It Is Not AI We Need to Fear. It Is the ICE Machine.
Francisco Longoria was driving a truck through San Bernardino, California, delivering equipment for a child’s water slide.
Then three unmarked vehicles blocked him.
Four masked men jumped out with guns.
They did not identify themselves, Longoria says. They pulled at his doors, smashed his windows and struck him in the face. The road ahead was open, so he drove away.
An agent fired three bullets at the truck.
Longoria did what criminals trying to murder federal officers ordinarily do not do.
He went home and called 911.
He reported that masked men had shot at him.
The masked men were immigration agents. And before Longoria could explain what happened, the ICE machine began building a different story.
The government accused him of turning his truck into a weapon and running over two officers. Federal agents later arrived at his home before dawn wearing helmets and night-vision equipment. They broke through the doors and pointed rifles at his family, including his five-month-pregnant daughter.
Longoria was arrested and charged with assaulting federal officers with a dangerous weapon.
There was one problem.
At his bond hearing, the federal prosecutor reportedly admitted that he could not identify a lawful reason for agents to stop Longoria’s truck. He also knew of no officers who had been injured.
The government eventually dropped the criminal case.
But the ICE machine did not release Longoria.
It transferred him into immigration custody and held him for three months. He lost 20 pounds. He missed months with his family. Today, he wears an ankle monitor and cannot work while the government tries to deport him. (The Guardian)
The criminal accusation disappeared.
The punishment remained.
That is how a machine works.
It does not feel embarrassment. It does not apologize. It does not stop when one gear breaks. It simply moves the person into another part of the machinery.
ICE agents have opened fire on at least 30 people since Donald Trump returned to office, according to reporting based on a database maintained by The Trace. Eight had been killed by mid-July. Again and again, the Department of Homeland Security has issued nearly the same explanation: the driver “weaponized” the vehicle, threatened an agent or endangered the public. (The Guardian)
Thirty shootings are not thirty isolated misunderstandings.
They are a pattern.
The machine stops a vehicle.
Masked men surround it.
The driver becomes frightened.
The driver moves.
Agents fire.
Then the government announces that the vehicle had become a weapon.
Sometimes video or witnesses contradict the story. Sometimes the criminal charges collapse. Sometimes the person agents shot was not even the person they were trying to arrest.
But the first government statement has already done its job. The dead or wounded person becomes the aggressor. The agent becomes the victim. The public is told that another dangerous criminal forced federal officers to defend themselves.
In Houston, immigration agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo through the passenger side of his van. DHS said he had tried to use the van against an agent. Passengers said no officer stood in front of the vehicle and that the shots came from its sides.
Salgado Araujo was not the man agents were seeking.
Six days later, immigration agents shot and killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine.
He was not their intended target either.
DHS again said the vehicle presented a danger. Witnesses and available video raised questions about that account. (The Guardian)
After the two killings, immigration officials briefly ordered most ICE agents to stop making vehicle stops.
Donald Trump complained.
The pause lasted approximately one day.
Trump called vehicle stops one of ICE’s most effective tools, and the machine was ordered back onto the road before the public had answers about the bodies it had already left behind. (Time)
This is not law enforcement correcting a mistake.
This is production.
Trump promised mass deportations. Congress gave ICE and Customs and Border Protection tens of billions of dollars to expand arrests, detention, and deportation. Thousands of agents were recruited. Arrest totals became political trophies.
A machine built to produce enormous numbers of arrests must continually find people to arrest.
The easy targets come first.
The man driving to work.
The woman selling food.
The day laborer standing outside a hardware store.
The family riding together in a truck.
The person who speaks Spanish.
The person who looks Mexican.
In April 2025, I wrote about Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez, an American citizen born in Georgia who was jailed in Florida as an “unauthorized alien.” His mother brought his birth certificate and Social Security card to court, but he remained under an ICE hold.
I wrote then:
Sometimes, just having the wrong last name can be enough to be detained. Welcome to my world of the 1950s.
That was not paranoia. It was the first visible gear.
Appearance becomes suspicion.
Suspicion becomes detention.
Fear becomes resistance.
Resistance becomes assault.
A moving vehicle becomes a deadly weapon.
And a government bullet becomes self-defense.
Longoria’s immigration status does not answer the central question. A person without legal status does not become target practice. Deportation proceedings do not authorize masked agents to make an unlawful stop, smash windows, or fire into a fleeing truck.
Immigration law determines whether someone may remain in the country.
It does not determine whether he may remain alive.
The Longoria family has filed a lawsuit accusing the agents of an unlawful stop, excessive force and manufacturing a false accusation to justify the shooting. A court will decide the legal claims. But Americans do not have to pretend that we have never seen this machine operate before.
When a duck waddles past us thirty times, quacking the same excuse, we do not need another federal investigation to determine whether it might be a giraffe.
ICE has used the “weaponized vehicle” explanation too many times.
It has declared agents justified too quickly.
It has hidden too many faces behind masks.
It has pointed too many guns at families.
It has detained too many people after the government’s original accusation fell apart.
Longoria’s truck still sits beside his home with bullet holes in it. His broken front door has been nailed back together. Those are not political opinions. They are the physical remains of what the machine did.
The danger is not that artificial intelligence may someday become powerful enough to treat human beings like numbers.
We have already built that machine.
We armed it.
We masked its operators.
We gave it billions of dollars.
We rewarded it for the number of people it could capture.
And we painted three letters on its side:
