Latest / The Overlap / ICE: Accountable to No One
Transcript
- 0:00Yell his name was Juan Hiro Coronilla Duran.
- 0:06He was twenty eight years old.
- 0:08He was from San Luis de La Paz,
- 0:11which is in the Guanajuato state in Mexico,
- 0:14and he had a wife, her name was Jessica,
- 0:17a seven year old son, a daughter who was seven months old.
- 0:21Seven months. She's not gonna remember her father.
- 0:25She'll just have to know him from photographs and stories.
- 0:28He came to the United States on a valid tourist visa.
- 0:32He went to Atlanta first and stayed with some family and some friends and
- 0:38he did the thing a million upon millions of people do every year.
- 0:42The the whole thing that the state of Florida is built to sell you.
- 0:47He drove to the beach. He wanted to see the ocean.
- 0:51On july fourteenth, twenty twenty six,
- 0:53before seven in the morning, ICE and Homeland Security Investigations agents walked
- 0:59up to the car he was in at a gas station in St.
- 1:03Augustine, Florida. That's the oldest city in America.
- 1:07And no one to this day is yet to explain why they walked up to him.
- 1:12All four people in that car did what people do in the
- 1:16When a group of armed men with tactical gear come at them incredibly fast,
- 1:21they ran. Fight a fight or flight response kicked in.
- 1:25Juan ran across State Road sixteen and slipped on the grass in the median,
- 1:30and he was hit by a tractor trailer.
- 1:33He died there on the ground, on vacation.
- 1:37The Department of Homeland Security won't confirm that he had a valid visa,
- 1:42but he did. They just won't say it.
- 1:45DHS cites the ongoing investigation.
- 1:48Everybody cites the ongoing investigation.
- 1:52But his body was flown home to Mexico,
- 1:55commercial flight straight out of Orlando.
- 1:58This guy came to see the beach.
- 2:00And they put him in the cargo hold of a plane going the other way.
- 2:19Hey everybody, welcome to the overlap.
- 2:21I'm Joshua. This is the show about power and labor and the machinery
- 2:27of American injustice. You know the parts that they don't put in the brochure.
- 2:32So Will's not in the room today,
- 2:34another solo episode. We missed you,
- 2:36brother, hold it down. But I want to talk about a dead man on vacation.
- 2:40And I want to be clear up front that I'm not talking about Mitch McConnell.
- 2:44But let's talk about what this episode is and it isn't.
- 2:47It's not about how ICE could do better about reforms or body cameras
- 2:52or better training. I'll talk about all of that because it's in the record,
- 2:57right? And I'm not going to hide my actual position in the second half
- 3:01of the show like I usually do.
- 3:03The position is that ICE should not exist.
- 3:07Not reformed, not retrained,
- 3:11gone.
- 3:12Now I didn't arrive to that opinion from ideology.
- 3:16I arrived at it from the body count,
- 3:19from the last twelve months, from a list of names that keeps getting longer
- 3:24and longer while the people in charge go on Fox News and tell the critics that they
- 3:30should shut their mouths, they're making America safer.
- 3:33Well why now?
- 3:35Because on July 14th, a tourist died in St.
- 3:38Augustine and it barely made the national news.
- 3:40Because of, you know, by July of 2026,
- 3:44a dead man after an ice encounter just doesn't seem to be news anymore because it's
- 3:48Tuesday and IC still exists. That's the part that should stop you cold.
- 3:53A man dying while running from federal agents at a gas station before dawn
- 4:00is now so damned routine.
- 4:02That it doesn't clear the noise floor.
- 4:04That's not because people don't care,
- 4:06I know people care, I care, you care,
- 4:08that's why you're here. Because the volume has made
- 4:12the individual deaths indistinguishable from the background radiation,
- 4:17the toxic sludge of this whole operation.
- 4:21Juan was, by the the count reporters were keeping,
- 4:26at least the tenth fatality connected to immigration sweeps since this
- 4:32campaign started. And I say at least because ICE is demonstrated,
- 4:37documented in the record, that it will hide its own killings for the better part
- 4:42of a year if you let it. So ten is a floor,
- 4:45not a ceiling. So we're gonna do two things.
