The news arrived from Austin, the state capital, that a man was shot by a federal agent from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The details of the case and what led the agent to shoot the Venezuelan-origin man named Wilber Garcés are not yet known, but what is clear is that this is happening with increasing frequency.
What we once saw in the news about incidents in cities far from us—such as two deaths in Minnesota earlier this year—has become a scene we now see much closer to home.
Here in Houston, on July 7, an ICE agent shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and he died as a result of his wounds. That news changed the life of a family and of an entire community living in fear; many, even those with legal status, say they wake each day in uncertainty about whether they will be targeted by agents who have flooded the streets, especially in areas where Hispanic communities are highly concentrated.
But it hasn’t only been people from our own community who have fallen at the hands of ICE. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were white individuals who protested the mass arrests in their city and, in some manner, confronted these agents and died. Although the circumstances are not clear and investigations are ongoing, what is clear is that they died for showing solidarity with our people.
Returning to Houston, the Salgado case was felt intimately; it was lived up close, and people continue to seek answers, especially his family.
His sons, Lorenzo Jr. and Ronaldo, have led the movement to seek clarity about the death, but two months after the incident the agents who shot their father have not been identified.
While the Salgado family was burying their loved one, in the state of Maine on July 13, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a Colombian national, also died in an encounter with ICE agents.
Guerrero leaves a small daughter who is now an orphan and a young wife left adrift, who also demands answers and justice for the death of a 26-year-old man. These are just examples of cases that continue to occur and that we are now seeing again in Austin.
It is deeply worrying that, despite the federal government’s claims that it trains its agents—especially those it hires in an expedited manner to patrol the streets of Hispanic neighborhoods—it is often said, and community leaders have documented, that this does not translate into action and allows people to keep dying.
In the Austin case of September 20, it remains unclear whether the wounded person was the target of the operation or if the incident unfolded as in the case of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, where ICE clarified that he was not the target but nevertheless lost his life.
We hope that the situation will improve, even if it is hard to admit, given the sight of agents going out onto the streets to detain people indiscriminately.
And we also hold on to the conviction that the deaths and the circumstances of the individuals involved in these cases will be brought to light.
