When people are killed in service to “public safety”

“The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”

These words from the Department of Homeland Security’s X post in the aftermath of the murder of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero have lodged themselves into my brain. It is the word salad of passive language. It is the strange assignment of the word ”fleeing” to a vehicle instead of to the person driving — a particularly jarring thing to read from the side of the political spectrum that is known to opine that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But ultimately, it is framing the shooting of someone in the street as an act of public safety. That framing is sitting in the deepest part of my gut like an ulcer, and I am not even from a community targeted by this violence. I cannot imagine what it would feel like to read those words if I was.

It is high time to reclaim the words ”public safety” from the Trump administration’s exploitation of them. If we do not, I fear too many people in this country will buy into their corruption of the term. But in order to do so we must put a stake in the ground as to what public safety actually means and what it does not. So let me state clearly — shocking as it may be that it even needs to be said at all — that shooting someone in the street is not public safety. No one has been made safer by the killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in front of his daughter and partner. Nothing is better or more peaceful about this country in the aftermath of his murder.

First, let’s address the immediate impact on his family. In her tearful remarks days after the shooting, Karolina Rojas Alvarez said of her late partner, “I will never have the words to express what a marvelous, loving man God gave me”. She talked about their three year old daughter and how she doesn’t have the heart to tell her she will never see her father again. I have worked with countless children after the traumatic and violent loss of a parent, and there aren’t enough words to describe the impact such a loss has on a child. A forever part of this child’s narrative will be not just his death, but the matter in which he died — shot and killed right in front of her. How does one feel safe in a country where the government is the perpetrator of the violence that killed your parent? Where is the public safety in that?

Then there is the communal impact. The Boston Globe’s reporting on the Biddeford, Maine community in the aftermath of the shooting is painful and essential reading. In the words of a Biddeford resident who is a part of a team that is tracking ICE activity: “They’re creating an element of danger. This is not normal, nor do we want it to become normal… A friend of mine saw ICE agents surround a car at night with guns in their hands... We’re all living on edge.” And of course, the impact on the immigrant community of Biddeford is profound. At a makeshift memorial marking the site of the shooting, a note in Spanish reads: “We are not criminals. We are fathers, brothers, sons, friends, workers.” And I can imagine the writer of those words ending those sentences with a plea: please don’t shoot us.

Much has been written about the widespread fear felt by immigrant communities as a result of Trump’s evil war against them. Immigrants fearing exposure have stopped going to work, creating a financial crisis for their families. According to Healthcare for All Massachusetts, immigrants are increasingly foregoing medical procedures, weighing the gravity of their health needs against the worry of detention or deportation. A while back, I wrote about immigrant mothers too scared to leave their homes to visit their fragile newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit. In another searing Boston Globe piece, immigrant parents describe choosing to keep their children home from school out of fear. Even more poignantly, the piece talks about children who are themselves afraid to go to school because they’re worried their immigrant parents won’t be there when they return. And now after the shootings of the past week, how many of these children are also worried their parents could be shot and killed in front of them? How many immigrants are thinking about whether they are the next ones to be shot? How does any of this fear make the public safer? I need someone to explain it to me because I truly do not understand.

I want to make an even finer point about the corruption of the term public safety related to the ICE shooting in Maine. The ICE agent who has been identified as the potential shooter is a man named David Brouillette. He is a man with a documented history of domestic violence, and one of his ex-wives had the following to say about him:

“David Brouillette is capable of this level of extreme violence.”

In the past days, both of Brouillette’s ex-wives have come forward to talk about his violent and abusive behavior. The Globe article linked above includes information from interviews and hundreds of pages of court documents. Lucinda Brouillette noted in her statement to the Globe, “I have feared for a long time that his anger, aggression, and escalating behavior would eventually result in severe, life threatening violence.” One of the incidents she recounted in court documents was her husband threatening her with a gun. But in spite of this long history of domestic violence with multiple victims (though to be clear one victim is one too many) the federal government saw fit to issue him a taxpayer funded weapon and set him out into the world to terrorize an immigrant simply for driving his car with his family in it. Give a weapon and mandate for harm to a man with a history of violence and what do we think will happen?

Exactly what did happen. A shooting. A life lost. A father gone, a family bereaved, and a community traumatized.

How is that public safety?

Fear is not public safety. Labeling entire communities of people as criminals is also not public safety. Handing a man with a documented history of violence a gun and a fuzzy job description of what to do with it is not public safety. The Vice President saying that we owe a debt of gratitude to the ICE agent that shot Renee Good in the face and called her a “fucking bitch” is not public safety. ICE refusing to hold shooters in their ranks accountable and then assigning themselves the job of investigating these shootings is not public safety. Furiously insisting on reinstating the traffic stops that too often precede ICE shootings is also not public safety. And Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, seems all too eager for the violence to continue. He issued quite the threat on a Fox News appearance this past week.

“I said if the hateful rhetoric didn’t stop, there will be bloodshed. And I’m saying it right now. There’s still going to be more bloodshed, unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted.”

In a subsequent interview he elaborated on these sentiments: “It comes down to one simple fact – these people failed to comply with law enforcement ... all they had to do is comply. If they did, they'd be alive today."

Shut your mouth or we will shoot you. Comply or we will shoot you. These are absolutely the words of an abuser and the antithesis to what safety looks like. After all, how will we ever solve gun violence in the United States when it’s the United States’ government doing the shooting?

And speaking of the public, according to the Merriam-Webster definition, the word public means of, relating to, or affecting all the people or the whole area of a nation or state, or relating to the people in general. Not certain people — all the people. Immigrant communities? They are a part of the public too. No one is safe unless all of us are safe. If we are truly going to talk about public safety, we don’t get to cherry pick who gets counted in that public. And I cannot say the following strongly enough:

Your right to be safe from being shot should not be dependent on your country of birth.

Of course, this is not the only example of murder being packaged as public safety. For too long, we have been sold a violent bill of goods by systems that have provided cover for the deaths of civilians at the hands of law enforcement, or have defined capital punishment in the context of justice. But I take great issue with the Trump administration’s claim to care about public safety as they wage this evil war against members of our public. It’s a lie. It’s about power and control, hate and fear. It’s about white supremacy, a world view that is completely incompatible with keeping people safe.

Shooting people in the street will never make this country better or our communities safer. And I wish the people who called out the shootings of the United HealthCare CEO or Charlie Kirk had the same level of outrage over the killings of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Or Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Or Alex Pretti or Renee Good.

You don’t get to shoot people in the street or anywhere else and call that safety. And you don’t get to pick who gets to be safe from being shot and claim that you care about the public. We should push back on that categorization at every turn. And then remind people of a critically important point, one that should guide all of our conversations about Trump’s war on immigrants:

The safest communities are the ones with the most resources. Not the ones with the most ICE agents shooting people.