the edit, vol. 43

the deportation surge, and what it's outrunning

It is 7:00 a.m. on July 13, 2026, in Biddeford, Maine, a coastal city of nineteen thousand people, and federal agents are watching a house. A car pulls away from the address. Minutes later a 25-year-old man is dead in the driver's seat, and the agents who fired on him were not wearing body cameras, and the man was not, according to the office of the senator who was briefed on the operation, the person the warrant named. Six days earlier, in Houston, a similar sequence produced a similar outcome. That same winter, within three weeks of each other, it had happened twice in Minneapolis, each time to a United States citizen. The Department of Homeland Security's own border czar has a name for the pace behind these encounters. He calls it "deportationmaxxing."

the number as the mission

Tom Homan, the administration's border czar, told NewsNation's "Katie Pavlich Tonight" on July 22, 2026, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is "deportationmaxxing," pointing to the fact that the agency booked more people into detention in June than in any month since President Trump returned to office. The word is borrowed from internet slang, the "maxxing" suffix denoting an activity pursued to its fullest extreme, and the administration has used the same framing in its own social media graphics.

The underlying figures are not in dispute. The administration arrested more than 43,000 immigrants in June 2026, the highest monthly total since the start of the second Trump term, and more than 65,000 people were in ICE detention that month, with more than half a million people deported since January 2025. The majority of those arrested in June had no criminal record, and that share has grown sharply over the course of the enforcement push. In December 2024, 64 percent of those detained by ICE had criminal convictions; by January 2026, that figure had fallen to roughly 29 percent. Over the same period, the number of people in detention with no convictions or pending charges rose from 3,165 to more than 25,000. The volume being celebrated as "deportationmaxxing" is, by the government's own numbers, increasingly composed of people the government does not allege committed a crime.

Congress has given the executive branch broad authority to enforce immigration law, and the scale of enforcement is a policy choice within it. What the record shows is what that scale has done to the mechanisms meant to verify who is being detained and why, because in the same window that produced the record June numbers, a specific and repeating pattern of fatal encounters emerged, each one sharing the same missing safeguards.

three states, four names

On January 7, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in south Minneapolis. Good was a 37-year-old American citizen, born in Colorado and the mother of three children, who had stopped her car, acting, according to her family, as a community observer of federal operations already underway nearby. She was not the target of any warrant. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said within hours that Good had "weaponized her vehicle" and tried to run over an agent, calling the shooting an act of domestic terrorism; Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz disputed that account, pointing to video they said showed her attempting to drive away rather than attack anyone. Family and friends remembered her as a poet who loved to sing and write, and reporting on her death noted she had never been charged with anything beyond a single traffic ticket.

Seventeen days later, federal officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital and a licensed gun owner who never drew his weapon. Noem said the day of the shooting that Pretti had "attacked" officers and intended to inflict harm; days later, without offering evidence, she described the scene only as "chaotic," while bystander video reviewed by multiple news organizations showed Pretti filming the officers and, according to witnesses, checking on a woman agents had pushed to the ground before he was pepper-sprayed, tackled, and shot ten times. Colleagues described him as someone trained to de-escalate crisis situations in his professional life. Both killings prompted protests and calls from Governor Walz to end the enforcement operation in the city.

On July 7, an ICE agent in Houston fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had lived in the United States for 35 years and was, according to his family, in the process of applying for legal status. Salgado Araujo was a construction worker driving his crew to a job site when agents attempted to stop his vehicle; he was shot in the abdomen and later died at the hospital, leaving behind a wife and three sons. Agents said he had used the vehicle as a weapon against them, a claim the three passengers riding with him have directly disputed, and the agents involved were not wearing body cameras. Investigators had flagged a substance found in his van as possibly narcotic, but Houston-area officials, including Representative Sylvia Garcia and the Harris County District Attorney's Office, said this month that testing showed it was not a drug. Houston officials say federal investigators still have not shared evidence from the case with them, and a federal judge has separately blocked the deportation of a witness to the shooting.

Six days later, in Biddeford, an ICE officer shot and killed the man his family has asked to be identified as Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old from Colombia, outside his family's apartment. Advocacy groups said Guerrero was authorized to work in the United States and held a Social Security number; DHS said he entered the country in 2023 and was granted a work permit in 2025, adding that authorization to work "does not confer legal status." Senator Angus King said he was told the man was not the target of the operation, though DHS's own account of that point shifted within the same conversation. DHS said the officer fired "fearing for public safety" as the vehicle "attempted to flee the scene," a version of events that is neither independently verified nor uncontested: a witness, Daniel Boucher, told ABC News he heard Guerrero say "I tried to stop" as agents pulled him from the car, and King confirmed the agents involved were not wearing body cameras. Guerrero left behind a partner and a three-year-old daughter. DHS has not confirmed the shooter's identity, but multiple news organizations identified him through interviews with two ex-wives as a 37-year-old former Maine law enforcement officer with a documented history of violence, raising questions about whether that history surfaced during ICE's rapid hiring push.

Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero were, between them, two American citizens, a man thirty-five years into life in the United States, and a man legally authorized to work here. None was the announced target of the operation that killed them, and in every case where the detail has been confirmed, the agents involved were not wearing body cameras. At a congressional forum in Houston on July 24, Representative Adriano Espaillat said the four are part of a larger total: eight people killed by federal immigration officers since the administration began, including two citizens. Each death has triggered its own review, run by different authorities with different scopes, and none of those reviews can draw on the footage that would exist as a matter of course in most other federal contexts involving deadly force.

what oversight looked like before it thinned

The pattern is not confined to fatal encounters. In July 2026, 120 people detained at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona, operated by CoreCivic under contract with ICE, signed a letter alleging medical neglect, abuse by guards, and inadequate mental healthcare. ICE disputed many of the specific allegations; harder to dispute is that a broader reduction in oversight mechanisms for immigration detention has made conditions inside these facilities more difficult to independently verify at all, a gap reporting has linked to a documented rise in deaths in custody nationally. The financial infrastructure behind that capacity is facing its own reckoning, for reasons that are themselves contested. Citizens Bank announced on July 17 that it would wind down its lending relationships with GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two largest private detention operators, after a monthslong pressure campaign moved an estimated $300 million in deposits to competitors. Citizens said the decision reflected the federal government's plan to purchase several of the companies' facilities outright, not the campaign itself. Either explanation points to the same underlying fact: the institutions financing detention infrastructure are recalibrating around the same expansion this piece has traced through construction contracts and detainee counts.

what the constitution says about who is protected

The Fifth Amendment's guarantee that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law has never been limited to citizens in its text or in the Supreme Court's reading of it. In Wong Wing v. United States, decided in 1896, the Court held that Fifth and Sixth Amendment protections extend to all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States, regardless of citizenship, when the government seeks to punish rather than merely remove them. In Zadvydas v. Davis, decided in 2001, the Court reaffirmed that "the Due Process Clause applies to all persons within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent."

The Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable seizure, including the use of deadly force during an attempted arrest, is likewise not contingent on immigration status. The Supreme Court set the specific test for lethal force in Tennessee v. Garner in 1985, holding that deadly force against a fleeing suspect is constitutionally unreasonable unless the officer has probable cause to believe the person poses a significant threat of death or serious injury, and refined the standard four years later in Graham v. Connor, which instructs courts to judge an officer's use of force from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene. Both tests depend on reconstructing what the officer actually perceived in the moment, which is precisely what body camera footage exists to make possible, and its absence in Houston and Maine leaves the officer's own account as the only version of events. A related principle governs conditions of confinement: because immigration detention is civil rather than punitive, courts applying Bell v. Wolfish, decided in 1979, have held that detained people cannot be subjected to conditions amounting to punishment before any adjudication of wrongdoing, which is exactly the kind of claim the Eloy letter raises and exactly what independent verification exists to test.

Renée Good and Alex Pretti were citizens. Guerrero was authorized to work and live in the country, though DHS disputes his broader legal status. Salgado Araujo had lived in the United States for thirty-five years. In each case, the government's account is the only account, because the tool built to test it against independent evidence was not in use. A protection that depends on the government's word alone, in the cases where a person has died, is not functioning as the safeguard the Fourth and Fifth Amendments were written to provide.

capacity built faster than the record-keeping

The infrastructure behind the enforcement volume is expanding on a similar timeline. ICE published a request for construction proposals in July seeking new or expanded detention capacity at as many as fourteen sites, including a facility on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which currently has no ICE detention facility at all, and continued construction at Guantanamo Bay. Federal records reviewed by CBS News found that more than 580 government personnel are assigned to the Guantanamo immigration mission, outnumbering detainees there by roughly 100 to one, at an annual cost of $73 million for a facility holding a fraction of its advertised 30,000-bed capacity. The administration has set a goal of 2,000 daily arrests, down from an earlier, unmet goal of 3,000, and Congress has appropriated ICE more than $100 billion to expand its capacity accordingly. A daily arrest quota, revised downward only after it proved unreachable, says something about what the system is being asked to optimize for.

the courts assigned to check it

The judicial mechanisms built to supervise this system are, in the same month, being tested for the first time in decades or straining under documented conditions. The Department of Justice filed the first-ever application to the Alien Terrorist Removal Court on July 15, a five-judge tribunal Congress created in 1996 specifically to handle classified national security deportation cases, and which had not received a single petition in the thirty years since. Chief Judge Joan Ericksen, appointed by President George W. Bush, held a hearing the next day and asked the government for a more "thoughtful" application, questioning the connection between the respondent's alleged conduct and the statutory provisions the government invoked. The application remains sealed, and the identity of the person it concerns has not been made public. A related order remains active: U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan directed ICE in August 2025 to limit capacity and improve conditions at 26 Federal Plaza in New York, after detainees documented overcrowding and denial of hygiene products; a trial in May 2026 found the agency had exceeded the court-ordered population cap on roughly half the days since, and the judge called one government filing "egregiously misleading."

The investigative apparatus meant to review the shootings themselves is now in question too. The New York Times reported on July 19 that FBI managers nationwide were told the bureau would no longer investigate assault allegations against ICE agents, evidence that has previously been used to determine whether agents were justified in using force and, at times, to prosecute them. That role would reportedly shift to Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE, leaving the agency to review its own personnel. The Department of Justice and DHS have denied any policy change, and the dispute remains unresolved. Whichever account is accurate, the question of which agency will examine the agents in Houston and Biddeford arrives at the same moment those investigations are what will determine whether the agents' own accounts match the evidence.

what the record will need to answer

The investigations opened in Houston, Minneapolis, and Biddeford have not yet concluded, and their findings will determine what accountability follows each of these four deaths. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the House Homeland Security Committee held a joint field hearing in Houston on July 24, calling family members of Salgado Araujo and Guerrero to testify, a sign the accountability question has reached Congress even as the executive branch's own review mechanisms remain in dispute. What is already documented is a policy celebrated for its volume, a growing share of that volume made up of people with no criminal record, and a set of oversight tools, body cameras, target confirmation, court review, that the pace has outrun. The Constitution's protections were not written with an exception for pace, or for who the government later determines a person to have been.