Category: Columnists

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Tuesday in Houston. He arrived in the U.S. from Mexico 35 years ago, built a construction business, and became one of five people killed by federal agents carrying out President Donald Trump’s plan of mass deportation.

As I read and listened to commentary from sources outraged by the killing, I kept bumping into their description of Salgado Araujo. Not that he was a hardworking father and loving husband who had sent his three U.S. citizen children to college, but that he was “on his way to obtaining legal status,” or was “applying for proper authorization.”

I know enough about immigration law to ask: What did that even mean? How could a man who had been in the U.S. for more than three decades as an undocumented immigrant be working to adjust his legal status?

During a news conference Wednesday, Ronaldo Salgado spoke eloquently about his father, heartbroken that the man who “wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people” did not deserve to be reduced to a headline. But Salgado also said this:

“After nearly 35 years of working to give us the American dream, he made the choice to begin the process of obtaining his American dream through a work permit. We dotted every ‘i,’ crossed every ‘t,’ filled every document, attended every appointment. He was close to obtaining his legal status.”

You may think this matters little. Salgado Araujo is dead, killed by a government that, in its misguided zeal for immigration enforcement, has already taken the lives of three U.S. citizens — Ruben Ray Martinez, Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Pretti — so clearly, legal status is meaningless.

Yet, in the fight to rein in the government’s abuse of power and fix America’s broken immigration system, public opinion is important. Confusion around immigration is already rampant; muddling the debate further only makes things harder.

Even a cursory look at the social media chatter around what happened in Houston finds people debating with incomplete or just plain wrong information. There are comments about how Salgado Araujo should have come here “the right way,” or how he should have tried to “become legal” sooner, or even how, until an immigrant is a citizen, they’re “considered illegal.”

Of course, there are people who will reflexively blame the Trump administration for everything, just as there are those who will unquestionably toe the MAGA line. But too many Americans are simply uninformed about how the system works, and may be skeptical of the media painting the portrait of another saintly immigrant dying at the hands of ICE.

These people may reasonably ask: If Salgado Araujo was close to obtaining legal status, why hadn’t he done so before? The answer is that he most likely couldn’t.

For someone like Salgado Araujo, with blue-collar roots in Mexico and no connection to the United States other than the drive to look for the American dream, it is virtually impossible to come here permanently.

Follow me into the weeds a bit.

Yes, the U.S. has a Diversity Visa program, in which a potential immigrant could apply and, through a lottery system, be given permanent legal residence, but Mexico does not qualify since the program is designed for countries with low rates of migration to the U.S.

If Salgado Araujo had an immediate family member (spouse or parent) who was either a legal permanent resident or a U.S. citizen, they could petition for him to immigrate. If he had a sibling, they could also petition for him to come, but there is a wait time of at least 10 years because of annual visa caps. Perhaps when people refer to immigrants getting “in line,” they mean that decade-plus-long queue.

Regardless, once Salgado Araujo was in the U.S., that “line” disappeared completely.

Let’s say Salgado Araujo had married a U.S. citizen. Since he entered illegally, he could not adjust his status inside the country. He would have to leave the U.S. and effectively risk being banned from reentry for up to 10 years. You can petition for what’s known as a hardship waiver, but they are difficult to obtain.

He could have also waited for one of his children to reach adulthood and petition for him to immigrate, but the potential to be barred for a decade remains.

Salgado Araujo’s son said his father was going to obtain a work permit, which is far from legal status. I spoke with immigration law experts who said one possibility could be to apply for asylum, which would grant a work permit while the case is adjudicated, or there are work permits available for someone who receives humanitarian parole.

To be clear, I do not know what happened in Salgado Araujo’s case. I was unable to reach the family before this column went to press. But it’s clear they were going through a fraught immigration process — one that, given the existing state of the law, would likely have been unsuccessful.

That is why it’s important that people understand the immigration system better.

People like Salgado Araujo — who have built their lives here and just want to go about their business and contribute to their communities — are exactly the kind of immigrants most Americans want to allow to stay.

It was the government under Trump that killed Salgado Araujo. But it’s America’s immigration system that made sure he never had a chance.

