'Let My People Work': A Cry for Justice Amid ICE Violence by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. October 9, 2026

'Let My People Work': A Cry for Justice Amid ICE Violence

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

October 9, 2026

We should all be outraged.

The speaker in the Instagram video shared here, which has gone viral, is Gabriel Rosales, Texas State Director of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Founded in 1929, LULAC is the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization and has played a historic role, alongside organizations such as the NAACP, in the long struggle for civil and constitutional rights.

Gabriel gives voice to much of what I have been feeling after a disturbing series of shootings involving ICE officers—including the recent shooting of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez in Austin and the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. 

Garces Perez’s attorneys say he was working as a DoorDash driver when he was shot.

In the Houston case, Salgado Araujo’s family and witnesses have disputed the federal government’s account of the encounter and described him as a longtime worker seeking laborers that morning. These cases remain contested in important respects, which is precisely why transparency, independent investigation, and public accountability are so necessary.

Gabriel’s outrage and moral clarity brought tears to my eyes—tears of rage, but also a profound sense that we need more of our leaders willing to speak with this kind of urgency. After hearing his remarks, I called him and told him that he sounded like Moses when he exclaimed first in Spanish and then in English:

“¡Deja mi gente trabajar!”

“Let my people work!”

There is something elemental in that plea. Let people work. Let families live without terror. Let children go to school without fearing that a parent might not be there when they come home. And when the government uses potentially lethal force, let there be transparency and accountability.

Relatedly, I recently came across the national ICE tracker called The Trace. As of today, it documents 100 incidents, including 9 deaths and 16 injuries.

Source: The Trace

Whatever our individual views on immigration policy, figures like these demand our attention.

And then, this very morning, I learned about 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in New York City.

According to The Washington Post, federal immigration officers approached Belgal during a targeted enforcement operation in Manhattan’s Marble Hill neighborhood—on the border of Manhattan and the Bronx—at approximately 4 p.m., just as schools were letting out and the street was crowded with children and families. An ICE officer fired at least seven rounds at Belgal’s vehicle, striking him in the neck. His five-year-old son was in the back seat and, thankfully, was not physically injured. 

I can only imagine the trauma this child experienced. He has become, in a deeply painful way, a symbol of the human cost borne by children and families when immigration enforcement is carried out with such force and fear. It is cruel, brutal, and truly appalling.

Federal officials say Belgal drove his vehicle toward officers and government vehicles and that the officers believed lives were in danger. New York officials have raised serious questions about the tactics used in the operation and have called for the release of body-camera footage. Those competing accounts make independent scrutiny all the more important.

Again, whatever one’s position on immigration policy, I think most of us would agree that the firing of at least seven shots into a vehicle containing a child, on a crowded city street as school was letting out, demands the highest level of public scrutiny and accountability.

The Washington Post further reports that this was the third officer-involved shooting since July. That should concern all of us.

We should be asking not only what happened in this particular encounter, but larger questions as well: What kind of immigration-enforcement system are we building? What rules govern the use of deadly force? Who investigates when that force is used? Who is accountable when policies or procedures are violated? And are fear, masked enforcement operations, armed confrontations, and the use of potentially lethal force becoming normalized in our communities?

These are not abstract questions. They concern the power of the state and the human beings—including children—who may find themselves in its path.

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How the shooting death of a Houston father is igniting Latino politics in Texas, by Natasha Korecki, October 4, 2026

Friends:

I encourage you to take the time to read this deeply tragic account of the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston father and construction worker who was fatally shot by an ICE agent while on his way to a job site. The circumstances of his death remain contested, and his family and community have demanded transparency, an independent investigation, and accountability. 

What is also striking, however, is the political awakening taking shape around this tragedy: grief and outrage are being transformed into public protest, civic engagement, and demands for change. At a moment when immigration enforcement has become central to the Trump administration’s governing agenda, this kind of community mobilization will, no doubt, carry enormous implications for the Midterm election and for the broader electoral and democratic response to the violence and utter lack of accountability of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Trump administration.

