Many progressive Democrats have made “abolish ICE” a rallying cry. But that should be the bare minimum.
A few days after the 4th of July, President Donald Trump’s masked armed secret police shot and killed another man in broad daylight in Houston, Texas. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stopped 52 year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — who has lived in the U.S. for 35 years, has no criminal record, and has three sons who are U.S. citizens — while he was picking up coworkers at his construction job. Salgado Araujo was eventually shot dead. His son, Ronaldo Salgado, said during a press conference that he recognized his father’s voice as he begged for help while bleeding out on the pavement.
ICE maintains that Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle” and that agents fired on him in self-defense. This is, of course, the same justification ICE gave for the shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, even though video showed Good turning her wheel all the way to the right, away from agents, before attempting to drive away. Surveillance camera footage just before the shooting shows two unmarked cars following Salgado Araujo’s van, with one even driving on the wrong side of the road in a construction zone before agents approached the van’s passenger door. Nowhere in those videos is Salgado Araujo’s van seen driving into ICE agents.
The husband and father of three had three passengers in his van at the time he was shot. All three men — one of whom is Salgado Araujo’s younger brother — are in federal custody and being pressured to self-deport. Through their attorney, the men said agents fired from the passenger side of the van and that it was impossible for Salgado Araujo to have driven the vehicle toward agents as there were none directly in front of the van. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has since admitted that Salgado Araujo was not even the initial target of the investigation.
Additionally, none of the agents present during the shooting were wearing body cameras. This is despite Congress appropriating $20 million to DHS earlier this year, specifically to make sure all federal agents in the field had body cameras. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem even promised that all federal agents would have body cameras after the fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. This means all we have to go off of is the word of ICE, and the three eyewitnesses they’ve detained and are trying to deport. And given that ICE has a track record of having their claims debunked by video evidence, their claims are sketchy at best.
The tragic shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is just the latest example of ICE having a fundamental disrespect for human life, and further proves that the agency should not only be stripped of funding and shut down, but that its rank-and-file agents and its leadership alike should be prosecuted.
ICE’s Callous Disregard for Human Life
As of July 6, 2026, at least 54 people have died in ICE custody since Trump’s second term began in January of last year. 33 of those deaths happened in 2025, which was the highest total number of deaths in ICE custody in more than two decades. At this pace, 2026 is shaping up to be an even deadlier year than last year. The National Immigration Project has maintained a list of immigrants who have died in ICE detention facilities. In several cases, the deaths are listed as suicides, with families disputing the government’s account.
One prime example of the hellish conditions immigrant detainees face in federal custody is Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, where hundreds of detainees engaged in a prolonged hunger strike in May and June to protest harsh and inhumane conditions at the facility. Detainees alleged that they were being fed spoiled and rotten food, routinely denied meetings with their attorneys, and subjected to vicious beatings by guards. Detainees said that in some cases, guards even deployed tear gas on them while they were in their cells.
It isn’t just happening at Delaney Hall: the ACLU reported in June that immigrants in detention centers across the country are also going on hunger strikes in Tacoma, Washington; Alvarado, Texas; Philipsburg, Pennsylvania; Adelanto, California, and Baldwin, Michigan. And when members of Congress try to conduct oversight inspections of these detention centers — as is their right under federal statute — they are denied access. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) was blocked from entering the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, California earlier this year.
One of the more egregious examples of ICE’s abuse of immigrant detainees was the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in the Florida Everglades, which was finally dismantled this year largely thanks to efforts by the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes. Last year, Amnesty International released a damning report describing in vivid detail how immigrant detainees were kept in unsafe, cruel, degrading, and unsanitary conditions:
“Each cage has three toilets which are located out in the open with no privacy. The men interviewed said that the toilets often clog or overflow which causes fecal matter to seep into the area where people are sleeping. There have been multiple reports of people having to unclog the toilets with their hands. Access to showers is also limited. A migrant said he was not given the opportunity to shower for over two weeks at the facility. All the men Amnesty International spoke with stated that they were often woken up in the middle of the night by guards to shower and that the water was often very cold or very hot.
“Individuals who had been detained at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ said that the food was of poor quality. They were only given 15 minutes to eat each meal and often went for long periods of time without food. They were not allowed food in the cages. Florida-based organizations have reported that, ‘food portions are extremely small, sometimes full of maggots, and detainees suffer from frequent hunger.’ The individuals that Amnesty International spoke with also said that the water they were given to drink smelt bad. An asylum seeker said that once he opened up the jug of water that was in the cage he was in and there was a large insect inside.”
If Amnesty International’s report is to be believed, the conditions at Alligator Alcatraz and elsewhere are in violation of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) guidelines. The UNHCR specifically recommends that “conditions of detention must be humane and dignified” and that “detention should be subject to independent monitoring and inspection.”
The UNHCR’s guidelines are legally non-binding, though UN member nations are still bound by ratified human rights conventions including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Article 7 of the ICCPR explicitly states that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” while Article 10 states: “all persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.”
