American Death Squads

The spirit of Óscar Romero cries out in protest against ICE killings

Mothers of the Disappeared hold a picture of Romero. Part of the “Memorial Wall” mural in El Salvador on the history of the war of the 1980s back to 1932, when a peasant uprising was brutally repressed by the U.S. backed military dictatorship. Source: Compadres, a Canadian teachers’ organization. (c) Walkyman

I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants. No one has to obey an immoral law. I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression. — Archbishop Óscar Romero

The day after this sermon, Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated while celebrating mass on March 24, 1980.

Archbishop Romero was a high ranking cleric in the Catholic Church in El Salvador. Romero experienced a profound transformation after witnessing systemic poverty and the assassination of his close friend, Father Rutilio Grande, in 1977. During his three years as archbishop, he used his weekly radio broadcasts to denounce human rights abuses, government death squads, and violence from leftist guerrillas.

What would Romero say to the ICE agents who are shooting and killing people with impunity?

A three-year-old girl watched as ICE officers fatally shot her father during an immigration raid in Maine. Hours later, authorities acknowledged he was not the intended target. After lying about it first, of course.

Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old man from Colombia, was identified by friends, neighbors and immigrant rights groups as the victim of the shooting. Maine confirmed that Guerrero was authorized to work in the United States and had been issued a Social Security number.

The killings of the 37-year-old Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal agents have sparked protests and outrage throughout the nation. Pretti and Good are just two people out of at least eight who have either been killed by federal agents or who have died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in 2026 so far.

Christy Lopez, a former senior civil rights litigator at the Justice Department who now teaches at Georgetown Law has emphasized that the Supreme Court “has been narrowing the situations under which you can sue federal law enforcement officers, including immigration enforcement, for many years…These are federal agencies that have not been constrained by the law sufficiently for quite a while, and now they’ve been given free rein by their management structure.”

These ICE agents are, in my view, killing people on purpose to create a climate of fear in the nation. And they have been given license to do so by an administration that has abandoned the law and even common decency.

Can we call out to these ICE agents in the spirit of Óscar Romero and say “You don’t have to do this. You can de-escalate these situations rather than using lethal force. You can acknowledge your common humanity with those you are investigating.”

Those words have to be said because they are the words of a moral order that must be recalled and upheld again. The words must be said even if they are dismissed or even derided.

We also need to pressure law enforcement all across the country to investigate these shootings as potentially murders and proceed accordingly.

We must continually shine a light on these ICE killings and not be quiet. The spirit of Archbishop Óscar Romero calls on us to do that.

Image Credit: https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/romero-assassinated/