Henry Flores, PhD Distinguished University Research Professor Emeritus
I grew up when Second World War movies were all the rage. One, in particular, made a deep impression on my little-boy psyche: the 1947 film 13 Rue Madeleine, starring James Cagney as the protagonist. Cagney plays an OSS agent (precursor to the CIA) who is arrested by the Gestapo inside Germany and tortured so severely that the Allies bomb the building he is in to make sure he does not talk.
The movie left an impression on me because of the way the Gestapo went about terrorizing and intimidating people in the cities where they operated. They roamed the streets in unmarked cars, wore long black overcoats, kidnapped people off the streets and from their homes or workplaces, then detained and tortured them. Some of the details of the torture, as told by survivors, are bone-chilling, to say the least. More often than not, the detainees were “disappeared” into the Nazi concentration camp system, never to be heard from again.
Earlier this year in Minnesota, two Americans were gunned down and killed by masked ICE agents. This week, another victim, a Mexican national, was chased, shot, and killed by another ICE agent. There have been fourteen of these events this year, and 32 detainees have died while in custody. Still, the larger question is why this country is allowing a bunch of “thugs” with guns to run around communities of poor and working people, intimidating the residents. I grew up in a working-class Mexican American community in San Antonio, Texas, during the 1950s and ’60s and, even then, raids by la migra were not uncommon. As a child, I was always told to watch out for the Border Patrol agents who patrolled our neighborhoods more than the local gendarmerie.
People at all levels of government, along with civilians, have called for investigations into the shooting of Mr. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents this week in Houston, Texas. Mr. Araujo was a law-abiding, hardworking patriarch of a three-generation family. He was a Mexican national who resided in the USA for more than 30 years, raised a family, all born here, and paid for their education so they did not have to do the back-breaking construction work he spent his life doing. He was driving his van in his neighborhood, picking up his workers so they could go to their work site, when suddenly they were chased by an unmarked vehicle. This was early in the morning, and it was difficult to identify any car in the rear-view mirror. Mr. Araujo tried to elude the vehicle—who knows who is chasing you that early in the morning in shiny black vehicles?—until they forced him to stop. Then all the facts get jumbled. ICE claims that Mr. Araujo tried to weaponize his van and run over the agents, so they shot him. Where have we heard that story before?
The next thing we know, they are taking cover behind various vehicles, just in case some of Mr. Araujo’s workers come charging at them with their construction tools or lunch boxes. They do not call for emergency assistance, even though witnesses said that Mr. Araujo was bleeding profusely from a stomach wound—it is not clear how he acquired the wound while sitting in his van—until it was too late.
If this is not a travesty of justice, then I do not know what is. Besides la migra, other police agencies have shot and killed many people of color throughout the history of law enforcement, including the Texas Rangers, local police departments, and sheriff’s deputies throughout the state. It is part of Texas history—the part that is currently being excluded from our history books—and it needs to stop.
Some of my friends will argue that we do have a right to protect our borders and grant entry only to those we wish; this is true of any sovereign nation. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about “thugs” who are supposed to be guarding our borders, roaming neighborhoods where Latinos live, arbitrarily stopping everyone who looks suspicious, and shooting them. What type of nation allows such behavior from its law enforcement people? Well, remember how I started this essay? Hitler was the sort of person who allowed and wanted this type of tyranny to reign. There are several reasons why, which will be the subject of my next essay.