Vote, vote, vote is all I can say. 

Su voto es su voz!

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

How the shooting death of a Houston father is igniting Latino politics in Texas

Story by Natasha Korecki | October 4, 2026

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot on his way to work by an ICE officer, after authorities say Salgado Araujo used his vehicle as a weapon. An outraged community is demanding justice — and change.

A rally in July to protest the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Houston. (Mark Felix / AFP via Getty)© Mark Felix

HOUSTON — As the sun set on a late September evening, a voice rose over the din of traffic at the roadside memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old husband and father fatally shot here by immigration authorities three months ago.

Sitting on barbershop steps, Berta Lopez, a nearby resident, alternately sang, recited prayers and cried for a man she never met.

“It was unjust — he was killed unjustly! The family is deeply hurt, his wife, his children. They are like family to us. And why don’t they show the people who did the killing? Why don’t they show them? Why don’t they release the names of the people who killed Lorenzo? Why don’t they expose them?” she said in Spanish.

In tears, Lopez said that after more than a year of intensive operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Salgado Araujo’s killing was a clarifying moment. The government, she said, saw those who weren’t U.S. citizens as less than nothing. She was tired of it.

“Just because we’re Hispanic, shouldn’t we hold our heads high? No, God doesn’t want us hanging our heads in shame. He wants all of us, his children, to hold our heads up high,” Lopez said. “God doesn’t care about papers.”

Lopez’s hurt and anger were reflected in NBC News interviews with more than three dozen Houston-area Latinos, elected officials, activists and political strategists. They reveal a distraught community whose members feel degraded by the messages they hear out of Washington, D.C., during President Donald Trump’s second term. They said they have been terrorized by the constant stories of those detained, many wrongly, and left to languish. They were aghast that the government was sending immigrants to countries they had never heard of.

Many said Salgado Araujo’s shooting death crystallized their feelings of powerlessness. Most Latinos were better versed in the details of the incident than in the names and backgrounds of those running for some of the highest-profile offices in their state.

Their refrains were in the same vein: That could have been my dad, my brother, my uncle, my son — or me.

A rally in Houston's Hidalgo Park in July. Many said Salgado Araujo’s shooting death crystallized their feelings of powerlessness. (Mark Felix / AFP via Getty Images file)

© Mark Felix

“They’re being unfair. They’ve lied about a lot of things. They’re killing innocent people, breaking families apart. It’s just not right. They have no sympathy for other people,” said Julio Roa, a Houston resident who lamented what he was seeing happen in his state. “I come from Mexican parents. I’m born a U.S. citizen, but I live it day by day when they’re scared to go to the corner store.”

It all illustrates a political environment in which Republicans and Trump are bleeding support from Latinos. A new NBC News/Telemundo survey of 800 registered Latino voters nationally showed that fully 69% disapproved of the job Trump was doing as president, and 54% said they intended their midterm vote to be a signal of opposition to the president. The survey, carried out Sept. 21-28, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Notably, immigration and border security did not score high among priorities in the survey, with 6% of Latino voters calling it a top issue. But it has hit a nerve: 67% of potential Latino voters said Trump’s immigration enforcement had gone too far.

In an earlier NBC5 Dallas/Telemundo Station Group poll of Texas Latinos, respondents ranked immigration and border questions as the second-highest priority behind economic factors. That survey showed a sizable swing. In 2024, 55% of Texas Latinos supported Trump, according to exit polls, but recent surveys show statewide Democrats garnering at least 55% of the Latino vote.

That’s part of the reason Texas’ Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton has become a battleground contest and why Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, is facing perhaps his toughest-ever general election challenge, from Democrat Gina Hinojosa.

One man who once held a deep allegiance to Trump said he could not explain the regret he felt.

“I’m guilty as charged. I voted for Trump. But I never thought it was gonna happen the way that this happened,” said Albert Riseño, a plumber who works in the Houston area. Riseño is a three-time Trump voter. He described a fear that has settled over the Latino community since Trump’s second term in office.

