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Before sunrise on an October morning in 1989, Ida Lee Delaney was making her long daily commute to her job as a custodian at the Houston Post. After the 50-year-old woman inadvertently cut in front of an unmarked car on the Gulf Freeway, the driver and his two companions responded by chasing her for 13 miles across Houston.
What Delaney didn't know was that the three men were off-duty Houston police officers coming home after an all-night drinking spree. Having no idea who they were, she pulled over and got out of her vehicle to seek help when she saw the flashing lights of a truck belonging to a highway work crew. The unmarked car screeched to a halt behind her, and a man brandishing a gun ran up to her car and punched her. Reaching for a gun she kept in the car, she shot and wounded the man. He shot and killed her.
All three officers were fired; only Alex Gonzales, who killed Delaney, was charged. The case was removed to Dallas, where a jury convicted him of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced him to seven years in prison. The conviction was overturned on appeal, and Gonzales got off with 180 days in jail, two years' probation and a $5,000 fine. (Houston paid the Delaney family $650,000 to settle a civil lawsuit.)
These days, nearly four decades later, even such meager crumbs of accountability seem unlikely after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on Houston's East Side and another agent fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Me. These men may not have been inebriated, but they were surely drunk. Drunk on power, perhaps on adrenaline.
David Brouillette, the agent who shot 25-year-old Guerrero four times during an attempted traffic stop in the small coastal town where he lived, should never have been near a gun, should never have been handed a law-enforcement badge.
One of Brouillette's ex-wives shared a voice mail with NPR in which he says that she and the women in her family should have their throats cut. "Am I threatening that I'm gonna do that? No, no. But do I think that you should have your f____ throat cuts? Or should have had them cut. Yep," the voice mail says.
The Associated Press obtained hundreds of family court records detailing allegations of physical and verbal abuse.
This is the man ICE hired, with insufficient background inquiries and inadequate training, and then entrusted him with weapons and the authority to roam in unmarked cars through American cities. This is the man, one of thousands hired in a headlong rush to staff up, who apparently has been given the authority to ram vehicles and run them off the road, shoot through windshields and rolled-down windows and even drag victims out of their car, handcuffing them while they lay dying on the street.
Brouillette and his ICE cohorts are the public faces of a federal law enforcement agency -- operating in our name with an obscene amount of congressionally appropriated money -- that has the authority to arrest men, women and children and either deposit them in fetid detention centers or deport them without a hearing to foreign countries where they may never have lived.
Nearly 70% of Houston-area residents disapprove of how ICE is doing its job, according to a University of Houston survey.
But what recourse do Houstonians and their fellow Americans have today to shut down a rogue federal police force that's potentially a danger to all of us?
Resistance alone is not enough. Even voting new leaders to Washington will not on its own bring about the change we need. As we have written many times before, Houstonians have a special obligation to imagine a different future. One rooted in our everyday reality of streets plied by white work vans filled with people like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo working so their children can have opportunities they didn't.
Houstonians should demand policy solutions that balance border security with compassion. Workers' rights with corporate interests. We don't want a return to the chaos during the Biden years. In the past we have held up the likes of the late U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan and President George H.W. Bush as Houstonians who led the nation on immigration.
We need a new generation of leaders who pass forward-looking solutions to our profoundly broken immigration system.
So yes, take to the streets, but also listen, learn and imagine. Demand town hall gatherings. Put forward ideas and insist on answers. We are Americans living through the 250th anniversary of our nation's foundational resistance to a government that showed no respect toward its people. As Texans, as Americans, we have a tradition to uphold. An obligation to act.