COMMENTARY Did a Mexican tourist run to his death in Florida this month because he feared U.S. immigration enforcement under Trump has become as predatory as Mexican law enforcement?
We may never know for sure why Juan Jairo Coronilla — reportedly a Mexican tourist with a valid visa, not an undocumented migrant — fled U.S. immigration officers in St. Augustine, Fla., on July 14, and ran across a road where a truck struck and killed him.
But it’s likely Coronilla had heard that Johan Sebastián Durán — a Colombian who also appears to have been in the U.S. lawfully — had been shot and killed by a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent the day before in Maine.
And that Lorenzo Salgado, an undocumented Mexican migrant who’d lived in the U.S. for 35 years and was applying for legal status, had been shot and killed by ICE a week before in Texas.
And that a year before, another Mexican lawfully visiting Florida, Carlos Martín González, had been sent after a traffic stop to the brutal and now shuttered migrant detention center in the Everglades known as Alligator Alcatraz.
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What may well have been running through Coronilla’s mind when ICE agents stopped him in a gas station parking lot was that he too could end up dead, or imprisoned in a hellhole like Alligator Alcatraz, as his countrymen Salgado and González had.
Or put it this way:
He may have been overcome by the sensation that he wasn’t in the U.S. anymore — that he may as well have been back in Mexico, where law enforcement is something you run for your life from. Where 40 students abducted by cops in Guerrero state more than a decade ago are still missing.
Where police are better known as predators.
The sad truth is: that’s precisely how the Trump administration would like the world to see its nativist immigration enforcement crusade.
It decided long ago that the best way to deter undocumented migrants from entering our country is to make public security in our country look more like public security in their countries.
Trump decided the best way to deter undocumented migrants from entering our country is to make our public security look more like theirs.
Why bother with the sort of rule-of-law repairs America used to be admired for, like bipartisan immigration reform legislation, when it’s more effective to make migrants face the same wreckage-of-law reality that Mexico — or Colombia or Haiti or Venezuela — is condemned for?
We knew, based on what President Donald Trump had tried in his more restrained first term, that the immigration policy of his unfettered second term would feature cruelty for cruelty’s sake — like the imminent, callous cancellation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for some 350,000 Haitians living in the U.S., who now face deportation back to murderous gang rule in Haiti.
Barbaric penitentiaries
But we didn’t fully appreciate how maniacally Trump — and MAGA minions like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — would turn America's immigration crackdown into a benighted cell block.
Alligator Alcatraz was the most egregious showcase.
It was bad enough last year when Trump started transporting migrants, with no due process, to El Salvador’s maximum-security mega-prison, CECOT, the epitome of barbaric penitentiaries that Latin America is infamous for. Trump then had to have his own CECOT here in the U.S. — and DeSantis eagerly, gleefully erected one for him in the middle of the Everglades.
It quickly became notorious for its inhumane conditions and treatment. But far from being discouraged by the bad press, Trump and MAGA seemed to get high on it. It was vindicating.
In the end, they shut it down this summer not because it was too execrable — but too expensive.
But lest you think Alligator Alcatraz was an isolated case, check out this week’s Washington Post investigation of ICE’s appallingly squalid and overcrowded migrant holding room in a Manhattan office building.
Even ICE officials acknowledged in emails that the situation there was “insane.”
We’re not in New York anymore, Toto. We’re in Nicaragua.
That’s the aim. And there’s no telling, once this "insane" period is over, how long it will take the U.S. to recover from it.
ICE claims its agents faced deadly threats in the cases of Salgado in Houston and Durán in Maine. Witnesses say otherwise. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has yet to give its version of who Coronilla was, why ICE targeted him and why he ran to his death in St. Augustine.
Why he apparently believed he was staring at something in America that looked a lot like Mexico.
