The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
A 52-year-old man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot dead by an ICE officer this week. ICE claimed it was in self-defense, but this account deserves serious skepticism. And indeed, this story has now gotten even darker. A representative for the victim’s family now says the three other men in the van with Araujo are not just in detention, they’re also under pressure to self-deport.
All this comes as even some MAGA judges are starting to reject Trump’s deportation policies in surprising numbers. So it’s time to take stock. Trump and Stephen Miller are escalating deportations in a big way, but trying to do so very quietly. We’re at a real crossroads moment here that will determine how far they can get with their lawless ethnic cleansing campaign. We’re talking about all this with New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant, who has a great piece laying out why people need to care a lot about this shooting. Melissa, good to have you on.
Melissa Gira Grant: Hey, thank you, Greg. Yeah, the piece is called “ICE Is Hoping You Won’t Notice the Man Agents Killed in Texas.”
Sargent: And ICE really is hoping that. Let’s start with this shooting. It was around six in the morning. Lorenzo was driving to a construction job with three other guys. He stopped as part of a targeted operation. ICE now claims that he attempted to evade arrest, refused to follow verbal commands, and then weaponized his vehicle against an officer, who then fired in self-defense. It hit Araujo in the stomach, and he died at the hospital. Melissa, can you explain why this account is worthy of skepticism?
Grant: So we’ve been hearing a lot from ICE and from DHS that people are using their cars as deadly weapons, or to potentially injure an officer. And that was certainly the case they made, for example, with Renée Good. They lied and said she was driving into them. We know that’s not the case.
So at the time, Araujo, his brother, and two other men—the three of them were part of a construction crew. You know, Araujo has been working in construction for like 35 years in Houston and then the suburbs around there. He was on the way to work.
When ICE approached him, as I understand it, they were in their vehicle. And we know from other ICE stops in other cities, they tend to drive vehicles that are unmarked. They tend to use their car to box someone in. And at times they approach people very threateningly without clearly identifying themselves as law enforcement. And I think we have every reason to believe that that is part of what happened in this case. It would be their pattern. If they didn’t do that, it would be a break with their pattern.
Sargent: Let’s talk about who Araujo is. He’s 52 years old. He’s been in this country for 35 years. He started his own business. He put several children through college. They’re all now grown up. And Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, says that the family had actually been preparing for the possibility that he might be picked up.
And they had a whole plan in place where he would just cooperate, and then the family would try to get him freed. So it’s a little hard to see this guy as someone who would try to commit vehicular manslaughter against law enforcement, isn’t it?
Grant: Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense that he would do anything to endanger himself when he had family support in a plan that ran counter to that. It is very clear from listening to the press conferences and reading some of what his son Ronaldo has posted on social media that this is somebody who had a lot of support, and I don’t think would make a rash decision in the moment.
Sargent: It really doesn’t seem like it. Now let’s talk about these three other guys who are in the van. As you mentioned, one was Araujo’s brother. The other two were workers at Araujo’s business. As we reported at NewRepublic.com on Thursday, a representative for all these families, Juan Proaño, who’s the CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, now says those three guys are in detention, and that they’re under pressure to sign self-deportation orders. As Proaño says, these could be the only witnesses that could contest the government’s account of the shooting.
There doesn’t appear to be any video of the shooting itself. There’s been video of the aftermath, but not the shooting itself. And yet these guys who saw this happen—presumably, we don’t know that they did, but it seems highly plausible that they might have—they might be removed from the country. Melissa, what do you make of that?
Grant: It is possible that they are the only witnesses, and it’s possible that that is factoring into how DHS is looking at this. And again, you said we don’t know what they witnessed, but I have to believe that they have more context, and that context is probably not favorable to the ICE and DHS story.
Sargent: Absolutely. It does seem like that. By the way, I want to quickly note that in response to my questions about this, ICE put out a statement that entirely dodged the matter. It was just boilerplate repeating what it had said before, and then adding that this is a developing situation. They won’t say any more.
They just referred all further questions to the FBI. So as of this recording, ICE is not denying that they are pressuring several witnesses to this thing that just happened to self-deport, remove themselves from the country.
And by the way, one other thing—we should note that Juan Proaño, who represents the families, did say on a conference call today that he does think the three men are illegal. So they may actually be deported, or at least subject to deportation. And it’s possible ICE is trying to deport them to prevent them from sharing their account of what happened, which is just amazing.
