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What One Week of Trump News Says About Our New Normal

Trump’s constant cruelty can make it all seem routine.

Candles are lit during a vigil for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national shot dead by a federal immigration agent, on July 8, 2026, in Houston.

Early Tuesday morning, ICE agents shot dead Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston resident who had, according to his family, been in the country for 35 years. Araujo was on his way to work at his construction job when he was killed.

As is now common practice after ICE shoots an immigrant, the agency immediately declared that Araujo had “weaponized” his vehicle and tried to run over agents. In response, agents shot him in the stomach, which in itself raises a host of questions—if they really were shooting in self-defense into a moving vehicle, how could they have shot into the car at an angle that would have hit Araujo in his abdomen?

At this point, we know the script well. We know in advance how ICE will explain a shooting incident: The agency’s spokespeople will immediately claim self-defense against a driver allegedly trying to run agents over; if there are rallies against the shooting, the government will label both the victim and the protesters as terrorists; and the Department of Homeland Security and White House will back up ICE. In short, we know that the Trump administration has given ICE a blank check to do its worst. And we know that the Department of Justice won’t even bother to pretend to investigate the killing.

We also know—or should, if we are paying attention—that even though ICE is no longer invading cities, as it did during the siege of Minneapolis, it is speeding up arrests and deportations. Last week, ICE hit a ghastly milestone, reaching 2,000 arrests per day for multiple consecutive days. If this pace keeps up, the administration could achieve one of its long-standing aims: a million immigrant arrests in a year, with tens of thousands warehoused in ICE detention sites around the country and hundreds of thousands deported, often without even a semblance of due process.

As a part of the escalating war on immigrants, the administration is ramping up its deportation of people to third countries as well as its illegal refoulement of deportees back to countries where there is a good chance they will be tortured or killed.

Immigration attorneys e-mail me regularly about such cases. Last week, I received one about a gay man from Egypt, who had faced torture in his home country and managed to escape to the United States. Under the provisions of the Convention Against Torture,........

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