FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Melissa Stek, communications consultant, melissa@mountgem.com
Tom Salyers, Director of Communications, tsalyers@clasp.org
Washington, DC, July 14, 2026—In just one week, U.S. immigration agents have killed two dads. On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Houston, Texas. He was not under investigation and he was not a suspect. Lorenzo was a husband and dad of three adult sons driving a work van with his crew when he was gunned down by ICE. On July 13, Johan Sebastián was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine. Johan was not under investigation and he was not a suspect. Johan was a young working dad driving his car in the morning when he was gunned down by ICE in front of his wife and 3-year-old daughter.
No child—whether a toddler, teenager, or adult—should lose a parent to the indiscriminate, lawless violence of our federal immigration agencies. Decades of evidence demonstrate the short- and long-term harm that the loss of a parent has on children and their support systems. And yet, Congress has continued to grant ICE billions more dollars to continue its terror campaign,with no oversight or accountability for the civilian deaths caused by this government agency. The Children Thrive Action Network (CTAN) calls for independent investigations of these murders, as well as the deaths of other parents and individuals in ICE detention or at the hands of immigration officials since January 20, 2025. We urge Congress to immediately pull ICE’s funding to get ICE out of American communities and stop additional funding to the Department of Homeland Security.
Wendy Cervantes, Director of Immigration and Immigrant Families at the Center for Law and Social Policy and Director of the Children Thrive Action Network:
“Immigration policies that include killing parents and breadwinners and undermining the safety of entire communities are failed policies that need to be stopped immediately. We’ve seen repeatedly how immigration operations harm children, and as a nation where one in four children has an immigrant parent, ICE is creating a public health and safety crisis. Congress has paid the bill for the Trump Administration to enact these horrors, and now they must take responsibility and freeze these funds immediately. From deadly and unnecessary immigrant detention to executions in the streets, ICE operations are orphaning children. Congress must end this reckless attack on kids and families immediately.”
