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ICE fatally shoot two men in Maine and Texas
00:33:31
Trump tells immigration officers not to pause vehicle stops after the killings
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Justin
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
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Asma Khalid
Is the American Dream still possible? I'm Asma Khalid, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. One of the most successful exports the United States has ever sold the world. Is the American Dream that tantalizing promise of a better, freer, richer life. But is it still attainable?
- [00:26]
Ronaldo Salgado
I feel like the American Dream is alive, but not well.
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Asma Khalid
For more, listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Anthony
Hello, it's Anthony and you're about to hear AmericasT and we're delighted to have you with us. And if you enjoy what you hear, please do consider subscribing to the podcast. That way you'll never miss an episode. Now on with today, we need to
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Justin
talk again about ice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more fatal killings, all within the space of a week time. A 26 year old Colombian father who had legal rights to live and work in America, a Mexican as well, had been working for three decades in the US As a builder. Neither had criminal records. Both have been shot. So big protests in Maine and in Houston, Texas, where those two shootings happened. Both men, it seems, not the intended targets. A third killing in Florida possibly. Details still coming in. But amid all of these claims and counterclaims and calls for investigations, what is happening with ice? How much of a priority is it for ICE ahead of the midterms to be sorted out? Does it matter politically? Welcome to AmericasT.
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Asma Khalid
AmericasT, AmericasT from BBC News.
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Justin
You hear that? Oh, I think when I hear that
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Anthony
sound, it reminds me of money.
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Ronaldo Salgado
We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.
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Anthony
This is a big cover up and
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Adriano Espallat
this administration is engaged in it.
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Sarah
This guy has Trump derangement syndrome.
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Ronaldo Salgado
I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.
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Sarah
Hello, it's Sarah in the BBC's bureau in Washington.
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Justin
And it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters in London, England.
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Anthony
And it's Anthony with Sarah live and in person in the BBC bureau in Washington.
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Justin
And just before we get to what actually happened in these two shootings, it's worth saying right at the start, just as we're beginning this conversation, there is some measure of chaos inside the Trump administration because you've got the administration telling people or unnamed officials in the administration telling people that these traffic stops where both of these shootings seems to have happened, these traffic stops are going to be halted or suspended at least. And Donald Trump just now going on truth social to say no, the traffic stops are really important. They've got to go on. So there's no question that what is happening, quite apart from the awful toll that it's taking of individuals in some circumstances, is also it's really playing into the politics of the midterms and the wider questions about ICE that there are all around. So we'll get to all of that in a second. Let's kick off though, with what has actually happened, insofar as we could know it, in these two cases. Sarah?
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Sarah
Yeah, so the first one happened in Maine, and in these circumstances, a 26 year old man, Juan Sebastian Guerrero, was shot in the city of Bideford in Maine. We don't have as much detail about that as we did about the cases that you'll remember from Minneapolis, because not as many cell phone footage and pictures to show us, but we have seen surveillance footage of what happened immediately after the shooting. And we see Mr. Guerrero being pulled out of his car by ICE officers. And it looks as though they immediately drag him down to the ground and handcuff him and saying that they were fearing for public safety rather than seeing whether he was all right. Because the other thing that we've actually got images of are bullet holes through his window. So he's obviously been shot several times by the agent who then drags him out of the car down onto the ground and he later died from his wounds. We know a little bit about the man himself. Guerrero was Colombian, but he was actually authorized to work in the United States. He'd been given a Social Security number. And so, you know, he was not actually the target that the ICE agents were looking for. It was a mistaken identity that has resulted in his death. And unsurprisingly, there have been some vigils and protests in Maine where he lived. This is outside an ICE building in Scarborough where you can hear one of the protest organizers.
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Protest Organizer
We knew that was going to happen. But it doesn't change the fact that it breaks our hearts that we are here today in solidarity with the Guerrero family to say you are not alone. But we're also here to say it must be the last person in Maine that ICE kills. There is no excuse from any elected official, from the Attorney General to the district attorneys, to the state police, to local law enforcement. These people are killers and they must leave our state now.
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Sarah
And it spread Beyond Maine. In D.C. the representative Adriano Espallat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, denounced the killing at this press conference.
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Adriano Espallat
So here we are again. A brown man, a Latino, killed. And I must say that I don't see the Outrage. I really don't see the outrage that I've seen in other cases. So whether you are an immigrant, whether you have an immigrant status, that's irregular, documented, undocumented, life is a life. Justice should be decided in our courtrooms, not in the asphalt in the pavement of any city across this country. This is a failure of leadership to allow ICE to continue to go on a rampage. A killing spree is a failure of leadership.
