Greg Abbott is lecturing ICE on optics after a fatal Houston shooting, while the southern border stays wide open and fentanyl keeps killing Americans — proving once again that politicians would rather manage perceptions than solve the actual crisis.
The Texas governor said Wednesday he expects immigration laws to be enforced "without shooting people," responding to the killing of 52-year-old Genzel Araujo, a construction worker in the country illegally for over three decades, shot dead by ICE during a traffic stop last week. Abbott called a meeting of state and federal officials to discuss the incident. Meanwhile, cartels move product, crossings continue, and the enforcement that does happen is either too aggressive in the wrong ways or too timid to matter.
Here is what happened in Houston: ICE agents were surveilling a target's address when they spotted a white van that resembled one connected to their target, according to a DHS official. They initiated a stop on Araujo's work van. DHS claims Araujo tried to evade officers and "weaponize the vehicle," allegedly attempting to ram agents. The passengers in Araujo's van tell a different story — their written statements, reported by the Texas Tribune, say officers were never behind or in front of the van and were never at risk of being run over.
Abbott's response was to insist enforcement can happen without fatalities. "It's proven that immigration laws can be enforced and stopping illegal immigration from coming across our border can be achieved without shooting people," he said. That is a statement about appearances, not policy.
The Washington Examiner framed Abbott's comments as a defense of law enforcement with a humanitarian caveat. NPR, covering a new ACLU report released Thursday, framed the entire enforcement apparatus as rotten — documenting over 1,200 operations across eight states since Trump retook office and finding that nearly a third involved force or the threat of it.
The ACLU data includes agents pushing, tackling, or pinning people more than 400 times, deploying chemical irritants, rubber bullets, and tasers about as often, and using potentially lethal tactics like knee-on-neck holds and chokeholds — maneuvers many local police departments have restricted. ICE and DHS did not respond to questions about the report's findings.
Both outlets missed the real story. The Examiner gave Abbott a pass for offering thoughts on a shooting without addressing the structural failure that puts ICE in chaotic traffic-stop encounters in the first place. NPR buried the fact that the ACLU itself admits its data is "a snapshot in time" and that many operations go unrecorded — then handed the microphone to a law professor who said it's "embarrassing" that DHS isn't producing this data itself, as if the ACLU's methodology of scraping news coverage and press releases constitutes rigorous oversight.
Meanwhile, Texas Democratic Party Chairman Kendall Scudder invoked earlier disputed shootings in Minneapolis, where DHS self-defense claims were contradicted by video evidence. He's right to demand transparency. But Democrats questioning one shooting narrative while their party spent years enabling the border crisis that created these encounters is its own kind of theater.
Araujo's family says he had no criminal record, ran his own business, and was close to obtaining legal status. His son called him "a family man, a man who understood that good things come to those who put in hard work."
The question neither party wants to answer: when will the border get secured, the cartels get dismantled, and the fentanyl stops flowing — or is managing the optics of failure all Washington intends to do?
