Accountability for ICE: Why "Moving On" After Trump Would Be a Mistake

One day, when Maga is out of power and the conditions of political possibility have changed, there are going to be people who tell you that the best thing for the country is to move on. There are going to be people who tell you that attempts to hold the purveyors of Trumpism accountable are petty, vindictive, engaging in a kind of petulant recrimination and score-settling. There are going to be people who tell you that there must not be investigations, that it would be a waste of time to have trials. There are going to be people who tell you that it is not wise to change the law to allow for prosecutions and lawsuits; that too great an emphasis on the past will only divide the country, and keep us from looking toward the future. This argument was made after Watergate; it was made after the civil war. It was wrong back then, and it will be wrong again when it is delivered, with piety and smugness, after Trump.

When Maga leaves power, all of the officers, bureaucrats and leaders of ICE – from the uniformed thugs in masks on the streets, to the contractors guarding concentration camps, to the suited vultures directing the operation in Washington and drafting legal memos to justify it – all of them must be held accountable. Their immunity from criminal prosecution and civil suits must be eradicated, and their liability must be made retroactive. They must be investigated, tried, fined, punished and ostracized. Needless to say, ICE must be abolished – attempts to merely reform it must be resisted as betrayals of democratic values. But it is not enough to abolish ICE. Those who are responsible for ICE must be driven from public life.

This much is clear from a slew of recent deaths. Last Tuesday, a business owner and father of three named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot dead in his car by an ICE agent in Houston while he was on his way to work. At 52, he had made an honorable and prosperous life for himself in Texas after immigrating from Mexico 35 years ago, at age 17. His three co-workers who were in the car – he had picked them up to give them a ride to work – survived the shooting, and were disappeared into ICE custody. Later, it turned out that the ICE agents had been looking for somebody else.

Before Salgado’s body was even cold, ICE killed again. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was a 25-year-old resident of Biddeford, Maine, who had been born in Colombia. According to his father, he had a work permit, a condition typical of asylum claimants. He worked two jobs – one as a food delivery driver, and another as a custodian at a veterinary office – to support his wife and three-year-old daughter. According to witnesses, his little girl witnessed the ICE agents ram into her father’s car, approach his driver’s side window and then shoot her father dead. The incident occurred at about 7am; the little girl was still in her Bluey pajamas. Angus King, a senator from Maine, was told by the DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullen, that ICE was looking for somebody else when they killed Durán, too.

After the agents killed him, ICE proclaimed that Salgado had been trying to run them down with his car, a statement that witnesses have contested. It’s also exactly what ICE said about Renee Good, the mother of three they killed in Minneapolis early this year. Video quickly disproved ICE’s account of the Good killing; there is no reason to think that their account of Salgado’s death is true, either.

What seems more likely: ICE, a group of reckless, trigger-happy bigots tasked with carrying out the president’s mass deportation and ethnic cleansing regime, is terrorizing communities, stalking disfavored populations, targeting innocent, hardworking people on the basis of their race, and often escalating their interactions to deadly violence.

We have been here before. The needless, cold-blooded shootings of Salgado and Durán come months after ICE killed two US citizens in Minneapolis, first Good and then the Veterans Affairs hospital nurse Alex Pretti. Their deaths galvanized an already robust civilian anti-ICE resistance in Minneapolis, and sparked protests across the country against ICE’s kidnapping and ethnic cleansing operations. The bad PR clearly got to the president; Greg Bovino, the high-profile border patrol commander who became famous for his Nazi-like attire, lost his job, apparently as a concession to the unpopularity of the raids; Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary who ran the department at the time, didn’t last long, either. But after a brief de-escalation, ICE has now resumed its raids with their former ostentatious cruelty, needless violence and terrorizing gore. “ICE hunts us like animals,” Maria Cervantes, a Mexican immigrant who lives in the Houston neighborhood where ICE killed Salgado, told the Guardian. “I can’t help but think, who’s next? Am I going to get a bullet to the head for being brown?”

If we are to rebuild America as a new kind of country – if we are to make it fulfill its promise to be a free and pluralistic democracy of equals – then we have an obligation to make sure that no one ever has to ask that question again, and that those who do receive justice for the suffering, violence and indignity that this regime has inflicted on them. When this is all over, people will tell you to move on. What they will not tell you is that moving on requires forgetting about Salgado, and Durán, and about Good and Pretti, and about everyone else that ICE has killed and will kill. It will require you to leave the insult and injustice of their deaths unanswered. We must refuse to.