“There’s no words to describe what’s going on,” he said. “Everybody’s scared.”

Posters, signs, flowers and other items memorialize Lorenzo Salgado 

Araujo in Houston.(Natasha Korecki / NBC News)© Natasha Korecki

Pushing back

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo woke before dawn on a hot Houston morning on July 7, as he did most days. He had lived in the U.S. for decades without legal status but was in the process of getting a work permit. He had no criminal record.

He picked up workers in his white van and was driving to a jobsite when he was pursued by immigration agents in unmarked vehicles. An officer shot him, according to authorities, after they say he used his vehicle to ram them. It’s a story contradicted by witnesses in the van, but it’s one immigration authorities have told before in explaining how a traffic pursuit turned deadly.

This time, though, the family wasn’t having it. Salgado Araujo’s eldest son stood before cameras and delivered an emotional testimonial to his father that went viral.

“He was a hardworking family man who never wanted his name to be known by anyone outside of his family,” Ronaldo Salgado said at a news conference days after his father’s shooting, as his brother held up a photo of their father.

Ronaldo Salgado stressed that the story of his dad ramming government vehicles could not be true. Their father had always taught his kids that if law enforcement attempted to pull them over, they were to pull off the road, hand over their license and registration and act respectfully.

In the end, authorities admitted Salgado Araujo was not the intended target of the operation.

In an interview with NBC News, Ronaldo Salgado said as immigration arrests became more prevalent in 2025, they talked to their father about the procedure if he had an encounter, including calling his family, and that they’d contact their attorneys.

“Just remember, don’t sign anything. Call us,” Ronaldo Salgado said he told his father.

Sitting at Las Perras Cafe in Houston, where a makeshift altar to his father sits in the corner, Ronaldo Salgado recited the names of those who had been killed by immigration officers, including Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Ruben Ray Martinez, saying the country is not now safe because of their deaths.

“These are lives that are lost, and they need to be investigated, just like any other life lost. It needs to be investigated with the full cooperation of the agents involved and the agencies involved,” the son said.

Ronaldo Salgado at a makeshift altar to his father, Lorenzo Salgado 

Araujo, at Las Perras Cafe in Houston. (Natasha Korecki / NBC News)

© Natasha Korecki

“All of this isn’t making us any safer. How is going after my dad going to work making the city safer?” Ronaldo Salgado said. “Criminals don’t wake up at 5 in the morning to pick up their crew and go to do a day of backbreaking labor. You don’t.”

In an unusual move, federal officials made public an FBI search warrant to get inside Salgado Araujo’s van after his death. Then, federal officials released a stinging detail: The bureau sought entry to look at baggies with crystals that they said resembled meth.

When he heard that, Ronaldo Salgado said he couldn’t help but break into a little smile: “Ohhh, they messed up.”

He knew what it was. And it would only make things worse for federal authorities. It was a homemade electrolyte mixture, mainly of salt, that his father later mixed into Gatorade for himself and workers to combat the triple-digit Houston summer heat outside.

The U.S. attorney’s office later confirmed that the mix was in fact not methamphetamine, surprising few who knew Salgado Araujo.

Ronaldo Salgado felt it was an effort to sully his father’s reputation and dampen public outrage.

The implication just added to community anger, viewed as a thinly veiled attempt at smearing the man immigration authorities killed.

“It really shook the community,” said Jasmine Khadem González, an immigrant rights organizer with the Houston Democratic Socialists of America. “A lot of us who are Latino, we have somebody in our family: If it’s not our father then it’s our uncle who has a very similar job. … To see somebody like that be targeted for just being on his way to work or for the color of his skin or for the kind of truck that he’s driving — because it’s associated with Latino men — to see somebody like that be targeted for doing a very everyday thing. For just existing.”

In the NBC News/Telemundo poll, 31% of Latino voters say they or someone close to them started carrying identification over concerns about ICE enforcement, while 27% say they know someone who has been deported or detained by ICE in the last two years.