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Sarah
That shows you some of the controversy that has been stirred up by this. But I mean, he's not wrong when he says there hasn't been the same level of outrage that there was when two white American citizens were killed in Minneapolis earlier this year. So there have been some protests around the country, but it hasn't reached the scale of what we saw earlier in the year. That may be because of the nationality and the ethnicity of the people involved. It may be because there just isn't as much footage of what happened. So it's less clear exactly what went on.
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Anthony
I think that may be a big part of it. There also was no footage of the shooting in Houston. The victim there, the target was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. He was a 52 year old Mexican national. He was working as a builder and he was stopped while driving to work with three other people in a white van and killed by ICE agents shortly afterwards. Now, the Department of Homeland Security has said that they stopped that white van because they saw someone who looked like an individual they were targeting operating the van. You said that the firing, the officer shot in self defense and that Araujo was not actually the man that ICE was looking for. We don't have footage of that, not even the footage that we had in Maine. But the three men in the car with him did say that they were not endangering ICE agents. Their lawyer said that he was not using a vehicle as a weapon or trying to run over the immigration officers and that no one was in front of the vehicle. If you remember that shooting in Minneapolis, the officer was somewhat in front of the vehicle, but we don't know this is. He said, she said, he said, he said there's multiple accounts because we don't have that same kind of video evidence to be able to get anything out of it. Here this is his son Ronaldo talking about how he learned of his father's killing.
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Ronaldo Salgado
I learned of my father's passing from a news report on social media. Not the hospital, not law enforcement. Through a collective effort from local organizations and elected officials, we got answers. My father's death was confirmed. I am calling for a full investigation into the events that transpired yesterday, July 7. He did not deserve to die. He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of Mexican Man Shot and Killed by ice. He deserved to quit to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, a father, and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream. What happened, though? My father was being followed by two unmarked cars. Had my father seen an emblem of ICE or an emblem that says anything about law enforcement agency, my father would have complied, he would have stopped, he would have not ran away because he feared for his life. He drove fast because he feared that someone would take his tools. One of his worst fears is that someone took away his work tools, because that's the tools of his. The van as well, because that is how he made his livelihood. That's how he raised us, how that's how he fed us for the last 35, 40 years of his life. So had my father seen any emblems on those cars, he would have complied, he would have stopped, he would have not reacted the way he did. Unfortunately, that was not the case. ICE did not present himself to him in an orderly manner, in a professional manner that any law enforcement agency should have. Should. That's the standard to identify yourself.
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Anthony
So that was Ronaldo Salgado calling for an investigation. The family has said that they haven't heard anything from ICE or the Department of Homeland Security regarding this case. And of course, he is relaying what are the accounts from the men who were with Al Rajo in the van prior to him being shot.
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Sarah
Yeah, and the call for an independent investigation is interesting because this has happened in each one of these cases, isn't it, that the Department of Homeland Security investigates themselves, essentially. And in each state where this has happened, the local authorities have very little confidence of how that investigation is going to proceed. And normally when a federal agent is involved in a fatal shooting like this, there will be a parallel investigation from the local authorities, but I submit, been denying the state access to that in every single one of these cases. So it doesn't appear that there is any kind of effective, independent investigation going on, and little confidence in some quarters that ICE can investigate themselves fairly.
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Justin
And it's worth underlining, isn't it? Neither of these people had a criminal record. They weren't the intended targets, as we were saying. And also, I mean, the really crucial thing, there isn't body camera footage, is there? So there's no clear footage from the ICE agents themselves. Which, I mean, again, just. You'd think by now, and particularly after the killings, that there have been. And there've been other shootings as well, not just the ones that we mentioned, the ones in Minnesota, but there have been others as well where ICE agents have been involved in shootings, not all of them fatal. You'd think by now they'd have sorted out the body cameras at the very least.
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Anthony
Right. One of the other things that's different here is that the two protesters, and there were protesters in Minneapolis, Alex Priddy and Renee Nicole Goode, they were not the targets of ice. They were not being swept up in these immigration enforcement actions. They were there protesting it. They were there trying to provide eyewitness accounts and try to warn some of the people who were targeted. Whereas in Maine and in Houston and in some of those other cases that Justin mentioned, where ICE agents discharged their weapons and at times shooting people who were in the vicinity of these investigations, this is a different sort of thing, and the response has been different. Although I will add that in Houston, there have been mass protests already calling for further investigation, and we're starting to see some of that now in Maine as well.
