ICE and DHS’s growing record of deception

Earlier this month, ICE agents in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican man who had lived in the United States for 35 years. ICE claimed Salgado Araujo, who had been driving a van, attempted to run over an ICE agent and an officer shot him “in self-defense.” Passengers who were in the van denied Salgado Araujo attempted to ram officers and disputed that the ICE officers were ever in peril. The FBI also raised the prospect that drugs were in the van—though an attorney for the Salgado Araujo family said the substance was salt mixed with lemon and water, a concoction used by outdoor workers to combat the Texas heat.

A week later, in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE agent shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian man, as he drove a car with his three-year-old daughter present. The Department of Homeland Security said he had “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement” and an officer, “fearing for public safety,” shot him—though none of the available video confirmed that account.

There’s no reason to believe the ICE and DHS explanations in these cases, for each has been caught issuing false statements about previous episodes, including other fatal shootings, such as those of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year. Since President Donald Trump initiated his brutal mass deportation campaign, the two agencies have jointly racked up a solid record of deceit and attempted cover-ups.

Here’s an incomplete list of incidents demonstrating ICE and DHS deception. The lying has become routine.

In July 2025, George Retes, a 25-year-old US citizen and Army veteran who did a tour in Iraq, was driving to his job as a security guard at a cannabis farm in southern California, where ICE and CBP agents conducting a raid had set up a roadblock. After he tried to gain permission to pass, he says, an agent pepper -sprayed him, smashed his window and dragged him out of the car. He was arrested, held in a jail for three days, and denied access to an attorney. DHS issued a statement saying he had assaulted an officer. Yet that explanation was undermined by DHS’s own action—or inaction. It did not file charges against Retes. Still, the department continued to reiterate the claim he had committed assault without bringing a case against him.

In August 2025, a man named Francisco Longoria was stopped by masked federal agents as he was driving in San Bernardino, California. When he did not obey a command to open the window and exit the car—the agents had refused to identify themselves—the officers shattered the window. As Longoria drove away, an officer fired on the car. No one was hit. DHS later said Longoria struck two officers with his vehicle and the officer had fired his gun in self-defense. Video subsequently reviewed by local journalists showed that there had been no attempt to run down the officers.

On September 30, DHS agents raided a Chicago building and detained 37 immigrants. The agency claimed the site was “filled” with Tren de Aragua gang members and violent criminals. A ProPublica investigation found that the agents arrested only two people allegedly tied to the gang. Ultimately, the raid yielded no criminal charges.

On October 4, a Border Patrol agent in Chicago shot Marimar Martinez several times while she was in her car. (She was wounded but not fatally). A DHS statement said that officers were “ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles” and that the shots were “defensive.” She was charged with assaulting federal officers with a deadly weapon. But her lawyer insisted that while she had been following the agents to warn people in the neighborhood that ICE was present, a CBP vehicle swerved into her car. Eventually body camera footage was released that confirmed his account, and the charges against her were dropped.

That month, a video of ICE officers in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, aggressively dragging a young woman out of a car, pinning her to the ground, and arresting her went viral. Tricia McLaughlin, then a DHS spokesperson, declared the video didn’t show an ICE arrest and was more than a year old. “Imagine being so desperate to demonize law enforcement you post a video from a burglary arrest Chicago Police made over a year ago,” she wrote on X. “This isn’t even ICE.” As PolitiFact subsequently noted, that was false: “Numerous videos from the incident and police statements show the video depicts an ICE arrest in Hoffman Estates.”

On October 23, 2025, Border Patrol agents under the command of Greg Bovino encountered protesters in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. Bovino fired tear gas at the crowd and later insisted that he did so after a rock was thrown at him and hit him in the helmet. DHS also made this claim. Yet in a subsequent deposition for a lawsuit filed against DHS, Bovino—after first sticking with that story—admitted no such thing happened. The federal judge overseeing that case accused him of “outright lying” during that deposition. She also said it was “difficult, if not impossible to believe” other DHS claims, such as the assertion that its agents during this incident had been attacked by gang members who had been positioned on rooftops with guns and communications gear to ambush the agents.

On January 14 in Minneapolis, an ICE agent, while trying to apprehend a Venezuelan immigrant named Alfredo Aljorna, shot his cousin, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, in the leg. DHS said the two men had violently attacked the agent—and had used a snow shovel to assault him—and the agent fired a defensive shot. But a month later, the Justice Department dropped charges that had been filed against the men, and ICE acknowledged that two of its agents had made false statements about the incident. Video showed there had been no snow shovel attack and that the ICE agent had fired a shot through the front door of Sosa-Celis’ home.

That same day in Minneapolis, two children were hospitalized after being tear-gassed near a protest against ICE. DHS blamed their parents, asserting they were “agitators.” The agency posted online, “It is horrific to see radical agitators bring children to their violent riots.” But the children were part of a family that had been in a car attempting to get home from a basketball game before being caught between ICE officers and protesters. The mother, according to CNN, had to administer CPR to her infant. Later, a DHS spokesperson acknowledged the parents were not agitators.

This is merely a partial list of DHS and ICE deception. The many lies that DHS and the Trump administration fired off about the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis have been well-documented—as has the Trump gang’s false claim that its deportation efforts are mainly targeted at criminals. These agencies and the Trump administration cannot be trusted to offer accurate accounts of their agents’ use of force and deadly violence. Which means they cannot be trusted to conduct legitimate and honest investigations of these episodes.

The recent shootings in Maine and Texas warrant independent investigations. In a previous era, the FBI might have been able to handle such an inquiry. But like all federal agencies, it has been politicized—and weaponized—by the Trump administration. That means state and local authorities available should handle these tasks

When the federal agents implementing Trump’s mass deportation crusade—who have adopted secret police tactics—mistreat, abuse, and fatally shoot residents and citizens of the United States, the public deserves answers and accountability. That won’t come from an agency and an administration that routinely lies about these tragedies.