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Two fatalities, a surge in arrests, giant protests within the streets — the previous two weeks of US immigration information have given me flashbacks to January.
However this time, one thing’s totally different. Or at the very least seems to be totally different. This time, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement brokers fatally shot two males throughout site visitors stops…the company ordered most site visitors stops to briefly stop.
The directive is a far cry from the denials and smears ICE lobbed final winter, after brokers killed two American protesters in Minneapolis. On the time, administration officers went as far as to baselessly declare the victims have been “home terrorists.”
The circumstances of those new shootings are totally different, although early reviews from eyewitnesses have raised related alarms. Yesterday, brokers shot and killed a Colombian man — recognized as 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero — after he exited a house they’d been surveilling. Guerrero was reportedly not the goal of the surveillance.
Days earlier in Texas, ICE brokers fatally shot one other man, 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, as he drove three fellow building employees to a Houston job website. DHS claimed Araujo tried to ram the officers’ automobile. However the different males in Araujo’s van mentioned the brokers by no means even recognized themselves as legislation enforcement.
The deadly shootings in Maine and Texas underscore an necessary actuality: President Donald Trump’s mass deportation marketing campaign may’ve light from the headlines, nevertheless it by no means really went away.
In March 2026, the newest month with full information, ICE arrested almost 30,000 individuals, based on Syracuse College analysis. And simply this month, ICE arrested 10,000 individuals in a single five-day dash — extra detentions than the company booked per 30 days for lengthy stretches of the Biden administration.
The quiet persistence of the crackdown displays Trump’s priorities: His want to deport tens of 1000’s of undocumented immigrants hasn’t really modified, even when the PR calculus has.
Nevertheless it additionally speaks to a profound administrative shift: ICE is a essentially totally different company than it was underneath prior administrations.
Take into account ICE’s price range, as an illustration, which shot up eightfold between 2024 and 2025. ICE now receives extra money than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives…mixed.
For the primary time in at the very least 20 years, ICE can also be charged with getting into communities to make proactive arrests, versus merely selecting up undocumented individuals detained on different fees by native or state police. That’s how we ended up with brokers surveilling properties and making site visitors stops within the first place.
➨ Should you’ve by no means learn The Odyssey, there’s no time like the current. Christopher Nolan’s film of the identical title comes out this week and appears destined to be a big hit. Additionally, Vox’s Constance Grady says, it’s “humorous, gripping, and attractive.” That’s not precisely my recollection from Eleventh-grade English, however I’m prepared to present one other translation a learn!
- Do you know…that the title of the favored beauty drug “Botox” comes from the Latin phrase for sausage? The micro organism that the drug is made out of, Clostridium botulinum, was found in Germany within the early 1800s after it brought about an outbreak of meals poisoning in individuals who ate spoiled sausages.
- In the present day’s trivia: What’s the weird human nickname that San Franciscans give their heavy summer time fog? (You will discover this and different mind puzzles in Vox’s every day crossword. Search for the reply in tomorrow’s version.)
- Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we requested you the title of the third US vice chairman. That will be Aaron Burr, sir — who’s, in fact, much more (in)well-known for capturing Alexander Hamilton.