- 4:48We're gonna go back.
- 4:49Because that's where we start.
- 4:50Because the impulse to build an armed federal force that can grab people
- 4:57off of the streets with complete impunity and no accountability is
- 5:01now older and uglier than ICE.
- 5:04ICE is just the current uniform on this very old idea.
- 5:08And then we're gonna come all the way forward to the machine as it runs right now.
- 5:13The $20 million body camera program.
- 5:18That produced almost no body cameras.
- 5:21And the ten point three billion dollars budget,
- 5:26the acting director who stood by his agents,
- 5:28the border czar, who said the bloodshed would continue.
- 5:33Because Juan didn't die because one agent made a mistake at a gas station.
- 5:38Juan died because of a system that was working exactly like it was designed to.
- 5:45So that's the argument. Let me build it.
- 5:48Let's go back to before the acronym to understand why a tourist is dead
- 5:52in Florida with nobody accountable.
- 5:55You have to understand that immigration enforcement in this country
- 6:00was never really about immigration.
- 6:02It was about a labor market. And who gets to be disposable inside
- 6:07of that labor market? And I want to start with something closer than
- 6:10the eighteen hundreds. Something that shows you the exact machinery that
- 6:14is still running right now.
- 6:16It happened on march fifteenth,
- 6:18twenty twenty five in South Padre Island,
- 6:20Texas. His name was Ruben Ray Martinez,
- 6:23twenty three years old, a US citizen.
- 6:26I'm gonna repeat that a US citizen,
- 6:29not a green card holder, not a tourist in this country fully legally
- 6:35as a citizen within our borders.
- 6:38Because it keeps somehow not mattering to the people who should care.
- 6:41Ruben Rey Martinez was an American citizen celebrating his birthday in
- 6:46a beach town in Texas.
- 6:48There'd been a car crash at a busy intersection.
- 6:51HSI agents, that's Homeland Security Investigations,
- 6:54that's ICE, were on the scene.
- 6:57In the version Ice tells, Reuben intentionally ran over an agent.
- 7:01Now his mother disputes that. A friend who was there disputes that.
- 7:05An agent fired three shots through the driver's side window and killed the man.
- 7:09And then they handcuffed him before he got medical care.
- 7:13A twenty-three year old US citizen shot three times through his own car window,
- 7:19and the priority was handcuffed.
- 7:22Now ICE hid its involvement for nearly eleven months.
- 7:25His family knew he was dead. They didn't have the full story of
- 7:29who killed him because the agency that killed him decided that you didn't need
- 7:33to know. It only came out because a watchdog group called
- 7:37the American Oversight filed a FOIA lawsuit and it pried
- 7:43the internal documents loose. That's how accountability works in this system.
- 7:48A private organization has to sue the federal government to find
- 7:52out that the federal government shot an American citizen on his birthday.
- 7:57A Texas grand jury declined to indict,
- 8:00is anyone surprised? And the acting director of ICE,
- 8:03a man by the name of Todd Lyons,
- 8:05remember his name because he's a POS,
- 8:07but he stood by the decision. He stood by it.
- 8:10So why start here instead of a century ago?
- 8:13Because let's be honest, it's been going on a long time.
- 8:16We originally brought slaves into this country for the same reason.
- 8:21It's because this isn't a bug in a young program.
- 8:24This is the program. Within the first months of this deportation campaign,
- 8:28before the machine was even warm,
- 8:30it had already killed a person and hid it for the better part of a year
- 8:35and walked away spotless, smelling like a rose.
- 8:38That's a system succeeding at the thing it was built to do:
- 8:42to move human beings without friction and treat the ones who die
- 8:47as a rounding error.
- 8:48And that impulse, right, to to build a force like this is very,
- 8:53very old and genuinely very American.
- 8:57And the through line is always labor.
- 9:00For most of the twentieth century,
- 9:02immigration enforcement followed the same pattern.
- 9:05When the economy needed bodies for the fields,
- 9:09the rail lines, the meat packing floors,
- 9:11the border, it was a sort of a hazy suggestion.
