What the Trump regime doesn’t want you to know about Dallas ICE shooting

The blood hadn’t yet dried after a deadly Wednesday morning sniper attack on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention site in Dallas when top government officials started flooding the zone with the story they wanted to tell the public about it.

Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security chief, tweeted that the shooting spotlighted hatred toward ICE even before the world knew the gunman’s name, let alone anything about his motive. FBI Director Kash Patel posted an image of a shell casing scrawled with the words “Anti Ice” the second it crossed his desk. Vice President JD Vance piled on, writing that “the obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop.”

So often these days, what the Trump regime says is highly predictable — but what’s much more revealing is what it doesn’t say. The “thoughts and prayers” politicians effortlessly and often mindlessly spout for most mass shooting victims were few and far between, despite speedy news reports that one man had been killed by the Dallas sniper and two were critically wounded.

Even worse was what the Trump regime didn’t want you to know about the three detained immigrants who were the victims of the Dallas ICE shooting.

Their names.

This is what the U.S. government labored to keep secret from the American people for as long as possible.

That a 37-year-old tree cutter from El Salvador named Norlan Guzmán Fuentes, who came to the United States several years ago and lived in Florida and Texas, was shot and killed in the attack.

That a second man named Miguel Ángel García Hernández, brought to Texas from Mexico as a child, who has worked for years as a house painter, was shot four times in the assault, once in the neck, and is clinging to life support in a Dallas hospital room.

That a third migrant, a Venezuelan named José Andrés Bordones Molina, was also gravely wounded when the 29-year-old gunman opened fire on the sally port where detainees were being transferred into a van by ICE agents.

Their names were gradually learned by reporters on the ground and not volunteered by ICE, but finally confirmed to NPR on Saturday by an agency spokesperson who stressed that the three are, or were, “criminal illegal aliens.”

The victims’ identities aren’t the only part of the story ICE wants to sweep under the rug. Only under questioning did officials concede that the detainees were handcuffed and shackled, and thus struggled, unsuccessfully, to flee when the shots began raining down.

What family members have said since the shooting — about a lack of information, their struggles to gain access to see the two surviving victims, and that the critically injured men are shackled to their hospital beds — all jibe with the message that the Trump regime has been hammering home since Day One.

It’s its foundational lie that immigrants who came to the United States seeking a better life are not human beings, or at least not worthy of human dignity — even when they are unjustly murdered or disabled by a madman, leaving their wives, children, and mothers to ask why.

“He was trapped inside that van, shot as if he was not a human,” Santos Odilia Rodriguez, Guzmán Fuentes’ aunt, told the New York Times. “How can you defend yourself when your hands and feet are tied up?”

“I want his name to be known,” Stephany Gauffeny, García Hernández’s wife, who is nine months pregnant with his son, their fifth child, told NPR this weekend. “I want people to know who he really was. He wasn’t just an immigrant or a detainee, or a criminal.”

She said she was shocked when ICE agents finally allowed her into her husband’s room at Parkland Memorial Hospital — the famed facility where John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead from another sniper’s bullet — and found he was shackled to his bed, despite being unconscious and clinging to life.

The Trump regime is right about one thing: The actions of the man who shot Guzmán Fuentes, García Hernández, and Bordones Molina — a 29-year-old gamer named Joshua Jahn — were truly despicable. Political violence of any type is never acceptable. It was morally wrong for the sniper, who took his own life, to target ICE agents, just as it was wrong to kill or maim these immigrant civilians.

» READ MORE: Inside Trump’s $75B ICE gulag nightmare | Will Bunch Newsletter

But the Trump regime is also horribly wrong when it seizes on the muddled motives of one 29-year-old lost boy to launch a crusade against left-wing political groups or donors who not only don’t support or condone political violence, but that Jahn almost surely had never even heard of.

They are now manipulating reality to unconstitutionally order U.S. troops into Portland, Ore., and use “full force” against a tiny band of anti-ICE protesters, to attack a similar group in suburban Chicago with tear gas and pepper balls, and to forge a censorship regime against those pointing out the truth that masked and unbadged federal agents have become a U.S. secret police.

Law enforcement body-cam video released last week to lawyers for a Guatemalan man — with a valid U.S. work permit — challenging his wrongful deportation after an upstate New York factory raid captured an unidentified federal agent saying the quiet part out loud: “They’re animals anyway. That’s what I would tell my kids all the time.”

The story they tell their children is the narrative of 21st-century fascism. But it begins to fall apart if and when everyday people start to realize Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive at the center of this tyrannical enterprise isn’t targeting faceless “animals,” but mostly decent folks who work two or three backbreaking jobs and still find time to pick up their kid after school.

People just like you and me. Human beings.

Instead, their political need to cling to power by dehumanizing not only the 14 million or so migrants who came to the United States to escape violence or crushing poverty, but even legal residents or U.S. citizens who look like them, is all-consuming. It means even these three men, who were shackled and tragically shot by a deranged American, cannot be given names or afforded basic dignity.

This diabolical effort hinges on framing our neighbors and coworkers around their worst days, like the foolish decision to get behind the wheel drunk (García Hernández, allegedly) or get into barroom fights (Guzmán Fuentes). We’re not supposed to know about their best days when they support wives or kids, or send money to family members back home by doing essential work like painting houses or cutting down trees that native-born Americans seem unwilling to do.

The dehumanization is at the blackened heart of everything the Trump regime does. You see it when, rather than give an inch and concede that a Maryland husband and father named Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to a notoriously inhumane gulag by mistake, it frames him with a ridiculous, ginned-up criminal charge and threatens to send him to Uganda. Or when it laughs about naming a Florida detention center “Alligator Alcatraz,” and then when hundreds of immigrants sent there are disappeared in an “it can’t happen here” echo of Augusto Pinochet’s abusive Chilean regime. Or in the faces of the gay makeup artist or the youth soccer coach who were shackled and flown to the same El Salvador torture camp as Abrego Garcia, all because some ICE agent misread their tattoos.

Trump created the disgusting template for all of this when he won a second term in the White House by calling these refugees to the United States “animals,” “stone cold killers,” and the “worst people” — inventing people who come here to commit crimes, not support their families by doing essential jobs. Now that Trump is the 47th president, no inconvenient truths can be allowed to contradict this. Not even the flesh and blood of the three men gunned down on Thursday.

This denial of humanity is the very essence of fascism, a word Trump and his minions would love to outlaw. Just as we can’t allow them to take that right away, we also can’t be forced to adopt the regime’s warped narratives about the refugees in our communities.

As I write this on Sunday morning, García Hernández is said to be on life support, and his prognosis is grim. He may never meet his new son. Whether he survives or dies, Gauffeny wants the world to know and celebrate the way her husband has lived, as a loving dad and the kind of neighbor who’d fix your stalled car or hang your new TV, who had a knack for making the people around him laugh.

Know García Hernández for the simple human decency the Trump regime treats as highly classified information.

Gauffeny also wants people to contribute to a GoFundMe effort to support her family, with García Hernández, their sole provider, unable to work. I can’t think of a more worthwhile cause right now.

But I also can’t think of an easier way to resist the vile crew that has hijacked our democracy than by simply honoring the humanity of these three men, who did not deserve their fate. Say their names.

José Andrés Bordones Molina. Miguel Ángel García Hernández. Norlan Guzmán Fuentes.

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