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The fatal shooting of a man this week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Houston has brought into focus an aggressive ramp-up of immigration arrests across the country that has largely occurred outside the public eye.
From large cities like Chicago and Las Vegas to small suburbs outside Milwaukee and San Antonio, immigrants have been picked up and detained at courthouses, ICE check-ins and traffic stops, with daily arrests doubling in the last week of June and continuing to climb.
“The operations have purposely been done behind the scenes,” said Getsy Hernandez, a community organizer with Escucha Mi Voz Iowa, an immigrant-led advocacy group in Iowa City.
Then on Tuesday, federal immigration agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican construction worker and father of three who had lived in the country for more than 30 years without legal status. However, Mr. Salgado Araujo was not the initial target of the agents.
In the days since, the killing has galvanized thousands of protesters, led to calls from local leaders and Latino civil rights groups for independent investigations, and prompted promises of legal action from President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico.
Mr. Salgado Araujo was killed during a traffic stop by immigration agents who had been searching for a different person, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman. When agents tried to stop the vehicle, the encounter quickly escalated, and an agent shot Mr. Salgado Araujo in the abdomen. He died at a hospital hours later.
Homeland Security officials said Mr. Salgado Araujo had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon, though three men who witnessed the killing disputed that account and said the victim had never tried to run over a federal agent. No video of the shooting has emerged. The agents were not wearing body cameras, the spokeswoman has said.
The Houston shooting has dragged ICE and the tactics used by immigration agents back into the national spotlight. Federal officials are defending their actions as part of highly focused operations, but Latino community leaders and immigration lawyers argue the incident follows a string of violent confrontations that have accompanied the surge in arrests. These clashes, they say, show federal agents are continuing to use their most aggressive tactics.
Federal immigration agents have shot at more than 20 people since September, nearly all of them in their cars. Some of the shootings have been fatal.
The Trump administration is continuing to push for more deportations. A Republican-led package signed by President Trump last month has funded $31 billion for ICE activities, such as supporting local and state authorities that have signed cooperation partnerships with the agency, known as 287(g) agreements. For jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate, the funding package has earmarked another $350 million to expand enforcement operations.
In a period of five days at the end of June, ICE officers arrested more than 10,000 people, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. After a brief lull during the July 4 holiday weekend, arrests picked back up by Tuesday, the day Mr. Salgado Araujo was shot. From Tuesday through Thursday, ICE officers across the United States arrested more than 6,000 people, internal records show, a pace of about 2,000 arrests a day.
The effect of the push is being seen across the country.
In Chicago, immigrant rights groups and Hispanic community organizers in a news conference on Thursday had counted at least 70 people taken in three days, many around courthouses. Many of the immigrants apprehended had been charged with minor traffic violations or had been trying to make their appearances before immigration judges. Calls to one legal aid center alone had more than doubled to 1,700 in that time, organizers said.
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Representative Sylvia Garcia spoke during a news conference on the case of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on Friday. Credit…Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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