ICE: Accountable to No One

Yell his name was Juan Hiro Coronilla Duran.

He was twenty eight years old.

He was from San Luis de La Paz,

which is in the Guanajuato state in Mexico,

and he had a wife, her name was Jessica,

a seven year old son, a daughter who was seven months old.

Seven months. She's not gonna remember her father.

She'll just have to know him from photographs and stories.

He came to the United States on a valid tourist visa.

He went to Atlanta first and stayed with some family and some friends and

he did the thing a million upon millions of people do every year.

The the whole thing that the state of Florida is built to sell you.

He drove to the beach. He wanted to see the ocean.

On july fourteenth, twenty twenty six,

before seven in the morning, ICE and Homeland Security Investigations agents walked

up to the car he was in at a gas station in St.

Augustine, Florida. That's the oldest city in America.

And no one to this day is yet to explain why they walked up to him.

All four people in that car did what people do in the

When a group of armed men with tactical gear come at them incredibly fast,

they ran. Fight a fight or flight response kicked in.

Juan ran across State Road sixteen and slipped on the grass in the median,

and he was hit by a tractor trailer.

He died there on the ground, on vacation.

The Department of Homeland Security won't confirm that he had a valid visa,

but he did. They just won't say it.

DHS cites the ongoing investigation.

Everybody cites the ongoing investigation.

But his body was flown home to Mexico,

commercial flight straight out of Orlando.

This guy came to see the beach.

And they put him in the cargo hold of a plane going the other way.

Hey everybody, welcome to the overlap.

I'm Joshua. This is the show about power and labor and the machinery

of American injustice. You know the parts that they don't put in the brochure.

So Will's not in the room today,

another solo episode. We missed you,

brother, hold it down. But I want to talk about a dead man on vacation.

And I want to be clear up front that I'm not talking about Mitch McConnell.

But let's talk about what this episode is and it isn't.

It's not about how ICE could do better about reforms or body cameras

or better training. I'll talk about all of that because it's in the record,

right? And I'm not going to hide my actual position in the second half

of the show like I usually do.

The position is that ICE should not exist.

Not reformed, not retrained,

gone.

Now I didn't arrive to that opinion from ideology.

I arrived at it from the body count,

from the last twelve months, from a list of names that keeps getting longer

and longer while the people in charge go on Fox News and tell the critics that they

should shut their mouths, they're making America safer.

Well why now?

Because on July 14th, a tourist died in St.

Augustine and it barely made the national news.

Because of, you know, by July of 2026,

a dead man after an ice encounter just doesn't seem to be news anymore because it's

Tuesday and IC still exists. That's the part that should stop you cold.

A man dying while running from federal agents at a gas station before dawn

is now so damned routine.

That it doesn't clear the noise floor.

That's not because people don't care,

I know people care, I care, you care,

that's why you're here. Because the volume has made

the individual deaths indistinguishable from the background radiation,

the toxic sludge of this whole operation.

Juan was, by the the count reporters were keeping,

at least the tenth fatality connected to immigration sweeps since this

campaign started. And I say at least because ICE is demonstrated,

documented in the record, that it will hide its own killings for the better part

of a year if you let it. So ten is a floor,

not a ceiling. So we're gonna do two things.

We're gonna go back.

Because that's where we start.

Because the impulse to build an armed federal force that can grab people

off of the streets with complete impunity and no accountability is

now older and uglier than ICE.

ICE is just the current uniform on this very old idea.

And then we're gonna come all the way forward to the machine as it runs right now.

The $20 million body camera program.

That produced almost no body cameras.

And the ten point three billion dollars budget,

the acting director who stood by his agents,

the border czar, who said the bloodshed would continue.

Because Juan didn't die because one agent made a mistake at a gas station.

Juan died because of a system that was working exactly like it was designed to.

So that's the argument. Let me build it.

Let's go back to before the acronym to understand why a tourist is dead

in Florida with nobody accountable.

You have to understand that immigration enforcement in this country

was never really about immigration.

It was about a labor market. And who gets to be disposable inside

of that labor market? And I want to start with something closer than

the eighteen hundreds. Something that shows you the exact machinery that

is still running right now.

It happened on march fifteenth,

twenty twenty five in South Padre Island,

Texas. His name was Ruben Ray Martinez,

twenty three years old, a US citizen.

I'm gonna repeat that a US citizen,

not a green card holder, not a tourist in this country fully legally

as a citizen within our borders.

Because it keeps somehow not mattering to the people who should care.

