Coffee Break: Texas Gets Trampled by Trump’s DHS

Texas is getting what it voted for with Trump good and hard with ICE murdering a Houston man in cold blood and bazillion dollar border walls threatening to mar the Big Bend.

Let’s start with the big picture view of the DHS — the villain of the first half of today’s post.

Even Under New Management ICE Keeps Killing

DHS and ICE might be under new management with the removal of “ICE Barbie” Kristi Noem by former MMA fighter turned US Senator from Oklahoma Markwayne Mullin, but their bloody handiwork continues.

Yea, it’s great that Noem’s personal gigalo (seriously watch Noem filibuster when asked directly if she’d had sex with Lewandowski at a Congressional hearing) senior aide and unofficial DHS uber-consultant Corey Lewandowski is not only out, but under investigation for improperly awarding contracts at an agency where he was never officially employed (although that didn’t stop him from personally firing the head of FEMA).

And it’s nice that Nazi larping Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino lost his job.

And I guess it’s even bueno that the grim sex farce that was Noem’s marriage is being put out of its misery, but is it really a good thing that Per Politico, Mullin has delivered on his promise of a “more discreet” Department of Homeland Security:

While the Department of Homeland Security continues to deport large numbers of unauthorized immigrants, it is making fewer arrests in public, holding back from deploying fresh waves of immigration agents to hotspots and has scrapped a plan to expand mega-warehouse detention facilities.

It’s all with the aim of fulfilling the president’s pledge for large-scale deportations — without attracting the kind of public attention that ignited widespread protests.

“It’s by design,” said one person familiar with strategic discussions within DHS, who like others was granted anonymity to speak freely about the conversations inside its agencies. “Just like Mullin and [acting ICE chief David] Venturella want — quieter and smarter operations. Finally.”

And how are those “quieter and smarter” operations working out for people in Houston, Texas?

The ICE-ing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo

The temperatures are a lot hotter in Houston in July than they were last winter in Minneapolis, but ICE is just as deadly.

Incompetent, but deadly — the NYT reports that they weren’t even investigating Araujo but stumbled across the van he was driving in the course of another investigation.

Like an agent from the famous FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit — except they’re reporting facts instead of making up nonsense, Migrant Insider pointed out all the tell-tale trademarks of this particular serial killer:

ICE says Araujo tried to flee a traffic stop, rammed an agency vehicle and attempted to run over an officer — the same justification the agency has offered in at least three other fatal or near-fatal shootings by immigration agents since Trump’s second-term deportation push began. In every one of those cases, video or the paper trail eventually cut against the government’s version. As of Tuesday night, no video of the Araujo shooting has been made public. That absence is the story.

…ICE calls the shooting self-defense, says Araujo used his vehicle as a weapon, and folds the operation into Operation Take Back America, the Trump administration’s mass-enforcement push that filed 259 immigration cases in the Southern District of Texas in a single week this May.

What’s missing?

Everything that would let anyone outside ICE check its story. Click2Houston reports no dash-cam or body-cam footage has surfaced. No independent witness has been quoted. Three other people at the scene were detained; ICE hasn’t said who they are or what they saw. The FBI’s Houston field office is investigating Araujo for a potential “assault on a federal law enforcement officer” — investigating the dead man, in other words — while DHS’s own inspector general reviews the shooting itself, as it must whenever a federal officer kills someone.
…
This is not the first time ICE has reached for “he tried to run me over.”

• In March 2025, an ICE agent on South Padre Island killed 23-year-old U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez. DHS said Martinez drove at an agent. The shooting wasn’t disclosed publicly until watchdogs forced the records into daylight.
• In January, agents in Minneapolis killed Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, a VA nurse. DHS said Good tried to run over agents and that the holstered, restrained Pretti still posed a threat. Video showed neither — Pretti was already subdued when Border Patrol agents shot him ten times.

They also point out that local officials are claiming impotence:

“Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia’s office confirmed it has no jurisdiction over federal agents and referred questions to the Sheriff’s Office and ICE — the same jurisdictional dead end that has swallowed accountability in every prior case on this list.”

While I’ve yet to hear of any local organizing comparable to what was done in Chicago or Minneapolis when ICE “invaded” their cities last year, Texans are protesting the killing of one of their own, via TPR.org:

The protest, organized Wednesday evening by civil rights group FIEL Houston and the Houston branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, brought hundreds of Houstonians to the 6800 block of Canal Street where, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot on Tuesday morning.

Local Democratic officials (keep in mind Texas is a red state, but its cities are blue) are putting out the proverbial “strongly worded statements” in droves.

The GOP officials are even more pathetic, remaining completely silent in the face of this deadly intrusion of the federal government into Texas.