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Sarah
And, of course, those investigations are not going to be helped by the fact that the officers weren't wearing body cameras. And there has been a lot of pressure to try and make sure that agents always do ever since what happened in Minnesota. But Tom Holman, the border czar, was up in Capitol Hill yesterday, and he was asked by reporters specifically why the agents weren't wearing body cameras, given that a huge amount of money had already been given to the department to pay for new body cameras. And he basically said that the government shutdown from a couple of months ago had held all of that up. That although the money is there to buy the body cameras, they've been ordered now, but essentially blaming Democrats for the holdup in supplying them, which. Well, we shall see how that holds up.
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Anthony
Right. And you also explained that pause that was ordered, according to reports in the traffic stops. You gotta remember, traffic stops, these seem to be a lot of the flashpoints for these type of incidents because you're pulling someone over, you have them behind the wheel of a vehicle, which in law enforcement's views can be a deadly weapon and has led to injuries of law enforcement officers when they get hit by these cars. So it instantly makes it a more tense situation. They were gonna pause this to review it. I mean, this is Homan talking about that pause and explaining the purpose behind it.
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Tom Holman
You know, I think what they're doing is taking a pause and make sure that, number one, the ICE officers have everything they need to stay safe because vehicle attacks are up 3400% and they're going to make sure is the training sufficient? Did anything go wrong? I'm confident they're going to get back to their policy of vehicle stops. But they're doing, you know, what they believe is a necessary short term pause just to look at it and make sure everything's good. But there's going to be situations where they need to do do a vehicle stop, especially if it's a criminal alien. And before you enter a city, downtown city, you want to take them down in a desolate area where public is safer. There are so many different extenuating circumstances that these officers have to consider. Do I stop it or do I wait, wait till he stops or should I approach him before he gets into the car? I mean, that's a two ton weapon. The average weight of a vehicle. There's two turns.
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Justin
So the question then, Anthony, is whether that stands now. Because just as we were beginning, you monitor Truth Social very carefully, don't you? And you alerted us all to the fact that Donald Trump has essentially said, no, that's rubbish.
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Anthony
Yeah, he did. This is the Truth Social post. He said, the men and women of ICE are doing a great job, one that has to be done. Crime is way down in America in many cases in numbers that haven't been seen in decades. He goes on to talk about the ICE Stop saying that we cannot give up one of ice's most important and effective crime fighting tools, the traffic stop. Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal's hands. He says Democrats don't want this to be done, but it won't happen on my watch. Ice, be judicious, fair and smart and go back and do your very important job. Keep those cramstat records coming. Remember, you are loved and respected in America. Although he didn't call it nice, I thought he was changing the name of it from ICE to nice. I guess not.
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Sarah
That's a whole different public body in the United Kingdom. But I think there's a couple of really interesting things in what Tom Holman said there because he actually posed a couple of questions which are material to this. He said, is the training sufficient of ICE officers? Now, he may have been talking specifically about the manner in which they pull over vehicles. But I mean, that's got to be at the nub of this, hasn't it, that you have officers who essentially don't know how to conduct these stops properly, who are maybe approaching people without having identified themselves. That's certainly what the victim who was killed in Texas, his son, seemed to be suggesting, creating unsafe environments and then feeling as though they are under threat themselves, when possibly more training might have taught them to handle it in a different, non fatal way.
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Protest Organizer
Right.
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Anthony
And you have to remember that the immigration enforcement activities that the Trump administration has been conducting have been rapidly, significantly increased in the past couple of weeks. They've been conducting about 2,000 enforcement actions a day, nearly doubling the number of people it takes into custody compared to the spring. So most of those are happening with these kind of stops, whether they're traffic stops or resident stops or on the street kind of stops. So the potential, the number of stops is so much more that the potential, even if you talk about a small fraction of something that eastern violent, has increased proportionately.
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Sarah
And the other thing Tom Holman was saying there was, look, we need to do this when it's a criminal alien. And the administration's always saying this, aren't they, that we are going to be deporting the worst of the worst, that these are criminals who've got no place in the country, that they're making America safe again, they're reducing crime rates by getting these people out of the country. 2000 arrests a day are not all criminal aliens. Many, many of them, in fact, the vast majority of them have no criminal record at all. So it's always fascinating, I think, where they both want to parade very large numbers and, and they want to say these are dangerous criminals and both things cannot be true at once.
