Don’t look away: ICE and CBP are getting away with murder

I grew up in a suburb of Dallas. I don’t know how many of my classmates were undocumented — we never thought to ask. It was the late 1980s and early ’90s, after all.

A few years later, I was a grad student living in New York City on 9/11. Suddenly, all immigrants — especially brown and Black ones — lived under a cloud of suspicion. That suspicion was fostered, in part, by the U.S. government’s response to the terrorist attacks.

The Homeland Security Act

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established the Department of Homeland Security with the primary purpose of defending the country against future terrorist attacks. In establishing the department, Congress set its primary mission as follows:

• Prevent terrorist attacks within the United States
• Reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism
• Minimize the damage, and assist in the recovery, from terrorist attacks that do occur within the United States
• Carry out all functions of entities transferred to the Department, including by acting as a focal point regarding natural and manmade crises and emergency planning
• Ensure that the functions of the agencies and subdivisions within the Department that are not related directly to securing the homeland are not diminished or neglected except by a specific explicit Act of Congress
• Ensure that the overall economic security of the United States is not diminished by efforts, activities, and programs aimed at securing the homeland
• Monitor connections between illegal drug trafficking and terrorism, coordinate efforts to sever such connections, and otherwise contribute to efforts to interdict illegal drug trafficking.

Then Congress added this explicit instruction: “Except as specifically provided by law with respect to entities transferred to the Department under this Act, primary responsibility for investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism shall be vested not in the Department, but rather in federal, state and local law enforcement agencies with jurisdiction over the acts in question.”

This mission of the Department of Homeland Security is noteworthy for its emphasis on preventing another terrorist attack on U.S. soil — not on managing immigration. Yet, the Act transferred responsibility for all things related to immigration and citizenship to the department.

The Act has come under recent scrutiny because the seeds for what we now know as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) were sown in this moment.

Longtime journalist Garrett Graff describes the genesis for CBP and ICE this way:

And so the thinking was that we were sort of creating two distinct immigration and border agencies, and that CBP was going to be all of the enforcement at the border. This unified border security agency. And that ICE was going to be the unified Customs and Immigration Enforcement Agency for the interior of the United States, that they were going to be in charge of people who were in the United States illegally already over the border, that they were going to be the people doing the smuggling investigations. They were going to be the people doing sort of complex transnational crime investigations, and that you would sort of have two agencies, one watching the borders, one watching everything inside the country.

CBP’s enforcement authority is most expansive within a 100-mile zone of the country’s borders and coastlines. Within this zone, they can conduct warrantless searches and set up immigration checkpoints.

It always has been the case that the CBP, as a law-enforcement entity, could operate in the interior of the country, but when doing so they have limited authority. Historically, CBP has only operated in the zone at the border.

The Trump administration has pushed that boundary by deploying CBP along with ICE to cities far from any border.

Regarding ICE, Graff explains:

They have the ability to enforce a narrow segment of immigration law and they can make arrests for crimes that are federal crimes that are committed in front of them, but that they are not HSI special agents who actually have the ability and the power to go out and investigate federal crimes that they don’t witness. … But I think that this gets at one of the other challenges that we are witnessing right now, which is, Border Patrol and ICE are just not trained for the work that they’re doing on America’s streets right now. They are used to working in this very narrow sphere of border enforcement and immigration enforcement, which have very different responsibilities for civil rights and civil liberties and due process on an average day doing an average task. Your average state or local law enforcement officer is far more experienced in investigating crime, enforcing crime and dealing with civilians than your average ICE officer or CBP agent.

ICE and CBP under Trump

In the wake of the recent killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastian Guerrero Biddeford, Maine, it’s worth considering how these agents are operating with impunity across the country. That impunity begins with who is being hired and how they are being trained.

Kali Holloway with The Nation chronicled the lax standards for ICE recruitment and training in a January 2026 article. In order to rapidly more than double the ICE force, DHS dropped the age cap from 40 to none, eliminated the requirement for a college degree and offered financial incentives to join (a $50,000 signing bonus and up to $60,000 to pay off college loans). The screening process became so lax that at one point Laura Jedeed, a journalist with Slate, was offered a position without so much as a Google search which would have turned up her job as a journalist who writes critically of the administration.

The thrust of Holloway’s article is that the DHS is actively appealing to and recruiting former January 6 insurrectionists and white nationalist extremists — findings supported by interviews conducted by U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and queries made by multiple Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ryan Schwank, former ICE attorney and ICE Academy instructor, resigned ICE in protest of the dangerously lax training. He later testified at a forum hosted by Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Rep. Robert Garcia about his experience joining the ICE Academy at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center:

“On my first day on the job at FLETC, I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.”

