FBI Quits Probing Assaults By ICE Agents as Killings Rise
NEWS & RESEARCH
On July 16, 2026, FBI managers around the country received written guidance that the Bureau would no longer scrutinize confrontations between immigrants and immigration agents. Yet within the span of just one week in July 2026, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers shot and killed two men—first in Houston and then in Maine—marking at least eleven civilian deaths by immigration officers in Trump’s second term. In Texas, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican homebuilder without any criminal record, was driving three co-workers to a construction site when unmarked ICE vehicles suddenly boxed in his van. According to the surviving passengers, an ICE officer opened fire almost immediately after stepping out, shooting Salgado Araujo through the passenger-side window. The Harris County Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide. Just days later, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian man who was authorized to work in the United States, was shot after exiting his vehicle at a home that ICE was surveilling. In both cases, the person killed was not ICE’s target. In Houston, they were looking for a Guatemalan man whom they thought resembled someone in Salgado Araujo’s van. ICE argues that its officers acted in self-defense in both cases, even claiming that Salgado Araujo "weaponized" his van and tried to run an agent over, but the eyewitnesses dispute nearly every element of that account, stating that no officer ever stood in front of the vehicle and that the van was crawling through a construction zone at no more than five miles per hour. Agents were not wearing body cameras and did not have dashboard cameras in their vehicles at the time of either incident.
SOURCES: Washington Post | AP | New York Times | The Guardian | NBC | CBS | KPRC 2 | Houston Public Media | Maine Monitor | New York Times
ANALYSIS & OPINION
Under the new guidance, responsibility for investigating cases involving federal immigration officers would likely fall to Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, effectively leaving the agency to investigate itself. No immigration officer has been charged with murder in any of the eleven killings even though bystander video from previous shootings has, in several cases, shown that ICE was the aggressor and did not act in self-defense. This casts doubt on ICE's statements about the Houston and Maine shooting—as US Senate candidate James Talarico put it, "Previous incidents have shown that this agency cannot be trusted to report all the facts." Civil rights groups and elected officials are calling for independent investigations, while the Trump administration has been pressuring the witnesses who were in the van with Salgado Araujo to self-deport, "mak[ing] it harder for them to share their version of events." The killings also raise doubts that the officers ICE is putting on the street are fit to carry a badge and gun at all. David Brouillette, the agent who killed Durán Guerrero in Maine, was hired this year despite a documented history of violence, including a police response to his home after he threw his teenage daughter through a glass table. He had initially been rejected by military recruiters over his mental health. His case is arguably the predictable result of the administration's race to flood the field with enough officers to fulfill Trump's mass-deportation campaign. ICE slashed training from 13 weeks to six, dropped its age and education requirements, and vetted so loosely that one Slate reporter was offered a job with no drug test or background check at all. ICE recruitment ads have leaned on white-nationalist dogwhistles, with posters and social media posts echoing neo-Nazi propaganda. And all of this is happening under relentless White House pressure to produce numbers—with arrests topping 2,000 a day.
SOURCES: The Guardian | PBS | PBS | NPR | Slate | AP | NBC | NBC | Washington Post | Southern Poverty Law Center | Houston Public Media
HOW TO FIX IT
Federal action:
Pass the Justice in Policing Act. This bill would strip all federal law enforcement officers—including, by definition (28 U.S.C. § 2680(h)), ICE agents—of their qualified immunity, the legal shield that lets officers escape accountability in court, no matter how egregious their misconduct. It would also mandate body cameras and dashcams, require independent investigations of killings by federal officers, create a national misconduct registry, and set a deadly-force-as-last-resort standard. If the act does not get passed as an entirety, Congress could introduce bills regarding individual components of this legislation.
Pass a statute that lets people sue over ICE's constitutional violations. Congress would have to expressly grant the right to sue through a bill like the Accountability for Federal Law Enforcement Act, which would let individuals—regardless of citizenship—sue federal officers and agencies for constitutional violations, or the ICE and CBP Constitutional Accountability Act, which amends the Federal Tort Claims Act to make the government liable for ICE violations specifically, allowing the families of the people who were killed to hold ICE accountable in federal court.
Pass the Under Color of Law Accountability Act, which would make it a federal crime for anyone acting under color of law—ICE officers included—to use excessive force.