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Justin
Yeah. And it's really interesting, isn't it, that they are doing what they originally said they were going to do. They said there are going to be very large numbers deported. And then during the course of the election and just afterwards, as you say, Sarah, they started to say, well, it'll be the worst of the worst, etc. But actually, in a way, and in a politically damaging way for them potentially, they seem to be living up to the first of those things rather than second, if you see what I mean. In other words, they are going the whole hog to go for really large numbers and including people who haven't necessarily done anything criminally wrong or not done anything criminally wrong recently. And that is, although it is what they initially promised to do or suggested they were going to do, it's still, I guess, quite a shock to people to actually see it happening and to see the fallout from it, as in these two cases and the other cases. Where people have been shocked.
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Anthony
Yeah. Sarah, you remember at the Republican National Convention, they had signs the convention delegates were holding up saying mass deportations. Now, that was, as Justin, you say, the promise, although maybe that they realized that was not politically acceptable to a larger swath of the American public, which is why they changed their messaging. But pretty clearly what they are doing and what they have the funding to do. The resource. The reason why ICE now has more prisons than the Bureau of Prisons in the federal government and more immigration enforcement officers than a lot of militaries in a lot of different countries is because this is a much, much bigger operation than just finding people who have criminal records and getting them off the streets.
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Sarah
And the politics, of course, are crucial to this. There is public support for removing people who are undocumented in this country, even if they're not criminals. That remains a popular thing, which definitely the Trump admin and Republicans could be running on in the midterms and maintain support. What's much trickier is when people are killed, especially when the people who are not the target of the operation in itself. And it looks as though the thing is both dangerous and badly organized. And that's when it gets much, much trickier. It gets much trickier for Trump to defend. But it's also complicated, isn't it, Anthony, for how the Democrats jump into this? Because there are dangers politically for them as well.
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Anthony
Right. Immigration has been, since Donald Trump first started running For President in 2015, his biggest issue and one of the issues that he has had the most public support on. Now, if you look at recent polling, it does show that there has been some erosion of his support, particularly after what happened in Minneapolis because of the killings there. And also, I think it's more than, even more than that. I think it's a feeling like sometimes this is being done in a crisis, cruel sort of way families separated, people snatch off the streets. It's one thing to say, yes, we need to get 10 million undocumented immigrants out of this country. Another thing, when it's your gardener or your housekeeper or your nanny or your neighbor or the person you're going to church with, that makes it a lot more personal. I think that has affected public opinion to some extent. But Democrats do have to be careful because this is an issue where Republicans typically have a stronger hand. And if they get over their skis on this, if they push back too much, it might play into Donald Trump's campaign messaging that Democrats want open borders and mass immigration.
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Sarah
Yeah. And the phrase defund ice, of course, Justin, is It becomes, you know, pretty toxic when you remember the arguments over defunding the police.
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Anthony
Yeah.
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Justin
And then you go to. So if you go to Maine, because it's interesting, isn't it? Both of these, these places where these, these shootings happened are states potentially the Democrats want to win in the election. Texas and Maine Senate seats absolutely crucial for them retaking the Senate if they intend to retake the Senate. Both of those places. So how do they play it? It's interesting. I've just been looking at Troy Jackson, former Senate president in Maine, who now wants to take over the place of Graham Platner, this guy who has imploded as their candidate for the Senate seat. And to get Susan Collins, the Republican senator, out, Troy Jackson now saying on social media that ICE is, I quote, this rogue agency that must be abolished. In other words, on the left of the Democratic Party. And I think it's fair to say Troy Jackson is on the left. They may well become the candidate in Maine. On the left of the party, there is a sort of all out push, okay, abolish ice. They're not quite saying abolish ICE and don't put anything in its place, are they? But it's still that initial abolish ICE thing that is potentially attractive to people on the progressive left, but not attractive to anyone else. That's the kind of tightrope, isn't it, that they're walking.
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Anthony
Right. And Susan Collins is in a tricky situation because she is getting pressure from her constituents. She has been a critic of some of this ramped up enforcement in the past and had been one of the people calling for a pause and some sort of consideration of these traffic stops. And now Donald Trump is coming in and doubling down on this. So the protests that happened in Maine just the other day, they were protests that started in a public park and ended at Susan Collins campaign headquarters or Senate headquarters in Portland, Maine. And so this is pulling her into an area where she probably doesn't want to be because she then becomes more and more associated with Donald Trump. She either has to defend the Trump administration's policies or criticize them. But if she criticizes them, people are going to wonder whether this is just another example of her being concerned about something but not taking any kind of concrete steps to stop it.