America’s current plight was nailed recently in an analysis by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Jeffrey Frankel, who dedicated an entire paragraph to the notorious despot who was bankrupting the world’s greatest superpower, “building luxurious villas and hosting huge parties.”

Frankel described how this strongman “blamed his troubles on his predecessor … He reveled in gold coins. He insisted that people worship him as god. He grafted busts of his head onto statues of gods. He humiliated senators by making them kiss his feet.” The mad king declared war over a narrow body of water, and also had an unseemly sex life.

Of course, you all know the Harvard scholar was writing here about the Roman emperor Caligula, who ruled the ancient regime during the tumultuous four years from 37 A.D. to 41 A.D., and whose obsessions with large public works, humiliating his political enemies, self-deification, and perversion have sparked two millennia of speculation about his cognitive state.

Why, yes, this does all sound very familiar. Donald Trump has never pushed his favorite horse for a top government position — as Caligula is said to have done with his trusted steed Incitatus — but he did send Pete Hegseth to the Pentagon, which is close enough. Professor Frankel’s riff on the notorious Roman is found in a February essay about Trump, “Caligula Reincarnated,” in which he argues that Trump’s “bizarre words and actions” are reaching the same depths of irrationality.

I agree, and it’s important to note that in the five months since that essay, there’s a new parallel between Caligula’s doomed and dangerous reign and the 47th American president, and it’s becoming a huge danger to civil liberties here at home and to peace abroad: fear of assassination and the paranoia that flows from that.

The last months of Caligula’s reign were marked by his mental deterioration and his panic that the many enemies he’d made in a short time on the throne — the once-allied lawmakers he’d publicly humiliated, or the political enemies that he’d prosecuted — would attempt to murder him. The emperor accelerated the most repressive aspects of his regime, even as he schemed to move the seat of power to Alexandria for his own safety.

In recent days, Trump has begun wobbling down this same bumpy, ancient Appian Way. It’s been reported that a Trump murder threat by Iran, which has seen a top general and its supreme leader killed on orders from the American president or his allies, was relayed to the White House by Israeli intelligence. That prompted a remarkable public moment in which the U.S. leader mused about his own death.

“I speak about it a lot because the life of a president is very dangerous,” Trump told reporters during a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. “I don’t really care, because I’m doing my job … I like being No. 1 on TikTok better. But I’m No. 1 on the list for killing,” which sounds, oddly, like a boast from a TV reality star still obsessed with his ratings.

There are several things to unpack here. First, you probably know this truism: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there’s not someone who’s out to get you. Famously, Caligula was assassinated (as were his wife and young daughter) just before his planned move to Alexandria by his own trusted guards.

Similarly, Trump has been the subject of at least four assassination attempts, including one at a 2024 Butler, Pa., campaign rally in which shots apparently grazed his ear and killed an attendee. This unfortunate situation has felt inevitable as Trump’s toxic, divisive, and often hateful rhetoric lights a spark under a nation where violence was already as American as cherry pie.

But political violence is morally abhorrent and never solves anything. The healing of America from the bad place we’re in right now depends on Trump’s continued health, so he can someday be brought to justice for his corruption and his crimes against humanity. A Trump assassination wouldn’t be just wrong, but it would trigger a wave of repression under JD Vance that would also drive the final nail in the coffin of U.S. democracy.

Still, the actual danger to Trump’s life — which the Secret Service learned of through a tip from some of the same Israeli intelligence officials who worked to goad the U.S. into this botched Iran war in the first place — remains hypothetical. The threat to the liberty of all Americans from the president’s spiraling paranoia is real and already underway.

To begin with, Trump has already used the assassination tip as an excuse to ratchet up tensions in the Persian Gulf, where the fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran’s new hard-line rulers had already imploded — bringing new death and destruction while dragging down the world economy. The president, who sounded blasé about his own mortality on Wednesday, has changed his tune.

Trump wrote Saturday in a Truth Social post that “1,000 missiles are locked and loaded” if he is killed by Iranian agents, adding, “Orders have already been given, and the US Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one-year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran.” There are many reasons here to worry — not only over the escalation of a war that was pointless from Day One, but also over the likelihood that Iran will be blamed if anything happens to Trump, regardless of who is actually responsible.