Pass the Federal Law Enforcement Standards and Accountability (FLESA) Act. Introduced after ICE killings in Minneapolis, the bill sets enforceable minimum standards for federal law-enforcement hiring and training. It would prohibit the kind of abbreviated training that cut ICE's academy from 13 weeks to six, bar agencies from deploying officers before their background checks are complete, block the hiring of anyone affiliated with a hate group, and apply these standards to officers already on the job. Agency officials who deploy officers without the required qualifications and training would face disciplinary actions. Importantly, the bill would also authorize states to bring civil actions against federal agencies like ICE that violate individuals’ constitutional rights.
Pass the Immigration Enforcement Staff Body Camera Accountability Act. It mandates body cameras for ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and says that officers who fail to record will face furlough, pay cuts, or suspension. It also establishes that a non-recording can't be written off as a "malfunction" unless the officer can prove it. Congress could strengthen this legislation even further by adding an adverse-inference rule, stating that any missing footage is presumed unfavorable to the agency. Other legislation, like the FOCUS Act, would go broader, extending a camera mandate to all federal officers doing immigration enforcement—instead of just ICE and CBP agents—but it leaves the consequences for not recording up to each agency rather than writing them into law.
Codify use-of-force standards. Proposed by Democratic leaders, this would write a reasonable use-of-force policy into law, expand training, require officer certification, and pull any officer involved in an incident from the field until an investigation is done. One step in this direction is the ICE Standards Act, which would require mandatory training in de-escalation and require not only body cameras but also dashboard ones.
Pass the DHS Use of Force Transparency Act, which would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, to turn over evidence in ICE-related injuries and deaths to Congress, including body-camera footage and incident reports.
Pass legislation mandating that DHS publicly release the officer's name and all footage within 72 hours of a fatal shooting. Such transparency is important, because even if officers wear cameras, the administration could still withhold that footage. And even more than a week after the Houston shooting, DHS has still not released the identity of the agent who was responsible for the killing.
Condition ICE funding on granting state and local investigators scene access and honoring state judicial warrants. In Houston, ICE denied the local District Attorney (DA) and his team access to the scene, even though the DA’s office was conducting its own investigation and such access would normally be granted in an officer-involved shooting. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, investigators were turned away by DHS from a fatal-shooting scene despite holding a signed judicial warrant.
Bar the deportation of any noncitizen who witnessed a federal officer's use of force or serious misconduct until the resulting investigation and proceedings conclude. This closes an obvious conflict of interest: the government should not be able to deport the very people who witnessed its officers' conduct.
Pass legislation prohibiting arrest quotas and requiring individualized, documented probable cause for each stop by ICE. When the incentive is to hit a daily number, agents are pressured to act first and verify later—like how they boxed in Salgado Araujo’s van because they thought someone inside merely “resembled” the actual person they were looking for. While removing quotas would not, on its own, stop a violent or reckless officer from pulling the trigger, it would eliminate one of the systemic pressures that put encounters like this in motion to begin with.
State action:
Pass bills like California’s No Kings Act (SB 747), which lets individuals file civil lawsuits against federal officials through state court. Although Egbert bars these suits in federal court, a state-law right to sue offers a way around that wall.
Litigation:
Minnesota v. Morgan and Minnesota v. Castro: Minnesota prosecutors charged two ICE officers under state law for their conduct during a Minneapolis immigration crackdown, which left two people dead. Both face assault charges, and Castro also faces a false-reporting charge for lying about the shooting. Morgan is now trying to remove his case to federal court, arguing the state can't prosecute him for carrying out federal duties. The outcome will decide whether a state can put a federal officer on trial at all—potentially opening the door for prosecutors to charge officers in fatal cases like those in Texas and Maine.
Minnesota v. DHS/DOJ:State and local prosecutors in Minnesota sued the federal government for withholding evidence in three earlier ICE shootings, and have since pried loose hard drives, body-camera video, and even a victim's car. This matters directly to Houston, where Harris County faces the identical stonewall. If Minnesota wins, it establishes that a state can legally compel federal agencies to share evidence and turn over what they’re hiding.
Legislation: H.R.5361 - Justice in Policing Act | S.3470 - Accountability for Federal Law Enforcement Act | H.R.7297 - ICE and CBP Constitutional Accountability Act | S.3804 - Under Color of Law Accountability Act | H.R.4651 - Immigration Enforcement Staff Body Camera Accountability Act | S.3699 - FOCUS Act | H.R.7870 - ICE Standards Act | H.R.7984 - DHS Use of Force Transparency Act of 2026 | SB 747 (California)
