbitrary arrest quotas with focused enforcement, and require judicial warrants, body cameras and independent investigations when people are hurt or killed.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s son asked me how many more dads have to die. That’s up to Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.
The post Look who’s caught in Trump’s ever-widening immigration trap appeared first on MS NOW.
