Are We Allowed To Enjoy Things While ICE Keep Murdering People?
What to do with your one precious life?
So here’s what is happening in America right now: people are being murdered by ICE in immigration enforcement stops, in custody and in protest to their actions. Men, women, parents, legal immigrants, citizens, asylum seekers. Some are killed on the street. Some are killed in detention centers. None of which are getting the care that basic human decency (and international human rights laws) demand.
This week alone, two men died during ICE enforcement operations after apparently not being the people agents were looking for. On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant and construction business owner, was driving a work crew to a job site in Houston when ICE agents attempting to locate someone else stopped his vehicle. Salgado Araujo was not the target of the operation. During the encounter, an ICE agent shot him. He was taken to a hospital, where he later died. Less than a week later, on July 13, Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian man, was driving to work in Biddeford, Maine, when ICE agents attempted to stop his vehicle while searching for another individual. Durán Guerrero was also reportedly not the person ICE had been seeking. During the stop, an ICE agent fired his weapon, fatally wounding him. He died shortly afterward, leaving behind his wife and young daughter.
None of these are “isolated” incidents. They are the pattern and intention of the institution of border enforcement. The federal murder machine that is murdering, in cities across the country.
We are all watching it. Families livestream arrests. Neighbors film masked agents surrounding apartment complexes, workplaces, farms, schools, and courthouses. Loved ones disappear into detention centers where communication becomes difficult and accountability impossible. (Spoiler: the institutions with the power to stop it are not doing so.) Those who could intervene are, at best, “reviewing” what is happening and at worst expanding their budgets.
The rest of us are left in this dizzying moral vertigo where the speed of suffering outpaces the tools we’ve been given to understand it.
An endless stream of surveillance footage, breaking news alerts, and body-camera clips becomes another form of sick entertainment while actual human beings are swallowed by detention facilities and deportation proceedings. What kind of moral hallucination are we living in, where I scroll past videos of terrified children watching masked officers seize their parents while someone I follow just “has to try” a $20 Erewhon smoothie? The language itself has become anesthetic, laundering cruelty through bureaucratic vocabulary until words like “enforcement” and “processing” conceal the flesh-and-blood reality underneath. And yet I keep scrolling, because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to do: metabolize atrocity as media, feel a sharp flash of shame or sorrow or concern, post a story about it, and wonder how many followers we might lose for “speaking out”.
There’s this old line from Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” It is always relevant but especially now, when forgetting doesn’t happen slowly but almost in an instant, in a torrent of novelty: meme, movie promo, sports trade, celebrity wedding, press conference, immigration raid, grieving family, baby photo, Jimothy the cryptid. Our hearts are breaking not just from the scale of the suffering but from the speed at which it is obscured.
