Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was murdered on his way to work in Houston, Texas on July 7. Joan Sebastian Guerrero was murdered with his pajama-clad 3-year-old daughter in his car in Biddeford, Maine on July 13. Both men were mistakenly murdered by ICE agents looking for someone else. Both were initially accused of threatening ICE agents’ lives with their vehicles. In both cases, ICE lied repeatedly.
ICE claims to be going after “the worst of the worst.” But these two men were anything but that.
Araujo, 52, was a father of three who’d been in the U.S. for more than three decades, owned his own construction company, and was trying to obtain legal residency. “He prided himself in his work,” his son Ronaldo said. “He built the homes that people bought for their families to put over their heads, and he saved up so much money to be able to build the house of his dreams.”
Guerrero, 26, worked two jobs, was authorized to work in the United States — and had been issued a Social Security number according to Presente! Maine.
“He was a member of our community, a neighbor and a human being whose life was cut tragically short,” the organization said in a statement.
The two murders put ICE violence back at the top of national awareness, following a period in which the Trump administration sought to lower the public profile of its mass deportation efforts. Both occurred in Senate battleground states, and protesters chanting, “Vote her out!” marched to Sen. Susan Collins’ office in the aftermath of Guerrero’s murder, in part due to her role as the deciding vote in the most recent $70 billion appropriation for ICE.
The murders were followed by the release of report on the widespread misuse of force against ICE protesters, journalists, bystanders and children, underscoring the fact that these murders are just the tip of the iceberg of much broader lawlessness on the part of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as state and local law enforcement that sometimes joined them. The report, “Charting the Crackdown,” from Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, documented 412 verified incidents of the “misuse” of these crowd control weapons, also known as “less-lethal weapons,” across 16 cities in 13 states from June 2025 through May 2026.
It documented 203 injuries — including blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions — with the caveat that “our methods likely systematically undercount such injuries. The true number of injuries is likely far greater.”
Five cities accounted for the majority of incidents, led by Los Angeles, (169 incidents, more than 40% of the total), followed by Minneapolis (94 incidents, nearly a quarter of the total), then Chicago (56 incidents, 13.6%), Portland, Oregon, (37 incidents 9.0%), and Newark, New Jersey (21 incidents 5.1%). In LA, both the Los Angeles Police Department and the LA County Sheriff’s Department were involved in some of the incidents. As Random Lengths News has noted before, the LA City Council passed 22 policy recommendations in the wake of these demonstrations, none of which were implemented by the Police Commission overseeing the LAPD. (A charter reform proposal to give city council the power to set policy directly was removed from consideration on a motion by Councilman Tim McOsker.)
“The high number of head injuries (19 brain, 10 eye, 1 hearing loss) suggests a pattern of force directed towards the head,” the report noted. “Whether intentionally or recklessly, this violates virtually all use-of-force guidelines and results in significant harm.” Elsewhere it notes, “Shots to the head (97 incidents, 24%) and shots to the groin (7.2%) directly violated prohibitions in every applicable agency policy reviewed.”
The report follows a report in June, “Dying in Detention: Rising Deaths in an Expanding US Immigration Detention System,” from Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, which analyzed deaths in ICE custody from Oct. 1, 2015, through June 4, 2026.
The report found that 52 people died in custody during the first 500 days of President Trump’s second term, with a mortality rate, “nearly three times the rate during the entire Biden administration and about twice as high as that of the first Trump administration, which included the first 10 months of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Together, these two reports paint a picture of systemic lawlessness and violence by ICE, its sister agencies and law enforcement agencies that aid them. Just as those being hunted down and deported — people like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero — are mostly the opposite of “the worst of the worst,” so, too, those doing the hunting and deporting are producing the opposite of law and order.