I'm a former cop. ICE isn't law enforcement, it's a militia.

Federal agents who killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7 were not looking for him.

The Department of Homeland Security says they'd spent weeks surveilling a different address after a tip from a law enforcement partner, and had noted two white vans parked there. On the morning of the shooting, agents heading back toward that address saw a white van and thought the driver "resembled the target." They stopped it. The driver was Salgado Araujo – a Mexican father of three American-citizen sons, no criminal record, decades in this country, no relationship to their investigation. Within minutes an agent shot him.

DHS has never said who they were actually looking for, whether that person was ever found or whether Salgado Araujo's van was even one of the two vehicles agents had watched for weeks. When the Texas Tribune asked directly, DHS declined to answer. An agency that spent weeks preparing an operation still shot a stranger driving coworkers to a construction site – and won't explain how it happened.

Less than a week later, the pattern repeated itself.

On July 13, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Biddeford, Maine, shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. The 25-year-old Colombian man was authorized to work in this country, driving to his job as he did every morning. DHS again said he wasn't the intended target. Neither shooting has body camera footage, because DHS still doesn't require its agents to wear them in the field.

Two men. Two mornings. Two commutes ended by an agency that couldn't tell them apart from someone else.

DHS's answer to two dead men who weren't even the right men was not to slow down. It was two press releases, each filed before the evidence was in, each using the same description: a "weaponized" vehicle.

Immigration agents have shot at 23 people. Six were killed.

But the vehicle damage points the other way: witnesses and photographs show bullet holes in Durán Guerrero's car, and body damage to Salgado Araujo's van consistent with having been struck by ICE vehicles, not the reverse. There was no independent video. Only grieving families and a federal narrative the facts don't support.

Only after the second killing did ICE order agents to pause most vehicle stops nationwide – the agency's own admission, in its own conduct, that it cannot yet run this operation safely. Border czar Tom Homan has already called that pause "short-term."

I spent 35 years in law enforcement, retiring as a commander at the San Diego County Sheriff's Office. I have investigated officer-involved shootings. I have taught use of force. I now serve as a civil rights expert witness in federal and state litigation. I write this next sentence with the full weight of that experience: What happened in Houston and in Biddeford is the predictable output of a federal agency that lacks the training, the oversight and the settled mission of a real law enforcement organization.

According to a New York Times analysis, immigration agents have shot at, or shot, at least 23 people since January 2025. As a result, six people, including three U.S. citizens have been killed, with nearly every fatal case involving officers firing at people in vehicles.

Renée Good in Minneapolis, killed. Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, killed. Julio Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis, shot in the leg – the agent who fired on him was later criminally charged after a medical exam refuted his sworn account. Now Salgado Araujo and Durán Guerrero, six days and roughly 1,800 miles apart, both the wrong men. When the script exists before the evidence does, the process is corrupt.

This isn't law enforcement. Police chiefs, sheriffs, must push back.

ICE was built after 9/11 for combatting counterterrorism and transnational crimes. It is now running door-to-door civil immigration operations with no rigorous, standardized use-of-force training regime, no independent civilian oversight of shootings, no consistent body camera requirement and no coherent mission floor. That is not law enforcement. That is a militia with a badge.

And the rot is spreading.

The FBI now carries roughly 45% of the Department of Justice's diverted immigration workload. Drug Enforcement Administration agents have been pulled off cartel and fentanyl investigations. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was gutted while extremist violence rose. Joint terrorism task forces – which every serious local police department, mine included, has staffed for two decades – have been repurposed. Every chief and sheriff whose officers still sit at those tables is now professionally attached to a federal enforcement culture that is producing dead people on neighborhood streets and outside their own front doors.

Where is the local pushback?

In Houston, the police department publicly declared there was "nothing we can do" with a killing on its own streets. In Minneapolis, elected officials went the other direction – Hennepin County has criminally charged federal agents this year, local prosecutors claiming jurisdiction over crimes committed in their community. The Supremacy Clause has limits. Those limits exist for exactly this moment.

Every silent chief, every silent sheriff, every silent command officer in this country is teaching the profession that some killings do not count. They are wrong. The public sees it. The families see it. History will see it.

Believe your eyes. Not federal press releases.

Silence is not neutrality – silence is authorization.

David Myers is a retired commander of the San Diego Sheriff's Office and a civil rights and police accountability expert witness. His writing has appeared in USA TODAY, CalMatters, the San Diego Union-Tribune and Times of San Diego.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: I'm a former cop. ICE isn't law enforcement, it's a militia.

Reporting by David Myers, Opinion contributor / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published July 27, 2026 at 2:08 AM.