Congressman Castro on ICE: “They've Engaged in Cold-Blooded Murder”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, Congressman Joaquin Castro (TX-20) joined the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) to speak out against ICE’s brutality and the killings of 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, and of 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine.
View press conference clip here.
Remarks as delivered below:
I'm Joaquin Castro, and proud to represent San Antonio, Texas, here in the U.S. Congress. And want to say thank you to my colleagues in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, most especially Representative Silvia Garcia, who, after the shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, did so much work in the community to try to start to heal the community, but also to get answers to why ICE brutally murdered Lorenzo. And also to other members of the Houston delegation who were here, Lizzie Fletcher and Christian Menefee, who have also been very helpful in Houston.
We are confronted once again with the fact that ICE has become, under Donald Trump, an abusive and rogue agency that should be broken up and disbanded. Yesterday, a woman walked out of her home and into the chaos of the street, where she saw a young girl, no more than three years old.
ICE had just shot and killed a 26-year-old man, shot him six times. While he was lifeless on the floor, they handcuffed him. Neighbors said the man was the father of that young girl. It was seven o'clock in the morning, and the young girl was still wearing her Bluey pajamas. The woman said, "things like this never happen.”
Except under Donald Trump, they seem to happen every week. And if we let this go longer, they will happen every day. I have said for a while that there is a brutality by ICE on the streets and behind the prison walls of places like Dilley, and Karnes, and Pearsall, and so many other detention centers across the country. This is an agency that is targeting, that is profiling, that is stalking Latinos across the country. I found it very interesting that in both cases, ICE has admitted that neither man was targeted. That they were not the targets of enforcement.
I think there's a reason for that, because they have contracted people who are essentially bounty hunters, as well as their regular agents, to go out in the streets to look for people in beat up work trucks, to look for Latino men early in the morning and coming home at night, who are going to and from construction sites, who are going to stores to buy supplies for construction and home building, and they're targeting those folks. So, they don't need names on a paper. They're driving around to see who's brown, driving around to see and listen to who speaks Spanish out in public, and then they're stopping those people. They're asking them whether they have papers, and in these last two cases, they've engaged in cold-blooded murder.
I think you'll agree with me that when law enforcement has video to prove its case, it releases it right away. They release the video evidence right away, and yet ICE has released nothing in either case. In Lorenzo's case, they literally have not released a shred of evidence to support their claim that he was a danger to them. They were a danger to him. They were a danger to the Latino community, and all of this is driven by a racial animus out of the White House—not just Donald Trump, but Stephen Miller, who's the architect of this racial animus and hatred and bigotry, so Americans have to stand up together, have to refuse to be silent.
We have to disband ICE in this Congress. We have to freeze their hiring. We should give them no more money. Congress has to use every leverage that it can to change ICE's behavior. Otherwise, these killings will continue. There will be another victim in a few days or a few weeks. I want to say thank you to the communities in Houston and throughout Texas who have spoken up loudly, the neighbors in Maine who got out yesterday into the streets in protest, and Americans across the country who have done the same thing. Your words matter, your voices matter, your actions matter.
ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND:
According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is contracting private companies to track and locate people, a bounty hunting process known as skip tracing. According to the American Immigration Council, these private contractors receive up to 50,000 names per month and use data tools, online research, and artificial intelligence to locate people and inform ICE where and when operations should take place.
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