Additionally, the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution expressly prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” which applies to both citizens and non-citizens alike. No matter how you slice it, ICE and DHS are in clear violation of both the Constitution and international law in their treatment of immigrants being held in detention centers.
A rogue agency full of masked, armed men who act beyond the scope of both US and international law and are only accountable to the president and his political appointees is fundamentally un-American. A leader’s secret police that kills both citizens and immigrants alike and concentrates populations deemed undesirable in camps against their will is everything we’ve been told America is not. If we are to move on as a country from the horrors this administration has brought, everyone responsible for these atrocities needs to be prosecuted and jailed.
Abolish and Punish ICE
It isn’t that hard to imagine America without ICE: all you’d have to do is think back to where you were when the film “The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers” was in theaters. Back then, immigration enforcement was conducted by Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). As the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University’s School of Law wrote in 2021, the INS was largely an administrative agency where deportation officers operated behind desks rather than in the streets.
Former immigration attorney Camille J. Mackler wrote that her contacts in the federal government jokingly referred to deportation officers, or DOs, as “desk officers” given that their day-to-day duties usually involved filling out paperwork. She noted that was “a stark contrast to the militant law enforcement culture” that currently permeates ICE. Mackler further argued that DHS — which was created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — had become far too bloated to have its powers appropriately checked by Congress.
Mackler proposed a series of reforms including bringing all of DHS’ sub-agencies, like ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), and the U.S. Coast Guard under the jurisdiction of a single congressional committee. She also recommended separating DHS’ national security and immigration enforcement bodies.
“Border Patrol and ICE should perform their administrative law enforcement functions separately from CBP’s and Homeland Security Investigations’ broader criminal law enforcement activities,” Mackler wrote. “For example, investigations of individuals traveling to the United States from abroad who are potentially part of larger criminal networks should be kept separate from the daily processing of travelers to the United States.”
It’s important to state that there should still be federal efforts to monitor and impede the operations of international criminal organizations like drug cartels and human trafficking rings. But Mackler is right in that these efforts should be compartmentalized and kept entirely separate from agencies that are simply meant to process tourists entering the United States, and even efforts to enforce immigration laws when foreign nationals illegally cross the border and/or overstay their visas.
In practicality, abolishing ICE could be as simple as disbanding the agency as we know it, stripping it of funding, and relaunching the INS to be an administrative agency of bureaucrats processing paperwork, rather than masked armed men with military-grade weaponry invading American cities and killing people with no accountability.
Sweden uses a compartmentalized model to conduct its immigration enforcement. The Swedish Police Authority conducts forced deportations, while the Swedish Migration Agency oversees residency permit applications, asylum assessment for refugees, and immigrant detention centers. While being detained against one’s will is never a totally pleasant experience, detainees in Sweden are allowed to wear civilian clothes, have access to the internet, and can even have a mobile phone (though phones with recording devices are still prohibited). The World Health Organization (WHO) found in March of 2025 that immigrants housed in Sweden’s detention centers are being held in compliance with WHO guidelines and given appropriate medical treatment and accommodations.
While the United States is a much larger country than Sweden both in terms of population and geography, our immigration system is still desperately in need of an overhaul. The Cato Institute found in 2019 that since 1991, the time immigrants spent waiting to apply for a green card for legal permanent residency had doubled for those seeking residency through the employment-based and family-sponsored avenues.
Cato found that more than 100,000 legal immigrants waited more than a decade or more to apply for a green card in 2018. Researcher David J. Bier also found that approximately five million more were stuck in the green card application backlog.
“Without significant reforms, wait times will become impossibly long for these immigrants. Altogether, about 675,000 would-be legal immigrants — 14 percent of those waiting in 2018 — would die without seeing a green card if they refused to give up and stayed in the line indefinitely,” Bier wrote. “It will take decades and — in some categories — a half century or more to process everyone else waiting now.”
Bier’s estimate of a half century of waiting to get legal permanent residency may sound far-fetched, but Ronaldo Salgado, the son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, said that his father was still in the process of applying for legal residency at the time he was killed. Salgado Araujo entered the US at age 17, and was 52 when he was killed. It’s entirely possible he was one of those five million or more in the green card backlog limbo.
While immigration reform should be a priority for the next Democratic Congress and president, accountability for law-breaking must be even higher on that list. One death in ICE custody is too many, let alone 54 in two years.
As of this writing, the agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti have yet to be brought to justice, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killer or killers have yet to be identified. Salgado Araujo’s wife no longer has a husband, and his sons no longer have a father, all because men like Stephen Miller and Markwayne Mullin don’t want people like him in the country. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has already called for those involved in the deaths of 17 Mexican nationals in US custody to be prosecuted, and that should be just the beginning.
The Nuremberg Trials and the de-Nazification period were critical moments for Germany in the wake of World War II, and bringing justice to those responsible for unprecedented human rights abuses was a necessary component to being able to move on from the horrors of the Nazi regime. Similarly, abolishing ICE and holding both rank-and-file agents and leaders to account for its horrific treatment of immigrants and deprivation of Constitutional rights is a must if we’re to move forward from what will rightly be remembered as one of the darkest periods in American history.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
