Houston, July 7: ICE agents prowling Houston’s East End, the city’s oldest barrio, stalked and murdered 52-year -old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in cold blood. Salgado was picking up 3 employees of his small construction company in the pre-dawn hours and preparing to drive to the suburb where they were working on homes. Salgado Araujo was well known in the Magnolia Park neighborhood—he was a cherished father, husband, neighbor and employer. He had lived in this neighborhood near Houston’s Ship Channel for 35 years after coming to the city as a teenager. He had no arrest record and never been in “trouble” of any kind.

A lot of love for Lorenzo has been expressed in Houston. There have been rallies, marches, vigils, and other forms of support for Lorenzo and his family. At the same time, the silence from the state’s political leaders—Christian Fascists one and all—has been deafening. But some of their fascist followers have popped up out of the sewers they dwell in to make ignorant, racist rants in comments sections of different social media items sympathetic to Lorenzo. They say immigrants don’t belong here, they need to "go back where they came from.” They support Trump and his efforts to drive immigrants out of the U.S. 

These fools don’t know jack shit about how and why millions of immigrants got here in the first place! Over the past 50 years, millions of youths like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo have been driven to this country from their homelands in Mexico and other countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa—driven by the workings of a system rooted in the U.S. and a few other countries. Capitalism-imperialism is a system in a restless and relentless drive for enormous profit. It sucks the resources, wealth, and people out of countries in the “global south.” Driven by the violence, poverty, environmental catastrophes, and grinding impoverishment this capitalism-imperialism inflicts on people, and by the military invasions, coups, brutal puppet governments, widespread rape and violence from police and gangs that keep the people oppressed, countless millions around the world have been driven out of their homelands and forced to seek a living elsewhere. 

Some Certainty Amidst the Lies

Initially Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokes-pigs lied about Salgado Araujo in a way similar to the lies they spewed when ICE gunned down Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. They claimed he “attempted to evade arrest during a traffic stop;” they lied that he rammed an ICE vehicle and drove it towards an ICE officer; they lied that he refused to follow multiple commands given by the ICE agents swarming the area. 

There isn’t a shred of evidence for any of their accusations. The three men with Lorenzo, who may be the only witnesses to his murder, are being held in an immigrant detention center about an hour north of the city. Their lawyer said to reporters, “I can tell you with conviction that my clients' versions of the events are extremely different from what ICE agents are saying or what the agency is saying … All three of my clients reiterated that at no point was there ever an agent standing in front of the vehicle, nor was an agent ever placed in the line of danger. That is simply false, and I believe my clients are telling the truth."

Several major news outlets contributed to the lies about the ICE assault on Lorenzo. They described the encounter as a “traffic stop”—language straight from the ICE/DHS handbook. Videos show several ICE vehicles surrounding, cutting off, and penning in Lorenzo’s van. It was a fucking ambush, not a “traffic stop!” 

Now, DHS has admitted that Salgado Araujo wasn’t even their target. An unnamed “Texas authority” supposedly tipped off ICE about a suspect white van driving around Houston’s East End, and ICE went after the wrong van. As if it would have somehow been justifiable if they had murdered the “right” immigrant?

Much of the truth about what transpired is being suppressed by federal (fascist) authorities and still needs to come to light. But some things are certain—a pack of lying, murdering ICE thugs mortally wounded Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when they shot into his van. He lay bleeding and moaning in agony on the pavement before he died in a hospital. It was an unjustified, cruelly racist murder that no decent person should abide.

A Massive Escalation, A Further Leap into Fascism

Thousands of immigrants were taken into ICE detention in June and the first part of July. In one 5-day period in late June alone, ICE arrested over 10,000 people. ICE officials were told by their higher-ups that “2,000 arrests a day was the new standard for enforcement.” These vicious kidnappings went on across the entire country, in large cities and small towns, and most often without the advance publicity and public awareness that accompanied previous ICE onslaughts. 

People are penned in by ICE vehicles as they try to drive off to work in the pre-dawn hours, as was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when ICE murdered him. They are followed and stopped as they go to gas stations or grocery stores, and often their families and friends are unaware of what happened to them. ICE is arresting people on buses and trains, and intercepting individuals in commercial parking lots, or monitored public streets. These masked ICE-Nazi goons have been busting people regularly outside local and state court proceedings and Home Depots. They are spreading terror that they could strike anywhere, at any time. 