- 9:15Come on in, we need you. When the economy softened or the politics turned,
- 9:20the same people who'd been invited became the target of raids and roundups
- 9:25and mass expulsions.
- 9:27The welcome mat and the deportation bus were the same policy,
- 9:31pointed in different directions depending on what the market wanted that year.
- 9:35In the nineteen fifties, this is the actual government name,
- 9:38Operation Wetback, the Eisenhower administration deported over a million people
- 9:45in one year. Military style sweeps through California and Texas,
- 9:49the people rounded up weren't strangers.
- 9:52They were workers recruited by American agriculture who'd spent years
- 9:57in the fields that fed our country.
- 10:00And when the political pressure shifted,
- 10:02the invitation evaporated.
- 10:04That's the real deep root. The person is never a person in this system.
- 10:09The person is a unit of labor whose legal status is a dial that gets turned
- 10:14by people who will never meet them.
- 10:16What got worse is that we built this standing armed federal police force around that
- 10:23mechanism, ICE. That was created in 2003 in a panic after 9-11,
- 10:29folded into a brand new department called Homeland Security.
- 10:33That framing Homeland Security is the whole trick.
- 10:39It took a labor market enforcement function and dressed it in
- 10:43the language of terrorism and national defense.
- 10:46So when an agent shoots a twenty three year old US citizen on his birthday,
- 10:53it gets filed under a security operation instead of what it actually is.
- 10:57I don't know if the people who built this kind of knew that that framing would
- 11:01let agents kill without consequence,
- 11:03but I know what they built. An agency inside the department least subject
- 11:09to the transparency rules that bind every local police officer I've ever met.
- 11:14An agency built to operate everywhere,
- 11:17not just at the border but in Minneapolis,
- 11:19in Houston, in a gas station parking lot in the oldest city in America.
- 11:24Built from day one with a culture
- 11:28of concealment masks hidden.
- 11:32Eleven months of hiding a citizen's murder isn't new.
- 11:37It's the oldest instinct in this apparatus.
- 11:41The people it processes don't get to know what happened to them because they were
- 11:46never really people to it. They were units.
- 11:49And you don't owe a unit.
- 11:52An explanation. So when IC hid the killing of Ruben Ray Martinez,
- 11:57that's not a scandal that somehow broke this entire system,
- 12:01that's the system peeking its dumb little turtle head out of
- 12:05its shell and introducing itself.
- 12:07Hi there.
- 12:08So, citizen Shawna's birthday,
- 12:10keep that in the back of your head.
- 12:11Take the the handcuffs before medical care,
- 12:14take the eleven months of silence with you forward,
- 12:17because we're gonna walk into the summer of twenty twenty six and you're gonna
- 12:21see the exact same machine running faster with more money and a promise
- 12:26it made and broke every single time.
- 12:29Ten point three billion dollars.
- 12:31That's the ICE budget for twenty twenty six,
- 12:33in case you were curious.
- 12:35I can't feel a number that big.
- 12:37I'll never touch a number that big.
- 12:39You won't either.
- 12:40So let me shrink it down to one line item that you can actually hold in your hand
- 12:46in a mind and in thought. $20 million.
- 12:49Not much better, right? But in April of 2026,
- 12:53Congress specifically appropriated $20 million
- 12:58for body-worn cameras for Department of Homeland Security law enforcement
- 13:04so that when someone dies, there's a record that isn't just a guy's word.
- 13:10Here's why that money existed.
- 13:12In January of 2026 in Minneapolis,
- 13:15an operation called Metro Surge killed two US citizens in 18 days.
- 13:20Renee Nicole Good on January 7th and Alex Jeffrey Pretti on January 24th.
- 13:27I talked about them all on this show in the past.
- 13:32Both deaths were caught on bystander cell phone video.
- 13:36And the
- 13:37Video contradicted the official accounts,
- 13:40not by a little, by a lot. When ordinary people could pull up camera footage
- 13:46on their phones and compare it to what DHS was saying,
- 13:49the legitimacy of the entire thing was cracked open wide and trust
- 13:54was forever broken for even people who think that ICE is a good thing.
- 13:59Now look, Minneapolis did what you're supposed to do in a democracy.
