Opinion: Is there a difference between trying to kill us and not caring if we live or die?

On August 3, 2019, Patrick Crusius drove more than ten hours to an El Paso Walmart and murdered 23 people. He'd posted a manifesto minutes earlier warning of a "Hispanic invasion of Texas." He wanted to kill Mexicans.

He wanted us dead. Read what's happened since, and ask what the difference is between wanting it and simply not caring whether it happens.

On July 7, 2026, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — a 52-year-old father of three, a homebuilder who'd lived in Houston, TX for 35 years — left before dawn to pick up his crew. An ICE agent shot him in the abdomen during a stop. He died at Ben Taub Hospital. DHS has since admitted he wasn't the man they were looking for.

Six days later, in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE officer shot 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero to death during an enforcement operation. Same admission: wrong man. Two states, one week, two wrong targets, two bodies.

And in July, an Overland, Missouri couple — Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, parents of three — were found bound, gagged and shot dead in a Guatemalan sugarcane field. Pérez Paz had been deported after an ICE stop on his way to a roofing job. González de la Cruz, fighting an active asylum case, gave up and followed him rather than risk detention and separation from her kids. Their 14-month-old daughter was found alive next to her mother's body, dehydrated, crying.

There is a difference between driving to a Walmart to murder Mexicans and operating what this administration calls immigration enforcement. Crusius acted alone, with intent, with a rifle, in one afternoon. The other is a bureaucracy — quotas, contracts, budget lines, agents making individual choices inside a chain of command. I'm not erasing that distinction. Intent, chain of command and accountability matter for what happens next, legally and politically.

But tell that distinction to the family of that toddler in the sugarcane field, or to U.S. Representative Sylvia Garcia's constituents in Houston. Crusius wanted us dead and picked up a gun. This administration built a system that keeps killing immigrants and has done nothing to stop it. If the body count and the outcome are the same, someone should explain what's meaningfully different between wanting something and never caring enough to prevent it.

The deaths do not stop at three

In April 2025, this administration deported families containing at least three U.S. citizen children — two, four, and seven — to Honduras. The four-year-old was mid-treatment for stage 4 cancer, sent without his medication; a federal judge noted it happened with no meaningful process. Mothers of citizen children are being deported at four times the prior rate.

DACA recipients — valid work permits, no criminal records, background-checked every two years — have been swept up too. DHS has said publicly that DACA "does not confer any form of legal status"; at least 86 Dreamers have been deported and over 240 more arrested.

Meanwhile, HHS let the national legal-aid contract for unaccompanied migrant children expire on July 31, 2026, cutting nearly 100 legal defense organizations loose and withholding $65 million already owed to them. An estimated 20,000 to 24,000 children now face deportation hearings alone; without a lawyer they win less than 1% of the time. The same government, in the same summer: shooting men who "resemble suspects" and stripping children of the one thing that might keep them from being deported alone.

On June 24, 2026, the administration deported 146 Venezuelans — including seven children — on a single flight to Caracas. Hours after landing, while the group was being processed at a hotel in La Guaira, earthquakes struck and the building collapsed. At least 25 were confirmed killed. DHS said ICE was no longer responsible for them once the plane touched down.

A four-year-old with cancer. A toddler in a sugarcane field. Twenty-five people crushed in a hotel they were forced onto a plane to reach. Two men shot for resembling somebody else. None were the "worst of the worst." None were even, in the moment they died, the person anyone claimed to be hunting. The machine doesn't check twice. It was never built to.

Somebody built that machine on purpose — and somebody else primed the public to look away from it.

This country has spent decades making entertainment out of Latino men as cartel bosses and criminals, filmed and distributed from Los Angeles, the most Latino county in America. The National Hispanic Media Coalition drew a direct line from that typecasting to Salgado Araujo's death: a 35-year homebuilder killed, then described by officials as having "weaponized his vehicle" — language that only sounds plausible to a public trained to expect Latino men to be dangerous by default. Hollywood didn't pull the trigger. It spent fifty years writing the character agents were primed to see. Kristi Noem's multimillion-dollar photo shoots at a Salvadoran mega-prison weren't decoration, either — propaganda is infrastructure, the connective tissue between a campaign speech and the half-second an agent decides who's the threat.

Stephen Miller, now White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, is the architect of the underlying machine. The SPLC has published over 900 emails Miller sent to Breitbart pushing the white nationalist "white genocide" framework and “The Camp of the Saints” — a novel about the violent destruction of the West by non-white immigrants. He engineered the 2018 family separation policy as a deterrent, reportedly because of the trauma it caused. This term, he's institutionalized arrest quotas, pushed agents to bypass due process and purged staff who might have slowed any of it down.

Crusius needed a manifesto and a rifle to act on the belief that we don't matter. Miller needed a budget, a quota system and men willing to fill it. Both needed the same story already believed by whoever pulled the trigger or signed the order. Crusius wrote his down himself. Miller spent years making sure the government would act on it without anyone having to write it down again.

So ask the question plainly: what is the difference between a man who wants you dead and drives to a Walmart to do it himself, and men who built a system that keeps killing you and refuse to fix it? Stephen Miller and Donald Trump did not hold the gun to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo's stomach, or tie Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz's hands. But "we didn't intend this" is not an acceptable defense for the people in charge. At some point it becomes its own kind of intent — to keep doing something you know is killing people, because the deaths are an acceptable cost of the story you've decided to tell about us.

The good news: this country has not stayed quiet. On July 25, over 330 communities held coordinated vigils nationwide — formal ceremonies in more than 115 cities honoring Salgado Araujo, Durán Guerrero and others. Houston held 14 straight days of demonstrations; Los Angeles carried 76 symbolic coffins to City Hall. Not a footnote — this country telling the administration we know when we're being lied to.

There might be a difference between wanting us dead and not caring if we die. But it's not a difference that matters to the dead, or to the families burying them.

We are suffering, but we can also learn how to prevent future suffering

We have been living in the El Paso shooter's white supremacist world that dehumanizes our families for too long. Body camera footage — when it exists at all — is evidence at a trial. But no trial brings Lorenzo Salgado Araujo or Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero back from the dead.

I have a Brown autistic son. My biggest fear is that he'll be killed by an ICE officer, a police officer or anyone who supports deporting children like the four-year-old sent to Honduras mid-chemo. If the worst happens, it won't matter whether the person responsible owned a MAGA hat, a Confederate flag or a badge. The worst will have happened, and nothing will undo it. All that matters is my family. And yours.

When my mother was diagnosed with cancer for the second time — a diagnosis far worse than the first — she reassured me she'd survive because she still had a lesson left to learn. Not punishment. A call to understand herself and the people around her more deeply, and to live long enough to do it.

That's where I find myself in the middle of the night, writing these words. We need to live. Our children need to live. Our elders need to live. To do that, we have to learn more about ourselves and each other.

I wish for justice in criminal and civil court for the families of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero — and for a greater justice than any courtroom can deliver.

Justice cannot be served until those unaffected are as outraged as those who are. If we cannot find humanity in one another, we cannot live together, build democracy together or keep our families safe.

Poisonous ideas and poisonous institutions may both perish. But we must not.