Ruben Rey Martinez was an American citizen celebrating his birthday in

a beach town in Texas.

There'd been a car crash at a busy intersection.

HSI agents, that's Homeland Security Investigations,

that's ICE, were on the scene.

In the version Ice tells, Reuben intentionally ran over an agent.

Now his mother disputes that. A friend who was there disputes that.

An agent fired three shots through the driver's side window and killed the man.

And then they handcuffed him before he got medical care.

A twenty-three year old US citizen shot three times through his own car window,

and the priority was handcuffed.

Now ICE hid its involvement for nearly eleven months.

His family knew he was dead. They didn't have the full story of

who killed him because the agency that killed him decided that you didn't need

to know. It only came out because a watchdog group called

the American Oversight filed a FOIA lawsuit and it pried

the internal documents loose. That's how accountability works in this system.

A private organization has to sue the federal government to find

out that the federal government shot an American citizen on his birthday.

A Texas grand jury declined to indict,

is anyone surprised? And the acting director of ICE,

a man by the name of Todd Lyons,

remember his name because he's a POS,

but he stood by the decision. He stood by it.

So why start here instead of a century ago?

Because let's be honest, it's been going on a long time.

We originally brought slaves into this country for the same reason.

It's because this isn't a bug in a young program.

This is the program. Within the first months of this deportation campaign,

before the machine was even warm,

it had already killed a person and hid it for the better part of a year

and walked away spotless, smelling like a rose.

That's a system succeeding at the thing it was built to do:

to move human beings without friction and treat the ones who die

as a rounding error.

And that impulse, right, to to build a force like this is very,

very old and genuinely very American.

And the through line is always labor.

For most of the twentieth century,

immigration enforcement followed the same pattern.

When the economy needed bodies for the fields,

the rail lines, the meat packing floors,

the border, it was a sort of a hazy suggestion.

Come on in, we need you. When the economy softened or the politics turned,

the same people who'd been invited became the target of raids and roundups

and mass expulsions.

The welcome mat and the deportation bus were the same policy,

pointed in different directions depending on what the market wanted that year.

In the nineteen fifties, this is the actual government name,

Operation Wetback, the Eisenhower administration deported over a million people

in one year. Military style sweeps through California and Texas,

the people rounded up weren't strangers.

They were workers recruited by American agriculture who'd spent years

in the fields that fed our country.

And when the political pressure shifted,

the invitation evaporated.

That's the real deep root. The person is never a person in this system.

The person is a unit of labor whose legal status is a dial that gets turned

by people who will never meet them.

What got worse is that we built this standing armed federal police force around that

mechanism, ICE. That was created in 2003 in a panic after 9-11,

folded into a brand new department called Homeland Security.

That framing Homeland Security is the whole trick.

It took a labor market enforcement function and dressed it in

the language of terrorism and national defense.

So when an agent shoots a twenty three year old US citizen on his birthday,

it gets filed under a security operation instead of what it actually is.

I don't know if the people who built this kind of knew that that framing would

let agents kill without consequence,

but I know what they built. An agency inside the department least subject

to the transparency rules that bind every local police officer I've ever met.

An agency built to operate everywhere,

not just at the border but in Minneapolis,

in Houston, in a gas station parking lot in the oldest city in America.

Built from day one with a culture

of concealment masks hidden.

Eleven months of hiding a citizen's murder isn't new.

It's the oldest instinct in this apparatus.

The people it processes don't get to know what happened to them because they were

never really people to it. They were units.

And you don't owe a unit.

An explanation. So when IC hid the killing of Ruben Ray Martinez,

that's not a scandal that somehow broke this entire system,

that's the system peeking its dumb little turtle head out of

its shell and introducing itself.

Hi there.

So, citizen Shawna's birthday,

keep that in the back of your head.

Take the the handcuffs before medical care,

take the eleven months of silence with you forward,

because we're gonna walk into the summer of twenty twenty six and you're gonna

see the exact same machine running faster with more money and a promise

it made and broke every single time.

Ten point three billion dollars.

That's the ICE budget for twenty twenty six,

in case you were curious.

I can't feel a number that big.

I'll never touch a number that big.

You won't either.

So let me shrink it down to one line item that you can actually hold in your hand

in a mind and in thought. $20 million.

Not much better, right? But in April of 2026,

Congress specifically appropriated $20 million

for body-worn cameras for Department of Homeland Security law enforcement

so that when someone dies, there's a record that isn't just a guy's word.

