“The Church Cannot Be Silent” — ICE Killed Lorenzo Salgado and Johan Durán on Their Way to Work

Pope Leo XIV told Bishop Seitz the church cannot stay quiet about ICE. This month, an archbishop in Texas listened — and the Diocese of Portland didn’t.

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Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was driving his construction crew to a job site in Houston on the morning of July 7 when an ICE agent shot him.

Six days later, in Biddeford, Maine, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero left home for the first of his two jobs. He never made it — an ICE officer fired on his car that morning.

Neither man was the target of the operation that killed him.

Salgado died on July 7, Durán on July 13 — and on July 11, between the two killings, the United States began striking Iran once again.

Since then, the war Pope Leo XIV has opposed from its first hours has swallowed the news cycle whole — the naval blockade, the tanker attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, some 140 military sites hit in a single night. That attention is understandable — two American service members were killed in Jordan on Friday, the war’s first deaths from Iranian fire since March — and grief for the fallen deserves its place on every front page. A country mourning its soldiers can still refuse to forget two workingmen shot on their way to work. The Church must insist on it.

What happened in Houston

Salgado was 52 years old, a Mexican national who had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years. He built homes for a living and raised three children, all of them American citizens. His brother sat beside him in the car when ICE agents moved to stop the vehicle as part of a targeted enforcement operation aimed at someone else entirely.

ICE claims Salgado rammed an enforcement vehicle and tried to run over an agent. The men who were feet away — his brother and two coworkers among them — say he did nothing of the kind. There is no body-camera or dash-camera footage of the stop — acting ICE Director David Venturella conceded as much to Rep. Sylvia Garcia by phone.

Salgado’s oldest son, Ronaldo, learned of the shooting when he recognized his father’s voice crying for help in a video posted to social media. “He was close to obtaining his legal status,” he told reporters the next day.

What happened in Biddeford

Durán was 25, a Colombian from Bucaramanga. He crossed the southern border in September 2023, received federal work authorization in March 2025, held two jobs, and was raising a 3-year-old daughter with his partner.

On the morning of July 13, ICE officers were surveilling the last known address of another man — someone under a final order of removal — when Durán drove away from the building. Officers moved to stop his car. The government says the vehicle “attempted to flee” and that an officer fired “fearing for public safety.” The officer was newly sworn in. No body-camera footage of the shooting exists — DHS says the officers wore none, though The Intercept reports that agents at the scene carried camera-equipped devices the agency never activates.

Reporters have since identified the officer, though ICE will neither confirm nor deny it: David Brouillette, an Army veteran and former Maine law enforcement officer. His first ex-wife told NPR that he shot Durán four times, that their marriage was violent, and that she once offered the Maine National Guard paperwork she says documented his diagnoses of bipolar disorder and borderline schizophrenia — and was brushed off. A 2021 court filing by his second ex-wife, who accused him of abusing their teenage daughter, temporarily stripped him of his firearms, and NPR obtained a voicemail he left last November — while under a restraining order — saying the women in his ex-wife’s family should have their throats cut. ICE’s answer to all of it: the officer has “nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training.”

The Guardian had already counted at least 10 people shot dead by immigration agents since Donald Trump returned to office. Durán made 11. Hundreds marched in Biddeford and Portland the following day, and the Department of Homeland Security has since ordered a temporary halt to ICE vehicle stops — a bureaucratic admission that something is deeply wrong, and one that border czar Tom Homan publicly walked back within days. A GoFundMe for Durán’s partner and daughter, and for the return of his body to Colombia, has raised nearly $500,000.

Two churches, two answers

The Church in Texas met the moment. Archbishop Joe S. Vásquez of Galveston-Houston issued a statement naming Lorenzo Salgado, calling the faithful to pray for his family “and all those affected by fear and anxiety,” and placing the American bishops’ indictment of this enforcement regime on the record: enforcement must be “targeted, proportional, and humane,” and an “enforcement-only approach” cannot deliver justice.

Vásquez does not stand alone in Texas. Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, who chairs the U.S. bishops’ migration committee, has called the mass deportation campaign “a grave moral evil” and compared it to a Category 4 hurricane tearing through immigrant communities.

Maine’s answer reads differently. The Diocese of Portland released a brief statement on July 15 through its Office of Hispanic Ministry, promising pastoral support and praying that “all those affected by his death may experience God’s loving comfort, strength, and peace.”

The statement never mentions ICE. Nowhere does it name the agency that killed Durán or ask for an investigation, and it carries no signature from Bishop James Ruggieri, who as of this writing has released nothing public of his own. The diocese never shared the statement on its own social media accounts, which have carried on since July 13 with feast-day tributes and event flyers.

Catholic Charities Maine offered condolences alongside its “trust that a fair and transparent investigation will be conducted” and its regard for “the tremendous responsibility” of federal law enforcement.

A young father in the diocese was shot dead by an agent of the state, and the institutional Church in Maine responded as though he had died in a storm. Prayer is where a bishop begins. When prayer arrives without truth, the flock hears the silence underneath it.

The pope has already told us what to do

Pope Leo XIV has left no room for this timidity.

On July 4 — the nation’s 250th birthday — the first American pope went to Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island where thousands of migrants have drowned, and released a letter to his own country declaring that the protection of human life means “welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants.” He has warned that history will judge harshly the leaders who mistreat them. Last fall he told Seitz that the church “cannot be silent” on the plight of immigrants.

The Church in this country already knows how indiscriminate the machine has become. Late last month, ICE officers handcuffed Sister Leticia Ugboaja, a Nigerian-born nun and registered nurse, as she walked to Sunday Mass in McAllen, Texas. They took her rosary. She was released only after members of Congress from both parties intervened.

I have argued in these pages that every Catholic must resign from ICE — today, without waiting for permission. The bishops are circling the same conclusion. Seitz has warned that the moment is nearing when Catholic agents must say, “In conscience, I can’t do this.” Bishop Mark Brennan, the former bishop of Wheeling, invoked Nuremberg to remind agents that no one escapes moral responsibility by pleading “I was just following orders.”

An agency that shoots men on their way to work, handcuffs a nun on her way to the Eucharist, and sends its officers into the streets without cameras has forfeited any Catholic’s good-faith service. The men and women inside it who share our faith now face a question older than this republic: whom do you serve?

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero were our brothers, and their families now grieve inside the household of faith. Cardinal Dolan — no liberal by any stretch of the imagination — reminded the country this week that we are a nation of immigrants, and the pope has told us plainly what receiving the stranger requires.

The war will keep the cameras pointed at the Strait of Hormuz. Our eyes belong on Houston and Biddeford — on a 3-year-old girl in Maine who will grow up without her father, and on three grown children in Texas burying theirs. These killings must wake the Church from its distraction. Evil does not pause because another evil is louder.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the families of Lorenzo Salgado and Johan Durán, with the pastors and bishops who refuse to whisper, and with every immigrant spending this summer afraid of a knock at the door.

We believe what the Church has always taught: every human being carries the image of God, and a government that treats his children as prey will answer to him.

This has become the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that tells the truth out loud — about a war, about two dead workingmen, and about a Church that must choose witness over caution.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a machine that kills the innocent and dares us to look away — I am asking you to join us.

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