The Deportation Should Be the Punishment, Not the Funeral

A post on Threads has gone viral: immigration is paperwork law, and nobody should die over paperwork.

No caveats can soften that sentence, and none are needed. It sets a moral floor that predates any statute. The floor has needed restating all year, in different states, under different agencies.

An ICE officer fatally shot a man on Canal Street in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of Houston in July, prompting LULAC to demand release of all body cam, dash cam, and bystander footage. Six days later, a shooting in Biddeford, Maine killed a 26-year-old Colombian man identified by rights groups as authorized to work in the country. Agents dragged him from his car and handcuffed his dead body in the street, where it remained for five hours, while a neighbor reported hearing his last words: "I tried to stop." His 3-year-old daughter watched from the sidewalk in her pajamas.

Federal officers have fatally shot at least three other people in the five months prior, including a cook killed while fleeing officers near Chicago and a man shot by a Border Patrol agent while being detained in Rio Grande City, Texas. An off-duty ICE agent added a name to the list on New Year's Eve in Los Angeles. The Trace counted over a dozen shootings total, some survived, some not, with one agent involved in a nonfatal shooting reportedly bragging about the round count in a text message.

January alone saw six deaths inside ICE detention centers across Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and California, with one ruled a homicide by local authorities, putting 2026 on pace to exceed the record set in 2025. That's the custody side of the ledger. The street shootings are their own separate column, and both are growing.

The Threads post makes a poignant point. Immigration violations are civil matters, mostly. The maximum consequence on paper is removal from the country, not removal from the earth. Nobody drafted a statute that says overstaying a visa or crossing without inspection carries a death sentence, and yet the outcomes on the ground increasingly suggest otherwise.

The federal government already possesses extraordinary authority over immigration. It decides who enters, who stays, who leaves, who receives asylum, who sits in detention, and who boards a deportation flight. Those powers already rank among the broadest exercised by any civilian agency. A government entrusted with deciding where someone lives should never confuse that authority with deciding whether someone lives.

The Constitution says no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law. It does not say citizen. It does not carve out an exception for someone who crossed the border without permission. Immigration law already contains its own punishment, one Congress wrote decades ago: removal, deportation, bars on reentry, administrative hearings, appeals, detention. Those penalties occupy thousands of pages of federal law, and death never appears among them. When a civil immigration encounter ends with a body on the pavement, public debate immediately shifts from immigration policy to constitutional limits on government force.

Every legal system depends on proportional punishment. Society does not authorize deadly force against someone for failing to pay taxes, missing jury duty, or violating a zoning ordinance. Immigration occupies its own category of law with its own remedies, and Americans disagree fiercely over border security, asylum, detention, and deportation. Those disagreements narrow considerably once the conversation turns to whether immigration status alone should ever place someone on a path toward a fatal encounter with the government.

DHS keeps reaching for the same defense: split-second decisions, moving vehicles, officers who feared for their lives. That defense might hold up in court, case by case. It still leaves the real question untouched. Nobody has explained why an agency built around visa violations and removal orders needs officers carrying weapons capable of ending a life over what began as paperwork. Encounter after encounter escalated to gunfire this year. Something in that equation is broken, and it isn't the paperwork.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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