According to Lauren Bonds, "ICE isn't acting differently than what ICE has always been designed to do, which is to target immigrants, often people who have never been accused of a crime, people who have maybe broken a civil law but aren't suspected of violence or any kind of large-scale misconduct."
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FEATURING LAUREN BONDS - On July 7, 2026, federal immigration agents shot and killed a 52-year old Houston man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Less than a week later, authorities killed another man, 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero, in Biddeford, Maine. The two killings are part of an on-going pattern of murder and mayhem by immigration forces, who also killed Keith Porter in Los Angeles, and Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year. Growing numbers of people are also being killed through abuse and neglect inside ICE detention centers.
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The Department of Homeland Security, under the leadership of Markwayne Mullin, responded to public outrage over ICE’s blunt force tactics this past Spring, not by ending raids, but by ostensibly making them quieter–and just as deadly. What will it take to actually end the federal government’s war on people?
Answering that question is Lauren Bonds, Executive Director of the National Police Accountability Project, with a background as Legal Director of ACLU Kansas and Assistant General Counsel at SEIU litigating civil rights and voting rights cases. A Kansas native, she now leads NPAP’s police accountability work from Kansas City. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the ICE shootings.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's first talk about these two killings. They came back to back. It feels like we are back in January when we saw Keith Porter, and then Renee Goode, and then Alex Pretti within the span of just a few weeks being shot and killed. And we are expected to believe that ICE has learned its ways. Two men killed within days of one another in different parts of the country. What does this say to you about what ICE is doing? Is it any different? It's really not different in any really impactful way, right?
Lauren Bonds: I think that we're still seeing a lot of the same tactics, just maybe at a lesser scale in particular communities. What we were seeing at the end of 2025, at the beginning of this year, were these large-scale surges in particular cities. Now, it's just a bit more dispersed in terms of where ICE is going and what they're doing.
But as you know, we've seen more people arrested by ICE, more ICE enforcement actions in the last couple of months than we have at any time previously. So, it's really not slowing down. The tactics really haven't changed in any recognizable way. What we're really just seeing is it not being really hyper-focused on a particular city or a community right now.
