The man struck and killed by a tractor-trailer on July 14 while fleeing federal immigration officers in St. Augustine, Florida has been identified as Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, a 28-year-old husband and father from Mexico.
Coronilla Durán, a native of San Luis de la Paz in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, had legally entered the United States three weeks earlier on a valid tourist visa. Isaret Jeffers, a spokesperson for the farmworker advocacy group Colectivo Árbol, told the Miami Herald that Coronilla Durán had already made arrangements to return home. He had been in Florida for only two days and had already purchased a plane ticket to return to Mexico the following Saturday.
“He had already bought a flight,” Jeffers said. “Now, unfortunately, if he is returning, his return is different.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has refused to say whether Coronilla Durán was the target of its kidnapping operation. In repeated statements, the agency has said only that its agents “conducted an operation near St. Johns, Florida” and that the Florida Highway Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations were investigating “an incident resulting in the death of a Mexican national.”
Colectivo Árbol is assisting Coronilla Durán’s wife, Yésica Alamilla López, with returning her husband’s remains to Mexico. The couple had been married for 10 years and owned a small business together in San Luis de la Paz. They had two children, ages 7 years and 7 months.
According to Jeffers, Alamilla López learned that her husband had been killed while watching television.
José Rivera, a 60-year-old garbage truck driver who witnessed the preventable tragedy, told the Herald that he saw Coronilla Durán run from a gas station shortly before 7:00 a.m.
Rivera initially did not know why Coronilla Durán was running. Following the young man’s gaze, however, he noticed what appeared to be “an undercover car with the lights on” chasing him.
Rivera said at least two unmarked blue sport utility vehicles with tinted windows had boxed in a car at the gas station. Coronilla Durán and three other men reportedly fled after federal agents approached the vehicle.
Rivera watched Coronilla Durán cross Highway 16 and reach the narrow grass median dividing the roadway. Still looking backward at the agents chasing him, Coronilla Durán stumbled on the grass and fell into the path of an approaching tractor-trailer.
“The traffic was coming pretty quick, and he just lost his footing and didn’t look where the traffic was coming,” Rivera said. “He kept looking back.”
Rivera knew immediately that the young father had been killed.
“It was a heartbreaking moment for me,” he told the paper. “I have kids around that age.”
Coronilla Durán’s death was the direct and entirely predictable product of the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation. More than a week later, the Department of Homeland Security has refused to identify the agents involved, explain why they were chasing someone who was legally present in the United States or even disclose whether Coronilla Durán was the intended target.
He was at least the third immigrant father to die within eight days during violent operations conducted by the immigration Gestapo.
On July 7, unidentified Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old home builder, husband and father of three US citizens in Houston, Texas.
Six days later, ICE agent David Brouillette shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian husband and father who had a work authorization and a Social Security number, in Biddeford, Maine. Durán Guerrero was not the target of the operation. Brouillette was identified by family members and subsequently by government officials, but he has not been charged with a crime.
The following morning, Coronilla Durán was killed in Florida while fleeing immigration agents, who remain unidentified.
These cover-ups are the rule under the Trump administration. The Democrats, who supplied billions of dollars for the expansion of ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), are facilitating them while sowing illusions that supposedly “independent” investigations conducted by state and local officials will secure justice.
In Houston, Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has promoted his office’s “independent” investigation into Salgado Araujo’s killing while acknowledging that it could take months or even years to identify the federal agent who fired the fatal shots.
As part of the investigation, Teare’s office filed U-visa certifications Tuesday for Daniel Tirado Pantoja and José Trinidad Rojas Pliego, two of the men who were inside Salgado Araujo’s work van when ICE agents opened fire.
The certifications identify the men as victims or witnesses of alleged qualifying crimes, including felonious assault, manslaughter and murder. Both men remain imprisoned at the Montgomery ICE Processing Center in Conroe, Texas, and have filed federal petitions seeking their release.
A U-visa can provide temporary legal status to immigrant victims or witnesses who assist police in the investigation of certain crimes. The certifications do not establish criminal guilt, but they sharply contradict the claims advanced by the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas Aaron Reitz.
Both have claimed that Salgado Araujo moved his vehicle in a manner that caused an ICE agent to fear for his life and open fire.
The eyewitness statements say the opposite.
“When Lorenzo stopped the van, the officer shot him anyway,” Rojas Pliego wrote.
“They say we wanted to run them over, but that’s a lie; there wasn’t a single officer behind or in front of us, they were only on the sides.”
After shooting Salgado Araujo, the agents dragged him from the van, threw him onto the pavement and handcuffed him as he bled to death, according to Rojas Pliego. The agents then violently removed and handcuffed the other workers.