Amy Zachmeyer, the executive director of New Economy for Working Houston, a group that helped organize community vigils and demanded accountability and transparency in the probe, said the Salgado family’s high-profile pushback kept authorities in check.

“They’ve shown incredible strength to be able to really defend their father,” she said.

Zachmeyer grew emotional as she spoke about the sons. “They never let a narrative set in that he was anything but a loving father, a Houstonian, a Texan, a hard worker.”
Anger reshapes local politics

Adrian Garcia, a Harris County commissioner, said Latinos are “feeling a lot of attack and disrespect.” Over the last year, he’s worked to reach out to those who don’t vote often. From his view, people now are willing to walk across broken glass to send a message to the Trump administration.

“The low-propensity voters that I’ve been speaking to absolutely have a great intensity to vote in this election, and they specifically speak to ICE enforcement. A lot of young kids: ‘I’m voting for my mom. I’m voting for my dad.’ I hear that a lot,” Garcia said.

More Latino registered voters than ever — 72% — rated their interest in the upcoming election as 10 out of 10 in the NBC News/Telemundo poll.

Garcia described the greater impact that fear of immigration enforcement has had across the Texas economy.

“This is not what our community deserves, and it is also what is impacting the things that we care about the most, the business, the economy. They’re hurting the industry,” he said. “They’re hurting those who work hard and play by the rules.”

Jareli Barrera, who works as a server at the popular Cielito Cafe in Houston, said she has never been so tuned into an election. Today, she said she’s helping others, including co-workers, to register to vote.

She cannot stand seeing the level of fear in her community, including among those who are citizens but fear being separated from family or an aggressive encounter.

“Republicans are probably going to lose. It’s not going to be the greatest thing for them at the end of the day,” Barrera said. “Most of these immigrants are the ones that are making the U.S. successful. They’re doing the hard work. … If everyone’s deported, who’s gonna do the hard labor? Who’s gonna construct? Who’s going to do all this cleaning that they don’t want to do?”

Since 2025, local activist groups have tried to work with the city of Houston to better protect Latinos as they watched intense enforcement operations in cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Chicago upend life for residents and lead to encounters with immigration authorities that turned violent or deadly.

Jennefer Canales-Pelaez, a Houston-based senior policy attorney and strategist with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, said Salgado Araujo’s death was a “culmination of years of Texas entrenching itself, entangling itself with ICE” and “illustrated to them the fear, the levels of persecution of justice that immigrant communities have been living with in Texas for a very long time.”

Before Salgado Araujo’s death, Canales-Pelaez was among those who worked to deter cooperation between Houston police and federal police agencies and pushed for greater transparency into immigration operations. Abbott, the three-term governor and a staunch Trump ally who is up for re-election in November, threatened to block $200 million in grants to Houston and other major cities if they didn’t change local rules that directed police forces not to hold individuals they encounter for longer time periods to assist ICE. The cities, including Houston, reworded their ordinances.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire, a centrist Democrat, told The New York Times last October that he kept his head down as other city and state leaders in the country grew combative with the White House over immigration operations. Whitmire said his city had avoided “turmoil” that others faced.

Whitmire initially declared his hands were tied after the shooting; the Houston Police Department had no jurisdiction to conduct an independent investigation. After community uproar, the city changed course. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has now launched a probe, with the county government approving the $2.5 million request to fund it.

“It ignited this flame and really showed other people that aren’t necessarily living this experience or working in this line of work, ‘Oh, this got to us,’” Canales-Pelaez said. “When the mayor told us that we weren’t going to be another Minneapolis, we weren’t going to be a Los Angeles, well, now we are. Someone’s dead. That really has sparked this rage, this collective, righteous anger.”

A makeshift memorial for Salgado Araujo in Houston in July. Most Latinos 

were better versed in the details surrounding his death than in the names

and backgrounds of those running for some of the highest-profile offices

in their state. (Mark Felix / AFP via Getty Images file) © Mark Felix

Republican recalibration

Abbott, who has long taken a hard-line stance on immigration, was silent on the Salgado Araujo shooting for a week but then ended up backing an independent investigation.