Grant: It’s something that stuck out as I was working on the background to ICE killings for my story. That, you know, we have 16 examples in the second Trump administration of the administration’s story coming to the conclusion that the shooting was justified before an investigation had even concluded. And so that’s the context in which I understand the statement that ICE made in response to your reporting. They’re going to allude to there being an investigation.
The other thing about any kind of investigation—local law enforcement, including the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, they have tried to join the investigation, offer assistance. They have been denied that. And that includes being denied access to key pieces of evidence.
So we’re being asked to, again, very similarly with Renée Good and Alex Pretti, we’re being asked to fall for what I don’t think you could ever call an independent investigation at this point, and they’re rejecting any outside law enforcement participation. I would not be surprised if the White House comes out and just says this is justified, moving on, and tries to let that be the end of the story. And as I understand it, this community will not let that be the end of the story.
Sargent: Well, it sure looks like there’s a major groundswell for Araujo right now. You had this very good piece about this shooting as well. I want to highlight one thing you wrote—how the government’s cavalier response to this killing really shows that Trump and Stephen Miller and MAGA just don’t regard people like Araujo as fundamentally human: You wrote, “[For them] the lives of people who aren’t worthy of citizenship have no value.”
And they really tried to create a second-class caste out of undocumented immigrants by pushing the end to birthright citizenship. They failed there, but they are going to do everything they possibly can to try and treat undocumented immigrants—and plenty of legal immigrants as well—as an inferior caste. That’s what’s happening now. Melissa, can you expand on that?
Grant: Sure. That comment, I was trying to capture the Trump administration’s ethos. That is certainly not my belief, that the lives of people who aren’t worthy of citizenship have no value. That is what this administration’s been telling us, I mean, since 2015, right? Since Trump came down the escalator.
This is where they’ve started. And, this idea of dehumanizing any immigrant in the course of this campaign—I feel like they’ve shown us multiple ways that they’re doing that, whether that’s in the legal arena, whether that is the news that they make, whether that is the panic that they’ve been kicking up over this. They’re fighting this in multiple arenas.
And there are two representatives from Congress who’ve also called for a full investigation. There may be others by now, but as of now, one of them is Christian Menefee, who I think has just very recently come to Congress—I think he only showed up in February. And he said something just completely perfect, honestly, at a press conference the family held earlier this week.
He said, what other profession has the power to take somebody’s life in the street? And meanwhile, our administration’s in court fighting to make sure people like Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr.—which is another one of his sons—can’t be citizens in this country, right? Like, Ronaldo, Lorenzo Jr., and the third—they are here because their father came here and they were born here.
Sargent: There’s a big tool that the administration has been using to try to maximize the deportations and maximize the ethnic cleansing. ICE is trying to detain people without bond—even if they’ve been in the country for many years, when they’d ordinarily be afforded bond.
Politico’s Kyle Cheney, who’s done great reporting on this, has just done a big count. He put out a piece saying that this has now been rejected by judges 15,000 times. Melissa, can you walk us through what this thing is about, what this policy is about, what they’re trying to do, and why it’s not working?
Grant: Sure. So, we’ve had decades of immigration laws that were and weren’t enforced in various ways. Like, I think that’s a good place to start. Every administration kind of comes in and is like, what are going to be our priorities? And even though this law has been sitting on the books for 30 years, it has never been used in this way.
The law that the Trump administration is weaponizing here concerns when someone can be detained, and for how long they can be detained, when they’ve come into the country. And standard practice had been, for decades in this country, even before this law, that people weren’t detained for crossing the border. That is a very insignificant crime. There’s a whole process for that person to get status in the country. It is optional for the government to detain someone for crossing the border. That is on them.
And now we’ve swung all the way to actually every single person—and actually not every single person who crosses the border, but every single person who doesn’t have legal status, or people who we have profiled as not having legal status, is fair game to be detained.
And an even older legal principle, of habeas corpus—literally “show us the body,” produce the body—using this tool, attorneys and families have been able to get people who are now being swept up by the thousands into immigration detention. I mean, we’re detaining more people in immigration detention than we ever have. I think it was 63,000 was the most recent number that I saw. That might already be out of date.
It’s really fascinating. It’s a kind of super simple, super basic principle. Like, you can’t actually just hold somebody for as long as you want without giving them due process. And immigration court is not the same thing as our criminal or civil courts—it’s its own process. People don’t have the same rights to counsel, for example. So what we have seen is this upswell of lawyers and community organizations using the habeas process to get people out, and seeing that in numbers that we’ve never seen before.