- 14:03Yes, Karen, it's also a republic.
- 14:06It's like saying all all rectangles are polygons,
- 14:12but not all polygons are rectangles.
- 14:15We have a democracy in this country.
- 14:17It's a representative democracy.
- 14:1950,000 people. Some counts said a hundred thousand in the streets.
- 14:23A Quinnapiak, I don't know how to say that.
- 14:26Quinapiak? Quinapiac? Quinapiac poll?
- 14:29Sure. Said that 82% of registered voters had seen a video of the shootings.
- 14:34That's a national consensus that something terrible happened.
- 14:38So DHS really didn't have a choice.
- 14:41They had to say something.
- 14:43So at the time, dumbfuck Barbie Christy Gnome pledged to rapidly acquire
- 14:49and deploy body cameras to all DHS law enforcement nationwide.
- 14:53Here's the detail that tells you it was theater.
- 14:56The same administration had originally proposed cutting the body camera program
- 15:01before the killings made cameras politically necessary.
- 15:03The rapid deployment wasn't a value,
- 15:06it was damage control. It was just a
- 15:09PR release with a verb in it, while the noun,
- 15:12the cameras, actually on bodies recording what agents do,
- 15:16has remained largely theoretical.
- 15:18And the truth is, Congress did it did its part.
- 15:21It did what they're supposed to.
- 15:22It controlled the purse strings and said,
- 15:24here, $20 million in April, folded into a bill that ended
- 15:29a partial government shutdown,
- 15:30real money, legally designated four cameras.
- 15:34Did the camera show up? By July,
- 15:37ICE told Congress directly that less than one third of officers nationally
- 15:42had been issued a body camera.
- 15:44Three months after the money showed up,
- 15:47two out of every three agents in the field were still roaming around with impunity
- 15:53unwatched.
- 15:54That's why this lands on actual bodies.
- 15:56July seventh, Houston. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo,
- 16:01fifty two, lived in Houston for thirty five years,
- 16:05owned a construction business,
- 16:06no criminal record, was literally in the process of applying for legal status.
- 16:11He's driving his crew to a job site in his white van.
- 16:15ICE agents are surveilling a completely different target.
- 16:19And Lorenzo's van matches a description.
- 16:23They stop the van, they shoot him in the abdomen,
- 16:25and he dies at Ben Taub Hospital.
- 16:27Ice says he weaponized his vehicle.
- 16:32Where have we heard that one before?
- 16:33Witnesses in the passengers say no agent was even in front of the van,
- 16:37and the shots came from the side of the van.
- 16:40There's no camera footage. The agents weren't wearing cameras.
- 16:43Ice later admitted he wasn't even the target.
- 16:46July thirteenth, six days later,
- 16:49Bidaford, Maine.
- 16:51Johann Sebastian Duran Guerrero twenty six,
- 16:55legal work authorization, a pending asylum case,
- 16:58not the target of the operation is shot and killed by an ICE agent named David
- 17:04Michael Bruyette. No cameras. The DOJ initially refuses to share information with
- 17:10the state of Maine. Over five hundred people rallied in Portland and there
- 17:14was not one federal charge.
- 17:17July fourteenth, the next day,
- 17:19Saint Augustine won. No footage of the encounter.
- 17:22DHS won't even confirm that he had a visa to be here.
- 17:26Three deaths, one week, zero cameras.
- 17:29An agency with ten point three billion dollars and
- 17:35a specific congressional appropriation for cameras,
- 17:38and not one agent involved in three murders was wearing one.
- 17:44Christy Nome was replaced as DHS Secretary in March of twenty twenty
- 17:48six by Marquine Mullen. Yes,
- 17:51that's the pronunciation of his name.
- 17:53He is a former ~ senator or House of Representatives rep to the state of Oklahoma.
- 17:59I know him very well. His office knows my name very well.
- 18:03The body camera rollout has stayed a joke under the under this joker.
- 18:08DHS has also refused to answer whether Juan had a valid visa,
- 18:11same instinct. The eleven months instinct.
- 18:14You don't get to know. Todd Lyons,
- 18:17the acting director, who stood by the grand jury on Rubin,
- 18:20is the one telling Congress about the one-third number standing
- 18:24by every public shooting.
