ICE will deploy body cameras by the end of next month — under a policy that lets the agency's own director decide whether the public ever sees the footage. The cameras are real. The accountability is not.
The three eyewitnesses who contradict ICE's account of the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo are in federal detention and being pressured to sign self-deportation orders — a move that would eliminate the only independent record of what happened.
ICE agent Christian Castro shot a Venezuelan man in Minneapolis in January, filed a report claiming self-defense, and was arrested in Texas eleven days after being charged. Body camera footage drove the case. The question is what conditions made the lie a reasonable bet in the first place.
Despite congressional mandates requiring transparency, families of 42 people who died in ICE custody are blocked from accessing medical records and autopsy reports that could explain preventable deaths.