“Immigration laws can be enforced, and stopping illegal immigration from coming across our border can be achieved, without shooting people,” Abbott said in mid-July.

Paxton, the Republican state attorney general locked in a tight race with Talarico for the Senate seat, met with the U.S. Hispanic Business Council last week and made supportive statements about an immigration program designed to help industries in need of workers.

Paxton has aggressively supported Trump’s immigration policies and in June boasted that his office had blocked public money to help pay for legal representation for immigrants facing deportation. Paxton had described the practice as “evil and wicked.”

Last week, Paxton had a softer tone on another aspect of immigration.

“Our birth population isn’t keeping up with demand, and so as long as we are doing this by the rule of law,” Paxton said, “I’m open to having help.”

Ronaldo Salgado doesn’t rail against Republicans or Trump. He has stressed that the quest to investigate exactly what went wrong in a deadly encounter with law enforcement “should not be a partisan issue.”

He also said those incensed by what they see should vote in November.

“Immigrants’ rights shouldn’t be a partisan issue, and I just urge faithfully to look for and to vote for candidates who honor and respect the lives and rights of immigrants,” he said. “Every single elected official right now has immigrants living in their districts, in their states, their neighborhoods, and it’s their job to protect them. And if they’re not willing to protect them, then people should elect someone else that will.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

A 'Kent State Moment'—When Power Gaslights What We Can all See With Our Own Eyes, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 A 'Kent State Moment'—When Power Gaslights What We Can all See With Our Own Eyes

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 10, 2026

There are moments in this nation’s history when what the powerful say is so transparently opposed to what any reasonable person can see—with their own eyes, with their own conscience—that we must call it what it is.

This is one of those moments.

Renee Nicole Good should still be alive.

Renee Nicole Good

She was a 37-year-old mother and an award-winning poet, driving with her
partner shortly after dropping off her child at school in Minneapolis when an ICE agent fired—killing her (Bjornson, 2026). 

Video footage and eyewitness accounts suggest she was not charging anyone, not wielding a weapon, not threatening lethal harm. Instead, the footage shows a woman who moments before being shot said, “I’m not mad at you,” revealing a human being clinging to peace even as violence unfolded.

Accordingly, I encourage you to see the video from the perspective of the ICE agents posted by The Guardian to witness a peaceful Renee Good with one of the two cops who then calls her a "f-ing bitch" right before she was shot in the face one or more times and summarily killed (Vargas, 2026).

But instead of truth, we are being offered something far worse: denial dressed up as an official story. How deeply offensive.

Kristi Noem

In the hours and days after Renee’s death, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance rushed forward with sharp, self-serving narratives about self-defense and “domestic terrorism.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued a premature, a priori conclusion—declaring Renee a threat before facts, investigations, or even basic accountability have been offered. 

And what's with the get-up? Wearing an over-sized cowboy hat worn for a photo op, jarringly out of step with the gravity of the moment. Even her eyes were hidden—mirroring masked ICE agents whose anonymity shields their violence from accountability.

This is not leadership. This is gaslighting.

Gaslighting isn’t merely lying. It is attempting to make the public distrust its own senses—its own basic moral compass. It insists that what feels wrong, what looks wrong, and what is wrong is somehow righteous, necessary, inevitable—or something else altogether.

This is why this moment feels like a Kent State moment.

Kent State was not only the killing of four students by the National Guard in 1970. It was the lie that followed—the attempt to justify lethal state force against unarmed youth, and then to sanitize that violence into a narrative of necessity. Despite photographs, witnesses, and tears, officials tried to tell the nation that nothing extraordinary had happened—that the pain we saw was a distortion. The lie was worse than the bullets. It asked us to turn away from what history later confirmed was inescapably undeniable.

