We Are Grieving People We Never Met and Every Latino Knows Exactly Why That Makes Sense

This article is written with the broken pieces of a community’s heart. There is a kind of grief that does not require having known someone personally, and the Latino community understands that grief right now. Joan Sebastián Guerrero looks like someone’s cousin, someone’s son, someone’s brother. He looks like the hardworking man from the neighborhood whose only ambition was to take care of his family. We have all known someone like him, and that is precisely why this hurts the way it does.

Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian man, was shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Biddeford, Maine, at 7 o’clock on a Monday morning and later died from his injuries. His wife and three-year-old daughter were present at the scene. He had been working as a delivery driver and living quietly in Biddeford with his family. Advocacy organizations have stated that Guerrero had work authorization in the United States, directly contradicting ICE’s characterization of him as undocumented with a final deportation order. His death comes days after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican man in Houston, also lost his life during an ICE operation and was also confirmed to not have been the intended target of the enforcement action that ended his life.

Why This Keeps Happening and Why the Latino Community Cannot Look Away

ICE stated that agents had been conducting surveillance at the home of a person with a deportation order when they attempted to stop a vehicle in the area. The agency said the vehicle attempted to flee and that an agent fired his weapon out of concern for public safety. The agents involved were not wearing body cameras, and no video evidence has emerged to confirm or contradict the official account. It has since been confirmed that Guerrero was not the person agents were looking for that morning, and advocacy organizations have maintained that he had legal work authorization in the country.

An investigation is currently underway. The Colombian Embassy formally requested clarification from the Department of Homeland Security about the circumstances surrounding his death, a move that reflects the gravity of what happened and the absence of a satisfactory official explanation.

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Why the Latino Community Is Grieving People It Never Met

There is a particular kind of grief that surfaces when a community sees itself reflected in a tragedy. Joan Sebastián Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo are not abstractions. They are young men and family men whose entire existence was organized around working hard and taking care of the people they loved. Every Latino community in this country has someone like them, and that familiarity is precisely what makes these losses land with such force across the diaspora.

Latinos across the country have been watching an escalating pattern of enforcement operations that have resulted in deaths, detentions and family separations, and the grief that follows each new case is cumulative. Joan Sebastián Guerrero was driving to work. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was on his way to pick up his workers. These are the details that the Latino community cannot move past, because they are the details of ordinary life, the kind of morning that any one of us has lived a thousand times.

For those outside the Latino community who struggle to understand why these stories produce the level of emotional response they do, the answer lies in recognition. This is not a distant news story for millions of Latinos living in the United States. It is a story about people who look like their fathers, their brothers, their neighbors and their coworkers, and the grief that comes with losing someone who could have been any one of them.

The Ethnic Cleansing Conversation and Why It Is So Complicated

Some voices within and adjacent to the Latino community have begun using the phrase ethnic cleansing to describe what they see happening, and that is a term that requires careful handling because it is one of the most serious accusations that can be leveled against any government or policy framework.

Ethnic cleansing, in its formal definition, refers to the systematic removal of an ethnic, racial or religious group from a geographic area through forced displacement, violence or other coercive means, with the intent to make that area ethnically homogeneous. The term was widely used to describe atrocities in the Balkans during the 1990s and carries the full weight of its association with some of the worst human rights violations of the modern era.

Applying that term to immigration enforcement in the United States is complicated for several reasons. Immigration enforcement, even when aggressive and even when it produces tragic outcomes, operates within a legal framework that is distinct from the systematic campaigns of violence and forced removal that the term was originally coined to describe. The existence of legal processes, judicial oversight and the ability of advocacy organizations to challenge enforcement actions in court places the current situation in a different category than historical examples of ethnic cleansing.

At the same time, the communities using this language are not doing so carelessly. They are responding to a pattern of enforcement that has disproportionately targeted Latino communities, that has resulted in deaths of people who were not the intended targets of operations and that has separated families across the country. The feeling of being systematically targeted, of watching members of your community lose their lives in enforcement operations that keep producing the wrong outcomes, is a feeling that the word cleansing attempts to capture even when the legal and political frameworks surrounding it make that comparison genuinely difficult to sustain.

The conversation deserves to be had honestly, which means taking seriously both the gravity of what the term implies and the real experiences that are driving people to reach for it. Dismissing that language entirely is as insufficient as applying it without careful consideration of what it actually means and what it historically represents.

A Collective Grief

Joan Sebastián Guerrero was 26 years old. He had a three-year-old daughter and a wife who was beside him when he died. He worked hard and lived quietly and asked for nothing extraordinary. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had been in this country for 35 years, building a life in construction, raising a family and pursuing legal status through the proper channels.

Neither of them was the intended target of the operations that ended their lives. Both of their families are now left without answers that make any sense. The Latino community is grieving both of them, and the grief is not separate from the anger and the exhaustion of watching this happen again and feeling increasingly unsure of what comes next.

Today this article goes out to the families of Joan Sebastián Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and to every member of the Latino community that has been sitting with this weight in the days since their deaths. The tears are real. The grief is collective. The demand for answers belongs to all of us.