Tonight in Your Rights: ICE's rising civilian casualties

Immigration expert Andrea Flores explains why these were "preventable tragedies." Plus, the nightly legal roundup: E. Jean Carroll edition.

Makeshift memorial for Joan Sebastian Guerrero, shot to death by an ICE agent. (Photo by Ryan Murphy/Getty Images)

Federal agents shot and killed two men, days apart, in different parts of the United States within the span of a week. In both cases, the victims were fathers who were not the intended targets of the operation, and federal authorities accused them of trying to flee the scene, only to be contradicted by eyewitnesses.

On Tuesday, the death toll rose again in Florida.

This time, there wasn’t a shooting. During an “encounter” with federal immigration agents, a man fled into traffic and was struck by a tractor-trailer, according to state authorities.

Immigration expert Andrea Flores, who worked as an attorney for the White House and Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, emphasized that these are “preventable tragedies.”

“It keeps happening because this administration is doing something no prior administration has ever done, which is to treat every immigrant who is here with a civil immigration violation as a priority for arrest, detention, and removal,” she told All Rise News in a video interview.

Last week, the victim was father-of-three Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas. On Monday, it was 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and both were approached by federal agents driving unmarked vehicles.

Possible Action Item:

The 50501 Movement has helped organize nationwide protests in response to the shootings, announcing a day of action scheduled for July 25.

An organizing call for that event has been scheduled for Wednesday.

Despite a massive budget increase, ICE agents weren’t wearing body cameras during either incident.

“They got $7 billion last year. They have another set of billions of dollars more recently, and they can't put body cameras on their officers?” Flores noted. “Even worse, it seems to be the case in Maine that they may have had the cameras, but they weren't wearing them.”

Next to the site where Guerrero was slain, someone accurately wrote the words “THIS IS BLOOD” in white chalk, an image that MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow found all the more shocking in noting that it was a crime scene. Photographs and footage of the site showed the area was unprotected.

That sight drew attention to the federal government’s refusal to investigate similar incidents and cooperate with state authorities, which was cast into sharp relief on Monday when the Trump administration finally turned over Renée Good’s vehicle and other evidence to state authorities.

Her family’s attorney Antonio Romanucci called the transfer of evidence “an important and meaningful step towards justice and accountability.”

As All Rise News has reported, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty has brought multiple criminal cases against federal agents, and she has been leading a homicide investigation into Good’s killers.

Flores believes that the state of Minnesota more broadly has been invested in a “Truth and Reconciliation-type” reckoning into the federal occupation of the Twin Cities.

“I also think these incidents are building political pressure clearly on the [Trump] administration to act,” she noted. “They're seeing that these policies are one, horrifying and two, politically unpopular.”

In the wake of the latest killings, Reuters reported that ICE has temporarily halted vehicle stops.

But Flores is wary of the Department of Homeland Security’s “window dressing” of responsiveness under Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s leadership.

“Detention conditions aren't better,” she noted. “I'm not seeing any improvements in due process, and I'm seeing rampant racial profiling.”

Look out for the full interview later this week on Legal AF.

E. Jean Carroll: ‘The Eagle has landed’

Through her attorneys, E. Jean Carroll has received the $5 million verdict, plus interest, that a federal jury unanimously ordered Donald Trump to pay her for sexual abuse and defamation.

“The Eagle has landed,” Carroll celebrated on social media, shortly after the federal court database confirmed transfer of the judgment.

Interest grew with every day of nonpayment since the verdict, resulting in a $5,625,005.48 award on the day of the transfer.

Carroll is still owed more than $83 million from her second defamation judgment, which Trump is appealing separately.

Closing the book on Reza Zarrab

As previously reported on All Rise News, the criminal case of a record-breaking conspiracy to violate sanctions against Iran has been a thorn in Trump’s side for roughly a decade.

That’s because it implicated the Turkish government under the control of strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man described by Trump’s ex-National Security Advisor John Bolton as one of the “dictators he liked.”

During Trump’s first term, there were multiple reports that Trump tried to interfere with the money laundering case, but U.S. Attorneys resisted those efforts. Prosecutors ultimately convicted the scheme’s mastermind Reza Zarrab and a manager at Halkbank, a bank controlled by the Turkish government. Zarrab cooperated with the government and implicated Erdogan in sanctions-busting trades during bombshell testimony in 2017.

Then, Trump-tapped U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton suddenly dropped the case against Halkbank itself earlier this year.

On Tuesday, the saga reached its final chapter: Zarrab, the gold trader at the center of the scheme, was sentenced to time served and praised for his “valuable cooperation” with the U.S. government.

U.S. District Judge Richard Berman said that Zarrab, a once-globe trotting playboy married to a Turkish pop star, had been reduced to a “negative net worth” and faced threats against his life for becoming a state’s witness.

Read more about the history of the case here, along with coverage of Zarrab’s sentencing on the Organized Crime and Corrruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), where I contributed coverage from the courthouse.

Programming note

Tomorrow, I will be joining Michael Popok on Legal AF to preview Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Watch it on YouTube at 8:45 a.m. Eastern Time here.

Also, check out my interview below with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) about Monday’s blistering ruling against Blanche.