Because what followed Kent State wasn’t just outrage. It was a breaking point in how Americans saw state power and the stories told to protect it.

That is why I am calling this a Kent State moment.

And I am not alone (e.g., OB Rag, 2026).

What makes this moment especially eerie—almost unbearable in its symmetry—is geography itself. According to The Associated Press, Renee Good was killed about a mile from where Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in 2020. One mile. Close enough that the memory of that pavement, that breath, that collective trauma still lingers in the city’s air. The distance is short, but the connection is vast—linking the two deaths in public memory as reminders of how easily state violence reappears, even after national reckoning, including promises of reform.

Here at home in Washington, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, herself moved to tears, did what true representatives are supposed to do: she named the human pain this incident has caused and asked those on the other side of the aisle to show something called humanity—to care about a mother who lost her life, a family shattered, and a community outraged. Crockett’s voice broke as she asked: Where is the decency? The courage? The basic heart to acknowledge a life lost, rather than rush to defend federal force?

Her tears were not performative. They were painfully real—so honest they undid me. They became a moral mirror, exposing a political body far more concerned with controlling its story than confronting the searing truth of a mother’s death and a child left orphaned.

And that is the real tragedy here.

Because this was not an abstract policy clash. This was a human being—a wife, a mother, a friend, a neighbor—whose last moments were recorded not as an act of aggression, but as a cry for peace and connection. Her partner’s anguished pain—chasing the car, saying “They shot my wife”—is etched into the conscience of any American who has ever lost someone they loved.

And yet the strongest responses from the federal stage have been attempts to reframe reality instead of confronting it.

To repeat, this is gaslighting. They are telling us what to see, even as the evidence screams otherwise. Power is demanding obedience to a lie.

That is why we must say, clearly: We see what happened. We see the video. We see the pain. We refuse to let a political narrative overwrite what is unmistakably evident.

A Kent State moment is not just a historical comparison. It is a wake-up call. It is a moment of moral reckoning when the state’s attempt to redefine reality collides with the undeniable truth that humans can see with their own eyes and feel in their own hearts.

We should not let this go quietly.

Renee Nicole Good deserves more than euphemism or spin. Her family deserves honesty. And the American public deserves leaders willing to name what is true rather than protect a narrative that defies what we all can plainly see.

This is not just politics. This is conscience.

And we should not pretend it is anything less.

References

Associated Press. (2026, January 7). ICE officer kills a Minneapolis driver in a deadly start to Trump’s latest immigration operation. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-immigration-enforcement-shooting-crackdown-surge-173e00fa7388054e98c3b5b9417c1e5a

Bjornson, G. (2026, January 8). Renee Good had just dropped 6-year-old off at school when she encountered ICE. Soon her partner was crying, “They just shot my wife.” People. https://people.com/renee-good-dropped-6-year-old-off-at-school-before-ice-encounter-11881867

OB Rag. (2026, January 8). ICE agent who killed Renee Good needs to be identified, arrested and brought to trial for murder. OB Rag. https://obrag.org/2026/01/ice-agent-who-killed-renee-good-needs-to-be-identified-arrested-and-brought-to-trial-for-murder/

Vargas, R. A. (2026, January 9). Renee Nicole Good said ‘I’m not mad at you’ before ICE agent shot her, video shows. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/09/ice-agent-minneapolis-bodycam-footage

West, A., & Fiorillo, C. (2026, January). Kristi Noem hides face under massive ‘stupid’ cowboy hat as she gives update on ICE shooting. MSN. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/kristi-noem-hides-face-under-massive-stupid-cowboy-hat-as-she-gives-update-on-ice-shooting/ar-AA1TXHXU

Secret Attempted Deportation of Close to 700 Guatemalan Children Blocked by Federal Judge, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Secret Attempted Deportation of Close to 700 Guatemalan Children Blocked by Federal Judge

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

September 1, 2025

Staffers of the Attorney General's Office take the data of relatives outside of the Returnee Reception Center while waiting for the arrival of minors intended to be deported from the United States, at the Guatemalan Air Force Base in Guatemala City on Aug. 31. Johan Ordonez/AFP Getty Images

In a stunning and chilling move over the holiday weekend, the Trump administration attempted to secretly deport hundreds of Guatemalan children—The Guardian reporting as many as 700—loading some onto planes before a federal judge intervened. Justice Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, issued a temporary order halting the expulsions, noting that these children were being denied their legal right to seek asylum and risked being sent back to danger. Thanks to the National Immigration Law Center for defending these children's rights.