And some local Latin leaders are grappling with Houston’s chronic lack of mobilized citizenry, via Straight Arrow News:

More than 1,000 people attended a protest and vigil Wednesday evening on Canal Street, an under-construction stretch of road in Houston’s historic East End where Salgado Araujo was shot the day before. Protestors walked several blocks of the neighborhood; elected officials shouted into megaphones demanding accountability and change; mourners lit candles.

That size crowd is a significant turnout — especially for Houston. But it stayed firmly within the bounds of a somber, highly organized gathering. The deluge seen elsewhere never appeared. It rarely does.

“Houston does not respond like a lot of the other liberal cities, especially like Minneapolis did,” David Contreras said. Contreras has lived in both Houston and Minneapolis, though Houston is his hometown. It’s where he made a name for himself as a local historian, eventually earning the role of national historian for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and where he now serves as chairman of the Harris County Hispanic Cultural Heritage Commission.

“And I really don’t know why,” Contreras told Straight Arrow. “We don’t get that response from the Latino community, and have not in the past.”

Some of the low headcount can be explained by the chilling effect ICE’s presence has had on communities of color, particularly in the East End. Earlier this year, LULAC canceled its annual Cinco de Mayo parade due to “growing concerns surrounding ICE enforcement activity,” according to the press release the organization published at the time.

“We canceled it because of fear of arrest, especially in the youth, and deportations,” Contreras told Straight Arrow.

“There’s a visceral fear in immigrant communities of what’s going on,” said Joe Higgs, lead organizer at the Gulf Coast Leadership Council, a community organizing group in Houston. “And so they’re not going to go out and protest. The question is: Is it agitational enough to others?”

Even in the nation’s most diverse metropolitan area, where 44.2% of city residents are Latino, translating one community’s fears into broader civic outrage has long been a high hurdle to clear. And the city has, for decades, struggled to generate large-scale turnouts for movements that see larger crowds in smaller cities.

As awful and frustrating as the above story is, it’s just one of several instances of the Trump regime and aligned businesses running right over Texans who don’t seem to know what’s hitting us.

ICE Pulls Back on Pull Overs, NOT

And I don’t mean sweaters. Looks like Markwayne Mullin is putting ICE’s rampage on the downlow, per FOX:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are being instructed to end “most” vehicle stops nationwide in a major policy shift, effective immediately.

According to multiple federal sources, ICE agents will cease making traffic stops, which have played a significant role in the agency’s operations until now. A federal source told Fox News that ICE will continue conducting vehicle stops only for those considered to be the most egregious targets with serious or violent criminal histories.

This comes after two people were killed in ICE officer-involved shootings in Maine and Texas in the last week.

But that was yesterday, today, POTUS Trump says nah:

pic.twitter.com/ioX6jkHRqz

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 15, 2026

I’d make a joke about “chilling effect” on immigration enforcement Trump rug pulls, but until ICE is frozen to death, there’s nothing funny about this.

Now, let’s look at the case of Big Bend National Park, one of the nation’s most beautiful and beloved natural wonders, and the lesser known but almost as spectacular Big Bend Ranch State Park.

Barricading Big Bend

We’ll start with some quotes from this March Texas Monthly piece which captures the chaos and incompetence accompanying the Trump regime’s inevitably bad intentions:

When news broke last month that the federal government was actively seeking leases for border-wall construction in the Big Bend region, an opposition movement quickly coalesced around protecting Big Bend National Park. The effort united folks across the political spectrum and drew bipartisan support from local officials, including a coalition of county sheriffs, and even some state lawmakers, all aimed at stopping a wall from cutting through the cherished natural resource.

Upriver, meanwhile, beyond the park’s boundaries and on private land in a string of tiny desert communities, residents were grappling with haphazard outreach from CBP, wondering if their properties were about to become casualties of border politics.

The notices were puzzling and inconsistent. One resident received a letter, while their next-door neighbor, located along the same length of river, did not. Some folks got calls from CBP representatives telling them to expect letters that never arrived. Others received notices about land that wasn’t theirs.

This video from Big Bend Sentinel tells the story well:

 

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Another Texas Monthly piece chronicles just how farcical the pretenses “justifying” the Trump regime’s actions in the region are:

…this year’s declaration of emergency, an annual requirement for our participation in Operation Lone Star. There is no emergency and everyone knows it, but it’s a game we all must play as poor counties, so the lights can stay on at the jail and the sheriff can make a salary that isn’t an outright joke. There is no discussion and the measure passes 5–0. Whereas, the health, safety, and welfare of the residents of Presidio County, Texas are under imminent threat of disaster from the unprecedented levels of illegal migration, human trafficking and drug smuggling coming across the U.S. border from Mexico . . .