- 18:26and saying that he stands with them consistently.
- 18:30And then Tom Homan, God, if I've ever met a man with a punchable face,
- 18:34the White House borders are. When the deaths piled up,
- 18:39Homan went on Fox News and warned that bloodshed would continue unless Democratic
- 18:44critics shut their mouth.
- 18:46He said he was afraid of having to bury an ICE agent.
- 18:49When pressed on the civilian deaths,
- 18:52the citizens, the tourists, the legal residents,
- 18:55his agents had murdered, he wouldn't address them.
- 18:59He redirected every single time.
- 19:01The bloodshed will continue.
- 19:03That's the man in charge saying the quiet part into a microphone,
- 19:07into a megaphone. It's horrific.
- 19:10Not a warning about, you know,
- 19:13like this is a problem, we need to solve it.
- 19:15A promise about a policy being maintained.
- 19:19The mechanism's not hidden, folks.
- 19:21ten point three billion dollars.
- 19:23An armed force that operates everywhere.
- 19:28A body camera program funded and not delivered
- 19:33on purpose because footage is a liability and darkness is an asset.
- 19:39Leadership that stands by every shooting hides the details
- 19:43and threatens the critics.
- 19:45Why does this still happen? Because it's working.
- 19:48Nobody's been charged. The velocity is up,
- 19:52the money is flowing. From the perspective of the people running it,
- 19:55there's no problem to fix here.
- 19:57Let's go back to Juan. Because in this episode,
- 20:01he's getting his own. We're gonna say his name and we're gonna refuse
- 20:06to let Juan just be a data point in this episode.
- 20:10Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran,
- 20:13San Luis de la Paz, Guanajuato,
- 20:1628 years old. He gets a valid tourist visa,
- 20:20goes to Atlanta with his family and friends.
- 20:23There's laughing in that, a couch,
- 20:24meals, somebody's kids running around.
- 20:27Then he does the most ordinary thing a person can do in this country.
- 20:31He decides he wants to go to Florida.
- 20:33He wants to see what it's like to be a Florida man.
- 20:36He heads east. He's got a wife,
- 20:39Jessica, a seven year old baby boy,
- 20:41a baby girl seven months old, and at a gas station in Saint Augustine before seven
- 20:46in the morning, men with guns and badges and bulletproof vests are
- 20:51Walk up to his car and nobody has explained why.
- 20:54What was the intelligence? What were they looking for?
- 20:58It certainly wasn't him, he couldn't have been on a list anywhere.
- 21:02It's never the person. It's a van that matched the description,
- 21:06a a car at a gas station, the wrong guy,
- 21:09over and over and over. He was brown.
- 21:14This operation generates motion.
- 21:16The motion generates contact. The contact generates death,
- 21:21and the death generates a citation of an ongoing investigation,
- 21:26and that's the i that's the loop.
- 21:27That's the whole thing. Look, he ran.
- 21:30People ask why he'd run if he was legal.
- 21:32Look, guys, you're at a gas station at dawn.
- 21:37Armed men rush your vehicle,
- 21:41three other people in your car take off,
- 21:43you run. That's not a confession.
- 21:46That is our central nervous system giving us two options fight or flight.
- 21:51And he didn't fight back. He ran because he was scared.
- 21:57Because that is what our central nervous system tells us to do.
- 22:01He ran across the road, slipped on wet grass,
- 22:03and a truck killed him. They flew his body home in the belly of
- 22:07a commercial plane out of Orlando.
- 22:09His seven month year old daughter will not remember his face.
- 22:12His wife had to retrieve him at an airport in Mexico,
- 22:17and the government of the country he came to visit as a tourist with permission will
- 22:23not even confirm that he had permission.
- 22:26Now put him next to Ruben Ray Martinez.
- 22:29Ruben was a citizen. Juan was a tourist.
- 22:32In the fantasy version of this system,
- 22:34this status is supposed to mean something.
- 22:37Both, by the rules that this system claims to run on,
- 22:41were people had that had no business killing.
- 22:44Both of those are dead. In both cases,
- 22:47no charges. In Rubin's case, a grand jury declined to indict,
- 22:52and the director stood by it after eleven months.
