Last week, we published a story on how three men who had witnessed the fatal ICE shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo were, according to a representative of their families, being pressured to “self-deport” after officers arrested them during the incident.
The Department of Homeland Security called us liars. “It is categorically false that we would pressure someone to self-deport,” the department wrote in a social media post. “HuffPost knows that, but they made the decision to prioritize clicks over facts years ago.”
This is what the Trump administration does when faced with the human cost of its policies: deny the truth. Lie. Deflect.
But the truth is important. I wrote our story after speaking to a community leader who’d spoken with the families of the three witnesses in detention. Since then, a family member of one of the detained men directly confirmed he was facing pressure to self-deport — that is, abandon his legal immigration case and leave the United States. An attorney who has spoken with the three men said they uniformly deny the government’s claims that Salgado Araujo “weaponized” his vehicle and claims that the federal officer fired in self-defense. And new evidence continues to contradict the government’s statements.
More broadly, we’ve spent months reporting on the Trump administration’s effort to pressure thousands upon thousands of people to self-deport. We broke the story on the administration threatening unaccompanied children with “prolonged” detention and other consequences unless they immediately left the country — a threat that a federal judge ruled months later was “obviously coercive.” We’ve reported on new, designed-to-intimidate detention schemes like Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” — the brutal and inhumane detention center where, in a press conference last year, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem warned millions of undocumented people across the country to leave the United States or “you may end up here.” Noem made a similar threat at El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where the administration sent hundreds of men without due process, most of whom had no criminal record. “If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison,” she said.