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Justin
I mean, they're in real trouble potentially, aren't they, as well, with Latino voters? And we ought to talk a bit just about that kind of segment of the vote as well, because Donald Trump did incredibly well with Latino voters in 2024. I mean, absolutely. Blew out. Getting on for half of all Latinos who voted, voted for Trump this time round. Well, the poll's already suggesting that that has reduced and reduced, I think it's fair to say, actually largely because of the economy rather than because any actions taken by ICE and by the administration, because plenty of Latinos probably don't want to see illegal immigration. And if they think that it can be stopped and stopped in a just and fair way, we're pretty convinced that the Trump administration had got that right. Are they, though, still convinced? I mean, that's the question, isn't it? The extent to which, particularly in Texas, where they're obviously very important concerns constituency, the extent to which they now think, as you know, you heard that the son of the Texas victim and his words about his father and his words about the family and his words about a man who's given employment to others and all those things. And you wonder whether for at least some Latino voters who will be crucial in the Senate vote, that there may be a kind of feeling of enough is enough.
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Anthony
Yeah. And we've seen this play out in special elections already. There was that one in the Dallas area where Hispanics swung dramatically back to the Democrat who ended up winning a seat in a district that Donald Trump had carried by double digits. We saw it in New Jersey, in some of the gubernatorial districts, districts around New York City that had very high Hispanic populations, that again, Democrat, the Democratic candidate did quite well with that. And I think there is a feeling among the Hispanic community where even by ICE's own account, DHS's own account in this Texas shooting, it was a case of mistaken identity, that the person who was shot, pulled from the car, Araujo, was not the target of this. They saw him and he looked like someone they were looking for. So what's to stop ICE from, you know, finding other Hispanic people and having the same sort of mistaken identity if they're just basing it on how they look? There's a very real concern, I think at a very real risk, that this community feels threatened by this stepped up immigration enforcement action in addition to, as you mentioned, Justin, economic issues and all of these things. I think you create an environment where Donald Trump is not very popular.
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Sarah
Yeah. And there's a story in Minnesota where those incidents happened earlier this year, that ICE agents have been stopping a number of off duty police officers who are legal US Citizens. There's no reason why they were being stopped at all, but asked to prove their citizenship, which if you are a citizen, is very difficult because you're not carrying papers in your car and you're simply your driver's license isn't going to prove your citizenship. But every single off duty police officer who was stopped by ICE was Latino. None of them were white. And when you see stories like that, the idea that there is some kind of racial profiling going on, which of course will upset everybody or many, many people in the United States, but obviously Latino community is exactly the kind of thing which I think this kind of policy was always going to lead to. And it's taken several months, but we're actually at the point now where it's becoming very obvious.
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Anthony
And the Supreme Court said that was okay. In a case last year, one of these shadow docket cases, not a formal one that was ARG argued and then issued a full opinion on, but it said that traffic stops that were kind of incidental, these sorts of things were okay. Even if you have a reason to believe by looking at the person, their Hispanic background makes you think that they're the person that you're looking for.
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Justin
Yeah, it'd be really ironic, wouldn't it, if the Trump administration sort of re racializes the broader Hispanic Latino community? Because one of the criticisms, and we heard it on the pod, didn't we've talked to people about this in the past. One of the criticisms of the Democrats outreach to Latino voters in the past has been, it's been kind of patronizing and suggested that they're separate and suggested that they need to be spoken to in Spanish and et cetera, et cetera, and that they were oppressed in some way. And actually the people we've talked to in the past said, no, they're just ordinary Americans and they quite want to do well economically and they have the same rights and aspirations as everyone else. And that approach to them wasn't working. Now, as a result of this, it's possible, I suppose, isn't it, that they do feel themselves to be oppressed and they do feel themselves to be all the things that Democrats used to tell them they were and that that has a real political impact.
- [27:59]
Sarah
And Democrats had always made this assumption as well, that Latino voters wanted looser border policies and didn't want to see immigration crackdowns, didn't want to see deportations, whereas of course, in many, many instances that wasn't true. People who were here in the country legally were not necessarily in favor of other people flooding into the country illegally just because they came from the same country as them or looked similar to them. But of course, exactly as you say, Justin you know, you could actually be producing with these policies. A turnaround in that.