- 22:55Of purposeful concealment of the case.
- 22:58And in Juan's case, they won't even release the details of why his
- 23:02car was even approached.
- 23:04The legal status does not protect you.
- 23:06The whole justification for this bullshit We're going after people
- 23:11who broke the law. It collapses the second you line up the actual dead people.
- 23:17A citizen on his birthday, a tourist with a visa on vacation,
- 23:22a thirty five year Houston resident in the process to get his green card,
- 23:28a Colombian man with a legal work authorization and pending asylum.
- 23:32Lorenzo Salgado Aurajo left behind a business,
- 23:36a crew, a family, a son named Ronaldo?
- 23:40Johann Durangero left behind a partner and a three year old little girl.
- 23:45Ruben's mother, Rachel Reyes, is still waiting sixteen months now
- 23:50for justice for her son. And Jessica La Mia is a widow with two kids because
- 23:56her husband wanted to see the ocean.
- 23:58He wanted to see the water, folks.
- 23:59That is n that is a human desire.
- 24:02And I think about this seven month old little girl that will grow up
- 24:06in a house where her father is just a story.
- 24:08And the place where that man should be just has a hole in it.
- 24:12Exactly the shape of an explanation that DHS decided she wasn't entitled to.
- 24:17Why did you walk up to the car,
- 24:20Mama? Nobody ever said Miha. The government cited an ongoing investigation
- 24:24and kept citing it and time passed and nobody got charged.
- 24:27And the investigation closed into silence and the hole stayed the shape it was.
- 24:32That is the human cost of this darkness.
- 24:35That's not just an evidentiary gap in a court case,
- 24:39a permanent hole in the world.
- 24:40In a child's understanding of why her father died,
- 24:44that no lawsuit, no FOIA request,
- 24:47no watchdog organization can close,
- 24:50because the footage that would have answered the question was never recorded.
- 24:54The bloodshed will continue, Holman said,
- 24:56and he was right. The blood keeps belonging to citizens and tourists
- 25:01and asylum seekers and construction bosses,
- 25:04and the man who said it still sitting fat in his office.
- 25:08Let me pull these two threads together because really they're just one thread.
- 25:12Thread one, ICE kills people who aren't the targets of its operations.
- 25:17Tourists, citizens, legal residents,
- 25:20and faces no criminal accountability whatsoever,
- 25:24forever. End of story. And thread two,
- 25:28the body camera promise is made and funded and broken every time,
- 25:34which means there's never footage.
- 25:36To contradict the official account,
- 25:38which means ICE's word becomes the record.
- 25:40Functionally, the only version of events.
- 25:43Put those together and you get an armed federal agency,
- 25:47a gestapo, that kills the wrong people,
- 25:50controls the only narrative of how they died,
- 25:53and answers to no one. That's not a broken system.
- 25:57That is a complete system.
- 26:00Kill without accountability, narrate without contradiction,
- 26:04threaten anyone who complains about it,
- 26:06and shut your damn mouth. That's not dysfunction,
- 26:10that is a design. This whole thing was never about immigration as a moral category.
- 26:15It was about controlling a labor market by making a class of human beings disposable
- 26:22and turning their legal status into a dial that you could turn.
- 26:27When a person is a unit, you don't owe them a body camera,
- 26:31an explanation, or their widow a phone call,
- 26:35you process them. If one dies while in processing,
- 26:38that's shrinkage, the cost of doing business.
- 26:41That's why Juan being a tourist matters so much.
- 26:44He wasn't even part of the labor market that they're claiming to police.
- 26:49He was a customer, exactly the person Florida's tourism economy is built to attract.
- 26:54Come see the beaches, bring your family,
- 26:56spend your money. And the machine murdered him anyway.
- 26:59Because it doesn't distinguish.
- 27:02It was built to grab first and sort out later,
- 27:05and later is a luxury that a dead person doesn't get.
- 27:09Eleven months of concealing Rubin's death isn't the exception,
- 27:12it's the promise. It's the agency telling you exactly how much accountability you're
- 27:16gonna get.