Tirado Pantoja likewise stated that ICE agents initiated the violence. He said their vehicles struck the work van from behind and later on the driver’s side. Salgado Araujo never tried to hit an agent or an ICE vehicle, he wrote.
During the attack, Salgado Araujo said, “Ya me mataron,” or “They’ve already killed me.”
Most significantly, Tirado Pantoja reported seeing agents exchange firearms after the shooting.
“After they took Lorenzo, another agent came and switched guns with the agent that fired the shot at Lorenzo,” his statement reads.
The only reason federal agents would switch weapons is because they are attempting to obstruct the investigation or compromise subsequent ballistic testing. It demands the immediate identification, suspension and arrest of the agents involved pending a criminal investigation. Instead, more than two weeks after the killing, none has even been publicly named.
This underscores the class character of the American justice system. After ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis in January, Vice President JD Vance declared that federal agents enjoyed “absolute immunity.” The killings in Houston, Biddeford and St. Augustine demonstrate what this immunity means in practice.
Appearing on television Monday, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan declared that those killed during immigration operations had brought about their own deaths by refusing to submit unconditionally to armed and masked federal agents.
“You can attack the men and women of ICE all you want,” Homan said. “It comes down to one simple fact: These people failed to comply with law enforcement.”
Homan ignored the fact that Salgado Araujo, Durán Guerrero and Coronilla Durán were not identified as the targets of the operations in which they were killed nor were they given any opportunity to “comply” with law enforcement, who did not identify themselves and aggressively attacked the men.
“All they had to do was simply comply with law enforcement,” he continued. “If you don’t like what law enforcement did to you, then go to the courts. Sue. Call ACLU. Do whatever you want to do. You should always comply with law enforcement. If they did, they’d be alive today.”
Homan’s defense of police state executions means that any person confronted by masked agents in an unmarked vehicle must instantly submit or accept death as the legitimate punishment.
His cynical invocation of the courts came as the administration was using the same judicial system to intimidate and imprison workers and opponents of ICE.
A recent New York Times investigation found that 558 people have been charged under 18 U.S.C. §111, which criminalizes forcibly assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating or interfering with a federal officer. An aggravated violation can carry a sentence of up to 20 years.
Of those charged, 213 had their cases dismissed or were acquitted, while 246 pleaded guilty. Charges against another 95 remained pending. The enormous number of failed prosecutions exposes the systematic use of the statute to manufacture felony cases against protesters and bystanders.
Those charged included Tatyana Reisini and Kristen Roos, two mothers in Charlotte, North Carolina, who saw ICE agents preparing for an operation outside a shopping center last November.
The women parked roughly 20 yards away and joined others in denouncing the agents’ presence. ICE vehicles responded by boxing in Reisini’s Acura sport utility vehicle, while armed agents emerged to threaten them.
After the agents drove away, the women continued their shopping trip and warned passersby that ICE was in the area. They soon realized that the same agents were following them.
Reisini called 911 and told the operator that armed men were harassing and chasing them. “They’re going to [expletive] hurt us,” she said.
After the pair inadvertently drove into a dead-end street, agents again surrounded their vehicle. Video recorded by a nearby resident showed an agent using his rifle, with its barrel pointed toward the driver, to smash the driver-side window.
The women were arrested and taken to a Federal Bureau of Investigation building, where they were held for hours and charged under Section 111. Their cases were eventually dismissed.
Alongside the mass prosecution of anti-ICE protesters, the Trump administration is attempting to activate a secretive court created to deport alleged “alien terrorists.”
The Justice Department last week filed the first application in the 30-year history of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. Established by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, the five-judge body had never previously received an application or heard a case.
The identity of the person targeted remains secret because the application was filed under seal. Chief Judge Joan Ericksen ordered the government to provide additional information after questioning whether it had established the required connection between the unnamed person’s conduct and the statutory provisions cited in its application.
Under the law, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer and political hatchet man, can seek the removal of a noncitizen accused of involvement in “terrorist activity.” Proceedings may rely on secret evidence withheld from the targeted person and the public.
The activation of this court is an ominous development. The administration is systematically expanding the label “terrorist” to encompass socialist, anti-capitalist, antiwar and other left-wing opposition.
At a State Department summit last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller delivered fascistic speeches portraying left-wing opposition as a civilizational enemy that must be destroyed.
Days later, Rubio’s State Department issued a 100-page McCarthyite report portraying Cuba as the center of a worldwide “anti-American” conspiracy. The document seeks to attribute virtually every expression of anti-capitalist, antiwar and anti-police sentiment in the United States and internationally to foreign subversion.
The simultaneous activation of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, mass prosecution of anti-ICE protesters and execution of immigrant workers is not accidental. These measures are interconnected components of the Trump administration’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship and criminalize all opposition from the working class and the left.