Stephen Miller is a rabid, immigrant-hating fascist, and one of Trump’s top advisors. In 2025 he bellowed to his underlings that they weren’t being aggressive enough in arresting immigrants. ICE needs to make 3,000 arrests daily, he insisted, so that at least a million people a year would be seized and deported. In the following months ICE staged gestapo-like invasions of several cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Tens of thousands of people protested ICE’s rampages with great determination, perseverance, and creativity. ICE, which is by far the most heavily funded police agency in the country and functions as an armed paramilitary force loyal only to Trump, was temporarily on the defensive politically. 

Then, in late spring 2026 the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (which includes ICE), Markwayne Mullin, announced that he was developing a “quiet way” to carry out massive deportations. It centers on what the American Immigration Council described as “a focus on increasing pressure on undocumented immigrants to ‘voluntarily’ leave the country by making it clear that the entire weight of federal government will work to prevent them from remaining in the country”. Mullin explained that his “quiet way” will mean ICE won’t be “the lead story every day.” But the fascist Trump regime will still be “… enforcing immigration laws. We’re still deporting illegals that shouldn’t be here. We’re still going after the worst of the worst—but we’re doing it in a more quiet way.”

The wholesale assault on immigrants is a cornerstone of the Trump/MAGA fascist order rapidly being consolidated. The people shaping and leading the fascist movement in this country—people like Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Pete Hegseth—aren’t simply racists who use racism and hatred of immigrants to whip up their mobs of racist followers (although they do plenty of that). They are aiming to lock in a full-on fascist America violently dominating the global system of capitalism-imperialism. These fascists are convinced that people from what Trump has called “shit-hole countries” must be purged from the U.S. They make the lynch-mob enflaming and warmongering claims that immigrants from third world countries “poison the blood” of the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spelled out this fascist logic last February at an International Security Conference in Munich: 

...in pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people. We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild... Mass migration is not, was not, isn’t some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.

Note well: This was not a MAGA rally to "stir up the fascist social base." Rubio is talking about how the fascists see the strategic security concerns for "the West" (Europe and the U.S.). 

A Nationwide Fascist Offensive

ICE arrests are most prevalent in Florida and Texas, where fascists have controlled state governments for years, and where state, county, and local police are required by fascist law to cooperate with ICE. But they are happening in the entire country, and ICE has established agreements which enlist and empower local police to perform certain ICE functions, including holding and identifying people for ICE, in 41 states and territories. 

And as for the “deep blue” states—Tom Homan, Trump’s thuggish “border czar”, recently boasted on “Fox News” that New York City will soon “see more ICE agents than you have ever seen in New York City. And it’s coming. I just reviewed an operational plan. I’m not going to tell you exactly when it’s going to happen, but it’s coming.”

A DHS document from  December 2025 labeled "Thanks to President Trump and Secretary Noem, More than 2.5 Million Illegal Aliens Left the U.S. " claimed that since January 20, 2025 the Trump administration had deported more than 605,000 "illegal aliens," with an additional 1.9 million self-deporting, bringing the total number of "illegal aliens" who had left the U.S. since Trump  returned to office to over 2.5 million. 

That was his first year back; this year has gotten even worse. The fascist regime is on track to surpass that number this year. At the end of June, Mullin told an interviewer that “I’d say probably, within the next six weeks we’ll probably pass what we deported in all of ’25.”

As Revolution wrote recently, “This wave of assaults has acted as the battering ram for the regime that is moving relentlessly to dismantle 150 years of the established form of capitalist rule. This is fascism consolidating in the most powerful capitalist-imperialist country in the world as one resolution to managing increasing crisis and challenges to this system's domination of the planet."

A Time For Courage, Determination … And Science

About 1,000 people rallied and marched demanding justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on Thursday. At least that many marched again Saturday through the city’s downtown. More activities in the East End and other locations around Houston’s sprawling metro area are happening this weekend. All this is very positive. Protests like these need to continue and to grow. But more is needed—and not just more protest. More profoundly, people need to dig into how and why we got here. And further—what is it going to take to get to a place where there are no more Lorenzo Salgado Araujos being gunned down by murdering thugs.

This whole damn system is guilty as hell for the murder of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo—and much more! There is a revolutionary way out of this, and a whole new way to live and a fundamentally different system that's possible. There is leadership for this in the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, and the new communism he has forged. Get with the Revcom Corps for the Emancipation of Humanity, go to revcom.us, dare to raise your sights to a radically better world!

JUSTICE FOR LORENZO SALGADO ARAUJO!

ICE MUST GO! THE FASCIST TRUMP-MAGA REGIME MUST GO NOW!

WE NEED AND WE DEMAND, A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM!"