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Justin
We had a question from Robin in London. Also Chris in Leamington Spa, James from Orkney, all emailing to ask whether there can be any update on investigations into the killings of Rene Good and Alex Pretty, who you mentioned earlier. Anthony, do we know These things happen so slowly, don't they? Do we know anything more about what's actually going on?
- [28:47]
Anthony
They do. We don't have a ton of new information that's been released publicly, but there are Minnesota prosecutors who have been looking into this case, and they announced on Monday that they've gotten some key evidence in their investigations into those shootings that have been turned over by the federal government. Federal government been dragging its heels on providing this. This is Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who says they have access to new information, new evidence, including Renee Goode's car, body camera footage and statements from people who were witnesses there. This is what she had to say to reporters on Monday.
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Mary Moriarty
As prosecutors, we are not typically in the position of trying to figure out what we don't have that might be in existence. So we knew, for instance from media that the federal agents were wearing body cams during the interaction with Alex Preddy, but we didn't know whether that was true or not. So we now have all of that information. I wouldn't say that there's. We. I believe we do have. I'm told we have the body cam evidence, but this is voluminous. This is hours and hours and hours of video. And so we are in the process of going through that.
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Anthony
So it is an ongoing process, and these sorts of things will take time. But the Minnesota officials in Hennepin county is where these two shootings happen. They are conducting an investigation, and I assume they will announce the results of this, which could include indictments under violations of state law, which would create a whole new can of legal worms that would lawyers and judges would have to get through. But it's not a closed book yet. I think to answer your questions, we just have to keep waiting.
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Sarah
And of course, the Department of Homeland Security have their own investigations into each of these incidents, but they've told us nothing about what's going on there. And I wouldn't hold your breath for the results of those investigations anytime soon.
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Justin
But just remind us, Anthony, why it is a can of legal worms? I mean, if they do decide that there is a case to be answered and an indictment comes, why won't the individual's concern simply appear before a court and get the court case and get charged and all the rest of it.
- [31:04]
Anthony
Well, law enforcement officers do have a certain amount of immunity from prosecution. It's called qualified immunity. And that prevents them from being charged with things that they're doing in their official capacity unless there is some sort of a clear case of a violation of rules of the law. So. So they have to prove that in order to bring these charges, which is one of the reasons why they're gathering this evidence.
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Sarah
Anthony, I remember when J.D. vance came to the White House briefing room during the trouble in Minnesota and he was very aggressive about saying that the ICE agents had acted correctly, that the protesters were proving a danger. And he said, I'm pretty sure that they were protected by absolute immunity because they were doing their jobs. Which I took to mean they. That he didn't want to see them persecuted and they possibly couldn't be prosecuted.
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J.D. Vance
The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That's a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job. The idea that Tim Walsh and a bunch of radicals in Minneapolis are going to go after and make this guy's life miserable because he was doing the job that he was asked to do is preposterous. The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official can actually prosecute a federal official with absolute immunity. I've never seen anything like that. It would get tossed out by a judge. So what I'd like Minnesota to focus on is the real issue that they're encouraging people, Minneapolis officials are encouraging people to commit violence against ICE officials. It's ridiculous.
- [32:38]
Anthony
It's gotta stop, right? I guess the question is whether they were doing their jobs and doing it in the proper way or if they were violating law, established law. Because if they do that, then they lose their immunity under the interpretation of it. Right now, Vance saying, no, they were doing their jobs. They were doing everything by the book, everything. Right then, yes, they have immunity. And that's going to be something that will have to be litigated. If Minneapolis officials decide to bring a case against anyone involved in this, they will have to prove that there was a clear violation of law.
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Justin
Okay, we will leave it there for now. Time to say goodbye. Bye bye. Thank you for answering our call and continuing to send your messages to us. We do read every single one. We love to hear your thoughts, your feedback and questions as well. So please do keep them coming. You can send us an email. It's AmericasT. The WhatsApp is 443-301-239480 and you can get involved in the AmericasT Discord server. The link to that is in the description and don't forget to subscribe. That way you will never miss an episode. Until next time.
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Protest Organizer
Bye.
- [34:12]
Asma Khalid
Is the American Dream still possible? I'm Asma Khalid, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. One of the most successful exports the United States has ever sold the world is the American Dream that tantalizing promise of a better, freer, richer life. But is it still attainable?
- [34:31]
Ronaldo Salgado
I feel like the American Dream is alive, but not well.
- [34:34]
Asma Khalid
For more, listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.