- 27:17As little as legally possible,
- 27:18extended as long as legally possible,
- 27:20and none of it at all if they can help.
- 27:23That's why the idea that reform is the answer is a categorical error.
- 27:28You can't add cameras to an agency whose core competency is darkness.
- 27:33Twenty million dollars proved that they had the money,
- 27:37they had the legal authorization,
- 27:40the mandate, and eighty-two percent of the country having seen the videos
- 27:44and they still didn't put damn cameras on the damn agents who killed Lorenzo Johan
- 27:49or stood at the gas station where Juan died.
- 27:52That was not inability. It was intent.
- 27:55Twenty million dollars against a ten point three billion dollar budget
- 27:59is a rounding error. They could have bought every camera needed for every agent
- 28:04in the field and had money left over,
- 28:06but they chose not to, because a system built on treating people
- 28:10as disposable has no use for a device that records their disposal.
- 28:15Camera isn't a tool the system wants.
- 28:17It's a threat to its fundamental operating logic.
- 28:20So the question is not how do we make ice safer?
- 28:22It's why does a country that can't claims to believe in due process operate
- 28:28an armed security force whose entire function is to deny due process?
- 28:33And once you ask it that way, there's only one honest answer with what to
- 28:38do with a machine like that. You don't figure out how to tune it,
- 28:41you turn it off.
- 28:43Here's what you should be watching more closely now.
- 28:45Watch out for the phrase ongoing investigation and watch it over and over again.
- 28:49It sounds like accountability,
- 28:51like the wheels are turning, it's definitely not that.
- 28:53It's the mechanism of the eleven months and how they hid Ruben
- 28:57Rey Martinez for nearly a year,
- 28:59and and how they're hiding whatever happened at that gas station to Juan.
- 29:03Every time an agency says it, start a clock.
- 29:05And watch how many of those investigations ever produce a single charge against
- 29:10a single agent.
- 29:12And they take advantage of that and they weaponize it.
- 29:13They know you're not going to pay attention.
- 29:15As of this recording across at least ten deaths,
- 29:18that number is zero.
- 29:20Ten dead, zero charged, and everything else is noise designed to keep
- 29:24you from figuring that out.
- 29:26Juan came here on a tourist visa.
- 29:27He was, in the most literal sense,
- 29:29a paying guest to the United States.
- 29:31Florida spends fortunes advertising its beaches to exactly this kind of person.
- 29:36Come see us, bring your family.
- 29:38And when he died running from federal agents who never explained
- 29:40why they approached him, the government's response was to refuse to confirm
- 29:44he was allowed to be there. We invited him to visit and killed
- 29:48him by accident during an operation that wasn't even for him,
- 29:52and then denied him the dignity of admitting.
- 29:55That he was our guest, because admitting it would make the story worse.
- 29:59The visa becomes a secret because the truth is inconvenient to the killing.
- 30:04Learn the names of the agents.
- 30:06There's one on record, David Michael Bruliette,
- 30:09the agent in Maine. And that name exists because people fought to make it exist.
- 30:15Because advocates and journalists and state officials pushed back against
- 30:19a government that wanted the shooter to stay a faceless representative
- 30:23of an institution. The default in this system of is anonymity for the shooter
- 30:28and a permanent secret for the family.
- 30:30So the most radical thing that we can do.
- 30:34Is refusing to let these people be just faceless ice agents.
- 30:38When you talk about these murders,
- 30:41attach the human names on both sides,
- 30:44Juan and Lorenzo and Ruben, and Renee,
- 30:47and Alex and Johan, and the agents when we can get them.
- 30:51Because a system built on darkness cannot survive being named out loud over
- 30:56and over by ordinary people who refuse to stop.
- 30:59I know this was a dark one, guys,
- 31:01but that's the overlap for this week.
- 31:03You can find us in all of the usual places,
- 31:05FOF dot foundation. You can find us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
- 31:11Please give us a rating if you haven't already.
- 31:12Say a name today, say Juan, say it to somebody who hasn't heard it.
- 31:17His daughter, seven months old,
- 31:18and she's going to need us to remember for her.
- 31:20We'll see you next week.
- 31:22Bye.