On my first day on the job at FLETC, I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant. For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program; cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour program — classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention, and the limits of officer authority. For example, they ceased legal instruction regarding use of force. This means cadets are not taught what it means to be objectively reasonable — the very standard which the law requires them to meet when deciding whether or not to use deadly force. Our jobs as instructors are to teach them so well that they can make split-second decisions about what they can and cannot do, in life and death situations. Yet in the name of churning out an endless stream of officers, DHS leadership has dismantled the academic and practical tests that we need to know if cadets can safely and lawfully perform their job. All to satisfy an administration demanding they train thousands of new officers before the end of the year.

These conditions have led to an ever-increasing threat to the public — citizens and immigrants alike.

A recent New York Times investigation found that since the start of the second Trump term, 23 individuals have been shot at by ICE or CBP officers.

Some, like 30-year-old Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen, survived. On Oct. 4, 2025, she was shot five times by CBP agent Charles Exum during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, only to be charged by the government for weaponizing her vehicle against immigration agents.

The case fell apart in court when Exum’s text messages were read aloud in court and he was shown to have bragged about shooting Martinez. A federal judge forced the release of the footage, which showed it was actually Exum who rammed Martinez’s car — not the other way around.

Others like Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen, did not survive their encounters.

On March 15, 2025, Martinez was shot and killed by an ICE officer while in South Padre Island, Texas, celebrating his birthday. Again, the officer claimed Martinez weaponized his car; however, body-cam footage obtained by a San Antonio news station tells a different story. No one has yet been held accountable for his death.

The killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good (shot by ICE officer Jonathan Ross) and Alex Pretti (shot by CBP agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez) in quick succession in Minneapolis led to nationwide protests. None of the officers involved have faced charges; however, after stonewalling for months the federal government recently turned over evidence to Minnesota prosecutors in these cases as well as the case of Venezuelan national Julio Sosa-Celis who was shot by ICE agent Christian J. Castro. Minnesota prosecutors have charged Castro with four counts of second-degree assault (a felony) and one count of falsely reporting a crime (a misdemeanor) when he lied about the events that led to him shooting Sosa-Celis.

In the most recent shootings involving federal immigration agents, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo of Houston and Joan Sebastian Guerrero of Maine were both shot in their vehicles.

Araujo, although undocumented, had lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years. The government has alleged Araujo weaponized his vehicle — an accusation the three passengers of Araujo’s vehicle have refuted. Those men, including Araujo’s brother, Victor, are being held in immigration detention themselves, making it difficult to access them.

Guerrero was a legal resident of the U.S. with authorization to work here. He was shot to death in front of his wife and 3-year-old daughter. Now, new details are coming to light about the ICE agent, David Brouillette, who killed Guerrero.

Brouillette has a documented history of spousal abuse and since his killing of Guerrero, both of Brouillette’s ex-wives have stated unequivocally that he is capable of extreme acts of violence. Additionally, court documents from last year reveal that a district court judge found Brouillette’s claims about his ability to pay child support were “uncredible.”

The Washington Post also uncovered that Brouillette lied during a 2019 divorce settlement when he said he was employed by a local police department at the time. That agency has no record of him working for them. But having said he had previous law enforcement experience likely allowed Brouillette to bypass even more of the already lax ICE training. He joined in November 2025 and told his ex-wife he would be getting a $50,000 bonus.

We the people

The Trump administration will not be in power forever. When they are gone, there will be so much for the people of this country to take stock of.

DHS was created in the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent a future terrorist attack on U.S. soil. To say there’s been “mission drift” at DHS is an understatement. Rather than protect our country from another terrorist attack, the agents of DHS are terrorizing immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.

It is time for a major overhaul of DHS. It is clear that will not happen with the current administration or Congress, but as soon as there is another one in power, every single one of these unvetted and unqualified agents hired by ICE will need to be fired immediately. Some will need to be prosecuted along with every supervisor and cabinet official who turned a blind eye to the shocking violence enacted.

This terror will end. Until then, we the people cannot look away. We must — as the kids say — keep the receipts. We cannot become numb to what is happening around us. This is not normal.

 

Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as the first Justice and Advocacy Fellow at Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas where she recently was ordained to the gospel ministry. She earned the master of divinity degree and a certificate in spiritual direction from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company, which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.