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Dallas organizers who have spent the last 18 months rallying against federal immigration enforcement crackdowns are mourning. They’re also confused, rocked by the whiplash of ICE officials saying one thing, only for the president to charge back with another.
It has been just over a week since Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot by ICE agents in Houston, a flash of violence that hits close to home both geographically and emotionally. Salgado Araujo was stopped by federal agents while driving to a construction job. A father of three who had been in the U.S. for decades, he was not the target of the agents’ investigation, but was killed after authorities claim he “weaponized his vehicle” against the officers. That claim has not been backed up by video evidence.
The slaying has left Texans, particularly those who belong to communities targeted by ICE, “shocked” by the feeling that “somebody who is a member of the community for so long can be taken in what seems to have been a pointless moment of violence,” said Eric Folkerth, an Oak Cliff pastor and leader with the Clergy League for Emergency Action and Response (CLEAR).
Folkerth spoke at a vigil for Salgado Araujo last week and has led weekly prayer vigils outside of the Dallas ICE field office since immigration crackdowns began at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.
Clergy League for Emergency Action and Response (CLEAR)
“What I heard [at the vigil], particularly from our Latino community, is a real identification with him. A feeling that he could be, for many of them, my father; he could be my tío,” said Folkerth. “The neighborhood in Houston where he lived is very similar to neighborhoods in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where we are. We all know our own hardworking Latino Lorenzos.”
Less than a week after Salgado Araujo was killed, another man, 26-year-old Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, was gunned down by immigration agents in Maine in an event so similar in the details that it is uncanny. Guerrero, too, was not the target of the investigation that killed him; he too was accused of becoming unsafe while in his vehicle, although officers were not wearing body cameras to prove that protocols were followed.
Folkerth doesn’t expect to ever get an apology from the Department of Homeland Security, or ICE, for that matter. But what came in the days following those two shootings was some recognition that something had gone wrong.
The agency committed to ceasing non-urgent vehicle stops and pledged to put officers in body cameras — a promise originally made after the shooting of U.S. citizen Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. The policy change was a “tacit admission” that ”they’ve crossed the line,” Folkerth said.
But it didn’t last long. On Wednesday, Trump demanded that officers continue stopping vehicles as part of an effort to detain record numbers of individuals living in the country illegally.
“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump wrote on social media. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
Just after Trump’s declaration, Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, posted to social media that he and the president were “on the same page” about ICE’s mission. It is unclear whether immigration officers will continue to make traffic stops, which are one of the primary ways they apprehend wanted individuals, or whether new safeguards have been put into place to ensure the shootings do not continue.
North Texas has led the nation in ICE arrests for years, federal data shows. Advocates say the Trump Administration’s ever-shifting policy on law enforcement strategies is intentional — meant to confuse and exhaust. Faisal Al-Juburi with the immigration advocacy organization RAICES told CBS News that the changing messaging ultimately instills a “culture of fear,” which he believes is “the intention.”
That’s Folkerth’s assessment, too, and he worries that a seemingly endless stream of fear will ultimately result in fatigue throughout the community he aims to organize. That, to him, is all the more reason to carry on with protests against the federal immigration policies he believes are harming his community.
“They are trying to create an unstable, deeply destabilized situation, through which people are tired, exhausted and check out or just acquiesce,” said Folkerth. “My father, there’s a lot of advice he gave me that I never took. One of the pieces of advice he gave was don’t give a bully what they want. If a bully wants you to be tired, don’t be tired. And if a bully wants you to be exhausted, find a way to renew.”