But the assassination paranoia is coming out in other, insidious ways. Alarm bells went off this week when Trump flew to the summit in Turkey in his new Air Force One — the $400 million “gift” airliner from Qatar that U.S. taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade, even as Trump plans to keep it for his presidential foundation in 2029 — but ditched it to fly home in an older Air Force model.

The New York Times put five top reporters on this story because Americans deserve an explanation of how and why our tax dollars were spent on this project — exactly the kind of free-press accountability the founders envisioned when drafting the First Amendment. Their sources told them that despite the massive expenditures, on top of the initial corruption, the former Qatari jet lacked key defensive features like advanced anti-missile capabilities — which explains why Trump switched planes after the Iranian assassination tip was delivered.

The White House was livid at the article, which it seemed to interpret not as accountability journalism but as a breach of security. Embattled FBI Director Kash Patel was yanked off an airport tarmac where he was flying to Chicago to mainly watch his girlfriend in a country music festival and was summoned for urgent meetings.

Late Friday, federal agents banged on the doors of several Times reporters and delivered subpoenas demanding that they testify before a grand jury on Wednesday, in what appears to be a pivot point for America’s already shrinking freedom of the press under a Trump regime.

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, the Times’ lead attorney, said.

Let’s be clear: Trump is using these assassination fears — real or perceived — to drastically increase his assault on the civil liberties of American citizens, and this is likely to only get worse in the coming days.

While the FBI was out badgering journalists, workers back at the White House were erecting scaffolding on the North Portico of the presidential residence, part of an apparent security upgrade that is supposed to last for months. This is in addition to the failed push for $1 billion in taxpayer money to build a massive underground bunker beneath his new ballroom, meant to replace the already demolished East Wing.

Somewhere underneath all of that, Caligula is surely looking up from his fiery final repose with a knowing smile of recognition.

The madness has been a slow train coming, but it’s starting to accelerate and may soon run off the rails. The assassination paranoia is a new layer on top of the president’s late-life obsessions with imposing his physical legacy on the nation’s capital and with clinging to absolute power — and thus forestalling the inevitable probes into his rank criminality — by any means necessary.

The increasingly unpopular Trump’s determination to prevent a free and fair midterm election — such as firing the entire Election Assistance Commission, while making extortionary threats for a new law that would make it harder for millions to vote — is not unrelated to his assassination-driven threats to Iran or the New York Times.

It is all moving in the same direction: building the foundation to declare a national emergency, the last refuge of every dictator from Caligula to Adolf Hitler to the strutting strongmen of the 21st century. If, heaven forbid, there is a fifth major assassination attempt against this president, it will surely reignite any smoldering embers of the Nazi’s 1933 Reichstag fire — a justification for the end of civil liberties.

Let’s not sing along to the age of paranoia. The lynchpin of American democracy remains the same as it ever was: the peaceful transfer of power. In the present crisis, that can’t come soon enough.

When dealing with President Donald Trump at a NATO summit, the European allies resemble desperate adults hovering around an unruly child who is clutching fireworks and matches.

So it was a relief that, despite his usual juvenile tantrums and threats at this week’s Ankara, Turkey, gathering — and his erratic behavior toward Iran — the president mostly kept his powder dry.

Indeed, POTUS had an unprecedented adult moment with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump finally recognized Kyiv’s stunning technological prowess in the production of drones that can now reach deep into Russia (some adviser must finally have convinced him that Ukraine had winning cards the United States lacked).

Trump actually heaped praise on Zelensky, in stark contrast to his shameful efforts in the past to humiliate the Ukrainian leader, saying he was “courageous” and had done “an amazing job” on the battlefield.

The president finally granted Zelensky’s years-old request to let Kyiv produce American Patriot missiles — the only available Western weapons capable of stopping the ballistic missiles Russia is using against Ukraine.

However, that’s the end of the good news.

The U.S. president’s ill-informed, incompetent, and, frankly, juvenile behavior on foreign policy, combined with his visible aging, presents a clear and growing danger to U.S. security. With his garbled and error-filled speech, his omnipresent ego, and his constantly shifting positions, he has become a global embarrassment.

Trump’s ineptitude helps our adversaries, from Tehran to Moscow to Beijing to Pyongyang.