Here's why that money existed.

In January of 2026 in Minneapolis,

an operation called Metro Surge killed two US citizens in 18 days.

Renee Nicole Good on January 7th and Alex Jeffrey Pretti on January 24th.

I talked about them all on this show in the past.

Both deaths were caught on bystander cell phone video.

And the

Video contradicted the official accounts,

not by a little, by a lot. When ordinary people could pull up camera footage

on their phones and compare it to what DHS was saying,

the legitimacy of the entire thing was cracked open wide and trust

was forever broken for even people who think that ICE is a good thing.

Now look, Minneapolis did what you're supposed to do in a democracy.

Yes, Karen, it's also a republic.

It's like saying all all rectangles are polygons,

but not all polygons are rectangles.

We have a democracy in this country.

It's a representative democracy.

50,000 people. Some counts said a hundred thousand in the streets.

A Quinnapiak, I don't know how to say that.

Quinapiak? Quinapiac? Quinapiac poll?

Sure. Said that 82% of registered voters had seen a video of the shootings.

That's a national consensus that something terrible happened.

So DHS really didn't have a choice.

They had to say something.

So at the time, dumbfuck Barbie Christy Gnome pledged to rapidly acquire

and deploy body cameras to all DHS law enforcement nationwide.

Here's the detail that tells you it was theater.

The same administration had originally proposed cutting the body camera program

before the killings made cameras politically necessary.

The rapid deployment wasn't a value,

it was damage control. It was just a

PR release with a verb in it, while the noun,

the cameras, actually on bodies recording what agents do,

has remained largely theoretical.

And the truth is, Congress did it did its part.

It did what they're supposed to.

It controlled the purse strings and said,

here, $20 million in April, folded into a bill that ended

a partial government shutdown,

real money, legally designated four cameras.

Did the camera show up? By July,

ICE told Congress directly that less than one third of officers nationally

had been issued a body camera.

Three months after the money showed up,

two out of every three agents in the field were still roaming around with impunity

unwatched.

That's why this lands on actual bodies.

July seventh, Houston. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo,

fifty two, lived in Houston for thirty five years,

owned a construction business,

no criminal record, was literally in the process of applying for legal status.

He's driving his crew to a job site in his white van.

ICE agents are surveilling a completely different target.

And Lorenzo's van matches a description.

They stop the van, they shoot him in the abdomen,

and he dies at Ben Taub Hospital.

Ice says he weaponized his vehicle.

Where have we heard that one before?

Witnesses in the passengers say no agent was even in front of the van,

and the shots came from the side of the van.

There's no camera footage. The agents weren't wearing cameras.

Ice later admitted he wasn't even the target.

July thirteenth, six days later,

Bidaford, Maine.

Johann Sebastian Duran Guerrero twenty six,

legal work authorization, a pending asylum case,

not the target of the operation is shot and killed by an ICE agent named David

Michael Bruyette. No cameras. The DOJ initially refuses to share information with

the state of Maine. Over five hundred people rallied in Portland and there

was not one federal charge.

July fourteenth, the next day,

Saint Augustine won. No footage of the encounter.

DHS won't even confirm that he had a visa to be here.

Three deaths, one week, zero cameras.

An agency with ten point three billion dollars and

a specific congressional appropriation for cameras,

and not one agent involved in three murders was wearing one.

Christy Nome was replaced as DHS Secretary in March of twenty twenty

six by Marquine Mullen. Yes,

that's the pronunciation of his name.

He is a former ~ senator or House of Representatives rep to the state of Oklahoma.

I know him very well. His office knows my name very well.

The body camera rollout has stayed a joke under the under this joker.

DHS has also refused to answer whether Juan had a valid visa,

same instinct. The eleven months instinct.

You don't get to know. Todd Lyons,

the acting director, who stood by the grand jury on Rubin,

is the one telling Congress about the one-third number standing

by every public shooting.

and saying that he stands with them consistently.

And then Tom Homan, God, if I've ever met a man with a punchable face,

the White House borders are. When the deaths piled up,

Homan went on Fox News and warned that bloodshed would continue unless Democratic

critics shut their mouth.

He said he was afraid of having to bury an ICE agent.

When pressed on the civilian deaths,

the citizens, the tourists, the legal residents,

his agents had murdered, he wouldn't address them.

He redirected every single time.

The bloodshed will continue.

That's the man in charge saying the quiet part into a microphone,

into a megaphone. It's horrific.

