Vigil in Little Village honors victims shot, killed by ICE agents
President Donald Trump has reversed the directive issued on Tuesday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to temporarily pause traffic stops after two people were shot and killed just days apart by agents.
Some called the then-directive a baby step. However, others distrusted that it would ever happen altogether.
All this as a vigil for those shot and killed by ICE in the last year is being held in Little Village—a community that feels the impacts of immigration enforcement deeply.
Community members gather to pray the rosary to remember those killed by federal agents. They named 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national in Maine who was in the country illegally. He lived with his partner and had a 3-year-old daughter.
A few days earlier, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant, was also shot and killed by a federal agent during a traffic stop in Texas. Both were not the intended subject in the shootings.
Their names join a list here alongside Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Silverio Villegas González, a father killed during a traffic stop in Franklin Park.
Less than a day after law enforcement sources told CBS News that most traffic stops would be on hold while ICE agents receive more training, President Trump posted on Truth Social and effectively reversed the pause, saying in part, "We must be strong, tough, smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.'s most important and effective crime fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!"
"We can't trust them because they say one thing and then they do another thing," said Baltazar Enríquez, president of the Little Village Community Council. "We've seen the president, again, say they're doing a great job. So, if killing innocent people is a great job, then we can see they are not empathetic. They do not have a heart."
The shootings once again sparked the conversation about the use of body cameras
Last October, a federal judge ordered all agents in Chicago to wear and turn on their cameras, but it wasn't a nationwide decision.
"The cameras were bought. One of the first things I did in Minnesota is bring hundreds of cameras to Minnesota recently purchased, but it wasn't the cameras to, to outfit every ICE agent. I was waiting up for more money, and the delay in ICE, the DHS funding shutdown, delayed a lot of that cameras," said Tom Homan, acting director for ICE.
Skeptics, however, questioned whether or not body cameras that do work are always turned on.
In the case of Marimar Martinez, a Chicago woman shot by a federal agent last year, her attorney says the agent did not have his body camera on at the time of the shooting.
Top ICE officials have voiced their support of the camera program because they say it would help justify officers' actions.
