This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a homebuilder in Houston, woke up before sunrise, ate breakfast prepared by his wife, and drove his construction crew to work. Around 6:50 AM, federal immigration agents surrounded Salgado Araujo’s van and shot him through an open window. Struck in the stomach, he died at a hospital a few hours later. 

The Department of Homeland Security put out a statement that evening which claimed that immigration officers stopped Salgado Araujo’s van as part of a “targeted” operation, and that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot him “in self-defense” after he “weaponized his vehicle” in an attempt to run agents over. Later, DHS admitted that Salgado Araujo was not the target of an investigation. And video evidence and witness reports revealed that Salgado Araujo did not aim his vehicle at ICE agents, who shot him from the passenger side of the van.

Just a few days later, the same deadly scenario played out all over again. On July 13, around 7 AM, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero left his apartment in Biddeford, Maine, to go to work. Mere feet from the front door, federal immigration agents fired at least four shots into his car. Nearby, his 3-year-old daughter looked on, in her Bluey pajamas, and cried.

Again, the Trump administration initially claimed that Guerrero was the “target” of an arrest warrant, and that officers shot him after he “weaponized” his car. Again, the administration later admitted that Guerrero was not the target of an investigation. An ICE spokesperson eventually abandoned the self-defense claim, too, saying only that agents shot Guerrero out of an amorphous concern for “public safety.”

The American Civil Liberties Union published a report on Thursday that examined more than 1,200 incidents of immigration enforcement across eight states that occurred during President Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House. The report concluded that in 432 of those incidents—representing more than one in three of the reviewed enforcement actions in 2025—agents used or threatened force, used intimidation tactics, or retaliated against observers. The ACLU also identified 130 instances in which agents brandished weapons and 16 incidents in which agents used lethal force.

The report stresses that the misconduct of immigration agents is not the result of “a few bad apples.” Rather, the fault lies with “a culture of abuse” encouraged by the Trump administration, and “a broken system of accountability.” Basically, when immigration agents are free to break the law without personal consequence, there are deadly consequences for everyone else.