Nothing shows this more clearly than Trump’s belated shift on Ukraine. Mind you, I offer two cheers for the dawning light, but how can anyone count on follow-through when the president changes his positions like he changes shirts?

Even if Trump keeps his word on the licensing of Patriot technology, setting up the complex production process is a lengthy operation that would probably take at least a couple of years (he hasn’t even bothered yet to notify the U.S. producers of Patriot interceptors, RTX and Lockheed Martin).

Similar licensing of Patriot missiles was only granted before to Germany and Japan, and it has taken them each years to scale up. I am confident that savvy Ukrainian techies can do so faster. But they need those interceptors right now, when Vladimir Putin is raining down ballistic missiles on Ukrainian cities because he knows they have no defense.

European allies, who need their own Patriots to defend against Russia, are willing to risk giving Kyiv more if the United States will pledge to backfill their needs quickly. Trump has made no such pledge, claiming they are in short supply in the U.S.

That is true, but do you know why? The U.S. and Gulf allies have wasted years’ worth of U.S. production of Patriot interceptors during the Iran war. They used hundreds, possibly thousands, of Patriots that cost $2 million to $4 million each to shoot down $30,000 Iranian drones.

Trump keeps hinting that the U.S. is interested in Ukrainian drone technology, but has still not taken up Zelensky’s offer to trade Ukrainian drone skills and wider joint production in return for Patriots.

POTUS claimed in Ankara that U.S. drone producers are building new factories for interceptors that will be up and running quickly “in the not-too-distant future.”

Bluster, bluster, bluster.

Lockheed, which produces the most advanced interceptor, the PAC3, has publicly announced its goal of producing 2,000 of these marvels a year … by 2030. That is a tiny fraction of what is needed.

Yet, this week, still short of drones and drone interceptors for the U.S. military, Trump announced at the Ankara summit that the ceasefire with Iran is ending. He appears to be plunging into a renewal of the Iran war. He is stuck in a trap of his own making because he relied only on his gut before entering the conflict.

POTUS never imagined that Tehran would respond to his attack alongside Israel by closing the Strait of Hormuz, even though he was warned by his military and civilian advisers. Then he claimed, totally contrary to the facts, that he had concluded a “peace deal” and started paying off the ayatollahs with billions in advance by letting them sell oil again. Now he is threatening a new war, which he clearly doesn’t want and for which he doesn’t have the proper weapons.

Trump knows he cannot win from the air. And, unless he is ready to invade Iran or occupy parts of that country indefinitely — which would be a disaster — he has trapped America into accepting some form of Iranian control over the strait.

That is why, in Ankara, with the rage of a spoiled child, Trump cursed the Iranians (whom he had praised only weeks ago) and pouted: “I’m not sure I want to make a deal. Let’s just finish the job.” This is not the language of a leader. This is the insincere threat of a 6-year-old throwing food at the wall to see if it sticks.

What is so terrifying about Trump is not his threats, which our allies and adversaries alike now tend to ignore, but his total incapacity to think in strategic terms. He talks big — “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” — but has no strategy on how to achieve this.

And even when recognizing Ukraine’s achievements, he insisted that “President ​Putin wants [this war] to end. I will tell you that very strongly.” If he really believes this, at this late date, he definitely lives in an infantile fantasy world.

As a result, there is a huge risk that he will drag America into an uglier quagmire in Iran.

And he will throw away the chance that he, himself, helped create by pushing Europe to rearm: the opportunity to work with a stronger Europe and bolster NATO’s role positively to counter Russia, China, and Iran.

Lost in fantasy, he drives America’s allies away.

Ukraine will try to stay on his good side, but will proceed to revolutionize unmanned warfare in cooperation with Europe, and possibly, eventually, with Washington.

And U.S. adversaries like Iran will choose whether to take advantage of Trump’s childishness or try to assassinate him in revenge, helped by his own fecklessness. Fear of that latter possibility was what made the Secret Service insist Trump fly back from Ankara on the original Air Force One, rather than use one of his vanity projects, the upgraded luxury gift plane from Qatar, which had not been secured sufficiently to protect against possible attack.

Trump had insisted at first on luxury over security. Even when it came to his own safety, the child in him could not be curbed.