I'm writing as a constituent to demand accountability for ICE's escalating pattern of lethal force and its dangerous lack of identification standards.
In the past three weeks, ICE agents have killed two more people in operations that targeted the wrong person entirely: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three and small business owner shot on his way to work in Houston on July 7, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old authorized worker shot in Biddeford, Maine on July 13, with his three-year-old daughter in the car. In both cases, ICE's initial public statements about the victims were later contradicted by the agency's own account. These follow the January killings of US citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, and Chicago line cook Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, shot after dropping his child at daycare. A recent report from Physicians for Human Rights and UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center documented over 400 verified incidents of excessive force against protesters, journalists, bystanders, and children across 16 cities since June 2025, with over 200 documented injuries including blindings and traumatic brain injuries. Researchers believe that undercounts the true scale.
The lack of identification standards for federal agents is creating its own crisis. On July 17 near Woodburn, Oregon, two armed men wearing tactical vests, badges, and face coverings pulled a driver over using emergency-style lights, identified themselves as "ICE," forced them into an unmarked SUV, and assaulted them for 15-20 minutes before releasing them. State police later confirmed the men were not actually federal officers — they were impersonators. When real agents are allowed to operate masked, unmarked, and unidentified, ordinary people lose any reliable way to tell a legitimate agent from a criminal impersonating one. That is not a hypothetical risk; it already happened, and it can happen anywhere ICE operates without visible ID or a ban on masking.
This pattern, taken together, points to inadequate training, inadequate use-of-force standards, and a lack of functioning oversight.
I am asking you to:
- Publicly call for a suspension of ICE field enforcement operations until independent, enforceable oversight and training standards are in place.
- Call for an investigation independent of DHS into the Houston and Biddeford shootings, and into the broader pattern documented in the "Charting the Crackdown" report.
- Push for the DHS Inspector General's review of ICE and CBP tactics to be completed and released publicly without further delay.
- Support legislation requiring federal immigration agents to display visible identification and prohibiting face coverings during enforcement operations, absent narrow, clearly defined safety exceptions.
- Support legislation establishing binding use-of-force standards and independent oversight for ICE and CBP.
Constituent pressure already led ICE to pause non-urgent vehicle stops after the Maine and Texas killings, which shows sustained pressure gets results. Please make sure our voices are heard on this issue and keep pushing. Thank you.
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