Mexico will ask for criminal charges over 17 Mexicans who died in ICE custody or during immigration enforcement operations by the Trump administration, officials said Thursday. The request goes to state prosecutors’ offices and the U.S. Department of Justice. It targets the machinery that cages, polices, and kills, while civil lawsuits are also planned against the companies that run detention centers.
Who Pays for Their “Enforcement”
Mexican Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco said the government will submit the request and ask prosecutors to consider criminal charges against those responsible for the deaths. He said the civil lawsuits are meant to put an end to human rights violations in those facilities. That’s the language of the state, but the facts underneath it are plain: 17 Mexicans dead, and a system of detention and immigration enforcement still operating as if bodies are just collateral.
President Claudia Sheinbaum said Thursday that Mexico decided to move beyond diplomatic channels after an ICE agent killed Mexican citizen Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston this week. Sheinbaum said the killing “is not only sad and regrettable, but also appears to have been targeted.” She added, “We are going to do everything in our power, because we cannot stand silent” in the face of the deaths of Mexicans “whose only crime is working honestly in the United States.”
Salgado Araujo had lived in the country for decades. He was transporting a work crew to a housing construction site when he was shot. His family demanded a thorough investigation into what happened. The people doing the work, the people moving the crews, the people trying to survive — they’re the ones who end up under the gun.
What the Apparatus Says
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, agents were pursuing him because he was living in the country without legal authorization. DHS said Salgado Araujo was shot after disregarding orders and attempting to ram an agent, who fired his weapon in self-defense. That’s the official version, delivered by the same institution that runs the force in question. The state writes its own alibi while the dead can’t answer back.
The Mexican government said 14 Mexicans have died while in ICE custody and 3 during ICE operations. Until now, Mexico had supported the victims’ families, sent diplomatic notes to Washington demanding investigations, and raised the issue with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Sheinbaum earlier this year ordered consulates to regularly check in with ICE detainees, and her government lodged a complaint with the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Those steps show the narrow corridor ordinary people are told to trust: notes, commissions, complaints, check-ins. Bureaucracy as relief. Paper as protection. But the deaths kept coming anyway.
The Limits of Official Remedies
Mexico’s latest request adds to an already strained relationship with the Trump administration. Sheinbaum has cracked down more fiercely than her predecessors on organized crime in the wake of mounting threats by Trump to take military action against cartels. She has also sought to keep an amicable relationship with her U.S. counterpart as the countries renegotiate the decades-old free trade agreement. At the same time, she’s taken a strong stance on immigration enforcement and the rights of Mexican citizens in U.S. custody.
That’s the bind of statecraft: one hand denounces abuse, the other keeps the machinery of trade and enforcement humming. The people at the bottom still face detention, surveillance, and the violence that comes wrapped in official language. The companies that operate the detention centers remain in the frame too, because the business of confinement doesn’t run on rhetoric alone. It runs on contracts, custody, and the quiet assumption that some lives can be managed this way forever.
Mexico’s move now puts criminal charges on the table. Whether the institutions that oversee, profit from, and defend this system will answer is another matter. The dead don’t get to wait for reform.