From El Paso to ICE: When Anti-Immigrant Hate Becomes Government Policy

Is there a difference between trying to kill us and not caring if we live or die?

By Unai Montes-Irueste, LA Progressive

On August 3, 2019, Patrick Crusius drove more than ten hours to an El Paso Walmart and murdered 23 people. He’d posted a manifesto minutes earlier warning of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” He wanted to kill Mexicans.

He wanted us dead. Read what’s happened since, and ask what the difference is between wanting it and simply not caring whether it happens.

On July 7, 2026, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — a 52-year-old father of three, a homebuilder who’d lived here 35 years — left before dawn to pick up his crew. An ICE agent shot him in the abdomen during a stop. He died at Ben Taub Hospital. DHS has since admitted he wasn’t the man they were looking for.

Six days later, in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE officer shot 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero to death during an enforcement operation. Same admission: wrong man. Two states, one week, two wrong targets, two bodies.

And in July, an Overland, Missouri couple — Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, parents of three — were found bound, gagged, and shot dead in a Guatemalan sugarcane field. Pérez Paz had been deported after an ICE stop on his way to a roofing job. González de la Cruz, fighting an active asylum case, gave up and followed him rather than risk detention and separation from her kids. Their 14-month-old daughter was found alive next to her mother’s body, dehydrated, crying.

There is a difference between driving to a Walmart to murder Mexicans and operating what this administration calls immigration enforcement. Crusius acted alone, with intent, with a rifle, in one afternoon. The other is a bureaucracy — quotas, contracts, budget lines, agents making individual choices inside a chain of command. I’m not erasing that distinction. Intent, chain of command, and accountability matter for what happens next, legally and politically.

But tell that distinction to the family of that toddler in the sugarcane field, or to Sylvia Garcia’s constituents in Houston. Crusius wanted us dead and picked up a gun. This administration built a system that keeps producing our dead and has done nothing to stop it. If the body count and the outcome are the same, someone should explain what’s meaningfully different between wanting something and never caring enough to prevent it.

The deaths do not stop at three.

In April 2025, this administration deported families containing at least three U.S. citizen children — two, four, and seven — to Honduras. The four-year-old was mid-treatment for stage 4 cancer, sent without his medication; a federal judge noted it happened with no meaningful process. Mothers of citizen children are being deported at four times the prior rate.

DACA recipients — valid work permits, no criminal records, background-checked every two years — have been swept up too. DHS has said publicly that DACA “does not confer any form of legal status”; at least 86 Dreamers have been deported and over 240 more arrested.

Meanwhile, HHS let the national legal-aid contract for unaccompanied migrant children expire on July 31, 2026, cutting nearly 100 legal defense organizations loose and withholding $65 million already owed to them. An estimated 20,000 to 24,000 children now face deportation hearings alone; without a lawyer they win less than 1% of the time. The same government, in the same summer: shooting men who “resemble suspects” and stripping children of the one thing that might keep them from being deported alone.