There isn’t a single person in the room who believes these words to be true. Maybe they were in 2022, when the resolution was first passed, but since then, Border Patrol apprehensions are down 79 percent across the southwest border, logging some of the lowest numbers in the agency’s history. The Big Bend—which sees, on average, anywhere from 1 and 3 percent of the agency’s total encounters year after year—remains as slow as ever.

Following the government’s logic about these plummeting numbers requires Olympic-level mental gymnastics. There is so much money—the most money ever set aside for the DHS in history—and then there isn’t enough. There are so many people crossing the border and then there aren’t; no one has crossed the border in eight months, according to the president. No one crossed the border in eight months, but everyone who has is the Worst of the Worst.

And then there’s the horrifying scope of the money being spent squandered to ruin some of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth, also via Texas Monthly:

In June, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, awarded a staggering $2.6 billion contract—the largest upfront award for physical border infrastructure ever—to build a four- to six-foot-tall steel “vehicle barrier” and pave new patrol roads for a 156-mile stretch from Sanderson to Lake Amistad. Fisher Sand & Gravel Co., a North Dakota–based contractor with ties to the Trump administration, won the bid.

The new proposal will still tear up Skiles’s land, destroying important archaeological sites and polluting what is one of the last wild places in Texas. And if anything, the latest plans may constitute an even more pointless waste of taxpayer money than a thirty-foot wall. Skiles Ranch, like almost the entirety of the Lower Canyons stretch of the Rio Grande below the national park, is characterized by a deep river gorge, with natural canyon walls typically soaring from one hundred to three hundred feet. It’s remote, harsh, and seldom trafficked by migrants.

A border wall might, in theory, keep some of the small number who do cross there from entering Texas. But a vehicle barrier makes no sense for the simple reason that vehicles do not and cannot cross an impassable river gorge. As of now, smugglers have not figured out how to drive cars or trucks down vertical cliffs, across a river (or giant Lake Amistad), up vertical cliffs, and subsequently onto private property that’s surveilled and patrolled by Border Patrol, enclosed within fences, and watched over by heavily armed private landowners. Why would they? There are far easier and better places to traffic drugs and people.

The Texas Observer has more:

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Rodney Scott told a reporter in May that because of the Big Bend’s “granite cliffs” over “90 feet tall”—likely referring to the thousand-foot tall limestone canyons that line the river—a physical fence would not be erected in the park. That same month, CBP awarded a $1.7 billion contract to Southwest Valley Constructors, a subsidiary of Kiewit, for “border wall” in and around Big Bend National Park. The agency then clarified to press that this actually referred to smaller vehicle barriers, roads, and tech.

Meanwhile, the state park was originally slated for a steel bollard wall from the park entrance through Closed Canyon, one of the park’s most popular attractions, but former Big Bend Sector Chief Lloyd Easterling promised Presidio County commissioners in March that no wall would be built in the state park. A few days later, Easterling suddenly and unexpectedly announced his retirement. The agency then said that Easterling’s retirement had nothing to do with the wall, and also that—just kidding!—at least two miles of wall would be built in the state park.

In addition to the Kiewit contract, four other border barrier contracts have been awarded for the Big Bend region, going to Fisher Sand & Gravel of North Dakota and Barnard Construction of Montana. Together, the companies will build 175 miles of traditional steel border wall through Hudspeth and Presidio Counties.
…

As a river guide who’s logged thousands of miles running the Rio Grande, the most polite word I can think of to describe the agency’s vehicle barrier plans is “baffling.” Much of the 17 miles presently marked on the map for vehicle barriers is in Mariscal Canyon, which forms the distinctive bend in the Rio Grande the region is named for. It’s around 80 miles from my house as the crow flies, but it takes around 6-8 hours to get there. There are no roads in Mexico leading anywhere near Mariscal Canyon, and the road that leads into the canyon on the American side is so bad that every time I’ve been out there I’ve brought a shovel for the express purpose of building the road myself.

Markwayne Mullin’s DHS may be unbelievably stupid but they also unbelievably well-funded and damn dangerous.

Next week I’ll be back to chronicle the deluge of data centers being dropped on rural Texas and the attempts to organize opposition.

Related Posts:

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• Posse Comitatus and Trump’s Post-Constitutional Order
• Will Trump Work Himself Into a Shoot Versus Illinois Governor?
• ICE Barbie on the Bleeding Edge of Trump Era Conflict & Corruption
• ICE, Antifa, and the Ever Expanding Definition of Terrorism
• Democrats Tangle Themselves on ICE and Israel
• Minnesota on ICE, Part One
• Democrats React to Minnesota on ICE
• Stephen Miller vs ICE Barbie & Corey Is a Distraction

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