| In a particularly busy news week, the killing of Joan Sebastian Guerrero by an ICE agent in Maine last Monday was easy to gloss over. |
| There have been other pressing matters consuming the national media, including the deaths of two U.S. troops in Jordan and Trump’s speech on Thursday night. |
| There have also been legitimately interesting stories about the use of inside information by government officials to personally profit — like the news that President Trump’s media company is going to sell advance access to his social media posts, and a story about how Trump’s teleprompter operator used his knowledge about what would be in Trump’s speeches in order to make money on the prediction market site Kalshi. (Only one of them is under federal investigation.) |
| Still, the death of Guerrero — a 25-year-old man who was killed in Maine by an ICE agent who was evidently looking for someone else — seemed to merit more attention, particularly coming just days after a similar incident resulted in the death in Houston of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who had lived and worked in the U.S. for 35 years. |
| We heard nothing meaningful about their deaths at the confirmation hearing to promote Todd Blanche from acting Attorney General. There was some coverage on the Sunday shows today, but not enough. One political news site managed to publish a story last week about purported concerns among some Republicans about the shootings that managed to entirely omit the names of Guerrero and Salgado Araujo (unless you count a reference to one of them in a photo caption, which you should not). |
| In both cases, the deaths appear to have been unjustified. And in both cases, once again, the Trump administration appears unwilling to mount a serious investigation into the conduct of the federal immigration agents. (This is despite massive red flags. The ex-wife of David Brouillette, the agent who killed Guerrero, said, for instance, that Brouillette was racist and violent.) |
| That itself may have been part of the problem — the sense that we have fallen into a pattern. By now, we know what the federal government will do — which, as a practical matter, is probably nothing — and we know why, which is that the administration wants to continue its aggressive and indiscriminate immigration crackdown. We know that state and local authorities would face an uphill climb investigating and criminally charging federal officials, and we know that it would be very difficult, if not practically impossible, for the families of the victims to sue the ICE agents under federal law. |
| Another factor relevant to the volume and nature of the coverage was that, unlike in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the public did not have immediate access to video that directly contradicted federal law enforcement officials’ account. That video made it possible for honest observers to say, immediately, that Trump administration officials were lying when they blamed the victims for their own deaths. |
| Still, while it is hard to disentangle these things, the fact that Good and Pretti were white protestors, unlike Guerrero and Salgado Araujo, likely also played a role in the relatively modest attention from the political and media classes. |
| You can see these even in the tenor of the coverage, which tends to get muddled on the subject of the victims’ legal status in the country. Did they enter illegally? Were they authorized to work? Did they have a pending asylum claim? |
| The details can obscure more than they illuminate. Illegal immigration is not a capital offense. |