Not a warning about, you know,

like this is a problem, we need to solve it.

A promise about a policy being maintained.

The mechanism's not hidden, folks.

ten point three billion dollars.

An armed force that operates everywhere.

A body camera program funded and not delivered

on purpose because footage is a liability and darkness is an asset.

Leadership that stands by every shooting hides the details

and threatens the critics.

Why does this still happen? Because it's working.

Nobody's been charged. The velocity is up,

the money is flowing. From the perspective of the people running it,

there's no problem to fix here.

Let's go back to Juan. Because in this episode,

he's getting his own. We're gonna say his name and we're gonna refuse

to let Juan just be a data point in this episode.

Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran,

San Luis de la Paz, Guanajuato,

28 years old. He gets a valid tourist visa,

goes to Atlanta with his family and friends.

There's laughing in that, a couch,

meals, somebody's kids running around.

Then he does the most ordinary thing a person can do in this country.

He decides he wants to go to Florida.

He wants to see what it's like to be a Florida man.

He heads east. He's got a wife,

Jessica, a seven year old baby boy,

a baby girl seven months old, and at a gas station in Saint Augustine before seven

in the morning, men with guns and badges and bulletproof vests are

Walk up to his car and nobody has explained why.

What was the intelligence? What were they looking for?

It certainly wasn't him, he couldn't have been on a list anywhere.

It's never the person. It's a van that matched the description,

a a car at a gas station, the wrong guy,

over and over and over. He was brown.

This operation generates motion.

The motion generates contact. The contact generates death,

and the death generates a citation of an ongoing investigation,

and that's the i that's the loop.

That's the whole thing. Look, he ran.

People ask why he'd run if he was legal.

Look, guys, you're at a gas station at dawn.

Armed men rush your vehicle,

three other people in your car take off,

you run. That's not a confession.

That is our central nervous system giving us two options fight or flight.

And he didn't fight back. He ran because he was scared.

Because that is what our central nervous system tells us to do.

He ran across the road, slipped on wet grass,

and a truck killed him. They flew his body home in the belly of

a commercial plane out of Orlando.

His seven month year old daughter will not remember his face.

His wife had to retrieve him at an airport in Mexico,

and the government of the country he came to visit as a tourist with permission will

not even confirm that he had permission.

Now put him next to Ruben Ray Martinez.

Ruben was a citizen. Juan was a tourist.

In the fantasy version of this system,

this status is supposed to mean something.

Both, by the rules that this system claims to run on,

were people had that had no business killing.

Both of those are dead. In both cases,

no charges. In Rubin's case, a grand jury declined to indict,

and the director stood by it after eleven months.

Of purposeful concealment of the case.

And in Juan's case, they won't even release the details of why his

car was even approached.

The legal status does not protect you.

The whole justification for this bullshit We're going after people

who broke the law. It collapses the second you line up the actual dead people.

A citizen on his birthday, a tourist with a visa on vacation,

a thirty five year Houston resident in the process to get his green card,

a Colombian man with a legal work authorization and pending asylum.

Lorenzo Salgado Aurajo left behind a business,

a crew, a family, a son named Ronaldo?

Johann Durangero left behind a partner and a three year old little girl.

Ruben's mother, Rachel Reyes, is still waiting sixteen months now

for justice for her son. And Jessica La Mia is a widow with two kids because

her husband wanted to see the ocean.

He wanted to see the water, folks.

That is n that is a human desire.

And I think about this seven month old little girl that will grow up

in a house where her father is just a story.

And the place where that man should be just has a hole in it.

Exactly the shape of an explanation that DHS decided she wasn't entitled to.

Why did you walk up to the car,

Mama? Nobody ever said Miha. The government cited an ongoing investigation

and kept citing it and time passed and nobody got charged.

And the investigation closed into silence and the hole stayed the shape it was.

That is the human cost of this darkness.

That's not just an evidentiary gap in a court case,

a permanent hole in the world.

In a child's understanding of why her father died,

that no lawsuit, no FOIA request,

no watchdog organization can close,

because the footage that would have answered the question was never recorded.

The bloodshed will continue, Holman said,

and he was right. The blood keeps belonging to citizens and tourists

and asylum seekers and construction bosses,

and the man who said it still sitting fat in his office.

Let me pull these two threads together because really they're just one thread.

Thread one, ICE kills people who aren't the targets of its operations.

Tourists, citizens, legal residents,

and faces no criminal accountability whatsoever,

forever. End of story. And thread two,

the body camera promise is made and funded and broken every time,

which means there's never footage.

