CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Since its last two murders in mid-July, ICE, mothballed for a mere 24-hours, has dropped out of the news. Its stop and shoot habit, one can only assume, is approved by the man who nixed the Department of Homeland Security’s pause of it, namely Donald “Deporter-In-Chief” Trump. On July 13, an ICE agent shot and killed Johan Guerrero, who was not the operation’s intended target. In other words, ICE would have you believe he was collateral damage in some Marvel-Comics war on immigrant criminals. But ICE’s war is on immigrants per se (as everybody knows), whether or not they are criminals, because ICE would have you believe the nonsense that immigrant equals criminal.

The previous ICE murder, of Lorenzo Araujo July 7, was just as horrifically random and casual. The ICE gestapo fatally shot him during a traffic stop, because ICE claimed, he tried to use his car as a weapon. With Guerrero, ICE claimed its officer shot him for attempting to flee, thus creating safety issues. In both cases ICE murdered innocent men gratuitously, presumably because for ICE brown skin means criminal.

So in mid-July, it was Minneapolis déjà vu all over again: it became transparent that all ICE could do was murder innocent people and clearly such a homicidal agglomeration should not exist; in fact, its continued existence proves that what emanates from the white house is a death cult, as does the fact, which cannot be repeated enough, that within hours of those two murders, Trump overturned the DHS order to halt these deadly traffic stops. If Trump wants to soften his place in history as a psychopathic killer, he will do something about ICE’s policy of stopping random drivers to inspect their papers and then murder them, a bad look, though Trump does not yet appear to understand that. Or does he? There has been only one reported ICE murder, similar to a stop-and-shoot, since mid-July, though there have been deaths in ICE custody. Make of that what you will.

But being out of the news doesn’t mean out of business, which is also called for. According to Katya Schwenk, writing in the Lever July 31, ICE’s “massive spending........

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