One wrong move could put you in ICE’s crosshairs.
Jul 17, 2026
I want to tell you something I haven’t said out loud to many people, because it sounds a little crazy. I’ve started thinking, when I pull my old Highlander out of the underground garage after dark, about what I’d do if a big blacked-out van suddenly cut me off and men I couldn’t identify came rushing at my car.
I’m not being dramatic. I’m a graying, white, Protestant-looking guy. Nobody’s profiling me as an undocumented immigrant. But I live in Los Angeles, in a city where carjackings and street crime aren’t rumors. They’re the average bad night on the news.
So, if that van boxed me in and those men didn’t announce who they were, my first instinct wouldn’t be to sit still and wait for a badge to appear in the window. It would be to get away.
That’s not defiance. That’s the oldest wiring we’ve got, the same fight-or-flight reflex that’s kept primates alive since before we had language for it.
Here’s the part that keeps me up at night. Under current ICE practice, that reflex could get me killed. Not because I did anything wrong, but because a federal agent in an unmarked vehicle, wearing no visible insignia, maybe masked, decided in a half-second that my car had become a weapon.
That’s not a hypothetical that I invented over martinis. Similar events have played out repeatedly this year alone.
The body count is real
On July 7, ICE agents in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national with no criminal record who was close to getting a work permit after three decades in the country. DHS says he rammed an agent’s vehicle and tried to run one over. Witnesses riding with him in the van tell a different story, and reporting afterward suggested the agents may have had the wrong man entirely.
Six days later, in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE agent shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national who left behind a wife and a three-year-old daughter. He wasn’t even the person the agents were looking for. DHS said he tried to flee and “weaponized” the vehicle. There’s no body camera footage. There rarely is.
Those two killings came on top of a string of earlier ones. That string stretched back to a Homeland Security Investigations shooting in Texas in March of last year and included the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Good during the Minneapolis operation this past January. Together, they finally embarrassed Homeland Security into action.
Maine’s Republican senator, Susan Collins, personally called DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and asked him to halt non-urgent vehicle stops. ICE grudgingly agreed. Word went out to Enforcement and Removal Operations agents that most traffic stops were paused, pending retraining, with exceptions for warrants and joint operations.
That lasted about twenty-four hours.
Trump took to Truth Social and torched it. Vehicle stops, he said, are one of ICE’s “most important and effective” tools, and the agency could not give them up. He accused Democrats of wanting the pause and vowed it wouldn’t happen on his watch. Mullin, who a day earlier had greenlit the halt, pivoted publicly to say he and the president were “on the same page.” By Wednesday night, ICE field offices were telling agents, verbally, that stops were back on the table.
Twenty-four hours. That’s how long safety lasted.
This isn’t an aberration but a pattern
I don’t want to relitigate any one shooting on its individual facts. Courts and investigators can sort out who said what and whether a particular agent reasonably feared for his life in a particular moment.
What worries me is bigger than any single case. It’s an operational style and a presidential instinct that treat extrajudicial force as a tool of first resort rather than last resort.
Look at where else this administration has reached for the trigger without asking permission. The U.S. Navy has carried out roughly sixty strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing more than two hundred people on the theory that anyone aboard a boat suspected of running narcotics is a combatant rather than a criminal suspect, meaning no arrest, no trial, no due process, just a missile. There’s no congressional authorization for any of this. There’s no conclusive public accounting of who died or why.
Then there’s Iran. Asked directly about a strike that hit a girls’ school in Minab and killed over a hundred children, Trump’s answer wasn’t an investigation. It was a shrug, followed by the suggestion that the images might be AI-generated. No report has been produced. None seems to be coming.
You start to see the throughline. An administration willing to kill foreign civilians without congressional sanction, and willing to kill suspected traffickers at sea without so much as an arrest, is not going to blink hard at ICE agents shooting through a windshield on a residential street and calling it self-defense.
The trigger-happy stop in Houston or Biddeford isn’t an anomaly produced by bad training, though sometimes it is that too. It’s the domestic expression of a foreign-policy habit: kill first, explain never, and if pressed, cast doubt on the evidence.
What worries me about November
Here’s where the personal and the political collide for me. I plan to vote in the midterms. I intend to drive to my polling place as I have my whole adult life. But I’d be lying if I said the last few weeks haven’t put a small, cold thought in the back of my head: what happens if ICE agents, feeling free to operate exactly as aggressively as the president has just told them to, are anywhere near my neighborhood or my polling place on election day?
Trump has spent months laying rhetorical groundwork for challenging results he doesn’t like, warning about foreign meddling and communist subversion of state election systems. He re-rang his favorite false alarms in a speech to the nation last night. Call it the Big Lie Relaunch.
Layer that onto a federal agency that has just been told, in no uncertain terms, that pausing to reconsider its most dangerous tactic was a mistake, and you have the ingredients, if not yet the recipe, for something that could genuinely suppress turnout.
Nobody has to round up voters at the polls to have an effect. All it takes is enough stories like Houston and Biddeford circulating in the weeks before an election to make some people, especially in immigrant neighborhoods, decide it isn’t worth the risk of driving to the polls.
I want to be honest about what this is and isn’t. It’s a fear, not a fact. Nobody has instituted a plan to station unmarked vans outside polling places. But I’ve lived long enough, and worked in enough corners of government, to know that you don’t need a written plan for intimidation to work.
And this administration, whatever else you say about it, has shown again and again that it understands the value of fear as a governing tool, whether it’s aimed at a suspected trafficker in a boat, a family fleeing what looks like an ambush in a parking garage, or a voter deciding whether the drive to the polls is worth it this year.
Spinning all this into a worst-case scenario may seem a bit paranoid. But there is a paper trail. Last January Trump mused about sending the National Guard to seize ballot boxes and voting machines, an idea he’d actually drafted as an executive order back in December 2020 and, by his own admission, regrets not signing. Steve Bannon has gone further. On his own podcast he’s called for ICE to “surround the polls” this November, and more recently framed the agency’s March airport deployments as a “test run” for election day.
Trump himself hasn’t endorsed the idea. His press secretary said in February she’d never heard him discuss it. But she wouldn’t rule it out either. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Put armed agents and uniformed troops anywhere near a polling place, and you don’t just get suppressed turnout. You get the conditions for a confrontation, and confrontations with this administration have a way of turning violent.
I hope I’m wrong in thinking this way. I’d like nothing better than to write a follow-up in December admitting I let my imagination run away with me. But I’ve watched this administration reverse a safety pause in a single news cycle, and I’ve watched it decline, again and again, to investigate its own body count. That’s not a record that earns the benefit of the doubt.
So, I’ll drive to the polls anyway. I just won’t pretend that the unthinkable doesn’t cross my mind.