To contradict the official account,

which means ICE's word becomes the record.

Functionally, the only version of events.

Put those together and you get an armed federal agency,

a gestapo, that kills the wrong people,

controls the only narrative of how they died,

and answers to no one. That's not a broken system.

That is a complete system.

Kill without accountability, narrate without contradiction,

threaten anyone who complains about it,

and shut your damn mouth. That's not dysfunction,

that is a design. This whole thing was never about immigration as a moral category.

It was about controlling a labor market by making a class of human beings disposable

and turning their legal status into a dial that you could turn.

When a person is a unit, you don't owe them a body camera,

an explanation, or their widow a phone call,

you process them. If one dies while in processing,

that's shrinkage, the cost of doing business.

That's why Juan being a tourist matters so much.

He wasn't even part of the labor market that they're claiming to police.

He was a customer, exactly the person Florida's tourism economy is built to attract.

Come see the beaches, bring your family,

spend your money. And the machine murdered him anyway.

Because it doesn't distinguish.

It was built to grab first and sort out later,

and later is a luxury that a dead person doesn't get.

Eleven months of concealing Rubin's death isn't the exception,

it's the promise. It's the agency telling you exactly how much accountability you're

gonna get.

As little as legally possible,

extended as long as legally possible,

and none of it at all if they can help.

That's why the idea that reform is the answer is a categorical error.

You can't add cameras to an agency whose core competency is darkness.

Twenty million dollars proved that they had the money,

they had the legal authorization,

the mandate, and eighty-two percent of the country having seen the videos

and they still didn't put damn cameras on the damn agents who killed Lorenzo Johan

or stood at the gas station where Juan died.

That was not inability. It was intent.

Twenty million dollars against a ten point three billion dollar budget

is a rounding error. They could have bought every camera needed for every agent

in the field and had money left over,

but they chose not to, because a system built on treating people

as disposable has no use for a device that records their disposal.

Camera isn't a tool the system wants.

It's a threat to its fundamental operating logic.

So the question is not how do we make ice safer?

It's why does a country that can't claims to believe in due process operate

an armed security force whose entire function is to deny due process?

And once you ask it that way, there's only one honest answer with what to

do with a machine like that. You don't figure out how to tune it,

you turn it off.

Here's what you should be watching more closely now.

Watch out for the phrase ongoing investigation and watch it over and over again.

It sounds like accountability,

like the wheels are turning, it's definitely not that.

It's the mechanism of the eleven months and how they hid Ruben

Rey Martinez for nearly a year,

and and how they're hiding whatever happened at that gas station to Juan.

Every time an agency says it, start a clock.

And watch how many of those investigations ever produce a single charge against

a single agent.

And they take advantage of that and they weaponize it.

They know you're not going to pay attention.

As of this recording across at least ten deaths,

that number is zero.

Ten dead, zero charged, and everything else is noise designed to keep

you from figuring that out.

Juan came here on a tourist visa.

He was, in the most literal sense,

a paying guest to the United States.

Florida spends fortunes advertising its beaches to exactly this kind of person.

Come see us, bring your family.

And when he died running from federal agents who never explained

why they approached him, the government's response was to refuse to confirm

he was allowed to be there. We invited him to visit and killed

him by accident during an operation that wasn't even for him,

and then denied him the dignity of admitting.

That he was our guest, because admitting it would make the story worse.

The visa becomes a secret because the truth is inconvenient to the killing.

Learn the names of the agents.

There's one on record, David Michael Bruliette,

the agent in Maine. And that name exists because people fought to make it exist.

Because advocates and journalists and state officials pushed back against

a government that wanted the shooter to stay a faceless representative

of an institution. The default in this system of is anonymity for the shooter

and a permanent secret for the family.

So the most radical thing that we can do.

Is refusing to let these people be just faceless ice agents.

When you talk about these murders,

attach the human names on both sides,

Juan and Lorenzo and Ruben, and Renee,

and Alex and Johan, and the agents when we can get them.

Because a system built on darkness cannot survive being named out loud over

and over by ordinary people who refuse to stop.

I know this was a dark one, guys,

but that's the overlap for this week.

You can find us in all of the usual places,

FOF dot foundation. You can find us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Please give us a rating if you haven't already.

Say a name today, say Juan, say it to somebody who hasn't heard it.

His daughter, seven months old,

and she's going to need us to remember for her.

We'll see you next week.

Bye.