Stop terrorizing migrants! Abolish ICE!
WW editorial
Aurora, Colorado, June 9, 2026.
There has been no letup in the racist terror campaign by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) against migrants and communities of color. The latest outrage making major headlines is the July 7 murder in Houston of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and father of three who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years.
Salgado Araujo was not even who the ICE thugs were looking for, but an ICE agent fired multiple shots into his car. Araujo died at the hospital several hours after the shooting. He could be heard screaming, “They are killing me,” while ICE allowed him to bleed out in the street without any medical care. Araujo, a construction business owner, was on his way to a job site with three employees when ICE agents in unmarked vehicles stopped him over an alleged traffic violation.
Now, typically, the ICE terrorists are blaming the victim, saying Araujo “weaponized” his vehicle against them. All three passengers in the car, along with members of Araujo’s family, have independently disputed this absurd claim, for which no evidence has been produced.
Not only is the Houston community holding daily protests calling for justice for Araujo, but the Mexican government is demanding that his murder be brought before the United Nations.
This is not a case of the ICE agents being “just a few bad apples.” The killing of Araujo was entirely consistent with the real mission of the fascist ICE — which is the mission of the whole capitalist state apparatus, one of repressing the working class and oppressed people.
The late chairperson of Workers World Party, Sam Marcy, explained the class character of the state: “Whatever its form, its essence is determined by which class is dominant economically and consequently also dominant politically. In contemporary society, this means the rule of the imperialist bourgeoisie over the proletariat and the oppressed nationalities.” (“A Marxist Defense of the LA Rebellion,” 1993)
ICE is showing its true nature, not only by its murder of Araujo but in its aggressive roundups of over 2,000 people per day — a number that could likely increase. An example is the detention of two Detroit high school students in Buffalo, New York. Twin 18-year-old sisters Alexka and Angely Jerez-Medina were in Buffalo for a summer job until they were detained by ICE on June 24 and held at a detention center in El Paso, Texas.
Activists in Buffalo have protested the detention and at least nine Michigan elected officials have demanded the students’ release, as have their pastor and teachers at Western International High School.
The ICE terror campaign has made immigrants afraid to go to work or school or attend religious services.
ICE — like the cops, the prisons, the courts and the whole capitalist state apparatus — can’t be reformed. Nor is the solution to replace ICE with some “kinder, gentler,” maybe a little less xenophobic version of itself. ICE must go!
Workers World joins with the thousands of protesters in Houston and all over the country in saying: “Abolish ICE!”