Attorneys did not mince words: this was child abuse disguised as policy.

Without the judge’s intervention, terrified children would have been expelled in the dead of night, stripped of protections guaranteed under U.S. law.

Of all this administration’s cruelties toward immigrants and its utter disregard for human rights, this stands out as an outlier among outliers. Not just Trump, but advisor Stephen Miller’s fingerprints are smeared across this operation—Miller, whose sadistic obsession with inflicting pain on immigrant families has long driven the administration’s most inhumane policies. 

Critics have even drawn chilling comparisons between Miller and Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s infamous propagandist, noting their shared reliance on fear, lies, and dehumanization as tools of power (Daily Kos, 2017). 

Joseph Goebbels and Stephen Miller.  Source: Daily Kos

Like Goebbels, his uncanny look-alike, Miller, understands that words and images can be weaponized: the relentless portrayal of immigrants as threats, the unending refrain of ‘invasion’ rhetoric, and the poisonous lie that immigrant children are a burden rather than a blessing.

Goebbels used propaganda to normalize the unthinkable; Miller uses policy and spin to achieve the same end—conditioning the public to accept, even rationalize, the abuse of small and young, vulnerable human beings.

What makes this episode even more alarming are the unanswered questions. We still do not know the exact ages of the children targeted—whether toddlers and very young children were among those nearly deported. If so, how many? Nor do we know where they were being held under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or in what conditions.

Equally disturbing is the possibility that ICE or U.S. Department of Health and Human Service officials ignored their own legal safeguards. Were attorneys, guardians, or child advocates notified in advance? If not, then the government sought to disappear children into dangerous situations without even the most basic due process protections.

And what of the dangers these children would face if returned? Violence, poverty, persecution—none of this appears to have been meaningfully assessed. Let us not forget: these are children who already managed the treacherous path from Guatemala to the U.S., carrying trauma from violence, displacement, and the long, perilous journey north. To now subject them to sudden deportation only compounds their mental anguish, turning resilience into retraumatization.

Finally, there are questions about whether the Guatemalan government truly requested their return, or whether this claim was exaggerated by the Department of Justice to justify a rushed and unlawful operation.

These children did not—nor have they ever—posed any risks to our country. The only “risks” here are the ones fabricated by a xenophobic administration: the false claim that children are a burden on our schools, that immigrant families undermine our communities, or that asylum seekers threaten national security. These are bogus risks, built on fear and racism, not fact.

We cannot remain silent.

Join us Thursday, September 4th at 5PM for the Austin SDS Rally—UT students standing against the Trump administration’s bigoted and reactionary agenda.

References

Eisner, C. (2025, Aug. 31) Hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children can stay in the U.S. for now, judge says, Morning Edition, NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/08/31/nx-s1-5524312/federal-judge-block-guatemalan-children-deportation

Guardian. (2025, Aug. 31). Judge orders US to halt deportation of hundreds of Guatemalan children, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/31/judge-blocks-deportation-guatemalan-children

hammerinhank. (2017, November 5). Trump’s Stephen Miller and Hitler’s Joseph Goebbels are chillingly similar. Daily Kos. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/5/1687333/-Trump-s-Stephen-Miller-and-Hitler-s-Joseph-Goebbels-are-chillingly-similar?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Jordan, M. & Kavi, A. (2025, Aug. 31). Judge Halts U.S. Effort to Deport Guatemalan Children as Planes Sit on Tarmac, New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/us/politics/trump-deportations-judge-guatemala-children.html