So the fact that, you know, more than 15,000 times judges have rejected this mass detention policy—the flip side of that is that that is 15,000 habeas petitions that succeeded. That’s 15,000 people, potentially, who were released.
And so it’s this cat-and-mouse of, like, the more people you detain, the more habeas petitions we’re going to throw at you, and the busier the courts are going to get, and the more incentivized judges are going to be to let people go. They can’t simply keep up with these numbers. And that’s the story I see behind that number too.
Sargent: There’s one other nugget of reporting from Kyle Cheney that I want to highlight here. He did this big count, and he found that even a majority of Trump-appointed judges who have considered this detention policy have ultimately rejected it. That seems to me to be pretty remarkable.
We’re talking about MAGA judges, judges who were picked by Donald Trump, who agree with more liberal judges that this major tool that they’re using—again, this is absolutely central to their entire mass deportation campaign—this major tool that they’re using is too much for a majority of Trump-appointed judges who have considered it.
Grant: This novel legal argument, this real stretch of a legal argument that has not been made before—I mean, it could just be like a true small-c conservatism on the part of these judges, is like, no, you can’t do this. You can’t just make up a new interpretation. This is too far.
I do suspect, though, that part of it is the sheer number of cases. None of these judges have been called upon to deal with this kind of volume, this many habeas cases, this many immigrants who have been detained.
Like, in a way, Trump and Stephen Miller, who I’m assuming is a significant architect of this policy interpretation—they have created the situation for their own failure. It just simply cannot circulate this many people through the system. And when you increase the number of people who are being harmed by this, there’s more people who are going to fight.
And then there’s other people—attorneys are looking at the success that attorneys are having in other circuits, and they’re going for it. It’s sort of a snowball effect at this point. And it only stops if they actually stop detaining people.
Sargent: So that brings me to the concluding question here. We’re sort of in this split-screen moment. On one screen, Trump and Stephen Miller have amassed really tremendous power to carry out this ethnic cleansing. They’ve gotten billions and billions, tens of billions of dollars, that’s basically not subject to any serious oversight, which they’re using to build massive detention centers and hire God knows how many ICE agents. They’ve got this real army at this point, which is armed with paramilitary weaponry in a very serious way. So they’ve got that, they’ve got all this power.
Yet on the other flip side of this whole thing, we’re seeing tremendous resistance to what Trump and Stephen Miller are wanting to do. You saw this backlash in Minneapolis. Public polls have shown that solid majorities are rejecting this. They reject the mass deportations as a policy, not just the tactics that we’re seeing in the streets.
You’ve got the courts really drawing a very hard line in many cases against this. There’s serious institutional resistance. You had the Supreme Court—not by enough, but still, the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship. And you have Trump-appointed judges in enormous numbers saying, no, you can’t do this.
So where are we? How far are they going to get? I tend to think that they’re not actually going to get that far towards what they want. What’s your reading of it?
Grant: I mean, there’s optics, and then there’s what’s happening in the courts, and then there’s what’s actually happening in people’s neighborhoods. So one of the things I found pulling my piece together—there was that big moment after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti of an alleged drawdown in Minneapolis.
There were some personnel changes—Gregory Bovino, the guy in the greatcoat with the kind of Nazi-appealing haircut—he’s out, we’re bringing in Tom Homan. He’s an old hand. He looks more legitimate, even though arguably he’s in the same exact lane ideologically as the rest of them.
A few months later, we get rid of Kristi Noem, we bring in Markwayne Mullin. I think there’s something going on where they at least want to change the optics. They at least want to make it look like grown-ups are in charge. And that to me says, like, what was sort of building up to Minneapolis—they took that very seriously. They don’t want to be in that position again.
However, we are seeing this huge increase in arrests and detentions. You know, we have double the amount of detentions daily happening in some cases. There were five days in June this year where 10,000 people were arrested by immigration agents. That’s double what would be the normal rate even under this administration.
So it’s important right now for people to maintain their focus, maintain the work that they’ve been doing to challenge these policies, and press for more. This is, I think, exactly what the administration would like—is for us to turn away and believe that things have changed. And they certainly have not.
Sargent: A hundred percent. Couldn’t have said it better. I really agree with that. I really hope people take that to heart. Folks, you saw what happened in Texas. That’s a very good sign that Melissa’s really onto something here. So stay in this, people. Please stay on top of it. Melissa Gira Grant, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for all this.
Grant: So good to talk with you. Thanks.
Sargent: Folks, a quick announcement. The Daily Blast is taking a short break to recharge. The pod will return in a week, early in the morning on Monday, July 20. See you all then.